"While once marginalized on economic issues, women today, everywhere in the world, have emerged as a new and powerful economic force."
With those words, I had the honor of opening CIPE's most recent conference, "Women: The Emerging Economic Force." That remarkable gathering, which is featured on the cover of this Overseas Report, brought together 175 participants from nearly 50 nations. In the eyes of many who attended the conference, it set a new standard for tackling some of the tough issues facing women the world over.
One of the biggest challenges for women today, in my view, is to build a bridge between the advocates of globalization and their opponents. Women have the power and motivation to change the negative way many local politicians view international commerce. We can do this with sophisticated modeling, sound economic data and, above all, compelling success stories.
The "phone ladies" of Bangladesh, for example, make up one such success story. According to John Micklewaite and Adrian Wooldridge in their book, A Future Perfect, business in Bangladesh has spawned a new breed of entrepreneur: phone ladies who rent out time on their mobile phones. Using loans made available through the Grameen Bank, a private firm that specializes in microlending, women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh are now using mobile phone technology to assist farmers with rice and vegetable prices and to eliminate unscrupulous middlemen.
For millennia, women have handed wisdom and ritual down from one generation to the next. Originally, this occurred around an earthen fire. In the last century, this took place around the kitchen table. Today, women are sharing their experiences via the Internet.
Thanks to this surge in information technologies, words like "interface" and "interconnect" have worked their way into today's lexicon. But interfacing and interconnecting might also describe what women have been doing for centuries.
Women have traditionally been consensus builders, seeking resolution rather than dissolution. We have often bridged the gap between wrong and right, war and peace, poverty and prosperity. And because we have served as an interface and interconnect for most economic and social issues, we have played an instrumental role in bringing about effective, balanced public policies.
President Lyndon B. Johnson once remarked, "To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts."
More than 35 years after President Johnson uttered those remarks, the facts speak for themselves. No policymakers today can afford to close their eyes to the increasingly influential role that women play in today's society.
As international delegates made clear at CIPE's conference in mid-June, the question today is no longer one of whether women will have a seat at the table. In board rooms, chat rooms, courts of law, and government assemblies around the world, women will be at the table. And we will continue to turn the tables until women are recognized as the world's most formidable, most beneficial emerging economic force.
Phyllis Bonanno