The power to shape the global agenda for women lies in the hands of a woman who does 15-hour workdays, loves yoga and always has a smile, writes JESSICA LIM.
THE wavy-haired, laugh-lined lady beamed at the smog-blanketed city from the 33rd floor of the hotel.
“Stunning. How absolutely beautiful,” she declared.
One could just about make out KL Tower’s blinking lights peeping from beyond the haze. Rain clouds were billowing about ominously. The air pollution index was the highest in days.
You catch yourself wondering if she’s “just trying to be nice”, or is she really one of those “glass-is-half-full” types?
Then you realise it’s Noeleen Heyzer, the executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem), the main mover for gender equality.
She has seen thousands of suffering women – young girls forced into prostitution, women caught in the crossfires of war, free-trade zone workers with zero protection, refugee women struggling to feed their children – and her job is to inspire entire nations to move for their sake.
If she can smile in the face of such a gargantuan task, it’s no wonder she sees beauty in the haze. Definitely a glass-half-full kind of girl.
“I work very hard. The minimum is 10 hours a day. That’s minimum. It usually goes all the way up to 15 hours,” says Noeleen, who was here to speak at the recent Women’s Summit 2006.
“But then I see the change on the ground. This is the part that is so satisfying.”
Under her leadership, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, a critical push for governments to walk the talk when it comes to women in war zones. The resolution’s impact is already seen in Afghanistan and Burundi, Sudan, Liberia and Congo. Not only that, Unifem’s resource base has quadrupled since she took over.
“Our projects have really taken off. In Afghanistan, for the first time, women are recognised as having full citizenship. In Rwanda, they changed the rights of inheritance so women can own land and property.”
She named project after project, pausing only to say a radiant “terima kaseeeeh” when her drink was refilled.
Morocco’s Family Law, for instance, was amended to raise the age of marriage for women from 15 to 18 and limit men’s rights to unilateral divorce.
Under another programme, the whole Indian Railways system, involving some 1.3 million people, was revamped. Jobs were set aside for wives of men who died of AIDS and gender and HIV/AIDS education became part of a life-skills curriculum in railway schools.
“Melinda Gates said this, she said you cannot reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS unless you empower women. As a disease, it’s a health issue, but as an epidemic it’s a gender issue. And here the issue of gender inequality is fatal. It kills.”
Although born in Singapore, Noeleen’s Malaysian roots run pretty deep. She spent a decade working here and both her daughters are “tulin” Malaysians.
In fact, her younger daughter Pauline still lives here and is active in the local arts scene. She recently translated a love poem by German poet Bertolt Brecht to Bahasa Malaysia, no easy feat for someone who only picked up German four years ago.
Noeleen is pretty familiar with how things run here too, evident by her careful reply when asked what we lacked most in the gender-equality race.
“In Malaysia? Well, this is a sensitive thing to talk about. I think it’s basically to bring everyone in so there is not such a strong divide in lines of ethnicity.
“And I think this is true of many other countries as well,” she adds quickly.
She calls it a “champagne glass” civilisation, where wealth generation is concentrated in the hands of a few people, leaving a big gap in the middle, consisting of people who live on much less. Inequality increases, she said, when the gap grows.
Noeleen now lives in New York, though she admits it shouldn’t actually be called “living” because she’s only there 40 per cent of the time.
She steals moments at airports and in between work for yoga, and on the rare evening off, she tries to catch a theatre show.
She declares that her life revolves around work and her two daughters. Although they don’t see each other much, she says they can still yak away like peers.
“We have fantastic discussions. Sometimes they travel with me, like to Africa. They have seen the realities of life.”
Her elder daughter Lillianne is one of the senior policy coordinators for international relief agency Oxfam. She is now in Acheh, rebuilding homes for the 1.5 million lives disrupted by the December 2004 tsunami.
It’s backbreaking work, said Noeleen, particularly as funds grew smaller as the world moved on to mourn other tragedies.
“Lillianne said she can do the work because she’s used to seeing me work like that.”
The pair managed to catch up recently. As her daughter told her about her work in Acheh, Noeleen expressed how proud she was of her determination to make life better for the less fortunate.
Lillianne’s reply, she said, was immediate.
“She said: ‘Where do you think I got it from, mum?’.”