|
|
AN ECONOMICS summit later this week
will draw three world leaders, dozen of ministers and hundreds of business
owners to Hong Kong, including a South African trade delegation comprising five
ministers and 43 entrepreneurs eager to do business with Asia.
They will attend sessions with titles that range from "Business and Trade
Opportunities in the Asia - Pacific Region" to "Successful Financing Models for
SMEs" (small and medium-sized enterprises) and "Packaging Your Business for the
Internet". Only a handful of participants will be wearing neckties, though. In
contrast to the high-testosterone World Economic Forum conference to be held
here in October, almost all the attendees will be women.
The Global Summit of Women, which in its 11th year is taking place from Thursday
to Saturday at the Furama Hotel, is the brainchild of Irene Natividad. Born in
the Philippines, Ms Natividad in 1985 became the first Asian-American to be
elected president of America's National Women's Political Caucus. She has spent
most of her career focused on helping women help themselves - and each other.
The summit, said Ms Natividad, is and international manifestation of her
commitment to promote women's issues globally.
"When you look at the formal international meetings that have to do with
business or economics … how many women do you see? Not many," she said,
acknowledging that few women have yet to claim the positions of power that allow
them to participate. "So why wait to be invited to such meetings? We decided to
have our own meeting of women leaders."
She stressed that while women have little representation in government - "only
three out of 50 governors in the US are women" - and big business - "less than 5
percent of senior executive positions in the US are held by women", they have
plenty of economic clout. "Part of what I do is give them information and facts
about themselves so that they understand what kind of clout they have."
"What is astonishing is that despite continuing inequities in the workplace …
women are becoming a focal force who are changing the face and practice of the
world's economies."
So much feminist rhetoric? Ms Natividad offers anecdotes and statistics that
suggest it is not. Women wage earners make up at least 40 percent of the global
labour force. As the number of women workers has risen, so has their earning
power, and their ability to affect the fates of multinationals. According to a
US study, women make or influence 80 percent of buying decisions, from food to
cars to homes. In the US, women represent the majority of healthcare consumers
and Internet users, trends that are mirrored in Asia. Women in the US also buy
more cars than do men.
"[Car-makers] used to think that women bought cars on the basis of colour. Guess
what? It isn't that: it is price, efficiency and safety," Ms Natividad said.
"They are the ones who fought for the safety belts, the child-proof locks; it
was a woman engineer who developed that."
Now Ford, Daimler-Chrysler and General Motors have all hired women engineers to
figure out how to design cars that will be attractive to women. They are also
investing a lot in advertising that targets women.
As principal in the Washington, DC-based public affairs firm Natividad &
Associates, Ms Natividad has such facts and figure at her fingertips. Her
11-year-old firm does research for corporations that focuses primarily on
helping them better understand women and minorities.
"I try to encourage women in other countries to gather data about themselves. If
you are going to interest business. You must provide them with facts and figures
that show how you influence the bottom-line. If we are the majority of
consumers, you have to tell them how many of us are there, what guides our
buying decisions and what is important to us."
An appliance-maker once asked Ms Natividad for her feedback on an advertisement
for a dishwasher that showed dishes dancing out of it.
"I said it was really insulting to women's intelligence. Tell them it is
cost-efficient, tell them other things. What they don't have is time. Tell them
how it impacts on that."
Perhaps more significant than their influence as consumers is women's increasing
sway as entrepreneurs. In Canada, the US and Europe, women own at least a third
of all small businesses, the backbone of most industrialized countries. In
Japan, women own and operate about a quarter of SMEs. Women run about 80 percent
of small enterprise that are fuelling growth in developing countries.
To underscore the kind of power women can wield, Ms Natividad trumpets
statistics form the National Foundation for Women Business Owners in Washington:
9.1 million women-owned businesses in the US account for nearly 40 percent of
all small businesses there. They generate US $3.6 trillion in revenues annually,
and employ 27.5 million workers - more than the Fortune 500 companies combined.
Monday Face
Irene Natividad, 52, was born in the Philippines and moved to the United States
to attend university at 18. She has a Masters in American literature from
Columbia University. She is married with one son. Ms Natividad has chaired the
national Women's Political Caucus and the national commission on Working Women.
She airs her views on a weekly PBS show. She is principal of Natividad &
Associates, a public affairs firm, and executive director of the Global Summit
of Women. She heads the Philippine American Foundation, which funds development
projects in her native country.
An encouraging trend that the summit will highlight is women's increasing role
in world trade.
"We are focusing on promoting cross-border business," Ms Natividad said. "There
is data around that shows that small businesses engaged in cross-border trade
grow five times faster than those that only look at domestic markets."
Marie Sharp, an entrepreneur from the tiny South American country of Belize and
who spoke at a previous summit, is a case in point. She began making hot sauces
for the local market in her kitchen tow decades ago. She now has a factory with
25 employees and is exporting more than US $1.5 million worth annually to the US
and Japan.
When delegate asked how she developed the courage to go into trade Ms Sharp
reportedly replied: " Do you know how many people there are in Belize?"
(The population is about 260,000, and nearly every family has a hot-sauce recipe
or its own.)
This 2001 summit will feature Sung-Joo-Kim, the CEO of Sung Joo International,
an 88-store Western-style retail chain in Korea. Ms Kim founded the company
eight years ago after working for the chief executive of Bloomingdale's, despite
opposition from her powerful family. Recognizing that women comprise less than 5
percent of management jobs in her home country, she set out to help them the
best way shoe could, by creating jobs for them. Other entrepreneurs can learn
from such success stories, Ms Natividad said.
"That is the reason why I bring together women from around the globe, so that
they can share winning strategies among each other and attempt to replicate them
to the extent possible in their respective countries."
Ms Natividad is herself a model of success, to the extent of being chosen one of
the "100 Most Powerful Women in America" in 1998 by the venerable Ladies Home
Journal magazine.
"There was no moment of epiphany when I said, Oh, I'm going to work on behalf of
women," she said.
Her activist role grew from her schooling at Columbia University when her
doctoral thesis in American literature centered on female slave narratives.
Later, as head of the continuing education department, most of the 3,000
students under her charge were women. She also discovered a flair for public
speaking, "so I use that to be able to educate and arouse sentiment among women
about empowering themselves".
She became involved in New York politics, working on behalf of women candidates.
Since 1988, she has been on the head of Women Vote, a campaign to encourage more
women to vote.
"We may not get a woman president but we can determine who will be president.
Where women's votes go determines who wins or loses," she said.
Her admiration of her former boss, president Bill Clinton, is clear. When asked
why he was so popular among women, despite the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky
scandals, Ms. Natividad said: "We were smart. We separated his personal life
from his public life. As one woman said to me, I elected a president to take
care of spending my taxes. I didn't elect a husband."
Mr. Clinton rebuffed attempts to overturn affirmative action and promulgated
policies that help a lot of women, she said. The first bill he signed was the
Family and Medical Leave Act that allows workers - of both sexes - to take
unpaid leave for the birth or sickness of a child or to take care of an ailing
parent or relative.
"There is still a stigma attached to workers who take time off for those issues.
For a man, even more so."
This she knows from personal experience. "When my son was born, my husband
wanted to take time off work and they laughed at him. So he took one week's
vacation, which is all he could take."
Although Ms. Natividad did not spend much of her life in the Philippines - her
father's work in an engineering firm took the family to many countries,
including Japan, Iran and Greece - she has strong links there. For 11 years, she
has run the Philippine American Foundation, which provides funding for
development projects.
She recognizes the challenges facing Filipinas working abroad, too.
"As I travel through Asia one of the first things people notice about me is that
I look Filipina, of which I am very proud. The only contact in some countries
that they have with Filipinas is as maids, helpers, or as "entertainers." I am
very conscious of that."
But she noted that domestic helpers in Hong Kong sent cash to their families in
the Philippines that they would not make at home.
"One woman's wages may support a big segment of their community. Do you send
them home and tell them they are being victimized? There is nothing at home.
They must earn wages. The best thing to do then is to establish policies that
protect them so they are not physically abused, so they are not fiscally
victimized as well by agents, and so on. Wages are wages."
While women workers represented 40 percent of the world's labour force, their
salaries were still perceived as secondary and non-essential, and therefore
smaller than men's.
"The wage gap is true for every country in the world. It can be as low as only
25 percent of what men earn in some developing economies. In the US, it is 79 US
cents to every dollar that a man earns, whether you are a waitress or an
executive," she said, citing a survey from a women-focused research organization
called Catalyst.
She admires fellow activists' abilities to capture such issues in simple
sentences, and recalls Jesse Jackson's words to a Democratic convention: "A loaf
of bread doesn't cost a woman any less, so why pay her less?"
Although men are welcome to attend the Global Summit of Women, Ms. Natividad is
not expecting many. Among its presenters are Liz O'Donnell, minister of state
for Ireland, and South Africa's deputy minister for trade and industry, Lindiwe
Hendricks, and its minister of minerals and energy, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Hong
Kong business and political luminaries taking part include Secretary for Justice
Elsie Leung Oi-sie, the chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong
Paula DeLisle, the presdient of the World Trade Centres in Hong Kong Annie S.C.
Wu and Marjorie Yang, chief executive of Esquel Group.
Ms. Natividad said: "It will always be viewed as a women's conference only - as
opposed to a bunch of women ministers and corporate leaders and entrepreneurs
looking to make deals and investigate the Asia Pacific market."
|
