International Women's Day celebrations focus on leadership roles

Carolyne Leroux says her company started a women in leadership program five years ago as a way to encourage female workers to take an interest in management roles.

Leroux, the recently installed general manager at Thunder Bay’s Bombardier manufacturing plant, said the path to the top begins at the bottom, but often workers don’t realize how to get there.

The program is just one method to help them find their way. And it’s worked, she said.

“In a manufacturing facility it is difficult to attract that talent pipeline, so we need to create those opportunities for women to enter the manufacturing business,” Leroux said on Wednesday prior to the start of an International Women’s Day event staged at the south-side facility.

“Currently we only have 12 per cent of our employees that are women. But actually when you move into the management team, we were able to create a larger quantity of women, up to 20 per cent, in amongst all the management team.”

Her senior management team has a 30-per cent female contingent.

Examples like Bombardier’s success are a start, but there is still plenty more that can be done to help the cause, said PARO Centre for Women’s Enterprise executive director Rosalind Lockyer, whose organization co-staged the evening event.

Lockyer said women continue to make huge contributions to the community, but gender gaps still exist. It’s time to close them, she said.

“It has been shown all over the world the more women we have in leadership roles, the better it is for the country and for the economy,” Lockyer said.

Women have the dual role of supporting their families and the communities they live in, helping them bring a bit of a different perspective to the workforce, and in particular the once male-dominated boardroom and political tables.

And women make up 52 per cent of the world’s population, she pointed out.

“So if you want to get a balanced view in making decisions for our country, we need parity in those areas,” Lockyer said.

Guest speaker and Minister for the Status of Women Patty Hajdu said it took her a long time to reach a point in her life where she felt she could run for office and still balance the rest of her responsibilities.

As a single mother, the Thunder Bay MP said she fully understands not everyone is so lucky.

That too needs to change, she said.

“For women who don’t have these luxuries, the systemic barriers they’ve had to face in so many sectors can be insurmountable and leave them on the outside looking in,” Hajdu said. “This problem is not going to fix itself.”

International Women’s Day is a global initiative being held on March 8.