Source: Gender Informational Network of South Caucus
The World Economic Forum anticipates an increase in the number of female leaders at its annual meeting in Alpine Village of Davos – and its record to date – after introducing a minimum quota for women executives last year.

The group anticipates that 17% of the 2,600 people set to converge on the summit will be female, a slight bump from last year, when 16% of attendees were women.

The rule, which requires that at least one of the five official delegates sent by corporations be female, only applies to ‘strategic partners,’ a group of about 100 major corporations that pay roughly Sfr500,000 ($538,118) per year for membership of the WEF.

The companies represent about 500 of the total group attending the conference. If they do not have a female board member or senior executive to send, they must forfeit one of their five slots.

Saadia Zahidi, director of the WEF women leaders and gender parity programme, said the quota garnered mostly positive reactions in its first year. She said: “By and large there was agreement that this was something that needed to be done and perhaps surprisingly, those organisations that didn’t feel they had someone who could join, felt it was a change they needed to make and that this made sense."

The projected female attendance is only a slight increase from last year, but nearly double that of 2001, when just 9% of the crowd were women. The quota was set in response to criticism that too few top women were included in the summit.

Only 12 Fortune Global 500 corporations were run by women in 2011, the same number as the previous year. European Commission figures show that only 3% of the largest publicly-listed companies in the EU have female presidents and women comprised only 12% of the highest decision making bodies at those firms.

Last summer, European Parliament passed a requirement that there must be female representation on 30% of company boards by 2015 and 40% by 2020.

WEF started studying the gender parity issue a decade ago and has since launched an annual Global Gender Gap report and started global and regional gender parity groups that study barriers to women’s economic participation.

The parity groups, launched in 2008, are comprised primarily of business leaders, Zahidi said, though WEF does not disclose a full list of members by name or company.

Some of the women representing major banks and financial services groups this year at Davos are Connie Heng, partner in finance and capital Markets in Hong Kong at Clifford Chance; Dame Clara Furse, non-executive director for Nomura; Zehavit Cohen, head of Israel, Apax Partners; and Mary Callahan Erdoes, chief executive officer of JP Morgan Asset Management.

Female attendance at WEF conferences began to grow markedly in 2009, but Zahidi said her group still realised there was an external glass ceiling in that there are only so many women in international leadership roles or boardroom settings. To mine for those leaders, the WEF approved the quota in 2010 and implemented it last year.

WEF’s gender parity groups will launch an online repository of measures businesses have taken to close gender gaps in their leadership ranks in March.