BBC 100 Women - The real impact

The BBC 100 Women Club was created; a differing approach to usual lists, this was not; more importantly it covered a range of aspiring female leaders across the globe debating on cultural topics of interest, what matters to women and giving them a platform to voice their opinions. The event marked the closure to the BBC season sharing women's achievements.

BBC 100 Women

Streamlined live on the BBC News website to audiences around the world. This was no ordinary event however an opportunity to stock take, reflect on the barriers to women and instrumental, linking high profile women with hidden talents from far as Afghanistan, Africa, Middle East and Bangladesh. The several names appeared from arts and media, global campaigners, political activists, business ambassadors, directors including Gemma Godfrey the most popular business woman on twitter.

The BBC full list of 100 Women: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24579511

BBC 100 Women Parveen Hassan CWO UK 

Zainab Hawa Bangura UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict presented information on social activism specialising field in women's rights and tackling corruption.

Zainab Hawa Bangura UN 

The hard facts opened in a video clip as a reminder why this was much needed; millions of girls have been aborted, the number of girls attending primary school is rising steadily in Sub-Saharan Africa (Source UNESCO).

The imbalance of women amongst national parliaments, only 21% in 2013 (Source International Parliamentary Union). See video of the highlight points; (source BBC)- What chance does a young girl have?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24402849

The space allowed unheard female voices to surface in an unprecedented participation event on what are the real challenges facing women, timely with the recent release of the World Economic Forum Global Gender Report findings. The report outlined the index benchmarking national gender gaps on economic, political, education and health- based criteria allowing rankings for effective comparisons across geographical regions and income groupings over a set time. Noticeably some improvements and a landscape of change to economic equality and political empowerment for women as 80% of countries made progress.

See press release and full report http://www.weforum.org/news/increased-political-participation-helps-narrow-global-gender-gap-2013

http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2013 Yet quoted by the report co-author Saadia Zahadi, "Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia both invested in education and health but lacked in integration of women in the economy."

Half the world speaks

The BBC 100 Women debate was far reaching as many women shared their individual personal experiences equally important to better the lives of other women through social media interaction, engagement, empowerment, mentoring and support. Selfishly the so-called usual suspects watched on the sidelines failing to comment or contribute as one participant put it Rehana Azib a barrister working in London, to progress their selfless ambition scarcely would support new women in the future with little encouragement.

Martina Navratilova Speech 

The BBC 100 Women had a raft of measures in place to hail it a success from the benefits of listening to advocates of equal rights for women and equal pay in sport, world champions in education, employment and change makers. Some 10 women already partnered for
a mentoring programme committed to developing their wider experiences. The legacy and immense experience albeit crammed worked; women within 8 hours conducted interview panels, radio and broadcast, networking, debating and proactive audience participation.

BBC hosts Shaimaa Khalil and Rupa Jha acknowledged the global experience with over 10, 000 tweets, the impact of the conversations outside the chosen 100 Women arena men included to approximately 256 million. Collectively these 100 women have a responsibility and a choice to push the messages wider beyond 25th October 2013 and thank the BBC Fiona Crack (Editor 100 Women) and Liliane Landor (Controller, Global News Languages).