Dutch Political Parties Working Together for Women's Rights

The Hague, December 6, 2012 – Dutch politics is deeply divided on a wide range of topics, but today there is one topic that unites parties from left to right: Women. In an article published by Wo=Men, we read that nine parties signed the Gender Multiparty Initiative: Women the Motor for Development, on December 6th. This initiative is only the second party-wide parliamentary initiative in Dutch parliamentary history. The Netherlands has a multiplicity of parties, with at the moment two in government, the Liberal Party (VVD) and the Labor Party (PVDA). The nine parties that agreed today to work together in the area of ​​women's rights are the VVD, PvdA, the Democratic Party (D66), The Christian Democrats (CDA), the Christian Union,  the Green Party (Groen Links), the Socialist Party (SP), 50plus – a new party devoted to the interests of the older generation -  and the Party for Animals (PvdD). The President of the Initiative is Ingrid de Caluwé  (VVD). Sjoerd Sjoerdsma (D66) and Marit Maij (PvdA) are Vice Chairs.

"From the Arab region to conflict zones: women make a significant contribution to global development, peace and democracy. Through the creation of a broad parliamentary cooperation, the Netherlands can now stand squarely behind these brave women and girls, and support them in their struggle for equal rights", the article says.

"Just how important Dutch support for the position of women is, is demonstrated in Egypt," the article continued. It quotes Hibaaq Osman of the women’s organization Karama: "I read an article last year in Time Magazine ‘Thank you for the revolution, but go back home now’. That is typical of what has happens in many revolutions: women participate actively and subsequently have no voice in the reforms."

Minister Liliane Ploumen

The initiative took its first big step in June of this year, just before the end of the parliamentary sitting and before the old Cabinet made way for the new. In June, seven parties signed a declaration in which their spokespeople announced that it was time to focus on gender. Since then, a new coalition leads the country, and new ministers have taken the reigns in many ministries. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lilianne Ploumen is now Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation. Minister Ploumen entered her new position with a drastically reduced budget relative to the previous year. Minister Ploumen has a deep understanding of women and development, having been a former director of Mama Cash, the women's funding organisation, and director of Cordaid, the Catholic Organisation for Relief and Development Aid.

"The initiative launched today is a sequel to that declaration. The goal is to anchor gender in all aspects of foreign policy, and especially in the field of international cooperation. The nine signatories agree that gender has to stay firmly on the agenda at home and abroad. They will do this for example by conducting research and by jointly submitting motions and amendments," the article concludes.

Congratulations are due to Elisabeth van der Steenhoven, her staff and the members of Wo=Men, who have been campaigning for this cooperation. Wo=Men is a network organisation, set up five years ago by entrepreneurs, development organisations, and knowledge institutions, who understood that combining each other's knowledge, resources and talents provides a faster route to achieving the goal of gender parity worldwide, than working side by side (or worse, getting tangled in each others 'strategies'!)

This article was originally published on the Wo=MEN website and the translation in English on the NETSHEILA Facebook page. LIKE the page and continue to get updates on the power of networks for good.

Lin McDevitt-Pugh

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Lin McDevitt-Pugh MBA is an active member of Wo=Men and has been from the start. She has provided strategic communication training and strategic development training to the staff and working groups. Lin is director of NETSHEILA and is passionate about people working together to create futures we believe in.

 

Lin McDevitt-Pugh

An Experiment with LinkedIn as a Tool in Gender Equality

When Niall Crowley, former CEO of the Irish Equality Authority summarised the hot topics that will take gender mainstreaming forward in Europe, diversity was one of them. Performance monitoring of gender mainstreaming was the other. He said this in his closing remarks at the the European Institute for Gender Equality's conference on gender mainstreaming and training, held in Vilnius in November. I had delivered a contribution to the workshop entitled Accommodating Diversity in Gender Training, and agree with Mr Crowley that including diversity in gender strategies is an important way forward. 

 

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In my ideal world, people who understand music, art and geography are as important as people who understand economics when it comes to deciding how we are going to define a new economic order. In my ideal world, women and men bake cakes and clean babies bottoms and head ministries in national cabinets. In my ideal world, professional women tennis players are paid the same as men tennis players. Thanks to Billie Jean King we have that part of my ideal world already. 

A few days after the conference I delivered my Mobilise Networks workshop to health professionals in the Netherlands. One manager challenged me on the value of LinkedIn in the work context, so I decided to put her challenge to the test. I posted on one of my groups the questions: "Because diversity is such a hot topic it is likely to be the topic that advances gender equality into the next phase. I'm interested to hear what you think."

Khosi Nxumalo of South Africa's Commission of Gender Equality responded that she thinks performance monitoring of gender mainstreaming is the key issue going forward. "This is what we are currently battling with in South Africa."

Susanne Moore, executive advisor and business transformation expert from Sydney, Australia responded to let Ms Nxumalo know that she is currently researching “The profit impact of organisational gender Diversity programs” as the first part of her research into Diversity Economics. She has developed a Diversity Program Review Framework, and sent the link http://susannemoore.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/major-dimensions/. 

So far so good. South Africa has now access to a framework for measuring diversity programs.

The framework was good news for Carrie Pemberton Ford, human trafficking researcher in the UK. She wanted to know more. She learned that the framework will do several things for a client.

1) It will measure the effectiveness of a diversity program from a standalone program perspective and assess the capability of the program according to known program metrics.

2) It will measure the effectiveness of the diversity program organizationally, that is: it will look at the level of engagement and integration of the program at an organizational level and if the organisation is fully leveraging the benefits of diversity (in terms of innovation, performance and creativity).

3) It will provide the data Susanne needs to input into her research project, “The profit impact of organisational gender Diversity programs”. 

Susanne said "So through the process of the review we are hoping to uncover areas where we think we can draw a causal link to profit."

"Currently, at least in Australia, most of our diversity programs are run out of the HR area, and I want to highlight the profit impact on the bottom line and get them recognised as an important business transformation driver, ie; getting them seen as more than HR. I have a background in the corporate world and know that in order for diversity (particularly gender diversity) to be taken seriously we must prove a causal link to profitability."

With the UK and South Africa involved and Australia providing concrete input nto how to measure the value of diversity in gender mainstreaming, World Bank gender economist Elbatoule Alaoui in Washington joined the discussion. She agrees that diversity is appropriate since gender issues is not only about the sex-specific differences between men and women, girls and boys but also about the differences between people in the same sex community.

"Diversity is at the basis of gender approach", she wrote in the group discussion.  "I believe that in Europe the policies needs to take into account the specific needs of the new citizen coming from developing countries and west Europe for a better social cohesion and sustainable growth. It is as important as in developing countries even if the parameters are different. Based on my experience in gender mainstreaming in Morocco, taking into consideration specific needs and interests of women and men is at the basis of development sustainability. For example girls in rural area don't have the same interests and needs as girls in the city. All women in the same city don't have the same needs and interests and public policies have to take into account this diversity in their development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation."

Ms Alaoui concluded that she would like to join me in my project, and that she can contribute in Arabic, French and English. I am sitting here thinking: what a great idea! There is not a project at the moment, but there is definitely a need for one. 

My next question to readers is: how will we create this as a project, and who will do what?

And yes, LinkedIn definitely works as a tool in promoting gender equality.

Lin McDevitt-Pugh
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At the core of Lin McDevitt-Pugh's work is a passion for freedom, exploration and respect for all people. Lin is the Director of NETSHEILA, a company she founded three years ago to provide management expertise in connecting organisations to the most valuable resource they have: the people they know or could know. Social networks connect, and so does sitting around a table with colleagues andt discussing real issues that matter to you.

Business Cases for Diversity Bring New Opportunities to Gender Mainstreaming

Gender training was the subject of a conference I spoke at this week in Vilnius, organized by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). Practitioners, professors and government representatives participated in the event that was intended as a networking event where people could exchange knowledge or find people with the knowledge and ideas they are looking for.

I was asked to speak in the workshop on Accommodating Diversity in Gender training programmes. This is a great subject for me, allowing me to follow through on inquires I have been involved in over the past dozen years. I have a long history in pushing the envelope in women’s empowerment and more recently in understanding how businesses and institutions benefit from taking into account that people with whom they interact – clients, employees, other stakeholders - are more than one of two things, Man or Woman.  People are clients and they are sources of information and they have multiple skills, multiple identities and multiple sources of engagement. In any group of people, the way Men are perceived and the way Women are perceived varies greatly. I notice this in simple interactions. I often hear women experiencing me as powerful and men experiencing me as scary. My identity, in the eyes of others, is fluid. How wild is that!

In my contribution, I brought in the concept of living from a future in which we all live in dignity and respect. If you think that is a new concept, think again. It is actually Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I find it incredibly compelling to work from that vision and to see what strategies we could implement now that could forward the action. Any one of us can think of something that can forward the action, depending on what our starting point is. In Sweden, for example, a kindergarten has chosen to change the language it uses with little ones. They no longer use the pronouns He or She and instead refer to Friends.  Imagine the impact this will have on kids. They will not be forced into gender stereotypical behaviours by the implicit assumptions of the kindergarten staff. Hopefully they will learn that playing with dolls and bashing boxes can be behaviours enjoyed by one and the same person, depending on the mood. 

As I was researching my presentation I came across an article on how 50% of the kids in craft classes in UK primary schools are boys. One of them was a football player who loves knitting because it gives him peaceful time. He is not required to run around and push and kick at all times and he loves it. The simple strategy of having knitting clubs at schools can contribute to developing a new notion of what being Boy is. 

In the end, the notion of who belongs in a boardroom will change.

I am grateful to Helga Christian and Landmark Education for the outstanding training session I recently attended, called Transforming Yesterdays Strategies, where we explored sex stereotypes and how they affect our reality. As children we develop strategies around being boy, or being girl. We tend to keep and strengthen the strategies, mostly because no-one ever tells us that we can choose to keep them or get rid of them and take on different strategies. We have, certainly as adults, the ability to reject strategies that don’t work for us and our communities, and bringing this element of choice into gender training is powerful.

More and more companies are inquiring into and developing the business case for diversity. It is taking the discussion on mainstreaming gender to a new level. In today’s wrap-up of the conference, the moderator noted that the issue of diversity was one of two "Hot Issues" of debate during the conference and added that he expected it to be a source of change in how companies, public institutions and civil society organisations reconstruct their relationship to gender.

I have every hope that this is the pathway to a world where all of us live in dignity and respect.

Marissa Mayer and the Business Case for Hiring Pregnant Women

We want to share this article from The Conversation by Diann Rodgers-Healey. It provides an excellent contribution to the discussion on "crippling the pipeline for talent" provoking the stalemate companies face in bringing women to the top.

Marissa Mayer and the business case for hiring pregnant women.

NetSHEila is collaborating on a new publication with Diann Rodgers-Healey. 

Copyright Gon Buurman, Photo from the collection of Aletta, Insitute for Women's History www.aletta.nu

Stalemate in Journey of Women to the Top

Amsterdam, 27 July 2012. The talent pipeline that should lead to more women in top positions in major Dutch companies is too limited. There are not enough women in the sub-top to be promoted to the top, according to new research by Dutch daily newspaper the Volkskrant (26-07-2012).

In 2016 companies by law must have at least 30% women in their top management and supervisory or executive boards. But in 2011 the numbers did not increase from the 20% of women at the top in the preceding year.

The research looked at 35 leading Dutch companies. A slight improvement in the metrics in some companies was balanced by losses of women in the top in other companies.

The electronic publishing company Reed Elsevier has the highest perentage of women in the top: almost 50% of management is female. At Unibail-Rodamco almost 4 in 10 women hold management positions. But technical companies like Imtech, the chip machine producer ASML, builders Boskalis, BAM and Heijmans can only find one in 10 women, if that, to fulfill the highest positions in their companies.

In total, 7592 women work in management positions in the 35 companies in the research. Many work in an international post and are not Dutch nationals.

Where to go from here? For one, research looking at gender and leadership in the Netherlands is needed.

The Netherlands signed the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, a UN declaration to advance the position of women. By signing this Declaration, the Netherlands committed among other things to gathering gender statistics to identify, produce and disseminate statistics that reflect the realities of the lives of women and men, and policy issues relating to gender.

Gender refers to the social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men.  These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialization processes. They are context/ time-specific and changeable.

We need those statistics now.  In the 6^th edition of the World Economic Forum’s  annual Global Gender Gap Report (2011) the Netherlands ranks 27 in the world on economic participation and opportunity for women.

We need to determine why women who are not Dutch nationals have opportunities Dutch women do not have – and what that has to do with gender relations in the Netherlands.  Such a study could make use of 13 gender-diversity measures determined by McKinsey in its 2012 Women Matter survey. These measures range from options for flexible working conditions, to inclusions of gender-diversity indicators in executive’s performance reviews and a systematic requirement that at least one female candidate be in each promotion pool. 

It is getting more and more urgent to address the issue of women and leadership in the Netherlands.

To read more on this issue, go to the 2012 McKinsey report entited Women Matter.

Lin McDevitt-Pugh

European Union Captures Gender Knowledge Through Networks

June 19, 2012 Vilnius, Lithuania.  The newest European Union agency, the European Institute for Gender Equality, EIGE, will power its possibilities on networks of actors.

Participants at the EIGE consultation on gender and useful and effective networks, Vilnius

EIGE strives for excellence as the European center for competence on gender equality and gender mainstreaming. It creates comparative data, and is establishing a resource and documentation centre to enable the institute to make available the collected data, information, tools and methods, best practices, policy documents and grey literature.

Gender and network experts from Europe shared their ideas on how to make the EIGE resource and documentation work as effective as possible, on June 18 and 19. Lin McDevitt-Pugh of NetSHEila was one of the people invited. We watched as the small, ambitious team unfolded the plans for a simple to use yet very effective online information repository. Work is in hand to launch a pilot portal on gender-based violence information in November 2012, with Aletta - my former workplace - being one of the partners. In addition, virtual networks will be established so that public policy makers can discover what other policy developers in other member states are doing, and have done, and they can inquire into their experiences, request their sources, and much more. The success of this process will largely depend on how it is 'animated'. In part, this 'animation' is about how EIGE creates the space as safe where people trust each other enough to share not just the successes, not just the end results, but the processes that led to creating breakthrough policies. The processes are often very personal, and the online space has to accommodate a discussion of personal drive to make change happen. Animation also deals with encouraging, in a very personal way, actors to be in touch with each other in the online space. Of course EIGE could just as easily link two people in different countries to each other, and have them exchange experiences. That would exclude the possibility of people with whom EIGE is not directly in contact reading the exchange and learning something that is vital for their own gender development process. Through this networking activity, EIGE is making the unexpected possible.

At the heart of the idea of sharing information between public policy makers and implementers at the EU level is that these people are curious. They want to know what already exists, they want to know who knows more about things that concern them, they want to know who has ideas that can bring them forward. The idea is also that people who have already created policies or generated successful programs are willing to stay with the subject and share with others what they know. Building this environment of curiosity and mentoring will require care and strategic thinking.

Besides the online space there will also be a physical space within the Europe offices in Vilnius, where visitors can meet.

What is the ideal physical space for a documentation and information center? At a time when most people look for their information online, and where bricks and mortar libraries are re-branding themselves to remain places where people want to be, we can't expect the center to build a vast library. Few people will visit hoping to read a book. The visitors space can better reflect and display the power of the network of European actors in the gender field to provide any information that is needed. 

Lin McDevitt-Pugh, NetSHEila

NetSHEila works with organizations to achieve their goals, at little cost, using the power of networks.

Bruce Springsteen Keynote Address - Inspiration for Women Leaders

"There is no right way of doing it, there is just doing it." Bruce Springsteen. This is one of the great lines in this keynote speech Bruce Springsteen delivered on 15 March this year at South by South West, an event with over 10,000 music bands. Now no longer available on Youtube, you can catch it on NPR.

I recommend watching this 57 minute tour of the history of rock. As every business knows, you need 'cool people' as well as numbers crunchers to really get to understand your business. After all, we are people and we live in the world. So what does this 'cool people' have to contribute to business and specifically, to women in business?

When Bruce Springsteen picked up his first guitar in 1964, Rock and Roll had a 10 year history. Transposing that to a timescale we can understand, if he had started today he would only have had the lessons learned since 2002 to build on, and to be inspired by. There were not even 10,000 guitars to go round the bands then, he quips, they would have had to borrow from each other between gigs.

My mind shot immediately to a profound statement by top manager Pamela Boumeester that I read in this week's Dutch evening newspaper, the NRC: "We are the first generation of women to work full time." Until 1956, married women in the Netherlands were not allowed to work outside the home. It wasn't until 1996 that the term "Glass Ceiling" was invented - 16 years ago. We don't have a long history to call on, or refer to, or be inspired by. We have a short history, of women taking on tasks that to their mothers and grandmothers would have been unthinkable. Like the young Hedy d'Ancona, who in the 60s was the face of the right to decide about our own bodies movement, who kept on saying yes when opportunities became available, all the time making new doors open. She became Secretary of State for Women's Affairs when that department was created. She was a force to be reckoned with in the European Parliament.She did what Bruce Springsteen's call us to do: just do it.

Many many successful strands of rock culture have emerged since 1964. Many successful strands of women in business are yet to be invented. Some have been invented, many are yet to be invented. That is the nature of change. What we will invent will be a departure from the past. We will look at what inspires us and build that into something that inspires many.

It is important for women leaders get together and reflect on what is working and what is not working. It is important to speak out. It is important we find our voice together.

In the past week I have noticed a number of opportunities for finding others to work with, to inspire each other and create the change we want. These are all in the Netherlands:

• Lesbian women are exchanging experiences together in programs like L-Women at Work.  
• De Beuk is offering masterclasses for Leading Ladies throughout the year. 
• Karin Doms and Hanske Plenge's  have a peer-mentoring event for women in boards in April.
• Stichting Yente has developed networking books  as a contribution to the success of women entrepreneurs in established and emerging economies.

Culture change is always part of the equation. Any strategy you develop to create a new future will fail if the culture of the organization is not changed too. New thinking in this area comes from CultureSync, after years of research on reflection on what makes great companies great in both a social and a business sense. The book Tribal Leadership sets out their ideas and their roadmap to change. They find that success comes from being true to shared core values. Read Dave Logan's article in this weeks' CBS News MoneyWatch to understand how a company that is not being true to its  core values can run into big trouble. Knowing and operating from our core values is key to our success.

Bruce Springsteen closes his keynote speech with the inspiring words: "Don't take yourself too seriously. And take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don't worry. Worry your ass off. Have ironclad confidence, but have doubt, it keeps you awake and alert".

By Lin McDevitt-Pugh

Lin is owner of NetSHEila, a company specialized in maximizing the value of relationships between people to companies an organizations. As a management consultant, she has been trained in delivering results in Tribal Leadership, starting from finding the core values of each person in the "tribe". She can be contacted on +31-6-150 48468 or through the contact form on www.netsheila.com. She offers online coaching services to clients outside the Netherlands, and face to face services in the Netherlands. Follow her tweets via @LinMcDevittPugh.

Leading Ladies Masterclasses

International Women’s Day news this week:  there is some growth in the number of women company supervisors and board members in Europe, but if we are going to reach the EU's goal of 30% by 2015 and 40% by 2020, we will have to put in twice the effort. The current rate of growth puts us at 40% by 2040, according to the Dutch newspaper, NRC. At present, only one in seven board members of publicly listed companies is a woman.

Stichting De Beuk and NetSHEila intend to be part of the movement to shift the balance in the Netherlands.  De Beuk has developed a program called Leading Ladies, and together with top women leaders offers a series of weekend sessions to work with women to position themselves in powerful roles.

NetSHEila provides the weekend on networking, in October 2012. We will look at the contacts  - the friends, colleagues, families, old school buddies, acquaintances that each participant brings to the weekend and develop strategies to utilize these in claiming leading roles. The NRC Weekend article highlighted the way women who are in positions of power presently go about acquiring these roles. They get most positions by responding to advertisements. As Pamela Boumeester (53), former CEO of the Dutch rail NS Poort said "We have to make the rules ourselves. Don’t forget I am the first generation of full-time working women in this country. We don’t have a blueprint to work from, we invent our careers ourselves.“  

At NetSHEila, we think there are networking strategies that can be used more effectively to bring more speed to the process of bringing more women to  board rooms and supervisory boards. For one, de Beuk has delivered programs supporting women with political ambitions for over 25 years and has a unique database of effective leading women. Bringing these women and their networks of contacts together provides an excellent platform for finding the right woman for the job.

For more information on the program, don’t hesitate to contact either Wilma Ruis of De Beuk or Lin McDevitt-Pugh of NetSheila. 

Lin McDevitt-Pugh MBA is a management consultant, project developer and manager in the public sector, private sector and civil society, based in the Netherlands. With a background in human rights and networking, she works with organizations to move the conversation from “This is not how it should be” to “This is how it will be”.

Lin gets very excited when she trains organizations in working with people as creative economic resources.  By mobilizing the resources we all have at our fingertips - the people we know and the people they know - we can create unique knowledge, build trust and access the people and institutions we need to access.
Contact: mcdevitt-pugh@netsheila.com

Global Gender Gap Report: No Investment No Return

The Global Gender Gap Report 2011

Over the last six years, while 85% of countries are improving their gender equality ratios, for the rest of the world the situation is declining, most notably in several African and South American countries. The sixth annual World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2011 shows a slight decline over the last year in gender equality rankings for New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom this year, while gains are made in Brazil, Ethiopia, Qatar, Tanzania and Turkey.

In the preface the authors state in no uncertain terms that "governments play an important role in creating the right policy framework for improving women’s education and economic participation. However, it is also the imperative of companies to create ecosystems where the best talent, both male and female, can flourish." This is the essence of public private partnership: the government on the one hand follows developments and legislates to ensure they are registered in our social code.

Companies however are the partners who have to bring these social codes into practice. This is not simply a glass ceilings discussion: it is a discussion about how all people in society can participate with dignity and be respected. Uneducated people can be educated, and this brings about change. Some change that needs to be made is attitudinal. We need to go through the phases of stating the unthinkable, moving into the impossible and ending with the inevitable. Homosexual employees, or transsexual employees, will not change. They do not have to change, the attitude toward them does, and this needs to be anchored in public law. Other change is just practical. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell noted how the orchestral world in the US went from a 97% male bastion to 50% women and men. Their commitment to having the best players, and their realization that their bias was that men are the best players, had them institute blind auditions. The musicians auditions behind a screen, and the number of women employees in orchestra's rose.

Our challenge with gender balance is to look at what kind of measures, and what combination of measures, need to be made. In partnership and collaboration, governments, the private sector and the public sector need to discover where the attitudes need to change, where the blinds need to be opened and where policy needs to be implemented to make change happen. We are all part of one society and we need to be working together.

The Global Gender Gap Report 2011

Lin McDevitt-Pugh

Lin McDevitt-Pugh, owner of NetSHEila, is a management consultant with a passion for dignity and respect for all people. To contact her, write to admin@netsheila.com.