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À chaque mois, nous abordons un thème différent avec un mot de la direction ainsi que de courtes vignettes portant sur les fonds, les philanthropes et les organismes qui forment la communauté de la FGM en se mettant à l’écoute et au service de la communauté du Grand Montréal.
Through its Women’s Impact Montréal Collective Fund (WIM Fund), the Foundation of Greater Montréal supports several organizations working in fields as varied as mental health, violence against women, and access to employment, offering concrete solutions to the particular challenges faced by women and girls in Greater Montreal. In this series of interviews conducted in 2022, discover a few of them.
The CEJFI’s mission is to work toward the social, economic, cultural, and civic integration of young immigrant women, by promoting an intersectional approach and advocating for their rights.
In terms of employment, the pandemic highlighted the role that businesses play in the emotional health of their employees — in other words, when employees are in distress, businesses pay the price. With the pandemic came remote work and home schooling, making the distinction between family and professional challenges increasingly difficult. Burnout, stress, and anxiety are on the rise, with women being disproportionately affected. Research shows that before the pandemic, men spent 33 hours per week on family responsibilities, compared to 46 hours during the pandemic. For women, that figure was 68 hours per week before the pandemic, and has since risen to 95 hours. Women with children must constantly juggle the pressure of being both an exemplary mother and a model employee. This pressure, often driven by feelings of guilt and failure, increases women’s distress in the workplace. As a result, women are emotionally and physically exhausted.
We must start with businesses, which need to help their employees set priorities and manage their workload according to their personal circumstances. For example, if an employee needs two hours during the day to attend to personal matters but makes up those hours in the evening or another day of the week, that could be a reasonable and acceptable arrangement for employers. Performance should be measured based on employees’ effectiveness, not the time spent in front of a computer.
Businesses and the community must reward healthy behaviours and promote a healthy work-life balance. As a society, we must stop glorifying overwork. Both businesses and the community must create a climate of psychological safety and never penalize someone who is facing mental health challenges.
The community, government, and businesses have a greater role to play. Women and minorities cannot drive change on their own. Employers, society, and government must work together by changing policies, culture, and socio-economic and cultural values.
We believe that the pandemic has set back gender equality. We are currently at risk of losing gains made in workplace gender equality. A new study has shown a regression in gender diversity in leadership roles and in the workplace more broadly.
For example, in the United States, 25% of women are considering leaving their jobs or reducing their professional responsibilities to care for their families. A similar study conducted in Canada found that “in a matter of weeks in the spring, COVID-19 set back three decades of progress in women’s labour market participation, threatening to slow Canada’s economic recovery relative to expectations.”
As a women’s organization, the ability to set boundaries is a powerful way to demonstrate courage and leadership. We need to stop making lists of things to accomplish in a day. We need to focus on how we add value through our professionalism, our personality, our work, how we share our achievements, and how we advocate for our own interests. We should take advantage of the fact that most people are currently working from home, and learn to leverage these new rules of the game. We must remember that networking, our positioning within an organization, building our personal brand, and managing our careers are more important than ever.
