(Bloomberg) — Two years after the dual shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic and global Black Lives Matter protests led to greater calls for economic and racial equality, leaders across business and government are convening at Bloomberg’s Equality Summit to take stock of what’s changed and how to measure progress.
On day two of the event, First Deputy Prime Minister of Spain Nadia Calviño will kick things off with a panel on inspiring women to get into finance in the European Union. Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, will talk about how to control inflation while helping close gender and racial wealth gaps. And, Anette Trettebergstuen, Norway’s Minister of Culture and Equality, will speak about how it became on the world’s most gender-equal countries.
* See a full lineup here. Catch up on yesterday’s panels here, and click here to read daily coverage from Bloomberg Equality.
First Deputy Prime Minister of Spain Is ‘Very Supportive’ of Quotas (8:16 a.m. NY)
As the European Union weighs requiring quotas for women on boards, First Deputy Prime Minister of Spain Nadia Calviño said she is “very supportive” of them.
The economist said her thinking evolved on the issue. “One day I realized that there are biases, that there are glass ceilings, and not so much glass ceilings, but very hard ceilings to break,” she said. “We can’t wait 125 years to reach equality, we need to do something now. Quotas are game changers, they are a shock to a system.”
Quotas have been shown to increase gender and racial diversity on boards both in the U.S. and E.U.