This online survey will collect opinions on whether/how to create an awareness campaign for the women’s economy for synthesis and report at Power Shift 2016. Click here to give your input.
So sorry! The Power Shift Forum Survey has closed. Results will be reported at the 2016 meeting, to be held in Washington DC on May 4 and 5. For more details, click here.
Sometimes I feel I am working on a world-changing, first-time-in-history global movement that has serious support from most major world institutions. Sometimes I feel like I am working in a closet somewhere that nobody knows about. The truth is the first statement. But the second is nevertheless a recurrent experience.
The data we now have to describe the women’s economy—not only its size, but its power and its problems—are still unknown to most people, I think. It seems like very few even realize how pervasive the economic disadvantaging of women is, or how consistently patterned it is around the world. Certainly almost no one among the general public is aware of the massive benefits in terms of prosperity, peace, and health that we now know would be achievable if we only reversed this ancient scourge of excluding women from the world of money.
So, instead, it seems to me, most folks go about their business thinking that women have already achieved equality in “the West.” Or that women’s inequality is a fiction. Or that women’s inequality in the workplace doesn’t really matter very much. They never even think that issues like financial markets or trade agreements could be “women’s issues.”
Does this sound familiar to you? Does it matter?
I personally think it does matter. We need people to be aware of how harmful gender inequality is to everyone, economically and otherwise. So how do we tell people? And who do we tell? And what do we say?
These questions form the substance of the #PowerShiftForum Survey coming out of the 2015 meeting. At the upcoming Power Shift Forum for 2016, we will issue a report that summarizes the findings from this survey, as well as synthesizing the input from the Power Shift meeting in Oxford in November. The survey will remain open until close of business, Central Time in the US, on April 15.
Make yourself heard! The survey only takes five minutes. Click here to give your thoughts.
We intend to use these results to formulate an awareness campaign (or not, depending on the results). So, get your two cents in! There are only twelve questions, plus an open-ended box for your own ideas and comments. It takes maybe five minutes, unless you want to spend more time on the open question. And if you know others who care about this issue, by all means, share the link with them, too. Click here to start!!
The Power Shift Forum for Women in the World Economy is an invitation-only gathering for people across sectors who are actively engaged in women’s economic empowerment. Power Shift was developed at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and will be held this year in the United States for the first time (May 4-5, with opening reception on the evening of May 3). To ask to be included, click here. (Don’t wait. We are going to reach capacity very soon. I mean it.)
