Way2Global at Expo Dubai for women

This year we are celebrating 8 March at Expo Dubai by taking a leading role in an initiative designed, created and promoted by women for women.

The project, named “Le Città delle Donne” (The Cities of Women), is run by Gli Stati Generali delle Donne, an association committed to UN Sustainable Development Goal 5: achieving gender equality through women’s empowerment.

The Association is led by Isa Maggi, a tireless fighter who, through her enthusiasm and energy, has managed to involve many other women working throughout Italy and beyond in the most diverse fields: from politics to entrepreneurship, sport, science, the arts and teaching.

One of these women is none other than our founder & CEO Laura Gori, the entrepreneur at the helm of our Benefit translation agency, which is majority-owned and governed by women.

Commitment to women and women’s empowerment has always been among our priorities, which is why we are on the front line at Expo Dubai to present the authorities with the “Dubai Charter”, an important milestone of the “Women of the World Charter” launched at Expo Milano 2015 and subsequently promoted in Matera in 2019. Since then, the Charter has been supplemented with valuable new contributions that have brought it to Dubai in its current form for the purpose of including this great intercultural metropolis in the network of future smart cities reimagined through women’s eyes.

The “Dubai Charter” is a policy manifesto that aims to commit decision makers and public administrations to empower women to play a leading role in building the future and society.

Women’s involvement in every sphere, from politics to business, is a valuable growth driver and a source of prosperity for the entire community, which must be promoted and supported.

This is the conviction that has brought us to Expo Dubai where, through our founder’s voice, we will have an opportunity to discuss the regenerative business model that sets us apart and how it perfectly complements the establishment of new female and sustainable leadership.

Benefit Corporations for new female entrepreneurship

As readers will be aware, we are a translation agency founded as a Società Benefit and certified B Corp.

Our founder reinvented herself as a Benefit start-up entrepreneur after 30 years at the head of a traditional translation company and is well aware that this is a complex undertaking. So are all the people who work together every day to deliver our services.

Nevertheless, we believe that it is precisely by virtue of our social vocation and this sustainable way of doing business for the benefit of the entire community that we managed to achieve significant growth in the most troubled two years of our history.

For us, being a Benefit translation agency means working every day toward Sustainable Development Goal 5 on Gender Equality, which we have incorporated into our Articles of Association to ensure that women have equal access, growth and career opportunities in the professional arena.

At Way2Global, our commitment to this is reflected in the adoption of several measures, including:

• Monitoring of a series of KPIs in the business plan to keep track of the number of women in the workforce, in senior positions and on the board;
• introduction of progressive measures in our second-level supplementary agreement to support work-life balance and parenthood, which we regard as a gift, rather than a limitation;
• numerous continuous training initiatives for the digital reskilling and upskilling required by the market, most notably the Way2Academy Open Education project aimed at the translators of the future.

This corporate culture allows each Way2Global employee to realize their full potential, which in turn translates into value for our stakeholders, most of all our customers.

This is why converting our translation agency into a Benefit Corporation has allowed us to grow healthy and robust, while generating benefits for all.

Having first-hand experience of the advantages of this business model immediately prompted us to promote and share it, which led to development of our “Made in B Italy” publishing project.

Through “Made in B Italy”, we want to make everyone aware of the regenerative power of Benefit Corporations and the contribution that doing business sustainably can make to the emergence of a new, more equitable, inclusive and sustainable economic system.

We are therefore proud to also bring our project to Expo Dubai today and hope it will prompt many other women entrepreneurs to convert their business models and embrace the Benefit Corporation philosophy.

In the words of our founder:

“There is no better tool than Benefit Corporations as a legal business form to allow us women to play a key role in the restart, driving a more sustainable model and creating new leadership committed to caring for society and the planet.”