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Hello everyone, Sunday March 8th 2020 was International Women’s Day, a day to mark the celebration of women’s achievements, increasing visibility and calling out inequity. And it had me think …. what responsibility to women do I have as a coach? Just as something starts showing up everywhere the moment we start paying attention to it, much around this showed up for me last week - in conversations with friends and family, in topics my clients brought to coaching and in many everyday happenings. It struck me as I was musing that although many of my clients ARE women, they certainly don’t make up 49.58 - 51% (depending on which gender split stats you look at) of my client list. Probably something more in the region of 25%- 35%. Which made me a bit cross. Yet the vast majority of my clients work for organisations that have very clear aspirations and intentions around gender and equal representation (I’m cognisant as I write that there are many forms of gender inequity in the workplace and that debating this along only the female:male ratio split is in and of itself worth questioning) and actively champion and support women in the workplace. And I also know, without wanting to over simplify the experiences of any individual, that there are many recurrent “topics” in my work with female clients and in my own lived experience that have to do with not feeling enough, and agency, and power. And then there are the myriad of ways in which we simply are not treated the same way as our male counterparts (have a read of Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women if you doubt this). And all of this got me thinking about what we can do about this in our work with women? What responsibility sits with our role as coaches, across all the genders, to promote and celebrate women’s achievements, increase their visibility and call out inequity? What stand can I make? Are we speaking powerfully to the organisations we work with about the gender split of those that get to work with coaches? Are we calling out the examples of systemic discrimination of women (and others) when we hear them in our work (and we do)? Do we check ourselves when we make assumptions about what a woman wants or needs support on in coaching? Are we talking enough about our work with this lens to see what else we can discover about our own bias? All of us know the power language and story has in the world around creating reality. I am sure most of you will have seen this brilliant reading of Camille Rainville’s ‘Be a Lady, they said’ by Cynthia Nixon; there’s not a woman amongst us who hasn’t heard or had all of this put to her…probably on a daily basis… since she was very young. And it had me think again…. what responsibility to women do I have as a coach? Sending warm wishes to you all
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