Women’s participation in the workforce could add a whopping $6 trillion to global GDP, helping not only product development but also inclusivity in terms of representing the demographics business sell to, said Nancy Wang, an American venture capitalist and founder of a non-profit organisation.
Nancy, who founded and is board chair of Advancing Women in Tech (AWIT), and a former Amazon Web Services general manager, was recently on a visit to Pakistan and engaged with entrepreneurs, business leaders, tech leaders, students and youth on subjects related to women in technology.
Her not-for-profit is a global organisation that empowers women and members of other underrepresented groups.
“If every country could have the percentage of women in the workforce such as Sweden, for example, which is 66% of their women in the workforce, that would increase the global GDP by almost $6 trillion. That’s a big number. So there’s great economic impact too,” Wang told Business Recorder in an exclusive interview at the US Consulate in Karachi recently.
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The price of gender inequality
A McKinsey Global Institute’s (MGI) report showed gender inequities are not only a moral and social conundrum but also an economic one: women accounted for half the world’s working-age population but for only 37% of GDP. This discrepancy robs the global economy of $12 trillion in wealth we could share if each country improved gender equality as quickly as the fastest-improving country in its region did. True gender equality everywhere would raise global GDP by up to $28 trillion.
Another MGI report – The power of parity: Advancing women’s equality in Asia Pacific – showed Pakistan as the worst performer on gender equality in work, essential services such as education, maternal and reproductive health, financial and digital inclusion, and legal protection and political voice. Pakistan is just behind Bangladesh for being unable to provide physical security to women in the region.
Nancy explained that the inclusion of women is important for product development as well as their input could make a product wholesome – appealing to most of the segments of the society.
“If you think about how products are designed – if it’s a car physical products or your phone or software services – if you don’t have women too, designing those products, if you don’t have women designing those services, well, it’s not going to be representative of the users that will be using that product,” she said.
Since Pakistan has not fared well in providing equal opportunity to women so far it means when the country opens up for women, the impact will be greater.
World Bank’s Group former Country Director in Pakistan Illangovan Patchamutha is quoted as saying that Pakistan has the ability to push its per capita income to $10,000 in 30 years by providing equal opportunity to women – almost six times more than the present per capita income of around $1,500 .
Pakistan’s tech space
Nancy, who also spoke at the Women Leader Summit that was themed Building Growth Minds, was a sought after person in Pakistan’s tech space on her visit to National Incubation Center Karachi and Katalyst Labs where she met aspiring entrepreneurs.
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“What really caught my attention was just the diversity, the wide breadth of different types of startups. I saw a startup that is focused on creating prosthetics for people who’ve lost limbs called Bionics and so many others across fintech, edtech, consumer tech, for example.
“And what I found was that there was a lot of diversity, an audience having this hunger for information on building a business, scaling it like the Silicon Valley unicorns, how to take the best learnings from the startup ecosystem maybe in the States or North America and apply that here in Pakistan.”
Unicorn deficient Pakistan!
Pakistan is the only country among the top 10 most populous countries that doesn’t have a unicorn – a startup valued at $1 billion or above.
Number of unicorns shows the efficiency of a startup eco-system of a country.
Unsurprisingly, the US leads the table with 653 unicorns – more than half of the total unicorns in the world. India has 70.
In fact, in the global tech space, there’s a new term – Decacorn, a startup having $10 billion plus valuation. There were 53 decacorns worldwide in July 2023, with a total valuation of over a trillion dollars, according to investopedia.com.
“There are some factors that help make startups successful or become unicorns.
“One is the talent, which is having sufficient numbers of engineers or technical talent that is capable of, for example, engaging or building some of the latest artificial intelligence applications. Number two, related to people, also looking at who is there to help sponsor, maybe invest in those teams.
“You (also) need people who can dream big and have a vision. Before Google became Google today, it was just a search engine. And before then, it was just lines of code. So it took someone who had that vision of what Google can be, and so even if they don’t have a product or they’re not making money, I’m going to invest in them. And so I think having more of that VC ecosystem, especially at an early stage, having more technical talent, and I think you’ll have the right ingredients to create unicorns here in Pakistan,” Nancy added.
India’s vibrant tech space: what is there to learn?
Nancy has significant experience working with Indian tech companies. She believes India has a great advantage of having a massive pool of talented people in the tech space. She has also worked with an Indian founder, who founded Rubrik – valued at $4 billion – a unicorn and is perhaps the fastest-growing unicorn in Silicon Valley.
Sharing her experiences and what she has seen, Nancy said many Indian people, who worked in the US tech space and later returned to India, started their own startup companies or gave their services to tech hubs like Bangalore or, Hyderabad or Delhi.
“And then once they started those companies, they started hiring other talent, which is either, like themselves, expatriates or laborers. They’re not going to be with local, educated talent. So you have sort of that new blood being inserted into the talent stream that is really helpful.
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“I think that itself creates a virtuous cycle where if wherever talent goes, money goes too, and so the venture capitalists from the Valley.
“I’m sure they’re looking at this pattern of good talent returning from places like the Silicon Valley or New York, East Coast, into cities in India and saying, okay, clearly these people are going to start companies.
“When you have a greater amount of talent as well as outside investment, you’re going to create a virtuous sort of flywheel where more companies are being created, more talent is being generated and hired, which potentially could result in a higher outcome of unicorns.”
Artificial Intelligence
Nancy says humans will remain at the helm and AI will just make things efficient.
“People are thinking about this doomsday reality or this doomsday picture. I probably sound jaded when I say we’ve been having these sorts of revelations, like AI is going to take over the world and there’s going to be a Terminator, usually about once every 10 years.
“Because if you think about artificial general intelligence or AGI, it’s been around for at least several decades. Why AI is back in the picture is companies like OpenAI releasing ChatGPT back in November 2022, which made it much more accessible.
“And that’s the important part why everyone’s talking about a Terminator potential reality is that it is now for the first time accessible to users like you and me. You don’t need to be a machine learning engineer.
“You can just go to OpenAI or ChatGPT and start typing questions and getting answers back. And that actually has been the wave that is new for this AI generation.”
Co-piloting with AI
Nancy says AI is not something that a person in a key position of a large company would completely rely on.
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“So, for example, if I’m the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), of a large Fortune 500 company, I probably would not be relying 100% on just AI to help me stop hackers, stop ransomware actors and help me protect my data. That’s too much trust in AI that we have not seen enough data that you can trust AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to that level.
“What I’ve seen more applications of is the idea of a co-pilot, which is AI, as imagine you’re a pilot in a plane, being that person that sits right next to you, helping you process information, make decisions. But ultimately, you are still the human in the loop, and you have the final say. So humans will have their relevance in the equation,” she envisaged.
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