Smart Meetings CEO, Marin Bright.

This is our moment. The work world is changing and the meetings and hospitality industries are the perfect leaders for the coming equality evolution. Anyone who has stood in line for the ladies room at IMEX knows we are overwhelmingly female in the meetings workforce, but underrepresented in management. This is our chance to step up and show those bankers and computer nerds that a representative C-suite not only can be done, it needs to be done if we are going to keep inventing cool stuff that solves real problems, putting people to work in meaningful jobs and increasing stock prices.

Numerous studies have shown that when more women are in leadership positions, their companies outperform more homogeneous executive teams and boards, have higher sales and better return on capital—66 percent better in some cases. The reason is simple. More diverse points of view result in more insight into what customers want, how problems can be solved and new ways to communicate. Elevating women is just good business.

But an integrated workforce—we are talking about gender, race and age here—is not going to happen by itself. It is going to take hard work. And any big job requires the right tools. That is why we have assembled a resource kit to equip you with the information you need to negotiate, balance, speak up and be healthy. Hopefully you find the information here useful and inspirational enough to bookmark. And because this movement is just getting started, we promise to update it with new nuggets as we cover the cool things you are doing and news about new trends that could help you be even more effective.

Thank you for sharing this moment with us at Smart Meetings. Let’s go out there and kick some paradigms and get stuff started. I look forward to seeing your brilliant solutions.

All the best,

Marin Bright

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