Expanding Your Female Tribe
One question I get asked a lot is “why is Tide Risers just for women?” It’s a solid and obvious question, but the answer is complex. To start, I have a gut instinct that spaces dedicated to women are essential and hard to come by. For many of us, we are working and living in what is — let’s face it — a man’s world. It can be a tremendous relief to walk into a room where you don’t feel you need to man up to fit in.
And, while we did launch Tide Risers soon after the 2016 Presidential election, I had been planning it for most of 2016, with no idea what the outcome of the election would be. As it turned out, there was a clear and burning desire in the early months of 2017 for women to talk through their reactions to the election.
But there’s more to it than all of that. Specifically, a few driving forces for the women-focused format for Tide Risers include the following:
1. Women experience the world differently.
Because of that, it’s helpful for us to be able to recount and reflect with people who have shared similar experiences. If you’ve ever been talked over, hushed, or mansplained to in a meeting, particularly when you’re the only woman in the room, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, tune in to gender dynamics in your workplace. Are women’s voices being heard as often as men’s? How do colleagues react when women speak up? What kind of language do women choose, and how does that compare to the language that is common amongst men in your workplace?
2. It’s too common for women to compete with one another rather than uplift one another.
This is something we have to consciously and actively work to change. The common explanation for this is the “one seat at the table” story: if there’s one seat in the board room for a woman, we are set up to compete with other women to get that seat. If that’s what we’re doing, we’ve got to stop it. But I think there may be something deeper that is just programmed into our DNA. It’s possible that we’re biologically designed to compete for the best mate, the best shelter, the best food, etc. Certainly, counterproductive competition is something we can work against, if we do it together. Tide Risers is designed to be a model for the type of collaborative, uplifting support we should all be actively offering one another.
3. Women need different kinds of female relationships.
Most of us have groups of women in our lives that have come together organically, either through family, work, or life in general. Our sisters, mothers, best friends, and colleagues are an integral and irreplaceable part of our lives. What we offer at Tide Risers, however, is a community with a diverse range of ages, expertise, race, and industry and a chance to expand the female presence in your life with purpose. The stage is set for more enlightening conversations than you might otherwise have in your daily life. This enables women to share frustrations, joys, self-doubts, and innovative ideas with a group of women who are there to actively listen, support, and engage. And because these women are not all just like you, you have an opportunity to get radically different perspectives that can be highly beneficial.
Tide Risers at an UntickHer session
In an effort to enable Tide Risers to engage even more deeply in this amazing community of women, we’re about to shake things up a bit for the summer months. I’m subdividing our members into small groups to do specific assignments within a different context. These groups of three to four women will do an activity of their choice together — reading a book, seeing a show, taking a walk — the choice is theirs. Then, I’ll ask them to meet at least twice between July and August to complete certain assignments, similar to the work we do between UnstickHer sessions.
This small group work is designed to give Tide Risers a way to get to know one another in a more intimate format while retaining an emphasis on growth, support, and connection. For our members who are less comfortable speaking in front of a large group, this will give them a different stage upon which to shine.
The maximum potential of bringing together intentional, well-facilitated groups of women feels limitless. I can see clearly just from our first six months that Tide Risers members have benefited tremendously from swapping shared experiences, joining forces, and going deeper with this diverse and supportive group of women. A rising tide lifts all ships, after all.
If you'd like to read more about the values that drove me to launch Tide Risers, read my Living Like a Tide Riser blog post.