The U.S. delegation includes cabinet members such as climate envoy John Kerry, who will camp out in Davos for most of the week, but others such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are skipping.
It’s not that Yellen has better things to do at home: She’s embarking on an 11-day trip with stops in Senegal, Zambia and South Africa, with no time for Davos.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, who campaigns to eliminate nuclear weapons, said she “genuinely had forgotten that Davos is still happening.”
“The format seems slightly dated now. The private jets and oligarch parties are no longer in step with modern biz [business] life,” said Scott Colvin, a Davos veteran who is now public affairs director at Aviva. “The events around COP [the U.N.’s annual climate summit] now feel a bigger deal, given their focus on a specific global policy objective,” he added.
WEF is a victim of its own success and stuck in a demographic bind.
The forum’s operating model requires it to provide a place for the world’s most powerful and influential people to talk.
In 2020 Bloomberg calculated 119 billionaires joined the party, with a combined net worth of more than $500 billion.
WEF’s efforts to bring the uber-elite together is a stark annual reminder that they don’t look like the rest of us.
The best ratio of female participants in WEF’s 52-year history of in-person gatherings was 24 percent, in 2020.
Despite years of exhortations and incentives for members to bring more female colleagues, the number often hovers in the range of 18 percent to 20 percent. A WEF spokesperson said that 42 percent of speakers this year will be women.
WEF aims for global reach — but often lands in the middle of the Atlantic instead.
This year Europe is supplying the most political leaders, while the U.S. corporate delegation will once again massively outweigh the others. The 700 Americans participating this year outnumber the Chinese delegation roughly 20 to 1.
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Ryan Heath