Covid-19 pandemic is showing off women’s leadership skills

Hamida Bhimani and Linda Irvine, co-facilitators of Schulich ExecEd’s Practical Strategies for Successful Women Leaders program, have launched a series of short video interviews featuring hot topic issues on women’s leadership.

The first video looks at how Covid-19 has impacted all of us in different ways, including workplaces. The focus in these interviews is to share relevant strategies and approaches that workplaces can implement to highlight the unique competencies of women leaders in order to effectively flatten the curve of economic recession that has resulted due to Covid-19.

In the video, Irvine shares observations based on her life, education and work experiences and particularly the point that leadership matters and it matters greatly for corporate success and for corporate culture.

Irivine tells Bhimani that “gender equity and gender equality are just about fairness” and how they “just make common sense as well as business sense…. So, if you’re driven by profit alone, that’s a good reason to have more women in senior leadership.”

Covid “has just hit women very badly and much worse than men,” Irvine says, citing reports that 30 to 40 per cent of … women in the workforce have had to quit for child care or other care reasons and the recovery we’re looking for isn’t happening. Men are being called back but women aren’t at the same rate and that’s a real concern for our economy.”

“Research shows again and again and again that men and women have equal leadership capacity,” Irvine says. “What we don’t have equal is opportunity and support.” To illustrate her point, Irivine cites the examples of women leaders in New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Taiwan and Iceland. “These are women leaders, political women leaders ,and they act decisively and they cause fewer deaths and they have higher ratings in terms of support of their followers than a lot of other countries who have not done as well.”

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Practical Strategies for Successful Women Leaders, now being delivered in the virtual classroom, starts Nov. 3. This program also qualifies for 21 HRPA CPD hours.