What is YWLC ?
In an effort to create a pipeline of women leaders and more opportunities for young women with leadership potential in Singapore, the Young Women's Leadership Connection (YWLC) was conceptualized by Mrs. Lim Hwee Hua, Minister (Prime Minister's Office) and Second Minister for Finance and Transport, and UBS Singapore. This initiative was launched in 2008 to serve as a mentorship, enrichment, networking and community engagement platform for young women leaders at the university-to-work stage of their lives.
In February 2010, the YWLC, led by its pioneer Executive Committee, was officially constituted under the People's Association network of community organisations. The society continues to further its goal of grooming young women leaders for Singapore, and structures its programmes and activities around 4 core pillars - Enrichment, Networking, Mentorship and Community. YWLC hopes to be a platform for young women leaders to connect and to find guidance, community engagement and personal development opportunities, and perhaps most importantly, friendships.
YWLC Leadership Development started with Ms Saw (CEO of SMRT) sharing her experiences with us - answering issues that ranged from working well with colleagues to management of people - which was very apt with women of different ages in the workshop some fresh out of university to some already in the working world management level. A key phrase that rings in my mind till date " You have to work on your strengths and work even harder on your weakness. Practice makes that weakness less of a weakness."
Following that, we had Prof Jayanth from NUS to share with us the positions of influence. How to not get easily swayed by influences around us and always be aware of the invisible influences that persists in the environment. At that same time, teaching us the concept of influence - where we watched a movie that narrates how 1 person of the whole jury thinks that the prisoner is not guilty. He asks the reason of the why each thinks the prisoner is guilty and refutes it by evidence and justification. Eventually, you will see that many people in the world go by the majority, it is not that they think the prisoner is guilty but thinks it is the safer choice to follow since if the verdict is wrong, he is not the only one to blame. How true it is - Don't you think so? Who dares to stand against the tide where we fear the tide may swallow us up - Do you dare to be the one that stands out among the crowd?
Next, we had Prof Eugene Tan from SMU to share with us gender issues at work place - where people voice out that discrimation is evident in certain jobs where for example, engineering seems to favor males being in the job than female, where nursing seems to accept more female than male and so on. And also in high level management positions, it always seems a male is more favored. Other than gender issues, age issues also arised. Where in a number of industries it seems one have to be of a certain age to be matched to a certain title - And many of us felt strongly about this issue - where some mentioned that their age issue made them have to work even harder to get acceptance for their efforts, where sometimes clients favor people who are older as it is matched up with years of experience. What say you?
Lastly we had the sharing from Norma Sit ( CEO of Foundation of the Future) where it gave us an opportunity to think about what makes us happy in life, what we are currently doing and how we see ourselves@ 50 years old. Then aligning our personal goals to what we can do for the world - how we understand certain issues that are evolving such as climate change, poverty, income gap - and how we can contribute. I felt that it was a very nice transition as personally I believe strongly that since the world has provided you with resources and all and its time we should also provide back for the world.
To mark the end of the programme, we had dinner with Ms Lim Hwee Hua ( Minister, Prime Minister's Office & Second Minister for Finance and Transport, Chair of YWLC Council of Advisors) at a splendid place called SpaBoutique at 6 Nassim Road. The place design makes you feel like you are in Bali - with a swimming pool ( for skinny dipping? - kidding) and beds align for your spa treatment and a bar beside for chilling. And the spaciousness with trees all around and away from all the traffic with the colonial atomosphere - a retreat venue to be considered.
This event was fantastic! A well-spent day :)
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