Reversing the Paradox – Promoting gender–balanced leadership

As a nation, Ireland has an excellent reputation for its attitude towards diversity and inclusion. Yet while the challenge of gender-balanced leadership has been addressed over the years, today in Ireland as in the rest of the world the lack of representative numbers of women in decision-making roles remains a very real issue. At the current pace of progress, female executive representation across Europe is unlikely to reach 20% until 2035. To address this issue, Ibec, along with the Department of Justice and Equality, with generous funding from the European Union under its PROGRESS programme (2007-2013) brought together 200 senior executives, CEOs and senior public sector officials to this conference aimed at showcasing better ways to promote gender-balanced leadership. The aim was not only to generate debate, but to encourage action by identifying practical ways to maximise the talent of both genders in senior decision-making roles