The Cost of the Gender Gap

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The global economy is falling behind its potential to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year because women are not being supported and encouraged to participate. That’s a finding of auditing giant KPMG. One way to redress this is by promoting the concept of “returnships” – corporate programmes encouraging skilled women to return to work after extended career breaks. On International Womens’ Day Serpil Timuray, Chief Commercial Operations and Strategy Officer for Vodafone, talks about the telecom company’s own efforts to redress the corporate gender gap. Gender imbalance is not restricted just to the boardroom though. In the state of New South Wales, Australia, just 6 per cent of train drivers are female. As Phil Mercer reports, a concerted recruitment drive is underway. As it is in Egypt. The food delivery service Mumm aims to provide speedy delivery of authentic home-cooked food. Edwin Lane goes to meet the CEO Waleed Abdul Rahman, who says the vast pool of unemployed, and under-employed women, stuck at home in Cairo, provides him with a hard-working and very flexible workforce to prepare his customers' meals. . (Picture: Traders on the floor at JP Morgan; Credit:Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)