This year is the 10th edition of the Women’s Forum Global Meeting. We are celebrating by bringing together a truly outstanding group of speakers — trailblazers for human rights and women’s empowerment and pioneers and new innovators in business, education, and science and technology. Our aim? For participants be inspired by and discuss with these leaders about how we can contribute to more equitable economies and societies. Ours is a complicated and sometimes overwhelming, unjust, and violent world. It’s also a world where more women, in more contexts, have agency and can make a difference.

Against this backdrop the agenda for the 2014 Global Meeting was organized around three pillars, in all of which women are playing national and international leadership roles today:

• Addressing basic needs, including food security, energy, health, education and employment
• Technology and innovation as a way to bridge inequities
• Human rights and the rule of law as the comprehensive framework of core principles of universality, nondiscrimination, transparency and accountability.

We treat the empowerment and advancement of girls and women as a global challenge across all of three pillars. And throughout we concentrate on the practical and possible, showcasing stories of workable solutions on the ground in different countries and contexts.

The Women’s Forum is a business conference while also being a meeting on the economy and society. We raise our game this year by launching for the first time in the Discovery, our renowned creativity space, a series of peer-to-peer sessions for executive participants to discuss trends and issues and challenges in their sectors and fields.