STA, 24 September 2019 - The 25th City of Women (Mesto Žensk), an international festival of contemporary arts, will kick off in Ljubljana on 1 October; however a series of events will take place as a prelude to the festival's opening, starting tonight (Monday, 24 September) with an exhibition Cheers to Women - 25 Years of Film and Video.

The exhibition launch will be held at Alkatraz Gallery in the Metelkova Mesto alternative arts centre, with the display focusing on creative endeavours of female film makers and video artists in Slovenia.

The feminist festival, running until 13 October, will be held under the slogan #HerStory, a pun referring to female, often forgotten or erased, history as well as female stories.

The events will take place at 18 venues and will include 160 participants, said the festival's programme director Teja Reba at today's press conference, highlighting that this year the festival will spread to Maribor and Zagreb as well.

Winner of Slovenia’s Most Sexist Statement of the Year Announced

"We're not talking about a special part of history which would only apply to women, but about a part of general history which is missing since mostly men's events were valued in the past," said Reba.

According to her, the time has come for "some feminist revisionism - a feminist re-interpretation of facts, events and traditions". The festival thus aims "to make visible all that has been overlooked, silenced and repressed".

The programme reminisces about the festival's past achievements, but also looks to the future by promoting up-and-coming female artists and art collectives as well as questions the existing forms of artistic expressions nowadays, said the organisers.

Highlights include a film marathon of Slovenian female film makers and video artists at the Slovenian Cinematheque as well as the opening performance of famous German theatre collective She She Pop, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary as well, at the Ljubljana Mladinsko Theatre (SMG).

The legendary duo, a recipient of this year's Theaterpreis Berlin, a prestigious German theatre prize, will put on Drawers, a performance about the German reunification process retold through the eyes of women from West and East Berlin.

Slovenia's Gender Pay Gap Relatively Low in the EU, But Rising Fastest

Eva D. Bahovec, the festival's honorary president and professor at the Faculty of Arts, said that the University of Ljubljana, marking its centenary this year, and City of Women will hold a regional symposium on Simone de Beauvoir celebrating the 70th anniversary of her influential work The Second Sex.

The artist-in-residence of this year's festival is Alicja Rogalska, a Polish-British artist who has dedicated herself to exploring the issue of erased people, left without citizenship after Slovenia declared independence in 1991.

Her exhibition Kinds of Pressure at the Škuc Gallery will analyse the global labour conditions under capitalism and its dehumanising effect, but a discussion with the artist at the exhibition opening will also touch upon her research on the erased and how to talk about an identity that was taken away.

This year, City of Women was awarded the European Cultural Foundation's annual Princess Margriet Award for Culture. The prize, honouring the festival's achievement in supporting women in culture and its intersectional feminist approach, will be presented in Amsterdam on 2 October.

You can find the City of Women website, in English, here, while a PDF guide – in English and Slovene – is here

STA, 12 August 2019 - Less than half of young women in Slovenia are happy with their current standard of living and many are unhappy at work and ready to move abroad in search of better job opportunities, a survey has found.

The survey, conducted among 500 women in the ages between 20 and 35 as part of a project designed to improve the position of women in the labour market, found that only 35% have a job agreeing with the level and type of their education.

Nine out of ten of those questioned believe that there should be more contacts with potential employers during the education process and seven out of ten say they did not receive any career counselling.

More than a half (57%) would prefer to work in the public sector due to greater job security it offers, while 29% would want to work in the corporate sector and 14% would prefer to work for an NGO.

As many as 44% are unhappy with their current job and only 41% are happy about their pay. Among the unhappy ones, one in three expects their pay to improve and one in five do not expect a rise.

Nefiks, an educational institute which conducted the survey, commented that young women are proactive in seeking work, but still they have it hard to get right jobs.

"Many are willing to work outside their field of education or commute more than 20 kilometres to work, taking jobs below their education. Although 44% of them would prefer much more to work at home, they are even willing to move abroad if they don't get an opportunity," said Nefiks.

Similarly, only 47% of the respondents, including students who are generally happier, are happy with their current standard of living.

The survey also suggests that 44% of young women are not planning a family or do not want it, which Nefiks says is a high proportion, given that the respondents are of childbearing age.

Only 7% say that employment is not an important factor in deciding to have a family.

Women above 30 think they have fewer job opportunities because they are too old to qualify for benefits under the Youth Guarantee scheme, something that the survey confirmed.

This group of women has spent longer finding a job and less than a half of them are happy at their job. Moreover, 70% believe they did not get enough work experience during their school education. They also have housing difficulties.

STA, 6 June 2019 - Slovenia's gender pay gap is relatively low when compared to EU average, however, it has been increasing at the fastest rate, warned participants of an international conference in Ljubljana on Thursday.

The latest figures put Slovenia's gender pay gap at 8% for 2017, which compares to EU average of 16%, but the gap expanded from only 0.9% in 2010, according to Eurostat data.

The figures were cited as a reminder of the escalating issue at the Equal Pay for Equal Work conference, held by the German political foundation Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung and the trade union confederation ZSSS.

Related: Slovenia's Minimum Wage 9th Among 22 in EU

Andreja Poje, the ZSSS executive secretary, said that equal pay had been a human right ensured by international acts since 1948. She pointed out that despite EU and national regulations aimed at tackling the gap, those acts had not proved effective in practice.

The gap has been closing very slowly and, based on the International Labour Organisation Data, if it continues to do so at the current pace, it will take 70 years to completely bridge it, said Poje.

According to her, women's gross hourly earnings are lagging behind men's most severely in financial and insurance services, health and social care and education. Surveys show that the situation is surprisingly worse in the public sector and not the private one.

Živa Humer of the Peace Institute pointed out that the gender pay gap affected the gender pension gap and resulted in the feminization of poverty. The EU average gender pension gap was at 39% in 2017, while in Slovenia the figure stood at 24%, said Humer, adding that Slovenia was among countries with the highest rate of older women being at risk of poverty.

Related: Find Out the Average Pay for Various Jobs in Slovenia

According to Humer, mitigating measures include setting up record mechanisms, reporting and sanctioning gender pay gap cases in sectors and companies, implementing bans on the gender pay gap in collective agreements, encouraging the young to opt for gender-atypical professions, raising the status of care work, raising awareness, and co-funding research as well as pensions to keep them above the poverty line.

Silvia Maja Melzer of the German Bielefeld University said that despite the growing trend, Slovenia belonged to the group of countries with the lowest gender pay gap, labelling that as a strong foundation for the fight against inequality, considerably better than the ones in countries such as Germany and Czechia, which, according to her, still had a long way to go.

The 2017 gender pay gap in Germany was at 21%, while the Czech figure stood at 21.1%, the second highest rate recorded in the EU. Both countries have started developing action plans and legislation amendment proposals to tackle the issue.

Maruša Gortnar of the Labour Ministry pointed at the government's measures for narrowing the gender pay gap, including integrating the gender equality index, determined by the European Institute for Gender Equality, into the country's development strategies. One of the sub-indicators of the index is the pay gap, which assists the ministry in developing its action plans.

Related: OECD - Slovenia Ranks 8th Globally on Gender Equality

Executive director of the Slovenian Managers' Association Saša Mrak said that the association had been striving to ensure equal pay and gender equality by awarding equal treatment in projects.

She pointed out that last year women managers were granted support by the association's management board in tackling this issue legally for the first time.

The ZSSS president Lidija Jerkič said that, according to her experience, such discrimination was usually covert and an issue that escalated gradually.

Female workers may be treated the same way as their male co-workers at the beginning, getting equal pay and benefits, but over time the former are less likely to get promoted than the latter due to their alleged lower level of competitiveness, said Jerkič.

As part of getting to know more about the work of SILA we found out that their 2019 Spring Soirée would be benefitting Europa Donna, a Europe-wide organisation that works on behalf of women with breast cancer, as well raising awareness of the importance of screening. What’s more, one of the speakers at the event would be the group’s president in Slovenia, Tanja Španić, a doctor of veterinary medicine with a PhD in molecular and behavioural neuroscience. Curious to learn more, we got in touch with Dr Španić, who was kind enough to answer our questions.

How long have you been working with Europa Donna, and how did you get involved?

I have been active with Europa Donna (ED) since 2010. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, when I was 26 years old and at the beginning of my PhD in biomedicine. I went through different kinds of treatment, and after the primary treatment was finished I went to rehabilitation where I met other women with the same experience, who told me about Europa Donna and their section for young patients. So I decided to join them. Soon, I became the head of the group of young women with breast cancer, then secretary general and in 2017 president of ED Slovenia. Meanwhile I’ve finished my PhD and another research project. Combining both jobs was impossible, so at some point I had to choose. I decided for Europa Donna.

What’s the aim of Europa Donna, and what work does it do to achieve this?

Europa Donna Slovenia has been a member of The European Breast Cancer coalition Europa Donna since 1997. The European Coalition has 47 member countries. Together, we create advocacy initiatives in support of the 10 goals of Europa Donna and thus improve the lives of women with breast cancer. In Europa Donna Slovenia we connect the healthy population, cancer patients, individuals, experts and institutions.

The main goal of our association is to provide equal opportunities and access for all breast cancer patients in Slovenia in order for them to have access to screening, early diagnosis, immediate and effective medical treatment with rehabilitation. With our experience, we developed different kinds of support, financial, legal and psychosocial, for patients and survivors. We provide this through specific sections, workshops, meetings and groups. Over the past two years, we started with an active program to support relatives and children on this path with cancer. All psychosocial support is grouped in the ROZA program (www.europadonna-zdruzenje.si/kdo_smo/program_roza). For the broader public, we are mostly known for our awareness campaigns during Pink October activities like lectures, stands, walks and runs, exhibitions around Slovenia.

What are some of the systemic and social challenges that women with cancer face in Slovenia?

First, you have to face with the stigma of being diagnosed as a cancer patient. If you successfully finish the treatment, you come to a stage where you have to face other obstacles like going back to work, part-time retirement, lower income, how to change jobs, not to mention dealing with the late and long-term side effects of the treatment. Usually, these treatments are very aggressive and long, with quite a lot of consequences like fatigue, big and stiff scars, lymphedema. A healthy person never thinks about the consequences of the treatment like that. And lots of cancer patients face misunderstandings from their employer, because you look OK but in fact you are not. In collaboration with other cancer patient organisations we are very active in talking about the issues and social challenges that we face after treatment.

How can people get involved?

We make quite a lot of effort to provide most of the programs free of charge for users or with a very low contribution. Anyone can become a member of Europa Donna Slovenia and help with membership or a part of their personal income tax (dohodnina). Anyone can become our donor or supporter on a monthly basis.

You can learn more about Europa Donna in Slovenia here, or on follow the group on Facebook, while you can read about its work all over Europe, and in English, here.

STA, 8 March 2019 - A report released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Friday places Slovenia eighth in terms of gender equality among 120 countries. Standing out as the biggest issue for Slovenia is the level of discrimination in the family.

The OECD's SIGI index (Social Institutions and Gender Index) is a cross-country measure of gender-based discrimination in society, with the index value 100% meaning the highest measurable level of discrimination.

The index for Slovenia was 12.9% this year, which put Slovenia in the "very low" discrimination category.

When looking at specific indicators of discrimination, Slovenia fared the poorest in the prevention of discrimination in the family (SIGI value of 21.8%).

Regarding restricted physical integrity, Slovenia received the index of 7.1%. In terms of restricted access to productive and financial resources, the country's index was 9%, and in the category of restricted civil liberties, the value was 13.2%.

Slovenia ranks behind Austria, Belgium, Portugal, France, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland. The latter ranked the highest with the index of 8.1%, while Yemen ranked the lowest with a discrimination level of 64%.

60 countries could not be ranked due to insufficient data. In general, gender inequality is lowest in Europe and highest in Africa.

The fourth edition of the ranking suggests that besides legal measures, cultural, social, and religious norms need to be taken into consideration to eliminate discrimination.

According to the OECD, the current level of discrimination deprives the global economy of USD 6,000bn, which amounts to 7.5% of global GDP.

Since the previous study in 2014, 15 countries have criminalised domestic violence, the same number have made marriage under the age of 18 illegal. Eight countries have implemented legal measures to ensure a gender-balanced representation among elected state officials.

Paid maternity leave is ensured everywhere, apart from Papua New Guinea and the US.

You can see the full OECD report here, while the detailed report for Slovenia, in PDF form, is here

STA, 8 March 2019 - Slovenia ranks high among EU member states in terms of the proportion of women in senior management positions. However, even as the rate is increasing, it is still far below targets set a few years ago.

Data released by Eurostat ahead of International Women's Day indicate that almost half of managerial positions in Slovenia are filled by women (47%) and one in four senior executives is female.

This places Slovenia fifth among EU member states, with EU average at 36% and 17%, respectively. The data take into account positions in public and private sectors.

While still above EU average, Slovenia is not among the leaders when it comes to the percentage of women on board members of publicly listed companies, which is at 27%, only a percentage point above EU average.

Similarly, data from the European Institute for Gender Equality show that the proportion of women in senior positions in largest listed companies in Slovenia is increasing.

The proportion of women CEOs, executives and non-executives in such companies rose to 24.7% in 2018, the highest in recent years.

Commenting on the figures, the Manager Association said that this was still far from the target of 40% by 2020, set in a EU directive proposal in 2013 by the then Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding.

The association has been advocating legislative changes to improve gender equality in top corporate positions, pointing to surveys showing companies with gender-balanced managements perform better.

This is also evident from the the Women in Work Index, a survey conducted by Pricewaterhousecoopers, where Slovenia gained one spot to place 4th among the 33 OECD countries.

Consultancy Bisnode has surveyed 18,300 businesses whose chief executives are women, finding that while those represented 25% of the economy, they generated 37% of total revenue and 39% of total profit in 2017, employing 37% of the workforce.

The analysis also showed above-average efficiency of "women businesses", having turned one euro into almost 1.3 euro of profit, which compares to the overall average of 0.9 euro.

Melania Seier Larsen, executive director of Boston Consulting Group and vice-president of the women manager section at the Manager Association, noted disparity between women university graduates and those in senior positions.

"Women represent as much as 58% of graduates, but then there are only 20% women executive directors and only 5% of women are chief executives," she said.

Trends in science are similar; while about as many women as men graduate or even win a PhD degree, the proportion of women as they pursue their careers to regular professorship drops to 17%.

Larsen noted that gender inequality in decision-making positions was huge, quoting World Economic Forum in projecting that at the current pace it would take 100 years to close the gender gap.

The full report, in PDF form, can be found here

To an entire generation of Slovenes, the name Angela Vode would have meant nothing. Even today bringing up the name of Ms Vode in the company of Slovenes may result only in confused stares and faces of disinterest, confused as to why you interrupted their coffee to talk about some dead woman from the past. But Angela Vode isn’t just some dead woman from the past, far from it. Angela Vode was one of those unfortunate souls who gave their entire life over to helping their fellow humans only to be consistently arrested because of it. Her life story isn’t a million miles away from mirroring Slovenia’s own in modern times.

Angela Vode was born on January 5, 1892, the third daughter of five children in a poor, working-class family. Her father was a chap by the name of Anton, who worked as a railwayman until his death in 1904. Little is known of her mother, other than the fact she passed away in 1919. Angela’s upbringing was fairly typical of a working-class Slovene girl in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, which means her future job prospects were ‘teacher’ or ‘wife’, or maybe even ‘wife of teacher’. ‘Wife and teacher’ legitimately wasn’t an option, unless it was ‘teacher and wife of teacher’. Married women were forced (by law) to give up their jobs unless they were teachers marrying teachers.

This is the societal system that Angela Vode was born into, and therefore you can understand why she was just a little bit miffed about it all. Angela graduated from a teaching school in 1911 and worked as a teacher in and around Ljubljana all the way up until 1917 when she was fired because of her ties to a youth movement known as Preporod (Rebirth), who were openly anti-Austria and all in favour of a future Yugoslav state. Despite being considered a ‘red feminist’ Angela continued on the educational path post-firing, studying special education in Prague, Berlin and Vienna before returning to Slovenia to work as what was then called a ‘teacher-defectologist’, which basically means ‘teacher of children with disabilities’. Angela actually published a number of articles on the education of disabled children, as well as a book in 1936 titled ‘The Importance of Auxiliary Schools and Their Development in Yugoslavia’. Well, it was called ‘Pomem pomožnega šolstva in njegov razvoj v Jugoslaviji’, to be precise.

The education of disabled children wasn’t Angela’s numero one focus however, no matter how forward thinking she was on the matter. The 1920s saw Angela Vode fast become one of the most vocal supporters of women’s rights in what was first the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (from 1929). The history of women’s rights organisations in Slovenia was not a long one, the first such organisation being established in the city of Trieste (now in Italy) in 1887. Angela was elected president of the Women’s Movement of Yugoslavia, as well as president of the Female Teachers’ Society of Slovenia (established in 1898), which carried the slogan ‘for equal work, equal pay’. The mid-1930s saw her publish a number of works on the subject of women’s rights and social injustice, although the events of the 1940s in Yugoslavia meant these books would cease to exist until after Yugoslavia had itself ceased to exist.

Again we must travel back ever so slightly. In 1922 Angela joined the then-illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia, in what she described as an act of idealism born out of a sincere belief in the fight against injustice. She stuck with the party until 1939, when she was expelled for openly criticising the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that saw Hitler and Stalin agree to carve up Eastern Europe. World War Two soon came to the Yugoslav lands, and despite her frequent warnings about the importance of a united anti-fascist front, the resistance in Yugoslavia split into many parts. Despite her expulsion Vode decided to join the commie-led Liberation Front of the Slovene People, quickly becoming the top representative of the Slovene women’s movements. In late 1941 Vode joined Stara Pravda (Old Justice), but the expulsion of this group a year later signalled misery on Angela’s horizons.

She continued to do her bit to help the resistance however, organising collections of food and clothing for Slovene refugees and those in labour camps. How one gets food and clothing into a fascist labour camp I have no idea, but I digress. Vode was in Italian-occupied Ljubljana at the time, and whilst this wasn’t the greatest place in the world it was simply heaven compared to the existence of the Slovenes in the Nazi-occupied areas of the country. This led to a whole heap of Slovene refugees moving into Ljubljana, and in late 1942 the Italian authorities decided the best way to deal with this was to start executing whomever it deemed unnecessary. Like any human with a heart, Vode decided to appeal to Italian leader Benito Mussolini to stop the executions, but her protest was destroyed by the Slovene communists who wanted to be the sole source of protest and resistance in order to enhance their claim to power when the war was over.

The war was soon over (well, a couple of years or so later anyway) and things didn’t look too rosy for Angela. She went back to working as a teacher, but as the communist stranglehold on power increased her future looked increasingly bleak. The fact that she was one of the few who tried to organise legitimate political opposition to the communists didn’t help, and her standing as an intellectual on the other side of the fence all but guaranteed her a visit from the secret police. That visit came in the autumn of 1947, and Angela was arrested and imprisoned for two months. After two months of torture and abuse, Angela Vode was put on trial, by which I mean after two months of torture and abuse Angela Vode took part in a show trial. She was charged with treason, accused of being an enemy of the working class, a western spy and any other stereotypically 1940’s communist thing one could be arrested for. These were the Nagode Trials, named after the leader of the aforementioned Stara Pravda movement, Črtomir Nagode. The ‘trials’ saw 15 intellectuals found guilty of treason and sentenced to death or life imprisonment.

Vode got 20 years, and whilst she only served six of these years thanks to international fury, she didn’t exactly return to a free and joyous wonderland in 1953. Vode was declared a ‘non-person’, that is a human being without any rights whatsoever. She wasn’t allowed to find employment, enjoy a personal income or get medical insurance. She was denied her passport, and her name was prohibited from public life. Her works, such vital and important works concerning women’s rights in the country, could not be quoted in any way, shape or form. It was as if Angela Vode had never existed, and this vibrant and revolutionary mind was reduced to being completely in the care of her sister Ivana. In the late 1960s, Angela began work on her memoirs, finishing what was known as ‘The Hidden Memoir’ in 1971. It wouldn’t see the light of day until 2004.

After the death of Tito in 1980 there began to be small ripples of interest in her oft-whispered about works throughout the Slovene republic. On the 50th anniversary of her book ‘Women in Contemporary Society’, she gave a low-key interview to the magazine Nova revija, marking her first public appearance in over 30 years. One year later she passed away at her home in Ljubljana, dying in May 1985 at the age of 93. She didn’t live to see the Slovene court annul the verdicts of the Nagode Trials, although after being robbed of her final 30 years justice would be nigh on impossible.

Vode has been posthumously rehabilitated, and slowly but surely her works have begun to reach more people. Despite being written almost a century ago they are still relevant today, with Vode expressing a desire to cherish the natural differences of the genders whilst putting forward the necessity of equality at the same time. She attacked subjects that were almost holy at the time, such as the role of husband and wife in parenting, stating she did not understand ‘…why a wife by nature would be more destined for motherhood than a husband for fatherhood’. She wrote extensively about gender roles as well as the influence of nature and nurture in those roles. Vode urged women to learn about the past, believing that only by understanding society could one improve one's position. She implored that a healthy marriage could only exist with love, friendship, mutual respect, understanding and economic independence. She stripped down the question of gender roles in society, saying that ‘…a woman is as integral a part of human society, nation, state and family as a man, and her life and position are equally dependent on all political, economic, and cultural developments, and a demand for her participation in public life is absolutely natural and necessary’.

Angela Vode was and still is a vital voice in the women’s rights movement in Slovenia, and it is a tragedy that she simultaneously became a poster girl for the abusive and criminal side of the semi-totalitarian dream that was socialist Yugoslavia.

If you enjoyed this story, then consider picking up a copy, in digital or paper form, of An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery from Posh Lost Books or following the related page on Facebook, while you can read more of John’s work on his personal website.

STA, 7 March 2019 - A statement by children's doctor and psychotherapist Viljem Ščuka equating sex and rape has been declared the most sexist statement of 2018 by the organisers of feminist and queer festival Red Dawns.

"Mass rapes of girls (schoolmates) are not possible if girls are against. Both participants are responsible for sexual intercourse because it takes place with both being fully conscious ..."

Ščuka, 80, made the statement for the news portal Svet24 commenting on a former teacher's proposal about how to tackle problematic, violent primary school children.

It earned him the Silver Thistle title, which is conferred annually to raise awareness about sexist statements which are usually overlooked.

"This dishonourable title is given to those who publicly attack, humiliate or offend others on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and/or sexual identity," according to the festival's website.

The citation of the Silver Thistle said Ščuka's statement "equalises sexual intercourse with sexual violence and shifts responsibility for violence onto victims, which is not only unacceptable but also dangerous".

It added it was hard to understand anyone would think rape takes place with the victim's consent and even harder if such a statement was made publicly by an expert.

The Silver Thistle is given out on the basis of an online vote by the editorial board of spol.si, a news portal focussing on gender issues, and the Red Dawns collective, which organises the festival of the same name.

The most sexist statement of last year was declared Wednesday evening.

Last year, the dishonourable title went to acclaimed jurist Boštjan M. Zupančič, who labelled French politician Simone Veil (1927-1979) a murderer for allowing abortion.

https://www.total-slovenia-news.com/lifestyle/748-slovenia-s-most-sexist-statement-of-the-year-award

Slovenia was recently assessed as the 28^th most LGBT-friendly travel destination in the world (see here), and the capital prides itself on being particularly welcoming to this community, at least in terms of the City of Ljubljana’s official programmes.

https://www.total-slovenia-news.com/travel/3147-gay-slovenia-ranked-28-for-lgbt-travellers-highest-in-ex-yugo

Yesterday, March 6, saw the official start of the Red Dawns International Feminist & Queer Festival, which offers several days of events, exhibitions, discussions and concerts to bring people together for art and activism. The full programme for the event, in English, can be found here, while the Facebook page is here.

One large event, not strictly part of the festival but surely related, will be the Women’s Day march that’ll take place on Friday (08/03), starting at 17:00 in Congress Square (Kongresni trg), the main square downtown that’s also home to Zvezda Park.

All our stories about LGBT+ issues and Slovenia can be found here

STA, 5 March - The women's magazine Onaplus has picked lawyer and lecturer Sara Ahlin Doljak as the winner among twelve inspirational Slovenian women whose professional achievements defined the past year and who led by example.

Ahlin Doljak, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, has not let her disability be an obstacle to success, the judging panel said in awarding Doljak the title Ona 365 (She 365) for 2018.

Speaking through a speech generator device Tobii, Doljak shares important professional as well as personal insights and her voice deserves to be heard by everyone, the jurors said. Doljak lectures at the European Law Faculty in Ljubljana and Nova Gorica.

"She incidentally makes us ponder - who are we and most importantly, what we could be. Despite the challenges life imposes on her, she thrives. Each time she stresses how large life is and her esteem for it. And that family is everything," said Onaplus editor-in-chief Sabina Obolnar.

"She doesn't conceal bitter moments and self-reflections. And one day she realized that she learned everything besides living," Obolnar added at Tuesday's award ceremony in Ljubljana, which also marked the 25th anniversary of the magazine.

Obolnar also pointed out that all twelve nominees are exceptional and successful women who honour life and despite being less visible in the media, leave a great legacy behind.

The 12 nominees for the title included successful surgeon Saba Battelino, who managed to restore hearing of a five-year-old, the first blind translator from Norwegian to Slovene Irena Mihelj, successful journalist, presenter, and author Mojca Širok, and ski star Ilka Štuhec.

Prime Minister Marjan Šarec was also present at the ceremony and congratulated the nominees.