In May of last year, a celebratory headline in Fortune[1] read: The Fortune 500 Has More Female CEOs Than Ever Before.

Which means: never before have there been even 33 women in the top spot. Leaving that 6.6% aside for a moment, let’s consider what it took to get there.

Of course, those responsible for hiring all those chief executives are the corporate boards. Recent data shows that, as of last year, only 26% of all S&P 500 and Fortune 1000 boards have women directors,[2] meaning at least one. Of those, only a third have boards where women represent 30% of board seats, according to the Women’s Forum of New York.[3]

Less than 3% of boards have reached gender parity, despite women’s obvious acumen and thousands of qualified executives to select from.

“The change is not going to happen because we expect boards of directors to change the way they think,” says Alina Polonskaia, global leader of Korn Ferry’s Diversity and Inclusion Solutions practice.[4] “The only way we draw change is through structural changes.”

Indeed, a 2015 survey from the stock index firm MSCI found that firms with at least three women on the board – or a female CEO and one female board member – saw 36% higher equity returns than companies with fewer women present in the boardroom.[5] Thirty-six percent!

So, we are forced to ask again, why would any business, knowing that other businesses are seeing higher returns doing X, not attempt to do X also?

After all, a 4.8% increase in female Fortune CEOs is something, but it’s hardly real victory. Rather, it signals how far there is to go.

Two of investment giant BlackRock’s eight original founders were women.[6]  Yet only three of their current Executive Committee members, and five of eighteen seats on the board, are held by women today[7] – a percentage loss of ground.

VC giant Goldman Sachs recently decided not to take public any firm without at least one woman on the board.[8] A noble ideal, and one bound to make an impact. Yet only four of the twelve GS board members are women. Their executive officers? Two-thirds male.

Just a week after their female-board-member declaration, GS held its first-ever investor day, during which there was, “barely a female executive in sight.”[9]

Even fairly progressive companies can struggle in this area. Apple, for instance, has a leadership team of 12 men and 4 women, while 2 members of their seven-member board are female, 28%.

There is some good news here, of course. Thirty years ago, Apple[10]^,[11] – and most other companies – had no women in leadership at all. Further, powerful women like BlackRock co-founder Susan Wagner, and Emma Walmsley, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, also inhabit other boards such as Apple’s[12] and Microsoft’s, and have opportunities to influence company direction and CEO hires.

But when even the best companies have female officers that represent a third or less of their total leadership, it’s not enough.

Clearly, we all have some work to do.

References.
[1] Fortune, The Fortune 500 Has More Female CEOs Than Ever Before,May 2019
[2] Korn Ferry, A New Gender Bar for Boards, 2020
[3] The Women’s Forum of New York, Breakfast of Corporate Champions, 2019
[4] Korn Ferry, A New Gender Bar for Boards, 2020
[5] Quartz, Companies with More Women Directors Generate a 36% Higher Return on Equity, Dec 2015
[6] Wikipedia, BlackRock: History
[7] BlackRock, Governance: Board of Directors,2020
[8] CNN Business, Goldman Sach’s New Rule: At Least One Woman on the Board or You Can‘t Go Public,Jan 2020
[9] New York Post, Goldman Sachs Investor Day has Few Women Presenters Amid Diversity Push,Jan 2020
[10] The Computer History Museum Archive, Apple Computer Inc. Preliminary Confidential Offering Memorandum, 1978-82
[11] Apple, Inc., Investor Relations, SEC Proxy Filing, 1994
[12] Apple, Inc., Investor Relations: Leadership and Governance

If one needed proof that the battle for gender equity continues in the trenches, look no further than corporate America.

In that milieu, where all is supposedly governed by the numbers, good decisions are the ones leading to profitability and growth. ROI is all that’s said to matter when staring into what Lawrence Sanders once called, “the unblinking, basilisk eyes of an investment banker.”[1]

But is that really so?

If it is, then why – when study after study has proven that historically, women-owned ventures, or businesses co-founded by women, have consistently outperformed those started by men[2] – do women-owned startups receive half the capital funding given to men?[3]

Given the data that startups operated by women grow faster[4] and perform better, this funding disparity is all the more remarkable.[5] As Smithsonian reported in 2014, a study making the identical pitch to investors – with only recorded male and female voices rather than the actual entrepreneur – found that the male-voiced pitch received funding 68% of the time to only 31% for that of the female-voiced one.[6]

And yet, an October, 2019 report by Morgan Stanley noted that an “overwhelming majority (83%)” of VC firms believe they could maximize their returns by “prioritizing investments in companies led by women and multicultural entrepreneurs.”[7] But is that happening?

Here are the basic numbers: as of spring, 2019, “seventeen percent of venture dollars representing $8.1 billion in the first quarter went to companies with at least one female founder. Of that, two percent was invested in only female founders, and 15 percent was garnered by companies with male and female co-founders. In contrast, 83 percent went to only male founders.”[8]

That is clearly inequitable and, as Susan Hunt Stevens, the (female) co-founder of tech startup WeSpire recently wrote, “It’s not fair that it’s not fair.”[9] Indeed, a 2018 CNBC survey put this paradigm in the following stark terms:

“All of the top banks are run by men. A Catalyst study reports that women account for less than 17 percent of senior leaders in investment banking. In private equity, women comprise only 9 percent of senior executives and only 18 percent of total employees, according to a 2017 report by Preqin. At hedge funds and private debt firms, the numbers are similarly low – women hold just 11 percent of leadership roles.[10]

But why is this so? Why are these firms acting against their own acknowledged self-interest? There is currently no unified opinion on this point.

“The key reason in my opinion,” according to Francesca Warner[11], founder of a non-profit dedicated to addressing this issue, “is the lack of diversity in VC firms themselves.” In other words: those doing the funding also don’t have women making their funding decisions.

“At the end of 2018, 85% of firms did not have a single female partner,” noted Fortune in February. “At the end of 2019, that number was 65%.”[12]

Okay so progress is being made, and “the number of venture capital firms with two or more female partners doubled last year to 14%.”[13]

That still means the majority of companies looking for funding do so from firms without decision-making women. And that may be part of why women-founded businesses, regardless of performance, have a harder road to getting funded.

“How many more hours did I have to spend fundraising for half the capital that other founders got to spend making their product better or meeting with prospective customers?” asked WeSpire founder Stevens.[14]

The “straightforward solution,” for this, according to Warner, is simply to hire more women in VC firms.

As we reported last fall and updated earlier this year,[15] research in MIT Management suggests it is important not merely to interview women for high-level open positions, but also to ensure there are women positioned throughout the company.  That way, there is an excellent pool of women candidates to select from when the time comes.

Beyond hiring and promotion are other potential challenges for women. As a case in point, the authors of the CNBC survey mentioned earlier found that men and women experience the same workplaces differently: that women report significantly more unconscious bias than men, see unequal pay more often, and find they’re excluded from many of the networking platforms men use to move up, among many markers of this bifurcated view of conditions at the office.[16]

Along the same lines is the almost universal narrative that women’s careers are truncated or held back because they generally tend family more often. However, as the Harvard Business School: Working Knowledge pointed out last year, “companies hold on to the ‘hegemonic narrative’ that work-life conflict is a women’s issue because it allows them to maintain the organizational status quo.”[17] In fact, they say, “an always-on culture and gender-role expectations were to blame, not motherhood. And men were mourning the loss of their family time to client demands as much as women.”

Yet societal pressures create divisions even within this framework, as “society’s expectation for men to be breadwinners supports spending long hours at the office. Women, in contrast, face career penalties such as loss of promotion for using corporate accommodations that help them balance different roles.”[18]

Clearly then, there is both progress and a long way to go. Women’s results make it clear they can reap returns in a business environment as well as, or better than, their male peers. The issue is not that women don’t thrive at the top. It’s that they so rarely reach it. That is where the change is needed now.

References
[1]Timothy’s Game, by Lawrence Sanders G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988
[2] Quartz, Companies with More Women Directors Generate a 36% Higher Return on Equity, Dec 2015
[3] Openview Partners, 2019 Expansion SAAS Benchmarks, 2019
[4]Ibid
[5]Ibid
[6] Smithsonian, Women Pitching the Exact Same Ideas as Men Still Get Less Funding from Venture Capitalists,March 2014
[7] Morgan Stanley, Beyond the VC Funding Gap, Oct 2019
[8] Crunchbase News, Q1 2019 Diversity Report: Female Founders Own 17 Percent of Venture Dollars, April 2019
[9] Susan Hunt Stevens, Founder & CEO, WeSpire Saturday Spark #33
[10] CNBCmake It: Survey: It’s Still Tough to be a Woman on Wall Street — but Men Don’t Always Notice, June, 2018
[11] Thrive Global, Today, Women Get Only 2% of VC Dollars, April, 2018
[12]  Fortune, Venture Captial, Long a Boy’s Club, Makes Some Progress in Adding Women, Feb 8 2020
[13]MSN Money, VC Firms’ Next Step After Hiring a Woman: Hiring a Second Woman, Feb 2020
[14] Susan Hunt Stevens, Founder & CEO, WeSpire Saturday Spark #33
[15] Valutus, Rattling Panes in the Glass Ceiling, Original Publication, Oct 2019
[16] CNBCmake It: Survey: It’s Still Tough to be a Woman on Wall Street — but Men Don’t Always Notice, June, 2018
[17] Harvard Business School: Working Knowledge, Women Pay a Higher Career Price in Today’s Always-On Work Culture, April 2019
[18] Ibid

Some alcoholic libations stand on their own. Others work best in partnership.

If a distillery were to set out to make an environmentally friendly beverage, it would then make sense to choose one whose constant companion is not infused with a potent greenhouse gas. 

Yet the Arbikie Distillery in Angus, Scotland, chose gin. As anyone who’s ever been to a… well, to a gin-joint knows, this aromatic, juniper-infused liquid is accompanied by one mixer above all others: tonic water.

It would take a course in early European history to trace the origins of this clear, fresh-scented spirit but in England, at least, barley-based gin rose to prominence[1] when French brandy was heavily taxed, some hundreds of years ago.

Malaria brought gin and tonic together, as the hideously bitter bark used to treat it – quinine – once dissolved in sweetened, carbonated water, was often taken with gin. Thus, the G & was born.

While gins are usually made from wheat, maize, or barley grain mash, the legal definitions[2] in the U.S. and Canada only call for alcohol “of agricultural origin.”

So, when Arbikie learned that peas – which can be grown on a carbon-negative basis and without chemical fertilizers – could be switched in place of grain spirits without loss of flavor or quality, they took the plunge.

Called Nàdar (Gaelic: nature[3]), this ‘climate-positive gin’ was several years in the making, and developed in partnership with two nearby research institutions[4]

A standard grain-based gin has a carbon footprint of +2.3 kg CO₂ (eq.)[5] per 700 ml bottle of gin. Nàdar, on the other hand, has a footprint of -1.54 kg CO₂[6] per 700 ml bottle, making it ‘carbon negative’, or saving more carbon than is used to make it.

This matters as, according the study’s authors, “In terms of climate change impact, sipping a large measure of gin is similar to… driving one km in a petrol car.” A 2017 evaluation by WorldAtlas[7]noted gin use at a rate of .55 liters per person annually in the UK, a nation of more than 65.1 million[8] people that year. That represents a lot of petrol.

Unlike a majority of plants, most legumes – such as garden peas – cull nitrogen from the atmosphere rather than from soil, hence they are ‘nitrogen-fixing’ plants that actually load nitrogen in soil through a complex microbial process, for the next crops in rotation. The research team from the Hutton Institute found that the “environmental footprint of pea gin was significantly lower than for wheat gin across 12 of 14 environmental impacts evaluated, from climate change, through water and air pollution, to fossil energy consumption,” according to the institute’s molecular ecologist, Dr. Pietro Iannetta.[9]

In addition, “a waste product known as ‘pot ale’ is created from the leftover pea protein and spent yeast,” that is “suitable for animal feeds that reduce the need for imported soybeans, noted The Drinks Business.”[10] It is the reduction in carbon engendered by cutting “soybean cultivation, deforestation, processing and transport,”[11] that pushes this gin into carbon-neutral status.  

The first batch – 1,000 bottles – is already up for sale. Bottoms up!

[1] Wikipedia, Gin
[2] Ibid
[3] Glosbe, Scottish Gaelic Dictionary
[4] Abertay University, Dundee; James Hutton Institute, Clattering Bridge, Laurencekirk, UK
[5] Science Daily, Just the Tonic!, July 8 2019
[6] Gin Kin, Nàdar Pea Gin is a New Carbon Positive Ultra Eco-Friendly Tipple, Feb 19 2020
[7] World Atlas, Countries That Drink the Most Gin, 2017
[8] Country Digest, UK Population, 2017
[9] Food and Wine, ‘Pea Gin’ Could be a Breakthrough for More Environmentally-Friendly Cocktails, July 16, 2019
[10] The Drinks Business, World’s First ‘Climate Positive’ Gin is Made from Peas, Feb 2020
[11] Science Daily, Just the Tonic!, July 8, 2019

Not all circumstantial evidence, however, is created alike. The advent of DNA in forensics gave the courts a powerful scientific tool for attributing blame or establishing innocence, often with a very high degree of certainty.

But this science was not always the accurate, systematic and broad-based field it is today. It took years of trial and error, diagnostic mistakes, and false positives. Many thousands of scientists around the world catalogued, sequenced, experimented, checked and rechecked results, and developed new techniques and technologies. Today, DNA evidence is routinely used to screen out the innocent and implicate the guilty.

Up to now, climate change has often presented the same types of problems as crime scenes with only circumstantial evidence. There has been a hurricane, say, that destroyed much of a major U.S. city and killed hundreds, or an unprecedented heat wave across Europe that also took many lives.
 
But what caused them?
Climate change! says one group.
Nature! screams another. There have always been storms and heat waves!

Yet, as in genetics, the science, equipment, and climatological techniques have improved greatly over the years and “extreme event attribution is rapidly advancing due to improved understanding of extreme events, improved modeling,”[1] etc.

As a 2016 report[2] by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine asserted, “In the past, a typical climate scientist’s response to questions about climate change’s role in any given extreme weather event was ‘we cannot attribute any single event to climate change.’ The science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unqualified blanket statement.”

In fact, at this point, “the existing body of detection and attribution research is sufficiently robust to support the adjudication of certain types of legal disputes,” according to the exhaustive, 238-page study of attribution by a team from the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law.[3]

Using climate forensics – what climatologists call ‘climate change attribution,’ experts can now sit in courtrooms just as DNA experts do, and say with “increasing statistical certainty,”[4] that X event was increased in likelihood and severity by anthropogenic climate change.

In an analysis of “high-resolution computer simulations,” scientists were able to attribute[5] the tropical storm that devastated Houston in 2019 to human-generated climate change which, they said, had made the storm as much as 2.6 times more likely and up to 28% more intense.[6] Indeed, “several studies have found that certain extreme events could not have been possible in a pre-industrial climate,” according to the Columbia report.

And recently the New York Times reported[7] that scientists had pinned a specific percentage of the damage and severity of the 2019 Australian wildfires on climate change. The scientists involved belong to World Weather Attribution,[8] a collaboration of scientific, meteorological and educational institutions that was “initiated in late 2014 after the scientific community concluded that the emerging science of extreme event attribution could be operationalized.”

A 2019 Carbon Brief[9] analysis of “more than 230 peer-reviewed studies looking at weather events around the world” concluded that “68% of all extreme weather events studied to date were made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change. Heatwaves account for 43% such events, droughts make up 17%, and heavy rainfall or floods account for 16%.”

Thus armed, the battle over climate change is shifting from courtroom analogy to actual courtroom drama.
 
As we forecast this January in Blame: The Worm Will Turn in 2020,[10] as costs and damages from human-driven climate events continue to rise dramatically, so will lawsuits against Big Carbon industries, and governments who have supported fossil fuels.

As the authors of  the Columbia study point out in their executive summary,[11] “In several foreign cases, plaintiffs have successfully used attribution science to demonstrate that a government’s failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at adequate levels endangered the public health and welfare of citizens within the country, and thus the government had violated its duty of care to its citizens.”

While there are also dozens of climate cases working their way through the U.S. courts, as we noted in Blame, “for those considering the current state of the U.S. judiciary, we suggest that such decisions are just as likely to happen outside the U.S.” Such extranational decisions, however, could “still affect multinational companies, including those based in the U.S.”

Interestingly, notes Vox,[12] in the U.S. courts,“climate science itself isn’t up for debate… in nearly all (U.S.) cases, the parties agree on these facts: Greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are heating up the planet, which in turn is fueling sea level rise, more extreme weather, and changes in the overall climate.” Rather, the cases hinge on “fundamental interpretations of law” rather than the facts of climate change.

The tobacco industry once found themselves in a similar pickle, insisting they didn’t know their product’s dangers, and burying information to the contrary as early as the 1950s.

As a result, for a time they were able to fend off most of the suits brought by individuals alleging fraud and other charges. Eventually, however, as smoking-related cancers and health care costs mounted, a 46-state suit was settled[13] for more than $206 billion over 25 years covering, along with restrictions on marketing and sales, the dissolution of key industry groups. Many successful class-action and individual suits have followed.

A key difference here is that, while there is overwhelming scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer in general, it is difficult to attribute any given case to that cause. Climate change attribution can now, in many cases, point to what Carbon Brief labelled, “the human fingerprint on extreme weather, such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, and storms.” And the science will likely continue to improve.

Climate attribution can also be used “by plaintiffs to demonstrate that they have suffered an injury as a result of anthropogenic climate change,”[14] and that greenhouse gas emitters are responsible.

In any courtroom, some will continue to believe in guilt or innocence – regardless of proof – to suit their own beliefs and agendas. But the proof is nonetheless there to allow a verdict beyond the legal standard for it.  And that is a powerful development. 

[1] Columbia University Press, The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution, Executive Summary, 2020
[2] National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change, Report, 2016 [3] Columbia University Press, The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution, 2020
[4] MIT Technology Review, Feb. 2020
[5] World Weather Attribution, Rapid Attribution of Extreme Rainfall in Texas from Tropical Storm Imelda,Sept 27 2019
[6] Ibid
[7] The New York Times, Climate Change Affected Australia’s Wildfires, Scientists Confirm, March 4 2020
[8 ] World Weather Attribution
[9] Carbon Brief, Mapped: How Climate Change Affects Extreme Weather Around the World, March 11 2019
[10] Valutus.com, Blame: The Worm Will Turn in 2020,Feb 2020
[11] The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution, Executive Summary, 2020, Columbia University Press
[12] Vox, Pay Attention to the Growing Wave of Climate Change Lawsuits, June 4 2019
[13] NOLO, Tobacco Litigation: History and Recent Developments
[14] The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution, Executive Summary, 2020, Columbia University Press

By Dan Kempner, Managing Editor, Valutus Sustainability R.O.I.

This morning I had a meeting via UberConference with Daniel, he in his New York office, me in my den in Vietnam.

It was late for him but still early for me, so I hustled out of the meeting and ran to the living room, as I had a call scheduled with a friend under lockdown in California. I reached him on WhatsApp and we swapped obligatory COVID-19 stories and caught up.

After that I pulled out my Vietnamese language homework as my class was starting soon. All in-person sessions had been cancelled, so we were working via Go-to-Meeting.

My kids came in while I was studying, wanting me to play. My five-year-old was repeating her new mantra: Daddy? Can I watch teeee-vee? Pleeeaase? because school’s been closed since January due to coronavirus. To say she has cabin fever is not saying nearly enough.

I gave them a couple of minutes, then rushed upstairs to class, dialed in, and went over the dialogue I’d been practicing. The tones of this language are a little tougher to hear online than in person, but I did okay.

I have a standing coffee date with another of the students after class every week. We usually hit a local café and chat over cà phê sũa dá – iced Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk. But no need for my travel thermos today: the coffee was real, but the date was virtual.

My wife makes heavenly coffee, so I shouted downstairs asking for some – in my experience at least, if Vietnamese aren’t shouting between rooms there’s something wrong – and jumped on my friend’s Skype link.

Our usual café has a koi pond with fish that could swallow a U-boat, and I miss that. But unfortunately, all cafés – and now everything else in the city – are closed by fiat.

I asked my wife to join us, but she was busy texting on Facebook, by phone, and on Zalo – a Vietnamese social platform – with the usual dozen friends at once. Meanwhile, she was on Facetime with her younger sister, who arrived back from the ‘States last week and is in quarantine nearby.

Incredibly, she was also prepping to teach her English class, looking up lesson plans and settling a whiteboard in front of her computer for the remote learning session. How does she do all that at once?

Soon it was time for me to prep my own English class. I have four students, including three Vietnamese teenagers hoping for acceptance at Western universities, and of necessity the class is now on Skype or Messenger. We are reading Charlotte’s Web over the web, which is odd. Still, I’m petrified I’m going to cry at the end, as I always do. Perhaps I can fake it better online, so long as I don’t blubber into the mic.

Class over, I played with the kids, and went back to my office for work. I shared drafts of several articles with Daniel – via Google Docs and Dropbox – and talked to him about them on the Webex Meeting platform.

A playdate was in progress – rare in these days of COVID-19, and this was to be the last one before the shutdown. There was rampaging going on, so I slid upstairs to my mother-in-law’s apartment and worked from there for a while, sending off emails and collaborating with a friend on via Webex document.

A quick call on Google Voice to my cousins locked down in Illinois, and that reminded me to Messenger text my bro-in-law in Mumbai, in lockdown too. He can’t get back to his wife in Singapore, as that country closed their borders also.

I worked for a while, grabbed dinner with the whole shut-in family gang, then it was time for my men’s-team meeting. The twelve of us logged onto Zoom for 90 minutes, and the discussion, as always, was intense. The fact that we weren’t around a firepit in someone’s backyard – as I always was back in Massachusetts – was of no consequence. This week one member was in Mexico, one in Cuba, another vacationing in Costa Rica, and the rest were sprinkled around the U.S., Canada, and Asia.

These men and I also keep in touch all week long via Marco Polo, a sort of video walkie-talkie app that allows individual or group discussions with no need for coordination: you talk when convenient, watch when convenient, respond when convenient. It is incredibly intimate despite time and distance and here, twelve time zones ahead, this comes in mighty handy. For scheduling and stuff, we use Slack.

I had some work to do later in the evening and I sometimes get distracted so I dialed into my scheduled SpaceWorks online co-working space.

Look, there is a downside to social distancing, no doubt. Daniel is writing about just that this week, delineating why and how we must be careful once this crisis is over. If remote work and remote school became the norm, we must guard against ‘distance’ becoming ‘isolation.’ He is making an important distinction between physical distance and social distance.

Some friends in Massachusetts held a gathering on their lawn this weekend – one of those hobbies requiring knitting needles, I think. They set up folding chairs six feet apart and knitted… or crocheted or something. Physical distance, yes. Social distance, no.

Now, Daniel and others correctly point out that the water-cooler chats are not so easily replaced. The pop-in office confabs that – legend has it – lead to brilliant solutions, may be lost the more people work remotely. It will take time to learn whether any online platform can adequately take the place of the casual chance encounter due to office proximity.

It is also understood that there’s value in nearness, in contact, in being able to assess body language. Simply knowing someone else is around has real, measurable physiological and psychological impacts, and Daniel’s upcoming article will expand on all of that. I have my family around me for company and contact, as I’ve explained, but by no means everyone does.

One solution is the growing trend towards work hubs, co-working offices – both virtual and physical. Shared offices, where unrelated people can gather to work with others wanting both office space and company, seems to solve a lot of the problems distance working may create. Work, chat, grab a coffee, perhaps meet that special someone, all without venturing into the home-office digs or staying home alone. If this model were decentralized, as easy to find as a café but equipped for business, that could represent a game changer.

Shared virtual offices, where others working at the same time give a feeling of togetherness, and a moderator keeps you onpoint, are another brilliant option during this crisis and for anyone who ever works in isolation.

We may not know for a while just what the effects of all this are. Whether people forced online during a crisis will embrace it thereafter, and whether companies will want them to.

We needed astronauts to spend a year in space before we could tell for sure if human muscles atrophied or cells broke down in zero gravity. We may need some time here, too.

Personally, I am a convert to the online experience. I well remember leaving my wife and baby behind and heading off for ten hours or more of physical and social proximity with people I did not particularly care for at work. Some of them felt the same for me, I fancy, which was no fun either. Was I isolated? No. Distanced? No. Alienated? Yes.

As you can see, in no way am I socially distanced now. Not at work, not with friends, not with anyone. I am surrounded only by the people I choose, with a few work exceptions online. I’ve never felt more social, more connected.

I can walk out of the office and kiss my wife and daughters whenever I wish – though the sooner those kids get back to school, where they can run around and learn to socialize properly, the better! And, once this crisis passes, I can go out any time and crowdsource an actual crowd in the real world whenever I choose.

There seems little doubt that we’ll come out of this with a new understanding, a pretty good idea what works and what doesn’t when it comes to social and working distance. The scientists will get busy too, and we’ll get readings on the brain, the heart, the feelings of those who regularly operate online.

When they do, there’s bound to be a webinar we can jump on to have it explained. See you there!

Here We Are

“We are not fully prepared for the next global pandemic,” Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates said in 2018. “The threat of the unknown pathogen – highly-contagious, lethal, fast-moving – is real. It could be a mutated flu strain or something else entirely.”[1]

And here we are.

Hubris

Why didn’t Gates’s prophetic warning (which he also featured in his 2015 TED talk[2]) take hold more broadly? One reason is hubris – in this case, the presumption that humans control nature and not the other way around.

But, as COVID-19 has brought into stark relief, the global economy is, undoubtedly, a subsidiary of the environment.[3] One tiny change, a wee mutation in a virus, and boom! The planetary economic system goes into shock.

Local Versus Global

This has always been true locally, to be sure. A hurricane sweeps in and devastates an island nation, batters a coastal mainland, or floods major cities, and life in that area is dramatically altered. But insurers pay out, and governments draw from disaster funds to stabilize the area, and things slowly return to normal.

Can this system hold when the disasters are prolonged and systemic, rather than brief and local? As we’re discovering, the answer is no.

Belated Awareness

A third of humanity lives along, works along, builds along, farms and fishes along the 372,000 miles (620,000 kilometers) of global coastline.[4] Both insurers and governments are beginning to question the wisdom of coastal settlement in vulnerable areas, and are looking askance at continuous rebuilding efforts. The entire system is built around insurance mitigating the consequences of disasters, but now those insurers are starting to see the entire carbon-based system as risky.

Investors and reinsurers are withdrawing support from climate-change agents such as Big Carbon. Credit agencies have begun considering climate when evaluating big corporations and cities – for example, Moody’s downgraded Cape Town’s credit rating after their water emergency and did the same to Trinity Public Utilities District in California after the wildfires of 2019.[5]

Bankrupting the Environment

The current pandemic is putting the scaffolds we have built our society around – carbon, credit, insurance, globalization, unlimited air travel and, especially, free-and-lightly-regulated markets – into stark relief. Our current approaches have bankrupted the environment, in other words, to the point where it is clearly threatening the global economic system. 

There’s some scientific sentiment that this bankruptcy – specifically, bringing animals in close contact with dense populations through habitat loss – creates the conditions for diseases crossing to humans.[6] “When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us,” Bard College biologist Felicia Keesing told Ensia.[7]

Climate and Pathogens

Another potential danger is that higher global temperatures may be selecting for disease agents that can survive in hotter conditions, neutralizing one of our bodies’ most effective immune responses: fever.

“As pathogens are exposed to gradually warmer temperatures in the natural world, they become better equipped to survive the high temperature inside the human body,” noted Time in February.[8] “The pathogens that survive – and reproduce – are better adapted to higher temperatures, including those in our bodies.”

Another potential impact of warming is that diseases usually confined to the tropics – malaria, dengue, Chagas disease, etc. – may become more widespread in temperate zones.[9]

In other words, a bankrupt nature doesn’t affect us through high water levels and more frequent devastating weather events alone. It can also unleash new pathogens and broaden the range and duration of both current and novel diseases.

Beyond the Immediate

Successful responses to COVID-19 are strongly making the case for community and global cooperation, with decisive action and public support helping contain the virus faster. It is a relief to see that we as a species are indeed capable of making a hard turn and changing course.

While we never wanted this, the course changes do show what is possible. In New York City, carbon monoxide was reduced by half, while NO₂ and CO₂ levels also fell dramatically.[10] China’s atmospheric carbon dropped “by around 200 million tons in February…roughly half as much CO₂ as Britain releases in a year.”[11] A bottlenose dolphin or two have been reported off Cagliari, and the Venetian canals are running clear and hosting swans, all rare sightings in the past.[12]

While these changes are beneficial, the pandemic that caused them is not. We need to find a way to recapture the declines in pollution and emissions that doesn’t depend on disease and suffering.

Not So Remote

As others have noted, our response to COVID-19 makes clear that the world can work remotely more than we currently do. “In a recent webinar snap poll, 91% of attending HR leaders (all in Asia/Pacific) indicated that they have implemented ‘work from home’ arrangements since the outbreak,” notes Gartner,[13] predicting that by “2030, the demand for remote work will increase by 30%.” The virus will probably drive that number up permanently and, if so, there will likely be a significant carbon savings globally.

That said, there are three things in particular we must remember.

First, as of now, this is a temporary stay rather than a pardon. For example, there is already evidence that China’s air pollution levels are ramping back up.[14]

Second, we’ve paid a steep price for what we’ve done to make diseases like COVID-19 more likely, for our lack of adequate preparation for them, and for the illusion we could separate our economy and our ecology. We’d all be guilty of dereliction of duty if we don’t learn from the mistakes we paid so dearly to discover.

Third, humans are social creatures, and our biology does not – cannot – evolve at the same rate as our technology.[15] As a result, when the crisis has passed there will be some changes but we will mostly go back to the way we socialized before – in person. That means we need to continue rapidly decarbonizing travel, work, and the economy.

When It’s for All the Marbles

The response to this crisis makes it clear that countries, sufficiently motivated, can make powerful decisions, mobilize their forces, and unleash the full range of human knowledge and expertise to solve problems. It also shows how hollow are the bleatings of those who claim the cost of sustainability is too high. To fight this emergency, trillions of dollars are on the table – in the United States alone – for business, social, and medical assistance.

The trick that has – so far – eluded us is convincing lawmakers and citizens that the climate emergency rivals that of this pandemic. Unfortunately, they both have this in common: “if you wait until you can see the impact, it is too late to stop it.”[16]

The Highest Stakes

The COVID-19 virus has shown how high the stakes are and how we must respond. Our economies, and our ultimate welfare, are wholly owned subsidiaries of our environment. We must nurse it out of bankruptcy, for all our sakes.

REFERENCES
[1] Yahoo Finance, Bill Gates: ‘My Biggest Fears About What’s Coming Next for this World,’ Sept 2018
[2] Bill Gates: “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready”
[3] This quote, often attributed to Herman Daly, has also been attributed to Gaylord Nelson
[4] NASA, Living Ocean
[5] Inside Climate News, Climate Change Becomes an Issue for Ratings Agencies, Aug 5, 2019
[6] The Guardian, Tip of the Iceberg: Is Our Destruction of Nature Responsible for COVID-19? March 18, 2020
[7] Ensia, Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge, March 18, 2020
[8] Time, The Wuhan Coronavirus, Climate Change, and Future Epidemics, Feb 6, 2020
[9] Scientific American, What Could Warming Mean for Pathogens Like Coronavirus? March 9, 2020
[10] BBC News, Coronavirus: Air Pollution and CO2 Fall Rapidly as Virus Spreads, March 19, 2020
[11] Autoblog.com, China’s NO2 Emissions Rising as Country Recovers from Coronavirus Lockdown, March 20, 2020
[12] Esquire Middle East, Covid-19 Upside? Dolphins Return to Italy and Clear Venice Canals as Humans Self-isolate, March 18,2020
[13] Gartner, With Coronavirus in Mind, is Your Organization Ready for Remote Work? March 3, 2020
[14] Bloomberg Green, Satellite Pollution Data Shows China is Getting Back to Work, March 2020
[15] In fact, while we need physical distancing to contain COVID-19, social closeness is important to our health, happiness, and productivity, as we discuss in a separate article
[16] Yale Environment360, Coronavirus Holds Key Lessons on How to Fight Climate Change, March 23, 2020

For years we have known that women do not rise to positions of power as often or as easily as men, and for years we’ve assumed that the ‘glass ceiling’ was entirely a function of bias on the ‘demand’ side, in interviewing. What if it’s not?

There’s no doubt, of course, about the problem: a glance at the Fortune 500, for example, shows a record 33 women CEOs, a not-exactly-whopping 6.6%. Corporate boards, which have also made recent progress, are similarly gender skewed, and women account for under 21%.

But is this really all a demand-side issue, caused by biased hiring managers, or is something else at play? It’s a difficult question for, as MIT Sloan Professor Roberto Fernandez told MIT Management, “the glass ceiling, like dark matter in physics, cannot be observed. We know it’s there, but we’re not sure what’s causing it to endure.” 

Up to this point, in other words, some of the smartest and savviest companies on earth have been working on the seat-of-the-pants assumption that, if they can cure themselves of hiring bias, the problem will go away.

Consequently, companies making efforts to achieve greater gender equity have been working to recruit unbiased screeners, train and retrain their hiring staff to remove internal biases, and to build in systems that make it harder for hiring managers to screen out talented women on the basis of gender.

And they have made progress, some anyway, using this model. The 33 women CEOs noted above, and the significant increase in the overall number of talented female executives and business owners, represent improvement from just a few years ago — much of it due to existing efforts to remove bias. Yet while companies have cracked the glass ceiling, they can’t seem to shatter it.

But more rigor, and a different perspective, can help fix that.

As Professor Fernandez says, “If you ask people, ‘what is a glass ceiling?’ it’s associated with an invisible internal promotion barrier. How do we rule in or out other suspects?” Examining this issue differently yields some new answers.

In three separate research papers, Fernandez, with several different partners, analyzed candidate pools, checked those against hiring results, and came to conclusions that supply and recruiting practices have at least as much to do with the ceiling as demand-side hiring bias. Therefore, they concluded, remediation efforts on the demand side alone, while meaningful, were never going to resolve the issue.

(A bit about these terms: Demand-side refers to employer behavior, such as stereotypes and preferential treatment; supply-side is employee behavior, such as employees’ beliefs about their qualifications; and recruiting practices are programs such as the use of headhunters to find candidates.)

Fernandez and his co-authors found, for example, that on initial application for specific jobs, both internal and external candidates were sorted into queues. Some of this sorting was done by females themselves, who tended to apply for lower-level positions than then men applying over the same period – for example, “7.5 percent of the pool of candidates for salaried (exempt) jobs (were) female; the corresponding percentage for males (was) almost double that rate at 14.3 percent.”[1] 

The disparity was wider for externals, where women also applied in higher numbers: men applied for these higher-paying jobs at “over 3 times the rate for females (6.1 vs. 1.8 percent).”

Applicants were also sorted into specific queues – i.e., matched with certain jobs – by screeners, more frequently leading women to lower-level positions than men applying for similar position. So, even if you were to eliminate bias in the selection process, the pool of candidates applying for higher-level positions ends up with fewer women applicants.

In a study looking at 441 high-tech firms, Fernandez and co-author Santiago Campero found that just addressing selection bias doesn’t work, but that “accounting for screening discrimination [and] also redistributing male and female candidates across the company hierarchy ‘dramatically flattens’ the glass ceiling pattern.”[2]

Yet the broader point here is that companies have been working on the popular, reasonable, and incorrect notion that by retraining their HR departments, and rooting out gender bias on the demand side, they could solve the problem.

The fact that they have not been fully successful means wider and more rigorous perspective may be required.  As Fernandez said regarding the results of the study of high-tech firms, “Whatever else is going on, policies of outreach that allow men and women to apply in more equal proportion are going to have more bang for the buck than screening discrimination or bias reduction.”

Such policies include the use of external headhunters, who change the dynamics significantly. A study of a UK executive search firm’s activities found that candidate pools include more women when headhunters are involved and also that “women are also much more likely to be considered or hired by a company using an executive search firm…than by a company filling a position on its own with either an external or internal candidate.”[3]

Combining this with changing how applicants are sorted into queues for different jobs can be powerful. In fact, when looking into a call center, Fernandez and co-author Marie Louise Mors found that, “once allocated to queues the wage differences between male and female candidates are nil. Consequently, the roots of gender wage inequality in this setting lie in the initial sorting of candidates to labor queues.”[4]

Given how many difficult, hard-to-fix issues fall under the rubrics of sustainability and CSR, solutions that take a new approach — and create new progress — are worthy of recognition.[5] 

References
[1] Fernandez, R., Mors, M.L., Science Direct, Social Science Research 37 (2008) 1061–1080Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process
[2] MIT Management, August 2017.
[3] Ibid
[4] Fernandez, R., Mors, M.L., Science Direct, Social Science Research 37 (2008) 1061–1080 Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process
[5] This isn’t to downplay promotion and recognition issues, which matter as well. For example, the youngest-ever economics Nobel Laureate is Professor Duflo, at 46. She’s also the first-ever female MIT graduate to be awarded a Nobel – while 35 male MIT graduates have Nobel hardware. -ed. 

‘Close’ is, famously, only good in horseshoes. Trite, perhaps, but pithy. It has the benefit of age and the perfect touch of scorn.

It is also quite wrong.

Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never even gotten close in horseshoes. But I’ve done enough valuation to know that hitting close to the mark on the right target – to paraphrase the late mathematician John Tukey – is better than a bullseye on the wrong one. More precisely he said, “It’s better to solve the right problem approximately than to solve the wrong problem exactly.”

On my first trip to Thailand, I had to get to a meeting in Bangkok with no knowledge of the city or its streets.

Now these days there are many ways to find an address, even in a foreign land. Still, it’s always wise to be prepared, so before I left the hotel I printed the directions – what passes for the ‘old fashioned’ method in these days of electrons – and tucked them in my pocket.

Then, throwing my cautious approach to the warm Thai winds, I put the street name and number of my destination in the ride-share app – the thoroughly modern and incredibly precise way to get a ride to exactly where you want to go.

Naturally, I wound up on the other side of Bangkok, miles from my appointed spot. I had been taken, very precisely and exactly, to the right street name and number, but in the wrong place.

I learned then that Bangkok isn’t organized like Milwaukee or New York and, not knowing what I didn’t know, I had asked the wrong question and gotten a very correct but useless answer.

In Thailand – or in Bangkok at least – it seems there are many streets that share the same name, in different districts in various parts of the city. I had entered the wrong one in the ride-share app and that was that.

To get back, I remembered my printed instructions and simply handed them to the driver. They are far more general – they don’t account for shortcuts, police actions, accidents on the road, traffic, or any of the other up-to-the-minute perks we now take for granted.

But they did give the driver an idea which section of the city we were going to and which of the several roads with that name was the one in question. Eventually, quite late, I arrived near my meeting – not as precisely or with as much specificity… but I made it!

I had the power to call up the global coordinates, to call the restaurant and have them warp me in, even to simply give the driver my printed directions which would have gotten me close enough and, just as importantly, not have taken me almost to the Cambodian border. With electronics in my pocket that could tuck the Library at Alexandria into a tiny corner of a silicon chip, I still got the wrong answer.

A similar thing happened in Tokyo, where the street numbers can be based on the order in which the buildings are built rather than simply numbered in physical sequence. This time, however, when my driver got us close, he stopped the car and said, “I’m not sure exactly where this building number is but it’s close. Why don’t you walk up the street and ask the locals?”

To bring this around to business, it happens all the time when I’m in a meeting with top executives at a big corporation and they’re scrutinizing my numbers. I’m showing them that an awesome sustainability project they’ve been contemplating would bring in far more value than they had thought – in some cases wildly more.

There’s a pause and then someone says, well, look, I don’t know if that’s the right number?

And I’ll say, okay, got it. But this is an important source of submerged value and it really matters. If we don’t include it we are, in essence, giving it a value of zero. Better to have an approximate number for something that matters than to have it appear worthless.

So the wrong question in this scenario is not is this number exactly correct? The right question is, does the thing in question really matter? One way I like to frame this is: it’s not about the number, it’s about the decision.

Now this is especially critical when dealing with values-based value. Values – such as trust, leaving things better than we found them, helping others, etc. – are intangibles and often seem impossible to place a specific value upon.

It is possible though, and my forthcoming book The Value of Values is based on two key premises: first, that the impact of integrating values into the cellular structure of a business can be measured, and second, that the positive value created by doing so can be very, very large.

Let’s imagine the approximate value we get is substantially in the black. We don’t know to the decimal what the value will be but that is surely enough to work with.

Or let’s say we’re performing valuation on the impact of an outreach program, a charitable giving regime, or support for a health initiative in Africa, and we find significant value. Not exact value, but significant. That again makes the decision an easy one.

On the other hand, if a company asks how much will it cost us? that is an answer likely to have an exact answer, but it’s the wrong question, if there is significantly more value in going forward.

So I learned long ago to hedge my directional bets when travelling in Asia. But I also learned that getting close is not only valuable in horseshoes.

In the movie Back to the Future, a lightning bolt strikes a clocktower, generating enough energy to power a trip forward in time – with the assistance of the ‘flux-capacitor’ of course.

It did not occur to the movie’s ‘Doc’ Brown, however, to bypass the lightning in favor of the rain falling around it, as his source of energy. Yet that is just what is being proposed by several teams of scientists working independently to create electricity from rain.

As unlikely as it sounds, a single 100-microliter droplet, falling from only 15cm, “can light up 100 small LED light bulbs,” with over 140V generated, according to Professor Wang Zhong Lin, Chief Scientist at the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, who is leading a Chinese and American team in this effort.

Still, a hundred small LEDs? That’s barely a Christmas tree…what’s the big deal?

It is estimated that a gallon of water contains more than 75,000 drops[1] while an inch of rain on an average residential roof[2] renders 1,743 gallons.[3] Suddenly, a little rain on a single roof could light 130,725,000 LEDs. That is a lot of Christmas trees.

In all, about 26,000 cubic miles of rain falls on land each year.[4] Imagine the power available during the annual 6-month monsoon in Cambodia, for example, or India, on any rooftop where the conductive material is placed.

One advantage of power from rain is the utterly renewable resource involved. The water cycle, as it’s called, is continuous, and the water does not need to be converted to hydrogen or steam in order to be used: the principle involved is strictly mechanical via gravity. Another benefit, of course, is energy production during a rainstorm when solar energy isn’t currently collected.

One group has taken the sun-rain power paradox to the next level by adding mechanical energy from rain to their photovoltaic cells, thus gaining continuous power even when the sun is obscured by rainclouds or during rain events at night. These hybrids are known as ‘all-weather solar panels’ using “triboelectric nanogenerators” to reap the power from rain. The idea is to allow continuous power in areas where it rains a great deal. As Euro Scientist reported in 2018, researchers at Soochow University created a panel where the solar and mechanical generation shares the same electrode, allowing a thinner, more efficient design.

Another team, in Grenoble, France, detailed their conversion process in Phys.org to the effect that, “when a raindrop impacts a surface, it produces a perfectly inelastic shock… To capture the raindrops’ mechanical energy, the scientists used a PVDF (polyvinylidene fluoride) polymer, a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy.” The impact of the raindrop on the “25-micrometer-thick PVDF” starts the polymer vibrating while “electrodes embedded in the PVDF” carry the electrical charges generated by the vibrations.

Scientists leading this research have suggested this could be applied to electronics as well as umbrellas, protective raingear, even the hulls of ships. Any surface which is bombarded by water’s mechanical energy could power this type of system.

So, to our surprise, here we have yet another plentiful, renewable energy source that – once the materials are refined and scaled – could provide power anywhere water is impacting a surface.

It may not be the ‘flux-capacitor’ but it is, nonetheless, a significant step forward. Though this new technology still needs between three and five years before it could be implemented in solar panels, according to IGS.com, with a little luck we won’t have to go far ‘Back to the Future’ to put it to use.

References
[1]Convert-to.com
[2]U.S. Geological Survey, based on 40’x70’ roof dimensions
[3]U.S. Geological Survey
[4] Wikipedia.org: Precipitation