Despite the outward appearance of gender equality in the Korean corporate environment, financial and business leaders who attended Wednesday’s Korea Times Forum emphasized that it is more important to cultivate a genuinely diverse workplace than merely having a few women on company boards as a formality. This includes enabling women executives and employees to assume similar roles and receive comparable compensation to their male colleagues
During the second session of the Korea Times Forum “Toward diversity, inclusiveness and equality” held at the Grand Hall of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), Blackstone Advisors Korea Chairman Ha Yung-ku led in-depth discussions on how to empower women in the workforce and foster female leadership in the corporate setting.
Four panelists — Citibank Korea CEO Yoo Myung-soon, Korea Network of Women in Finance Chairperson Kim Sang-kyung, Korean-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry President and CEO Martin Henkelmann and British Chamber of Commerce in Korea Executive Director Lucinda Walker — offered their insights and unique perspectives to deepen the conversation.
The session started by discussing why it’s significant to have diversity and inclusiveness in the workplace. Panelists put forth that gender diversity does make a real difference and leads to higher performance for companies, citing both their own corporate experiences as well as various eminent studies conducted globally.
“What they found was that having more women on boards led to boards and the C-Suite being more open to change and less driven to take risks and also more likely to invest in R&D, rather than being completely M&A focused. So having women on board led companies 카지노사이트킹 being more open and focused on long returns rather than immediate reward, leading to their better performances,” British Chamber of Commerce in Korea Executive Director Lucinda Walker said during the session, referring to a Harvard Business Review study.
She added two other important conditions for realizing this effect: having a number of women on the board, not just one, to actually create this change, and that diverse representation needs to be mirrored all the way through at all levels of management.