At mostly male Davos, there's much talk of women

DAVOS, Switzerland — In rooms packed with men, the talk is of women – and why they're not here.

The World Economic Forum, an elite gathering of 2,500 of the world's corporate, political, entrepreneurial and media leaders, throws the gender imbalance into stark relief. Here, blue-suited, red-tie-wearing men outnumber women five to one. The ratio only gets worse when it's a room full of CEOs.

Now a group of those men, the CEOs from 10 companies — AccorHotels, Barclays, Koc Holding, McKinsey, PwC, Schneider Electric, Tupperware, Twitter, Unilever and Vodafone — see it as a business problem they want to solve.

The CEOs committed to achieving gender parity by 2020, joining HeForShe, a solidarity movement led by United Nations Women — the U.N.'s entity for empowering women — to advocate for gender equality in the workplace. The 10 companies agreed to make public the overall number of women at their companies, the gender ratio of new hires, the number of women in senior management and how many women serve on the board.

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HeForShe released its first report Friday. The numbers show there's a long way to go.

While half the companies come close to parity in their overall employment, none of the 10 companies have parity in the boardroom. Tupperware, with women holding a third of the top 6% of positions, and Unilever, with women accounting for 43% of the employees in the top 9% of the company's leadership, posted the best numbers.

"If you start with parity on day one, why aren’t we making progress? I think you need to something different," said Dennis Nally, chairman of PwC. "We need to have an intervention throughout the process on how we managed careers. We think it’s about data. We think it’s about the leadership intervention."

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Another handful of male CEOs from global corporations, including Barclays, Cisco, Marriott, Mercer and UBS, have also committed to increase gender diversity in the workplace. Men make up 80% of the executive ranks in the world's top corporations, according to Mercer, a human resources consulting firm with 20,500 employees in more than 40 countries.

"I don't think we should sit in boardrooms without women," says Jurg Zeltner, CEO of UBS Wealth Management.

Devin Wenig, of eBay, sees such diversity as a business imperative. One half of eBay's 170 million active customers are women, he said.

"We could employ all guys in Silicon Valley, but that’s not going to help us understand our customer,”  Wenig said.

Women aren't making it to the boardrooms because they're hitting barriers on the way up, says Pat Milligan, global leader of When Women Thrive, Mercer's global research organization on female participation in the work force.

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"Most companies do a good job at the professional entry level. The real issue is the talent pipeline," she said. "When they get to higher levels, they leave at higher rates. What happens? Typically, they encounter work-life issues. Typically, they have a male supervisor who can't counsel them."

Theresa Whitmarsh, who oversees more than $100 billion in investments as executive director of the Washington State Investment Board, is one of the top executives leading the charge. She says it's the men at the top who have the power and must be persuaded to make the changes in corporate culture.

Three years ago, at her first appearance at the forum, Whitmarsh often found herself the only woman in the room. It came as no surprise, of course. Whitmarsh has long-navigated the mostly male word of high finance. When she heard another executive complain about a shrinking talent pool, she suggest he tap more women.

Everyone agrees, Whitmarsh said, that the gender imbalance is unfair, a moral problem. Whitmarsh poses it as a business problem. Employers worried about a shrinking labor pool could look to the other 50% of the population to expand it, she said. Companies looking to best reach the full scope of the market could seek input from women.

At Davos, it means making sure those top female executives who do reach the rarefied air of the Swiss Alps also get top spots on high visibility panels, she said.

"Having women more visible is a very powerful step," Whitmarsh said.

Yet for all the talk over the past three years, the number of women at the World Economic Forum barely budged from 17% last year to 18% this week.

"Most businesses state that they want to hire and promote and retain more women," Saadia Zahidi, head of employment and gender initiatives at the World Economic Forum. "Where there seems to be a failure is in the action."