Living the dream: how to find laser-sharp focus in a pandemic
Few things drive home the importance of an enabling environment for women quite like being a women-owned small business during a pandemic.
As the editorial partner for the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society, we supported the development of content for the Women’s Forum Global Meeting from 17–19 November.
We started our work in a very different pre-COVID world, anticipating the typical hubbub of a live, in-person gathering. We closed the first fully-virtual Global Meeting on the afternoon of 19 November in a cavernous production studio with masks on, six feet apart. We did our work from home, the kitchen table, the bedroom, or from hotel rooms with strong wi-fi and stronger coffee.
And along the way, we lived out most of the challenges the world’s women have faced during this crisis, from seamlessly shifting between supervising remote fourth-grade mathematics and strategising about high-level fireside chats, to struggling along without childcare during a fortnight’s quarantine, working from 3am to noon and after toddler bedtime.
Kite is a women-owned business, and women make up about 80% of our employees. We also know that women-owned businesses are disproportionately affected by the pandemic, have less access to financing, and less access to global supply chains.
For the Women’s Forum project team, living all these challenges infused our work with a stronger sense of purpose than ever. The notion that we were working towards a more inclusive world and a better future got us out of bed on days when nothing else could.
But the point is not that we snatched triumph from the jaws of defeat. The point is that we shouldn’t have to.
You want to build an enabling environment for women to contribute their leadership, innovation and expertise to a thriving, sustainable economy?
- Stop glorifying burnout and destigmatise rest instead.
- Demonstrate decisive, empathetic, inclusive, empowering leadership that guides economies and societies steadily through a pandemic to a healthier, greener today.
- Tackle the ‘shadow pandemics’ of domestic violence and mental wellbeing.
- Protect healthcare workers, fully value care labour — which is everyone’s job, not just women’s — and fully value education.
And finally, only through inclusion will we amplify our creativity, our solutions and our strength. We’re all in different boats in the same storm. And we’ll ride it out by rafting up together.
