Feminomics: feminine values

I was wowed by Erika Watson MBE on Friday at The Forum. A pioneer for women's enterprise issues, Erika left her role as CEO of Prowess earlier this year to explore new challenges and is in the process of writing a book.
I have to be honest, I wasn't completely sure what to expect, and was a teeny bit worried that it might descend into a man-hating, bra burning kind of debate. But Erika did a great job of presenting some key facts about the role of gender values in the recession and the wider economy to the gathered audience of Women, Research and Enterprise Forum (WREF) members and friends, which allowed us to draw our own conclusions. My conclusions were:
1. The UK has a huge distance to travel to reach anything close to gender equality in the workplace. As the discussion was focused on the circumstances of the recession, we looked specifically at the financial services and banking industries where the gender pay gap is the largest of any industry sector at a whopping 55%. Similarly women earn only 20% of the bonuses of their male counterparts.
2. Self employed women do far more unpaid work than any other group. This includes caring for family, voluntary work and contributing to the community. Therefore encouraging more women into enterprise has a massive, unrecorded wider impact.
2. I learnt a lot about the concept of feminine values - it doesn't mean everyone hugs each other and eats chocolate at board meetings - far from it. The difference between feminine and masculine values can be seen clearly when it comes to measuring success. In masculine terms, a country's economic success is measured in GDP, that is cold hard cash. If you use feminine values (which interestingly are being adopted in France and have been mooted by our own David Cameron), success is all about quality of life, sustainability and environmental impact.

Achieving success in terms of masculine values could come at the expense of all of the above.

Read Erika's blog: http://enterpriseandequality.wordpress.com/