The old power structures which excluded women and confined them to rigidly prescribed roles and limited horizons were crumbling, the President, Mrs McAleese, told delegates at the Network Ireland "Exploring our e-Future" annual conference in Belfast at the weekend.
"In the past, women's success was achieved against the background of a framework of structures, rules, attitudes and ways of looking at the world that had been shaped with little or no input from them," Mrs McAleese told the annual conference of the organisation for women in business, the professions and the arts.
"This electronic world of the future and increasingly of the present is so new and changes so quickly that many of those old rules which inhibited women no longer apply. We are entering uncharted territory and we are entering it at a time when women are ideally placed to be among its most adventurous pioneers.
"The capacity of women to communicate with each other, to build partnerships and forge alliances, has been immeasurably strengthened by the power of the Internet," the President said.
Technology and its role in shaping business and social lives formed a central theme to the conference.
"As women in business, what do we really care about?" asked Ms Fran Murrin, national president of Network Ireland. "It really is a question of our time. It's a question that each of us needs to ask, regularly. That's why it's so important to stop and ask ourselves if the future we're creating is the future we want. And, if not, what do we need to change."
Change and how businesses were transforming themselves to meet the challenges of equality, integration and balance were explored.
There was a revolution going on in the world of business and it was coming from the grassroots, Ms Lynne Frank from the UK-based SEED network told delegates. The leaders of this revolution were entrepreneurs interested in the future and they were mainly women, she said.
"There has been a shift in values. Women and men want to live their lives in a different way," she said. "More women world-wide are starting businesses and financial gain is not always their primary motivating factor."
Describing it as the feminine way of doing business, she said this revolution was about integrating all aspects of our lives so that our personal values and professional ambitions went hand in hand.
Ms Gill Colman, the director of New Academy of Business, said finding and keeping talent was the number one challenge for organisations large and small, and increasingly, success would depend on establishing a new contract between employer and employee. She said this would involve moving the relationship away from the traditional financial transaction to a partnership based on mutual responsibility within a more enlightened working environment.
Work-life balance was one of the top three career values cited by respondents in the 1999 Career Information Survey, she said.
Quoting the survey, Ms Colman said the employment relationship - like all relationships - needed regular dialogue to succeed. Each person had a different bottom line, which might be financial, family-based, or a quest for meaning and purpose, she said.
There is a danger that the technological mindset tends to look at business solely in terms of profit, loss and market share, said Mr Billy Glennon, CEO of Vision Consulting.
"Business is about passion, emotion, energy, people and relationships," he said.
And while the buzzword today is flexibility, the business relationship is also about commitment, he said.
