MY NAME IS
JOAN KUHL
I’m an author, researcher, training facilitator, and advocate for corporate inclusivity. I am a mom to two strong, bold daughters – and I help women advance and thrive in the workplace, fearlessly forging new paths within their organizations and paving the way for today’s girls to become tomorrow’s leaders. I’m here to arm you with every tool you need to make it happen.
But wait: How did I get here exactly?
How did helping women become pioneers for systemic change become my calling?
Let me tell you a story...
In my early childhood, my mom raised me alone with a fierce determination to instill in me the belief that I could do anything.
One of my earliest memories involves sitting on a stack of telephone books in the co-pilot seat of a small Cessna airplane while she logged miles to earn her instrument private pilot’s license. And that’s why I also earned my license after my freshman year of college.
While other kids dreamed of being doctors, lawyers, or superheroes, I envisioned standing at the front of a boardroom in a power suit, calling the shots (or in a puffy white dress as the commencement speaker for my 6th-grade class).
Even at fourteen years old when I was flipping fries working at McDonald’s or working at my local gas station or the DEB store at the mall, I believed this vision was a real possibility that I deserved in my future.
That dream also made me a leadership junkie – and my years of mentorship and volunteer work would eventually set the tone for my 13 years in the pharmaceutical industry.
Around 2005, my passion evolved into speaking on college campuses and mentoring millennials; a group put at a powerful disadvantage at the time of the recession, as companies pulled back on investments to develop early career professionals.
(Seeing a pattern yet?)
Eventually, through this work, I founded my consulting company, where I focused on creating change and infrastructure inside major corporations and top business schools to shift how they invested in young talent and nurtured that talent into leadership roles.
As I saw a fair amount of success in this arena, I was invited to lead a research project centered around women.
That is where my journey with a multinational corporate client really began.
The goal of my research was to offer perspective on what was happening with women in their career journeys, and how it was going to impact the next generation. This involved many focus groups and interviews with hundreds of thousands of women all over the world, including female executives at the top of the corporate ladder.
At the time I was pregnant and reading Lean In. I knew the number of women in the C-Suite hadn’t budged much in 20 years, but I could not wait to meet the women who’d done “IT” – the women who were living my childhood dream having achieved it all.
THE REALITY WAS… BRUTAL.
Instead of tales of triumph and exciting globe-trotting lifestyles, what I got instead was story after story of pain. Stories of struggling to stay in the workforce through life-stage changes, and battles for pay, credit, and recognition.
These women were incredible – but they weren’t thriving.
They were barely surviving.
I thought things were getting better for women. But in fact, they were stuck in a holding pattern and maybe worse yet… sliding backward.
In one of our global studies, when asked “What would you do if you were offered a senior leadership role in your company tomorrow?”, Millennial women were 55% more likely than Millennial men to turn it down.
And to make matters worse, when asked
“Do you feel the need to change yourself to become a senior leader at your company?”
70% of women in management said “Yes”.
At that moment, my business took a sharp turn. I couldn’t just report these findings through research.
I had to take action.
IN 2016, A LEAN IN MCKINSEY AND COMPANY STUDY CITED THAT IT WOULD TAKE 100 YEARS FOR WOMEN TO REACH EQUAL REPRESENTATION IN LEADERSHIP.
IT'S (NOT YET) A WOMAN'S WORLD.
And now the World Economic Forum predicts that it will take 300 years to get to global workplace equality for men and women.
I wanted to start building solutions, whether that was training, transformation, community, or some combination of all 3.
And that’s what I did.
Since then, I’ve developed a series of strategies designed to promote equality from within the corporate landscape, and answer the questions no one had answers for:
“How can we help a woman stay in the game, and create change where she is when she’s completely burned out?”
“How do you help a woman stuck in middle management – with everything being dumped on her – to become an inspiring leader?”
“How can we help more women continue to climb the ladder and grow in their careers when they have a family or loved ones they need to support?”
My mission is to help organizations transform to better support, engage, and advance their female employees of all backgrounds and levels.
Clearly “seeing is believing” and young women are judging and watching leaders, brands, and companies closer than ever before.
That’s why I created
To help women who are thinking of jumping ship from the corporate world assess their options, build career endurance, and start having the courageous conversations they need to have to create the change they deserve.
MY WORK
More than ever before, women need a playbook full of real-world strategies and actionable tools to fuel their ambition, their talents, and their passions wherever they choose to focus them – at school, in their community, in companies, or even in their own homes.
Through our research on the career journey for women, I realized the only way for women to achieve their dreams is to ensure they are thriving, not just surviving.
We can’t afford to wait another 140 years to reach equal representation in leadership.
Let’s start now.
Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s the smart thing to do.