Jakarta, 30 October 2021 – The alliance for women's economic representation advancement and empowerment, G20 EMPOWER, in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), launched the book “Best Practices Playbook 2021”. This book is expected to be a reference for increasing the leadership capacity of women in the business world. The compilation of this book is based on a study involving more than 150 best practices from 23 countries in the implementation of various private sector policies and initiatives to strengthen corporate commitment and performance to women's leadership.
Director & Chief Strategic Transformation Information Officer of XL Axiata, Yessie D.Yosetya said, "I wish this G20 EMPOWER Best Practices Guidebook can provide motivation for business friends in Indonesia to implement the vision of gender equality in their respective companies, including providing space for broad scope for women's leadership."
Yessie who is also Chair from Indonesia in G20 EMPOWER sees that this book will be a very good and useful guide for women to prepare themselves to be able to compete in the midst of very tight industrial competition, where there is still a lot of gender discrimination that occurs. . Through this book we can learn a lot from experiences in 23 countries with 150 best practices in committing, collaborating, and implementing concrete actions to achieve gender equality.
Meanwhile, Chair of the Italian Presidency of G20 EMPOWER, Paola Mascaro, said, “This “Best Practices Playbook 2021” is a valuable work that shows that cross-country and cross-sectoral synergies are important in efforts to empower women, and this needs to be disseminated. The best practices contained in the Best Practices Playbook 2021 Guidebook demonstrate a pragmatic approach that is unique to the business world and can be adopted by all parties to drive change.”
BCG Managing Director and Partner, Laura Villani, said that Best Practices Playbook 2021 is a guidebook that provides best ways and practices that focus on three main things to do to close gender inequality, namely, measurement schemes to see women's representation, building women’s talent pathways, and enabling women to lead the future.
This book, among other things, describes the most popular measurement scheme regarding talent pathways, namely the company's policy to provide equal opportunities in recruitment and promotion (quota in candidate lists or in succession planning). Most of the companies interviewed identified unconscious bias and culture as the main challenges for advancing women in their careers.
There was also a presentation on special development and mentoring programs for women, and the formation of communities where women have networking opportunities, and take inspiration from other women leaders. In addition, it is also revealed the challenges faced by women, including the bubbles of women's insecurities, women's fear of speaking up or taking on challenging roles. This shows that women need mutual support, as well as guidance from senior leaders who believe in them.
In early October 2021, during a special G20 EMPOWER session held in Rome, Italy, XL Axiata CEO Dian Siswarini had the opportunity to share experiences in implementing good practices implemented at XL Axiata regarding support for female employees to get positions at the company leadership level. Besides Dian, other speakers were Christine McLoughlin (Suncorp Group, Australia) and Marta Blanco (CEOE, Spain).
Further information related to G20 EMPOWER Best Practices Playbook 2021 can be reached through this link https://www.g20.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Empower-Playbook-2021-complete_September-20_compressed.pdf