What International Women’s Day Taught Me About The Unflappable Events Industry
It’s Monday, March 8th, 2021, and I feel buoyant and excited for the day. This is very uncharacteristic for a typical Monday morning. But this one is a little different. It’s not only a sunny morning (very atypical for early March in the Pacific Northwest), but it’s International Women’s Day. It’s a day dedicated to saluting women’s cultural, political, and socioeconomic achievements and the continued journey towards gender parity. And I’m lucky to have the day off. Besides the sunshine, my company, MCW Events, made March 8th a company holiday to allow our team time to celebrate and rally for women’s equality. After a turbulent year of unprecedented challenges, this day of reflection and action has never felt more necessary.
As I take time to reflect, I remember the first time I genuinely understood how gender bias and discrimination were embedded in our world. I was 7 years old and the proud twin sister of a real-life girl scout. My twin was asked to participate in a local holiday parade with her troop of about 12 other girls. They planned to wear Santa Hats and fasten felt wreaths to the back of their little brown vests. I was very excited for my sister and arrived at the closed-off street in the middle of town early to get a front-row view. The parade was full of everything my 7-year-old self wanted: kids from my school dressed up as elves, a Santa who threw candy at the crowd, and the middle school choir singing holiday carols. My sister’s troop was early in the parade’s lineup, placed right after the local troop of boy-scouts. I’ll never forget the announcer introducing the boy-scouts as “our future leaders” when they turned the corner and arrived on the roped-off block of our town’s main street. Then my sister’s troop turned the same corner, and the announcer continued in his unwavering enthusiasm. “And here come the girls,” he said. “Look at their creative and coordinated outfits. I bet they’re having a lot of fun!”
Sure, my sister’s troop looked like they were having way more fun than the boys. They also demonstrated creativity, coordination, forethought, and planning in their parade debut. But why weren’t these things considered the characteristics of tomorrow’s future leaders? Why were the boys taken seriously while the girls were just having a good time?
More than 25 years later, I’m fortunate to be working in the event industry. Not only are we an industry that thrives off of solving problems, conquering challenges, thinking on our feet, and now the ever-so-prevalent pivoting brought on by a global pandemic, but this country’s meeting, convention, and event planners are made up of more than 77% women. This year, International Women’s Day invites us all to “Choose to Challenge.” This call to action asks us to challenge and combat gender bias and inequality and reminds us not to shy away from facing challenges head-on. In a time when the ability to reimagine the event world’s status quo has never been more necessary, it’s the very skills that my sister’s troop demonstrated (creativity, coordination, and the ability to have fun) that have led this industry through this recent transformation. Challenges permit us to showcase our expertise, lean into our creativity, and allow us, an industry led by women, to turn a catastrophic year of canceled events into a reimagined and flourishing experience.
MCW Events is the perfect microcosm to encapsulate just how much the event world has changed over the last 12 months and how women have led the charge of reexamining, modifying, and evolving. The MCW Events team includes 20 passionate event planners and visionaries, 75% of which are women. As part of this team, I was fortunate enough to get an intimate and collaborative view of my female colleagues leading this charge of reimagining an industry that many of us have known as an absolute for years, if not decades. It was in them that I saw so much experience, expertise, and unruffled mentality come together to not only keep us afloat in the event world but come out stronger. My colleagues demonstrated all of the characteristics that the parade announcer attributed to my sister’s girl scout troop: creativity, coordination, and enjoyment. But he missed one crucial thing. These women, my colleagues, are leaders.
