Women’s Forum: Building the future with women’s vision

by Aurelie Salvaire

For its 10th edition, the Women’s Forum took over Deauville’s beaches again to inspire its participants to « lead for a more equitable world ».

Salma Hayek herself opened the event explaining her work with the Kering Foundation against domestic violence, and the platform Chime for Change she has set up with Beyoncé to accelerate women empowerment.

During two days, more than 1000 participants exchanged in a large variety of small simultaneous workshops, which allowed a wide diversity of conversations in an intimate set-up.We could see here the women’s touch…

I had the honor to be invited by Jennifer Milliken, the content curator, to host the roundtable on the innovators of the Mexican delegation.

Pilar Aguilar, director of Endeavour Mexico, explained how only 1 % of their applicants are women when half of the entrepreneurs are actually female in their country.

So she invited the audience to refer more women entrepreneurs to her, and to apply to be a mentor or an investor to foster the scalability of their fellows.

One of them was present with us: Tanya Moss, who created her own jewelry brand 26 years ago. She told us about the resilience of Mexican entrepreneurs, as when she had to rebuild everything from scratch after her stores were destroyed by a hurricane.

Later on, I met another inspiring Latin lady: Johana Baramon, a famous Colombian actress, who set up Teatro interno to teach theater to women inmates in the prisons of Bogota. As she put it, after interpreting with them inside and outside jail « La casa de Bernarda Alba »: « Theater changes people ».

We met the nominees of the Cartier women’s initiative awards and of the Orange African competition. We learnt why Iceland is the champion of gender diversity.

But the strongest moment was the standing ovation given to Christine Lagarde, the French IMF director, by a very welcoming crowd of women impressed by her trajectory into a men’s world.

Mrs Lagarde joined the stage for a sincere interview, shared with us the words of Madeleine Albright: « There is a special place in hell for the women who do not help other women » and reminded us of the need to mentor and sponsor more women around us.

Her speech, on a variety of topics from Ebola to emerging powers, was sharp and yet very accessible. She explained how she pushed the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to unleash the women’s potential of his country as a key leverage for the future economic growth of the country in an aging and isolated society.

And apparently he did listen to her!

Last thing we heard, a woman stood up in the audience to ask her to run for President.

After this moving moment, it was time to dance with Rachida Justo, fellow Spaniard, teaching social entrepreneurship at IE Business School.

Next day, we discovered the Accelerate! Project from The European Union, dedicated to give more visibility to women in the media, as we advocated for in our last blogpost !

Françoise Laborde from the CSA, the French Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel, took a very strong stand talking about the still pervasive sexism existing on French radio and television.

On my way back from Deauville, I thought it was so refreshing and inspiring to see so many other men and women committed to change, and to hear elsewhere the same conversations that we are trying to spark through Shiftbalance. The world is moving and it gives hope… Back to Spain with many ideas of projects which could actually be really interesting to set up in the peninsula!

If you want to know more, check out the Women’s Forum Facebook page and our interview with Les Echos!

Mujeres al poder!

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