Nima Abu Wardeh Staying Seen.Heard.Empowered. Why should you care & what does it mean anyway?
Bringing About Change for Women in the Tech Industry
In today's tech sphere, women face a slew of challenges. Whether it's bringing visibility to their work or managing to sustain their success while juggling personal responsibilities, the path to progress can be fraught with obstacles. However, the key to overcoming these lies in proactive action, self-advocacy and informed decision making.
Elevating Visibility, Sustaining Success
The first step towards propelling oneself forward in a career is ensuring visibility for one's efforts and accomplishments. As emphasized during a recent webinar, "It doesn't matter how clever you are or what degrees you have or what brilliant thing you invented if nobody knows about it." This situation, often referred to as being the world's best kept secret, can halt career progression in its tracks.
That's where the power of self-advocacy comes into play. No matter what result you're after - a promotion, a salary raise, or even a change in your home life - how you communicate your needs and wishes is of utmost importance. Utilizing powerful communication, the right tools and skills can increase the likelihood of achieving your desired results.
The She Strategy: Success, Visibility, and Life-Sustaining Choices
Crafted to empower women, the "She Strategy" aims to provide women with real skills, tools, and knowledge that enable them to self-advocate, showcase their brilliance, and sustain their success. But even beyond these professional benefits, the strategy also provides informative insights into the financial implications of career decisions, arming women with the necessary understanding required to make informed choices about their future, both financially and professionally.
- Example: A woman earning $44,000 per year who decides to take a sabbatical for five years will not just lose $220,000 in income. With the incremental losses accumulated over the rest of her working life, she stands to lose almost $707,000 over her lifetime.
Information like this is valuable not only for decision-making, but also for negotiation and communication processes in personal and professional contexts. It enables women to communicate effectively, understand their needs, and negotiate for them in various settings.
The Battle for Change
While the dialogue around increasing diversity and inclusion in tech is growing, there is still a significant gap between talk and action. The biggest challenge for actual change lies in translating these conversations into tangible measures.
By equipping themselves with the right communication tools and insights, women can take charge of their career paths and drive the change they wish to see. Secondly, creating small, everyday changes - like altering your work schedule for better work-life balance or voicing your concerns within your work environment - can make profound differences over time.
Start creating your path today with real information, effective self-advocacy, and the power of informed decision-making.
For further information about the She Strategy or to explore one-on-one coaching possibilities, please reach out to Neema at [email protected] or connect with her on LinkedIn. Her bio is available online.
Video Transcription
And now we're trying also to connect with Nima, and now we'll try it, and it works. And very well. We're in good place. Hello. You have a cool mic.I love it.
I don't think so. All
of your energy.
Nope. That's really funny because I think you can still hear me.
We can hear you better with Mike, but yeah, we can hear you.
Brilliant. Okay. Because I didn't think it wasn't working earlier. Hello, everybody. You know what? It's the simple things that trip you up in life. Okay? Remember this. Shall I just take over, Anna?
Yeah. The stage is all yours. Enjoy have fun. Love your energy. Talk later.
Great to be here. Hello, everybody. Now because we are virtual, I like to start my virtual meetings with people with the following way of greeting everyone. So if you can stand Please join me. Stand up, and I'm going to shake your hand. Follow my actions. Shake my hand. Let's shake hands. Hello. Let's give each other a high 5. Hi. And I love hugs, so I'm giving you a big hug. It's wonderful to be here. And I want this to be an interactive session, so feel free to post questions as they happen. Okay? I'd like to start with this. It doesn't matter how clever you are or what degrees you have or What brilliant thing you invented if nobody knows about it. Would you agree? So it doesn't matter how clever you are, degrees, how brilliant you are, if people don't know. That's 1. 2.
It doesn't matter what company you've built up what promotion you got, what product you are working on if you can't sustain your success. And what I mean by that is your version of success, and we come back to this word success in just a minute. So that's the second thing. What's the first thing? The first thing is you're the world's best kept secret, you're dead in the water. Nobody knows. You won't go anywhere with yourself. 2, if you can't sustain what you're doing, you're in trouble. And the 3rd big thought is this. You as a female are more likely to die broke. Sorry. And I'm here to tell you, yes, there's something you can do about this. Right? So That's what we're drilling down into. It's the how do I do it of all the stuff that we hear. For example, women are told, hey, put your hand up, step up, speak up.
I'm just thinking, great. Okay. Even the ones who are brave enough want to try it out, are doing it. A lot of them don't do it well, not because it's their fault, or they're not great at what they're doing, but because They don't have that skills, tools, and knowledge to be able to do it in a way that is remembered for the right reasons. That resonates with the people they're speaking with and that gets the results that they're after and the results could be. A promotion that you're going for, a salary raise, funding, your partner, providing 3 meals a week instead of the assuming you're going to do it, it doesn't matter what it is that you're requesting asking for pitching for. It's about how you do it so that you increase your chances of getting the results that you need, the results that mean you can sustain your sick SES. Alright? So we're going back to that thing. Now I love what I've been hearing so far, today.
And it it all the building blocks of what really the she strategy is all Now let's talk about me for a minute. Who am I? What do I do? Why do I get to talk about this? Well, I have spent decades on TV, so I used to present, a business and finance program on BBC World. I used to travel a lot I, deal with people who have something to say. That's what I do. So governments industry, people. It's all about somebody has something to say, and they need buy in from the public. Policymakers, potential clients. As well as working on TV, and in TV. I create content, so I write a lot about things that interest me, for example, money and life. Right? Really important because whether you like it or not, we need money to live with dignity and to sustain our lives.
And I've got a special interest in women, money, and life because guess what? There's a whole bunch of stuff that nobody tells us about, and we find out of the hard way usually when it's too late when we can't go back and earn what we need. To have a dignified life later on. So that's the second thing. And the third thing is this, and I do. I enable people to get across what they have to say on stage, on camera. Internally, So I chair, moderate, host, speak at big global events and conferences. I train people to do this too, I train people to be able to speak to the media. And when they have an important internal event like a town hall, if there's a big change or something like that, that's going on.
And again, it boils down to the one thing. They have something important to say, and I enable them to say it in a way that It's remembered for the right reasons that resonates with whoever they're speaking with, and it gets them or increases the chances of of them getting the results that they're after. Now here's the point, and this is why I'm here today. Doing all these things I was usually the only female in the room. Now to be perfectly honest, I didn't care because I didn't notice because I was too busy doing other things. Right? But a few things happened towards the end of 2018 that made me think that's it. I'm done. I'm doing something about it. And I created something called the She strat keeping you seen, heard, empowered. This is what happened. 1, I ended up training, a multinational before an annual event.
And there was a woman in the room. And I thought, wow. Oh, there's a woman here. Bing. She was the VP. It's a a huge part of the world for the business in STEM, and she was being prepared not to take part in her zone of genius and what she was great at, but to participate in one panel discussion, and the panel discussion was Diversity and inclusion. So she was being wheeled out as a token woman to take part in this panel discussion to prove that the company really valued, respected, wanted more women to join them. And I said to her, this is the height of me too and the calls for equal pay and so on. I said if I was in the room in the audience and if I was a journalist in the audience, I'd ask you one question, it would tell me everything about your company. And the question is this. Are you paid the same as your male counterpart? Silence. She looked at me with big eyes.
All the men looked down their pieces of paper, and that was the answer. The answer, of course, is no. And so I realized, wait a minute, I'm enabling people to advocate for corporate issues, policies, governments, and so on, but she can't advocate for herself. That's one. 2, when I was at events and conferences, I'd go to the ladies and women would follow me to the ladies and they'd have conversations about the reality of life for them at work. So that was another thing. Put that in my head. Third thing is my work around behavioral economics, money and life, and what happens with women, especially, all these things put together made me say this, I drew a line, and I said, instead of focusing on enabling people at the top of their game in industry and in government, to advocate for whatever it is that they're doing.
I want to pass on the same skills, tools, and knowledge of how to communicate effectively to women because it means the difference between you. Showcasing your brilliance. You're brilliant at what you do. Do people know about it? 2, it means that you can sustain your version of success. What do I mean? I mean that if you need something to change at home, in your private life, at work, in government even, how do you get that across in a way that gets buy in from whoever it is you're speaking with. How do you choose the words that you need in order to resonate, get results, be remembered for the right reasons, that kind of thing. You know, simple stuff. Now, actually, this is simple stuff, but it's really difficult. And nobody teaches us these things. It's called, usually, soft skills. How to communicate? I disagree with that. These are core skills. They are core to everything in your life. Core.
Without the ability to communicate effectively and with influence, that's what I'm calling it, you're dead in the water at some point because you hit a wall. You get stuck. You can't do it anymore. Something's got to give. And often it's you. You are the thing that gives. You get sick. You get tired. Your child gets sick or tired, your parent gets sick. Whatever it is, something happens that means that you can't sustain the thing that you're doing. Here's the deal. It's no good telling women marginalized people. Whoever. Step up. Speak up. Participate. If we don't have the tools and the, how do I do it? In a way that is enabling calm that you can use in every situation, So this is about building a process, and it is the cheese strategy. I'd love you to find out more. I'll share my contact details later on. But here's the big, big, big deal.
I'm sharing skills and tools in Xi's strategy that enable you to get across what you need to say to whoever it is you need to speak with so that you get those results that mean that you can stay in the game. It could be. You're pitching a project. You're chairing a meeting. You've got a meeting with your partner in life and going to talk about things at home. I don't know your teenage child about their room. It could be that you are going to start a company and you want to get funding, it doesn't matter what that it is. It's the how do I do it, and it is the same core principles. Hallelujah. Brilliant. Right? But that's not really what it's all about. Those are the skills that you use. But it's really about enabling you to have dignity and choice in your life. Dignity and choice now?
Dignee to in choice later, especially when you stop earning. Right? And to base your decisions on real credible knowledge and information so that you can make informed choice, for example. I'm just gonna check the time here. Please answer in a chat. When a woman takes a year off work, what is it that she loses now, Tom? Say a woman earns $44,000 a year. Right? $44,000 a year. What do you think a year off work costs her? Any answers? What do you think 5 years off work costs her? So 5 years off, she earns $44,000. A lot of the time, people Rila, the window, please.
Hey. Something probably went wrong, and to me, I got disconnect we are waiting her to tune in and here she is.
Oh my god. It's like, where did I leave you? Where did you, come from?
Well, I am not sure. It was just a minute ago because I also had to tune in, so I I didn't pitch exact moment.
That's okay. I'm sorry
to what you remember the last thing you said.
So basically, I was saying imagine a woman earns $44,000 a year, and she takes 5 year 5 years off work how much money does she lose out on? Any ideas? Come on. We're good with numbers. $44,000. She takes 5 years off. She will lose people. Well, we assume 44 times 5. Okay. So you lose its $220,000, right? Wrong. When you accumulate the annual loss of her salary and all the incremental losses that she loses over the ma many years of the rest of her life say she has a child at 26. Right? So she's young. She takes 5 years off. She will lose just under $707,000. I'm gonna say it again. If she earns $44,000 a year, takes 5 years off, she will lose from her lifelong earnings just under $707,000. And this is the point at the cheese strategy.
It is arming you with real information and the ability to make decisions based on what the likely outcome is for you. So You, instead of saying, ah, I'm going to hit a wall, I'm going to leave, you say, okay, if I leave, this is going to happen, so I'm going to take a sabbatical. I'm not going to walk away. Or you say, I am going to take part time work. I am going to leave for 5 years, and I'm going to earn money in a different way over that time and do this with it. Do you see the point? So the Xi strategy gives you the skills, tools, knowledge to be able to self advocate, to get to showcase your brilliance, stay on your path, earn more when you're working, but the bigger picture is arming you with real information that means you will not die poor because you know what you need to do to have choice and dignity in your life.
And it starts with, how do I get across what I need in a way that's relevant and resonate in? Remember? What am I up against in life as a woman, as a woman in tech, as a woman generally? Yeah? That's what this is all about. If you have any questions, please ask me. I think my time is nearly over. I've got one more minute. Anna. Over to you. Any questions? You are all good. Say again?
One question from the audience.
And by the way, you can contact me via linkedin. My details are in my bio. That you can find online. And, you can email me. My email address is there too. I believe, but it's neema@nema at finding hyphenema.com. Yep.
There's there are so many people are sharing lots and people want to talk. What do you think is the biggest challenge for a change.
The be all guy. I love this question. From my perspective, the biggest challenge for change is that, one, There's a lot of talk. There's little action. Okay? So people say, ah, we've done another study. We've got all this data. Okay. Who cares? You're not doing anything with it. That's the point. So, actually, the whole point of cheese strategy is do it yourself. Have the skills, tools, and knowledge, to do it yourself, to bring about the change that you need. Change can be really small stuff like. I need to start work an hour earlier or an hour later. It could be I need to have a safe space to talk about things to do with what I'm facing. Doesn't matter what that thing is, but those little changes that you bring about that affect your daily life, those are the biggest changes. Right?
That's what's gonna help you and women like you because when you create a tiny little new path, I define that as lead leadership. Leadership is creating new ways of doing things that enable you and others. So that's really the biggest thing. The biggest thing is there's a lot of talk, little action, your life happens every day. So you do it. Don't wait. Next.
Don't wait. That that's correct. That's right. Thanks a lot, Nima. Very great positive energy from you. Our You have loved loved your talk. You shared very eye opening examples and very interesting insights. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Enjoy the rest
of your day.
I hope that you hear from you on LinkedIn and email. Take care. Enjoy. Well done. Thank you. Thank you.