May I very quickly answer your previous question? What I'm hearing right now, just as a marketing professional, is that your biggest challenge is communicating to people that opportunities are already out there, and we know this with women who are already in the workforce.
Create and recommend, as a committee, a flagship campaign that promotes women in the workforce. We don't see things like that. We're starting to see campaigns that focus on skilled trades because we know that's a need coming up. But are you focusing on a key demographic? If you were to turn this into an ad campaign, if the key message you want to communicate is “we want more women in these fields”, then say that as a message, not a general message that is gender neutral.
Sorry, now on to the question you actually asked me: yes, the barriers are that we are not willing to talk about race in workplaces. We are not willing to talk about what harassment looks like when it comes to job security. We're not willing to talk about the fact that there are things women face in the workforce that are different from their male counterparts. What we are told is that if you work hard enough, if you get enough experience, if you are tough enough, if you act like it, you will get where you need to be.
That is the mindset that we enter the workforce with. We probably get that mindset a lot earlier on. We probably get it at that key drop-off point where you get kids excited when they're younger, both girls and boys. As they grow older and socialization take more of a hold, they get the reinforcement back from media, from government, from our education system, at home, at school, in society in general, that they're not meant to do these things and they're not meant to play leadership roles in these sectors.
I would think that intersectional stuff is very important and you should definitely have that as part of the conversation this committee carries out.