For my 26th birthday, I would like to celebrate women. I am who I am and have the opportunities that I do today, because of the many sacrifices, power and voices of uninhibited women ingrained throughout our history. And our work is not over just yet.
Just earlier today, I read that only 33% of FTSE 100 directors are female. How can we attempt to close this gap?
Chaarvi Chiduruppa and I are pleased to formally introduce to you the work we have been doing, over the past few months, to promote women empowerment and support, and also highlight women leaders in business. The Warwick MBA Women in Business Club aims to connect and create a strong support system for all the women across the Warwick MBA cohorts. This is a platform to create dialogue related to challenges faced by women in business and in society, to identify tangible steps forward, acknowledge your uniqueness, and realise that you are not alone!
The events we put up also extend out to big topics like diversity and inclusion, women empowerment, ethics and sustainability, etc. The society aims to promote “getting comfortable with uncomfortable conversations”. We also host a series of interesting business topics for the cohort to benefit from. These are open for everyone to attend!
We hope you enjoy our launch video featuring our work so far! ⚡
What we have achieved since the launch video (and overall!):
Group Coaching Sessions
✨ These are roundtables focused on discussing issues faced by women in their professional lives such as taking risks, having resilience, dealing with gender bias, and tackling casual sexism. The sessions, facilitated by a coach, created a safe environment for women in the cohort to voice their challenges and learn tangible ways to tackle them from their peers. We hope to develop this further through the LinkedIn Group
Guest Speaker Series
🌿 This was a response to an observation that not enough women showed up to networking events or as guest speakers. As a result of the pandemic, all speaker events were virtually held, and the flexibility helped us promote more women professional speakers! This allowed us to continue getting insights from industry practitioners and continue our networking. Featured companies included Amazon & Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, Citi Group, PwC Strategy&, GE Healthcare, Apple, J.P. Morgan, Johnson & Johnson, Bank of America, and more!
Inclusive Leadership Series
🌈 These webinars focused on topics surrounding diversity, ethics and sustainability. This is a two-fold effort, consisting of diversity discussions panels with members of our cohort, and webinars featuring senior executives. This has created an open dialogue and understanding of multiple perspectives and experiences on diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Examples of events include a Diversity Discussion Panel with the 2019/2020 MBA cohort, a talk from 2020 Empower Role Model, Ambily Banerjee (Director at GSK), and talk on Leadership from Gemma Stuart-Young (Director at Jaguar Land Rover).
The MBA Pilgrimage 