‘We had something really critical to offer’: Green Bay Institute for Women’s Leadership is growing

While working as a consultant in the Green Bay region, Bridgit O’Connor kept hearing the same thing from women in the business world — they were looking for ways to build skills to advance their careers.

O’Connor, founder O’Connor Connective in De Pere, said women in the area told her there was a need for more opportunities for business training and workshops. 

“Women professionals experience different things than our male colleagues. The way in which we communicate and the way in which we problem solve is different,” she said. “How we then can leverage that in a way that can be really, really helpful to our organizations is not always clear.”

O’Connor said she brought together local experts and women in business and hosted programming in late 2018. The next year, she partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s College of Continuing Education to expand those offerings.  

That partnership led to the launch of the Institute for Women’s Leadership at UW-Green Bay in 2020, O’Connor said. Three years later, she said local manufacturer Schreiber Foods endowed the institute and became the naming sponsor.

“We knew that we had something really critical to offer, and we knew that women were interested in what we had to offer,” O’Connor said. “What allowed us to be able to get more buy-in and more support is when you had organizations with credibility, like Schreiber, step up and say, ‘This is important in our community.’”

Over the last year, the institute has seen a 6 percent increase in attendance at events and a 52 percent increase in participation in the leadership certificate programs. That growth has also fueled plans to expand programming into the Fox Cities.

“The institute is a way for us to formalize and not just have individual mentorship, but really formalize a system, and that system can further advance our community,” O’Connor said. “To see that happening here in northeastern Wisconsin is really, really exciting.”

The institute hosts networking events, conducts research and provides professional certificate programs aimed at helping women advance in their careers. 

Pa Lee Moua, the institute’s executive director, said buy-in from the local business community and word of mouth from past attendees has helped the program grow.

“The women that have participated in our events or certificate programs, they are the ones that are really championing this opportunity and helping to broaden that opportunity to other women who may not already be connected,” she said. 

She said some events are relatively informal, like monthly “Caffeinated Conversation” meet-ups. Others are more formal, like leadership certificate programs or the executive coaching certificate.

“Our instructors are really women that are kind of experts in the field, women that are not always a traditional faculty,” she said. “But it’s women that are in the field, working (or are) entrepreneurs that are really coming in to provide knowledge on a particular topic.”

In the last two decades, women both nationally and in Wisconsin have made gains in the workplace, but they remain underrepresented compared to their share of the population. 

Over the last five years, women have made gains in the corporate pipeline. They made up about 28 percent of the highest-ranking executives and managers, according to a 2023 report from multinational consulting firm McKinsey & Company, up from 17 percent in 2015.

In Wisconsin, women had 27.3 percent of board seats among the state’s top-50 public companies in 2023, according to a report from the nonprofit Milwaukee Women Inc. That was up from 15.8 percent in 2015.

At the same time, a wage gap persists between men and women both nationally and in Wisconsin. 

Moua with the institute said addressing those gaps isn’t an issue that should be addressed by women alone.

“For us to address the wage gap and any kind of disparities, we need both women and men to come along — particularly people in high power, privileged positions to be able to understand that the culture is shifting,” she said. “Women contribute multiple ways to an organization, whether that’s their creativity, there’s their sincerity, their authenticity.”