With this in mind, I am honored to introduce our next panelists to keep this conversation going. They are five private sector leaders who have been empowering women through their organizations and initiatives and advancing the WEPs around the world. Please welcome Michel Khalaf, CEO of MetLife, Roberto Marques, CEO of Natura, and Sally Gilligan, Chief Information Officer and Chief Strategy Officer of Gap Inc. Thanks to all of you for being with us today. I'd like to begin the conversation by asking each of you to tell us why gender equality is important to you, both personally and as a leader. Michel, if I could start with you, why is it important for you and for MetLife to make this a priority? Sure. Thank you, Maggie. I think you'll find that a lot of men who champion allyship often draw from experiences in their own lives. I grew up in a part of the world where women are fighting for basic rights, let alone equal rights. When it came to my own family's experience, my parents treated my sister, my brother, and I equally. They wanted us to pursue the same opportunities, all opportunities that we were interested in pursuing. My sister has gone on to have a great career in journalism. Shortly after I became CEO of MetLife, she became the first woman editor of a major financial publication. I'm very proud and inspired by her journey. I also know that, if I compare hers to mine, she's had to overcome many obstacles along the way because of her gender. I have two daughters of my own, and I want them to pursue all of their ambitions and dreams. I think they shouldn't face those same obstacles that my sister faced. I'm hoping that will be the case if we all commit to gender equality. This is an area that I'm very passionate about. I'm also the CEO of MetLife, and I have a fiduciary responsibility to MetLife stakeholders. I believe that the business case for gender equality is highly compelling. We're a purpose-driven company, and for us to truly live our purpose, we have to be an equitable, inclusive, and diverse company. That's something that we're very committed to. Our strategy is anchored in our purpose. At the core, it's creating this virtual circle where we deliver for all stakeholders, our people and communities, our customers, and our shareholders. If we think about those stakeholders, starting with our people, investing in our people means promoting gender equality, gender equity in the workplace. If you think about the talent that's out there, a very significant percentage of that talent are women. Being able to attract, to retain, to promote is critical to our success as a company. If we think our customer base and the importance of our employee base mirroring that customer base in order to meet the expectations of our customers, then again, a high percentage of our customers are women as well. The case is compelling from that standpoint. I think Sanda pointed to it, there's a lot of research out there that indicates that more diverse companies are also more successful, are more profitable companies. For all these reasons, we believe that the bottom line here is promoting gender equity and equality is good for the bottom line, as well as it's truly about living our purpose as a company. When you combine that business case and the personal commitment, it can't be more powerful. I can tell you, as a business journalist, I am thrilled to see your sister at the helm of the FT. We need more women serving in top leadership positions at media companies. She'll certainly be an inspiration to many. We continue the conversation, I just want to welcome, we had a little bit of technical trouble getting her in, but I'm thrilled to welcome Maria Villanueva from CBC Bottling Corp. She is now part of the conversation. Maria, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. We're just going around and just starting off by talking a little bit about why people are so personally committed as well, to why this is important from a personal position as a leadership position. I just wanted to continue with Sally. Bouncing off of what Michel said, you certainly have lived the experience of climbing to the very top in what is sometimes male-dominated positions, especially as you get to the top of corporations. Why is gender equality so important to you personally and as a leader? I think that in every company, the strategy leads the way. Maria, sorry. Let me just interrupt one second. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Maria. I was directing that at Sally, but we will get to you in just a moment. Okay, sorry. It's okay. Thanks, Maggie. Thank you for the opportunity. I think just to pick up on your question, for me personally, I've had incredible career opportunity in supply chain and technology, as you've mentioned, traditionally fields that are very male-dominated, particularly at the executive level. My opportunity came through strong advocacy through my mentors and sponsors, and I really do believe strongly that opening the same opportunities, similar to how Michel spoke earlier, to all women and girls so they can bring their point of view, is so important. To create those opportunities really require strong advocacy. As a leader, I believe without that diversity of thought and representation, we're not getting the best answers to the best problems. I think many of our speakers have spoken to it. If we don't have everyone around the table, we aren't going to get those points of view. I do believe strongly, to support women, you have to support the whole self. That comes through training, health, safety, and community. For that reason, I am executive sponsor of our Gap Women in Leadership resource group. I think empowering women in the workplace begins by creating safe environments to mentor, coach, and learn. That's so important to continue the advocacy to let all of us reach our potential. Absolutely, having role models in positions so that women can see a path forward is incredibly important. Maria, CBC is the first Guatemalan company to sign the WEPs. Why do you feel so passionately about this work? I think that for us as a company, it's a real example of how you can align the strategy with the culture. I was saying that the strategy always leads the way, but the only way to get there is the culture. This is a company that has really, on the daily basis, the leadership really engaged in trying to make a difference, not only for the employees, but also for the community. Starting from that point, for us, the commitment to guarantee the quality of all the model, of all the reward system, the process to engage the team, to guarantee that we have that good training plan with the good competencies between all the female and the male that work for the company, it's been quite a journey. Sometimes you see your goal, your dream in a real long term, but when you get the chance to put this together in little milestones, it allows you to be in to guarantee that you are aligning the strategy with the culture and give the opportunities to all the amazing women that we have in the company. Roberto, everyone's had different journeys, but Natura's been involved for years. Why is this an issue that you've chosen to champion? First, Maggie, thanks for having me. First of all, Natura &Co., which is a group of businesses, all of them were really founded with this notion that business can and should be a force for good, right? Avon, Natura, The Body Shop and Aesop. On a personal level, I would say this is very important for me, and I'm very passionate about it, and similar to Michel, I have three daughters, two of them are already in the workforce. What I dream for them is to make sure that they can be very successful in their careers regardless of the gender, and being able to really succeed equally, in their decisions, professional decisions, whatever that means for them. On a professional level, Natura &Co is very lucky to be working, not only with 40,000 associates, but we work with almost six million consultants and representatives in 100 countries. The vast majority of them are women. Really, it's incredible to see the power of transforming society and the work of those consultants and representatives and being able to support them, being able to create the right conditions for them, to really be successful as entrepreneurs. Really, it's the core of our business. As a consequence of that, almost a year ago, we actually launched our 2030 Commitment to Life, our sustainability agenda. A key pillar of that talks about defending human rights and being more humankind. In that particular one, we are very connected to the Women's Empowerment Principles. We want to make sure that we establish very clear goals and track the progress of those to make sure that we can really tackle gender inequality. I'm gonna just illustrate three of them. We committed ourself that by 2023, we wanna have 50% of women on board in senior leadership positions across our entire group. I'm pleased to say that we are now at a 48%. We still have a little bit of work to do, but we're very committed to close that gap in less than two years. The other thing is equitable pay, and we committed ourselves to close any gap that we might have in terms of equitable pay, also by 2023. Here, we conducted last year a very thorough study, over 35,000 associates in over 70 countries. What we found out is when we have in the same geography, same seniority, and same roles, we still have a gap of about 1%, what we call an explainable gap. We are committed to close this gap this year. We're not going to even wait for 2023. The last goal that we put for ourselves is to make sure that we have living wage or above for everybody by 2023. We believe companies holding themselves accountable, establishing very clear goals, and really tracking the progress, and committing to the Women's Empowerment Principles is a great way for us to make progress in this very important topic. It certainly is. Perhaps so important now to double down on those commitments, given what we're seeing as we come out of this pandemic. Michel, why is it so important that businesses ensure a gender-sensitive response when thinking about community initiatives, advocacy, and your own programs as we pull out of this pandemic? Yeah, Maggie. Well, we conduct a survey every year, where we survey employers and employees in the U.S. to see what are the main trends that are emerging in the workplace. We're actually releasing the survey today. The biggest takeaway from our 2020 survey is that the longer the pandemic drags on, the worse the women in the workplace feel and are doing relative to men. That's really a telling takeaway. This trend holds across mental, physical, and social health as well. I also read an article in "The FT" last week with very similar conclusions in terms of the fact that working mothers in particular bore the brunt of the pandemic from a parenting perspective. That's made balancing parenting and their careers extremely difficult, and that's led to mental stress issues for them as well. If we think about the WEP principles, the third principle in particular, I think is relevant here because it calls on signatories to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of workers. Here we see that women, in particular, are bearing the brunt of the pandemic. I think there's several things that we can do to, and we are doing, to address this issue. One is, I think, for leaders just to remove the stigma of talking about mental health issues by talking about it, by addressing it. Our experience is that this is very important. Also, it's equally important to have wellness programs in place that help alleviate some of these issues by offering support resources to women and men in the organization. In particular, during this pandemic, it was important to enhance those support tools by addressing work-life integration and resilience in particular. We also have women business networks in 30 markets across our businesses globally. Those are basically volunteer networks that are backed by company support and resources. This peer networking can be very helpful as well from a mentorship perspective, but also in providing indispensable support to address issues such as those that we're seeing emerge during the pandemic. What we also saw during the pandemic is the need for parents to adapt to working from home. One of the sort of simple things that I can mention here that we've trialed and that's proved quite effective are simply parent coffee chats where a group of parents get together, typically 15 to 20. You'd be amazed at sort of the power of realizing that some of the same challenges, issues, struggles are shared by other parents. Having this type of exchange, as well as exchanging ideas on how to deal with these issues has been quite effective. Last but not least. Absolutely. Michel, I just want to jump in for a second because that's such an important point. I think for some people, just being seen and knowing that you are not alone in this has been so important. Maria, I know that the burden of care has been a focus for you at CBC as well in sort of grappling with the challenge that this has presented families. What are some of the things that you have been doing in order to address this? You're either on mute, Maria, or we are having audio issues. Okay. Now you hear me? Yep. Go ahead. Perfect. I was saying that during this pandemic, we knew that 80% of the process that we were living was with a really psychology context. We put together a plan to guarantee that our team members could have the opportunity to go with the family and to have all that information that they needed, not only to be good at this point of the year of the company, but also to guarantee that the family had tools to be really aware of how they can work right now as a team. For us, it was really exciting to see that when you give tools, we have a corporate university, and with that corporate university, we gave different kinds of trainings to guarantee that everybody knew how to perform at this time to guarantee the productivity, for them to feel really safe at home, as the company was given the opportunity to manage the working days at home. We didn't know how to do that, with the technology and with the training process, we did a great job. For us, it was really important to know that the wellness process in this moment is really important. How to guarantee that we can have three main pillars, that the team could have the opportunity to keep on developing, but also to have a really balance between the health that they need, emotional and physical. We put together a wellness plan that is going along all through the system. To guarantee that we have 43% of the key decision positions of the company are women, how to manage all the management system when you are online. How they can be really aware of how can they work with the families at home, with the kids at school. The psychological process was really important for us, and it was really successful. Another thing was the training programs, not only based on the importance of the skills to doing a good job, but the will, the competencies that you need to put together so everybody can have the same opportunity to develop. Yeah. A broad approach. Sally, we're talking about a lot of the challenges and the difficulties we have to overcome. It strikes me that as companies are thinking about what this post-pandemic new normal, if we can call it that, is going to look like, there's also an opportunity here to put the empowerment principles into action, perhaps to accelerate some of the things companies were thinking about, programs around gender equality. Where has the Gap found success in implementing the WEPs and making progress on gender equality, and what are you going to be focused on moving forward? Thanks, Maggie. It's incredibly important that we continue the momentum. For us, it started with ensuring equal pay for equal work. We were the first Fortune 500 company to ensure that our data was validated by a third party that showed that we are paying, at all levels of the organization, equal pay for that equal work. In building on that, we employ millions of women in our supply chain. We founded our P.A.C.E. program, which is a women's life skill and empowerment program for the women that work in our factories. I think what is important in terms of building momentum forward is we've chosen to share that program with other organizations under the spirit of the more we partner, the more we amplify the impact. To date, we've impacted 800,000 women and girls with this program. That program provides, similar to some examples that others have shared, life skills, important childcare support, financial literacy, and providing an ability for women and girls to see a better future for themselves. We've had such incredible impact, not only for the women in the program, but also recognizing the impact on our business and on our suppliers. They're realizing that when you invest in others, you increase your return, and you also decrease some of the negative impacts on women have on our business environment. I think what we're most excited about moving forward in building on that strong momentum, we just recently announced a partnership with Empower at Work. It's a broad initiative across the industry to create a platform that is really a network and skills to the benefit of women and workers around gender equality. We just committed for 2025 for 100% of our strategic factories to be participating in Empower at Work, 100% of our strategic factories to achieve gender parity at the supervisor level. Ensuring that women are in leadership positions is an incredibly important step. 100% of workers also will be employed through the programs at our strategic factory, and we will also make sure that their voices are heard through gender equitable workplace committees. It's really important to have the feedback loop, 100% of our factories will have prevention and response management systems and trainings in place to address gender-based violence. We do believe that continuing to build on the public and private partnerships with measurable goals and continuing to work through that has had the largest impact and continues to amplify what we can do together. That is powerful once you move beyond the walls of your company and start to reach down through that supply chain and through your partnerships. Roberto, I'd like to bring you in because I think this is something that you think about as well with the different companies under your umbrella and the many different women that touch that supply chain, especially in light of COVID. Can you tell us a little bit more? Sally just mentioned domestic violence. Your company unveiled a really, I think, innovative program touching on that. This is a subject that used to be taboo for companies, the Isolated Not Alone campaign to shed some light on domestic violence. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's really innovative. I know, Maggie. Thank you for bringing that up. It is really a very important issue to tackle, right? We heard on the previous panel that one of the consequences of the pandemic is that two-thirds of the jobs lost were actually in women, which we all need to think about how to reengage, how to reconnect with those women, and how to create the right environment for them to actually get back to the workforce. Another consequence of the pandemic is exactly what you mentioned. We've seen and tracked data showing significant increase in domestic violence. Think about it. Unfortunately, with the pandemic and the lockdowns, most of those women that were subjected to domestic violence got confined in an environment that was actually the most perverse one for them to deal with that terrible consequence of domestic violence. On that, we were able, for the first time, together, the four business joint forces to create a campaign called Isolated Not Alone to really raise awareness and create conditions for those women to reach out and seek help. We're able to really reach over 200 million women through our online channels, and we're able to donate over $2 million between the Avon Foundation, a lot of the activities also in Latin America, through NGOs, through organizations that could really be closer to those women and try to offer some comfort and help when needed. Again, it is a very perverse consequence of this pandemic and something that it is important that everybody is aware and try to do our part in helping those women that are confined in environment that actually even promote more that kind of violence. A very important topic. I think we all need to think about some of the consequences for women in terms of job loss, domestic violence, how we also help them in terms of education and importance of vaccination. Thinking about in a holistic way, what are the things that we as companies, but most important, as society, we can do to really alleviate some of those pressure points that we are seeing as a consequence of the pandemic. Absolutely, and so important to be having those conversations in a venue, in a discussion, in a day like this. Michel, top leaders can make commitments, but things only change when we can follow through on the implementation, right? How is MetLife getting that level of buy-in? We heard Sanda and Phumzile both talk about that when we kicked things off at the top of this hour. How are you getting buy-in across your global organization? Absolutely, Maggie. One of the things that I'm very pleased and proud of is the fact that, when we decided to sign the WEPs, 37 of our general managers from across the world took on the initiative to do so themselves as well, as just a clear signal of their support and their commitment to gender equality. This is something that has to be sort of driven from the top of the house, but it's also important to build grassroots support for it as well. From my experience, the best ideas, frankly, don't come from the top of the house. They come from our teams, from encouraging and promoting an open culture where people challenge the status quo and generate innovative ideas in terms of how we can make progress. Building that grassroots support is not confined to women only. We have to bring men on board. One of the important aspects here is to make sure that we make the case for why this is important for us, critical for us as a company, critical to our success, critical to our future. Making this compelling case, as well as helping to identify some of the unconscious biases that exist in an organization, can be very helpful in terms of bringing men on board. Last but not least, you have to also put in place the processes that based on the gender gap analysis on the tools provided by the WEPs to make sure that you are making progress and to hold yourself accountable for that progress by being sort of open, including publicly about sharing your data and statistics, but also your progress as you move along on this journey. Those are some of the things that I think can help an organization make real progress in this area. Absolutely. That lays it out so perfectly. Make the case to convince people it's the right thing to do, give them the framework and the tools to do it, then the transparency and accountability that comes after it. All critical steps in this. Maria, as we look forward, what barriers do you face? You've made so much progress, and there's so much passion you can see coming through. What are the barriers that you face as you try to continue this conversation? Are they internal, or is it rooted more in a broader culture? We are a company that we have operation in 14 countries in Latin America. At the beginning, for us to guarantee the equal opportunities all along the organizational structure, going all the way through the front line was one of the main issues. We have a different kind of security issues for the women who can go in the sales area, for example. That was a real obstacle. At the same time, that was a great opportunity to us because we decided that to allow all the recruitment process all along through the company, we decided to go all the way from the doors to the inside. We started putting together amazing programs to give opportunities in the supply area, logistic area, and now we are really proud to say that we have amazing general managers, we have amazing fabric managers. As I was telling, from the door to the inside, we got the opportunity to put together plans to do training programs with women to go to the universities and to show how amazing it's the industry. We are in the food and beverage industry. We are involving the same way with the sales area, it's a little bit difficult. In the manufacturing area and the logistic, we've been making amazing plans. We put together mentoring. We put together in the corporate university different kinds of programs to guarantee that our women in the team can have the ability to perform their competencies. One thing that we understood is that a lot of the women that works in the company, they are married, and they have kids. We put together a program that is called Excellence Academy, we are giving the opportunity of scholarships for the girls, not only the sons, but only the girls. In our countries in Latin America, you see often that all the education programs in the daily basis of education goes a lot to the little kids, to men. We are putting together scholarships to guarantee that the leadership of the daughters of the employees that work for us can have the same excellence attitude, they can go all the way and end the school and the scholarships in the university. I think that's something. That is wonderful, Maria. That is planting the seed, certainly, for the next generation. Sally, as we begin to close out this session, what's your message to other businesses? Why should they adopt the WEPs and really increase their focus on gender equality? Women, for us personally, women make up over 76% of our company, and they predominantly make up our companies. In society at large, they make up well over 50% of the global population. In order to have the representation with everyone's voice and to truly build thriving communities, we have to do it together. You do it together through building public and private partnership. It starts, as many of our speakers have spoken with to today, of giving people opportunity that truly is equal and ensuring it's a holistic approach, a systemic approach that allows them to build the life skills needed to sustain that opportunity. As I think about closing out this conversation, it's been an absolute pleasure to participate with everyone, it's that continued partnership towards the principles and making sure we are using data and measurement to forward all of the intentions behind it so that every woman and girl can have their voice heard. As they should. Roberto? Just to build on this last point, which I totally agree. Super important to embrace the principles because they will drive better outcomes. Gender equality and having the right representation will foster better conversations, better outcomes for business and for society as a whole. I would encourage everybody to make sure that you support, that you better understand that, driving transparency, right? Not being afraid to disclose when there is gap. In order to actually make progress, we got to track the data, we got to commit ourselves to goals and objectives in this area. Most important to be transparent about it, to talk about it, not to hide it. Accept when there are issues, because in most cases, as we also have as in our companies, we still have gaps that needs to be addressed, that needs to be corrected. By talking about, by engaging the workforce, that's the way I think we're going to make progress. The last thing that I would say is let's always remember that the health and wellbeing in women and women both at home and a working place is still an issue. We heard about it, the impact of the pandemic, and how we needed to really think holistic about reengaging all those women that lost their jobs, thinking about domestic violence and all the other issues that women are facing, working from home with their families, and how can we really facilitate that transition to this new normal? Michel, very quickly, we'll let you close it out. That sort of transparency and honesty about shortcomings, so important but not always easy. No, I think where the principles are, we found it to be extremely helpful to us is that everybody has the right intentions and good intentions here, but sometimes it's about where do you start? What do you focus on? What are the priorities? How do you measure progress? I think the principles, the gap analysis has been extremely helpful in helping us identify those areas that we should focus on, then holding ourselves accountable and being transparent in terms of measuring the progress that we're making. Maybe one last thing I would just say, Maggie, just in terms of the impact of the pandemic, one of the big issues that we all have to deal with and to contribute to is to make it easier for women to return to the workplace. The studies show that women are lagging men in terms of intent to return to the workplace. Thinking through about creating a more flexible workplace, work environment, returnship-type programs will be extremely important in making sure that we bring women back to the workplace as quickly as possible post-pandemic. Absolutely. I'm so disappointed that we're out of time because this is a wonderful discussion. We could keep it going. Thank you to all of our panelists. Thank you for your leadership, your wise insights, and for highlighting some of the really innovative programs that are helping close the gender gap in your organization. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you.