Rich Monday Paper London Edition 121: Whose Voices Are Heard Where Decisions Are Made?

Taking part in the Celebration of International Women Forum in Paris has kept one question in front of me through a week of Nobel announcements and yesterday's International Day of the Girl: whose voices are heard where decisions are made. Gatherings of women leaders from different countries matter to me because that question is still open, in Paris and in London. I came to Britain from Jamaica at nineteen, trained as a nurse and became a senior leader in the National Health Service, and in 1989 I founded Beacon Organisational Development. In more than thirty years of coaching leaders since, I have seen careers turn on who is advocated for in the meetings where promotions and appointments are decided, and many of the people reading this letter chair those meetings.

On Friday the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law. Born under apartheid in Durban, she became a lawyer while confronting what the committee called "deep structural discrimination, segregation and exclusion". Of the eight laureates named for the five prizes announced by Friday, two are women: Navi Pillay and the Canadian poet Anne Carson, who received the prize in literature. The prize in economic sciences is announced in Stockholm today.

This year's physics and chemistry prizes honour work that began in the 1980s, and I read each year's list of laureates as a record of who was given the posts and the funding to do such work a generation earlier. The appointments and sponsorship decisions London's leaders make this year will shape who is in a position to do that kind of work a generation from now.