A growing body of research demonstrates that women are often more effective leaders, yet there are many programs geared toward women upskilling and networking to get there because they are still underrepresented in leadership. Can these programs offer long-term solutions?
Nine years ago, Citlalli Rios was working in supply chains and logistics in Mexico, dissatisfied with her job and the steep climb required for women to secure leadership positions. Despite spending years in the industry, Rios doesn’t recall women sitting in any CEO positions. “Of course, there were plenty of women [employees] because we are the ones actually doing the work in most of the [places],” Rios says. “But the ones on top was a boys’ club.” She says the men in leadership would go to strip clubs together, while she was the one processing their expenses. “I would never see myself achieving a position in that industry.”
Rios decided to move to Canada for more opportunities, seeking women’s leadership training to help accelerate her career. She joined whatever programs were available to her: she enrolled in virtual and onsite workshops, attended fireside chats and webinars, and signed up for any opportunity to learn about the road to women’s leadership in Canada. She spent three years in the logistics and supply chain industry again until she began to recognize the same pattern. The barrier to having more women in leadership “was not a Mexico thing or an industry thing – it was a world thing,” she says. “Very few women sit in high-level positions, and if they are women, they will normally be white. Again, I just failed to see myself ever getting there.”
Imposter syndrome comes [up] in every single conversation about women leaders or women advancing . . . As it’s framed, it feels like it’s your fault.
Citlalli Rios, Hispanotech
As Rios became more familiar with women’s leadership programs, she grew tired of hearing the inevitable conversation about imposter syndrome. “I think that topic comes [up] in every single conversation about women leaders or women advancing . . . As it’s framed, it feels like it’s your fault, and I think we can just switch or flip the script.”
Leadership programs help develop women’s skills and networks so they have more opportunities for leadership roles in the workplace. But with research showing the benefits of women’s leadership and higher returns from investments managed by women, their underrepresentation seems to be the result not of inadequacy but of gender bias. Can women’s leadership programs address a systemic issue?
According to leadership and business coach Miriam Buttu, workplaces replicate the social systems we live in. The workplace “absorbs all of these other systems, like white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism . . . the patriarchy,” she says. “Men get into leadership. Women don’t.”
“The second that [women] have families, they’re at this ceiling where they can’t move forward anymore,” she adds. “I think what I’ve seen in the non-profit sector, because it is dominated by women mostly, is that women . . . take on these roles, but there’s no way to compensate for the extra roles that [they] have at home as well.”
We’re still operating in a workplace design that was built for the early baby boomer world, which was predominantly men in the workplace.
Belinda Clemmensen, Women’s Leadership Intensive
According to the International Labour Organization, women are 708 million of the 748 million people worldwide who do not participate in the labour force because of their care responsibilities. “We’re still operating in a workplace design that was built for the early baby boomer kind of world, which was predominantly men in the workplace,” says Belinda Clemmensen, the founder and executive director of the Women’s Leadership Intensive. “There was somebody whose job – or at least part-time job – was explicitly household labour, including caregiving work. And when women were in the workforce, their jobs were often seen as supplemental, not bread-winning jobs.”
While the number of women in management positions globally has increased over the decades, today women in Canada account for just 35.6% of management positions; their promotion rate has increased by 6.8% over 20 years. The stats are even lower for women of colour, who hold 6.2% of board and management positions. “What happens when we start working is that we start to believe that we’re not worthy anymore, and that especially relates to people with marginalized identities,” Buttu says. “I think that our worth is questioned over and over and over, and as a result, naturally, we’re going to have less self-confidence because our confidence is directly related to our self-worth.”
Buttu says the current system is not accommodating for women. “I think that is the bottom line. That’s why we need women’s leadership programs,” she says. “It’s not because women can’t lead as well, or women need to upskill, or women need to learn how to do this.”
In her report Race to Lead: Women of Color in the Nonprofit Sector, Ofronama Biu finds that education and training are not enough to help women of colour advance in the workplace. In fact, they are repeatedly losing leadership opportunities to men of colour, white women, and white men, despite having equal or higher credentials.
People have to get out of the traditional way of doing things. What we do traditionally is not equitable at all.
Miriam Buttu, leadership coach
When Buttu worked at Fora Network for Change, first as a program director, then as the interim CEO before becoming COO, she implemented short-term insurance, long-term and critical-illness insurance, and one extra-long weekend (Monday and Friday off) per month. There were regular quarterly feedback sessions with staff and opportunities for people to provide feedback anonymously. When recruiting for leadership roles, they would acknowledge that people with different marginalized identities might not have access to the same resources as other women. “You can’t compare apples to oranges and think you’re comparing apples to apples,” Buttu says. At Fora, they provided opportunities for people who were from marginalized groups who may not have checked every single box on the job description but deserved a chance.
“There are procedures and processes in place if people care enough to do them, but they have to get out of the traditional way of doing things,” Buttu says. “What we do traditionally is not equitable at all.”
What women’s leadership programs can offer
“We want to continue to do women’s leadership-development work because we’re trying to solve a problem,” Clemmensen says. With year-long intensive programs, online leadership training, and free video series, the Women’s Leadership Intensive is meant to empower, equip, and support women in leadership. “We’ve got a leaky pipeline for women in leadership,” Clemmensen says. “What’s really missing from the landscape is working on inclusive leadership skills for leaders of all genders and in all functions.”
We’ve got a leaky pipeline for women in leadership.
Belinda Clemmensen
Clemmensen says she believes it should be a “non-negotiable” for organizations to train leaders on inclusive leadership. Still, creating a women’s leadership-development course to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion through an intersectional lens can offer something different for women seeking support on their leadership journeys. “We take an unapologetically feminist perspective when we’re talking about those things and developing them,” she says. The Women’s Leadership Intensive “is a women-only space, which can be a huge relief, because with the low numbers that we still continue to have of women in leadership roles, that means that these women are often still the only women in the room.”
Biu’s research found that among women with a master’s degree or higher, 57% held CEO or senior management positions, compared to men of colour and white men with the same educational background, who held 71% and 75% of leadership positions, respectively. The same women were also more likely to report inadequate salaries compared to men with the same education and positions. “When we’re in our women’s leadership programs, those experiences are centred,” Clemmensen says. “We can talk about the real things in a much more open and affirmative kind of environment.”
Leadership buy-in beyond the gender binary
People who don’t identify as women or men may not find women’s leadership programs to be affirmative spaces, however.
Salomé Wysocki, a partnership regional manager at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, says that when they attended women’s conferences, they saw how empowering it was for people around them – but since they are non-binary, they could not relate the same way. “I don’t know if [women’s leadership programs] necessarily need to be as gendered,” Wysocki says. They wonder if they could be more inclusive for everyone. “A woman’s space that is also being inclusive, not just in saying, ‘We welcome non-binary folks as well,’ but [that has] gender-nonconforming speakers . . . I would want to be in that space as opposed to just a general space where even cis[gender] men can go.”
Clemmensen says that the Women’s Leadership Intensive is open to cisgender women, trans women, and non-binary people.
Wysocki says it would be extremely valuable for younger staff to have more people who openly identify as queer to look up to. As the only person who speaks French on their current sales team, Wysocki says that they want to have conversations about how to navigate gender, language, and pronouns in sales. They also say that some of their colleagues struggle to use the right pronouns for them and they still feel grouped into the same category as women.
Wysocki says that they have received feedback that seems to go beyond their work. When they were on a team with other women, they were all told they needed to smile more at events: “I remember thinking, ‘This seems really gendered because the person who was [previously] on our team who was a man never got that feedback.’” Another time, during a performance review, Wysocki was told they needed to dress more professionally. They think the comment was transphobic because they are always dressed professionally for client calls. “They’re comparing me to my female co-workers who are very outright [feminine], wearing heels and things like that.”
You can’t mandate inclusion [into] an organization. You can’t get inclusion to happen if you don’t have leadership buy-in.
Suzanne Duncan, Canadian Women’s Foundation
But Wysocki says that Canada is the safest place they have lived, having grown up and worked in Europe and the Caribbean. They feel more comfortable being out as non-binary in the workplace, with Canada recognizing gender identity as a basis for discrimination. Of course, that does not stop the gender bias from affecting the way they work. As Suzanne Duncan, vice president of philanthropy at the Canadian Women’s Foundation, says, “You can’t mandate inclusion [into] an organization. You can’t get inclusion to happen if you don’t have leadership buy-in.”
Many participants in the Women’s Leadership Intensive work in the mining industry, where, Clemmensen says, retaining women is a problem but replacing them is difficult because they hold highly technical positions like geologists and engineers. “When you lose somebody because your culture is not inclusive, that’s a huge cost,” she says.
Throughout her years in leadership, Clemmensen has seen how ideas of what makes a leader successful have changed. Traits like directness, assertiveness, strategic thinking – usually attributed to men – used to be valued, but now thought leadership and research points to empathy, emotional intelligence, and collaboration – traits usually attributed to women – as desirable skills for a leader.
Duncan says that from a feminist perspective, leaders need to recognize that people are whole humans and that everyone can gain valuable experiences and skills. “We know that empathy is a teachable skill. We know that inclusion is a muscle that you build [and] work on,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a female leader or a male leader or a non-binary leader.”
Duncan adds that sponsorship – vouching for women to be hired for roles they would excel in – is key. “The biggest privilege of getting to work in this space for as long as I have is that I have a reputation I can leverage for others,” she says. “That, to me, is what builds a better sector. We can’t just keep referring the same 10 people around the same 10 jobs.”
How leadership programs are evolving
Outside of putting the onus on women to enroll in programs to address barriers to leadership, some programs target current leaders to foster better work environments. That’s the goal of Connection Village’s intercultural leadership workshop – one of many programs offered by the organization whose mission is to connect local Albertans to newcomers to Canada so they can build meaningful relationships.
Based in Medicine Hat, Alberta, which is the traditional lands of the Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, Stoney-Nakoda, Tsuut`ina Nation, Cree, Sioux, and the Saulteaux bands of the Ojibwa peoples, Connection Village’s social programs reach approximately 1,000 people a year. The most recent workshop, hosted at the end of November, was attended by leaders from the City of Medicine Hat, a construction company, a psychiatry clinic, and Medicine Hat College.
The workshop’s goal is to “help our leaders build the cultural competence that is required to be able to function in a multicultural society,” says Yusuf Mohammed, the founder and director of Connection Village. The training supports leaders’ cultural knowledge around diverse communities, builds inclusive and equitable team dynamics, and helps them navigate cultural challenges in the workplace. Originally from Nigeria, Mohammed moved to Canada after working in Switzerland for five years; he recognized a gap for newcomers struggling to settle in their new home.
Mohammed is a management consultant by profession and has done similar leadership training with organizations, but he wants the work of Connection Village, which is nearly 100% volunteer-run (there is one part-time staff member), to be community-based. “I have ideas to steer us in the right direction, but it’s not going to be only me.” The workshop’s facilitators are those who joined the organization’s newcomer programs when they first arrived in Canada.
The Connection Village workshop is building the inclusive workplaces – and leadership roles – that women leaders say are necessary to foster the environments they require to see success. That’s how Rios found herself in a leadership position she is proud of, at last. Though Rios works as a freelance business analyst, she volunteers as the vice president of Hispanotech, where she supports newcomers to Canada entering the workforce, helping them build their skills and develop professional connections.
One of the leadership programs Rios drew value from was Women in Power, which focuses on reflective and conscious leadership and brings racialized and white women together to become empathetic individuals and inclusive leaders.
[Shifting systems] requires us to do away with the polarization, the lack of discourse, and be able to just come into conversation with each other and not be so afraid to mess up.
Saralyn Hodgkin, Women in Power
“Part of [Women in Power] is being able to work with other women, to shift the systems, even just as models within ourselves . . . And what that requires of us is to do away with the polarization, do away with the lack of discourse, and be able to just come into conversation with each other and not be so afraid to mess up,” says Saralyn Hodgkin, a Women in Power co-facilitator.
Learning what power can look like as a woman from a minority made everything fall into place, Rios says. “I joined [Women in Power] understanding that I wasn’t the only one experiencing these feelings.” Though she has participated in other leadership programs, Women in Power felt different. Rios says it was “more appealing because my relationship with power was one of caution. I wouldn’t say I have power, but I like to feel empowered, if that makes sense. [It] was a very interesting self-assessment of my whole identity and what relates to power and money and influence.”
What we do in six weeks or eight weeks or nine weeks is actually force you to think about these ideologies.
Surabhi Jain, Women in Power
“What we do in six weeks or eight weeks or nine weeks is actually force you to think about these ideologies,” says co-facilitator Surabhi Jain, Women in Power’s founder. “What is that bias coming from? What are the biases you have faced? Where is somebody else’s bias? What are their narratives? You and I don’t know, but perhaps it’s worth interrogating.” (Women in Power’s next cohort begins in February.)
Rios says that it took time to see herself as a leader but that learning about her sensitivities and others’ experiences through conversations about ambition, passion, and self-doubt was a “mind-blowing” experience.
“Don’t go through the same impossible obstacles that I went through because I didn’t have anyone here,” Rios tells people who seek out Hispanotech’s help. “I didn’t know how the game was played. Bursting the bubble as early as possible is life-saving.”
