Activities for Women's Empowerment That Involve Managers
Activities for Women's Empowerment That Involve Managers
Most organizations run their women's programming for women. Sessions on confidence, negotiation, visibility, and career progression, attended by the people who need sponsors rather than the people who could be sponsors, while the managers making decisions about assignments and promotions attend none of it.
That's a structural problem rather than an oversight, and it has an obvious fix that organizations avoid because it's harder. I'm Magical Katrina, an award winning magician and mentalist who speaks at women's events, and I want to look at activities for women's empowerment designed for managers, and why they're usually avoided.
Why Manager Sessions Get Skipped
Worth being honest about the reasons, since they're understandable. Programming for women is welcomed by the people attending, produces good feedback, and nobody objects. Programming for managers is a harder sell, risks defensiveness, and requires senior sponsorship that the person organizing may not have.
So organizations do the easier thing repeatedly and wonder why the numbers don't move. Among activities for women's empowerment, the manager focused version is the one with the most leverage and the most friction, and those two facts are related. It's worth attempting anyway, and it's worth designing carefully rather than borrowing the format used for everything else.
Make It About Decisions, Not Attitudes
The single most important design choice. Sessions framed around bias, attitudes, or what people believe produce defensiveness, because nobody thinks they're the problem and being told otherwise invites resistance rather than reflection.
Sessions framed around decisions do not. Who got the stretch assignment last quarter and why. How the shortlist for that role was built. Who's been given client facing work and who's been given the operational work nobody notices. Those are concrete, checkable, and don't require anybody to accept a characterization of themselves. Among activities for women's empowerment for managers, the shift from attitudes to decisions is what makes the session possible at all.
Run a Decision Audit
The most useful format, and it's straightforward. Ask managers to look at their own last twelve months: assignments given, people put forward, opportunities offered, and who received them.
Most managers have never looked at this, and looking at it produces more reflection than any presentation would. It's also personal to them rather than abstract, which is why it lands. Some will find nothing, which is fine and worth knowing. Others will notice a pattern they hadn't seen, and a manager who noticed it themselves behaves differently from one who was told about it in a session.
Use Real Scenarios From Your Organization
The second format that works. Rather than general principles, present situations that actually happen where you work: a promotion round, a client allocation, a returner from parental leave, a team where the same person always takes the notes.
Ask managers what they'd do and let them disagree with each other, which they will. That disagreement is the valuable part, since it surfaces the actual reasoning behind decisions in a way a presentation never does. Among activities for women's empowerment, sessions where managers argue about a realistic case produce considerably more change than sessions where they listen to someone explain a concept.
Keep It Short and Specific
Practical, and it affects attendance more than content does. A half day workshop on inclusive leadership will be resented and attended reluctantly. A forty five minute session about how your promotion process actually works will not.
Specific beats comprehensive with this audience, and short beats thorough. Managers are considerably more willing to spend forty five minutes on something concrete and relevant to their own team than a morning on something general. If you have a series of things to cover, cover them separately over months rather than in one session that requires clearing a diary.
Don't Make It a Women's Session With Men Present
A trap worth naming. Some organizations solve the manager problem by inviting managers to the existing program, which usually means men sitting through a session designed for a different audience with a different purpose.
That produces polite attendance and no change, and it can be actively counterproductive if the session's framing implicitly positions attendees as the problem. Manager programming needs to be designed for managers, addressing what they actually control, rather than being the same event with a wider invitation list. The audiences need different things, and pretending otherwise serves neither.
Give Them Something to Do
The measure of whether a session was worth running. Managers should leave with a specific action rather than an awareness, because awareness decays and actions can be checked.
That might be reviewing their own assignment history, changing how they build a shortlist, committing to a specific sponsorship relationship, or altering one thing about how their team meetings run. Among activities for women's empowerment aimed at managers, the ones that end with a concrete commitment produce change and the ones that end with a discussion produce a pleasant hour. Ask about it three months later, which also signals that the session mattered.
Senior Sponsorship Decides Whether It Happens
The practical reality underneath all of this. Manager programming that's optional will be attended by the managers who least need it, and one that's mandated without genuine senior backing will be resented.
What makes it work is a senior person visibly taking it seriously: attending, referring to it afterwards, and asking about the commitments made. Without that, you're organizing a session that managers correctly identify as optional and inconsequential. If you can't secure that sponsorship, it may be better to wait until you can rather than running something that quietly demonstrates the topic isn't a priority.
Be Honest About What a Session Changes
Worth saying, since overclaiming undermines the case. A single session does not change how someone allocates work, and behavior follows incentives and habits rather than training.
What a well designed session can do is prompt a manager to look at their own decisions, surface reasoning they hadn't examined, and produce one specific commitment. Repeated over time, alongside processes that actually check outcomes, that contributes to something. Presented as a solution in itself, it's the kind of activity that makes an organization feel it has addressed something while nothing changes, which is the failure mode this entire category is prone to.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do organizations avoid manager programming?
Because it's harder. Programming for women is welcomed, produces good feedback, and nobody objects, whereas manager sessions are a harder sell, risk defensiveness, and need senior sponsorship the organizer may not have. So organizations do the easier thing repeatedly and wonder why the numbers don't move. The manager version has the most leverage and the most friction, and those facts are related.
How do we avoid defensiveness?
Frame it around decisions rather than attitudes. Sessions about bias or what people believe invite resistance, because nobody thinks they're the problem. Sessions about who got the stretch assignment, how a shortlist was built, and who's given client facing work are concrete and checkable, and they don't require anybody to accept a characterization of themselves.
What format actually works?
A decision audit, where managers examine their own last twelve months of assignments, nominations, and opportunities, and realistic scenarios from your own organization that managers discuss and disagree about. Both are personal and concrete rather than abstract, and a manager who notices a pattern themselves behaves differently from one who was told about it.
How long should a session be?
Short and specific rather than comprehensive. A half day workshop on inclusive leadership is resented and attended reluctantly, whereas a forty five minute session about how your promotion process actually works is not. Managers will give time to something concrete and relevant to their own team, and a series covered separately beats one session requiring a cleared diary.
Can we just invite managers to our existing program?
It rarely works, since that means men sitting through a session designed for a different audience with a different purpose, which produces polite attendance and no change. It can be counterproductive if the framing implicitly positions attendees as the problem. Manager programming should address what managers actually control rather than being the same event with a wider invitation.
What should managers leave with?
A specific action rather than an awareness, since awareness decays and actions can be checked. Reviewing their assignment history, changing how they build a shortlist, committing to a sponsorship relationship, or altering one thing about their team meetings all work. Then ask about it three months later, which produces follow through and signals that the session mattered.
Will one session change anything?
Not by itself, and claiming otherwise undermines the case. Behavior follows incentives and habits rather than training. What a good session does is prompt managers to examine their own decisions, surface reasoning they hadn't looked at, and produce one commitment. Repeated over time alongside processes that check outcomes, that contributes. Presented as a solution, it's exactly the failure this category is prone to.
Program for the People Who Decide
The ceiling on activities for women's empowerment is that they're almost always aimed at the people affected by decisions rather than the people making them. Involving managers is the obvious fix and the harder one, and it works when the session is about decisions rather than attitudes, built on their own data and your organization's real scenarios, kept short and specific, designed for them rather than borrowed from the existing program, and ending in a commitment somebody follows up.
None of that requires a bigger budget. It requires senior backing and a willingness to run the harder session rather than the comfortable one.
Reach out if you're planning a program, and I'm glad to talk honestly about where a session fits.