Why Women truly aren’t moving forward in Business

This is a hard subject to talk about because the title feels so sad to me. I’m currently four weeks into visiting Sydney and my intention was to personally come to and experience the city. Also to see where women are at currently in todays society as business owners, entrepreneurs and honouring their full self.

So I had the pleasure of going to two Women in Business events this week and the first one was Women in Business in the Middle East.

The concept was having women speak who are currently in Bahrain who are Australian or have connected descent and there were organisers that were speaking on how we can globally cross Business from Australia to the Middle East.

The second event I attended was called Celebrating Female Founders re-writing the script where there were three guest speakers talking of their entrepreneurial business journeys.

Now from mentoring many women in their Businesses and from my lived experience, both events had something so obvious in common that we are missing for women. They were all trying to give women a route for the “what” and “how” but there was no speak of the “why”.

Now I know it looks like in 2022 we have all levelled up and you will see lots of places all around the world female founded and headed businesses and entrepreneurs. However both of these events described what’s in the how’s of inspiring women that create their own path in Business.

Given their detailed experiences of hardship in business but also the incredible highlight moments and what strategy they think is necessary and for example how it’s important that we learn how to say “no more”, how to understand our self worth of what we charge. The importance of not being influenced by opinions around you, to refrain from people pleasing and believing in yourself.

The importance of understanding the “Why”

So what we have there is an incredible outlook and outlet to how we move forward and what we need to do but I think where we’re not creating enough safe space is for the “Why”.

Why women when they get back to their coffee and laptop, or their homes and everyday life chaos on top of trying to build and expand a business. Why they procrastinate, why they doubt their ideas or feeling worthy enough to charge a certain amount. Why they feel the need to not share their ideas until they’re perfect, why they just struggle to move forward with people pleasing and boundary setting.

Why they get imposter syndrome and resist action feeling under qualified or under experienced. Why they build an audience and then are so affected by opinions of the people around them and often do within the network of all the followers that they’ve created, question their own direction. Making an individual even if they have built a profitable Business feel inadequate and ironically an imposter to being an owner or director. I feel like us as a team saying “You need to get over that and not be like that in business.” Is as bad and ineffective to the social expectations of the toxic masculine. Ironically what we have all coded too from learnt behaviour of patriarchy.

What stops women from moving forward in business

Having the pleasure to mentor Women in their businesses is the greatest thing in my life. But I have to speak my truth on this subject because the one most common thing I see that stops women moving forward and continuously comes up and stunts their progression regardless of the scale of their Business. Are the majority of all of these things because they are not spoken about in glorified environments like networking or social media as much, or given space to understand the complexity of it because we are conditioned to believe these are weak, hold guilt or shame, being unsuccessful and unfamiliar traits as Business owners.

When we identify our past and understand that women from the beginning of time were conditioned and socialised to show up as: small, to show up as perfect, well groomed. To not make mistakes and be the caregivers. We can start to identify why there is an underlining disconnect between our past and how we move forward from our true selves in a healthy, aligned way. More unpacking, understanding and support or tools is required for women to redesign their programming of today and maybe their generational trauma to then successfully implement the strategy and truly believe in it, from the bi-product of believing in themselves.

Which for myself at 33 is only one generation removed just one example being my mother born in the UK would have been quite likely refused a mortgage without a male guarantor or partnership in the 1970’s. So only then we were deemed inadequate to lend to as a gender and now we are trying to do our best moving forward and building Businesses from our truth. I believe we are still in a state of progression and are as a society treating the “symptoms” of all of these commonalities that hold us back from our conditionings and social expectation rather than working from and healing the “cause”. This is why Women in Business struggle to truly progress with ease and from an aligned place of confidence. Image a wall with cracks in it, if we just filled them the wall would do its job for a while and have more resistance for a while. It could look great from the outside. But do we think it would be more effective to knock the wall down and rebuild it? Imagine the sound, calm, structure. Rebuilding it with more experience too for even more aligned strength, without the anxiety if it eventually falling.

The impact of toxic masculinity

From history we know business was always male led. So it makes sense as to why women to be accepted first had to mimic the path of what men had created. Mimicking a lot of learnt glamourised behaviour in business being to hustle, “just get on and fix it”, leading by the mind, facts and disconnected to emotions, attachment to success, and being fully led by money in Business decisions. It’s all way out of date if you are looking for a journey without chronic stress, anxiety and force. Which I do believe both genders are slowly making change in and seeing clarity that it doesn’t build for longevity. But as Women we now have the opportunity to rewrite the script by learning this but also utilising our vulnerability, intuition and creativity to be able to build long sited businesses and brands with integral company culture. With the ability to slow down along with the inspired aligned masculinity of action, forward precise thinking, the ability to take responsibility. Grounded in service and honest, logical and accountable.

When we are fully in alignment we don’t sell we just speak our truth. When we led every business decision by the values and vision of the company we find and build the right team because there is no contradiction. The direction of our business, the content we want to create and offer our audience becomes clearer and simpler to access.

Human work via learnt behaviour and its time we stopped and honoured our truth. Give space to understand why we struggle with certain conditioned thoughts, expectations and believe we can honour them, heal and move forward from a true space leading to fulfilment building aligned businesses.

We then can encourage and create an environment to stop the need to look like we’ve got it all together and forcefully move forward doing the things we “should be” because in doing this all we are truly doing is given an injustice to ourselves of what we truly deserve, can be and are mimicking the cycle of oppression.

We are all a working progress, I am a working progress but please commit to you not what you think or the world has taught you to be.

Laura x