Women In Leadership: A Need For A Greater Systemic Change With Belinda Clemmensen

Foreign.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

And so this week we're going to be talking about the why of Better Way. So if this is your why, then you are the ultimate innovator and you are constantly seeking better ways to do everything. You find yourself wanting to improve virtually anything by finding a way to make it better. You also desire to share your improvement with the world. You constantly ask yourself questions like what if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? How can we make this better? You contribute to the world with better processes and better systems while operating under the motto I'm often pleased but never satisfied. You are excellent at associating, which means that you are adept at taking ideas or systems from one industry or discipline and applying them to another, always with the ultimate goal of improving something. So today I've got a great guest for you. Her name is Belinda Clemenson. She co created Paddle to a cure in 2000. This women led series of sea kayaking expeditions for people living with breast cancer taught her that there are different ways to build and lead organizations and that women working together do things differently. Almost 20 years later, Belinda founded the Women's Leadership Intensive with a mission to inspire, empower, support and equip women to lead the change the world needs. Today she serves as CEO of the organization A Certified B Corp. These two formative experiences drew Belinda to work with women in leadership. Now her passion is for the potential for positive change when women lead at scale. Belinda loves her work and feels honored to work and mentor amazing women who make a difference daily through their leadership. Belinda has received the Gold Canada Award for Excellence in Training and is a certified professional coach, training provider and member of the International Coaching Federation. She is also a CEO, activator and member of the Equal Futures Network and the Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce. Belinda qualified as a finalist for the Canadian association of Women Executives and Entrepreneurs Extraordinary Woman of the Year award. She published articles in the Journal of Experiential Education, Adventure Kayak Magazine, Kanawha Magazine, and was a finalist in the National Flair Magazine Volunteer Awards. She is a regular presenter at conferences around the world. Belinda earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Waterloo and her Master's of Education in workplace Learning and Change from the University of Toronto. Any place that takes her to the peace and beauty of nature is Belinda's happy place, especially when she is in her sea kayak, backcountry camping and learning to sail. Belinda lives in Ontario with her partner Shane and son Gabe. Belinda, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Gary. It's great to be here.

That was a mouthful. You got a lot going on there.

Melinda so now you're not in Ontario, right? You live outside of Ontario?

No, I live in Ontario, but I live in what we north is relative in Canada, Right. So I am in what's called the near north because there's so much more north north of me. But whenever you sort of get north of that band, that's right by the Canada U.S. border, that's where all our big cities are. So I'm north of that in a little town called Huntsville, Ontario.

Okay, so where did you grow up? Take us back to what you were like when you were in high school or even before. What was your childhood like?

Belinda I grew up in a very quiet rural place, and so I think that's where my love of nature came from right from the beginning and my love of peace and quiet. And so grew up in a small town in Ontario. And that worked for me when I was in elementary school. For the most part, by the time I got to high school, I was looking for something bigger in my life. So small town high school, for any of those in your audience who also grew up small town high school, you kind of either love it or it feels a bit like you're in this small pond and you're trying desperately to get out of it. And that was definitely me. So I think high school for me was a time to rebel. It was a time to look at the sort of systems and structures around me and ask a lot of questions and do a lot of pushing back on those things. And honestly, I think that set me up pretty well.

Okay, so for those that are listening, Melinda's why is Better way Which we already talked about her. How is challenge to challenge the status quo and push the limits.

Right.

Think differently. And ultimately what Belinda brings is a way to contribute, add value, have an impact in people's lives. So it sounds like you were already doing that when you were very young.

I think so. It's interesting because having done my yos felt a little bit like telling me back my life story.

Exactly. Okay, so you have high school in a little town. Well, like what kinds of things were you into in high school?

I was into theater, I was into books, I was into anything that sort of took me to the bigger world outside of my small town and my small high school. I was already a feminist in high school and a pretty strong minded feminist at that. I remember co writing a feminist magazine in high school with a good friend of mine who felt like the only other feminist in my school. And I'm sure that was not true, but it kind of felt like it way back then. And what Was that, the 80s? Yeah. So that was kind of. I was definitely a fringe kid in high school and that suited me pretty well. And I kind of feel like I've always been a little on the margins, to be honest. Always questioning and pushing. As you said, it's that it's the better way, it's the challenging and it's the what can I do about it? How could I make this better?

So what got you into the feminist movement or being considering yourself a feminist? What was that turning point for you?

I think it was my experience of just seeing the differences in my own family and my own community. And I think a really big turning point for me was early in my career I worked for Outward Bound, Canada. I did a little bit of work in the US as well, but mostly in Canada. And I'm big believer in Outward Bound. I learned to be an amazing facilitator there. I learned to be an amazing expedition leader there. They do great work and the outdoors is a very interesting place to notice gender differences. So for example, whenever I was in a palace, had an instructor pairing. So there would be two instructors for any expedition that we were taking out on a canoe trip or a sea packing trip or whatever it might be. Whenever there was a male, female, co instructor pairing, people would inevitably go to the male for all things technical, all things hard skills, and inevitably come to me as the female for all things relational, emotional, facilitative. Now I love both of those things, right? I love the facilitative conversational stuff. But I also really like technical things. I like Learning them. I like knowing how to fix things. I like knowing how to navigate, knowing how to tie a knot. I find that really fun and engaging too. And so I always felt in those situations that I. We had this gender binary always put over here. And it's not that I needed to completely flip it, but I just wanted to be the whole thing. I wanted to be able to be a whole person. And I think that's the downside of the gender binary, is it pushes into these boxes that may not feel like us or it may not feel like the entirety of us now.

So define for us what you mean by a feminist. What is a feminist?

Yeah, I kind of go back to a really simple definition, which is a feminist is just someone who believes in equal rights and opportunities for all people, regardless of gender. We're thinking now these days of gender as a spectrum, which I think is actually really healthy shift that we're making in our society. Right. We're moving away from the strictly binary. You are masculine or feminine and saying, well, actually there's a lot of gray area in between these things. And so feminism, although it's a tricky word because it has a history, the way that I use it and the way that I like to work from it is just believing that everybody deserves equal rights and opportunities. And right now, we don't have that.

Okay, so you were Outward balance showed you that women could do just as much as men, and women shouldn't be marginalized or put into the box of, hey, you're just a relationship emotional gal, and we'll go to him for everything else.

Yeah, yeah. And vice versa. I mean, I'm assuming there's probably men who also got tired of only being asked technical questions and might want to have a relational question or be on the other side of it. So I'm assuming that maybe there was a longing on both sides to be able to be more. More of a whole person.

So how was that received in your high school?

Well, small town Ontario, I imagine, is like small town, lots of places. And so I couldn't get out of there fast enough in terms of getting out into the bigger world and trying to meet new people and, yeah, expanding my worldview, wanting to travel. That was kind of my response to it. I knew that I could not continue to learn and grow in that small town context, and a lot of people can, but for me, that just wasn't working.

Mm. Okay, so off to college now. Where did you go to college again?

I went to do an undergrad at the University of Waterloo, which Is a school in Ontario and did a five year co op there. So met lots of people, co ops, great for getting out and actually working. So yeah, that was my sort of a next step in moving out into the world.

Okay, and then you did some education after that as well? Right.

Then it's interesting because I have a science degree. I've never worked a day in science. I think it was through doing a science degree that I learned that I probably didn't want to be a scientist, but it was still a good experience. Like, I think education in and of itself is so beneficial on so many levels. But then I realized what I was really interested in is more about human systems and human relationships and human dynamics. And so that's where I went in to do a master's degree about workplace learning and change thinking. We spend so much of our time, our energy, the contributions that we make in the world, in our work, that if I was going to start looking at how can we make things better, that was the place that made sense to do it.

Okay, so got your degree there and then what was your first job after that?

I worked all throughout my master's degree. So I come from a history of business people. My dad's got a construction management business and his dad had a concrete business. And so when I graduated by undergrad, it kind of didn't occur to me to go get a real job. I started building my own facilitation and training company early on and did a lot of subcontracting work to kind of get that off the ground. And then by the time I did my master's, I was looking more, I think more at what does a leadership development, consulting or training look like? What would that mean? And so that's kind of where I went from there with my business.

Okay, first business, your own business was a leadership training. What was that called?

It was called Clemenson Consulting. I chose the name so that I had the option to change my mind anytime about what I was doing. Keep it open, keep it flexible.

How did that go for you? How did the. Your first business work out? Or maybe you're still doing that?

Well, not really, I'm not still doing it, but it actually worked out great for me. I love freedom. I love being able to do what I think is best fit at the time. And so being a business owner allowed me to do that. I was young, I was in my 20s, so I didn't really need to be making big bucks. I was happy to be having experiences and working with great people and great companies. So I did that for quite a long time. And there came a turning point as I got older, sort of in my 40s, where I started to look at that work and say, I am supporting a system in the corporate world, in the capitalist society that we live in, that I'm not sure I fully believe in. And so that was a bit of a crisis because my business was doing fine and I loved doing the work that I was doing with the people that showed up in my spaces, right? Whether it's training programs or whatever. But there was this doubt in the back of my mind saying, am I doing the right work? Am I helping these people to perpetuate systems that I don't think are best or that I don't think are working for a lot of people? And so it took me, I don't know, probably three or four years of going through a process of wondering and asking myself those questions and having a bit of a crisis, to be honest, about what am I doing with my life? And I'm sure lots of people have that crisis around that point in your life too, right? Your late 40s start wondering, okay, what's this all about? What's the last third or hopefully half gonna be like? And so that's what sort of led me back to my feminist roots and to start asking the questions. If I was going to support leaders, who do I want them to be? What kind of work do I want them to be doing in the world? And by then, we finally had some good research and data on not just the fact that our numbers are still really low in terms of women in leadership, but also when we do have women in leadership, we see incredible benefits, not just for women, but for businesses, for communities, for societies. And so all of these things just started to line up to the point where I shifted my focus and changed my business to be the Women's Leadership intensive. And that's where we come in with this mission to inspire, empower, support, and equip women to lead the change the world needs. And I think there you've got your better way and you've got your challenge and your contribution, and they all line up again.

Yep, yep. What you said was you didn't believe in the system that you were in. So what do you mean by that? Like, give us an example.

Yeah, well, I could tell that even without doing research, which I subsequently did, but I could tell that some people were being promoted over other people, that it just seemed like some people were being heard at the table and other people were not. I look at Executive teams. And I still do this to this day. Whenever I'm looking at an organization that I might want to work with, I look at like, what does their executive team actually look like? Right. And if that executive team all looks the same, which almost all of them still do, then we know we've got a diversity problem. And diversity problems are not just accidental. Systems are designed to maintain and uphold what we know as those norms. And we can design those systems differently, we can design them better so that they are more inclusive. But I think we have a lot of work to do to get there.

Gotcha. So have you seen improvement? When did you start the Women's Leadership Intensive?

That was probably seven years ago now.

Okay, seven years ago.

Yeah.

And what's the purpose of the Women's.

Leadership Intensive is to support women in their leadership development for a couple of reasons. One, so that they are ready to level up in their career. Right. So they're ready to take on the next leadership role. Another is for development in place. So how can you have more influence in the role that you're in? Because some people aren't looking to be promoted. They love what they do, but they want to be able to do it with more influence and scope. And regardless of sort of where you go with that leadership development, one of our sort of core ways of working with people is it's about leading as you. So not necessarily emulating the leadership styles or the approaches that you've seen in the past, because, frankly, those are already outdated, even though they're still everywhere. But it's really about figuring out what matters to you, what are your values, what feels purposeful and meaningful to you as a leader, what kind of conversations do you want to be having? And it's kind of this idea that if you are in a leadership role, I would say, let's say 50% of your job is the functional stuff. So maybe you're a finance person, maybe you're in sales, maybe you're in operations. That's great. In a leadership role. I call that half your job. The other half your job is leading people. It's having hard conversations. It's having vision. It's understanding the context of the world around us and knowing that, hey, we don't exist in a world anymore where we can ignore things like diversity and inclusion or sustainability. Right. Even if that's not part of your job, if you're a leader, part of your job.

Well, so I have two daughters, right. And so this is interesting for me as well. And I have a lot of women on our team here also. So what have you found makes a great leader?

Yeah, good question. I think a willingness to know yourself first, understand your own life experiences, be reflective. Right. Skill of reflection. Can you look back and understand your own life experiences? Can you understand your own privilege?

Understand your own privilege?

Well, I think we have sort of a bit of a myth of how everyone is self made or there's a myth of meritocracy that the, the best person rises to the top and that's why they've got the job. And there's been some interesting research that's really debunked that idea that a lot of the people who have those positions or those roles also have a lot of other things like resources or white skin or they happen to be men. Or even their name can be predictive of where somebody might end up in a certain organization. And it's not to say we should necessarily feel bad about that, but is to understand that it exists. And so my starting point to go somewhere is different from yours is different from somebody else's. Right. It's the idea of that intersectionality. What are the factors where we have privilege in our lives? What are the places where we are marginalized in our lives and just starting to understand our own picture so that we then have space to understand that others pictures are very different than ours. Hmm.

I can see how this could all become pretty controversial.

100%. This is the leadership courage of the future, I think, is being willing to have those kinds of conversations.

It's hard to tell how much of it's true. Meaning when I look at my own friends, my own friend group I grew up from, my father was a dentist. We had all the advantages that you could have, and my brothers and sisters has done well. But if I look at most of my friends that have done really well, most of them, they came from nothing. They came from working their butts off. So even some of my friends that are doing well now are wondering about their own kids. Should I not give them what I could give them and have them struggle? Because it seems like the people that had to struggle have risen to the top and the ones that had everything given to them are not at the top. So what's the truth? Right.

Yeah. Well, and I think it's also, it's this interesting interplay between individual experience and then themes and trends when we look at bigger population groups. Right. So absolutely. Like anything that I say in general, there's going to be individual exceptions to that. Of course. Right. Generalities are inherently inaccurate. However, when we look at sort of bigger themes in populations. Let's say women in leadership, just because that's the thing I know the most about. We can look at, for example, data that will tell us that Fortune 500 CEOs, we just hit 10% women this past year, like in 2023. There's never been more than 10% CEOs of Fortune 500 companies that were women. So we can look at that and say, okay, well, obviously we have a disparity here between these two groups of people when we look at it at the population level or those big group level. And CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is just one metric, but it's an interesting metric because those are people who have a lot of impact and influence in the world. So it's interesting to say, well, then who's setting the tone for business culture in North America? Right. Not really women or not at scale. So then we start to say, okay, but are there individual women who are being incredibly successful in business? Of course there are. Both are true. It's not either or, it's both. And there are definitely individuals who struggled, and that's what made them great.

Yeah.

And then there are other individuals who had an easier path, and that's what got them to be great because they had all the resources and they were able to use those resources. Both are true.

Yeah, both are true. And it comes back to the. One of the things that comes out for me is looking at the Gap versus the Gain. So you said it's 10% women CEOs in the Fortune 500.

Yeah.

What was it, 20 years ago?

Yeah. Well, this is the thing. This is something I talk about in the book a lot, is the idea of things are getting better and they're still bad. So we want to look at both of those things. We want to look at progress made, and we also want to look at how big's the gap left to go. So, again, not an either or, but if we look at progress made, like two thumbs up across the board, there are definitely more women CEOs in Fortune 500 today. And there's a graph that will show that curve and it's going in the right direction. It's great. And this is true almost everywhere. We see some drops in the data where it says, like, we had a bad year, or we were on a trajectory where we were seeing this kind of progress towards equality and equity, but then something happened and it dipped down. So it's looking at both. It's saying, yes, the trajectory is going in the Right direction. That's progress. That's the gains. And the gap is still 40%. That needs to be made up if we're going to get to 50, 50, which women are just past 50% of the population and 48% of the workforce.

So is the goal then to have 50, 50?

I think it would be an interesting experiment. I really do. We've never done it. I would love to see what happens. I really would.

What is the goal of feminism? What is it? What are feminists trying to accomplish?

I can't answer that question for all feminists, but I can certainly answer it for myself. I think there's two things. I think certainly we want to get to equality, which is where we get the same thing. So that would be the 5050 idea, right? It would be really cool to see 50% of. I mean, we're just going on the Fortune 500 CEO things because we've got the numbers. But it'd be really cool to see 50% of those CEOs be women and see what changes. We know that there's good research that shows that things do change when we have women in leadership, so it'd be cool to see what happens. So that's the equality piece of getting there. But I think the other interesting thing is when we look at the workplace, for example, it wasn't really built for women's lives because women weren't there in the past when the workplaces were set up. Things like, we're moving towards parental leaves and acknowledgement that all workers are potentially parents in the workplace as well as workers in the workplace. But in the past, that certainly has been on the shoulders of women. So how can we also create different kinds of systems that take into account different kinds of people's lives? So now if women are 48% of the workforce, then what needs to change about workplaces to make them more friendly as a culture to women and women's lives? And childcare is an easy one to look at there because we can see the impact that a lack of parental leaves has on women's careers. Particularly.

Should a leader of a business, an organization, have the ability to pick who they want as the successor, or should it be dictated to them that they have to pick a woman?

That is such a juicy question. Yes. Well, the thing is, I think the ability to choose for yourself is really important. And that makes it even more imperative that you do the work to understand your own bias. Because, interestingly, this research about the myth of meritocracy, what they found was that the more people believe in meritocracy, the more likely they are to demonstrate bias in hiring.

What is meritocracy?

Meritocracy is the idea that you got there because of your. Your merit alone, because you're the best person for the job. Not because your skin is white or because you're a man or because you had the right connections or were introduced to the right people.

But it makes it sound like having the white skin color, having a family that's done well in the past, working hard, having the right school systems, working your butt off is a bad thing?

No, not at all.

Not at all.

It's not about.

Does anybody listening to this not believe that based on what they're hearing right now, how would they not believe that?

It's not about feeling bad about it or thinking that it is a bad thing. It's understanding that your starting point's a little different than somebody else's. Or it's understanding that we tend to hire people who are like us or look like us. That's well documented. And so it takes intention for us to go, hey, why do I actually think that candidate who looks more like me and behaves more like me is the best person? Is it because they actually are, or is it because it's so familiar to me? It feels right. And can I challenge myself to say, I want someone beside me or with me who is very different, who doesn't look the same, think the same, hasn't lived the same kind of life, so it's not really about. Again, I don't want people to feel bad. And I think it's not helpful or constructed for us to feel bad about being white or about having had resources in our lives. I think what's much more constructive is to be able to say, okay, I recognize the difference, though. I see it in myself. And to be able to go, okay, because of that, I see the world this way. And it's important, I think, for today's leaders to expand that view significantly and say, how are other people seeing this world? How can we ask that? How can we find that out? And if people around us all look like us, it's really hard to get that information.

Yeah, I could see that. I have a friend who writes a weekly email newsletter in the finance world. He's one of the world's leading economists, and I went to an event at his house, and it was amazing, the diversity in that group. I mean, it was just crazy. Every possible walk of life you could imagine was there. Even his own kids. He has seven kids, two that are biological. And then five that were adopted in five different races. And I asked him one time, I said, why do you have such diversity in your. I mean, in your group here? I've never seen something like that. And he said, well, if all I do is look at the world through my own eyes and I don't get the perspective of everybody else around me, then I really don't know what's going on. And I really can't write or talk about it because all I know is what I know.

This is it.

Yeah, I found it really interesting to, you know, he says, my job is to tell the world what's going on, but I can only see it through my eyes if those are the only ones I use. So.

Yeah. And then if we scale that out a little bit, like, if all the other people who are telling the world how things are look the same way and kind of have that similar life path, then we're going to get one slice of the story. Unless we have people like your friend who's really working intentionally to expand the viewpoint, expand the perspective, and have it be a lot more rich and diverse and inclusive of all kinds of threads in the story.

Yeah, I can see it being challenging to get people to even care about what you're saying, because if I'm in a leadership role, it's worked great. I got a great business. I got great things going on. I'm living the life that I want to live. I don't care what you have to say. I don't care about diversity. I don't care about all the stuff. It doesn't matter to me.

Right.

Because I already know what works. This works. What you're telling me is, hey, let's see what happens. I'm not willing to go to a. Let's see what happens. I want to know. This already works. I know it has for generations. Why do I want that? I don't.

And it works for some people. It works for some people much better than others. And, I mean, I'm certainly seeing a movement here in younger generations coming into the workforce. And a lot of the industries that I work in where they are starting to say, if there's not actual diversity, equity, inclusion work happening, like real work, not just lip service, but real diversity, equity, inclusion work happening in an organization. I don't want to work there. If they don't really care about sustainability and it's only about profit, I don't want to work there. And so I think the rubber will start to hit the road as the workforce changes and Puts pressure on organizations and other stakeholders start to put pressure on organizations, which is already happening. Right. It's happening through policy, it's happening through the court of public opinion. I do think the pressures are there and for courageous progressive leaders to be able to start looking at the context and the culture that surrounds us and say, okay, what's happening here? What do people care about? What do I need to do differently to not just be the leader today, but be the leader tomorrow?

So tell me the downside to feminism. I want to give you an example. In one of my daughter's schools that she went to, they hired this diversity expert. There was no diversity in the school, the whole area, there wasn't any diversity. And they kind of made it up. They had to create diversity. And it turned such a great school into not a very good school. It just had a lot of hate after a while, turned negative, the whole thing turned negative. And I know that wasn't the intent, but it did go south and it did go sour. And I've seen that happen as well. So what are some of the downsides to that movement?

Well, I mean, I think one thing that I struggle with all the time is like, how do we have these conversations and, and not be like pointing fingers at each other and blaming and creating further positionality? Because I really don't think that's helpful. I think if we're not all on board with doing this together, it's really hard to get anywhere fast. So it's like to create a gender balanced, gender equitable world is going to take women and men working together who both want it. Right? Who both see that there's benefits for all of us, for our children in a world that is more gender balanced and more equal. And the same is true for anti racism work. Right? Like that work needs to be done together. And so if we have a bunch of people who are feeling like they're on sides and they're positional and they can't talk to each other, that's a problem. I think we're hopefully, as we're learning how to have these kinds of conversations, these difficult conversations about things like gender and race and social class and wealth. I hope that we're getting more skilled at it. Right. And a lot of people will say we gotta call out people who are doing things wrong. And I always think of it as like, how do we call people in? How do we call people in to have conversations? Even if they're hard conversations? The idea that we won't be uncomfortable is not a thing anymore. We're going to have to be uncomfortable. But again, isn't that part of leadership, being willing to be uncomfortable?

Yeah, that's true. It's an interesting path you're on. I'm sure it's had not been without challenges and won't continue to be with challenges. You're trying to challenge the status quo, right? Find a better way so people can have a bigger impact.

That's it. That's it. And I think it is. It's not the path of least resistance, that's for sure. And I recognize that. I feel it.

So how does your husband and son feel about your path?

My husband is an amazing feminist and ally. He's a high school shop teacher. He teaches construction and woodworking and he's been a huge advocate for getting girls in skilled trades, for having girls only construction classes. Like he's 100% on board. And it's great. I mean, we get to have these conversations together. We're learning about it together. Neither one of us is perfect. We make mistakes, we make each other mad. But yeah, it's been a pretty cool journey together. Yeah. And my son, I think younger generation, right. He's a teenager, they talk about this stuff in ways that we did not when we were kids.

So you brought something up right there that I would guess some of the other listeners picked up on. You said girls only.

Yeah.

How does girls only fit in with inclusion?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm so glad you asked that because in certain spaces, if you are used to being a minority, right. If you're one of the few, so that could be an executive team, maybe you're like the only woman. Or there's only two women on a team of 12, which happens a lot, Right. That's kind of the stats right now. You're usually one or two on an executive team. Or if you're in an industry like mining skilled trades, which is a male dominated space, you're probably the only woman on the crew, right. And so in those kinds of environments, it is really helpful to have some women only spaces because it takes away the work of being the only. Right? Imagine you're the only woman on a construction crew. You're the only woman at the executive table. I'm telling you, it's extra work to be that only. Maybe you're the only person of color, maybe you're the only LGBTQ2S+ person, right? Whatever it is, being an only is a lot of work. Or one of the minority. So it's helpful in those situations to have some in this case women only or girls only spaces because in that case you don't have to do that extra work. It's kind of like the first story I told about working with a male co instructor on a sea kayaking expedition. When I'm working with women on a sea kayaking expedition. It takes the whole gender binary dynamic out of it for a little while. I don't have to worry about it. And the same might be true of men only spaces. I don't know because I haven't been in them. But I've certainly seen that sort of that magic happen in women only spaces. Whether that's leadership development or skilled trades or whatever the environment might be. There's lots of places we don't need that. But there are some places I think we still do. Yeah.

I mean, how do you feel about men only groups? I mean they're frowned on. Right now you have a men only club frowned on. Men only golf clubs frowned on. Yeah, Only business group. Don't like it. It's frowned on. Hey, I want to join. So how do you balance that if it's supposed to be inclusive? And I want to take a second to just kind of thank you for answering all these challenging questions because I've never had an opportunity to just ask these kinds of questions and get answers without all kinds of emotion involved. Right.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's so and so the difference with men only spaces and I am not saying we don't need men only space. I think we need healthy men only space where men can be whole human beings, including emotions and the whole picture for sure. I don't know if all men's spaces are like that. They're probably a mix. Some are, some aren't. The difference is when it is the socially dominant group. So if it's men only space in a society that is male dominated, which is we have today we still have a more patriarchal male dominated society that's a little different because you have a different goal with your men only group than you do with your women only group. The women only group, we are trying to move from a marginalized position to being able to be one of many. And so that's not the case with men only groups. This could also be true of like a lot of the people that I work with who are doing anti racism work say we need spaces for people of color to gather where we don't have to explain anything to anybody. We don't have to explain it to people who are have never had that experience. Right. We can just talk to each other and it takes some of the weight off and some of the pressure off. Whereas if we were to say the same thing, like let's have white only spaces, it would be perceived very differently. Right. So it depends on which end of the dominant marginalized spectrum you're on and what you need from that space. Right?

Yeah. And it's interesting because you really are only looking at it from one perspective, which is the minority perspective. Right. But you're not looking at it from the majority perspective. So let's say the men's club, like you say the executive group has one woman in it or two women in it. It's not easy for them either. Right. It's not easy to have a woman in the group because the dynamics change on all guys. Group is totally different than you throw a couple of women in there. So now got to deal with that too. So it's not a one sided affair.

It's good to come back to things like human rights law or policy or things like that where we can say, okay, what's reasonable here? It's reasonable to say that in a business setting we potentially could have equal number of men and women in leadership roles or that we would have representative people of color in leadership roles.

In an ideal world, would you say, okay, the. It's 50, 50 men to women. So we need to have 50, 50% in leadership. Men to women, it's 30, whatever, I don't know all the percentages of black Asian. So let's say it's 30% black. So now 30% has to be black. Do you believe that life should be fair? Life has to be. Is fair.

I think it's a goal. I think it's idealistic, I grant you that. But I do think it's an interesting shift in perspective when we start to think about it that way. Why not? Like, what are the arguments? Not. And I know that there's some upskilling that might need to happen for people who haven't had those roles in the past, but there's also again, like some really great research that's showing that this idea that we don't have enough qualified women or we don't have enough qualified people of color is actually being debunked too.

So how is that different than a socialistic view? Because why work hard? Why would I work hard to get to the top when it's supposed to be fair and I'm not supposed to be able to get to the top? Because if I'm at the top, then it's not fair. Or maybe I started at a different level and I got here because of my skin color, because of my parents or because of whatever. So why would I bother to work hard?

I think you're asking a question that, for example, women and people of color and other marginalized groups have probably been asking themselves for a long time. But they haven't though.

They have.

Not at scale.

It won't ever be at scale.

Oh, I don't know. I still am idealistic enough to hope that it will. I don't see why I shouldn't. I really don't. I. I don't see why. If we're going to use the gender math, which is easy math, because it's 50 50, I don't see a reason why we wouldn't aspire to have 50% of all leadership roles be women. There's great benefits to it. There's tons of research behind it.

Can you see how confusing what you're saying could be to somebody? Because we go round and round. Well, we got binary, but we don't want binary. It's 50 50, but we don't really want to use 5050 because we don't want to say there's men and women. We want to say there's a spectrum of, of gender. So. But we want to talk 50, 50 when it's in our advantage. But we don't want to talk 50, 50 when it's not to our advantage to talk that way. We want to talk spectrum.

So we still live in a gender binary society fundamentally. And no, I don't want to, but I feel like we got to work with what we've got. Right. So if we fundamentally live in a gender binary society, there's no way we'll achieve gender equity unless we like level set that and sort of say, okay, here's the gender binary that is inherent everywhere in our society.

But it's not.

Right.

No, I don't want it to be that way. I don't want it to be that way.

Let's go.

What I would like is this is going to happen in steps. So first I think we can start talking about ideas of equality and equity and say given that the gender binary is not dissolving anytime soon, we're making some interesting movements on the gender binary with things like non binary trans. We're starting to pick away at the gender binary, but it's still alive and well. So working with what we have, which right now is a pretty deep gender binary and everything in our world, let's move towards Equality in that and on the road there. Let's also question the ideas of how binary do we need to be?

Yeah, it's very complicated.

I don't even know what to think about it. But it's out there and it's a mission that you have. So I think it's going to continue. Right. And last question for you. What's the best piece of advice that you've ever given or the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Great question. I think the best piece of advice I was ever given was given to me by my mom, who's not an advice giver. This was a rare event, and I was struggling to decide what to do next as a young person. And she said, you know, just do something. Take a step. Take a step, and then you'll take another step, and you'll take another step. Nothing is irrevocable. You can change your mind. Just start doing things and see and learn that way. And I do think that stuck with me. You know, it's like we can't get paralyzed by these things. We just got to take it as step. It won't be perfect. That's okay. Take a step.

Yeah. You can't steer a parked car, right?

That's right. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much, Belinda, for being here and coming on the show. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I love how open you are to talk about everything. Or you can just ask anything and you've been able to. We've been able to have a conversation without emotion. Right. Without the drama.

Yeah. I've so appreciated it too, Gary. Thank you so much.

Yeah. So if people are interested in what you're doing, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?

They can go to the website womensleadershipintensive Ca because we're up in Canada, and probably the best entry point is there's a book page there. So we've recently published a book about women in leadership, and that's probably a great place to start just to get to know the work that we're doing around women in leadership.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you, Gary.

It's time for our last segment, which is guess their why. And for this week, I want to use Tom Cruise. What do you think Tom Cruise's why is he's part of the Scientology. Been in lots of movies. Just had the big blockbuster come out again with Top Gun. He's been in so many different movies, even when he was a kid. So what do you think Tom Cruise's why is and I'll tell you what I think it is. I think his why is the same as our guest today, which is better way. I think he's always looking for a better way. I think he sees Scientology as a better way and that's what I'm guessing. I wish I knew if you know Tom Cruise, connect me with him and we'll find out. But that's what I'm guessing Tom Cruise's why is better way. So let me know what you think. Thank you so much for listening. If you have not yet discovered your why or yos, you can do so@yinstitute.com you can use the code PODCAST50. If you love the beyond you'd why podcast, please don't forget to subscribe below. Leave us a review on whatever platform you're using so that we can bring this to more people, and I will see you next week. Have a great week.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.