Each year, our Gilbane family honors WIC Week by highlighting women who work in all facets of our business, from executive leadership and project management to office supervision and accounting. We’re heartened by the overwhelming response of our team and the outpouring of accolades and appreciation in support of women at Gilbane. This culture of caring and support is in no small part due to our continued commitment to diversity and inclusion and our proactive approach to challenging unconscious biases and fostering equity at an enterprise level.
Allyship is an important piece of this commitment; it is an ongoing process of unlearning and re-evaluation, in which allies and advocates stand in solidarity and partnership with marginalized groups of people to challenge systems of discrimination and work toward equal opportunity and growth.
Who can practice allyship?
Everyone can be an ally. A man can be an ally to a woman; a straight person can be an ally to LGBTQIA+ people; an able-bodied person can be an ally to people with disabilities, and so on. Due to the intersection of our identities, allyship is more important than ever. As women working in a male-dominated industry, we seek allyship from men who recognize opportunities to help dismantle systematic inequalities. We also challenge ourselves to dig deeper into how we, as women, can better ally in support of each other, understanding that the experience and perspective of women varies and is not identical.
Using Personal Insights as an Allyship Tool
Recently, the national leadership team of empoWer, Gilbane’s internal Employee Resource Group (ERG) focused on the advancement of women, had the opportunity to engage HR and participate in the Insights Discovery behavior assessment. Through individual surveys, our team was presented with various scenarios in which we were asked to gauge our response. The outcome of these questionnaires was a comprehensive, detailed, personal summary that identified each of our “color energies” to help guide our self-understanding and promote effective interaction with others.
Through an interactive workshop, our team used these summaries to understand our preferences and proclivities, but more importantly, discover the ways in which the varying color energies present themselves in our interactions with each other.
Upon completion of this exercise, we gained a better understanding of ourselves, but also an understanding of each other, which is the first step in becoming an effective ally. By using this tool, we are better able to adapt our behavior, understand our differences, and proactively (and effectively) engage those whose experience and perception is different than our own.
We’re empowered to use what we have learned to help support each other, during WIC Week and every week, and strive to use this power and our company-wide platform to affect positive change both at Gilbane and in our industry.
