03/08/2021
In honour of International Women’s Day, I wanted to do something a little different and share a bit about myself (Jaemi) – I am one of the owners and the CEO of Dominion Messenger. I began working at Dominion as a teenager and took on a leadership role as a very young woman while I was in university. Something I quickly noticed about the Transportation and Logistics industry is that it is mostly made up of men. I have attended many conferences and industry events over the years, and am always one of the few women in the room, and there are only ever a handful of us in leadership roles. I find myself gravitating towards the women at these events, feeling more safe and comfortable approaching them to network as the tales of “old boys clubs” are very true. At one meeting I was in with the owners of fellow courier companies throughout Canada, where I was speaking on behalf of the Northern Alberta region, I was the only woman in the room. I was shocked when rather than being asked to contribute my ideas, I was asked to take the notes from the meeting. This opened my eyes to the challenges that women can face in industries where we are under-represented – being invited to the meeting is a great first step, but the assumptions and expectations around a woman’s role in meetings like that are dangerous. I am grateful to have learned a skillset so that I could be assertive in that moment and set a boundary around my need to participate in the meeting as an equal, but I know that many women would have been silenced and their brilliant ideas would have been missed out on. This is a disservice to the industry.
Something that I am proud of at Dominion Messenger is that we are not only women-led, but women-operated as well.
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