(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) The relevance of gender equality and women's empowerment for sustainable development has already been established and is still a key topic of discussion in key intergovernmental commitments such as the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and Agenda 21. Women's contribution to sustainable development is today undervalued and underutilised. Gender equality promotes development and lowers cost on society. It is not just the right thing to do; it makes business sense at the global, national, corporate, community, and family levels. Addressing gender issues, including women leadership, voice, and participation in decision-making are central to the achievement of all three pillars of sustainable development. How to achieve this was the focus of First Ladies Summit at the World Energy Forum on Tuesday. Dr Leila Hoteit, Principal at Booz & Company, who participated on a panel on 'Women and Sustainable Development', said: "Let us first agree that no effort to advance sustainable development will succeed if it ignores half of the world's population. We've known this for some time, but recently, through our Third Billion work, we can reconfirm this notion based on much quantitative evidence. Approximately one billion women are poised to enter the workforce in the next decade as employees, employers, and entrepreneurs. We call these women "the Third Billion" given that the group is as significant as that of the populations of China or India. We believe this Third Billion has the potential to have significant economic and social impact as a group if prepared and enabled." We developed the Third Billion Index which ranks 128 countries based on how effectively its leaders are empowering women as economic agents. For each country we looked at the inputs that the government and private sector have put in place with regard to preparation (education), access to work (including access to energy, access to technology, equal pay for equal work policy), and entrepreneurial support (including training and access to finance). We also measured the outputs for each country, specifically, how well they are doing on inclusion, advancement, and non-discrimination, explained Hoteit. The correlation between input and output - countries that have invested in front-end policies and efforts to prepare and enable their women are seeing results on the inclusion, advancement, and entrepreneurship dimension of women in their workforce. Third Billion Index (combination of input and output) strongly correlated to GDP per capita. In fact, we separately measured that if female employment rates rose to male employment rates, GDP would increase by five per cent in UK and US, up to 12 per cent in UAE (given the gap is much larger). Clearly, the more economically productive your nation's women (half your talent pool), the higher the GDP, hence it is the key factor to economic sustainable development, she pointed. "Third Billion Index (combination of input and output) strongly correlated to outcomes related to societal well-being: illiteracy, child mortality, early childhood development. Thus, empowering women is a key factor to social sustainable development. This is not surprising and for the large part, due to what is called the "multiplier effect", women tend to invest a bigger portion of their income to their children's education, which means these children are more educated and bring social and economic benefits to their society," added Hoteit.

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