I am often asked this question: why a women’s workshop, a women’s circle, why not men and women together? Isn’t it an unreal representation of the world in which they exist, to isolate women? These questions are asked by both men and women.

Well, there is some truth in these questions, yet they are not 100% true. When a group of women come together for a Leadership journey, they are working on Leadership, but that is not it. Leadership is not only about skills.
She goes through the inner journey of what makes her who she is, and that begins with the many roles she lives and how her identity has shaped up in the process.

Her gendered experiences impact her showing up at work, where she meets many others who may represent the world she has lived in. Such experiences are often not known to men, many times men are in disbelief of such experiences, sometimes in shock, sometimes they normalize it as not a big deal, which in many ways negates her experience, and she falls into the spot of proving her experience as real.
So, what an only group of women needs is shared experiences to work with, to feel safe and to work with self in a group that can enable her shift.

Women also live by many injunctions, which form the collective’s narrative. In such experiences, some move with the challenges, some
feel stuck, and some give up. What is needed is a living role model in front of me, who has journeyed like me, or is living irrespective of
such experiences, to look at possibilities. Moving away from poor me or I am not good enough to accessing one’s Personal Power is
important in a space where vulnerability is the normalized. Women learn to hold space for each other in the shared pain.

Women come together to also work with their dynamics of being with each other, envy, jealousy, competitiveness and collaboration. Legitimizing these realities and still being effective. Challenging each other to push boundaries, to seek a support group outside, which many women miss out on, since she travels from work to home and home to work. Such a support system, enables her voice and her standing up for herself.

When women come together, they also have fun, fun that is not approved in a space of mixed genders. She doesn’t have to posture, be
appropriate. She doesn’t have to worry about being tagged with a character certificate, as an aftereffect.
She can be herself, access her shadow, reel in others who are hesitant, and fail, be messy and still be included.

While women and men should at some point journey the leadership path together, we are yet to reach a space where women feel safe with men to explore their vulnerabilities, where often they are the perpetrators. And the same may be true for men also.

** The intimacy of a women-only group, a men-only group is needed for each gender to do their work first with themselves.