i am very concerned about that. [ applause ] >> if i could just add one thing. i was on another panel on conflict resolution and transformation, and what we talked about was this exact phenomenon, and women in positional power is critical. women don't need to be involved but in positions of power. if we had our own country and congress, 17% of our congress are woman, and 20% of afghanistan's parliament are women. enough said. >> just very briefly. if you want to get into international development i encourage you to look at economics and economic models.

when we are talking about results, we are using metric numbers to understand results for development and don't get stuck in the ghetto of looking at a very small scale and you have to take it up to policy. there's a great organization in national security called w.i.s.e. it's a fantastic organization. if you know how to think strategicly in development terms and in military terms. >> there's another organization called white house. their goal is to put women in elective office and that's another thing to consider. >> upstairs? >> upstairs. we do have a question from a gentleman in the back row. can i get to him after you -- >> here he comes. >> i can't see who is asking the question.

ask your question, sir. >> you mentioned critique of aid from the left and that you thought that critique was incorrect. would you expand on that, please. >> i said i think it has some elements of validity. there are actually two critiques from the left. a domestic critique and an international critique. the international critique is one of the most interesting developments in the field that happened in the last decade or so which is that you have people from aid countries saying no thank you and we are better off

without your aid. one of my favorite antdotes about this is from ghana where the ministry declared a holiday, a month where they refused to meet with any representatives of any donor organizations or governments, and they said thank you very much and we need time to get our work done. carrie referenced the problem of coordination. and there are increasingly strong voices from traditional recipient aid countries, and they say you take away our power of choice and you impose your priorities on us, and you destroy our cultural traditions in the name of scale, and you try out ideas on us that don't work and you send us your rejects and we would have been better off without you. as i say, i think that critique is overblown. but for actually reasons that judith laid out, it's very important to hear and take seriously when we think about the kind of large-scale quick

let's run in there and put on a show in the barn and build a democracy kind of foreign aid that comes nationally. there is actually many aspects of it that don't come from ill will or don't come from sort of deep-seeded imperialism, but that do play out on the ground in ways that have been very damaging, and then this is a critique that we need to listen to now. at the same time, you get the critique from the left that judith mentioned getting from her family. why would you -- famous words of john kerry. why would you build fire houses in iraq instead of the in the united states? well, the answer might be because first of all we knocked down the fire houses in iraq. but secondly, because maybe as i said at the beginning of my talk, it's really important to the u.s. that country "x" have a functioning society where if somebody's house is burning down somebody could come and put it out. my problem with the domestic critique, it's where we should not spend money overseas and should spend it at home.

to my mind, one of the things it means to be progressive is to realize that we're all connected and that especially as wealthy and powerful we are is we simply don't have the choice of say taking the ron paul choice of saying, oh, the rest of the world can look after itself. so -- >> a question from the gentleman against the back wall? >> the grassroots policy, i am not aware of what that is. >> the question is what is the grassroots policy? >> i think i mentioned a little bit about grassroots development which is the notion of bottom up development, so you take local community ideas or local community approaches. there's a big discussion right now about the kind of -- the bottom of the pyramid that is also kind of a little bit grassroots approach that the private sector is beginning to look at. you have all these people that have tremendous needs that are getting access to financial

resources and they need to purchase things, legitimate things, like cell phones or health care services, how can you provide services to the people that make up the bottom of the pyramid that is pretty significant proportion of the world's economy. but the grass roots, it's not necessarily grass roots policy, but grass roots development approach which is are locally based approaches. >> yes, ma'am. are we beginning to redefine the paradigm for how we measure poverty new or development or cultural models that where, you know, we are always thinking about the dollar and a person's take home income, but a lot of communities, poor communities of

the world, don't think much about dollars. they think about whether or not we're growing enough food. >> so the question is there a need to broaden our definition of poverty or change it so that it's not measured on individual income? >> i think one of the challenges is when we're trying to make comparisons across cultures, we do tend to oversimplify and i think there is recognition that the models are often very simplistic. but if you look at for example what goes in to the human development index, it's often -- it's a minimal level of basic services. again, those services may be slightly different depending on the local context and someone mentioned to me here within the

context of this conference a discussion on the -- i don't think she's in the audience here, but she's involved with the happiness index and the discussion at the u.n. i think that's a challenging of models. but i don't want us to lose sight of the fact that having good health care one or two hours distance from your home, having access to clean safe drinking water, having access to basic education. these are things that i do see as universal rights and i think we don't want to cloud the motion of having local models and kind of losing sight of some of the others. most development practitioners are aware of the limitations of the models, but it's so difficult to make comparisons across countries. and they are really needed to push policy, to be able to say this this country is moving better, to be able to move forward. it makes government feel really good about their progress, or it puts a spotlight on situations that are particularly dire. for example, we do a lot of work with people looking at gaps that are tremendous in countries in

the region between the indigenous population and the nonindigenous population. it's almost as if you're looking at two completely different countries. you do meet some of the measures, but they're very limited. >> and one more thing coming from your discussion of the gross national happiness index. i think we assume the traditional model assumes that you have to be rich to be happy or at least you have to be a certain level of rich to be happy. and i don't think that's necessarily true. and the gross national happiness index is interesting because it showed that people in china are actually happier than people in the united states. but -- and just a tiny little anecdote. my son spent a couple months in liberia, he was 16, and he was

helping them teach soccer to kids who were formerly child combatants, many with missing limbs. and they lived in very dire conditions. but i said to him after a month and a half of doing this, what are you learning from this? and his number one learning was, you know, mom, they're so much like us. the things that we have in common are exactly the same. and the things that are different from us are very small. and they're happy and they love each other. i think we assume that people who live in poor countries are less happy and i think that's a fallacy. >> so a question from the woman here, we might have time for two more questions and i will -- you can have the second question if we have time defending on the length of the question and the answer. >> thank you for sharing your expertise and knowledge. it's been a great experience for me. you both or all of you had touched on the importance of measuring results and it was kind of a lead-on to her question. you had mentioned the paris

declaration as a possibility. i recently worked with an international ngo and a lot of our work had to incorporate or assimilate the mdgs. so i'm really interested to hear from all three of you on if you feel that the mgds have been a successful tool for measurement, and if it has or has not been, what's your recommendation for tools of measurement for impact and finding results? >> so the question is the mgd a good tool for measurement? >> millennium development goals. i think actually probably you've done a lot of work in this area, but the one thing i want to say, they're goals and underneath those goals are all sorts of different -- literally hundreds of different indicators that organizations or governments use

to measure whether or not they're achieving the mgds. but i think you've done a lot of thinking so this, so i'll let you -- >> yeah, the millennium development goals were a set of ten broad goals and as carrie said a bunch of sub targets adopted in 2005 because the deadline is 2015. and i'm going to comment on this from a public affairs perspective rather than from a development practitioner's perspective and maybe that's a partial answer to your question already there. and they did a tremendously good job of drawing attention to the problems that her intended to rectify. and especially in 2005, they got a lot of intention. you hear about them still in a lot of community groups, churches, my own church spent all of lent this year praying for the mdgs. that's really asking a lot of

god given what i know about the mdgs. couldn't we do something that's not my day job, please? so it was an inspired marketing stroke. but like many marketing strokes, the initial idea for the campaign was unsustainable and not closely connected must have to the reality of if, which is that these are enormously complex issues. it was a largely rhetorical campaign with no real ability to compel anybody to change what they do to make the goals happy. and there have been some amazing pieces of progress, some areas of even moving backwards. and that makes it easy to for people to say it was a meaningless pr campaign. so were i doing it over again, i would have picked fewer and --

well, this of course is very hard to do this at the u.n. where everybody has to be happy, but ideally withdrew have picked two or three and asked somebody to make some commitment as to how they would be actualized. so that's my critique in terms of getting people who aren't immersed in this stuff to care and be motivated and involved. i'll let these two speak to the practitioner critique of whether it actually helped and how it helped our hurt on the ground. >> i think one of the challenges in latin america is that the local region was seen as moving on track. in fact there were some discussions in the early years about this is really about africa and development in africa. goals are good on gender, not so good on cultural and ethnic equality. and one of the challenges i think also is that they're taking averages. that's part of the reason why it's really easy it for latin america basically you don't have

to have a lot of policy changes to make sure that the targets are met. because in countries and regions where you have inequality, it's really the gaps between the groups that are most important, not necessarily that growth is moving and things are moving in the right direction. we know the historic case of brazil where you had huge income inequality, yet you still had kind of brazil was moving towards targets. which is what is making this kind of development so interesting in brazil is that brazil is saying it's not acceptable for us to meet targets when we have such levels of inequality and poverty in our inner country. so again i think some discussion on racial and ethnic equality or cultural difference, cultural values and maybe who are discussion i don't understand the averages with the commitments by the individual governments because then you

have something to work for. it doesn't become an exercise for just certain parts of the world and not others. >> and i think they are what they were intended to be. largely for public relations purposes, but also to get the donors aligned on the same subjects and to make a common commitment to each other. i think one of the reasons why they are important is that they do focus people on a few of the key indicators. but another problem is we are completely unrealistic about what we can attain. and i'm not sure why question that, but it is continual. my husband works at usaid and he's constantly battling with all of the people who are in the bureaus that are responsible for some of the different progress matt tick areas. because they always want to vastly sort of inflate the likely achievements of their programs. and i don't know why we do that except for perhaps because we want to persuade congress that we're worth investing in. i'm not sure. but we're in the realistic about what we can actually hope to achieve with our money. >> and i have a strong perspective on why we do that and for those of us who come into the world and want to make the world a better place, we all do need a personal source of optimism to continue to get up in the morning and work on these terrible things. so we're sort of sometimes guilty of externalizing our own optimism.

and in this work where we don't live in a dictatorship. we don't just have money handed down to us. we're constantly persuading people. we're living on the knife edge of what is and what ought to be. and the very great challenge that we have in this work anytime we are talking about it and promoting it is giving an expression that's realistic that won't lead to disappointment, but that's also hopeful enough to get your audience excited and wanting to come with you. and i think that's the core dilemma we all face in this business. it reads us down pretty unhelpful directions. >> i'm sorry to report that we are out of time. i'd like to apologize to the -- [ applause ] i'd like to apologize to the people in the balcony who had questions that didn't get answers, but i'd also like to thank our panel. which was great. so thank you very much. [ applause ]

the university of colorado's annual world affairs conference in boulder also looked at women in the corporate world. among the speakers, former apple executive and the creators of take our daughters to workday.

welcome, everyone. i believe it's time to start. let me start out by saying my name is sharon adams. i'll be moderating the session today. and it is wednesday, april 11th at noon in old maine. and the number of our panel is 3412, and the title of our panel is women in business, a seat at the table. before i start in with the introductions, the brief introductions, i just want to make an announcement that any students that are in my classes need to sign up at the door. there should be a clipboard for you to sign up. okay. so we're very, very pleased to have the panelists here with us today. i think it's a very lively topic. we're going to start out by having our first speaker will be donna morton.

she has extensive experience? building relationships between business and nonprofits, communications and government relations, and she was recently recognized as a leader in social change innovation. and also i want to note that she was -- she is an unreasonable fellow at the unreasonable institute here in boulder, colorado. we may be hearing more about that. di is passionate about inspiring leadership. she is working on inclusive workplaces and the success of women. this led her to both to found explore for and to be on the founding board of dress for success. she is the managing director of

apple australia. she has been the managing director for apple australia from 1997 to 2001. . our third speaker will be joe muse, and joe is a director of multikuehl chur intelligence. he's produced works for clients such as american honda motor operation, nike, mgm, mirage, the u.s. army and the white house. he also runs an organization where 70% of the employees are women, including the executive director and the ceo, i believe. and then we have finally marie wilson, and marie is the founder and president of the white house project, she founded this white house project in order to build a richly diverse, generally

representative democracy, and the white house project, it's important to note that it spans politics, business and the media. she's also the creator of take our daughters and sons to work day and the author of the book "closing the leadership gap: why women have and must rule the world." >> so i have a fairly -- i have had a very unusual career. and some would argue unreasonable career path. including my family, who have thought that just about everything i have done since i left the university has been uncivil and unruly. i actually started my career working for grandees and actually went to jail every five weeks for two years and i learned a lot about being a woman inside that particular container.

green peace has a lot of male energy and the idea of sort of direct action and the sort of confrontational nature of what green peace has done was very foundal for me, very important. the idea of learning how to say no as a woman. powerfully, with dignity, actually using your body to say no, was actually very foundal. and i spent a lot of years working in other softer environmental organizations, the sierra club, a whole series of different sort of green movement career paths opened up for me. and then i hit a wall. i hit a place where i realized that my background as a woman, my interest in economics, my heritage which includes having indigenous blood were out of

step in some ways with aspects of the environmental movement. i felt like there were these missing pieces and i wanted to sort of move off in a new direction. and i found the only way to really do that was as an entrepreneur, and so i started a series of nonprofit organizations and now recently a business. and i think there is something really powerful for me, as a woman being able to define the terms of the work, on my terms and that's really what i think invited me into the entrepreneurial space and while i would be encouraging particularly young women to look at their lives and maybe see their entrepreneurship energy. i think often women aren't as encouraged to be entrepreneurs as men historically, but some of the most amazing, particularly social entrepreneurs i have met

over the last decade have been women. and women from all over 2 world. several people in the audience and people on the panel are familiar with this really innovative company out of pakistan called bags for business. and they're highly unreasonable, brilliant ceo is a woman named savgor, from pakistan, educated at mit, two degrees including a graduate degree at m.i.t. and she went back to pakistan, and she went back to change the face of business in pakistan, but also open up opportunities for girls and women. and let me get my purse. this is one of the bags that this school in pakistan, run by salvo makes. they basically use the lure of a beautiful handbag, and if anyone

wants this bag or a bag like it, see me later. they use this incredible piece of essential women's fashion to drive change in pakistan. they take girls from the ruins and they put them in school, they pay their families the same wages that they would have got for them to work for 10 hours a day, almost as endentured servants to the rooms, and then they send them to school for seven hours aday. one additional hour a day, they learn embroidery that gets turned into these bags. i think that's an example of women in business. of whole people doing whole work, bringing all of themselves, salvo brought everything she knows about economics and business to bear. but she also brought everything she knows as a human being, and her desire to see girls lifted into her business model. and i think that's one of the

pieces that i'm seeing over and over again that women do differently. part of the design of the company that i'm the ceo of right now, is to build an energy company that actually hands the power of clean technology, clean energy to indigenous communities. to native american, i work in canada so first nations communities in canada. and in essence we do that through this kind of complex model. it's not just an energy company. we use clean energy as a platform to build skills and capacity, to build jobs, and to incubate businesses in the communities. and a lot of the people that we train and develop are women in these communities. actually a lot of the chiefs and counsel that we work most closely with are women's communities.

and some of the most kind of brilliant political leaders i can think of in north america are several women chiefs of native tribes in canada who are also these complex women who bring their respect for elders, their reverence for culture and their desire to create jobs in their communities but on their own terms. and so i think there is something that actually goes back to women's brains. and this is for you, george. there is something in women's brain chemistry and the science that's now very abundant about women's brains that i think is part of why we do complexity in everything we do, but particularly in a business context differently. that there's actually evidence that women have more white matter, more of the interconnective tissue that allows for long-term thinking, that doesn't compartmentalize, that contexturalizes, that connects people and connects information and can bring very

complex variables to bear. and that's in essence what i'm trying to do with my work is be a whole human being in my work. which means i'm a mother. which means that what i know about running a company, some of it i learned from raising children. and some of what i know about building teams i know from my work in my family. and i feel like it's time we started to stop pretending that men and women are the same. i just -- i don't believe it. i think lots of us intuitively don't believe it. it doesn't mean we don't have the same capacities, but we manifest those capacities and the way our work in the world shapes is foundationally different. and i want to wrap up by talking a little bit more about one of the big pieces that i think brings substance to the work of men and women but i think has a