On terra firma

Writing about Tessie Sy-Coson, the DAILY TRIBUNE Filipino of the Year for 2024, got me thinking about the ways of top leaders — and by top, I mean those leading immense organizations, and successfully at that.

Reading up on all the materials I could get my hands on about Sy-Coson, I feel like I have gotten to know the SM Group boss better, through various lenses. As much as the lady has tried to keep herself out of the limelight, stories have been written about how she has managed to take the business her father built to even greater heights.

Not that she would readily take credit for it all, I think. “In everything, you cannot do things alone,” she did say in one of those articles I read. In my mind, the humble CEO remains very grounded in spite of tags like billionaire, Asia’s top CEO, mall magnate and banking wiz that, perhaps, would make lesser beings puff up like a poisonous fish.

TSC, on the other hand, keeps it simple. Her father taught his children to never forget where they started, to handle wealth wisely by reinvesting it to grow the business rather than splurging on luxuries, and to innovate. As she told a group of young businessmen in a forum last year: “We all need to always be on our toes, be innovative, creative and use technologies.”

Even the SM leader knows the importance of moving with the times, which makes one wonder why certain things in the world are just emerging from the hold of the past.

Not in our humble islands, though, where women leaders can thrive.

The Philippines has had two female Presidents — Cory Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo — and two female Vice Presidents in Leni Robredo and Sara Duterte. We have a slew of female senators, congresswomen, governors, mayors and CEOs. Needless to say, the idea of a woman holding a position of power is not something we find strange nor is it frowned upon.

I say with some sense of pride that, perhaps, our halo-halo culture is not so bad, after all. As a mainly Catholic nation, we remain quite liberal in terms of gender differences. In the Vatican, you see, women in leadership roles remain few and far between.

Only under Pope Francis have more women leaders joined the congregation of the Vatican. Most recently, he named Sister Simona Brambilla, 59, to head a dicastery of the Roman Curia — the first woman to hold the position.

This game-changing Pope had also earlier appointed a number of religious and non-religious laywomen “to important posts in the Vatican, including Franciscan Sister Raffaella Petrini, the first woman to hold the second-ranking post in the government of the Vatican City State,” said the Catholic News Agency (CNA).

What a feat after all these centuries, huh?

Sister Brambilla’s role is basically to help the Vatican evangelize in a world where religious traditions and ideals are rapidly losing ground.

Brambilla, moreover, joined the “16th Ordinary Council of the General Secretariat of the Synod alongside Argentinian laywoman María Lía Zervino” last month, with CNA emphasizing: “They are the only women and non-bishops on the 17-member council.”

It’s a new world we are facing, indeed, where even countries with “ultra conservative cultural norms” are somehow letting modernity seep in, bit by bit.

According to a friend who visited Saudi Arabia recently, “Ironically, this country in the Middle East we feared the most made us feel the safest and glad to have experienced the warmth of the Arabian culture,” she posted on Facebook.

Maybe, as we start on a new year, there are still some things we can continue to hope for.