We at Westwing pride ourselves on being a company that not only has many female team members (63%) — but also many female leaders (59%)! Unfortunately, this is very rare. Still in 2021, the share of women in the executive board of DAX30 companies was only 18% (1) and only 3,3% of DAX30 CEOs in Germany were female (2).
Anna and Katharina from our P&C Business Development team initiated the Women@Westwing series and gave us insights into the creation of the series and what to expect in the coming weeks.
“Working at Westwing, we are used to a very inclusive and diverse environment. But from previous work experiences, stories from contacts or friends, we know that this cannot always be taken for granted. We have all experienced or heard stories that have shown us that the fight against gender biases is not over, even though we are living in the 21st century. Today these biases can be more subtle, but they are nonetheless persistent beliefs women get told and are confronted with during their career. We interviewed five participating Women@Westwing to find out what they are tired of hearing.”
So how can we make a change? “We can make sure to share our learnings and experiences as women in business with each other and to build a strong allyship! And so the idea for a Women@Westwing session series was born. The goal was to create opportunities to exchange knowledge, to build up a network and to show how many strong and inspiring women we have at Westwing — throughout all departments and countries!”
What is Women@Westwing?
“Over the next six weeks we will offer a total of 18 internal sessions presented by 27 amazing women of Westwing. These sessions include larger, company-wide insight sessions but also smaller workshop-like settings to cover everything from female entrepreneurship, empowering female literature, beating Impostor syndrome, leadership training, systemic coaching sessions, how to manage career and family — and many more.
We are super happy to have speakers not only from our HQ in Munich but also from Poland, Spain, Czech Republic, and the UK. And, even though we want to put our female team members in the focus, we happily invite all genders to our discussions!
Following this year’s International Women’s Day Motto #breakthebias we wanted to put all our inspiring women in the spotlight to share experiences, to learn & grow and to get one step closer to gender equality. Even if bias is often unconscious instead of deliberate, bias hinders women’s career progression, and not being fully aware of it makes it dangerous.
Together, we can break the bias — on International Women’s Day and beyond.”