Despite decades of initiatives aimed at promoting gender equality, women continue to face significant barriers in the business world. In 2014, 11 years ago, barely 19% of senior management roles were held by women.
Today that figure stands at 33.5% globally while in South Africa, it has increased from 26% to 42%. Top management roles are only held by 29% of women in South Africa – .3% higher than the global average of 28.7%.
Representation is improving, but there remains a persistent challenge in creating spaces where women leaders can connect, network and expand their knowledge bases so they can collectively drive the diversity narrative forward.
For many women in leadership, safety at work is about the subtle but powerful sense of being heard, valued and supported. Not once a year on a specific day, but consistently and meaningfully, without conditions.
At Braintree, this conversation around women in leadership came into focus at Accelerate Action, an event focused on exploring how to build an environment where safe, inclusive spaces are not the goal, but the norm.
It highlighted a growing concern for women in business – to work in a culture where all employees are given the time to discuss ideas, and feel they deserve to be there.
Recognising the need for authentic spaces is one thing, creating them is another. Companies need to come together and form partnerships with organisations designed to foster this inclusivity and these connections.
This lived experience matters, it pushes companies to move beyond the assumptions of what women might need and to instead listen to the women who are already in leadership roles and to take their advice on how to move forward.
This takes the concept of safe spaces beyond the performative. Employees need to feel they can walk into anyone’s office and be themselves – that kind of access matters more than companies realise.
It is also a model that works. It has already been adopted by companies like Braintree because it is quietly powerful in an industry where inclusion can still be more rhetoric than reality.
Of course, creating safe spaces is only one part of the solution. Companies need to implement policies and practices that support women’s advancement.
This includes mentorship programmes, flexible work arrangements and transparent promotion pathways. Actively changing policy and collaborating with initiatives designed to foster inclusion, such as GirlCode, means businesses are playing a pivotal role in changing the gender narrative.
Events like Accelerate Action, which brought together C-Suite women and rising leaders, are designed to reflect the leadership that’s already in place, giving attendees a safe space to share stories, not scripts.
They allow for people to be honest about the challenges they’ve faced and how they’ve built resilience in their roles.
Importantly, these stories aren’t about bitterness and resentment but rather about shared knowledge and creating a blueprint for those still climbing the ladder. Here, at events like these, people have the opportunity to reflect the lived reality of how leadership looks when women lift each other up.
A surprising insight shared by many speakers was that they attributed a large percentage of their career growth to their mentors – most of whom were men.
It is not a story of men rescuing women, but men playing an increasingly important role in building mentorship ecosystems that are gender-inclusive by design.
The future isn’t gung-ho women’s only spaces, but diversity in all its forms that brings everyone together and gives everyone a chance to thrive.
It’s easy to treat equity as a finish line and measure progress in statistics and press releases, but the women of Braintree spoke to something quieter and more enduring – the need to keep evolving.
Many women are thriving and feel supported, and believe their companies are getting it right, so the narrative isn’t that all is bad but rather that the good models, the working models, should be shared widely so more workplaces embrace this level of change.
The challenge isn’t creating safe spaces from scratch but recognising the ones that exist and asking how these can be scaled so everyone can benefit.
