Dior and UNESCO staged their latest Women@Dior & UNESCO Global Conference on Thursday, as over 1,000 women gathered to hear speeches and testimonies from luxury executives, mentees, mentors and even a Nobel Prize winner.
“We are here to celebrate women’s empowerment,” explained Asha Sumputh, the bi-lingual journalist host from the stage at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
This gathering celebrated key feminist themes: access to education, equity, inclusion and gender equality, priorities at the heart of the Women@Dior & UNESCO mentoring and education program. Which led to the creation a half decade ago to Dream For Change, where several hundred talented young female students from countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Jamaica, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka annually benefit from the Women@Dior mentoring program.
A jury chaired by Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri selected the winners of this year’s Dream For Change project, where five teams presented concrete projects to empower girls in their local communities.
This year’s two winners were Meraki, a business incubator project in India to support small businesses launched by rural women, which was presented by Neha Jain. And Be Neutral, a project from Korea that addresses the dangers of body dysmorphia and the pressure to conform to beauty standards, presented by Lee Soun.
The morning session began with a musical performance, an ode to the power to sisterhood by gospel choir Voice2Gether. And ended with a powerful speech by Leymah Gbowee – Nobel Prize winner and rights activist from Liberia.
Her key idea, having the courage to make oneself heard. An idea she learned after a teacher gave her an F grade, since she rarely spoke and was unnoticed in the classroom. After she asked the teacher to read it more carefully, it was upgraded to an A.
“Speak up! I realized that my voice was my agency and my soul,” said Gbowee who had the courage to address one of Africa’s cruelest dictators in her homeland. Leading her to create a foundation to give women more options.
Gbowee has a pretty unique story. Her grandmother, who died at 115, was a first community teacher. She herself graduated at 17 from high school and wanted to be a pediatrician, but civil war threw her world upside down. Before she went on to have four children in the space of five years, prior to going back to higher education.
Over 1,000 women from more than 60 countries gathered for the event, where Delphine Arnault, President and CEO of Christian Dior Couture, addressed them in a video message. “In a world in transformation, gender equity plays a critical role. Our guiding principal is to transmit, to empower. So, we are thrilled about our partnership with UNESCO,” Arnault said.
“Christian Dior was a pioneer of women’s empowerment, he dreamed of making women feel beautiful,” noted Olivier Sastre, a Dior human resources director, in the opening address, underlining how women’s role is often overlooked, noting that 70% of farmers in Africa are women.
While Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director General, Education – was determined to underline the world’s least liberated country – Afghanistan.
“Women are banned from education there, primary and secondary. This is one of the most serious obstacles to women empowerment anywhere. We should all be Afghanistan women,” she stressed, playing on an early Chiuri show for Dior, where she presented T-Shirts reading, ‘We should all be feminists.’
“Worldwide, there has been progress – 50 million more girls in school since 2015. Yet, we remain far from our goal. Women account for two thirds of the world’s 700 million illiterates,” she lamented.
If at times, the event verged on a public relations exercise by the world’s richest luxury group, LVMH has clearly worked hard to bring great gender and salary equality to its collection of over 70 brands.
“We cannot drop our efforts. The world needs more equality. UNESCO was born after WW2… an even more useful effort today when intolerance threatens freedom of expression and human rights,” said Chantal Gaemperle, LVMH’s EVP Human Resources, attired in a large white men’s shirt with a muddy print of the Eiffel Tower.
“Recent estimates in the World Economic Forum suggest it will still take 130 years to close the gender gap. It must not take so long… Women control 80% of the household budgets in the world – that is the bigger than the economies of China and India combined. Imagine that power,” added Gaemperle, underlining that LVMH has supported thousands of women in obtaining salary equity.
On March 8, the group launched a new group digital mentoring program, while this summer’s Paris Olympics and Paralympics, where LVMH is a huge sponsor, will be the first with full gender parity.
Calling Women@Dior & UNESCO “a public/private alliance to make a better world,” LVMH’s VP for Corporate Social Responsibility Isabelle Faggianelli, noted that there are now over 400 mentees per year in the program, and some 300 mentors.
A growing issue is AI, which several speakers cautioned risks reinforcing stereotypes and perpetuating women’s positions.
“Thousands of decisions are now already based on AI, and as women are under-represented in the data, they have less chance of being recognized, or being called for a job. So, AI is amplifying inequality unless it is properly directed,” said Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s Assistant Director General, Social and Human Sciences.
Other contributions were made by Dior decision makers Marie-Céline Dupuy D’Angeac; Anne-Valérie Narcy; Borhene Chakroun, UNESCO Lifelong Learning Systems Director; influencer Lena Mahfouf; and film producer Virginia Valsecchi who spotlighted the remarkable story of
Franca Viola, a brave Sicilian and the first Italian woman to win a judgement in an Italian court against a rapist who intended to marry her back in the Sixties.
Before the whole event ended with Voice2Gether singing from an upper gallery, as hundreds of women invitees gathered for a joint photo on the main stage. The sisters are doing it for themselves.
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