BRUSSELS: Female speakers are outnumbered by men by three to one at Europe’s top international meetings including the Davos summit and Munich Security Conference, a report revealed on Thursday. The survey of world leaders and businesspeople addressing top conferences over the last five years shows a “huge gender gap” with 74 percent of speakers being male, the Open Society Foundations group said. The prestigious Munich Security Conference – which this year drew British Prime Minister Theresa May and Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu – rounds off the bottom three with 15 percent of female speakers. Open Society Foundations, a group founded by US billionaire George Soros, looked at 23 conferences between 2012 and mid-2017, finding that 26 percent of 12,600 speakers were women and 74 percent male. The #MeToo movement had broken a taboo on discrimination against women, Monika Ladmanova, gender equality advisor for EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova, told AFP.

Source: New Strait Times March 07, 2018 23:15 UTC