A partial view of the meeting room
Photo: A. de Ferron (ITU 990014)
On 8 March 1999, ITU celebrated International Women's Day with panellists from around the world who shared their experience and thoughts on the theme "Innovating leadership in telecommunications". These knowledgeable people from different positions in the telecommunications sector spoke from their own perspectives.
Roberto Blois, ITU's Deputy Secretary-General, set the tone. Hanne T. Laugesen, Chief of the Conferences Department and Focal Point for Gender Issues in ITU, stressed the need to strive for equitable representation of women at the various levels as one of the cornerstones of the Union's management policy.
Mary Frost, Vice-President and Regional General Manager, North America, ICO Global Communications, offered tips on how women can create, deliver and extract value. Amie Budiarto, Administrative Assistant, ITU Area Office, Jakarta (Indonesia), spoke on the leadership and role models at the administrative staff level. Candace Johnson, founder of Europe Online and President of its Advisory Board, spoke on entrepreneurial leadership and responsibility in the changing world of telecommunications.
Hawa Keita Bâ (Technical Adviser at the Ministry of Communication of Mali), stressed that her country would spare no effort in the building of a world in which gender equality, notably through telecommunication technologies, becomes a reality.
Lyndall Shope-Mafole, Chairperson of ITU's 1999 session of Council and Plenipotentiary Minister of Communications at the Embassy of South Africa in Paris, spoke of leadership and change of management in telecommunications.
Françoise Sala, the former head of ITU's French Translation Section and a former President of the Federation of International Civil Servants' Associations (FICSA), served as moderator. Ms Sala was instrumental in starting the gender debate in ITU more than twenty years ago.
A partial view of the meeting room
Photo: A. de Ferron (ITU 990014)
The event attracted more than 160 participants (most of them ITU staff), including Hamadoun Touré, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT), Robert Jones, Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau (BR) and Houlin Zhao, Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB).
Opening the round table discussion, Mr Blois highlighted the events in 1998 which he said had led to a much greater awareness in ITU of gender issues. In Valletta (23 March-1 April 1998), the second World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC-98) passed a ground-breaking resolution on "Gender and telecommunication policy in developing countries". Later in September, the first Task Force meeting on gender issues was held under the auspices of BDT.
In tandem with WTDC-98, the Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC) adopted its "statement on gender equality and mainstreaming in the work of the United Nations system: a commitment for action". The statement commits all executive heads of the organizations of the United Nations family to treat gender equality as a major strategic objective of the international community. As a follow-up to these events, Pekka Tarjanne, ITU's former Secretary-General, nominated Ms Laugesen as Focal Point for Gender Issues in ITU.
Then came the Plenipotentiary Conference in Minneapolis in October-November 1998, which passed a comprehensive resolution on "Inclusion of gender perspective in the work of ITU" (see ITU News, No. 10/98, page 12). The Conference instructed the Secretary-General and the Directors of the three Bureaux to report each year on progress in implementing the resolution. Top management is expected to make a major progress report to the next Plenipotentiary Conference scheduled in Morocco in 2002.
The panel discussion provided a new and interesting perspective for those responsible for implementing these legislative instruments. In particular, Mr Blois will oversee the implementation of the Minneapolis resolution and ensure that gender issues are given full consideration at the highest management levels in ITU.
One of the first tasks is to ensure that all efforts are made to mainstream the gender perspective in the Strategic Plan and the Financial Plan for ITU as well as in the Operational Plans for all the Union's three Sectors and the General Secretariat.
Since gender issues have not so far been considered as a separate and identifiable programme in ITU, a lot of groundwork has to be laid before we can really start measuring progress. We also need to be provided with the required tools to introduce a gender perspective in our work, some of which may not be so easily gender desegregated.
A great deal depends not only on the willingness of management to ensure the inclusion of a gender perspective in all areas of the work of ITU, but also on the means at our disposal to do so. The work of the Focal Point for Gender Issues and the Group on Gender Issues which she has established is therefore extremely important for all of us. The group has been expressly established with participation from all Sectors in ITU and additionally with a gender balanced composition. We hope that this group of dedicated staff will give us the tools required and all the assistance that we will need to move forward.
The fact that we have taken the bold step to invite distinguished guests as panellists from both government and the private sector and from all corners of the world is a sign that we welcome the contributions of our membership in this endeavour. We count on our Members to show us ways and means of achieving the goals that have been set for us and on their expertise with regard to gender issues. I am sure that we can achieve significant progress in this respect if we all pool our efforts, including those of our Member States and Sector Members.
Roberto Blois, Hanne Laugesen and Françoise Sala
Photo: A. de Ferron (ITU 990015)
The advances made in the world today in telecommunications must benefit women and men alike. We as the international body responsible for overseeing international action in this respect must equip ourselves to provide assistance and guidance. But first and foremost we must ensure that our own actions inside ITU show and confirm our commitment to gender mainstreaming.
Gender issues and gender perspective are now to become an integral part in the work of ITU, which does imply that striving for equitable representation of women at the various levels at ITU must become one of the cornerstones of the management policy of ITU in the future.
It was evident from the four-day meeting (23-26 February 1999) of the Inter-Agency Committee on Women and Gender Equality (IAWGE) in New York that the organizations are all at different levels of implementation and that they are all grappling with the same problems as ITU.
The IAWGE has members from all the Organizations in the UN system and deals with the ways in which the system responds to the challenges of implementing the Beijing Platform for Action, adopted in 1995.
We have indeed come a long way since Eleanor Roosevelt, at the first session of the UN General Assembly in February 1946, proposed the adoption of an "open letter to the women of the world", at which time the Dutch delegate (a woman) said: "There is no one in this General Assembly who supposes that a recommendation like this would result in a future Assembly with as many women as there are men. There are very strong reasons why, in public life, women will always be in a minority. There are biological, sociological and psychological reasons."
The open letter was nevertheless welcomed by all participants in the General Assembly.
What is gender?The term "gender" is not always well understood, even though it is one of the most fundamental organizing principles of our societies. In fact, gender is defined as "being male or female in a society", outside of the sexual characteristics. While sex is physically determined, gender is socially constructed. |
Hanne Laugesen
(ITU 990016)
Perhaps we should quote a later document, the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development adopted in March 1995, which, in its fifth commitment, says: "We commit ourselves to promoting full respect for human dignity and to achieving equality and equity between women and men, and to recognising and enhancing the participation and leadership roles of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life and in development." I believe these same principles are in line with the recent developments in ITU's governance.
Mary Frost
(ITU 990017)
"Those things that hurt, instruct"
Benjamin Franklin said: "Those things that hurt, instruct." Today's health club instructor would say: "No pain, no gain." So we have to ask ourselves some painful questions. Are we creating value? Are we delivering value? Are we extracting value?
These three premises are the basis of a successful global enterprise. We can look at ourselves as an individual global enterprise in telecommunications and apply the same principles.
We bring diversity. In today's competitive world, the company which can display a competitive advantage by having diverse ways of looking at the customer and market has a significant advantage.
Insight. Women are often considered intuitive because they have to read signals really well such as interpret a baby's crying. This insight is a keen professional advantage.
In promoting sensitivity and customer focus, a life crisis is a defining experience for all in clearly defining priorities. Live your professional life as if it is always in a crisis of priorities and ask yourself every day: what is the single most important thing I can do today for my company? what causes my company the greatest harm if I do not do this?
Today's alliance and partnership environment requires a win-win relationship. Approximately 65% of all alliances fail unless there is a long-term shared win-win situation.
When two children fight, mothers look for a win-win situation. They do not try to "conquer" one child. Women have a competitive advantage in creating a win-win environment internally and externally.
Organized flexibility may best describe a day in the life of an executive, a young mother or a wife. The concept is to provide a balance of strength in complex situations together with the flexibility to change.
Ensure that changes bring progress. "Change is certain, progress is not." Circumstances change, but managing and directing those changes within our power challenge us to progress professionally and personally.
The bottom line on innovative leadership in telecommunications is to remember that after all, it is not the way we do things, but the way things get done that create, deliver and extract value. So: "Live your life so that your children can tell their children that you not only stood for something wonderful — you acted on it", Dan Zadra (Compendium, Inc.).
"Lead, follow or get out of the way"
How many women throughout history can you name whose reputation is associated with vision? Vision is the key to the ability to really change something. It is more than an idea. Vision implies a continuation of a number of ideas or solutions towards a larger goal. With vision, the road map is included.
In 1989, Europe was working towards the open market and the walls of the east were tumbling down. The "vision" was crystal clear to me. Europe needed to have private transborder communication networks in order for business to expand from national to European markets.
The best way to do it would be with satellite communication networks. For I figured how else could we have a common market without a shared, common network infrastructure? How else could we include the new democracies of the east into the community of the west?
Teleport Europe, Europe's first private transborder telecommunications network company, was my answer to this vision. It was born in 1990, nine months after I put my vision down and sent it to a couple of newspapers and some of the largest companies in Europe.
Today, Teleport Europe is the largest private satellite communications network operator in Europe in two out of three categories. Situated on the grounds of the World Fair Expo 2000 in Hanover (Germany), it is poised to play a major role in bringing the virtual reality of the Expo 2000 pavilions into homes of citizens around the world via global satellite communications. No one in 1990 believed the World Fair would come to Hanover, but I did and insisted that we put Teleport Europe there!
In November 1993, I decided "Europe had to get Online". I wanted Europe to be represented on the Internet with all its richness and diversity of cultures and languages. I wanted to have Europeans take this global information infrastructure (GII) and make it a global information society (GIS). I also wanted to have "mothers communicating with mothers".
To me it was so obvious, so simple it did not occur to me that others could not do it. And so I made a very big mistake. I let others implement my vision. I was not a shareholder. I was not in the management. I could not influence in any way my vision.
The company went bankrupt. It was awful. I looked around, the shareholders were gone. The management was gone. The superficial accouterments that one had surrounded the vision with — bureaucratic management, proprietary technology, notions of power and control — these were all dead and that was good. But the vision was still there, as were the young people who had implemented it.
So, in October 1998, I bought Europe Online out of the bankruptcy courts and started it again as an international non-profit association so that no one could ever use Europe Online again for their own purpose or control it. Today, Europe Online is a complete pre-packaged front-end value-added service for Internet infrastructure providers. It incorporates content from all 15 European Union countries.
Let us go out and start realizing our visions!
Candace Johnson
(ITU 990018)
On the question of entrepreneurship, it is believing in yourself and in your vision. It is having good common sense and putting energy behind your initiative.
If you have the entrepreneurial spirit, and many of you probably have it, perhaps without even knowing it, you are by definition a leader. If you have the vision you know how to do it. If you are an entrepreneur, you are doing it. Follow your vision and others will follow you. Nothing puts leadership into perspective as much as what Ted Turner says: "Lead, follow or get out of the way".
Amie Budiarto
(ITU 990019)
"Doing what you like is freedom, but liking what you do is happiness"
In my country, Indonesia, like in several other countries in Asia, people usually think that a "leader" is always the top person in an organization or company. But nowadays, many people are beginning to think that leadership should not be restricted to the person at the top. A leader is a person you respect, a person from whom you can seek advice in moments of crisis, a person who can serve as a good example to others. Leadership is the ability to motivate others to do something for mutual benefit.
Everybody has the opportunity to be a leader, but to have leadership, she or he should have talent, aptitude, maturity and resources. Administrative staff, for example, have powerful resources compared to many members of an organization. They have information resources and access to decision-makers. They know details of office procedures and policies, meeting and mission programmes. They know the right key officials to deal with, so they can get things done correctly and faster.
We do not decide if we are a good leader, it is others who judge for us. For example, in most countries in Asia, fathers, as heads of the family, hold the top spot in the family. However, in reality, mothers are the ones who are active family caretakers, are responsible for and motivate their children, and are the liaison between children and their fathers. In this case, fathers cannot claim that they are the leader of the family. Rather, their children, relatives and friends decide who the real leader is.
When I joined ITU in 1985, I was required to carry out very broad administrative and clerical tasks including filing, maintaining accounts, organizing meetings, liaison with government officials, obtaining visas and arranging travel. I had to leave the "secretarial stereotype" behind, develop my skills in administrative areas, and bring myself up to date with new technologies.
After five years, and when the ITU regional presence became stronger in Asia, many new activities were introduced, and I had the opportunity to become actively involved in organizing meetings in other Asian countries. Besides getting more knowledge on how to organize and handle successful meetings, I enjoyed the opportunity to share my experiences with administrative staff from other countries, including the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Viet Nam and Cambodia, where ITU has held regional or subregional meetings in recent times.
These are the actual roles of an ITU administrative assistant in the field, sometimes an administrator, initiator, supporter, information seeker, information giver, coordinator, filter or buffer. These multifunctional roles will be easier to handle with sincerity, honesty, loyalty, and a smile. "Doing what you like is freedom, but liking what you do is happiness."
ITU's activities have, to a large extent, a significant impact on the future of the half of humankind that is constituted by women. I should therefore like, on behalf of the Government of my country, Mali, to share with you our vision which consists in identifying certain actions that could be the subject of recommendations. These include:
One example of such a project would be the establishment of a dynamic partnership, based on a multi-purpose community telecentre, between a women's agricultural or handicraft cooperative in Mali and electronic marketing and trading companies.
Hawa Keita Bâ
(ITU 990020)
Lyndall Shope-Mafole
(ITU 990021)
"We must enter the global information society as equal citizens"
In the global information society, arts and science, cultural values and philosophy should take an equal place alongside business, technology and government in the lives of citizens everywhere.
In our contribution towards the efforts of ITU's membership and management to bring about change by introducing a gender perspective in all of its work, we must start with some basic assumptions. That policy decisions on the need to change have not only been taken but embraced as well. That policy on universal access and/or service forms the core of policy on the provision of telecommunication services.
That policy of some sort of affirmative action in favour of women, rural and other disadvantaged areas of society has been established. That telecommunications policy is part and parcel of a broader national policy and that it will therefore require other broader policies such as education, science and technology in order to be successful.
Having assumed that the relevant national policies have been taken, it is then the responsibility of managers to implement the new policies. Yet, the managers in both public and private sectors may not be adequately prepared for the challenge to change. Time is of the essence.
If you look at managers in government, you notice uncertainty due to policy changes, political pressures, an unfavourable government attitude, the feeling that the civil service is unfashionable, and social pressure to hire and promote women.
If you look at managers in telecommunication companies, you observe similar uncertainty due to rapid changes in policy and therefore the future of the entity, the feeling of being unwanted, social pressure to hire and promote more women. In addition, there is no budget for development programmes. Nor is there time to think about development.
Then you look at managers in private companies. They are uncertain about the existence of the company tomorrow. They do not know who owns them the next day. They have to understand and outmanoeuvre policies and regulations in a variety of countries to maximize their investment. They are also under social pressure to hire and promote more women.
You turn to ITU, there is uncertainty due to changes in the sector in general and in the countries. There is a change of attitude by government towards all civil servants, especially international ones.
You observe increased pressure to perform "as if private", accentuated by the increased involvement of Sector Members in the work of ITU. There is now the social pressure to hire and promote more women.
Create an atmosphere that supports change at all levels. Provide the management with the necessary training. Involve everyone in the planning and implementation of change. Have a budget to support the "change plan". Set aside time to plan, modify, implement and evaluate change (not evenings or weekends, this is not an extra-curriculum activity!). Make sure there is energy to implement change. Change should be a part of all our agenda and not an item under "any other business".
The bottom line is that all should feel happy, secure, needed and a part of change — not like moving targets.
There must be a change towards more women in the organization. We should set up an advisory group and communicate regularly so that we come up with an action plan to promote gender equality. We must enter the global information society as equal citizens.
The Government of The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has accepted the above-mentioned Instruments amending the Constitution and Convention.
The instrument of acceptance was deposited with the General Secretariat of the Union on 7 January 1999.
Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (Louisville, CO) has been admitted to take part in the work of this Sector.
Duchtone N.V. (The Hague, Netherlands), Electronics and Telecommunications Researcvh Institute (ETRI) (Taejon, Republic of Korea), and STMicroelectronics (Agrate Brianza, Italy) have been admitted to take part in the work of this Sector.
Kokusai Denshin Denwa Company, Ltd. (KDD) (Tokyo) which participates in the work of the Development, Radiocommunication and Standardization Sectors has changed its name. The new denomination is: KDD Corporation.
Mutiara Telecommunications Sdn. Bhd. (Shah Alam, Malaysia) which participates in the work of the Radiocommunication and Standardization Sectors has changed its name. The new denomination is: DiGi TELECOMMUNICATIONS Sdn. Bhd.
Circular letters (via facsimile) which have been sent to all Member States and Sector Members of the Union announce the following vacancies:
Detailed applications with ITU personal history form should be submitted to the General Secretariat of the ITU, Place des Nations, CH_1211 Geneva 20 (Switzerland), not later than the final dates mentioned above.
Vacancy notices and personal history forms are available on the ITU Web site, under the "ITU General Secretariat" section: http://www.itu.int/.
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