On Nov.27^th 2012, the international conference “Gender Equality and Corporate Social Responsibility: for Better Corporate Competitiveness” was held in theMarriott Hotel in Beijing. It was co-organized by UN Women, All-ChinaWomenFederation (ACWF), Sino-German Corporate Social Responsibility Projects (GIZ), and Corporate Responsibility Center of the Swedish Embassy. Over 300 representatives from domestic and foreign tradeassociations, chambers of commerce, multinational corporations and NGOs including CIBE, and personages who made contribution to the development of China’s corporate social responsibility and gender equality attended the conference.

 

The conference was made up of 3 keynote speeches in the morning and 6 panel discussions in the afternoon. Participants discussed topics including how to help Chinese enterprises protect women’s right, how to incorporate gender equality into the existing corporate social responsibility projects and how enterprises couldstrengthen their competitiveness through promoting gender equality and performingsocial responsibility. Representatives from different industries elaborated the current status of women from a number of perspectives and introduced relevant successful cases.

 

According to the statistics made by theAll-ChinaWomenFederation(ACWF) from 1990 to 2010, on the one hand more and more women have their own jobs, however on the other handtheir salaries rapidly droppedcompared to men’s salary. Interestingly, women still occupy 45.4% of China’s workforce and womenentrepreneursmake up about 25% of the total number ofentrepreneurs. The percentage of women employees greatly rises in emerging industries, technology and knowledge intensive industries. In the field of education, culture, art, healthcare, TV and broadcasting, the number of women employees even exceeds that of men. More and more companies have realized the importance of women. Research shows that women affectover 70% of China’s social purchasing power and that in the huge consumer market, 80% of the purchasing decisions are made by women.

 

The conference concluded with thewrap-ups of thepanel moderators and representatives.