NEWS & INSIGHT
THE PERCEPTION OF WOMEN
SUPPORTING LATIN AMERICA’S B MOVEMENT COUNTRY: Chile SCHOOL: Universidad Adolfo Ibañez (UAI Business School) The Business School at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (UAI Business School) has signed a collaborative agreement with Sistema B, an NGO that promotes the B Corps certification of the highest standards of social and environmental performance in Latin America. MBA students of UAI Business School will provide pro bono advice to B companies, and the Business School will offer scholarships for its postgraduate programmes to B company employees, in the terms of the agreement. ‘We are facing a paradigm shift, where we must develop different answers to the questions we are facing as a society,’ said Luciana Mitjavila, Director of the Executive MBA (EMBA) at UAI Business School. ‘Sistema B raises a convergence of three issues that must be addressed – economic growth added to social and environmental concerns. As a Business School, we firmly believe that these three variables have to be present in any leader’s decision making. These variables should not compete with each other; they must coexist.’ Mitjavila went on to explain that all students who choose to tackle the area of ‘Business Challenges’ in their thesis requirement on any of the School’s MBA programmes will be able to work on strategic problems for a B Corp company, starting with students of UAI Business School’s modular-format Advanced MBA in the final quarter of 2021. There are currently 699 B Corp companies across Latin America (of 4,000 worldwide) according to Sistema B. Since its creation in the 2012, the B Corps community in Latin America has grown to a combined value of $5 billion USD in annual revenue. Perhaps the world’s best-known example in the global community is French multinational food corporation Danone, which has multiple subsidiaries certified as B Corps. The first B Corp company in Chile – gaining registration as early as 2012 – was waste management company, TriCiclos. With regards to scholarship offering, Mitjavila advised that ‘all postgraduate degrees at the Business School have benefits and scholarships’ for members of B companies. ‘With this, we achieve a positive reinforcement of the model, allowing its leaders to acquire new tools to lead change,’ she added. / TBD
AND MONEY COUNTRY: UK SCHOOL: Brunel University London
The way in which women are portrayed in stock images relating to money and finance varies considerably to the way in which men are portrayed. This is the finding of recent research from Brunel University London and Starling Bank. Brunel Business School’s Human Resource Management Professor Shireen Kanji and Divisional Lead and Reader in Marketing, Ana Canhoto scrutinised 600 of the most used stock photographs with the search term ‘people and finance’, and found the portrayal of women in these photos to be drastically different from the portrayal of men. Women were nearly four times more likely than men to be depicted as ‘childlike’ when handling money in images; for example, hugging piggy banks. This increased to more than half (52%) when the search term was ‘women and money’. Women in photos were also more likely than their male counterparts to be holding coins (25% compared to 13% of men), while men were more likely to be holding banknotes (53% versus 44% of women). The researchers argued this illuminated the perception that women have smaller amounts of money than men. In addition, people with disabilities were rarely represented in these photos, and there was little variation in characteristics such as sexual orientation or age. For example, women over 40 were rarely portrayed, with young models used for women 29% of the time compared to young models being used for men just 7% of the time. ‘Financial inequality doesn’t end with the wage gap – it’s all around us in the images we consume, often subconsciously, every day,’ said Starling Bank CEO and founder Anne Boden. ‘That needs to change. Too often women are pictured like children with tiny amounts of money. We need fewer piggy banks and pennies, more women taking the lead, and greater diversity overall.’ / EB
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
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