GES 2017: Ivanka Trump bats for technology empowering women

Hyderabad: United States President Donald Trump's daughter and advisor Ivanka Trump on Wednesday said technology held an immense potential in the present scenario to help women entrepreneurs grow in both - their personal and professional lives.

"Technology offers a tremendous opportunity to women entrepreneurs, and we are seeing that in terms of the explosive global and domestic growth," Ivanka Trump said, while addressing the plenary session on the topic 'We Can Do It! Innovations in Workforce Development and Skills Training' at the 8th edition of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), here.

She also said that technology had helped reduce barriers and was empowering and enabling women to become more flexible.

"Technology is a great driver of entrepreneurship because a lot of women are leaving and saying this doesn't work for me. It is emboldening them to go out on their own. It is reducing barriers to starting new businesses, and creating flexibility around schedule," Ivanka Trump maintained.

She also lauded the efforts made by women and women entrepreneurs to manage both their personal and professional lives, concluding that the way ahead required a fundamental change.

"One of the reasons we are seeing an explosion of women's entrepreneurship is because traditional workplaces often haven't worked for us. We are disproportionately providing unpaid care, while also needing to support our families financially," the 36-year-old businesswoman remarked.

"These cultural, social, work institutions were not set up with the assumption that there would be two parents in the workforce. So we just have to fundamentally change things. It is starting to happen in the corporate world," she concluded.

Also present at the session were state cabinet minister for IT E&C KT Rama Rao; ICICI Bank, Managing Director and CEO, Chanda Kochhar; Cherie Blaire and Karen Quintos.