07 Mar Women in Wholesale Supports Sister Initiatives
Women in Wholesale (WiW) is sharing its tools, resources and knowledge to support sister organisations like Meat Business Women to help attract more females into male-heavy industries.
WiW founder, Elit Rowland, said, “It’s important to have diversity up and down the supply chain – and that means supporting organisations that supply to, and buy from, wholesalers, too.”
“Meat Business Women (MBW) is one of the first events that inspired Women in Wholesale – both initiatives have the same goals, so it made sense to help each other.”
WiW provided MBW with the briefing packs needed to launch their first Speed Networking event.
Laura Ryan, Chair and Founder of Meat Business Women said,
“I’m hugely proud that MBW went some way to inspiring Women in Wholesale. By attending the highly successful WiW Speed Networking in 2018 I knew the format would work well as part of our conference and we were delighted that Clare Bocking (WiW co-chair) was able to be one of the mentors too. We are really grateful to the team at WiW for their support and plan to continue to share best practice and insight to strengthen both initiatives in the future.”
More pro-diversity groups need to share knowledge and tools this way, Rowland said.
WiW is supporting a number of initiatives including retail and consumer goods-focused LEAD (Leading Executives Advancing Diversity) and has shared knowledge and resources with a number of FMCG brands, wholesalers and big retailers, including the Co-op and Nisa.
“There are so many groups out there now supporting women in the workplace – if we work together we can learn from each other’s mistakes and reach our goals quicker,” she added.
61% of senior level attendees have made changes to their business strategy since attending WiW events. “We want to help other organisations to inspire similar change,” said Rowland.
WiW’s resources, including its Guide to Mentoring, Benchmarking Tools and Best Practice Reports (Six Steps to Advance Talent in Wholesale and How to Market Wholesale Jobs to Women) are freely available to “any business actively trying to support females to progress”, said Rowland.
Since the launch of Women in Wholesale, founder Elit Rowland and co-chair Clare Bocking are regularly invited to speak to other organisations about introducing a diversity strategy.
The next WiW event is it’s Speed Networking day on April 25th in London.
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