MANILA, Philippines - Eat, pray, love. The concept was so feminine. A number of female mid-level managers from various industries gathered in a one-day meeting at Crimson Hotel in Alabang. They were not in business suits – but in khaki pants, shorts, and skirts. They sat not around a corporate board table, but on comfy couches, with their hands and feet stretched out for a relaxing mix of manicure-pedicure and massage. Some enjoyed hydro-yoga at the pool. Others simply got make-up and hair makeovers in another room. The rest opted to be taught a new hobby of weaving accessories, a therapeutic way to ease stress away.
For the first time after more than 10 years of treating its corporate clients with various R&R activities, Globe Telecom this year rolls out enrichment activities exclusively for female executives.
The company’s information and communications technology (ICT) arm, Globe Business, is spearheading the program, dubbed “Project Wonderful.”
“We recognize and want to emphasize the role of female leaders as a driving force in local industries and in the economy as a whole,” says Charmaine Bautista-Pamintuan, Globe Business head of Marketing.
Pamintuan says the Philippines “remains a great place” for working women, pointing out that the country has relatively one of the most number of female executives in the world.
The latest yearly Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum ranks the Philippines first in the Asia Pacific and fifth in the world to achieve gender equality out of 136 countries in 2013.
The GGG Report was developed in 2006 to measure how countries have equitably divided their resources between their men and women citizens.
“Countries and companies can be competitive only if they develop, attract, and retain the best talent, both male and female,” explains World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab. “While governments have an important role to play in creating the right policy framework for improving women’s access and opportunities, it is also the imperative of companies to create workplaces where the best talent can flourish.”
The GGG Report guages the countries by four main criteria – economic, political, education, and health. The Philippines moves up three places in 2013, after doing even better on economic participation and corporate parameters, such as women in senior management, female advancement, remuneration, and wage equality.
The Philippines ranks 10th on political empowerment globally and remains the top Asian country in this respect. The country is also the only one in Asia and the Pacific to have fully closed the gender gap in both education and health.
The GGG Report says it continues to track the strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its national competitiveness.
“Because women account for one-half of a country’s potential talent base, a nation’s competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its women,” the report says.
International management consulting firm McKinsey and Company also affirms women’s important role in attaining corporate and economic competitiveness. Guaging by nine criteria of organizational excellence, it says companies with women representing at least a third of their senior teams outperform those with no women in senior leadership. Likewise, leadership behaviors observed more frequently in women than men also positively impact a company’s performance.
The Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore also came up with a study on women leadership in Asia. Titled “Rising to the Top?,” the report was authored by the school’s vice dean for Research, Astrid Tuminez, who first entered the workforce as a secretary in a freon company in Manila.
The study, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, found that despite overall progress in women’s attainments in Asia, still many women professionals quit when facing transition from middle to senior level of management.
The study says the percentages of women dropping out in the transition from middle to senior level of management are high: 70.24 percent (Japan), 52.88 percent (China), 48.83 percent (Hong Kong SAR, China) and 45.90 percent (Singapore). It suggests that more systematic support, including mentoring, is needed to encourage the women executives “to persevere in their professional lives without giving up their roles as mothers and caregivers.”
“Since more and more Filipinas are becoming leaders of enterprises, there is also a growing need to empower them so they can strike a balance between career and family life,” says Pamintuan. “We want the female executives among our clientele to further enhance their potentials through some enrichment activities.”
Globe Business has so far done its Project Wonderful activities for female clients thrice this year. First was last March in Cebu, second, in Davao, and third, in Manila in July.
In its last Project Wonderful event, businessman, newspaper columnist, and inspirational speaker Francis Kong gave an animated discussion on how he perceives women to be different from men, giving the female executives some relevant life and career pointers in the process.