In May, Mastersfund Venture Partner Vani Rao took Mastersfund to the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Vani assembled a powerful group of women business leaders in the boardroom and beyond, including Meg Bear CPO SAP, Thea Soule CCO Ecobat, Lakshmi Reddy Partner Elixir, Julie Rasmussen CEO She Banks, and Kim Flanery Rye of MyKimisms, Urban Artworks, and Adjunct Professor at Seattle University. The group presented two-panel discussions at Equality Lounge, hosted by The Female Quotient, “The 50% Blind Side: Why Corporate Boards Need Women to Survive and Thrive” and “Woman’s Work: A Q&A with the Panelists.”

During the first of the panel discussions, Vani noted, “We discussed the advantages that women’s perspectives, experiences, and vision bring to multinational corporate boards, many of which lack sufficient gender-diverse perspectives today. We bypassed complaints and platitudes and delved into detailed solutions to increase this perspective worldwide.”

At the second day’s panel, this group of women, trusted for their proven decision-making skills, spoke out about the economic opportunities resulting from their leadership. “If women are to step into multinational leadership positions,” Vani noted, “we must reframe our thinking around power and authority. Both concepts have been developed solely with men in mind and history has been extremely unkind to powerful women who ‘behave like men’. We unraveled these concepts to develop a clear and positive path forward for all genders.”

You can review both panels at this link for women on boards, and this one for women and power.

Our Take on the Topic
In today’s social structure, money is power. For women to achieve equity on the planet, they must ‘be in the room where it happens’ – boardrooms and C suites. Unless equity becomes a part of governing and managing where, how, and why capital is leveraged at the highest levels, inequity will continue and amplify with disastrous financial, political, and social results. This is why we do what we do at Mastersfund. We feel grateful and humbled for the insightful, forward-thinking, and talented colleagues who join us on this mission.