As part of the firm’s diversity and inclusion program, Shearman & Sterling advised the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, a leading platform that highlights women’s voices and perspectives, and which creates global influence by making concrete recommendations and devising innovative solutions on key social, economic, and environmental issues.  

Shearman & Sterling’s International Arbitration team assisted the Women’s Forum with the preparation of a report to be submitted to the G7 at the upcoming summit to be held on 10-12 June 2020. Specifically, Shearman & Sterling advised on the drafting of for measures that could be adopted by G7 economies to promote and support women’s entrepreneurship, with a specific focus on increasing the participation of women entrepreneurs in the private and public supply chains. 

The persistent gender gap in entrepreneurship at the global level – and within the G7 countries – constitutes a massive loss of opportunity for the global economy, which has been quantified in the trillions of US dollars.  Women’s economic empowerment has been a key topic of discussion at G7 summits over the past few years and G7 countries have acknowledged on several occasions the necessity of taking further action to address the gender gap in the economy. 

After taking stock of the barriers that women entrepreneurs tend to face, Shearman & Sterling studied in depth the legal frameworks of all G7 economies to ensure that the proposals are concrete and actionable in all G7 economies and will enable them to lead by example in effecting global change in this area.

To learn more about the challenges that women-owned businesses face and how to address them, listen to our remarks at the 2020 Women’s Forum G7 Virtual Meeting, “Beyond recovery: designing an inclusive world."

This work is part of our Paris office’s Shearman#Elles initiative for women empowerment, which includes legal and policy work to support equality between women and men and to promote equal opportunities for all.

The team also included Chloé Vialard (Singapore – International Arbitration), Peter Petrov, Arianna Rosato, Matthew Rogier, Georgios Andriotis, Max Hulme (all Paris – International Arbitration), Anders Nilsson (Frankfurt – International Arbitration), Masashi Shimojo (Tokyo – Mergers and Acquisitions) and Paschalis Paschalidis (Paris and Brussels – International Arbitration). 

The Team