The honorary doctorate was presented on occasion of the 15^th anniversary of the Louvain School of Management as a full faculty unit within the Université catholique de Louvain. The motto of the anniversary events and the title of the accompanying academic conference was “Put Human Values at the Center of the Enterprise.”

At the conference, WU Rector Hanappi-Egger gave a lecture entitled “Enhancing the Place of Women in Company Boards and Management.” She addressed the fact that still only very few women hold senior management positions at the EU’s largest companies even though 54.1% of tertiary education students in the EU are women. Rector Hanappi-Egger highlighted possible ways of achieving an equal gender balance in supervisory boards and senior management positions. She also explained WU’s diversity-oriented performance assessment approach, which plays an important role especially when recruiting senior faculty members for professorships. In 2016, this performance assessment system won a major diversity management award.