KUWAIT: Alghanim Industries and Gulf Bank kicked off their conference on ‘Women in the Corporate World: Beyond the Glass Ceiling’, taking place on Wednesday at Jumeirah Messilah Beach Hotel. The press conference to start off the event included International Keynote Speaker Randi Zuckerburg as well as representatives from Alghanim Industries, Gulf Bank, and conference supporting partner KIPCO.

The conference, which features major international and local speakers as well as panel discussions, aims at creating a networking platform for business people to exchange ideas on achieving success in the corporate environment.

This conference is being held in partnership with KIPCO, with support from Cadillac, and Everything Kuwait. The keynote international speaker is entrepreneur Randi Zuckerberg, CEO of Zuckerberg Media and author of Dot Complicated.

She is passionate about elevating women in the workplace and has mentored several successful businesswoman and entrepreneurs. She will be delivering a keynote speech on the topic of gender diversity in the workplace. During opening remarks at the press conference, General Manager of Human Resources at Gulf Bank, Salma Al-Hajjaj said: “At Gulf Bank we invest in human resources, not only to cultivate the bank’s performance and reach our targets of providing excellence, but also to develop the whole society. We are proud that at Gulf Bank women represent 25% of top management, which is above international standards and represents 40% of our total workforce. I believe all participants will be inspired by the experience exchange, knowledge transfer and the different case studies presented at the conference”.

Ms. Zuckerberg remarked: “It’s such a pleasure to be here today and to take part of an important conference which I consider as a magnificent event for Kuwait, the region and the whole globe. Ten years ago I used to be one of the few females in a room where any business issue was discussed, so it’s a real pleasure to be here today with males and females discussing challenges faced by women in the workplace, working on finding solutions for them, which is an achievement on its own” “Hopefully this conference will result in links between local women’s groups and like-minded groups in the United States” added Zuckerberg.

Chief Human Resources Officer at Alghanim Industries, George Lambros said: “I am amazed at the level of interest ‘Women in the Corporate World’ has generated. The conference brings together many international, regional and local influencers to share their views and experiences. This is a vital topic, and I hope that the discussion will enrich the knowledge of participants and will inspire them to apply these new ideas to create a healthy working environment that ensures equal opportunities for both men and women”.

Commenting on the women in the workplace, Eman Al Awadhi, KIPCO Group Communications Director, commented: “At KIPCO, we believe that it is important to understand the key challenges that women face in the workforce and what could be done to motivate and drive more of them to join the private sector, as well as to create an internal culture where women can thrive in their work and also rise up the ranks to the top.

Partnering with Alghanim Industries and Gulf Bank on this conference will offer us the opportunity to further support gender diversity to improve corporate culture and to create a more socially and economically balance environment.” The conference includes local speakers Sheikha Al-Zain Al-Sabah, who is presently Undersecretary at the Ministry of State for Youth Affairs and received the Arab Woman Award for being the “Inspirational Woman of the Year” in 2015, and Sara Akbar, Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder of Kuwait Energy and one of the first women to hold a senior position in the oil and gas industry.

The ‘Women in the Corporate World’ conference also hosts two major discussion panels. The first panel, entitled ‘The Work/Life Balance’ and moderated by Nima Abu Wardeh, Columnist and award-winning broadcast journalist, and the second, ‘The Role Identity’ by Richard Mosley, Vice President of Global Strategy at Universum, the international employer branding company.

The conference will also announce results of a nation-wide survey by Alghanim Industries and Gulf Bank to better understand the key motivating factors for women in Kuwait workforce; the survey targeted both students and professional women in Kuwait and generated over 2,000 responses. The findings will be presented to participants of the conference to help enrich understanding of the main drivers that incentivize women to work