Britain’s Oxford University has teamed up with nine of the world’s biggest companies, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Coca-Cola Co, to increase women’s financial clout by sharing success stories.
The Global Business Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment initiative, launched on Thursday, is the brainchild of Linda Scott, one of the world’s top thinkers on women’s entrepreneurship.
“The whole agenda would move more quickly if these players were sharing with each other what they were learning,” said Scott, who is DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Oxford University’s Said Business School.
“These companies are far more than the people they employ or their supply chains. They are huge global systems that include everything from production to transportation; they go from farms to laboratories, from offices to factories,” she said.
“If we don’t learn to work within those systems, we have really missed a bet on making the best use of our resources in solving an important global problem,” Scott said.
About half of the world’s women are in the labor force compared with about 75 percent of men, data show.
They hold less senior roles and earn on average 60 to 75 percent of what men make, according to the data.
However, studies show that more women working accelerates economic growth, while women also invest more of their income into families to educate children and end poverty.
“If women have the money and freedom to choose how to spend money, they will spend it on the health, nutrition and schooling of their children — and this has implications for long-term economic prosperity,” Scott said.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc, food giant Mondelez International Inc, auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, retailer Marks & Spencer Group PLC and the ExxonMobil Foundation also joined the coalition.
Their flagship initiatives include bringing women-owned businesses into their supply chains, boosting their access to finance and technology, and improving female farmers’ yields.
One success story is Goldman Sachs’ decade-old 10,000 Women program that aims to help about 100,000 women entrepreneurs in emerging markets get more capital.
It said women who graduated from the program doubled the size of their workforce and increased revenues almost fivefold within 18 months.
Sam Smethers, chief executive officer of Fawcett Society, a British women’s rights group, welcomed the news.
“It needs to be meaningful and lasting so that women’s lives are genuinely transformed,” she said.
TECH TITAN: Pandemic-era demand for semiconductors turbocharged the nation’s GDP per capita to surpass South Korea’s, but it still remains half that of Singapore Taiwan is set to surpass South Korea this year in terms of wealth for the first time in more than two decades, marking a shift in Asia’s economic ranks made possible by the ascent of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電). According to the latest forecasts released on Thursday by the central bank, Taiwan’s GDP is expected to expand 4.55 percent this year, a further upward revision from the 4.45 percent estimate made by the statistics bureau last month. The growth trajectory puts Taiwan on track to exceed South Korea’s GDP per capita — a key measure of living standards — a
Samsung Electronics Co shares jumped 4.47 percent yesterday after reports it has won approval from Nvidia Corp for the use of advanced high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which marks a breakthrough for the South Korean technology leader. The stock closed at 83,500 won in Seoul, the highest since July 31 last year. Yesterday’s gain comes after local media, including the Korea Economic Daily, reported that Samsung’s 12-layer HBM3E product recently passed Nvidia’s qualification tests. That clears the components for use in the artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators essential to the training of AI models from ChatGPT to DeepSeek (深度求索), and finally allows Samsung
READY TO HELP: Should TSMC require assistance, the government would fully cooperate in helping to speed up the establishment of the Chiayi plant, an official said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said its investment plans in Taiwan are “unchanged” amid speculation that the chipmaker might have suspended construction work on its second chip packaging plant in Chiayi County and plans to move equipment arranged for the plant to the US. The Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported earlier yesterday that TSMC had halted the construction of the chip packaging plant, which was scheduled to be completed next year and begin mass production in 2028. TSMC did not directly address whether construction of the plant had halted, but said its investment plans in Taiwan remain “unchanged.” The chipmaker started
MORTGAGE WORRIES: About 34% of respondents to a survey said they would approach multiple lenders to pay for a home, while 29.2% said they would ask family for help New housing projects in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu city and county, are projected to total NT$710.65 billion (US$23.61 billion) in the upcoming fall sales season, a record 30 percent decrease from a year earlier, as tighter mortgage rules prompt developers to pull back, property listing platform 591.com (591新建案) said yesterday. The number of projects has also fallen to 312, a more than 20 percent decrease year-on-year, underscoring weakening sentiment and momentum amid lingering policy and financing headwinds. New Taipei City and Taoyuan bucked the downturn in project value, while Taipei, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung
RSS