Singapore Minister Calls on Women to Become CEOs - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Adding to previous government-backed initiatives Singapore’s Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports, Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, urged women of the city-state to push to be chief executives at large companies. “We want to see more women as CEOs,” she said.

• Women already hold prominent places in smaller and midsize enterprises, Ms. Yu-Foo said, but she said women should play ever-more-active roles at companies, including multinationals.

• Banking and finance in particular are sectors where women can thrive, the minister said, especially in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region.

• Women in business and how they and technology fit into the workplace are to be topics of discussion at an APEC forum meeting in summer 2009. Ms Yu-Foo said technology makes it easier for women to pursue careers and also address what The Straits Times called their familial roles.

• Giving what she called an example of such use of technology by working women, the minister said that delegates to the conference from South Korea would take part in the August meeting via video-conferencing. The Times said the link will be a first for the event, letting female staff and students of Sookmyung Women’s University to take part in the forum in real time.

• At the same event as Ms Yu-Foo’s speech, the SingTel chief executive Chua Sock Koong, one of most prominent woman CEOs in Singapore, said no barriers exist to stop women from reaching the same levels at work as men.

• “In this global war for talent,” Ms Chua said, “no country or organisation can afford to ignore the female population. She cited SingTel’s own flexible working arrangements for female executives with family obligations as a way to balance work and life.

A link to The Straits Times report