“Donne in carriera”, article on Annalisa Gigante published on the Bocconi online magazine.

Check Claudia Filsi’s blog from abroad.

“Study says female directors bring added value”, an article from Financial Times.

“Women’s share of UK board seats stalls”, an article from Financial Times.

“Nordic women cut gender gap”, an article from Financial Times.

“Nordic Companies begin to fill gender gap”, an article from Financial Times.

First of all, we would like to thank SDA Bocconi for supporting this initiative and hosting this event.The first day was devoted to analysing the past year’s results: membership evolution, new networks, website features and updates, think tank groups’ news, corporate sponsors and financial results.

We would like to welcome our three new networks launched in Germany in 2008: Berlin, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. This brings EuropeanPWN to 17 networks all over Europe and more are expected in 2008. The enlargement of our network gives us the opportunity to get directly in touch with more countries and hence more professionals, providing us all with the possibility to network on a European level. Despite different cultures, we all realized that the challenges we are facing are very much the same: from increasing membership so that members have a powerful network and can compare experiences; to the need to have more members actively involved in our activities. The only way to make concrete change is to act.

With Margaret Milan cited as one of the top 10 “women driving change” in Europe; Mirella Visser nominated for European Campaigner of the Year 2007 for her work on promoting women’s growth; our BoardMonitor on FT; our membership of over 3.500 across Europe; and the 500+ events we organise every year, EuropeanPWN is recognized as a visible, powerful and influential International network in Europe. Our internationalism is one of our shared values and differentiates us from all the others in Europe. Now that we are becoming a point of reference, the time has come to lead change in business and politics.
The EuropeanPWN online platform has been updated with new features, such as the Business Xchange tool, that enables every member to promote her activity and competencies and provide members with special offers. Online participation, through the forum in particular, is growing and usage of the internal directory that enables you to search within the 17 networks categorically (name, industry, company name, local network, etc), has incredibly increased. This gives me the opportunity to underline once again the importance of creating, feeding and updating your online profile, in order to exploit completely the benefits of this powerful tool.

Think Tank Groups, after their launch 18 months ago, have been effective at surveys, knowledge sharing and tools creation. A new TTG on networking was launched at the beginning of the year and the first outcome expected is a book on how women network, that should be published this autumn. The MATRIX, as this self-coaching tool on “Your first 100 days in your job”, is online now for you all to test it.

We have had an evolution within corporate sponsors, with Deloitte still our platinum sponsor, now together with Orange. We are proud to announce that Sodexò and Coca Cola are now EuropeanPWN corporate sponsors too, together with IBM, Mercer, Mexx, Aon, Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco.

We also had the official presentation of the BoardMonitor 2008 data during a press conference kindly hosted by Egon Zehnder in their wonderful location, who have partnered with EuropeanPWN on this research project since the very beginning in 2004.

As it is a tradition to offer a small gift to the visiting Presidents, we reflected a lot on what we would have liked to have given as a gift and in the end our decision was to offer them a present to people in need. We donated the sum devoted to our Presidents’ gift to Siticibo to support their useful initiative.

The Saturday morning meeting was devoted to sharing best practices. From how to attract corporate sponsors to how to motivate network volunteers, from creating events and activities that appeal to our corporate partners to how to plan and implement a mentoring program. These 4 hours offered all the Presidents a concrete opportunity to learn from other networks experiences, and to share ideas and create new projects and initiatives and, most important of all, create awareness that we are all sharing the same ambitious goals and facing the same challenges.

As PWA Milan the success story I presented was the Coaching Program, that has attracted 48 women up to now, with each single workshop sold out within a couple of days from the launch with long waiting lists, that have convinced us that we should keep offering such opportunities to our members and enlarge the scope of workshops offering some new ones on topics different from coaching.

In conclusion, the EuropeanPWN Annual General Meeting has been a great opportunity to share experiences and best practices with other networks, making us all aware that, despite differences in names, history, network origin and roots, membership size and of course country, we are willing to grow together and to reach great achievements.

Monica Pesce

Women are good at ethical behavior, creativity/innovation, and mediation.

They should improve negotiation skills for themselves and develop their own personal leadership style. Warning: you have to be able to take decisions.

Develop self confidence

Learn to ask for things that are important for your development (challenging assignments, training, promotion, etc)

Women should care more about

1. Competence – this is taken for granted.
2. Visibility
   - inside the company – be visible in projects which are also seen by the CEO and top management/making the management aware
   - outside the company – be present in internet, on the press/media; be well known and appreciated by HR, by clients/choose right people as ‘sponsors’ (clients are particularly important, as they experience directly how good you are as a professional – frequently best sponsors)
   Men communicate first and then they do things, Women do and then maybe they communicate
3. Networking/lobbying – networking but with content! Women should work on lobbying, reinforcing relations as men do.

Ideas and projects to be developed

• Build awareness and women networks within companies: actions must come from the top but requested, promoted, developed starting from bottom (learn to ask);
• organize training for high potential women;
• analyze pipeline/measure performance: why and how do women get lost from studies/MBA to top positions at work and what can companies do in order not to loose precious talent;
• make women visible now: even if women are not as numerous as men, we already have women with profiles and CVs that are in line with board positions requirements;
• Build a ‘pressure group’ to make the cultural changes happen. Probably a slow but true cultural change would be better than a forced quota system;
• education in schools on leadership/bring role models in schools;
• education for men/courses for men to build awareness on women skills
• Importance of choosing the right company – ‘great places to work for women’ is under study

Viviana Cavalli

On the 21st of May 2008, PWA hosted what I would call the event of the year if not one of the landmark events in the history of PWA Milan. There were over 150 registered participants. The event was attended by men and women alike from multinationals to government institutions, from CEO’s to HR directors bringing with them a rich network to serve a common purpose – to raise the visibility of women in the professional environment. The event was a presentation of key findings on women on boards in Europe with a specific focus on Italy. Interventions on this theme were made by Italian female board members Rosanna D’Antona, Maria Pierdicchi, Stefania Celsi who shared their ideas and best practices. The debate was monitored by our very own PWA Milan president, Monica Pesce of Valdani Vicari & Associati.

What are the main factors to reach a CEO position?

VISIBILITY:

• Importance of selecting the right company – our panel speakers Gigante and Pierdicchi preferred to work in a US Company since American companies’ tend to evaluate and promote people based on merit instead of age, loyalty to the company, relationships.
• Be involved in projects that are also visible to the CEO
• Improve women’s image in the media (Il Mondo named Emma Marcegaglia as Mr Marcegaglia which is unacceptable)
• Head-hunters should promote women’s CV’s
• Get yourself on Google
• Spend 5% of your time to show others what you have done – “do something, do it well, and let others know”

NETWORKING: Very important but tends to be male dominated so women associations are essential. Focus also on relationships with ex-colleagues, external partners and clients – these tend to recommend!

COMPETENCES: Without competencies you don’t go anywhere. You must maintain and increase them. This includes managerial skills (executive courses specific for women) and Negotiation.

Food for thought: Men communicate and then do; Women do and maybe they communicate

How can we improve the “Pipeline” to get women in managerial positions in order to be better placed for CEO positions?

• Introduce measures and Monitor. At Accenture the pipeline is monitored after 3 years of the employee cycle.
• Assign the right project, sponsor and client to women at the critical age of 30.
• Train men to work with diverse teams. Assign performance indicators to reward men (who tend to be the managers), who cultivate promotion of women. Measure this progress and know why women drop out if this is the case.
• Training but also specific managerial course for women. At S&P, high potential women are selected to go on specific training to then cover top positions.
• This action must be top down, so the CEO must be involved, other managers and the shareholders. The question is how? The panel suggest women should ask
• The company must respect the life stages and promote a work life balance. This can be done through role models and ensuring that women will have their position when they return and are supported to get back into it.

Food for thought: Be aware of your potential and know what you want

Is the problem that women are just not ambitious in Italy?

Unfortunately in Italy women are not taught to be ambitious. In a matriarchal society, we are trained at an early age to look good and not talk back. It is up to us to change that.

We shouldn’t give up after having children.

Our leadership style does not have to be like that of men.

Should Quotas be introduced?

The general answer is no although in a country like Italy, maybe it’s the only way. Given that there are insufficient women in the pipeline who could then go onto CEO positions, introducing quotas would be counter productive. An increase therefore should be done through targets – increasing board members by 2 for example.

A regulation could be introduced to limit appointments to the board so that more posts are opened up.

Women profiles should be promoted through executive search and media, to public institutions and Confindustria.

We have received several thanks and emails of appreciation for the above event. We will do our best to work on the main factors that arose from the discussion and we believe it will be possible with your support.

Hema Mali

Women mean business. We are delighted to announce the launch of a new functionality on our fantastic online platform : BusinessXchange.BusinessXchange is designed to help members network for business. Whether you are the founder of a start-up in search of investors, an international tax advisor in Madrid, a manager of an Italian shoe manufacturer looking for distributors in the UK, or a coach who wants to advertise her next workshop in Paris, BusinessXchange will allow you to introduce your business in a short and crisp way, and to specify the type of contacts you are looking for: customers, suppliers, partners, distributors or investors.

This searchable directory is a resource for all members — those offering their services and those looking for providers. Just imagine that all 3,500 EuropeanPWN members’ businesses are listed – it will be our first resource when we urgently need to find a PR agency in a foreign city!

As a directory directly linked to the members who represent the business listed, BusinessXchange is unique in a community network. It was designed according to your specifications and to meet your needs for efficient and non-intrusive business promotion and business exchange.

For great business deals, we invite you to check BusinessXchange. You will find it on the menu of the members-only platform, together with greater detail on how it works. Your comments and suggestions are very welcome. Please send these to websteering@europeanpwn.net.