Deborah Gibbins | 2019 Women’s Empowerment Principles Forum

yes thank you it's a great honor to be here at the United Nations headquarters representing Mary Kay as we officially signed the Women's Empowerment Principles and represent our enthusiastic and unwavering support for gender equality around the world. And in doing so, I honor our founder Mary Kay Ash who created her company 55 years ago for the sole purpose of enriching women's lives through entrepreneurship and giving them pathways to financial stability and independence. She was truly ahead of her time. I know if she were here, she would be so proud of her company. So thank you for this opportunity of standing here in this esteemed hall. If Mary Kay were here, I know she would be enthusiastically, wholeheartedly supporting SDG number five: achieving gender equality and empowering women all around the world. Mary Kay Ash experienced many of the frustrations that women still face as they attempt to advance at the top of their fields. For years, male colleagues accused her of thinking just like a woman in her business. And on many occasions, as she went out—she was in charge of sales training for a company for a long time—and she would go out to the workplace or at the market and take men with her and train them, and they would come back after months on the road together, and they'd come back to Dallas, and she would see that man be promoted above her and be paid twice the pay that she was making after she had just spent months training him. So when she founded her company, Mary Kay's Cosmetics in 1963, she wanted to create a company where thinking like a woman was seen as an asset, not an insult. And so today, millions of independent beauty consultants around the world have embraced her philosophy, and we support them. In our company, empowerment and entrepreneurship are synonymous at Mary Kay. And at a corporate level, Mary Kay demonstrates the first Women's Empowerment Principle of establishing high-level corporate leadership for gender equality, because 50% of our executive team is comprised of women. Besides myself, our general counsel, our chief scientific officer, our chief people officer, our chief marketing officer, and the president of our Europe region are all women. So we're already there. And I'm not sure how we can talk about the future of work working for women unless we talk about advancing female entrepreneurship. Female entrepreneurs are key drivers of economic growth and poverty reduction. The World Bank found that in the United States, women-owned firms are growing at more than double the rate of all other firms and contribute nearly $3 trillion to the economy and are directly responsible for more than 23 million jobs. We're seeing similar trends around the world. As we've heard today, in 2016 the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that 163 million women were starting or running new businesses in 74 countries, and that since 2014, women's entrepreneurial activity has been growing at a pace of 10% a year. These are positive developments, but the obstacles to success still have to be erased. If we want an equitable, vibrant future, we must be aware of the systemic challenges that exist as barriers to empowerment. Women in every part of the globe are predominantly restricted by three things: social norms, lack of skills, and lack of capital, which we just heard about in the previous panel. First, from the social norms perspective, many women-owned businesses are small-scale, operated from home, and are focused on retail or services. Operating from home allows women the flexibility to create their own schedule and balance multiple demands. Mary Kay was founded on this principle, and it's the core of how we cater to the needs of the female entrepreneurs who sell our products around the world. However, many women lack the support systems needed to run a thriving business. They are often tasked with a disproportionate share of childcare and household duties in their home and don't have the option of running a business outside their home because of social pressures or the real or perceived dangers of leaving their home. We need to equip women-owned businesses with access to affordable childcare, elder care, and healthcare. Mary Kay was a single mother of three in the 1950s, and there were very few options for quality childcare that she could afford, so she had to have a network of family and friends step in when she needed it most. But that option is not available to people on a wide-scale basis. In order to make the future more hospitable for women-owned businesses, we have to educate local communities on the benefits of women at work and advocate for government policies that create favorable conditions for female entrepreneurs. Second, lack of access to training and skills. It's difficult for anyone to draft a business plan or create a physical or digital storefront or negotiate contracts if they don't have the right training or previous work experience. But it's even more difficult in this field to be challenging if you do not have access to those skills and if you do not have financial literacy or just basic literacy. What's astounding in 2019, UNESCO is finding that women still account for two-thirds of the 750 million adults around the world without basic literacy skills. This is a fundamental disadvantage and automatically deprives women of the capacity to control all aspects of their businesses. But there are reasons to be hopeful. Thanks to the activism galvanized by the Millennium Development Goals and now the Sustainable Development Goals, more women have access to primary and secondary school education, but unfortunately they are still getting left behind when it comes to higher education, vocational and technical skills training. We see an opportunity to create more pathways for these girls, ones that lead to entrepreneurship as a means for economic security and personal empowerment. We know there's a growing digital divide, and technology, which is so critical to new businesses, is often inaccessible for women who can't afford it or can only connect to the Internet in unsafe public spaces. Bridging that gap by increasing digital literacy and access will allow women to learn more and be confident and connected as entrepreneurs. Women across the United States and across the U.S. to sub-Saharan Africa face the issues of access to capital, which we just heard about in this panel. The keepers of the key to finance are often men and tend to support entrepreneurs who look like themselves. As a result, women often have to fight even harder to get the capital they need. Generally, women have less access to bank accounts in their own name. Many female entrepreneurs, especially in developing countries, dip into their own life savings or get loans from family and friends, and this limits their ability to make long-term investments and build sustainable enterprises. Financial barriers are often written into the law, and many governments do not grant equal rights for women to open a bank account, get a job without permission, and own or inherit property. So what can we do? We can be forthright about these conditions that women entrepreneurs face, but we can't accept them as they are. We must challenge the status quo. Entrepreneurship grants a woman the ability to set her own goals. And what could be more empowering than that? To make the future of work work for women, we need to create support systems for women to access healthcare, childcare, and elder care; close the digital gap and increase women's access to technology and education; and connect women-owned enterprises to new sources of finance. Our company has always been believers in women's potential. The whole world benefits when women are connected to markets and gain status in their communities. Mary Kay Ash said, "Women do not think differently from men, but the differences have nothing to do with being inferior or incompatible with how men think. On the contrary, thinking like a woman can be a tremendous advantage." So let's make thinking like a woman something to be proud of. Thank you.