We Are Empowered

Women of the Channel Leadership Summit is about finding inspiration, connection, and professional growth – the steps past empowerment. It’s also about saying the quiet part out loud: gender inequity is a systemic problem, not one to be solved via individualism.

This past March, I had the honor of hosting a webinar sponsored by our parent company The Channel Company. I, along with several leaders of the channel, shared personal stories of encouragement and ways to spot and challenge gender inequities, and key strategies for organizational change.

What stuck out to me the most, and what sits with me still three months later, is a statement from Claudia Gómez Llamas, vice president global marketing at Schneider Electric. When commenting on the role of empowerment for women in their careers, Gómez Llamas powerfully stated: “We have our own power; we don’t need anyone to empower ourselves because we already have it.”

Indeed.

So often the narrative shared to women is one of empowerment. This understanding of a lack of empowerment is often framed within declarations that we as women hold a collective need to be told about the power we have and the skills we possess.

It seems ironic that we are told to be empowered while organizational systems and policies continue to remove access to career advancements, education, and capital.

Take, for example, the field of entrepreneurship. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2022 women-founded startups accounted for 2 percent or less of venture capital (VC) funding investments in the U.S. and Europe. A competing, but also compelling study on women and entrepreneurship from Harvard Kennedy School’s women and public policy programconfirms that 11 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms are women. Further, 13 percent of VC dollars in the U.S. go to startups where a woman is on the founding team.

For a statistics check – women comprise 50.49 percent of the U.S. population. We are half of the population but only receive a tenth of the funding – and that’s if I am being statistically generous.

Reframing Empowerment

A simple definition of empowerment is having the authority or power to do something. It can also be defined as becoming stronger and more confident in controlling one’s life and claiming one’s rights. And, as history and current social-political circumstances show us, a women’s right to control our futures can be taken away not just socially but legally also.

However, what if we reframe our narrative to be one in which women have power, that we are influential and brave, that we come to the proverbial table possessing the much-needed skills and talents that make teams and organizations better, more profitable, and higher functioning. Doing so would change us from focusing on finding ways to empower women, to finding ways to fund women.

Shifting the narrative from a need for empowerment to a standard that already exists allows us to see women for who we are fully: people with specialized educations who are at the forefront of tech and the IT channel.

We do not have a lack of empowerment. We as women have historically found ways to live our truths, find our voices, and inspire each other to build power in unique ways, all within the confines of patriarchy and social repression.

What we statistically lack is systemic access to rooms where decisions about the future of business are being made.

So, as some of us travel to Women of the Channel Leadership Summit in Palm Springs, Calif., next week, let us be reminded that we are already empowered. What we are looking to change, to shift, to make right, are the systems that tell us we are less than powerful because of our gender, gender identity, or gender presentation.

Let’s work to inspire action, to lean into our inclusive leadership, building change beyond keynote speeches and networking. Because, as the saying goes, when we work together as women, we are indeed powerful beyond measure.