"If you really want to change society, change the economic power of women," says Dorothy Spence.

Spence is the founder of Imaginal Ventures, a business advisory, management consulting and training firm based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They work with businesses aiming to be a force for goodhelping to scale their impact to a broader audience.

And she's not wrong. According to the UN, financially empowering women not only grows economies but is key to realizing gender equality targets and achieving global sustainable development goals. And women are good for businessmore employment and leadership opportunities for women translate to increased effectiveness and growth, and a better bottom-line across the board.

"Statistically the stats are mind-blowing," says Spence. "The same goes for women on boards of directors, too. The research is clear that when (at least) 30 percent of your board is made up of women, all performance measures of corporations are much stronger."

Despite the mounting evidence that economically empowering women benefits all, women still face a host of economic barriers, both locally and around the globe. Women are more likely to be unemployed and are over-represented in informal and vulnerable employment. Additionally, women bear the brunt of unpaid and domestic workaccording to a report by Oxfam, "if all the unpaid care work done by women across the globe was carried out by a single company it would have an annual turnover of $10 trillion43 times that of Apple."

Unfortunately, that unrealized economic power becomes a compounding loss as research shows that when women make money, they invest in their family and their community, making them stronger.

Even when women do get a piece of the pie, it's not divided equally. Globally, women are still paid less, to the tune of 77 cents for every dollar paid to men. We're less likely to be entrepreneurs, and when we do take the plunge, we face increased disadvantages. And with only 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies led by women, it shows there are still constraints to women's ability to rise to the highest levels of leadership. Constraints that impact marginalized women, and women (including Black, Indigenous, disabled, queer, transgender) who live at the crossroads of oppression, the most.

Since 1978 Business Roundtable, an association of leading American CEOs that aims to promote a thriving economy and enhanced opportunities for all Americans through smart public policy has periodically issued their Principles of Corporate Governance.

Since 1997, this document, which profoundly influences how corporations operate (in the US and beyond), has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy or the idea that corporate purpose is to serve shareholders first. That all changed in August 2019 when Business Roundtable released a new statement prioritizing the benefit of all stakeholders customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders.

"The purpose of business is no longer simply to maximize profits for the shareholders but to take care of your communities, your families, the environment, and your staff as well," says Spence. "I believe that that broader view of the purpose of business is one that women really resonate with."

Spence should know. In addition to Imaginal Ventures, she leads The Purpose Led Business School, a growth acceleration program aimed at founders looking to build their business as a force for good, a group that (so far) has, overwhelmingly, been women.

Additionally, Spence spent 2019 working as a Development Guide with SheEO, a global community and 'radically redesigned ecosystem' that uses a visionary business model to support, fund, and celebrate female innovators and entrepreneurs. Rather than trying to level the playing field by forcing women to conform to existing business models, they've developed a whole new gameone based around treating each other with radical generosity.

"When we emerge from what's going on right now globally, there'll be no doubt that we're in a hyper-collaborative environment," says Spence, of the (still not fully known) impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic. "I think that as we emerge, there is going to be the opportunity for women to step into stronger leadership roles, but in a way that is true to them."

One of the first things we can do to advance the empowerment of women financially is to close the wage gap so that men and women doing the same work receive equal compensation.

"That's clearly change one," says Spence.

A 2019 study by job search titan, Glassdoor, found Canadian women earn just 84 cents on the dollar as compared to men overall. Even when factors like education, experience, and title get taken into account (what Glassdoor calls the adjusted pay gap), Canadian women make 4 cents less than the dollar paid to men. And the numbers are even worse for women from marginalized communities.

Another way to empower women financially is to give traditionally gendered industries their economic due. A 2016 study by Oxfam Canada and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that female-dominated industries' average pay is lower than those of male-dominated sectors.

For example, Early childhood educators (a position often held by women), working full time, make a median annual wage of $25,334. Meanwhile, the median salary for truck drivers (a role overwhelmingly taken up by men) is $45,417. This is despite Insure.com's 2019 Mother Day Index finding, which estimated the 'value of a mom' at $71,297. Clearly, there's a disconnect.

"We need to make powerful requests of society," says Spence. "And we need to step up and say, you know, I would be a great board member. I could contribute. I have a lot of wisdom; I have a lot of experience."

Spence believes the government certainly has a role to play as we start to create large-scale system change. Her experience with SheEO taught her that going it alone for that level of system change is an enormous task. And, and for small businesses, it can become debilitating.

"Government is doing a great job in terms of turning their funding towards women in business," says Spence. "But the more of that, the better, I think."

And while Spence believes viewing the world through a gendered lens is critical to our ability to make the right choices, she is quick to caution against inflaming the gender divide. To her, we must work together to enact the necessary change.

"How are we going to do this together? How are we going to learn to be accepting of diversity and the perspectives of all of us? And how are we going to make choices with all these different perceptions?," she asks. "That is a much higher level of consciousness we're asking to operate on."

"How we come together is going to be key here," she adds, speaking again to our (very) current viral challenge. "Do we come together and say I need all of this because everything's scarce or do we say, what's the highest and best use of our resources today? Those are two different conversations. We've had the everything is scarce conversation in business for the last while. I think it'd be refreshing to have that different conversation: What do I really need, how can I support you? And how do we uplift the whole society right now? We could do with an upgrade anyway."

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Show her the money: Empowering women economically will empower us all - TheChronicleHerald.ca