The quota debate raged on at the second day of the Women’s Forum, as executives from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, UBS, and Total expressed their views and/or took sides.

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Didier Lombard, Charmain and CEO of France Telecom, said women who made it to the top of France Telecom were among the strongest in the staff because they had had to work harder than men to get there. “When you’re in Burgundy, you know the best crus are at the top of the hill, because that’s where the soil is poor,” reports Andrew Hill for the Financial times.

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Aude de Thuin goes a step further: “Forget China, India and even new technologies - for the past 10 years the number one vector for global growth has been women,” she wrote in an article for the Financial Times.

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Samuel DiPiazza (CEO, PriceWaterhouse Coopers International),

Bjorn Hedlund (Global Business Director, DuPont Engineering)

and Olivia Fox Cabane attending the Cartier Gala on Day Two

Eight hundred women, three days, one theme: saving the world.

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Having the previous night reveled in the splendid settings and scrumptious fare of the Strassburger Villa in Deauville, we strove to nonethless be (or at least appear to be) bright-eyed ‘n bushy-tailed the next morning.

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Aude Zieseniss de Thuin, Founder and President of the Forum and phenomenal woman herself, opened by calling for a revolution– or perhaps an evolution.

Later in the day, Bush’s Under Secretary for Public Affairs, Karen Hughes, shared a panel with Areva’s Anne Lauvergeon and Monique Canto-Sperber of ENS. The highly controversial issueof affirmative action to promote women in the workplace soon bubbled up, some even labeling quotas “humiliating”, as reports Andrew Hill for the Financial Times.

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Over lunch, the highly controversial Aubrey de Grey, Biogerentologist and ageing expert at Cambridge University, talked about age a disease, similar to any other, for which he was finding a cure. Think there would be a market for that one?
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Other sessions included such luminaries as INSEAD’s Herminia Ibarra, Harvard’s Social Entrepreneur In Residence Nancy Barry, or Mercedes Erra, Co-Chairman of EuroRSCG Worldwide and Managing Director of Havas France..

The day was closed by a dinner reception, where we were honored with the presence of the lovely Queen Rania of Jordan.
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Nathalie Risacher (Chief Security Officer, IXIS Capitl Markets)
Olivia Fox Cabane
Mercedes Erra(Executive Co-Chairman of Euro RSCG. Worldwide)
Tabi Haller-Jorden (General Manager, Catalyst Europe AG)

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