Building Your Legacy: Catalyst’s 60th Anniversary and the MARC Movement

By Alix Pollack, Vice President, Product Content & Strategy

This year Catalyst is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. In many ways the world was quite a different place 60 years ago. I know that if I were in the workforce in 1962, I certainly wouldn’t be celebrating my eleventh work anniversary, just returning from a second maternity leave, and sitting in a leadership position within my organization. Our founder and first CEO, Felice N. Schwartz, knew this all too well. In fact, in 1972 she authored a book titled “How to Go to Work When Your Husband Is Against It, Your Children Aren't Old Enough, and There's Nothing You Can Do Anyhow.”

We have certainly come a long way since then. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is now a deeply embedded value for most leading organizations and women’s full participation in the workforce is more expectation than exception.

And yet, women are only?29% of senior managers and 23% of executives globally. Rights and benefits?critical to enabling women’s full participation in the workplace?are still inaccessible or in question in far too many cases. And even with fulsome work lives, women still carry the disproportionate burden of household labor—practical,?mental, and emotional. Men, in no way exempt from the?impacts of restrictive cultural and gender norms, face challenges of their own.

Through all of this, Catalyst has been working to make workplaces work for women—partnering with leading organizations to achieve meaningful and lasting progress. Importantly, about a decade and a half ago, it also entered the space of engaging men, and shortly thereafter,?MARC (Men Advocating Real Change)?was born. We know from over a decade of MARC research and practice that involving those in positions of decision-making and culture-carrying power—namely, men—has profound impacts on our ability to achieve the kind of change we all believe in, to a degree and at a rate that is meaningful and sustainable.

As we look ahead, it is essential that we continue to involve men as active partners and inspire more men (and the organizations they work for) to join the movement. And it is just that—a movement: in motion, active, evolving. We will not make real change from the comfort of silent, passive agreement,?performative action, or reactive support for the work of others. We will change the world through the discomfort of hard conversations, honest self-reflection, and rejection of the status quo. Our MARC alumni are living examples of this work.

I am proud and privileged to lead MARC into this future. It is both full of promise and full of hard work. In 60 years, looking back, I hope we will all count our involvement with the MARC movement as a proud part of our legacies. What will your contribution be to that story?