Women’s Organizations

Several women’s organizations exist today that help train, coach, and consult women in assisting them with professional development and career progression. These organizations empower people to produce unprecedented results rapidly, with much of their focus on women’s leadership and the development thereof. Most of the organizations were formulated from the underlying belief that increasing the number of quality women in the work place exponentially improves an organization’s ability to innovate, collaborate, improve, and perform (www.womensleadership.com).

Most written resources that exist today, i.e. books, periodicals, newsletters, training programs, etc, tell women what they need to know in order to be an effective leader in the workforce. Unfortunately most of these resources do not give further detail on the “how”, because being an extraordinary leader and change agent is more about core person and how well they target and harness the resources in the environment. These organizations help the women bring their core to the surface and how it identifies with leadership. In addition these organizations help examine the context 'the beliefs, myths and preconceptions' underlying your business decisions and help women discover how changing their context can make breakthrough change an exciting reality (www.womensleadership.com).

Based upon doing some research some common examples of Women’s Organizations that exist in the Northeastern Ohio community today according to Google include the following:

1. City of Club of Cleveland

2. Penton Media, Inc

3. Women’s Re-Entry Network

4. World WIT

5. Consortium of African American Organizations

6. Women’s Community Foundation

7. Cleveland Foundation

8. Council of International Programs

9. YWCA of Greater Cleveland

10. Profiles of Diversity Journal

In our interviews we did see a couple of trends amongst the women. Actually most are not members of such organizations listed above. However, they all do agree that if they had more hours in the day they would be members because such organizations have “exponential merit for women in business”, according to interviewee Merry Quebodeaux. Generally, all interviewees collectively agree that such organizations provide excellent network opportunities and allow women at different stages of their professional careers to interact and share their experiences and expertise with one another.

Some of the women that we did interview stated that they are in fact members of organizations which reside within the company they work for. For instance, Maura Mansour, a partner at PriceWaterhouse Coopers, states that there are several organizations within PwC that are broken down by local offices, industry specific groups, national groups, and other minority groups e.g. Asian American and African American groups. She, in particular, is involved in the Women’s partner group in her industry. This specific organization gives women partners in her industry group a chance to help mentor women other women, help them know about different opportunities, give them a guiding structure, and give them outlets to talk to women. In addition Maura also attends an annual women’s conference where women leaders are brought in to discuss how to appropriately interact with men, how to address different situations, and other various topics. She feels it is so important for women to have a peer group and a mentor group, and outlet in which to create such partnerships.

Another of our interviewees, Mala Garg, a partner at Ernst and Young, stated that she too is a participant of an organization that resides within her company. The name of the organization is Women in Leadership and they host quarterly conferences where they invite women to speak in great detail about their career path, resources used to excel, and offer personal experiences which others could benefit from hearing. In the last meeting they had invited the Chief Executive