About Our Audience:

Our community is made up of intermediate and senior women in male-dominated industries. Most of our members are based in the Vancouver, BC area, but we have members all over North America. Our community is focused on women working in a traditional corporate structure (vs. entrepreneurship, trades/unions, or military/paramilitary structures).

What Level to Target Your Proposed Talk

Our audience is made up of a mix of individual contributors, managers (new & experiences), directors, and VPs. We focus our talks on issues faced by intermediate individual contributors and up (vs. students or new grads).

Talk Topics We Love

We have a few guidelines for our talks that help us deliver the amazing WIMDI content our audience has come to know and love. Here they are:

Talk content is career- or leadership-focused, non-technical, and industry non-specific. Because we serve women across a variety of industries, we make sure to stick to topics they all have in common: Building career and leadership skills.

We love talks that focus on specific issues women and minorities face. This includes talks that cover specific gendered challenges, industry norms and trends (and what they mean for women & minorities), and techniques for building more inclusive and diverse workplaces.

Not all talks have to include a gendered point of view. Lots of useful career skills are the same, regardless of gender, ethnicity, LGBTQIA2+ status, etc. Learning to understand company financial statements is helpful, regardless of gender.

The talk features clear & actionable advice, techniques, or skills that our audience can try, practice, and implement immediately. It’s important we don’t just tell our audience to take a certain action; we want to give them the roadmap for how to do it too.

We prefer topics to be narrow rather than broad. We’d rather do a deep-dive on one skill set than have a shallow overview of many skills. For example, we’d love a talk called “Giving Feedback to Your Team that Gets Results” way more than one called “Communication tips for Managers”.

The ratio of time talking about the problems and the solutions is balanced. We’ve all been to too many talks where the speaker spends 90% of their time developing the problem or pain points (or worse, their sales pitch!), and then throws a few tips in for good measure at the end. Yuck!

Examples of Talks We’ve Done & Loved In The Past:

• How to Build a Business Case
• Understanding Financial Statements
• Dealing with Sh*tty Comments That Undermine You at Work
• Accepting Feedback with Grace
• Negotiating for Raises & Professional Development
• The Overcommitted Person’s Guide to Saying No
• The Practice of Strategic Planning
• How to Interview for Senior & Executive Roles
• Demystifying Company Equity: Shares vs Options
• Building Buy-In at Work
• Networking: You Don’t Need to Old Boys’ Club
• How to Have Performance Conversations with Your Team

Talk Topics WIMDI Doesn’t Do

There are a few types of talks that WIMDI almost never hosts, unless a speaker has a particularly unique and innovative take on the topic. Those talks are:

Talks whose focus is inspiration-only. We want our audience to be fired up, but we know our members need more than just that.

Talks whose focus is sales-only. You’re welcome to talk about you, your business, and what you do, but we want to make sure the goal of your presentation is to teach our audience, not sell them your service or product.

Panel discussions. These rarely offer what we aim to give our audience: Tangible how-to’s and narrow-focused advice.

Individual career stories from successful women. Just like panel discussions, talks about individuals’ career stories that discuss how one individual woman made it rarely offer the kind of tangible how-to’s and narrow focus we try to provide our attendees.

Broad “10 tips for Women in Leadership”-style talks. We don’t offer listicle-style talks that cover many topics quickly – we’d much prefer a deep dive one one of those tips so we know exactly how to implement it.

The importance of mentoring or sponsorship. No woman with a pulse has missed the ubiquitous advice to get a mentor or sponsor. Our members know this stuff already. We’re happy to have speakers come talk about the specifics of how to create those relationships (eg: “What to Say to Successfully Create a Mentoring Relationship with a Manager 3 Levels Above You”), but we’re not interested in talks that go through the why.

Building your personal brand. These talks are incredibly common amongst women’s groups and are usually too vague and too time consuming for the average professional women to apply to their careers. We’re all for building personal brand, but we need the talk topic to be more targeted than this. Examples of targeted topics in this area that we would like are, for example, “How to prepare and submit your first conference talk proposal”, or “How to develop a reputation as a thought leader in your industry without it becoming your full-time job”).

Personal Finance/Investing. This is useful information for women, but it’s not career-focused enough for us. Learning about RRSPs and the difference between stocks, bonds, and mutual funds won’t help women lead better or get promoted.

Talks with gender essentialist or TERF-y (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) themes. WIMDI doesn’t ascribe to the idea that gender is inherently biologically rooted. As a result we don’t offer talks that rely on the idea that gendered traits (eg: EQ, communication skills, etc) are fixed, innate, or intrinsic – regardless of whether these traits are framed positively.