Women are the last group in the world to enjoy full democracy.

This is what Noble Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi believes due to the discrimination women face in “all countries without exception”.

The Iranian human rights activist spoke at the Women in Education and Employment conference organised by the European Training Foundation (ETF), an agency of the European Union, in 2006.

ETF contributes to the development of education and training in the EU’s partner countries. Promoting gender equality is high on its agenda.

The International Women’s Day  on March 8th is coming up. It will be its 100th anniversary next year!

ETF is organising an international conference on the vision of women in education and employment in Turin on 7-8 March 2010.

We are preparing for the event and ETF would like to engage in a dialogue online with female bloggers and women who write about gender issues on the web.

It’s so exciting! I will be helping ETF to identify these women and manage the dialogue.

We will discuss gender equality, school-to-work transition, female economic participation, women entrepreneurs…. and much more.

The conclusions from the dialogue will be discussed at a workshop to be held during the conference and will be presented to international policy makers.

If you  are based in MENA, former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Russia, Caucasus or Central Asia and you blog/write about women’s issues, please get in touch with me through this site or direct-message me at @XCulture.

Seventy-five million children worldwide are out of school. Educating every one of them would result in 7 million less cases of HIV-AIDS in the next decade.

Queen Rania’s speech today at LeWeb went beyond statistics.

She believes that “digitalising ourselves has heightened our instinct to be selfless”. Because of her active presence on Twitter and Facebook, she is often called the “monarch with a mission” .

She had two questions this morning: Can the real-time web bring real-time change? Can it tackle some of the big challenges facing the global community (poverty, education, disease, etc)?

The time has come to move  from virtual activism to real action. That’s the purpose of the 1GOAL initiative, a project Queen Rania co-founded together with the Global Campaign for Education, in partnership with FIFA.

1GOAL will use the energy and tools of the interactive web to collect 30 million signatures by the end of next year’s World Cup in South Africa. These will then be used to push world leaders to act and make education for all a reality.
Queen Rania has asked bloggers to support 1GOAL by dedicating their sites for one day to the initiative. She is asking for ideas that can be twittered or direct-messaged to @QueenRania.

XCulture is definitely in!

I love this amazing video by Saudi poetess May Kutbi.

And I am going to show it every time someone talks to me about women in the Middle East and the usual stereotypes.

Kutbi writes a column for Hia magazine. I interviewed Hia’s editor in chief, Mai Badr, while doing research for my book.  She told me that media “can act as an instigator of change”.

Kutbi’s powerful video is a clear demonstration of this.

Have you ever played the token foreigner?

We have all been there and done that. I am talking about been invited to serve on a board that is not necessarily interested in your contribution but rather in the exotic flair you bring. It may be your accent, the way you dress, places you’ve been to, etc etc.

And if you are a woman, the invitation may be to play the token foreign female board member. You know how it goes…. tick two diversity boxes with one appointment.
 
I was reading The Female FTSE Board Report 2009 and wondering whether this is what is really going on. 

Fourteen new women were appointed to join FTSE 100 boards this year and…. only one of them is British (Julia Wilson at 3i). The others are from Singapore, the Netherlands, the US, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand and Zambia.

However, by looking at these women’s backgrounds, I don’t think we are dealing with tokenism here. What companies are looking for are clearly the cross-cultural experiences these ladies are bringing to the table.

Good news for those of us who spent years moving around the world. I think our time has come.

Every time I go back to Prague I find it almost impossible to leave.

I sit in a taxi driving me back to Ruzyne airport with my mind kicking and screaming… Invariably, I end up leaving a part of me there.

I took a four-hour walk through the city on Saturday, dodged hordes of Italian tourists on the Charles Bridge, visited my favourite church, shopped at the Christmas market… all this while thinking about the changes that have happened over the past 20 years.

Has too little changed? Was I expecting something different?

It is a confused Prague I visited last weekend. Or so it appeared to me….

The enormous fuss Czech President Vaclav Klaus kicked up over the Lisbon Treaty has reopened old wounds and reawakened nationalistic feelings. How sad that a project meant to bring Europeans closer to each other was used to open rifts between people and distort history.

Patience has never been a great virtue of mine. It doesn’t come natural to me. But during my years in Easter Europe, I had ample opportunity to get used to the idea that time is often all we need.

I walked up Nerudova on Saturday and looked down at the stunning beauty of Prague. Regimes and politicians come and go. This city has survived so many.

I know time will do its magic. Klaus and his toxic rhetoric will only be a faint memory some day.  A new generation will come.

This is the part of me I left in Prague last night…. This enormous hope I have for a place I love so much.

Social networking sites like Twitter are supposed to be costing UK businesses £ 1.3bn/year in lost productivity…. that’s according to Director.  

I read this the other night and just sat there wondering…

How do they know this? Where do they get this figure from…. Given the fact that most companies don’t really understand social media and how people use them. I wonder…

But if  Director’s estimate is accurate, isn’t this number telling us something about the way in which employees want to communicate?

If your staff is already using Facebook and Twitter to receive and consume information, why not capitalise on this familiarity with Web 2.0 and introduce similar platforms for internal communication purposes?

Employees spread over different countries or regions could use an internal Twitter-like tool to exchange information about a project, update each other on the progress they are making, share the content of their latest meetings, etc.

Staff is often much more enlightened than their employers think. 

Let’s stop blaming social media if we don’t want to end up looking like Luddites!

For the first time, a report published by Community Business and Cranfield University looks at the representation of women on the corporate boards of Hong Kong’s top companies as listed on the Hang Seng Index (HIS).

Out of a total of 585 directorships on the HIS, 52 (8.9%) are held by women. This percentage is comparable to Australia (8.3%) but lower than the UK (11.7%), US (14.5%) and Canada (15%).

Twenty-eight of the 42 HIS-listed companies have women on their boards. At the top of the list is China Construction Bank Corporation with 5 women on a board of 17. Bank of China is second with 3 women out of 15 board members and Cheung Kong Holdings is third with 4 women on a board of 21.

The women interviewed for the study were surprised by its finding: 8.9% is a lower percentage than they expected.

The reasons mentioned for this result were the limited talent pool, Hong Kong’s male dominant society and the fact that women tend not to be as well networked as men and don’t get considered for board positions.

Audrey is the one who saved me from a total meltdown when I almost lost control of this site a month ago.

I am very grateful and… thrilled to have contributed to her report on Intranet Strategy and Governance published by Ark Group.

Audrey Scarff has researched the use of intranets by corporations. These platforms often fail to reach their potential because companies struggle to articulate their purpose.

Intranets also require a certain degree of flexibility in order to adapt to unstable business climates – like the current one! Their strategy is not cast in stone. It has to be flexible enough to mutate and reflect corporate changes like downsizing and mergers.

The publication contains case studies from organisations like BT, McDonald’s and Cancer Council New South Wales.

My part deals with the challenge of harnessing cross-cultural intelligence through team building. I guess its main point is that, while in the past teams were mainly treated as vehicles for the exchange of knowledge, they are now becoming a tool for making the most of the different nationalities working for a company and their expertise.

Intranet Strategy and Governance is featured this month on simply-communicate.com.

What is Web 3.0 going to be about?

I gave a talk yesterday together with @fusionview and @simplygroup about social media in Asia and the lessons for the UK.

One of the questions we were asked was about the role of mobile phones and the future of the interactive web.

In 2000, one-quarter of all mobile phones was in the hands of people in developing countries. By the beginning of 2009, this figure had risen to three-quarters of a total of 4 billion phones.
In the developing world, mobile phones are being used for all kinds of transactions from money transfers to the distribution of agricultural information and farming tips.
Experts believe that Africa and several parts of Asia will leapfrog PCs and go straight to mobile phones as a means of interacting online.

Are emerging markets going to lead the mobile revolution in the Web 3.0 era?