Women’s Leadership Dialogue Series: Dialogue with Ms. Michelle Bachelet

• Ms Pham Lan Dung, Acting Director - Diplomacy Academy of Viet Nam (DAV)
• Ms Nguyen Phuong Nga, Former Ambassador to the United Nations, President of Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organizations.
• Our special guest today: Excellency, Ms Michelle Bachelet, Former President of Chile, [first Executive Director of UN Women and Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights]
• Excellencies, Ambassadors, UN heads and colleagues, representatives of non-governmental orgs.

Dear students and friends,

Xin Chao!!

First of all, allow me to start my expressing warm regards to Ms. Bachelet from our UN Resident Coordinator, Ms. Pauline Tamesis, who really wanted to be here this morning, but sends her deep regrets for health reasons.

Secondly, let me express my appreciation to the Diplomacy Academy of Viet Nam and President Dung, and the government of Viet Nam, for mobilizing all efforts to host today’s event.

This Women’s Leadership Dialogue is part of a series organized by UN Women for the past 5 years here in Viet Nam, with the aim to create spaces of dialogue and reflection about women’s leadership building on the experience of accomplished women in different areas of public life, especially in positions of decision-making, and to create a role modelling and inspirational effect to the future generations. We are happy to see many students today. Women and men, and people of diverse gender identities. I am sure the interaction today will give you a lot of food for thought for your own lives and careers.

Conviction, Commitment and Courage… The 3Cs of leadership according to Ms. Bachelet. A good starting point for our discussion today. In her video, she also discusses about the different ways women lead, which might be different, but by no means less effective.

This bring us to the important role that women can and are due to play in decision-making processes, which unfortunately, remains insufficient and low; limiting their ability to contribute fully to society. 

In Viet Nam, although women’s representation in the National Assembly has been positively recognized for being higher than the global average (at 30.26%, 5% higher than the 26.5%). Still, women parliamentarians tend to be clustered in certain committees, such us ethnic and social affairs, but their representation in committees addressing financial, budgetary, security and defence issues is low. There is still a persistent idea that women’s leadership is more suitable to address certain questions, often call “soft issues” but not “the hard ones”.

In other areas of government women’s representation remains low. Currently, in Viet Nam only, 3 out of 27 ministers are women, and only one of the 18 members of the Politburo is woman. Moreover, women represent only the 6% of the formal decision-making bodies on national defence.

The lack of participation of women in decision-making positions is not only limiting to the women themselves, but to society at large. Basically, we are missing half of the population’s ideas and talents.

When the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came to Viet Nam last year, he no longer spoke about accelerating the Sustainable Development Goals. He spoke about rescuing them!!!  Advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women is at the fore front of these rescue efforts, not only for SDG5 but for all of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

By promoting women’s empowerment and equal participation in decision making, we can generate the best solutions to increasingly complex challenges of society.

Distinguished guests and students,

Today, we have the have a unique and rare opportunity to have a face-to-face dialogue with one of our most successful and influential women leaders of our times:

• Ms Michelle Bachelet,
• She not only became the first female president of Chile in 2006, but occupied this position a second time 8 years later, in 2014. At that time, there were only 9 Heads of State in the world.
• In 2010 she became the first Executive Director of UN Women, which was a bold step of Member State to commit, in action, to accelerate the advance gender equality and women’s empowerment globally.
• And more recently, she served at the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights until 2022.

In this session we have the opportunity to engage in an informal dialogue with Ms Bachelet, to discuss and reflect about her leadership journey, as a way to inspire so many Vietnamese women present here today, that will be the next generation of leaders and diplomats. But also, to hear from her and exchange ideas about the role women in the world. Men are also invited to this discussion, as gender equality is a matter for all.

I stop here. Without a further a due, I’ll pass the microphone to Ms. Dung, so that she can give the floor to Ms Bachelet.

Thank you. Xin cảm ơn!