The Secret Women Activists Among Us
Dr Sam Collins explores how women are quietly using influence, information, relationships, courage and collective action to challenge unfairness and create change inside the systems where they work.
When we hear the word activist, many of us imagine somebody protesting in the street, campaigning publicly, or leading a movement for social change.
But what if some of the most important activists of our time are women working inside corporations, professional services firms, universities, hospitals, charities, government departments, and public institutions?
In this episode, Dr Sam Collins challenges us to rethink what activism really means. She explores how women are quietly using influence, information, relationships, courage and collective action to challenge unfairness, support one another and create change inside the systems where they work.
Drawing on personal stories and reflections on the pioneering business activist Dame Anita Roddick, Sam makes the case that activism is not limited to marches, campaigns or public protest. Sometimes it looks like sharing salary information, sponsoring another woman, questioning an unfair decision, building alliances, creating new ways of working or speaking up when something does not feel right.
Most importantly, she asks: are there more women activists in our workplaces than we realise? And would more women create change if we recognised ourselves as activists?
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- Why activism is much broader than most of us have been taught to believe.
- How women are already changing organisations from within, often without calling themselves activists.
- The connection between pay transparency, sponsorship, allyship and collective action.
- Why women may hesitate to speak out and how to navigate risk strategically.
- The difference between individual activism and collective activism.
- How small actions can create powerful ripples throughout a team, organisation, industry or community.
- A practical framework called The Secret Activist Map to help turn concern into meaningful action.
Whether you work in a global corporation, a public institution, a small business, a charity, a healthcare organisation or are building something of your own, this episode invites you to think differently about power, responsibility and influence.
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Transcript
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to the Dr Sam Collins podcast. Today we’re going to talk about the secret women activists among us. Maybe you are one. So today I want to talk about women who are working in corporations, professional service firms, public institutions, banks, insurance firms, shops, retail, IT, tech, but who may be doing something. far more radical than their job descriptions suggest. They may never march in the corporate lobby with placards, and they may never organise a sit-in necessarily, and they may not even use the word activist about themselves, yet quietly and strategically they are changing things.
They are changing the future. They are changing systems. from within. So yeah, they’re everywhere. You are everywhere. Law firms, hospitals, universities, manufacturing businesses, charities. You’re in boardrooms and teams meetings. You’re working from home. You’re juggling deadlines and kids nappies and school drop-offs and healthcare appointments and the requests and the meetings keep arriving because they are known. and you are known as the woman who somehow just manages to get everything done. On the surface, these women look polished, professional, commercially focused, but underneath it, they’re asking difficult questions, sharing information, building alliances, creating alternatives, and helping other women gain access to power.
These are the women who are bringing up the other women. They’re not, you know, closing off the ladder to other women. I call them the secret women activists among us. Hmm. So before we go any further, I know that corporate and activism and business and activism and activism at work is maybe we don’t often put those things all in the same sentence.
And I looked up actually, I looked up the definition of activism today, and it describes an activist as this, as a woman or man who uses or supports strong action to help create political or social change. So yeah, no mention of work there, no mention of business, no mention of home, no mention of family, no mention of community, just political or social change, which obviously they’re huge things, right? But… I think that activism, we really need to bring activism front and centre into our day-to-day of how we work and how we live.
I mean, yeah, these definitions are definitely useful, but when we use words like strong and vigorous, it can make activism sound as if it only must be loud or public or confrontational. And protest is definitely activism, but Activism is not only about protest or it’s not only, let’s say, in the traditional thinking of when you think about activism, what that looks like. At its core, activism is the decision to move from believing that something could change to taking purposeful action to help change it.
Now, I love that definition, don’t you? So when you actually start to believe that something should change, could change, and then you start doing something about it, however small it is. So for today, I’m going to use the word corporate activism, because I think that there are loads and loads of people, particularly women who work in these big businesses and we wouldn’t maybe often think about ourselves or yourselves as activists. So I’m not talking about corporate social responsibility or making a donation or corporations doing good in their communities.
All of those things are really, really important. I’m talking about it on an individual level and then a potential collective level. This is about women inside organisations. So it doesn’t have to be a big, massive global corporation. It could be you work in the local shop or you work in a small business or whatever it is. We often accept and just sort of tolerate, don’t we, what’s going on around us and we think that’s the norm and we shouldn’t really do anything about it because we might lose our job.
So stay with me today to talk about how you become more of an activist, what that looks like, what you can do and why you would even care to do anything like this.
This is about women inside of organizations using your judgment, your relationships, your information, your influence, and our collective power to challenge unfairness and create better alternatives, create a better world. And isn’t this really how anything ever changes? All right. So it can be very visible, of course, but it can also be discreet, individual or collective. or very creative. What makes activism? It’s not the volume necessarily. It’s the intention, the action, and your attempt to shift what is possible.
This matters. It matters because of the change that shapes our lives inside what seems like very ordinary decisions. who is paid what, who is promoted, whose idea is credited, which supplier is selected, whose safety counts, where we buy from, whose workload is considered sustainable, which customer is imagined, who is included in the data, and what behaviour is quietly tolerated. Now, I remember
when I was, let’s say I was 28. All right, I was 28. So this is, this is some time ago now it’s 28. I’m currently now 55 and I’m 28 and I wanted to start my own business. All right. Didn’t really know where to start. Didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but knew I wanted to do something that I could have more flexibility. because I was working so many hours in the business in the work job I was doing and I wanted to do something good a meaning like good for the world kind of thing wanted to make a difference and I wanted to do something that helped women.
All right, this is this was about it at that point. All right, and so one of the things I was doing in my sort of research and to help me start a business was I was going to some talks, all right, to get inspired. So I went to the British Library in London to hear Dame Anita Roddick speak. Remember Dame Anita Roddick, the founder of the body shop? No. I was totally in awe of her.
Oh my God. One of the first things I remember is she had a leather jacket on, a black leather jacket, and I just thought that was the coolest thing because… All of the other business leaders around there, they’re suited and booted, and there she was in this leather jacket. And I thought, first, that was my first impression. My God, how cool is she? She’s in a leather jacket. And then she started talking about why she founded the body shop and her entrepreneurial story.
So that was all really inspiring and great. I hadn’t, I mean, I’d heard similar type of entrepreneurial stories before, and it really spoke to me. And so that was all great. Anyway. She then went on to talk about traveling into a war zone, I think it was former Yugoslavia at the time, and taking some body shop products, like hundreds and hundreds of truckloads of body shop products, to children who had just been displaced in the war as she was bringing them soap and, you know, the basics of things that you need.
I couldn’t believe it. I was like, what? This woman, this commercial business entrepreneurial woman who could be talking about profits and business success, and she was talking about those things, she was behaving in a way that seemed to me entirely counter-cultural to what I thought business was all about. So she was the first that I ever knew. To be publicly known as both a businesswoman and an activist, she brought these two things totally together, didn’t she?
She connected commercial activity with campaigns on human rights, environmental issues, opposition to animal testing, fair trade, remember? And still continues today. So her example expanded my understanding of what a business could be. And it really played an important part in inspiring me to start Aspire as a social business. Yet, this episode is not an argument for corporate social responsibility in this extent. I think that conversation already exists and should keep building.
This is not a call for companies to behave in a responsible way in their communities. I absolutely believe that they should.
But I want to bring the question much closer to home. What does this mean for you to become an activist inside where you work, where your salary, your reputation, your relationships, perhaps even your future prospects are all at stake? So it can seem very risky, can’t it, to perhaps… bring these two things together, they should sort of be quite separate. And I see lots of models of that where I have my corporate job and then I volunteer outside of work or I have my business work but then I do something in the community or I donate or I volunteer or I give some money or something.
You know, it’s all separated. I want to have a conversation today about bringing these things completely interconnected. And what would that look like if they were more interconnected? And this is where our values start to collide with our careers. And this can be a tension. The tension can begin when our values collide with our careers. You may see a pay decision that doesn’t make sense to you. You might notice that women are repeatedly leaving where you work.
You know, maybe there’s a lot of Young full of energy women coming in to the entry positions of your organization and then sadly none at the top there. What’s that all about? You can see this happening even though your organization will say it’s a meritocracy. We don’t understand it. We need some data. You might see an ethical concern in a supply chain. You might be working in a coffee shop going, why do they throw away all this food?
Like I was saying in the last episode, when I was looking at an event I was attending and the panel was all men, we see these things and they don’t align with our values. And then we don’t do anything about it, or we might want to do something about it but feel like it might be career limiting to do so, or we just might quite frankly not know what to do. So I think that we know what we think.
That’s the first step I think, isn’t it? We’ve got to look at these things and say, that’s not fair, that’s not right, I don’t understand that, that person shouldn’t have been treated that way, I didn’t like that. Yet another set of questions, I think, arrive quite immediately, which is, you know, if I say something, will I be seen as difficult or will I be labeled as the aggressive woman or the too emotional woman or will they say I’m soft or I’m not commercial or the other one too passionate? Have you ever been told you’re too passionate? How does that make any sense? How can someone be too passionate? Don’t you want very passionate people working in your organisation? Or that terrible f-word, will I become known as the feminist in the room? The woman who always raises race, equality, intersectionality. The woman who leads the women’s network. The woman who makes others uncomfortable. Will this limit my career? And quite frankly,
These are not imaginary concerns. Organisational power is real and speaking up can carry consequences. Strategic activism should not romanticise risk or pretend that every woman has the same level of safety or status or financial resilience or freedom. We put up with a lot because we need to pay the bills, because We need to get on with life because we need to put clothes on the kids’ backs because we need to pay for food.
We put up with a lot of shit because of that, right? And risking that is not something that many of us are willing to do, all right? So, what I’m talking about here is I want you to help you to really start to read power accurately and build your courage.
And also very importantly, build the support around you and choose the actions around you very deliberately. This isn’t about one woman performing a lone act of heroism where she isn’t being heard. Now let me give you an example of some group of women that I know that I just think is absolutely terrific. So I know a small group of women who work in the City of London. And for any of you who don’t know particularly about this square mile of the City of London, it’s basically where they make all the money for the entire country.
So it’s where all the big banks are, all the finance and a lot of law and the rest of it. So it’s a very, very traditional place still. I will say it’s still a very traditional place. and women who make it in the city are pretty phenomenal in my view. So this small group of women, they all work within one particular sector of finance, but this small group, they often are going for similar types of roles.
They’re not the most senior, but they’re up there. If they’re ever looking for jobs, they’re often going for similar roles. So conventional career advice might tell them to guard their information and treat each other as rivals, yes? But they don’t. This small group of women, there’s about six of them, they share information between them. So what they do is they tell each other exactly, and they keep each other up to date over the years, of exactly how much they’re earning. in the different companies and they tell each and so they work for different companies all right and they tell one another what they’re offered at interview i think this is so good and they actually um if one of them is going for a job the other ones will also go for the job so that they can share information about how the interview went and what they were offered and they compare what they were offered in terms of the pay and you know, any other parts of the packages and stuff.
And so what they have done is they’ve noticed that sometimes each of them gets offered different things. And in their experience, this can differ according to race, age, assumptions about their cultural fit, their personality, and the access to who they know. Is that activism? I believe it is. They are converting information into collective intelligence. Pay systems are not yet transparent and uncertainty and women can find negotiation challenging, but they’re, you know, meeting each other for drinks after someone’s had an interview and helping each other and encouraging each other to go for jobs.
Now don’t get mad at me about any of this because Isn’t this what men have been doing for centuries and millennia? It’s called the old boys club now. So, but these women aren’t doing it for private gain or to one-upmanship or to hurt anybody. They’re doing it because they genuinely want to help each other. And they genuinely also bring other women, younger women into their group and bring women up with them.
I think this is just absolutely Phenomenal, no banners, no sit-ins, transparency, quiet, with some might say secret, activism going on right where it’s needed. These women though, I think you’ve got to have a little note about what’s going on in these women’s heads. They display a particular kind of confidence, not arrogance, not at all. not arrogance. They are not about themselves. They are about each other and changing the wider system. They have succeeded and become successful.
Now, when I say successful, I mean that they’re doing well in their jobs and they’re happy because there’s a lot of people who do well in their jobs, but they’re not very happy. All right. So they got that both. They don’t confuse. self-belief with self-importance. So they’re not always, you know, being pumped up. They are very humble and they trust, very important, they trust that another woman’s success does not diminish their own.
Their instinct is not only what can I gain, it’s what have I learned that can help you? And what have you learned that can help me? Now imagine that. Imagine if you had five or six women that were in your industry that you met up on a regular basis and you asked that question. That’s it. That’s all you did. You had a nice cup of coffee, cup of tea, whatever it is.
And you said, what have you learned that could help me? And here’s what I’ve learned that could help you. Just that, that could be the biggest activism move you make in your entire career. And it’d make a massive difference. I also know another group of women.
who are in the US. They work in the US, like East Coast. And they all work for themselves. They all have their own businesses and they all work in the area of PR, public relations. And they do not want to work in a big, large agency. They particularly have chosen to have their own small agency or work solo. So they value their own creativity, they value independence, they value flexibility. But at the same time, they want to be able to compete for significant big tenders, big bids, big projects when they arrive.
So when a large opportunity appears, which when it appears, they all let each other know, yes, When a large opportunity appears, they come together. So, you know, they’re out there, they’re networking, they’re talking, they’re doing what they need to do when you have your own business. But what they do is they come together and they combine their experience and they bid collectively. So look, they don’t work directly with each other. There’s no direct employee relationship there.
They’re all independent, but they come together. I don’t know, like a swarm of bees. You know, they come together and then they disperse again. So they bid collectively and they compete against these big, established, more corporate PR agencies. And because they don’t have all the overheads of those companies and because they’re very creative and they value their independence and they come up with all these cool ideas, they win. They win these big projects.
So then they work together flexibly. for the life of that project in six months or a year or whatever it is and then they disperse again. Is that cool? Is that activism? Yes, I think that’s activism. That’s activism through creation. These women are not asking an existing institution to redesign itself around their lives. They are building a new model of work that gives them access to scale without requiring them to copy the structure that they rejected.
They show that activism does not only oppose a system, it can construct a more useful alternative. The women I’m describing here, though, they’re not fearless. They worry about things like any one of us.
But they have developed a different relationship with fear, I would say. They understand that a difficult conversation will have consequences, but they also believe that everything will be all right in the end. You know, if they don’t get the promotion, if they don’t get the role, if they don’t get the job, they will be like, okay, you know, we’ll find another route. So they don’t dwell on the past. Yeah, so this discomfort around fear is there, but it doesn’t really stop them doing what they need to do.
I would say as well, what I’ve noticed about both of these groups of women is that they take their work very seriously, but they take life very lightly. And I just love that about them. You know, they work, I guess it’s sort of this work hard, play hard thing, but not in a I’m going to work 18 hours and then go to a bar for two hours and unwind. It’s very much integrated into their every day.
They care enormously about what they do, but they laugh a lot, like belly laugh on the floor laughing. They recover and they sort of adapt and begin again. And I think that lightness of energy is really wonderful to be around. not only for them and their own energy and own self-care and all of that, but it just makes them very, I think, free and very attractive in terms of people wanting to work with them and, you know, because they’re not, you know, sort of so weighed down by things.
They find the time, even when they live very extremely busy lives, they find the time to spend time with each other.
Now I think this is really, really important because I noticed that many, many women will say things like, I need to expand my network, or I need to make that contact, or I need to reconnect with that person. But it’s really low down the to-do list and often it gets bumped because of more immediate things. So it’s not prioritised. With these women, they that’s like number one, like they’re doing that first in the morning, they’re sending the introduction, making that call to that person, recommending the woman who’s not in the room, telling the truth to the other woman who’s actually being underpaid or underestimated.
And I think that prioritising that is a complete revelation because rather than it being bottom of the to-do list, it’s top of the to-do list. And I encourage you to think about that. Making and keeping those connections, and I don’t like the word networking, I never really have. I’ve always seen it as making friends and I have a very interconnected relationship between my friends and my work. And some people would probably say that’s not very healthy, but for me, it’s worked really, really well.
And in fact, where I have met most of my very good friends is through my work. And so, you know, I just think that it just makes life so much more interesting and fun when you’re surrounded by great people, particularly, I would say, by powerful, fantastic, funny, intelligent women. And so they have these recurring questions that they…
have asked me and they ask each other and I love them and they’re very simple, they are, why not you? Why not now? How can I help you? Don’t you love that? I say to them, oh, how am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? Oh, I’m not good enough. You know, I’m not good enough or I don’t know if I can do it or I’m too old now or I’m too tired or I don’t know where to stay at the start.
And they say, Sam, why not? Why not you? Why not? And why not now? Why would you, you know, why would you, why would you delay? And then they say, how can I help you? So it’s fabulous. And then they come up with some ideas of how they’re going to help me. It’s not, you know, they’re not always things I’m going to take up, but often they are. And it’s, and then, and then the magic is they actually follow through.
Can you imagine? Because lots of people will say, Oh, how can I help you? And I could introduce you to this person or I could do that. And then they never do it. They actually follow through and they follow through really fast as well. And so that can make all the difference. So this isn’t these secret women activists. This is not a transactional network in which favours are recorded and every introduction creates a debt.
This is transformational. The intention is to raise the bar, to raise the level for everyone. The women involved understand that collective advancement creates possibilities.
that individual competition absolutely cannot. Now I can hear the objection. Don’t I already have enough already to do? You’re going to the office or working from home or going to your job and you’re already juggling a huge amount. I understand it. Activism can sound like one more responsibility added to women’s unpaid workload. It’s really not what I’m talking about and I’m not proposing that. In fact, I might say that this could even save you time in the long run.
Corporate activism should not mean that women carry the entire moral conscience of an organisation while everyone else continues like they have been, all right? It’s, I really want you to just think about this and connect with a small strategic action that you might already be doing or that it’s time for you to do. It might mean asking for the pay range before accepting a role. It might mean questioning why, oh, I see there’s no women on the shortlist.
It might mean changing the time of a recurring meeting because it always occurs at drop-off or pick-up time for women in the room. It might review whose ideas receive credit and whose do not. It might mean backing a colleague when they raise a concern and people look aghast that a concern has been raised. So activism
does not have to be dramatic, but please it does need to be intentional. Small acts can become really significant when they interrupt a repeated pattern and make people at least start thinking in a different way. I mean, could you imagine if it became from individual corporate activism, beginning with one woman using her voice, to collective corporate activism. Like, one woman asks something and then another woman asks something else, and it actually starts to become a culture change.
It starts to become a way of doing things that makes a difference. And that’s, I think…
really, really interesting because that’s how new norms are created and it’s how new norms have always been created. It’s one of the reasons I really like women’s networks within corporations and I think that they have been going through an evolution of late. Whereas I think the early days of women’s networks were very focused on helping women to survive and and navigate. These were words that were used very often. How does one communicate with difficult characters?
How does one plan one’s career when one has children and all these kind of things? And there’s a bit of two camps, women that went to the women’s networks going, this is really helpful and it’s great. And women that went, why would I go to something like that? And why is it only women? What I’m noticing now is while there’s been a really good shift to bringing more men involved as allies, and that’s very good.
But now women’s networks are actually becoming a force of collective activism where the networks are becoming so large and having so many women within them that they can’t be ignored. And they are beginning to be used as sources of data, as focus groups for new products and new ideas. as campaigns and campaigning for what is needed for women. So numbers matter, actually, when it comes to collective activism. And so if you haven’t been to the women’s network, if you work in a large organisation and there’s a women’s network, then maybe see what it’s all about.
And I know that many of you are starting or have started women’s networks recently. Maybe you can think of them as a
quiet resistance movement. On the surface, the women attending may be composed, commercial, impeccably professional, but beneath the surface they are exchanging intelligence, building trust, protecting one another and shifting power. The polish is not the opposite of activism. Sometimes it can be the strategy that enables it. But we do need to have degrees of freedom here. We need to be free from the belief that being liked is the same as being safe.
We need freedom from the fantasy that perfect performance will eventually protect us from bias because it will not. We need freedom from the idea that one missed promotion defines a life. Freedom matters because we need to be able to speak up, to speak out, to be ourselves, to be authentic, to have personal, financial, body, emotional freedom, to then be able to use that as a force to help those around us. So I’m not asking you to behave recklessly.
I’m asking you to behave intentionally. and to use your business skills, to use your strategic skills, to use your communication skills to change things that matter. And if your organisation punishes you for it, what does that tell you about the organisation? Perhaps the promotion is not the only prize. Perhaps retaining your integrity.
changing the conditions for other people or discovering that you can create something elsewhere matters too. You’re going to need some courage, a good dose of courage, but it’s not going to be enough. You need to start to really understand the formal and the informal power map. Who decides? Who influences? Who is affected? Who quietly agrees? What are the risks for you? What evidence will make the issue harder to ignore? It needs language.
It needs timing. It needs boundaries and judgment. But most of all, most of all, it needs great allies around you. All right? Great other women and all genders. This myth of the lone heroic activist is seductive, but collective action is much, much more sustainable. If you speak out in front of other women and they see you do it, they might not acknowledge you. They might be fearful of doing it themselves, but they will always remember.
They will always remember what you’ve done and hopefully be inspired.
to do the same themselves. Now, I have a little fantasy here myself. Imagine if one day all women across workplaces chose one day to actually properly look at their pay. Now, I know that there are equal paydays and there are days when we’re meant to do this, but I don’t know that everyone’s doing it. All right. I’m not talking about exposing personal information and I’m not talking about violating any lawful obligations, but we actually all at the same time asked informal questions.
All right, we asked the questions that need to be asked. What are the salary ranges? How are offers determined? Who receives the exceptions? And we women all compared our pay across race, age, and levels. It was a bit of a big day to research day. I’m just saying like if, because one woman can do that, 10 women can do that, 500 women can do that. But if you can imagine that like a million women did that or a billion women did that, would things start to change?
I mean, things would start to change. So this collective focus where we start to look at one issue, you know, whether it’s pay or whatever it is. ethical supply chains, promotion criteria, meeting culture, parental leave, menopause, AI, psychological safety, invisible work, work-life balance, whatever it is, just pick one. Pick one that is important to you and start to ask questions. Yeah. I mean, I say just, it’s not so easy to just start asking questions.
You know, maybe do some research, look at what’s happening in your industry, look at what’s happening in your company, look at what’s happening for women. The more we can be informed and educated, the more we know. When you know, you can’t un-know. You just can’t. And once you know, you’re like, okay, now I know this is what I want to do about this and find other people who may be interested in being secret women activists with you.
So I want to leave you with a short exercise. Are you ready?
First of all, I want you to choose one issue at work that you care about enough to think about acting on. All right. So you don’t have to choose change in the whole world, something within your sphere of influence. So number one, name what needs to change. So I want you to write one complete sentence describing the current pattern and one sentence describing what a better reality would look like. So try and keep it.
as focused as much as you can. One complete sentence. So name what needs to be changed. Number two. Now you can keep stopping and starting me if you need to, right? You just pause and then come back to it. Number two, identify the power. Now I know a lot of women don’t like the word power, but power is important. Not power over, power with. List the people, if you can, who decide influence. or understand this issue.
So you’ve got the formal authority and then you might have the more informal credibility and notice who is missing from the conversation. So where is the power being decided on this issue? Because it might be that you’re doing all this work with a group or you’re talking to these other people and you’re trying to get something changed, but are you really working with who is
What do they call it? The decision maker. Number three, find your other secret activist. Identify two people. I’m going to say two women, but there’s lots of amazing men out, activists out there too, isn’t there? Identify two people who also might care about this issue. You could sort of ask them, what do you think about this? See what they have to say. And you can judge by their reaction. And so you identify them and say, would you like to talk about this issue?
And ask them what they see before you stop talking about any solutions. You just listening mode and look, look for some shared purpose. All right. Not that you don’t necessarily have to agree exactly on what to be done, what needs to be done about it, but you’re agreeing that this is, this is an issue that needs to be addressed. Number four, between the, between the three of you. All right.
Three is kind of a nice number. Decide what you’re going to do within seven days. Now I know that’s a big arse because everyone’s super busy. So you want to keep it fairly small baby step, but I think it’s really good to have a bit of momentum and get off on the road. What are we going to do within seven days? So this might be ask one question, request a piece of data, make an introduction, convene a conversation.
All right. So, you know, it’s not going to be massive, but a small baby action is better than no action. Yes? All right. So you’re going to decide what you do within seven days. And then at the end of that seven days, next step, review. Come together again. What did we do? How did it go? What resistance appeared? What did we learn? And then
Discuss what your next smallest useful steps could be. Activism is momentum and practice. It’s not a single dramatic moment. All right. It does require the integrity of leading something. So you’re starting this conversation. Someone told me years ago, Sam, lead or support, don’t complain. So you’re leading something or are you supporting someone else is doing something. And because a lot of people will be like, oh, why are you doing that? Oh, that’s not going to work.
And you don’t want to be that person. You’re saying, okay, I’m interested. How can I help? So it’s a practice and the integrity of doing what you say you’re going to do. So if you say, I’m going to do this in seven days, then make sure you do it. If you say, I’m going to meet up in seven days, then make sure you meet up. It is these simple things that often fall apart.
Oh, I, I wanted to attend, but I’ve got this meeting now. Can we change it? No, if you’re going to do this, do it. All right. Put it in. Doesn’t need to be five hour meeting. It’s going to be like 20 minutes or something. Just getting together. Okay. What did we do over the last seven days on this issue we’re trying to change for customers or this thing we’re trying to change for people or like looking at flexible working, like we’re just getting started.
All right. So working group, if you like. So review and keep moving forward. Yes. And enjoy yourselves along the way.
We often imagine activists as people who are outside of the business world placing pressure on power from the street. And we need those people. We need those women. But the future also depends on women inside of businesses and companies and institutions who are at the coalface of where decisions are made. and you’re prepared to use your access differently. The secret women activists among us are team members, our leading teams, our analysing budgets, our selecting suppliers, designing technology, caring for patients, cleaning floors, advising boards, making us coffee. negotiating deals or managing pre-change programmes.
They may be working from the kitchen table after school drop-off. They’re probably really tired. They’re often frightened. But they keep going. They choose to act. They do not necessarily have the more stereotype of looking radical, whatever that might look like. They may look calm, polished and professional. They take their life. lightly enough to recover and their purpose incredibly seriously enough to prioritise and persist. They believe in themselves, support one another and ask, remember the questions?
Why not you? Why not now? How can I help you? And how can you help me? So perhaps activism is not something that happens.
somewhere else by someone else. Perhaps it begins when you stop treating it like it’s someone else’s responsibility because leadership is for everybody and leadership is when we become the leaders we want to see. What would you change at work if you were braver, if you were more of an activist? and what becomes possible when one secret woman activist finds another. Thank you for listening. Until next time.
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