As part of its global Womenwill initiative, Google will host its inaugural conference titled Womenwill /today, in association with Global Citizen India in Mumbai on 19th November. The half-day conference explores key challenges women face with regards to economic opportunities and access to basic information, skilling, education and gender-neutral work policies.
The theme of the conference “Agents of change - accelerating economic opportunities for women and their communities” brings together regional and global thought leaders, including the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje and noted speakers like Dr. Rebecca Tavares - UN Women’s Representative for South Asia, Chetna Sinha, Founder of the First Rural Women Bank and Amina J Mohammed - Minister of Environment of Nigeria, also served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. The conference will see panels and discussion on topics like “Opening up a world of (economic) opportunities”, “Economic gender disparity”, “Influence of media & culture on Economic Inclusion”.
As part of the event, the Google Arts & Culture initiative will also unveil collections from partner institutions, featuring untold stories of pioneers and path breakers, and virtual exhibitions on women in Indian culture and history.
Speaking about Google’s efforts in tackling this challenge, Womenwill initiative, Miki Iwamura, Director Marketing for APAC Brand, Search, Insights, Google, said “We believe that easy access to information and putting technology at the fingertips of women everywhere can make the world a better, fairer, more amazing place. Women will is our global initiative to fight and close the gender gap by helping women fulfill their ambition and dreams with technology. We’re delighted to host our first conference in asia pacific in India, where over a million women have already benefitted from our Internet Saathi Program, which helps women in rural India to learn from one another about the Internet and how they can use it improve their daily lives. We hope this conference will help rally more support for the cause and accelerate the pace of efforts in India.”
Lending their support to the cause, the conference will also see participation from Freida Pinto and Farhan Akhtar, Nandita Das, Anupam Kher and Richard Wolffe, NYT Best Selling Author and former Journalist at MSNBC and Randall Lane, Editor Forbes in the US.
Bhavya Bishnoi, Global Citizen India spokesperson, said: “Across groups - whether gender, age, religious, social or otherwise - technology is a catalyzing force for change. At Global Citizen India we firmly believe that the easiest of technological tools like social media can be a powerful force in national and global dialogue on the issues that matter. That’s why we started this movement to mobilise the youth of India into a force to ask our leaders to commit to sustainable change on water, sanitation and hygiene, education and gender issues, and also to hold them to account on their pledges. We are delighted to partner with Google to combine our efforts to reach the end goal of closing the gender gap.”