It has been so exciting to be asked by the European Training Foundation to identify and mobilise women bloggers from EU Partner Countries in preparation for Women & Work .

For all of us who believe in digitalising women issues, this has been a unique opportunity to put women and social media on the map of international opinion leaders and decision makers

As EU Commissioner Viviane Reding said at the conference, “the global labour market can no longer do without the creativity of women.” Although 60% of university graduates in the EU are women, they still earn in average 18% less than men.

“Women should have long hair but short intelligence.”

That’s what the grandmother of Wild Swans author Jung Chang was told while growing up in early 20th century’s China.

I heard Jung Chang speak at ETF’s conference, Women & Work, in Turin yesterday. Her energy and beauty are mesmerising.

Over the past two days, I have also been mesmerised by the  commitment and wisdom of the 22 women bloggers who got together with me and ETF to work on a series of recommendations for EU policy makers in the field of women and employment.

I met most of them on Twitter. That’s how I connected with them.
On a gray winter day in December I sent out a Tweet, left for a meeting, came back 3 hours later and realised that it had already been retweeted  9 times… and mostly by people I was not following!

So, you can imagine my excitement, when on Friday night, I walked into the lobby of my hotel in Turin to “meet” our community of women bloggers for the first time.

The moment when the virtual and the physical worlds meet is a magical one!

You first try to recognise the other person based on their Twitter photo… but then you realise that you don’t need that reference… you have known them all along… you know their thoughts, you know what moves them, you would be able to recognise them anywhere!

To those who think that Twitter and social media are gadgets… we would like to say… think again!

ETF Madlen Serban mentioned at the conference that power is never given…”you have to take it”.

Social media offers a unique way to empower women. Our Women & Work project is the living proof of that.

Click Here to see photos of the event.  Read about Women & Work in Egypt’s Al-ahram, Hia magazine, Communication World and Live&Learn.

Wild Swans, the Chinese family saga, has always been one of my favorite books.

I am really excited I will be meeting the author in Turin in March. Jung Chang will deliver the keynote at the Women & Work conference, organised by the European Training Foundation.

I am afraid… I will have to do the tacky thing and… ask her for an autograph for my father who also loves Wild Swans.

Preparations for the conference are going at full speed. We have just launched a discussion platform on ning.

If you care and blog about women in education and employment or if you do projects/research/policy work/etc. in this area, you are welcome to join us at Women and Work 2010.

You might also be interested in two White Papers the European Training Foundation published on women and work in Egypt and Jordan.

We have just started a discussion on women in the informal sector and the need for an inclusive definition of work. Do you have one? Would you like to share it with us?

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.

It is June and it’s time to leave for San Francisco again.

At the end of the week, I will be attending IABC’s international executive board meeting.

I am thrilled that my friend Mark Schumann is taking over as chairman. Mark has a great sense of humour. And we will probably need it in the years to come…

One of the issues we are discussing in California is the direction in which the communication profession is going and where it will be in 10 years from now.

At the moment, it feels like walking through a maze at a summer fair. You can only go forward. You can’t turn back. There is nothing to go back to.

Journalism, as we used to know it, is no more.

And the power of social media is chipping away at corporate communication’s old command-and-control culture.

The more I work with organisations to introduce Web 2.0, the more I realise that it is mostly about relinquishing fear. I believe communicators can play a major role in removing resistance and developing what Kevin Roberts calls “emotional connectivity”.

Now and again, I still meet people convinced that blogging and Twitter are only used for weirdoes who want to upload their frustrations on the internet.

So, it was refreshing to read an interview with Queen Rania of Jordan in which she calls social media “a catalyst for the advancement of everyone’s rights…It’s where people can find and fight for a cause, global or local, popular of specialised, even when there are hundreds of miles between them.”

Who needs to know how to exit the maze?! I just love the “attraction economy”.

I did not know that women use 20,000 words every day, while men use only 7,000.

But I did know that half a billion women worldwide are still illiterate and 41 million girls are shut out of school gates because of poverty and prejudices.

I have blogged before about Queen Rania’s YouTube channel. I am a great fan.

This video makes a strong point about the advantages of female education in the developing world.

Educating girls is important and makes a lot of sense in both economic and geopolitical terms. Is the solution to the problem of female illiteracy going to come from governments? Or is social entrepreneurship going to provide the answer?

This week, I will be following the live video streaming of the Skoll World Forum on Social Enterpreneurship broadcasted from Oxford and I’ll be looking for ideas.

Wanna know what to answer when asked about the crisis?

How about this: “It’s Dubai, Shanghai or … Goodbye!”

The post-subprime doom is forcing businesses all over the Western world to exit the comfort zone and venture into new regions.

And the message from the Middle East is one of change and hope.

Forget the stereotypes.

Middle Eastern countries have been introducing ambitious reforms aimed at progressively closing the gap between genders and giving women a wider role to play in the development of their economies.

Thirteen years ago, Egypt had only one association of business women. There are now 22.

In Saudi Arabia, 1/3 of all bank accounts are held by women. Women own 40% of the country’s businesses through silent partnerships.

According to a survey conducted by the US law firm DLA Piper, 71% of the men in the United Arab Emirates are in favour of women working. While only 18% of the women think that women should stay at home.

Even if growth in the Middle East is expected to drop from 6 to 3% in 2009, these developments speak of a new dynamic.

One that is likely to turn into a major trend in the years to come.

I am leaving for Paris tomorrow where I will attend the Arab International Women’s Forum conference , “From Partnership to Prosperity: Women in the Arab World, France and the International Community”.

The program is exciting. It includes great topics like how to help women leaders manage an internal investment portfolio and the formation of biotechnology clusters in the Arab World.

I always get to meet inspiring women at AIWF’s conferences.

As you know, I am constantly on the look-out for female role models.

I found one this week in the latest issue of Columbia University’s magazine.

Wafaa El-Sadr is the founder of the International Centre for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs, which works with 700 hospitals and clinics in sub-Saharan Africa.

She rose to fame during her years at the TB clinic of the Harlem Hospital Center in New York.

While working with poor and socially isolated patients, she developed a new approach based on a family dynamic that would help them complete their treatment. Within one year, the TB treatment completion rate at the clinic had jumped from 11 to 89% and El-Sadr became famous for her “surrogate family approach”.

Reading this got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great to use social media to create surrogate families to support socially-isolated AIDS patients?