"Women Enhancing Democracy" Conference at the Office of the President (Lithuania)

This past week was our big week!  The Office of the President hosted the “Women Enhancing Democracy: Best Practices” conference, a high-level, high-profile summit on women’s leadership.  It was hosted by Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite, and featured many female leaders from around the world, including Hillary Clinton, Tarja Halonen (President of Finland), Atifete Jahjaga (President of Kosovo), Solvita Aboltina (Speaker of the Parliament of Latvia), and others—as well as two CWWL staff members, Patricia Deyton and Heather McAuliffe, who were in town for the conference (CWWL was a sponsor of the event). 

I have been working on this conference since I arrived in Lithuania, and to see it finally come together was very rewarding.  When you’re spending hours late at the office printing badges or editing programs, it can feel quite mundane; it’s hard to feel like you’re working towards something bigger.  But to hear Hillary Clinton speak in person, to meet President Grybauskaite, and to hear from women from around the world who represent NGOs, academia and the UN, was an incredible opportunity.

“Women Enhancing Democracy” was one piece of a three-day conference of the Community of Democracies, an intergovernmental organization of the world’s democracies. For the past two years, Lithuania has been the Chair of CoD. It was interesting and also a little disturbing to see that although the attendance at “Women Enhancing Democracy” was about 80% women and 20% men, the inverse was true for the rest of the Community of Democracy forums.  Why were women present in so few numbers in the overall conference?  Our event was a clear indicator that women in leadership most certainly do exist.  But do they only show up if gender is an explicit component?  Or are they not being included in the other conversations?

An interesting observation that I heard at the conference was: “We can’t fully achieve gender equality unless men are speaking to men about these issues.  And not just any men – men who have power.  Without their advocacy, we can only get halfway.”  I noticed that Ria also wrote about this in one of her blog postings, “Men as Allies.”  To me, this rings quite true. Without men as allies, how far can gender issues progress?  I think this conference was an important step in the right direction, but there's still a long journey ahead.