WGF Public Advocacy Initiatives:
WGF works to raise awareness of fundamental social inequalities to the media, to voters, to public officials, and corporate and nonprofit leaders. WGF engages in public advocacy not just to highlight current inequities but more importantly to aid the community in discovering viable solutions that will create sustained equity for all citizens. Public Advocacy efforts for 2009-2011 will be focused on:
- Articulating how women and girls are being impacted by the economic recession.
- Advocating for the needs of women and girls, and the agencies that serve them, to be included in local, state, and national economic stimulus efforts.
- Framing the regional wage gap as an inhibitor to regional economic growth, and advocating for regional efforts to decrease the regional gender wage gap.
- Increasing female representation at the leadership levels of our region’s public and private sectors.
Zero No More
Since 2005, WGF has collaborated with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to benchmark annually the representation of women on the senior executive staffs and Board of Directors of Pittsburgh’s Fifty Publicly Traded Companies. Each year, after the data is published in the paper, we follow up with the CEOs of each of the companies. For those who do have women on their boards we congratulate them, we publish an ad in the Wall Street Journal (and Post-Gazette) celebrating the companies that added women to their board over the last year and we send letters to those who still do not have women on their boards offering our assistance in helping them meet their corporate diversity objectives to add women to their boards. In 2006 there were 26 companies out of the 50 with zero women on their boards, to date there are now 16. We are currently working with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to prepare the 2010 analysis. There is a community advisory group, led by WGF Board Members, which provides additional advice and peer networking and peer-to-peer advocacy on this topic. The message of the campaign is not that one woman on a board is enough, but the message is that zero is unacceptable. The campaign messaging focuses on the business case for corporate and board diversity.
