New program for Women in Male Dominated Industries
If you knew that recovering from burnout takes months to years, would you change the way you work?
by Rachel Sinha and Tatiana Fraser
If you knew that recovering from burnout takes months to years, would you change the way you work?
Personal sacrifice, overwork, undermined leadership, aggressive competition and unwanted sexual attention. Sound familiar? Women who work in male-dominated professions know all too well the games they are immersed in, and the nuances to the well-trodden headlines.
Women in senior leadership positions who have navigated toxic work environments and invested years in their careers have much to lose by disrupting the status quo or speaking out.
We hear over and over again, ‘I thought it was just me.’ Far too many stories have gone untold.
We are launching The Systems Sisterhood: Male Dominated Industries, a place where powerful personal stories of women leaders can be shared. We hope to see collective patterns and identify the subtleties that are the opportunities for change, and offer a wider framework through which to understand an all too common experience.
We’ve come a long way, with educational interventions designed to teach girls that they can grow up and become programmers and scientists and to love math. Tremendous efforts to increase representation of women in male dominated fields and resources poured into diversity and inclusion, programs to support women in the science, technology, engineering fields…..
And yet, we still face a significant gap in representation, and especially in the senior leadership and C-suite roles.
This Sisterhood is a place to go deep, to shine light on the dark and invisible truths, to set aside ‘I’m fine’ for once.
An interview with Ginny
Ginny Cullen, a leader in the Engineering profession, saw our offerings and approached us to run a program for women in leadership positions.
Here are some of her personal insights on why this is so badly needed:
Can you tell us about your career and experience stepping away for your work — and what inspired you to reach out to the Sanctuary?
It was my interest in systems thinking and systems change work that led me to the Sanctuary. I attended a webinar that Tatiana gave on how systems thinking is infused with feminine principles and I realized that this perspective was missing in the corporate world. To me, it was an explanation as to why it was often difficult to try and shift existing systems of work into more collaborative structures — if the feminine principles were not valued at the same level as the new structure, then progress would be slow.
I spent 18 years working in the engineering consulting industry and for the most part had very positive experiences. I worked with supportive co-workers, many of them very much aware of the importance of diversity and inclusion within collaborative work environments where connection and respectful communication were upheld.
However, when I stepped away to take a break and assess what I wanted to do next, I had a wakeup call to how much fatigue I was carrying. It was a gradual process, but after about 2 months my energy levels faded so that I could do nothing but read and sleep — this lasted for almost 5 months. It was the most humbling period of my life. I had to completely surrender and trust that if I got enough rest I would eventually feel better. The level of fatigue surprised me and it caused me to reevaluate how I had been working. I also had to assess how the work environment can harbor invisible resistance that can wear you down over time.
When I started speaking to friends of mine who work in similar leadership roles within similar industries, I was concerned at the similarities in the experiences between us as well as the reluctance and fear to share our experiences with wider audiences.
What are some of the challenges you see women navigating in male dominated industries?
Women have to fit into a workplace that was designed in their absence. They often hold back parts of themselves to play by the rules of a system that favours competition over cooperation and self-promotion over success of the team. Working in this way can lead to unfulfillment, lack of motivation and exhaustion due to the necessity of wearing a professional costume — which acts as a barrier to authenticity.
The impact of high stress professions with unreasonable workloads and highly competitive work environments is burnout. Burnout looks different for every individual but always impacts work productivity and physical and/or mental health. The stories of burnout are not being shared widely enough, nor are the unreasonable expectations (often self imposed) that lead to working in an unsustainable way.
Why do you think these issues are still invisible and not discussed?
Both men and women who are brilliant supporters and advocates for women in their organizations are not aware of biases that can undermine female leaders.
This can look like subverting formal lines of communication to try and ‘smooth over issues’ that a growing leader is coming up against. This type of response undermines leadership and creates additional challenges. These challenges manifest as team members resistant to carry out tasks or provide support or backlash from difficult decisions including hiring or firing and promotions.
We need to identify the subtle shifts that women can take action on to strengthen resilience for the hidden resistance that is felt in an outdated work environment. We can’t do this without sharing lived experiences and identifying both the obvious and invisible barriers that stand in the way of working with ease.
Like other systems of inequity — these barriers and challenges are often internalized by women and men. This means that they are normalized, and typically operate in the shadows without being questioned. How else do you see this playing out?
Women in executive roles are often making horizontal moves between organizations to negotiate fair pay and to get promotions. This has a negative effect on the organizations they leave. We need to understand what is standing in the way of women being promoted within organizations as well as articulate the impact to organizations for not promoting within.
There are also gender related expectations that set women up to take on tasks that aren’t strategic or aligned with their career trajectory — like organizing the summer BBQ. Men typically only take on tasks they know will get them ahead while women take on tasks nobody is doing to help out.
Statistically women do the lion’s share of domestic work and often make sacrifices and choices to support family life, including taking on the load of the emotional work at work and at home. Beyond burnout, what other impacts are these invisible barriers and inauthentic ways of working having on women in the workplace?
Women in these professions are often delaying having a family until their mid to late thirties and then are having difficulty conceiving. Many are having to turn to the private medical system to get help with fertility issues. Women are having to work hard to get ahead in their 20’s and 30’s, taking on more than their share of work to prove themselves. Then when they start trying to have a family, and they can’t, another layer of shame shows up. This time, the shame is about not being enough of a woman.
We also see women ‘dropping out’ to have families — and making decisions to support their partners’ career while they take care of the children’s needs and domestic fronts, because the burden of carrying it all simply becomes too much.
Some reflections from us
“Having it all” is an impossible balance that sets women up for disappointment — and can have negative impacts on their health, their spirits, personal and professional lives in devastating ways.
We want to succeed, we have proven we can make it in a working world designed by men, we have the smarts and capacity. But outdated leadership styles perpetuate hierarchies and power instead of collaboration that promotes fairness and shared workloads. There are unanswered questions about the cultures and systems that persist in these fields of work.
If we want to create the conditions where both women and men can thrive, we need to shine light on these issues and find new ways forward.
We are looking forward to surfacing patterns and themes with a diverse cohort of women in the coming months — and to make sense together about how to connect the personal and internalized experiences into collective understanding and action.
Questions as we launch the program
Some of the questions that will guide this reflection include:
- How can we begin to shine light on the unconscious behaviours and communication that undermine developing female leaders?
- What if we could go to work and know that our co-workers have our backs and see our success as a collective achievement?
- What would happen if we could redirect energy that is being used to play defense into creative pursuits and development of those around us?
- How can we find a different way of working that doesn’t require us to sprint and then collapse at the finish line?
- How can we build rest and recovery practices into our work lives so that we can find sustainable modes of operating?
Our solution
The Systems Sisterhood — Male Dominated Industries is a place to find camaraderie and leadership support for women leaders (identified and gender diverse) in traditionally male dominated fields.
This program has been designed for women who have been navigating their professional careers for some time. These women will have gained a high level of success and at the same time, have faced systemic obstacles and barriers that feel like glass ceilings, limitations and isolation.
Despite attempts to make more room for women in professions such as accountancy, law, engineering, tech and media, the culture and demands make it very difficult for women who have worked hard to succeed, to actually thrive.
Hosted in small groups on zoom, this program will be an intimate place to go deep and to identify ways past the limitations we face.
We will illuminate our personal experiences and the connections to the systemic nature of the challenges we share, we will introduce systems change frameworks to help participants see paths forward. We will explore these barriers and start to think collectively about what we can do to shift outdated power structures and cultures towards new creativity, new freedom and a new way of being.
This is an invitation to a Cohort with people who understand and immediately ‘get it’.
You will find a brave space where you can be honest.
You will be validated.
You will make great friends with other senior women leaders.
You will leave with frameworks that help you have bold conversations.
We interview every applicant and curate special groups of up to 9 participants from different locations and industries.
