"Now more than ever do we have the opportunity to step into the limelight- and we must take action and choose to shine."

I have never been able to relate to the majority of women.

Sexual harassment, inequality in the workplace, feeling the need to prove myself as a woman…these have never been barriers to success for me, and I feel incredibly lucky!

I cannot comment on competitive corporate work environments, nor can I make a judgement on whether I’m being paid less than my male colleagues, because I’ve never worked in these environments.

Being the founder and CEO of a now global consultancy, I know that my experience isn’t universal.

This is about sharing my personal experience as a female executive coach, and entrepreneur living and working in Australia and across Europe.

I’d like to believe that my gender doesn’t affect the way people perceive me in the workplace, and that I’m taken on my own merit. Every professional relationship I’ve earned, I’ve built with integrity, strong values, professionalism and through hard work.

Don’t get me wrong – I haven’t lived a charmed life! The road hasn’t been easy and I’ve hit at least my fair share of bumps along the way, but I have never defined myself by my wounds, my failures or low points in my life. 

Empowered by my mother at a young age and being exposed to a variety of cultures and ways of life on a global scale, I was incredibly fortunate to grow up receiving unconditional love and having a female role model to look up to, who instilled in me that I could do anything.

Testament to this was my first job at Aldi, which I proudly acquired one Saturday morning during school holidays, marching into the supermarket and demanding a job. In exchange for wage, I promised to stack the soup cans like no other, and boy was I good at it!

Moving to the other side of the world for love at the ripe age of 21 to start my degree all sounded romantic until I ran out of money. “Tough luck” my family said (smiling), waiting in anticipation whether I’d return back home to Germany- less than 42 hours I found a job in a bar, mixing cocktails and waiting tables.

I recognize that this has given me the courage, confidence and creativity to take action, ‘create,’ and be self-sufficient, and I’m utterly grateful.  

My mother and past generations didn’t have the same privilege that I’ve had, and every day I’m grateful to her and women like her for fighting fights so that I haven’t had to.

So, what would a perfect world look like for the next generation of women?

Cliché as this is, today is an exciting time to be alive as a woman. The #MeToo movement is just one way in which women are saying ‘enough’; whilst it’s disconcerting to hear fresh accusations almost daily about men I look up to (and we must be careful not to turn this into a witch-hunt), it’s truly fantastic to look forward to a world where women will never be asked to sacrifice their integrity to follow their dreams.

Now more than ever do we have the opportunity to step into the limelight- and we must take action and choose to shine.

I’m still not seeing equal representation on panels, or many women having the fearlessness to be heard in leadership discussions and this must change, and the ‘putting our hand up to speak on a subject matter’ must come from us.

I wouldn’t be the first person to write about what we need from men to promote equality. I think that something we need to talk about more is what we need from women to allow other women to thrive.

Large-scale surveys and academic studies still show that women prefer to work with men; a 2009 study published in the journal Gender in Management found, that although female study participants did believe women make good managers, “the female workers did not actually want to work for them” as “women seem to cut down women.”

I find this particularly sad, as; surely, women in the workplace have it hard enough? We need to empower and believe in each other. We’re so severely under-represented at the top that there’s space for all of us!

Our job now is to take the momentum of the current zeitgeist and convert it to structural changes in culture and society. We need to equip women with the necessary tools, so they can feel confident and be heard.

In my work I see women systematically undermine their authority in the public realm. Whether this be by falling into low status poses when they stand up to present, or speaking with weak voices followed by upward inflections, I’d like to see this change, empower others, and work with more women than men.

It’s like the rising tide; when we succeed, we succeed together.