Symposium on Global Women Empowerment and Development was Held

As women make up 49.6% of the global population, promoting women's well-being and all-round development is crucial to global development.

On December 17, 2022, China Development Research Foundation (CDRF) held the Symposium on Global Women Empowerment and Development in Shanghai. The symposium was hosted by Li Jin, co-founder of Care for Women’s Health Initiative, and was held in a combination of online and offline formats, with Fang Jin, Vice President and Secretary General of the Foundation, attending and addressing the seminar.

Deputy Secretary General Yu Jiantuo, on behalf of the Foundation's "Global Women Empowerment and Development" project team, introduced the background of the project, the overall concept and objectives, the basic framework of the index, the planning of the report series, the cooperation framework, the future release and promotion, and other project ideas. The project vision is to publish and promote the index in the future.

Prof. Alfred Ho, Head of the Department of Public and International Affairs, City University of Hong Kong, shared the future application scenarios of the report and the future directions of the work based on Hong Kong and international experience. Professor Gong Ting, Visiting Professor of the Department of Public and International Affairs, City University of Hong Kong and Chair Professor of Fudan University, introduced the current research progress, indicators and data collection of the project.

Researcher Du Jie, Director of Women's Research Institute of All-China Women's Federation, Professor Peng Xizhe, Senior Professor of Liberal Arts of Fudan University and Director of Women's Research Center of Fudan University, Professor Chen Yan, Deputy Director of the Department of History of Fudan University and Director of International Women's History Society, and Zhou Zhiqiang, Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee and Senior Editor of Liberation Daily, put forward constructive opinions for the subject group on how to do the next research work from the perspectives of research intention, research method and index system construction.

The roundtable discussion was moderated by Chunyan Wei, Vice President of Government Affairs, Danaher China. The keynote speakers were Roberta Lipson, founder of United Family Healthcare; Wang Aiying, president and CEO of Envac Greater China and Southeast Asia; and Liu Hui, founder and chairman of sHero.

Finally, Fang Jin summarized the seminar, saying that women's development has always been a key focus of the Foundation's policy research, and that women have been indirect or major beneficiaries of many of the Foundation's children's programs. The "Global Women Empowerment and Development" project is a newly launched research topic of the Foundation, and the current goal is to conduct quantitative research by building an indicator system. In the future, the Foundation will deepen the field, use data to conduct in-depth comparisons across history and countries, summarize outstanding cases and the reasons behind them, study women's empowerment and development from a more comprehensive, macro and global perspective, and make our contribution to the construction of Chinese modernization and the development of Chinese and global women.