"It's not 'radical feminism', it's Irishness"

As the year comes to an end, I wanted to share a story about Mentor Her and why I believe it resonates with women around the world.

I experienced something this year that gave me pause. Something almost unbelievable. It happened at a networking event in Madrid. After chatting to three engineers from a European start-up with a 200 strong team, I began to introduce myself and my business. But halfway through my sentence, with one eye roll, a shared smirk and an alarmed glance, they literally turned their backs on me and began a new conversation together in Spanish. At first, I thought, did I say something wrong? Do I have some food on my face? Is my English so difficult to understand? I was left standing on my own, only midway through my own introduction having listened to theirs intently. My only friend was a lukewarm beer, I was one of three women at the event to begin with. Inside I was laughing, surely this is not happening.

And this is simply all I had said: “My name is Katie, I’m the founder of a platform called Mentor Her, we connect female Mentors and Mentees in entrepreneurship, corporate careers and self-development.” It was around the word “female” that they all began to peel off. Now, by Hanlon’s razor, and on review of the situation, we (boyfriend, mother) concluded that it may not have been my feminist undertones but something else: perhaps not malice but stupidity (or “incompetence” by Robert Heinlein’s 1941 quote for Napoleon Bonaparte). It could well have been that I was a founder of a company, and they were junior engineers. Maybe it was that I’m at least eight years their junior. It could be that they were just lacking social skills. There could have been a language barrier that suddenly occurred despite a lengthy conversation beforehand. But there is a small likelihood that my introduction threw them off me entirely. At the time, it felt like I had been slapped in the face with an accusation of totalitarian feminism.

I’ve heard the argument before. Getting women into the workplace is all about diversity, not exclusion. By focusing a business on only women-to-women mentoring, aren’t we excluding men from the conversation? And therefore, could it not be easily derived that I desire a utopian ideological paradise where women occupy more positions than men? I must surely hate men, running a business hellbent on destroying the patriarchal hierarchy of corporate culture. But I’m here to say, it’s not that- it’s something else.

People start businesses based on their own experiences and yes, it’s because I’m a woman but something is also evident when you meet me at 5 foot 1, unruly red hair and skin so pale it’s almost translucent- I’m a stereotypical Irish woman, Grace O’Malley eat your heart out.

Before I began my own business, I was a world-traveller working around the world from France to Thailand, Amsterdam to Japan occupying everything from a toilet scrubber to a social media manager. If you’ve ever been a solo backpacker, you’ll know that everywhere you go in the world you’ll find an Irish counterpart. Whether it’s on a beach hut in Bali, a pub in New York, a conference in Paris… the Irish are everywhere. It’s not just anecdotal, according to the Census Bureau in the US, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claim Irish descent.

The reality of this is a long Irish tradition, borne of pain and suffering, of the Irish emigrating in droves during and after the Famine, and it’s also something historians call “chain migration”. The social process in which migrants learn of opportunities and have transportation, accommodation and employment arranged by means of primary social relationships with previous migrants. So, when Paddy Malone travelled by famine ship to New York in 1768, he didn’t just assimilate into the culture, begin playing baseball and eating hotdogs and forget about his Irish roots. Instead, he wrote letters home to his sisters, and he asked Kitty and Mary to send over their nephews and nieces. Paddy may have undertaken on his new adventure alone, to build roads where there were none, to make a life from nothing and thrive in a new area, but he reached back to his relatives and brought them along behind him to benefit from his successes.

This historical chain migration, from which we can now see the results, is distinctive to a few countries but none so much as the Irish. The Irish mentality is to be an explorer, the first in your family, and look after your own. It’s this phenomenon that my business is attempting to reproduce, around the world.

Mentor Her is about women. It starts with the trailblazers- the women who set off in unknown territory, to make waves in industries by being the first female CEO, the first female board member, the first explorer who fought hard and against the odds to find and nurture success. What follows are the inspired women behind her, who have an easier path to walk along made level by their predecessors. What happens is a connection between these two groups that is coming from a place of altruism, support, and desire to see our own succeed. And by “our own”, I don’t mean white redhead women from Ireland- I mean all women, around the world. This idea, that we are terming the “Irish Method”, can be applied to every single woman, from anywhere. All women have one thing in common: we are traversing a space that wasn’t originally built for us. Helping each other isn’t a rebuke against men (come on, we love men), it’s about helping people who are like us and who we understand best.

Only the Irish would have known the treacherous journey across the Atlantic Sea and how to navigate a new life in America. Having gone through it themselves, they could then communicate that to those coming behind them- the right paths, the wrong moves, the tricky corners, and the uphill battles. Only women know how to traverse the landscape of professional and personal, to thrive even when you don’t feel like it, to find solutions to problems others have already experienced themselves. If we all support our own, give insights on how to survive and how to succeed- the world will continue to be an incredibly diverse place.

At the event in Madrid, I muttered this to my beer and left the event, to go have dinner with a group of women who are more open to big ideas.?