Cultural Boundaries & Cyber Spaces: Presentations

Innovative Tools and Strategies for Strengthening Women's Leadership in Muslim Societies

Symposium Presentations

Mahnaz Afkhami

Welcome to the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. I would especially like to welcome those friends of ours who just got here hours ago, literally moving across cultural boundaries and being jetlagged into cyberspaces. I'm glad that they're here, even though I'm sure it will take a while for them to be with us in reality, rather than in virtual reality.

Today's conference is one of the gatherings in preparation for the UN Beijing Plus Five Review Session. We took advantage of this particular moment so that many of you, who have come for the longer gathering, would be here with us. To put our work in perspective, it would be useful to look at the Beijing event as a process, rather than as one momentous happening. Many of us here in this room attended international UN gatherings throughout the last quarter of the 20th century which focused on specific issues related to women's lives. At the Cairo conference, we were able to put it on the books that we have a right over our own bodies. At Habitat, we agreed that in order to have full participation of women, we must redesign cities, homes, and communities to accommodate the evolving roles women are playing. At the Human Rights Conference in Vienna, we were able to put on record something that should have been common knowledge, and fortunately is now, that women's rights are human rights. At Beijing we were finally able to talk about women's issues as inter-related and connected to all human concerns. We were able to put across the idea to the world that all issues are women's issues. The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was the largest international gathering in history. The major achievement of the conference was the consensus reached in approving the Platform for Action. The Beijing Platform emphasized women's empowerment through leadership as the necessary condition for achieving the goals of the Platform and addressing successfully the twelve other areas of concern.

So, in some ways we came a long way in the years leading to Beijing. However five years after Beijing, when we look at our situation, we see that we still face major problems. Of the 4.4 billion women living in developing countries, three-fifths have no access to basic sanitation, one-third are without safe drinking water, one-fifth are beyond the reach of modern health services, and one-fifth of the children don't reach grade five. We know that of the poorest people on the face of the earth, who live on less than a dollar a day, seventy percent are women, and that of the 855 million illiterate people in the world more than seventy percent are women.

There is a long list of figures and facts that illustrate the reality of poverty, marginalization, and lack of equity in our world. But fortunately we also have extraordinary new developments and opportunities that can be used to help change these realities for the better. One such opportunity is presented by the process leading to Beijing plus Five that created a network of women activists working together in solidarity across the world. The 35000 NGO representatives at Beijing were a small part of the extensive network of diverse and dynamic individuals and organizations that provide a great resource for activism to transform our world. This network has helped provide interaction and dialogue leading to clarifying and defining our needs and our aspirations, culminating in our collective focus on empowerment. We are now looking at empowerment and leadership in new ways. We have discovered together that we are not talking about equality with men in traditional leadership situations only. We know now that we seek to change the very nature of leadership. We look for leadership that emphasizes creation of shared meaning, shared goals, shared aspirations. We wish to create organizations within which everyone works together toward commonly defined goals. This is something that is new in the world and it is something that women have brought to the table.

Another extraordinary development which is the subject of our conference today, is the information revolution, the fastest growing explosion of communications means in the history of the human race. This is something that has brought about a whole new set of possibilities and potentials. It has opened doors for people to instantaneously and inexpensively communicate with each other. It has opened doors so that the women's networks that have been established in more cumbersome ways can now be utilized and expanded in much easier and less expensive ways. It has made possible, for the first time, a truly global dialogue that can bring a variety of voices to the international debate.

The problem is, however, that so few people from disadvantaged groups are participating in this information revolution. What we must do is to try to find ways to bring in others. We need to bring in not only the masses of women from all regions and from all walks of life, but also other disadvantaged peoples who are not part of this international dialogue, and are not benefitting from the possibilities of the communications revolution. A quick look at the available data illustrates this point. Of the approximately 300 million Internet users in the world 110 million are in the United States. Seventy percent of all Internet users are in Europe and North America. In the Middle East there are only two million users of the Internet and of those only four percent are women. A huge discrepancy exists even among the small portion of women who are using the Internet. The women who are using the Internet are mostly from the more advantaged classes, live in urban areas and have the resources that enables them to use this useful tool. Without the benefit of the wealth of information and knowledge brought within easy reach through the new technology, the growing disparity between the haves and the have nots will continue to increase.

Therefore, one of our main objectives is to bring access to everyone, especially to women in the developing world. We need to bring to them not only the technological capability, which is rather easy in the long run, but also content which is culturally relevant and locally produced- content which is meaningful to the people of the developing world. This, of course, relates to the question of empowering women and of new forms of leadership that enable women to determine the ways and means of using communications technology and to select and develop the messages they wish to send and receive through it. We must help enable women to generate information and knowledge as well as receive it.

The new technology can be a tool for empowering women that has not been equaled in history. It is a tool that allows for interaction across all borders and boundaries. It allows people to determine their own wishes, their own aspirations, their own priorities, and their own ways of learning and teaching. It is also a tool that can leapfrog many of the development hurdles that we've faced in the past. For instance, until even a few years ago, we were overwhelmed with the problem of infrastructure, of telephone wires, of hundreds of thousands of villages in countries where there are no roads, where there has never been a telephone let alone computers, and how to deal with this problem when you're trying to connect, network, learn and teach. Now there is the possibility that with satellite technology we can leapfrog these problems, not in order to avoid the building of infrastructure, but to facilitate development. Communications technology can be used to mobilize people to build infrastructure. In the final analysis it is not the question of bread or computers, but computers used to help make easier our efforts toward expanded participation in the process of development.

Another important aspect of the new means of communication is the potential it gives to avoid a uni-culture world. At present, eighty percent of all web sites are in English while fewer than ten percent of the people of the world speak English as their native language. We look to a world where diverse voices and diverse cultural input from around the world set global priorities and determine the context for the global discourse.

Today we will hear from a number of extraordinary women from around the world, particularly from the Middle East and North Africa, who will discuss the ways and means of achieving these goals. The first panel will give the contextual framework for our discussion. Then we will hear from a panel on best practices that will demonstrate some of the ways in which women are using multi-media tools at various levels of sophistication in order to mobilize women. We will end with a panel of leaders from the developing world who will share their personal experiences on how they have developed their leadership capacities, how they have dealt with impediments, and what resources they have used to foster their leadership. I would like to now turn to our facilitator for this morning's conversation, Shazia Rafi, who is the executive director of Parliamentarians for Global Action. You have a little sketch of her long and wonderful history of activism in your programs, so I won't say much more except that her organization is one of the first to recognize the importance of the communication revolution and one of the first to develop a dynamic program on involving women in the use of information technology. Then we will move on to our opening speaker, Noeleen Heyzer, director of UNIFEM who has transformed that organization and has been a strong influence in bringing effective gender mainstreaming to the UN system and innovative ideas on gender equity programming to the international community. I will leave Noeleen's full introduction to Shazia. We at WLP are pleased and honored to welcome our distinguished speakers and to welcome all of you who have joined us this morning for this dialogue on "Cultural Boundaries and Cyber Spaces." Thank you very much.

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Janice Brodman

Transcending Boundaries

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Noeleen Heyzer

A very good morning everyone, and a big welcome to the Beijing Plus Five process. I recall that when women prepared for the Fourth World Conference on Women, we were not focusing so much on a world conference on women. It was really about women trying to shape their perspectives on what was happening to their lives in the context of what was is taking place in development and what was happening in the world. Five years later, where are we now? What came out of Beijing was called an agenda for women's empowerment. Empowerment has two major components. The first is an internal one, internal to the lives of women. In other words, the sense of self-worth, the kind of internal confidence to reshape your environment, and so on. But equally important is the other side of empowerment, and that is the removal of barriers in the context within which women live. In other words, this is to really locate the lives of women in grounded realities, and to remove the barriers that allow women to use the agency of empowerment.

Now what is just as important when we talk of leadership and empowerment, is the word power. What women have tried very hard to do, from the time of Beijing until now, is to understand what power is all about. We have suffered as women from the patriarchal use of power, the kind of hierarchies that we have seen. Women have tried to transform that notion of power, so that it is power to be with, to learn with, to create and to facilitate. If you use power to create, that kind of power has no barriers, it has no boundaries. In fact, it creates what we call the synergies of relationships. In other words, the whole and the outcome of that whole become much larger than the sum of all its components.

As we review these two concepts today, where are we in terms of the Beijing Plus Five process? On the eve of the opening of the Beijing Plus Five meeting on Monday we know that over one hundred and twenty countries have in fact come up with gender-action plans and commitments by governments on the whole area of bringing about gender equality. But, in terms of implementation, and in terms of the kind of transformation that has actually occurred, there is much to be desired. Why is that so? Well, there are many reasons. People say it is due to a lack of technical know-how and a lack of resources. There is also a lack of political will as expressed or indicated by these policies that are not implemented into action.

So what has happened? First, it is easier to come up with words and much harder to translate them into action, because action shows us where the real commitment is. That is why Beijing Plus Five has to ask for real commitments. We need to insist on the allocation of resources for women's priorities. Much of what we at UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) have been trying to do is to ask governments to re-look at not only women's programs or the women's budget as such, but the engendering of the whole national budget. Where are your priorities? Where have you spent your money? But at the same time, we need a strong constituency that can support our goals from the inside as well as the outside. We need civil society to put pressure on governments and we need partnerships to guide us.

We also must understand the differing nature of states in a post-Beijing scenario. States can make verbal commitments more easily. But for implementation, we must take into account the issues and the challenges related to globalization. The state alone is not capable for a variety of reasons, to implement those recommendations. We need to hold other stakeholders accountable as well, such as corporations; the people who have actually shaped or have not shaped the rules of globalization in such a way that actually allows the recommendations and the targets of human development to be met.

What do we mean by globalization? It's basically four different components, if we are talking about economic globalization. We look at trade, at investment, the flow of capital, and the use of technology.

For today's meeting, I will focus mainly on technology. What is really interesting for me is how fast this technology has grown. But then at the same time we also know that this technology will only benefit those who are well placed in their knowledge to use this technology, are familiar with its language. This is very much the access issue related to who in fact has access to the "new wealth", especially as societies evolve more and more into a learning society; a knowledge based society. I call this the "new wealth", because if you look at what is happening to our societies, when there was an agricultural based society, land was the basis of wealth. When it shifted into an industry-based society, the means and control of production were equally important. When it moved to a service-based society, the capacity to build alliances, to bargain and to fight for the right kinds of prices was extremely important. But when you move to a knowledge-based society, those who have access to the technology, but also those who have access and means to generate what is regarded as knowledge, is extremely important. That includes the whole definition of what is knowledge, and what is learning, and whose knowledge is being learned and whose knowledge is being shaped.

Therefore, the issue is not just one of access to technology, but also of leadership and empowerment in generating that knowledge, and the capacity to be engaged in a particular dialogue, so that there is not just one perspective r one single message, which is recognized as knowledge. Equally important is the regulatory environment. Cyberspace has been seen as a kind of common good, but increasingly, this space is undergoing privatization. Very few women actually have access, even if they have the knowledge, to the regulation of that knowledge. We are operating in an entirely different value system where there is privatization of particular thought, and women have not played a major role in this process and stand to lose a great deal from privatizing what was once a part of the common good. What we want is a sharing of protection of women's knowledge as well.

UNIFEM is placing a strong emphasis on new information technology. We have supported the Sisterhood Is Global Institute in the largest ever grant given by UNIFEM to an organization, to build leadership of women in the Arab world using information technology. We have provided the Women's Human Rights Network with another almost equally large grant to help build the Women's Human Rights Net. But at UNIFEM itself, the work on violence against women has taken hold in a very strong way by establishing for the first time in the UN, a list-serve that connected 2,300 women from throughout the world, to be engaged in a conversation of ending violence in women's lives. We also used video-conferencing technology to bring women activists' voices directly into the General Assembly to show some of the best strategies that have emerged through our campaigns in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This video-conference linked five sites from around the world.

Our experiences with what I call 'e-consultation', is one way of prioritizing women's knowledge and recognizing women as knowledge creators leaders. We have also used information technology for e-commerce. We, in our work on the ground, especially in the work in West Africa, have been able to create sites where we are able to showcase some of women's products and to get the best pricing for women using electronic commerce or the virtual soukh (Arabic word for market). We have also built a partnership with Home Net. Women working at home now have the potential to use the technology to create better market access, avoid the cost of the middle man, and therefore make sure that the buying and selling actually goes directly to women.

The future depends on using women's leadership to transform the nature of globalization, and also to transform the kind of technology and the use of technology in such a way that it could lead to the empowerment of women.

"E-consultations" have directly enriched and broadened the Beijing+5 review. Based on UNIFEM's "End-Violence" electronic working group. The UN system has held internet-based consultations with women's groups from around the world in all the twelve areas of critical concern as identified in the Platform for Action. We involved ten thousand women in discussion lists, the findings and perspectives of which have been incorporated into one of the conference papers that was presented at the CSW (Commission on the Status of Women). In other words, the views of ten thousand women have been incorporated without them necessarily being present. This, in fact, is the kind of change that has happened since Beijing. So let me stress, we can use this technology in terms of the e-campaigns to do some of the major campaigns that have been done, not just the work on violence, but also work on land mines and the work on the WTO (World Trade Organization). Without the electronic media, it would have been impossible to have the participation we have had.

E-inclusion means that through this kind of technology we can overcome barriers of distance and language. With e-campaigns, e-consultation, and e-inclusion I think we have many tools to foster new approaches to women's empowerment and leadership. Thank you.

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Bushra Jabre

Arab Women Speak Out: Strategies for Self-Empowerment

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Aruna Rao

Leadership for Social Transformation: Challenging Institutions, Challenging Ourselves

Introduction: I recently looked into a new course being offered called "Strategic Leadership for Women" for leaders in the non-profit and corporate world. It was focused primarily on building women's presentation of themselves, their negotiating skills, enhancing their ability to read their organizational context and mapping a road to success for themselves within that environment playing by the rules. It strikes me that this course in not unique in its emphasis in this genre but it is strikingly different from what I would call leadership for social transformation which is about changing the rules of the game, not playing by them. That is the challenge of the feminist movement, the challenge of social change, the challenge of the work we do. I'd like to talk about two aspects of this challenge - institutional transformation and individual transformation - what they may mean, how they are connected, and what implications this might have for our way of thinking and our actions.

Institutional Transformation: When I talk of institutions, I use the term in the way that Douglas North defines it: "institutions are structures that humans impose on human interaction." It refers to formal rules of the game, and the informal constraints such as norms of behavior and codes of conduct, as well as the degree to which both the formal and the informal rules can be enforced. Our ability to make change happen depends on the formal rules but perhaps more so on the intangible, complex and sometimes hidden but highly powerful terrain of the informal ones - the institutional values, norms, structures and processes that underlie and shape human interaction.

When we work at the level of policy change we work at changing the formal rules. This is necessary but it is insufficient to bring about real lasting change. What are more intractable, messy and difficult to change are the informal rules. We know little about this terrain and perhaps even less about how to change it. These informal rules are embedded in language, symbols, myths, and social custom; they are embedded in institutions such as marriage, markets and local governance structures such as village panchayats. And they are also embedded in what we might call modern organizations - the kinds that you and I live and work in -- which also have drawn on principles from 19th Century Newtonian science. Newtonian images of organizations have inbuilt assumptions about human nature and how work gets done that are mechanistic and controlling. They promote a world view that sees power as a limited commodity to be held by few in order to shape the behavior of the many rather than as energy which is limitless and empowering. In the organizations that you and I are familiar with, these institutional principles are overlaid with cultural values and patriarchal norms that are anti-women and exclusionary.

Gender-Biased Nature of Institutional Principles: Recent research has delved into the gender-biased nature of these institutional principles that underlie a variety of organizational forms - public bureaucracies, international organizations, corporations and NGOs. Through the work of Nuket Kardam, Kathy Staudt, Anne Marie Goetz, and Joan Acker for example, we have learned that gender biases are built into the very foundations of organizations and have seeped into their culture and ways of working. Joan Acker calls this the "gendered substructure" of organizations, which she characterizes as built on a fundamental separation and consequent devaluation of life from what is considered productive work. Through the work of organizational theorists such as Edgar Schein, we have also learned that organizational culture shapes organizational outcomes and that culture is often hidden, not obvious, and that it needs to be uncovered by a variety of methods. Extrapolating to our world, we can hypothesize that gender-biased organizations will produce gender-biased outcomes.

Deep Structure of Organizations: So, even if we had all our policies and agendas in place, we should not expect that they would be accomplished by the organizations that we entrust them with - those that are mandated to carry out the task. Why? Because, we know that organizations are not rational, neutral bodies but living and breathing microcosms of the societies that house them. This has to do with what I call deep structure of organizations: an interlocking system of beliefs that is large hidden, taken for granted and unquestioned and perpetuates gender inequality including the assumption that there are no reasonable alternatives to "business as usual." Key aspects of deep structure are: beliefs about power and hierarchy and their expression; the split between work and family; a narrow focus on instrumentality; and the tendency of organizations to valorize the individual hero and achievement model at the expense of collaborative efforts involving both visible and so called 'invisible work'. There may be many other aspects of the deep structure of particular organizations -- such as their ability to learn or not, historic and locational specificities of structure and processes that maybe gender biased, and sub-cultures within the organization that may be more or less women-friendly - that also need to be uncovered and changed. Two important ways to do that are by surfacing silent voices and changing work practices so that they counter deep structure values that hinder gender equality objectives. These deep structure biases coexist in a context where clients of organizational services have little if any connection to organizational accountability and governance mechanisms and processes that facilitate the client's oversight of and participation in the planning, and evaluation of organization's programs and services. Such organizations are poor vehicles for promoting values of gender justice and new paradigms of sustainable development.

Leadership for social transformation must provide the vision and paths to changing these institutional principles and their manifestation in organizations as a means of changing our lives and the world we live in. We don't have a blueprint for a transformed organization but we have some good ideas to guide us, for example Peter Senge's work on learning organizations.

At the heart of this transformation is the way we think about and exercise power. Much of how we experience power is in the context of hierarchy. It is often practiced as a win-lose situation and viewed as a limited commodity. If I have more, you have less. This practice of power devalues participation, and silences voices that would bring alternative perspectives and knowledge to deliver equitable outcomes including gender-equitable outcomes. In organizations, it blocks learning particularly on issues that are at odds with core values. We know this and we say this but we don't often practice this. Too often what we try to do is get more power so that we can push what we believe is a better agenda over that of others.

Individual Transformation: Part of the wonder that a different kind of exercise of power holds -- for example, power viewed and practiced as win-win, and infinite like energy -- is the potential to transform relationships and with that institutions and organizations. This is fundamentally implicated in the way we view others and ourselves. A clue to thinking and talking about this in a secular realm is offered by the quantum physicist David Bohm who sought a unifying concept in physics that could get beyond the contradictions posed by relativity theory and quantum theory and heal the fragmentation in society. In his book "Wholeness and the Implicate Order", Bohm suggests that the material world and consciousness are parts of a single unbroken totality of movement. Thus, everything in the universe affects everything else because all are part of the same whole. And in each one of is enfolded the whole of humankind. When we are engaged in something that is deeply meaningful and are attuned to one another, human beings can participate in the unfolding of the implicate wholeness into the manifest or explicate order.

The challenge to us is how do we discover what is required to build these relationships and live in them. What guiding principles can we draw from this for leadership? Joseph Jaworski in "Synchronicity: The Inner Path to Leadership" provides a few:

We need to be open to fundamental shifts of mind from seeing the world as made up of things to seeing a world that's open and primarily made up of relationships
The future is not fixed; we live in a world of possibilities
When this fundamental shift of mind occurs, our sense of identity shifts and we begin to accept each other as legitimate human beings
In this worldview, leadership is about how we collectively shape our destiny.

Conclusion: The forces of the staus quo are very powerful; the daily pressures to play the game by the rules are overwhelming. But if we believe that the way we think and the way we act shapes reality, then we need to work on three levels: ourselves, relationships, and institutions. As individuals, we must be a force for transformation. As a collective, we must participate in creating new realities. How do we do that concretely to address the pressing challenges that women around the world face today is the task at hand.

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Najat Rochdi

ICTs: New Ways of Learning and Leading

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أفغانستان	البرازيل	الكاميرون	مصر	الهند	اندونيسيا	ايران	الأردن	لبنان
ماليزيا	موريتانيا	المغرب	نيكاراغوا	نيجيريا	فلسطين	تركيا	اوزبكستان	زمبابوي