Davos: How companies are adapting to a gender-balanced workplace

Women still represented less than 25% of the participants at the World Economic Forum, Davos. But, nevertheless, a gender “tipping point” appeared near as those in positions of power are increasingly implementing building blocks for a gender balance workplace. The exact best practices and levers for every transition are still to be determined.

As a journalist and employee who has attended the World Economic Forum ten times, I am well aware of the gender imbalance. Davos was a meeting that women comprised about half of the attendees when I attended it for the first time in 2013. A decade later, this share has risen to 25%. It’s agonizingly slow progress for an issue that’s been on the agenda for so long.

Yet something felt distinctly different this year, and that arguably had a lot to do with the kind of executives I followed this week—and their agenda of choice: the chief sustainability officers (CSOs). As I’ve noted, previouslyDavos is home to around 60% of CSOs who are women. This was evident in the sessions and interviews I attended where women dominated.

Thanks in part to their presence, companies in the U.S. and around the world are increasingly putting in place what you could call “gender balanced” policies.

The rise of the 16-week, gender-neutral parental leave is a prominent example. At Bank of AmericaSheri Bronstein, chief human resource officer at financial services provider, said that the leave was used by both men and women in a ratio between 51% and 49%. This is one of the pioneering companies. It has also been adopted in many other tech companies and financial institutions, over the past months and years.

It means that the reality of gender roles at home and work is changing rapidly for many employees in junior and mid-career ranks. According to one senior executive, he didn’t have any paternal leave when he had his children. That he still developed a close relationship with them was due to a radical choice to organize his life around work, family, and physical exercise—and nothing else, he said.

If these and other gender-neutral policies work, then parents of all genders in the workplace will no longer need to make such difficult choices. Thus, the road to more parity—including at higher levels in corporate America—lies wide open. The rise in women in executive positions, including the CSO, will ensure that more women make it to the top of the corporate ladder.

Fortune 500 companies already see the seeds of this virtuous circle. This year, my colleagues notedThis is the first time that 10.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and it’s the largest percentage in history. It’s an additional sign of the positive change that is underway at the very top of corporate America.

However, at Davos, I believed that rapid change was more likely to be achieved in places where women are a majority or even a third of participants than in places where they make up a tenth, or quarter, of participants.

The sustainability-oriented sessions I attended, where women were in the majority (including one co-organized by Fortune The vibe was noticeably different from traditional Davos sessions such as the Fortune At the CEO dinner, the proportion of men in the participants was roughly 90%.

After the CEO dinner, where Chinese travel firm Trip.com’s CEO Jane Sun was the only woman at my table, I received an e-mail from Sun about some of the policies her company was implementing to increase the share of women in positions of leadership. “As the only female CEO of [a] major Internet company in China, I feel tremendous responsibilities to empower female leadership,” she wrote.

As she noticed “more female employees…struggle between having kids versus coming to work…we set a policy that if they decide to have their eggs frozen, the company will pay for the cost,” she wrote. For the Shanghai-based company, it proved to be a successful lever, according to Sun: “More than 40% of the middle management are females, and more than one-third of executives,” she wrote.

Although the results of parental leave policies and frozen egg policies are similar in terms of gender parity, they represent two different models. In the first, men (as parents) are encouraged be more like mothers (as mothers) and to spend more time with their children. The second encourages women to look more like men (as careerist managers).

It remains to be determined what the right balance will be between these types of gender incentives and policies. Uncertain is when and how gender parity will be realized. However, the trend at Davos was obvious: Women are more often taking part in the corporate world’s meetings.

This story originally appeared on Fortune.com

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