Professional women gathered together on Saturday, March 8, 2008 to honor three women for their leadership at the International Women's Day Luncheon hosted at Chez Leon Restaurant in St. Louis. These women represented their leadership in the areas of international business, arts/culture, and education. Through advocacy, mentorship, and education women in various leadership positions continue to be an important aspect towards improving the livelihoods of women in their personal and professional lives.

Honorees
Jennifer Ozimkiewicz works at Monsanto as the Brand Business Director for DEKALB corn, the second largest corn brand in the U.S. Jennifer has been with Monsanto since 1995, holding a variety of commercial management positions. Most recently, she returned from Europe where she was the Area General Business Lead for the Mediterranean region based in Madrid, Spain. Prior to this assignment, she worked in Lyon, France as the Seed and Trait Strategy and Licensing Director for Europe-Africa. She has also been a Corporate Strategy Lead, working with Monsanto's Executive Team on enterprise strategy and acquisitions. Her other commercial positions within the company have included marketing management, account management and product management. Prior to joining Monsanto, she was a Marketing Director for a small environmental services firm. Jennifer has a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Madison-Wisconsin and an M.A. and M.B.A. from Washington University. Jennifer currently resides in St. Louis with her husband and four year old son.

Dr. Cheryl Bielema, President, has been a member of Zonta International and the Zonta Club of St. Louis since 2003. She has served as Vice President, Program Chair, Yellow Rose Awards Program Co-Chair, and Area Meeting Chair. She teaches part-time in the College of Education Transition to Teaching Program at UMSL, which provides an accelerated certification for K-12 teachers in Missouri and internationally.

She works as Instructional Designer in the Center for Teaching and Learning, consulting with faculty in the integration of technology, student-centered instruction, and evaluation. She coordinates workshops in collaboration with several campus units, including Information Technology Services and Continuing Education. She assesses training programs, faculty technology use and technology-enhanced learning experiences, including a longitudinal study of blended courses using Blackboard, an online course management system.

Previously, she worked at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in Information Technology, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, as well as in the University of Illinois Extension program. Her teaching experience is in Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Technology. Her Ph.D. in Human Resource Development and a Master's degree in Adult and Continuing Education are both from the University of Illinois.

Naomi Silver, a native of St. Louis, is the creator of CultureSurfer.com. Her years of experience as a political consultant brought her together with various ethnic communities in the St. Louis area. Her appreciation and love of the diversity of cultures in her hometown, in addition to her experiences through extensive travel, encouraged her to share her experiences with others via the internet.

CultureSurfer.com is a multi-sensory medium that encourages the understanding of our global community through video. Naomi maintains a hands-on approach to managing her site, doing everything including production, interviewing, filming, editing, and day to day site maintenance. CultureSurfer.com highlights ethnic communities and art forms. Visitors can view videos that showcase diverse cultures (Bosnian, Latin, Asian, African, and African-American) and cover a broad range of topics (Art, Cinema & Theater, Music, Literature, Fashion, Dance, Sports, and Politics). There are currently over 270 videos on the site and over 4,000 visitors per month, 15% of whom log online from outside of the United States.

About IWD
International Women's Day has been observed since in the early 1900's, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies. Women's oppression and inequality spurred women to become more vocal and active in the campaign for change. In 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. In accordance with a declaration by the Socialist Party of America, the first National Woman's Day (NWD) was observed across the United States on February 28, 1909. Women continued to celebrate NWD on the last Sunday of February until 1913. In 1910 at a Socialist International meeting in Copenhagen, an International Women's Day of no fixed date was proposed to honor the women's rights movement and to assist in achieving universal suffrage for women. Over 100 women from 17 countries unanimously agreed on the proposal. Three of these women later became the first women elected to serve on the Finnish parliament.

Following the Copenhagen decision, International Women's Day (IWD) was honored the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19, 1911. More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women's rights to work, vote, be trained, hold public office and end discrimination. However, less than a week later on March 25, 1911 the tragic 'Triangle Fire' in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labor legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women's Day events.

On the eve of World War I campaigning for peace, Russian women observed their first International Women's Day on the last Sunday in February 1913. In 1914 rallies were held across Europe to campaign against the war and to express women's solidarity. In 1917 on the last Sunday of February, Russian women began a strike for "bread and peace" in response to the death over 2 million Russian soldiers in war. Four days later the Czar was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote.

From 1918 to 1999 for decades, IWD has grown in strength annually. For many years the United Nations has held an annual IWD conference to coordinate international efforts for women's rights and participation in social, political and economic processes. 1975 was designated as 'International Women's Year' by the United Nations. Today, organizations and governments around the world continue to observe IWD annually on March 8th, and is a recognized official holiday all throughout the world. The United States has even designated the whole month of March as 'Women's History Month'. Great improvements have been made, and annually thousands of events are held throughout the world from political rallies, business conferences, government activities, theatre performances, and networking events to inspire women and to celebrate their achievements.

Reference: http://www.internationalwomensday.com