Are women ready for leadership? This is the wrong question for our time. This year we are celebrating two historic victories, with the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman president, in Liberia and Michele Bachelet as the first woman President of a new, democratic Chile

They are not alone. Women in high-level political leadership positions include 11 elected heads of state or government, 23 foreign ministers and 12 defence ministers. In Rwanda, women make up 49 per cent of seats in both houses of parliament- the highest of any country in the word. And in India, women head up nearly 1.5 million of the village level decision-making bodies, the panchayats.

Moreover, there are twice as many women in powerful economic decision making positions that there were five years ago-including 20 Minister of Finance; 10 Minister of Economy, Economic Planning and/or Development, 45 Minister of Trade/Industry and 11 Ministers or Secretaries of State addressing Budgets, Taxes, Auditing, Investment and Revenue.

In the private sector, too, women’s leadership power is increasing. Among the Fortune 500 companies, 10 are now run by women, up from 9 last year, and of the Fortune 1000 companies, 20 are run by women, up from 19 last year.

These leaders are important role models. Beyond that, they can be powerful agents of change. With the increase in official development assistance expected to help countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals and the roll-out of the new aid effectiveness agenda, they can be the building blocks of a power coalition to reshape political and economic priorities - building a world free of violence, inequality and discrimination.

The challenges they face are serious. Today’s world is one of unprecedented wealth, with increasing poverty and inequality; a world that boasts of enormous advances in knowledge, with no parallel increase in wisdom, of innovation and technology with little increase in health and well being in most of the world. And an increased importance of religion and spirituality, with a parallel increase in fear and hatred of ‘the other’ in everyday life.

So the question we should be asking is rather, can women provide a new kind of leadership? And what kind of world do they want to shape?

Women leaders and change in the political sphere

Let me first look at the political arena. While in the 44 year between 1945 and 1989 there were only 20 women presidents or prime ministers, there have been 50 between 1990 and 2006-more that double. Yet in 2005 there were still only 20 houses of parliament and 17 cabinets that have reached the 30 per cent benchmark set at the United Nation 4th world Conference on Women in 1995 - a critical mass to bring about change. Women political leaders are still lone individuals in male terms. And most are elected or appointed to implement a party or national agenda - rarely, until recently, to promote women’s interests.

In order to influence politics in women-friendly direction they need to be supported by a strong women’s constituency and influential male allies, both inside and outside of government. We saw in Liberia the way a strong constituency demand propelled a committed leadership response. When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was forced into a run-off after the first round of voting, it was women, especially grassroots women and market vendors supported by the Minister of Women’s Affairs in partnership with UNIFEM, who mobilised to get women to get women to the polls - and realise her victory. At her inauguration, she acknowledged their role and dealing with crimes that dehumanise them. She pledged to enforce the new law against rape; to encourage families to educate their female children; and to “provide economic programs that enable Liberian Women – particularly our market women – to assume their proper place in our economic process.”

What we have seen is that given a leadership role, and with strong constituency support women can not only make needed changes through strong partnerships, they are able to bring together the ideas, leadership and resources needed to make them sustainable.

An example is the work to amend the Family Law in Morocco, where we engaged at multiple levels - legal, institutional and personal. As in all of our work, we identified change agents, including women Members of Parliament, and invested in their leadership, linking women at grassroots with those in the mainstream, and also providing support from the international community. This helped us to build public and institutional awareness and work with local communities to gain reforms in the Family Law, such as raising the age of marriage for women from 15 to 18 years, allowing women to contract marriage without male approval, and limiting men’s rights to unilateral divorce. The new law also gives a key role to the judiciary, mandating the state prosecutor be party to all legal actions involving enforcement

Another powerful example is seen in UNIFEM’s programme with Indian Railways, where women and men leaders formed a partnership to bring about the institutional changes needed to break through the silence and stigma that surrounds issues of gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. The initiative engages the system at all levels, including workers’ unions, central level policy makers and middle level management - affecting the lives of some 1.3 million people. It provides free anti-retroviral drugs to people living with HIV/AIDS, offers jobs to wives of men who have died of AIDS; and support to their livelihoods through credit and enterprise in Railway school, increasing awareness among 4200 students.

The participation of women as decision-makers and as change agents is particularly important in crisis and conflict situations. For this reason, UNIFEM took a strong leadership role and worked closely with members of the Security Council in their formulation and adoption of Security Council Resolution 1325, which recognises the impact of war on women and their important role in peace-building and reconstruction. The impact of this resolution can be seen in Afghanistan and Burundi, Sudan, Liberia and the DRC. But the transition from conflict to post-conflict and reconstruction is always fragile - as we have seen in Timor Leste, and in Afghanistan. This makes women’s participation and leadership all the more critical.

In this context a group of Israeli and Palestinian women asked me to convene them in the International Women’s Commission for a Just and Sustainable Palestinian and Israeli Peace, which unites women political and civil society leaders on both sides in a partnership with prominent international women to leverage high-level support for a negotiated, mutually secure and sustainable peace. Next month they will meet with several of the elected women Heads of State and Government to try to jump-start the peace process through an international conference.

Women leaders and change agents in the economic sphere
Turning to the economic arena – while it appears that women have made greater progress in the political arena - where they have taken advantage of the norms and standards established through UN convention and the commitments to women made through a series of UN conferences - they can also be powerful change agents in economic life. When we look at the places where women are not in political leadership, we find that they are often the places where there are no agreed standards, no regulations of codes of conduct, in political life. Many women refuse to engage on such terms, and instead look to the economic sphere to make a difference.

In today’s global world, the political realm is not the only arena in which a new kind of leadership is needed. As key players in the global economy, corporations also have a vital role to play. Because corporations affect capital flows, employ so many people and affect the life of so many communities, they exert tremendous influence and can be a force for socially responsible business and investment.

Women are entering the paid labour force in greater numbers, in both developed and developing countries. In emerging economies in Southeast and East Asia, the Economist pointed out in their article on Women Economy: A Guide to Womenomics, there are now 83 women for every 100 men in the labour force - higher that the average in OECD countries. Women are a major reason for the success of their export industries, accounting for 60-80 per cent of jobs in sectors like textiles and clothing.

The increase in female employment has also accounted for large part of global economic growth - adding more to GDP than either capital investment or increased productivity. Rough calculations indicate that women’s increase in employment in developed economies has contributed even more to global growth than China according to the Economist article.

The importance of women’s contributions to the economy has also caught the attention of the World Economic Forum, as seen in their recent on Women’s Empowerment: Measuring the Global Gender Gap, which ranked countries in terms of opportunities for and participation of women in economic and political life.

At the same time, women are still primarily responsible for household and care-giving tasks. This in part explains why they tend to be clustered in the part-time or temporary jobs in the informal economy, where they have little job security, no benefits, and earn very low wages. This makes it important for women in both political and corporate leadership positions to show how to create more opportunities for women in formal employment and at the same time to extend benefits and protection to the informal economy.

Women who head up corporations can affect the conditions in which people live and work. They can improve and promote better and fairer management practices, balancing work and family life. They can reduce disparities within the workplace. Two years ago UNIFEM partnered with the women CEO of the Calvert Women’s Principles, a comprehensive code of corporate conduct focused on empowering and investing in women worldwide. The Principles give companies a set of goals to measure progress, and investors a set of guidelines against which to assess corporate performance on gender equality. They cover such issues as gender gaps in hiring and promotion, in wages and benefits, in health, safety and violence, business and supply chain practices, along with civil and community engagement and management and governance.

At the end of the day, what is needed is social and legal protection for workers in both the private and the public sector, the formal and informal economy. The United Nations has taken the lead in bringing the private sector into partnership, creating a new Global Compact. This partnership asks participants to embrace, support, and enact within their sphere of influence a set of core values in the areas of human rights, labour standards, environmental sustainability and anti-corruption. It urges them to promote an inclusive and sustainable globalisation process in order to realise a shared vision of the global economy that benefits all of the world’s people and advances a new understanding of the relationship between business and society in support of development.

UNIFEM has forged such partnership with women leaders in the private sector to create skilled job opportunities for younger women, to increase funding for innovative approaches to end violence against women, and to enhance market opportunities for women entrepreneurs. We currently partner with CISCO System in Jordan to enhance women’s access to and control over new Information and Communications Technologies - training women to compete in this expanding sector. The partnership is now expanding to other countries and attracting additional corporate partner including Microsoft. We have engaged Johnson & Johnson in supporting the work of the UN Trust Fund to Eliminate Violence Against Women - working across sectors and at multiple levels to implement strategist that work. And we are partnering with a coalition of women business leaders and Macy’s Department Stores to improve the livelihoods of window who survived the genocide in Rwanda, enabling them to market their hand woven baskets in the global marketplace.

In concluding, I want to highlight what we have learned in over three decades of support to promote women’s leadership – at all levels of society.

First, it is important to recognise that social, economic, cultural and political factors influence the participation and leadership of women - meaning that women must be accepted as both political and economic players, with full economic and political rights.

Noeleen Heyzer, Womens Summit 2006 Malaysia