women and men working in partnership

Lesley's World - Dec 2000

by Lesley Abdela
First Published on Executive Woman On-linehttp://www.execwoman.com
December 20001

I got a nasty shock in Geneva the other day. I telephoned from my hotel room to a Swiss mobile number to arrange lunch with a friend living in Geneva. The hotel charged me 13 Swiss Francs for a 2 minute call! Even for a strong pound, the Swiss Franc and hotel phone costs are no laughing matter - that 120 seconds cost me over £5.

With hotel phone prices being so expensive it can sometimes make sense to use your mobile when abroad, even though the costs seem terrifying. If you want to use your cellphone, here’s a useful tip when you’re going abroad - check to see which local network is cheapest for your mobile in the country you’re visiting. Quite often you can choose network and the prices vary. For example, in Geneva, prices for my mobile vary between 60p and 99p per minute for outgoing calls depending on the network. Ask your service provider for relevant details and check their websites for updates. For the exact page for Orange users like me, go to http://www.orange.co.uk/cgi-bin/roaming/roam_clist.pl Don’t forget that text messages can be a low-cost, fixed-price alternative. I was able to ask a colleague for someone’s contact details using text-messaging. It cost me 20p instead of probably about £5 if I had called the office.

I was in Geneva to give the key-note talk at a gathering of humanitarian aid organisations working in the post-conflict situation in Kosovo. I spent two and a half months last year in Kosovo helping to develop democracy. One of the depressing aspects is that women still get overlooked in the post-conflict rebuilding process by the leaders of the international community. After the horrendous massacres and rapes in the previous conflict in Bosnia, Human Rights Watch carried out a survey about how women had been treated in the reconstruction process.

Their report said:

“Discrimination against women during the reconstruction period is legion. Women received far smaller loans than men. Women were pressed into training programmes focussed on gender-stereotyped, low paying, low prestige skills such as sewing, hairdressing and knitting."

One woman told Human Rights Watch...

”Women came last - after everything else came women.”

A year later in Kosovo I found nothing much had changed. Nearly all senior posts in the international missions in Kosovo were held by men. Ignoring and clearly ignorant of the majority gender, they regularly discussed what percentage of Serbs and other ethnic groups and ‘minorities’ should be represented on judicial, political and public bodies. If they considered women at all, they sidelined them, asserting it would be ‘alien to local culture and tradition’ and ‘in any case no women in Kosovo are interested in participation in politics or public life’.

Not true! Kosovan women complained they had never felt so marginalized as they were by the international community. To involve women as well as men is part of any solution to rebuilding a society after conflict, not an optional luxury extra.

Anyone involved in Northern Ireland is aware of the important role women have played in the community there.

There’s a real need for women’s rights to be taken far more seriously by the International community. Perhaps we should remind them that it’s women’s taxes as well as men’s that pay these people their salaries.

A woman determined to mobilise women on a global scale is Lynne Franks. She was reputedly the basis for Jennifer Saunders’ zany PR character Edina in TV comedy series ‘Absolutely Fabulous’. I attended the London launch of Lynne’s latest venture, a global network for sustainable women entrepreneurs called ‘SEED’.

“It’s not women who throw the stones and shoot the guns, we women need to do things in a different way”, says Lynne. “Seed is the feminine way to create business.“

The SEED website offers SEED products, educational tools and SEEDTV plus the first chat-room to include 3 minutes silent meditation each week. One of SEED’s first global partners is iVillage.

lesley.abdela@shevolution.com

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