Treasa Fitzgibbon works with clients in a two-pronged approach, identifying where systemic issues on one hand, and personal behaviour on the other, are impacting career progression.

While women cannot change systemic issues in the short term, they can use personal agency to take control of their own careers, she says. “We can influence career outcomes more than we recognise,” she explains, laying out the ways she helps her global client base transform their careers.

Taking ownership and responsibility includes women adapting how they behave at work. An example is that many women mistakenly believe hard work is the most important factor for achieving career success. In reality, being more intentional and strategic about the work women undertake with a focus on more valuable and impactful activities, is key to long-term career success.

She says it requires an attitude change that replaces the idea that “if I do a great job my career will happen” with a new belief that “my job and my career are not the same thing.” She explains that by working on both job performance and career strategy women can elevate career progression and long-term career planning above their daily job.

Barriers to progression

Fitzgibbon says women face external and internal barriers in their jobs. External barriers include systemic biases that often push women to take up more non-promotable work within their job – for example, they are more likely to volunteer – or be volunteered – for additional, less impactful work such as organising the office lunch to taking minutes during a meeting.

Other barriers include the double standards women can face, told on one hand to be more assertive, but then criticised for being aggressive. “Assertive behaviour is acceptable if you are a man, but for a woman you can face a negative backlash. The nuances are different regarding what we expect for a man, and what we expect (or accept) for a woman.”

The lack of representation of senior, diverse women in leadership roles creates another barrier to those at lower rungs on the ladder. “A young man can look up and always find somebody there to look up to and identify with.”

Fitzgibbon voices her frustration at the slow progress in DEI. She says, while female representation in senior roles has improved, it has not changed dramatically over the years. Part of her motivation to set up the Career Activist comes from the fact it is easier to have more impact on DEI from outside the finance industry than within it.

Solutions

Fitzgibbon says creating awareness and education is key to progress. She encourages people to confront their own mindsets and behaviours that pigeonhole men and women to behave in a certain way.

And she urges everyone, both victims and perpetrators (and you can be both) of career sabotaging behaviours to wake up to tropes and shy away from behaviour that becomes perpetuated and internalised unless we confront it.

Similarly, confronting and calling out unconscious bias should not be seen as criticism or be met with a defensive response, she urges. “We have to get comfortable with calling out and being called out for our biases, as we are all human and have them. It should not be read as a personal attack; come from a place of curiosity and learning, not judgement.”

She also simplifies complex terms in the DEI landscape like privilege, urging women to also recognise their own privilege. “Privilege is not about personal fault, but about systemic disparities that benefit some groups over others. For example, my gender creates challenges but as a white woman I have privilege compared to a black woman, a woman of colour or a woman with a disability.”

In the face of these social and systemic biases, Fitzgibbon focuses on building up women’s resilience. She argues that although we can’t change other people’s behaviour, or at least not as quickly as we would like, it is possible to control our own mental fitness to deal with career challenges and how we respond to them.

She encourages her clients to put a special focus on learning the art of self-advocacy, especially during the performance review cycle. She advises a new approach where women upgrade their own rating and talk about themselves differently. Research shows men rate their performance up to 33% higher than women in the same role, immediately putting them at an advantage to women. A performance review is a chance to share the impact you have had, she says. “This is the one time of the year to put your performance in writing; it is the one time of year to really take charge,” she says.

Women should see their performance review as an opportunity to highlight how they have achieved specific KPIs. “We live in a world where results, not effort are rewarded,” Fitzgibbon says, adding that most performance reviews focus on the tasks completed, rather than the impact and results of those activities. “Women are conditioned to be productive and doers. We really identify ourselves by how much we can get things off our to-do list.”

A Career Activist moves from reactive, to proactive and intentional behaviours by prioritising the activities that will count, focusing on the most important and impactful things. This could mean restructuring time spent during the day, reducing the number of conference calls or delegating. “This is intentional and proactive and stops others from dictating what is on your to do list, allowing you to focus on deep work, rather than ‘shallow’ or ‘low value task work’,” she concludes.