NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE: Businesses are starting to understand what development experts have long known: investing in women pays dividends. Women are more likely than men to put their income back into their communities, driving illiteracy and mortality rates down and GDP up…
Bringing women into businesses creates what Michael Porter and Mark Kramer of Harvard Business School call “shared value”—it helps companies while helping communities too. Consumer-product businesses have quickly understood the benefits—for instance, bypassing retail and hiring women to build person-to-person distribution channels for everything from cosmetics to beverages. More recently, companies have found it especially effective when the purchaser needs to be educated on the product being sold, be it a mobile sonogram machine, an energy lantern, or a cookstove. Women can also be the best innovators of the products they use and sell, sometimes transforming their communities with something as small as the knowledge of the optimal use of a household’s single electric light… (more)
