Photo by Anna Shvets
As Women’s History Month and the celebration of International Women’s Day comes to a close, we want to take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the organizations we had the privilege of working with during such a pivotal month for so many companies to drive gender equity action forward.
With this year’s International Women’s Day theme of #BreakTheBias, individuals were called to take action for collective progress. At Gild Collective, we worked with our clients to approach this theme in different ways—providing tools for interrupting bias in big ways within workplaces and small ways within our own interactions.
We started off the month delivering the final session of our Changing Bias Behaviors program to the teammembers of Twisthink, an innovation firm in Holland, Michigan. This was a continuation of work we began with the company’s leadership team last summer, and we focused on the actions that individual contributors can take to interrupt their own biases and serve as allies for one another.
The following week, which included International Women’s Day, our clients Circor and FIS both opted for our special women’s history month program on Setting Intention and Boundaries in Transition. Especially relevant as many organizations are restarting halted plans to return to the office, this program focuses on breaking biases by:
Exploring the current state of work—remote, in-person or hybrid—and the positive and negative norms that have been adopted in the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Increasing awareness of potential gender biases and inequities with the continued state of workplace transition and uncertainty.
Identifying intentional methods for establishing personal and professional boundaries—fighting bias to create a flexible and sustainable workplace environment for all.
Of course, one of the benefits of setting (and keeping!) these boundaries is avoiding the burnout that comes from being always-on during difficult periods. This was our focus of our IWD session with GAF and a topic that came up during Kelsey’s participation in a panel of women small business owners with MessageMedia Group out of Australia.
In March we also continued a series with VOX Global on building allyship culture and delivered a single session on the same topic to close out TIBCO’s month of programming to celebrate the women of the WISE (Women Inclusion Success and Equity) employee resource group. While we focused on different key aspects with both organizations, the content was centered on:
Understanding the presence and impact of unconscious bias in the workplace and beyond.
Increasing participants’ confidence to recognize and interrupt biases.
Developing concrete steps and actionable tools that allow each individual to become an ally to the women in the organization—creating a culture of advocacy company-wide.
Finally, we got back to our roots with a 3-part series on Mapping Career Strategy with the non-profit, LISC. This program allowed participants of the newly-formed women’s initiative to spend time looking inward to create a holistic strategy map to drive their goals for the year ahead. The map—rooted in core values, purpose and personal strengths—also allowed participants to identify areas of mentor and sponsor support to develop an ideal personal board of directors to guide them as they achieve their specifically defined objectives and strategies.
It was a busy, but invigorating month! We love seeing all of the different ways that our clients choose to #BreakTheBias within their organizations and can’t wait to see what is next for each of them. The work is far from over, so we leave you with this reminder of the 2022 theme which lasts well beyond a single day or a single month: