Insights of a Career Coach: Addressing systemic gender discrimination
Often achieving a successful career is working in a job that aligns with your professional identity, values, skills and education.
For women, this alignment regularly gets interrupted. From their mid-30s, women’s career choices start to adjust to what others need; when the decision is made to return to work, over time these efforts can lose momentum and fail. Many women experience they cannot find a re-entry point back into high quality work.
This has significant negative implications, affecting not only their financial future but also their capacity for self-determination in their own lives.
There has been an array of woman-centred interventions and programmes supporting women to navigate back to the workplace and these have had considerable success in moving women to an empowered professional identity.
Business in the Community Ireland’s (BITCI) Women@Work programme has been successful in transitioning women into high quality jobs through a mix of individualised career coaching, training and mentoring by our valued business partners and enormous dedication by the women themselves to overcome the barriers in their path. It has led to these women moving into roles in professional advisory services, the civil service, IT and finance sectors. It has enhanced the women’s confidence and independence and positioned them as role models for their families.
As their career coach, I see first-hand the extent to which the women need to be able to maintain their motivation and commitment over the long-term to achieve these results. I also think, ‘it shouldn’t be this hard’.
If women are to re-enter the workforce successfully, there needs to be a willingness to address the deeper root causes of gender inequality, both in our companies and in society. That willingness is being eroded in some companies now due to the withdrawal of support for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion measures.
BITCI’s Elevate – The Inclusive Workplace Pledge which has over 65 large companies as signatories is committed to enhancing recruitment and retention of marginalised jobseekers. From the data gathered, core ingredients to a successful employment focused initiative for women returners are:
- Returner programmes with a high number of places and regular recruitment calls, focusing on transferrable skills.
- Remote and hybrid working offerings supporting shared parenting and rural based women.
- Strategic part-time hiring through job shares giving access to those women caring alone or caring for a child with a disability.
- Government funded programmes that link skills shortages to industry, focusing on re-skilling and connecting women directly to employers.
Adopting a dual approach of empowerment and re-skilling of women at an individual level and the creation of employment led pathways is what is needed if we are to genuinely address the systematic gender discrimination that currently presents to many women.
Instead of EmpowerHer, MotivateHer, PropellHer, it is time to take the necessary action to simply Hire Her.
Gail Fitzgerald, Career Coach BITCI’s Women@Work programme
