Unilever's Paul Polman on the power of women.

• Position: FIVE QUESTIONS WITH... - Interview

Ed. Note: WomenCorporateDirectors honored Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever PLC and Unilever NV, with its 2013 WCD Visionary Award for Leadership. The award recognizes a top-performing company that has a board of three or more women directors for serving as a role model in both corporate leadership and best governance practices. (Unilever has five women among its 12 nonexecutive board members.) The award was presented to Mr. Polman at WCD's annual conference in June 2013 in New York. For a keynote session at the event he was interviewed by WCD co-founder and CEO Susan Stautberg. Edited excerpts of the interview follow.

Why are women important to Unilever?

When you look around the world and at the issues that society faces, you find that if you invest in women you get the highest returns. Where people are moving into the middle classes, usually it is because of women starting to work. Take Africa, for example. When women work, 90% of their earnings are reinvested in their families or in their communities. That's why we have to invest in women to address the big social issues. It makes sense for the world and it makes sense for our business model--with 85% of our growth at Unilever coming from emerging markets and 70-80% of purchase decisions and use of our products by women. This is enlightened self-interest.

How are you bringing women along in your pipeline?

You have to have robust programs in place. You set your targets--from recruiting to mentoring, tracking and accountability. I set a personal example. One of my own personal targets is linked to our gender balance objectives, which I did deliberately to set that tone from the top. What we also do is hire from the outside. We insist on hiring a significant overrepresentation of women. This has leapfrogged us by bringing Unilever an enormous amount of knowledge and gaining us a lot of respect. Right now we are about 45% women in manager levels, 30% in higher levels, and almost 50% at the board level. This is quite a dramatic change from where we were a few years ago.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Tell us about the women on your board.

First and foremost, everybody on the board, male or female, is there for their capabilities and for their knowledge and what they bring. Having worked for Kraft, Ann Fudge obviously has great experience in marketing. She is on three other boards and brings a wealth of experience to me. Laura Cha and Mary Ma are two executives from China who have just joined the board. It...