In an article in the Platinum Business Magazine’s ‘The Big Story’ , Warren Buffett, PAIRFUM and the Me Too Movement (or #MeToo) were mentioned..
O.K, so maybe PAIRFUM was not mentioned in the same exalted company as Mr Buffett and the reference to #MeToo, refers to using the power of Women in Business and Life, rather than wasting this immense untapped pool of talent.
However that article did strike a cord with us….
Not only is it about encouraging and empowering Women, it is also about optimism and positivity.
Mr Buffett stated that – “It’s one of the things that makes me optimistic about America because when I look at what we have accomplished using half our talent for a couple of centuries, and now I think of doubling the talent that is effectively employed — or at least has the chance to be — it makes me very optimistic about this country,”.
He also said that “Life is a lottery, I had a 50% chance of being born Female with the same IQ and talent, which would have made career options as limited as they were for my sisters”.
He mentioned that his sisters who were born around the same time as him the 1930, were given the advice to marry early and marry well.
Although society has come a long way since then, Buffett recalls a time when women were kept out of the workforce and predominantly told to depend on marriage as their path to livelihood.
He has also spoken about his own shortcomings in encouraging and empowering women. During the first ‘United States of Women Summit’ in 2016 at the White House, which was a summit held in Washington, D.C. that focused on gender equality in the United States.
Warren confessed that he only thought to put a woman on the Berkshire Hathaway board in 2003 almost 40 years after taking over the company, and this he confesses was not his own idea but that of his wife Susie.
In an essay for Fortune Magazine in 2013, Buffett argued that “women are a major reason we will do so well” he also warned that the great “enemy of change” lives in “the ingrained attitudes of those who simply can’t imagine a world different from the one they’ve lived in.”
When so much in today’s World appears negative and derisive, it is heart warming to see successful people like Warren Buffett who place such stock in ‘Integrity and Ethics’ in business.
He has also said that “If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%”.
If that is the case then we all owe a debt of gratitude to the wonderful ‘Women’ in our lives, to our Great Grandmothers, Grandmothers, Mothers, Sisters and to any Women who was brave enough to take that first step for us.
As Warren Buffet once said…..
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
So from all the Women and Men here at PAIRFUM London – “Thank You”
