Were you aware it was International Women’s Day yesterday? If you weren’t – where have you been? I’ve been Facebooking and Tweeting it all week!!
In case you missed it, we joint hosted an event with our friends at Leading Women in Business, at the Renaissance Hotel in Manchester and had a great line up of speakers including Marie Diamond from The Film and book The Secret. Marie is a Feng Shui master and her talk about where you should have your office desk and your bed and why you shouldn’t have a statue of ‘The Thinker’ in your success corner, was very interesting.
If you’d like to know why – email me. Or go get Marie’s app on the app store.
We had a room with about 40 women in it (and 2 men, one of whom was one of the speakers). It was interesting because – although men were invited and also targeted through the Facebook advertising, only women bought tickets.
And that made me think – it is great that we come together as women, I mean women are great at collaborating and supporting each other aren’t they? But there is also a problem with that, as well as the definite upsides.
On the upsides, the event itself was a collaboration between The Find Your WHY Foundation and Leading Women in Business. Marie Diamond and, in fact, ALL of the other female speakers are members of the Association of Transformational Leaders – so there’s some more collaboration.
The event organiser – Asha – also organised for those who wanted to, to go on and join another event which was happening – WoManchester at the Radisson Edwardian – after our event finished. Another collaboration.
And the male speaker – Dene Stuart of the Thinking Revolution – is one of the members of the Professional Speakers Association – which again, all the speakers (except Marie) are part of. So, yet another collaboration.
The final collaboration of the day was UClan (university of Central Lancashire) – who rang Leading Women in Business during the week to ask if they could send a journalist and camera man to cover the event and go live at 3pm.
Of course, there were many mini collaborations before the day – with supporters and attendees sharing the event on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Again – pretty much all of these were women.
So – what’s the problem Cheryl? I hear you ask.
Well, here’s the thing. Unless we can get MEN involved, the key themes of International Women’s Day – gender equality, equal pay, lack of women in senior management and many others – will never be fixed. This is not the time to go into a political rant, so I won’t – but it bears thinking about – for next year’s event – how can we get more men involved. How can this become a day where everyone comes together to celebrate?
If you have any views on that – we would love to hear them – but meanwhile, know that it was a very successful day – according to the delegates, the vast majority of whom stayed for the evening networking and on into the night!! We celebrated, we shared, we collaborated and we had a lot of fun doing it.
If you feel like you need a bit of celebrating, sharing and support, why not go check out the Find Your WHY page here or have a look at our next retreat (which one lucky attendee yesterday won a free place to come to!) – retreat details here.