Women in Sustainability

The Women in Sustainability panel discussion at Sustainability LIVE Climate Week NYC aims to highlight the critical role that women play in advancing environmental goals, from grassroots activism to corporate leadership.

Can you share a specific project or initiative that you have led that significantly impacted sustainability in your community or organisation?

Nina Eisenman

We're really at a pivotal moment in sustainability. If we are going to achieve the emissions reductions goals and find the proper balance between energy sustainability and energy stability, we're going to have to make progress on a few fronts:

• Capital formation and allocation
• Technology innovation
• Reporting and disclosure improvements.

It's an ecosystem challenge – it's always a team effort. 

I try to look at my life from that ecosystem perspective. I think about things that I've done in my personal life and in the community and how I can make progress on those fronts professionally. 

On the personal front, I try to be a good role model. I live in a home that's heated and cooled with geothermal energy and I talk to my neighbours about that. I have solar panels, I have my EV plugged in front of my house — when you do something and your neighbour sees you doing that something, they're more likely to do that as well.

From a community perspective, for a number of years now I have been on my Climate Smart Community Task Force.

As part of that group, I volunteered and did our town's municipal greenhouse gas inventory. That report actually allowed the town to identify emissions reductions opportunities in our municipal buildings and fleet. We were able to leverage the information to secure grants and we now have geothermal and air source heat pumps in a number of our municipal buildings.

We now have EV vehicles in our municipal fleet and EV chargers in town that we were able to secure through that work. 

As the Head of ESG Strategy and Reporting at Nasdaq, my job is to constantly improve our reporting practice. That is really important because it builds the trust between those that need capital for sustainability projects and those that are allocating the capital.

Kristen Siemen

At GM, we’re about driving sustainability into all aspects of our business. We're a company that's founded on innovation and is innovating every day. New technologies, new processes, new ways of doing things have been weaved into our business strategy. Sustainability isn't something that just a small team of individuals are focussed on.

Probably one of the things that I'm most proud of – beyond our products – was back in 2016, GM set a goal to be 100% renewable in its global operations by 2050. I’m super proud of the fact that we’ve overachieved by 25 years. It really is an example of how quickly you can really move if you just get started.

I participated in the ribbon cutting in Arkansas for the Newport Solar project which will provide renewable energy on to the meso grid and power three of our assembly plants. One of the great things about being down there was the engagement with the community. After we did all the ceremonies we were sitting down with the superintendent of the school and he talked to us about what an impact this had on their community. 

He said they were able to increase the revenue that they got for that land versus what they were doing for farming, and it enabled them to provide laptops for every student in their district. He was so excited about the opportunities that this was going to give to the kids and enable them to have a more productive future. 

It's seeing that and being part of something that is big for us as a company, but then to understand how it impacts individuals is what is so rewarding about this job.

What are some unique challenges that you've faced as a woman in the sustainability sector and how have you overcome those?

Christina Shim

I don't know if I fully overcome them, so I'll start there.

If you look across the board, there's a lot of CSOs who are women, but it's not a woman or man thing — this is existential. This is everybody. It's all our communities. It's all our families. It's everybody, all our businesses. 

As an executive in a large company, there are just a lot of challenges.

The only way that we're ever going to make the progress we need to is by creating business value. It's cost cutting and revenue generating as a growth enabler if you allow it to be part of your business. 

Our roles are more of an influencer role — I don't have a thousand people on my team running sustainability around the company. It is a small group and what we have to do is tentacle out and make sure that we are touching every function and business unit in the company.

Especially with sustainability being increasingly important in how we think about our businesses, it is challenging when you're not necessarily in every room to make sure that you have influenced all the discussions.

Kristen Siemen

I've been at GM for more than 30 years and 27 were in product development. As an engineer I was definitely a minority, especially early in my career. So coming into the sustainability role, I think two things are nice: 

• There are a lot more women
• It's very collaborative

I've made some great friends — we learn from each other and are natural collaborators. It's really important in the role to understand the business and to be able to drive and communicate that within the business.

How do you see the role of women evolving in the field of sustainability over the next decade?

Jennifer Motles

There are a lot of women in sustainability, but they're still so many barriers for women to actually be able to compete and thrive in equal ways because there's so much of the system that does not make it easy.

It's important to have awareness of the privilege that we have in the positions that we hold, just by the fact that we are representing our companies in a leadership role. It means that you are bringing representation and paving a road that is wide enough that others can work with you. 

It's very important to not forget that alongside the privilege of holding this role, driving change, being passionate about sustainability and trying to do my job well, I'm also a woman holding that space so that others can actually grow under me or with me.

The way to address systemic issues like climate change or poverty or inequality is to acknowledge them and have a platform to discuss them. 

What role do you think education plays in empowering women to take on leadership roles? How can we improve access to that education?

Nina Eisenman

I encourage any people at any point in their career, regardless of where they're coming from, to go back to school. You can come into sustainability from so many different places and so many different facets of sustainability are needed. We need everybody. 

Christina Shim

I think people do feel like they need to have a specific sustainability background to be in sustainability — that's nonsense. 

You don't necessarily need whatever sustainability certificate — although they’re wonderful, and there's actually a lot of free options now, which makes it more accessible. Because this is an ongoing and all pervasive issue across all industries it doesn't matter where you're coming from. If you have the intention and desire to do something, we need folk — and that includes folk very junior all the way to senior — that are passionate.

Kristen Siemen

I think we talk a lot about green jobs. I always say we need to green all jobs. 

We need to find a way that everyone has it as a core of their curriculum and in their everyday world.

Christina Shim

Especially if we're thinking about embedding it within businesses, then it's got to be part of everyone's job. The more that people are aware of how they can bring their skill sets, the more powerful and impactful this will be. That's how you scale.

Kristen Siemen

It's a journey. I think we've made great progress, but we've got a long way to go. We are thinking about it from the engineer at the very beginning to the materials they're selecting and the equipment we're selecting for our facilities.

Traditionally we've built or engineered a vehicle with design for manufacturing and serviceability. Now we need to design for recyclability and disassembly so that we can think about remanufacture and how we really bring in a full lifecycle and circularity into the whole vehicle development process.

We're at stages along the way but there's a long way to go.

What stage are you at in your sustainability journey? 

Jennifer Motles

The complexity for PMI is that we're simultaneously managing the impact of two value chains — we're trying to minimise the impact that the cigarette business that we're leaving behind creates on society, but we’re also proactively starting to think about what the new business looks like.

We've talked a lot about how to embed sustainability into strategy. There's also something to say about the external environment because businesses don't operate in a vacuum. PMI is a company that has 70,000 employees present in more than 160 countries. The realities in those countries are obviously different.

These are complex issues because they're systemic — like women in leadership. There's a lot that we can do, but there's also a lot of hurdles and constraints in terms of how.

This is also connected to climate change. If you want to transition into renewable energy — away from fossil fuels or from smoking or from leadership that looks very homogeneous — you need different parts of society to play their part, whether different regulations, civil societies raising awareness, consumer engagement. That doesn't happen overnight, it takes time to turn a moving ship. It's about perseverance.

Christina Shim

I think we're also actually on a pivot point. IBM used to be a manufacturing company, but we set up our first environmental policy in 1971. That was a long time ago, so there's a really strong legacy that the company has built on around manufacturing and sustainability.

We are no longer a manufacturing company. Our current CEO, who came in about five years ago, has completely pivoted our strategy around hybrid cloud and AI.

AI in sustainability is seen as a hot topic. That's where a lot of my focus is with my team — how do we think about AI to support sustainability use cases, energy efficiency, data centres, buildings, climate risk mitigation, adaptation. And how do you also increase the sustainability of AI?

We're working with our R&D teams and others to make sure we're focussed on building chips that are more energy efficient and creating smaller AI models that are then more energy efficient and cost effective for our partners and for ourselves. The journey continues because the world evolves and our companies are evolving. It's the only way that we're continuing to make sure that we're staying relevant and innovative.

We are on a journey. We’re at this intersection of the past and the future and we're trying to make sure that we are across both.

Nina Eisenman

A different part of that whole puzzle is how important it is to have leadership who's behind it. Nasdaq has great female leadership — it's inspiring. There weren't that many role models for me when I was young in my career. But also they understand the strategic importance of sustainability and having that leadership filters down through the organisation.

What advice would you give to young women aspiring to careers in sustainability?

Nina Eisenman

Do it! It's the best place to be. Think about the facet of it that you want to come in from. There's so many different opportunities for young people — do a lot of networking and take advantage of any kind of mentorship and sponsorship opportunities that your company offers.

Kristen Siemen

I don't think it matters what career you’ve gone into – it's all about what you can learn, who you can network with and doing everything you can do to get to that next step. You can always do more than you think you can do.

Having the aspiration to change things — whether it be a process or a technology or the world, whatever you are passionate about — you're going to be your best at.

I would say two things:

• Advocate for yourself: I do think that in general women are much poorer at this than they should be
• Communication: I hear a lot of women saying ‘I'm sorry’. It's like a caveat to almost everything. I use it as a very tangible example because it's real and it diminishes credibility. When I do mentoring I start with asking ‘How are you articulating yourself? How do you present yourself in conversations?’ If you're starting with, ‘Oh, sorry’, or ‘Oh, I didn't mean to’, these types of caveats immediately diminish everything that you're going to say next.

Jennifer Motles

My advice is to be kind and help others. If you're kind it can go a long way. It's about not just thinking about yourself. There is a lot of privilege and responsibility when you have the honour to represent a company and build a strategy. There are a lot of people that are dependent on you and there are a lot of people that you can impact in a very tangible way.

To read the full story in the magazine click HERE

Explore the latest edition of Sustainability Magazine and be part of the conversation at our global conference series, Sustainability LIVE. 

Discover all our upcoming events and secure your tickets today.

Sustainability Magazine is a BizClik brand