Tag Archives: #GenderEquity

Breaking the Mold: How I Balance Job Security and Entrepreneurship

Leave a reply
A woman in business attire with a hijab covering her hair in a modern and stylish office sat in front of a computer reading a budget report.
Photo by Cedric Fauntleroy.

I have two jobs. I have a full-time role as Director of Support for a tech corporation. This is a job that I find both fulfilling and comes with a monthly salary. I also have my own business helping leaders to make more inclusive tech products and workplaces. I love it too.

I’m often contacted by women who see my posts on social media, visit my website, or have attended one of my workshops and want to know more about how I “manage” to have a salaried job at a corporation and my own business because they’re exploring the possibility to do the same.

Last week I had three of those conversations almost back to back. Also, this year’s International Women’s Day motto was “Invest in women: Accelerate progress.” It looked to me like a sign from the universe that it was time to share some of my key insights on this topic with a broader audience.

More specifically

  • The genderisation of entrepreneurship
  • The three ways patriarchy keeps you from launching your business whilst enjoying the security of the salaried job
  • How you’re using productive procrastination against yourself
  • Three keys to my success in balancing my corporate job with my business.

Failure as a status symbol for wealthy white men

I work in tech so I often hear about privileged men parading their business failures as a symbol of status.

How does that manifest in practice? For example, somebody introduces the enterpreneur in question by  

  • Their number of failed startups.
  • The millions in investment they’ve got – and wasted.
  • The renowed universities where they drop out before finishing their degrees.

Strangely, this is no way to disparage the person but to portray them as

  • Visionary
  • Fearless
  • Experienced

Can you imagine a businesswoman introduced in the same way expecting people to be impressed by her entrepreneurial capabilities?

Neither can I.

How patriarchy is talking you out of your entrepreneurship dream

Belittling the commitment as an entrepreneur

I’ve lost count of all the people who have told me that I don’t take my business seriously because I’m “not all in”, meaning that I haven’t quit my salaried job.

In their view, if you believe in your business you should drop everything and “follow” your passion.

What do I think? That when you have the privilege of financial, social, and emotional stability is easy to lecture others.

My parents became immigrants for financial reasons and I’ve been an immigrant since I was a baby.

A major lesson of a life shaped by financial ups and downs — not only those of my family but of many the countries I’ve lived in: Spain, Venezuela, Greece, France, the UK  — has been that financial security is priceless. No pun intended.

I cannot even phantom having the luxury of tech bros of dropping from Harvard (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg), Standford University (Elon Musk and Sam Altman), or the University of California (Travis Kalanick).

I never felt that “failure” could be “fun” or proof of my experience. Moreover, I never wanted to be a financial burden for those around me. All the opposite, I’ve strived to be a financial rock that people around me have been able to tap into in moments of need.

Discouragement from family and network

A recurrent theme in the conversations with those women is what those close to them think about it.

It starts with something like “My friend/partner/parent says”

  • I won’t like it
  • It’ll be too stressful
  • I don’t have what it takes
  • I’ll stretch myself too much
  • I better concentrate on my salaried job

When those fantastic women share those “pearls of wisdom” with me they often add that their friend/partner/parent knows them very well… Somehow implying that they know them better than they know themselves.

Minimisation of the business

Those women may refer to their business ideas as 

  • Hobby
  • Pocket money
  • Money for “my things”
  • Hustle

Those words minimise their business. Why? Often, because they’re afraid of

  • Failure
  • Ridicule
  • Being patronised later with an “I told you so”
  • Making others feel threatened

Referring to their business with words that make it look small and inconsequential keeps those women safe.

But it’s also a way to hide the fact that business is linked to finances. We don’t expect a hobby to bring money. A business is.

What’s driving that dissuasion campaign?

Patriarchy. 

Imagine if women would get their own business and enjoy financial freedom – who would

Patriarchy cannot tolerate that women get to have the cake – a salaried job – and eat it – their business.

How women keep their dreams alive (without acting on them)

I’ve talked at length about how productive procrastination keeps us from doing what we want to do. I refer to this term as performing tasks that are alibis for not sharing our work with others.

This is how I’ve used productive procrastination against my business

  • Resisting launching my website with the excuse that I had to keep refining the “draft” version until it was perfect.
  • Endlessly crowdsourcing advice — and secretly permission —  from many women with a salary and a business before starting mine.
  • Continually enrolling in courses to teach me all the different aspects of business — marketing, finances, accounting, and many more — with the excuse that I needed to be an expert on all areas of entrepreneurship before giving it a go myself.
  • Avoiding talking with my target client about my business idea.
  • Denying myself to invest in business mentoring and coaching because deep down I thought my business was not “worth the financial investment”, disregarding the mental toll and time spent going in circles and searching for approval from others.

But there are many more excuses that those women searching for advice have shared with me:

  • I’m not good a call calling
  • I don’t know marketing
  • It should be overwhelming to make both the salaried and business work
  • I don’t have time to do “everything”
  • I don’t know how social media works

Are those women wasting our time together? I don’t see it that way. They are fighting to get somebody to believe in their dreams despite their resistance and that of those close to them.

3 steps to get you started

To manage my transition from getting revenue only from a full-time job to developing my business and my personal brand whilst thriving in my corporate job – I was promoted to Director whilst running my business – several streams came together:

1.- Gaining awareness of my skills, background, and experience — In 2019–2020, I played with the idea of a startup focused on an app to help educate and identify unconscious biases. I went to a start-up accelerator and learned about VCs and pitches. I also painstakingly learned that it was not for me. 

Then, I had a lightbulb moment. I’d been delivering services — training, contract research, and support — for 20 years. Moreover, I’d been coaching and mentoring women in tech for as many years if not more. 

Since that moment, I haven’t looked back. I’ve made all those hard-earned skills the core of my business offer.

2.- Developing a personal brand — A very dear mentor and sponsor of mine told me years ago, “Patricia, you’re your brand.”

In retrospect, I realise that I didn’t understand what she meant. Brand sounded like something influencers and big companies like Coca-Cola and Nike had, not me. Since then, I’ve invested significant money and time in addressing my gaps in that area. 

For example, learning how to 

  • Craft articles that people want to read — initially, only my family would read them but today some of my pieces have been read by more than 3K people.
  • Get consistently +1,000 monthly visits to my website
  • Become a paid speaker

All have taken effort — not only grasping the “know-how” but adapting it to the vision, mission, and values for my business.

3.- Managing my mind so I move from “thinking” to “doing” — From setting impossible goals to motivating myself to do the things that I need to do and I’m not doing, I’ve had to learn strategies to work through and sometimes around my limiting beliefs.

And I often get the following up questions

  • Which of the three was the hardest for you? Of the three, the toughest one has been #3. Whilst #2 can appear as the most time, effort, and money demanding, I love learning and I use it to procrastinate on tasks that I want to do but I’m not doing.
  • In which order should I do the steps? Chances are that your business is going evolve as you test your offer with potential clients, so the reality is that you’ll need to keep coming back to the three of them.

A final piece of advice — check the conditions in your salaried contract regarding setting up your own business. Some organisations are more flexible than others.

My business is allowing me to explore complementary sides of myself like creativity, entrepreneurship, branding, and systems thinking. If you’re thinking about keeping your salaried job and starting your own business, I hope you have a journey as rewarding as mine.

And if you’re going in circles questioning if you should or shouldn’t have a dual role like mine, I invite you to think about what would you do right now for your business idea if you knew you couldn’t fail.

And then, go and do it.

PS. Do you want to have your cake and eat it? 

I’m also a career and life coach and I helped many women to design a career they love.

If you have a full-time job and want to launch your first business counting on expert advice and support, let’s talk about how my mentoring and coaching can help yo thrive exploring this new side of yourself. 

My Post #IWD2024 Reflections: One Win and Three Persistent Failures

2 Replies
Handcuffed hands of a woman on a background of a cloudy sky.
Image by Лечение наркомании from Pixabay.

Another International Women’s Day has passed but how much have women’s rights progressed since last year?

If my social media posts last week were an indication, there have been some important wins but at the core, we’re still living under patriarchy.

More precisely 

  • Abortion became a constitutional right in France
  • Femicide alarming UK statistics 
  • The feminisation of hybrid work
  • The unnecessary male context in framing women’s achievements

Let me share my take.

France makes abortion a constitutional right

I love and hate International Women’s Day.

I love #IWD because it tells the world that we won’t close our eyes to gender violence, gender health disparities, gender pay gap, and other gender inequalities.

I hate it because it “reminds” me that I’m still a second-class citizen. For example, I don’t have the same rights about my body that a man has.

Moreover, unlike when I was a young woman when I could see barriers coming down, I now see barriers been purposely built to prevent women from being prosperous, educated, and healthy.

This is not a bug but a feature.

Women keep spending their energy re-fighting their basic rights instead of innovating, creating products that serve us, or investing their money to ensure we have enough wealth to enable us to get a dignified retirement.

Amid these conflicting emotions, an unexpected gift arrived:

This week France became the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

Of course, there is no free meal in the universe, so reading this BBC article, my heart skipped a beat — or 2 — when I read

1.- “Before the vote, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told parliament that the right to abortion remained “in danger” and “at the mercy of decision makers”.”

In summary, decision-makers are not on the side of women. 

2.- “In a 2001 ruling, the council based its approval of abortion on the notion of liberty enshrined in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is technically part of the constitution.”

We have a Declaration of the Rights of “Man” dated almost 250 years ago that “decision makers” haven’t updated to the Rights of “human being” or “people“.

Until when will we need to keep fighting for laws and regulations that treat women as human beings with the same rights as men rather than Adam’s rib?

(Note: More on the Adam’s rib below)

Femicide alarming UK statistics

The European Institute of Gender Equality defines femicide as the killing of women and girls because of their gender, among other things, which can take the form of

  • The murder of women as a result of intimate partner violence
  • The torture and misogynist slaying of women
  • Killing of women and girls in the name of “honour”
  • Targeted killing of women and girls in the context of armed conflict
  • Dowry-related killings of women
  • Killing of women and girls because of their sexual orientation and gender identity
  • Killing of aboriginal and indigenous women and girls because of their gender
  • Female infanticide and gender-based sex selection foeticide
  • Genital mutilation-related deaths
  • Accusations of witchcraft
  • Other femicides connected with gangs, organised crime, drug dealers, human trafficking, and the proliferation of small arms.

When we talk about femicide we may think about Latino America, Asia, or Africa.

But we’re wrong.

A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK on average. 

The Guardian

During #IWD2024 social media was full of posts talking about having more women in leadership, in tech, in STEM, in business…

But the reality is that society cannot even keep women alive.

The Guardian has started an interactive project highlighting the women who have been murdered in 2024 so we don’t forget them.

But is that enough?

No. Because they are not the problem.

We need to start focusing on the perpetrators.

  • Who are they?
  • How come sons, husbands, brothers, and male neighbours feel entitled to kill their mothers, wives, sisters, and female neighbours?
  • How do we as a society foster and at the same time minimise those murders naming them as “crimes of passion” or a “spur of the moment act”?

And also on their alibis

  • Family
  • Police
  • Justice system
  • Patriarchy
  • Misogyny

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Let’s start doing things differently.

The feminisation of hybrid work

I got an email from LinkedIn asking me to comment on the post Flexibility versus visibility: Does hybrid work threaten women’s progression? sharing their research on their site. 

I have reproduced below the key insights about hybrid work

“Now, LinkedIn data shows that women in the UK are more likely to have a job offering hybrid work than other types of work. More women had a hybrid role in 2023 than a fully remote or onsite role. Across a majority of industries, women are also more likely than men to have a hybrid role. In finance, consumer services, retail and even accommodation and food services, where remote and hybrid roles are less common, women are more likely than men to split their working week between home and the physical workplace.”

My take? I challenge how many men reporting “office” jobs are not doing “hybrid” jobs in disguise. 

In my experience, women need to be very clear about the terms and conditions of their place of work because of their caregiving obligations, hence the preference for jobs clearly articulated as such. 

On the flip side, men don’t see themselves as having such constraints, so they are happy to go for an “office” job and in practice do remote work.

For example, my company advertises jobs as office-based but in practice, employees can work up to 2 days a week from home.

Another point: Uneven transparency. Whilst typically women announce that they’ll be late, have been late, or won’t be able to make a meeting because of childcare responsibilities, men simply say that they are “double-booked” or that they cannot make it.

Whilst definitively there are gendered patterns, it’s paramount to recognise that men have the luxury to disguise hybrid work as office work whilst many women don’t.

The Adam’s Rib effect

Why can’t the media highlight a woman without “attaching” her to a man?

It happened again this Sunday.

I’m reading an article in The Guardian and the Headline reads

“ ‘I could have written three plays about her’: Jennie Lee, MP and wife of Nye Bevan, is celebrated on stage

Then, the subtitle says

“The coal miner’s daughter who set up the Open University and the Arts Council and was Britain’s youngest MP is the subject of two new shows”

And then, the first paragraph continues

“ ‘Behind every great man stands a great woman,’ the dated old saying goes. In the case of the celebrated Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, honoured in a new play at the National Theatre in London, the woman is his largely forgotten wife, Jennie Lee, who earned her own independent “greatness” on the public stage, not a domestic one.”

If that was not enough, even the article’s URL mentions her husband

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/mar/10/i-could-have-written-three-plays-about-her-jennie-lee-mp-and-wife-of-nye-bevan-is-celebrated-on-stage

Ms. Jennie Lee, MP

  • Is Britain’s youngest MP
  • Britain’s first arts minister
  • Set up the Open University and the Arts Council

But in the first 4 sentences of the article — title, subtitle, and first paragraph — The Guardian feels is important to to let us know that

  • She was the wife of Nye Bevan
  • A coal miner’s daughter
  • And then repeat that she’s the largely forgotten wife of the celebrated Labour politician Aneurin Bevan

We need to wait until the second paragraph to actually learn about this woman.

“Lee, who was Britain’s first arts minister and established the Open University and the Arts Council, as well as backing the building of the National Theatre itself”

As the article continues, we learn more about a play about his husband and it’s not until the fourth paragraph that we learn more about Ms. Lee.

“she became an MP aged just 24 and had a big influence on British postwar culture.”

Can somebody explain to me why we cannot have a headline highlighting a brilliant woman without “sprinkling” a man — or two — on it? 

Why does the media believe that we need to know first about her husband, father, son, brother, and teachers as a preamble to showcasing a woman’s merits?

I’m naming this the “Adam’s rib” effect — providing unnecessary “male” context when highlighting the achievements of a woman.

This is utterly ridiculous and it’s a contemporary version of a not so distant past when women needed their husbands’ signatures to open a bank account.

@The Guardian — You need to do much better.

Back to you

How do you feel about #IWD?