As the dust settles on another whirlwind Climate Week NYC, it’s hard not to feel a mix of both optimism and skepticism. With over 900 events to choose from—Climate Week offers countless opportunities for inspiration, activation and networking. But now that it’s wrapped, the key question I keep returning to is this: Will the events of Climate Week lead to concrete action?
This year, the topic of women and climate gained momentum. There were a number of inspiring events, panels and conversations focused on the intersection of women’s leadership and climate action. This is incredibly promising—but we still have a long way to go. I’ve been thinking about how we turn this momentum and enthusiasm into connected and intentional action.
For the fashion industry, integrating more women into leadership could be a game-changer for climate action. When we talk about climate solutions for the fashion industry, we should be talking about advancing women into leadership roles as a climate solution as much as we talk about renewables, new technologies and sustainable finance. Simply put: we need more women in fashion leadership, from the factory floor to the board room.
The relationship between women’s leadership and climate action isn’t just theoretical—it’s proven and makes business sense. According to the World Economic Forum, women are more likely to invest in resilient communities, push for environmental protections, and advocate for social initiatives. In industries like fashion, which have considerable environmental and social footprint, this is the type of leadership we need to achieve the transformation we talk about, but haven't fully realised. Empowering women to lead in fashion can unlock innovative solutions to environmental and social issues and create long-term resilience for the entire value chain.
In fashion, there is a lack of diversity in leadership. While women make up a large proportion of the fashion workforce, their representation in leadership roles remains woefully lagging. Most garment workers are women, and women are the primary consumers of fashion, but the industry remains largely male-led. This imbalance is more than a gender equity issue, it’s a missed opportunity to achieve the industry’s climate goals.
Climate Week provides a critical platform to discuss the fashion industry’s challenges and opportunities on climate, but much of the talk felt familiar. The urgency of collaboration and bold action was echoed in countless panels, yet sometimes without concrete strategies for implementation. This repetition echoes the broader climate movement's dilemma—decades of calls for collaboration and partnership with not enough action to meet the urgency of the moment. As someone who’s spent the better part of a decade working on pre-competitive collaboration, I know firsthand that collaboration is easy to talk about and much harder to actually do.
