Leadership, Power and Politics: Gülseren Onanç

“Our world and my country are under the threat of populist, authoritarian and patriarchal politics. Politicians who are expected to find solutions to global problems such as the Covid-19 pandemic enslaving the world, climate change, migration, poverty and discrimination, become the main actors that magnify the problem instead of solving it. In order to protect our civilization, the nature and our future, we have to change this patriarchal system.

The global women's movement has been the leading movement resisting this system. In the U.S., Chile, Belarus, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Poland and Turkey, millions of women are selflessly fighting in the streets to change the system. Greta Thunberg alone led the organization of young women for the climate crisis. During the pandemic, women politicians such as Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern and Tsai Ing-wen were the ones who managed the crisis in their countries very well. I believe that women would better rule my country and the world. We, women, will build a new system through global solidarity in our country and in the world. We will achieve this with feminist consciousness and solidarity. We will build a World at peace with its nature, where peace, gender equality, social justice, individual rights and freedoms reign, by means of self-confident, honest, humble and sincere female leaders who defend life, people, nature, children and immigrants.”

Businesswoman, politician and women's rights activist Gülseren Onanç is among the founders of The Women Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey (KAGİDER). Onanç, who was the president of KAGIDER for a while, pioneered the establishment of the KAGIDER Brussels Office. Onanç organized training programs, local and international meetings to support women entrepreneurs in order to remove the barriers to their participation in the labor force, and also provided the granting of bank loans to women entrepreneurs. Onanç, who took an active role in the establishment of the TBMM Committee on Equality of Opportunity for Women and Men, argues that everyone who wants to touch the lives of women should take responsibility and that this subject should be considered a social issue.

Onanç was awarded the "Woman Making a Difference in the World" in 2009 as one of the 100 women making a difference in the world, World of Difference 100 Awards given by the Washington-based International Alliance for Women (TIAW). She was a member of the Party Assembly in the main opposition party CHP between 2011-2018 and served as the Deputy Chairman of CHP Public Relations in 2012-1013. Organizing the 2017 Women’s Summit for Equality and Justice, Onanç established the Equality, Justice, Woman Platform in 2018 and the SES Equality and Solidarity Association in 2019. She is the participant from Turkey of Transformative Women Leaders and Connected Women Leaders groups, and the 2019-2020 fellow of Washington-based Vital Voices Association’s VV Engage program.