Business and Professional Women is international federation of women with local branches in more than 90 countries all over the world, with more than 50 thousand members worldwide. It was founded in 1930 and has an advisory status by the UN and participative status with the Council of Europe. Its members are influential women in leading positions, businesswomen and managers. The Czech branch was founded in 2006 and it has more than 30 active members.
The main objective of the BPW is to ensure, that their members: are professionals in their economic, political and social life; are part of the networking, mentoring and lobbying in the benefit of women’s solidarity; lifelong learning; are promoting BPW and its activities, and supporting Young BPW; are cooperating with other women’s organisations; are supporting Equal Pay Day worldwide; are developing friendships between nations and cultures; are thinking locally, nationally and internationally.
Generally, the purpose of BPW is to mediate contact of its members, organize educational, retraining and other programmes, publish informational materials, participates on the projects supporting women, organizes seminars, lectures and meetings, gathers and disseminates experiences of women from Czech republic and other countries, helps its members to get to working process, makes effort to improve women’s position in business.
BPW is organizing conferences and meetings in order to connect more women through the Czech republic, therefore is used to finding and choosing successful women for their activities. The last conference had 800 businesswomen participants from the whole country, conference included mentoring courses. Organization is providing continuing monitoring of the labour market and of the success of Czech women. Natural part of the useable skills is networking. One of the biggest events is worldwide “Equal Pay Day”, which is based on the lectures of successful businesswomen given about their careers and business stories. BPW Praha was cooperating in the project Eurobusinesswomen of the 21. century.
It had also take part in the regional projects supporting employment in region suffering from high unemployment rate – project called “By supporting labour market to higher attractiveness of the Děčínsko region”.
BPW Praha also participates in the project called “Women’s entrepreneurship and family”. For the year 2014 is BPW part of the granted project of Ministry of Labour and social affairs in Czech republic for the support publicly purposeful activities of the NGO’s dealing with equal opportunities for men and women.
BPW is organizing some smaller activities during the year, such as “Breakfasts with extraordinary women”, “Coffee with BPW”, “Health as s personal investment”, and is participating in some charitable events.
Leader of the project would be the president of the organization, Mrs. Lenka Šťastná, which was in the high management in big banking and consulting companies and now is helping other women through BPW Praha, leading all the projects since funding Czech branch. She will be responsible for the final choice of the 20 women for videos, as she has experiences with gathering successful women in BPW.