Prague Journal

Tuesday, November 23, 2004.

Thanks to an astute technician at Český Telecom, the gremlins in my ADSL modem have been exorcised, temporarily at least. I still don’t understand why the modem ate my username and password and had to be reinitialized, but, for now, we’re online again.
Most of my day was spent at a conference on the “Role of Equal Opportunities for Women and Men within the Company’s Prosperity.” Despite the title, there were perhaps six men in the audience of over 100 women. The conference was hosted by Gender Studies, an NGO, and sponsored by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Zentiva Pharmaceuticals, and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a non-profit German political foundation committed to the advancement of public policy issues and social democracy. Panel presentations included “Impact of Foreign Investment on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men,” “Role of Non-Profit Organizations and Commercial Sector in Enforcement of Equal Opportunities in the Private Sector, and “Gender Perspectives within the Companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility.” Speakers were from the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands. The Gender Studies director started the day with a presentation of findings from a research project about equal opportunities (women’s promotability and working conditions) in multinational companies (foreign investment) in the Czech Republic, and concluded the conference with “Recommendations to the Entrepreneurial Environment and Non-Profit Organizations in the Area of Enforcement of Equal Opportunities for Women and Men.” After lunch, there was a presentation by the Minister of Industry and Business for the “Best Company with Equal Opportunities Contest in 2002” in three categories, small companies (<100 employees), large corporations, and a special category for “good startup.” The winners were R-Presse (Respekt Magazine), IBM, and AirProducts, respectively.
Tuesday evening, the American Embassy’s Woodrow Wilson Center hosted Harriet Ottenheimer and Maurice Martinez’s film, “The Quorum,” about their New Orleans coffee house in the mid-sixties during the civil rights turbulence. Rick and I invited Ales to join us. He had been in New Orleans in 1969 and had been impressed with the outward harmony of the city. Rick and I had not been in New Orleans, but we had been active in the civil rights movement in the Midwest, and the tension and violence of those times was stamped into our memories.

posted by JWinn @ 9:43 PM