Alongside The She Table, our quarterly leadership forum for senior women across the sector, we run something closer to home. It's called The She Shift, an internal programme built for the women inside Log my Care itself. One of its regular strands is our monthly speaker slot, where we invite brilliant women in leadership to sit down with the future leaders of our own business and talk honestly about their journey.
It matters to us because of the kind of company we are. Log my Care is now almost exactly balanced by gender, and that balance runs right across the business: sales, marketing, customer success, product and engineering. That's not something we take for granted, and it's not something that happens by accident either.
Social care is a female-dominated sector at the frontline, with women making up roughly 78% of the workforce and holding around 68% of senior leadership roles. But that pattern breaks down at the very top, where only 41.2% of board positions in the sector are held by women. The representation is there in the room, and it thins out as you move up. When researchers have asked women in the sector whether gender has shaped their career progression, a striking number didn't initially think it had, until they looked back and realised it did.
Each session is simple. A senior woman from outside the business joins us for a fireside chat to talk about her career, unfiltered, including the parts that didn't go to plan. The She Shift has hosted women including:
Katie Thorn of Digital Care Hub, who kicked things off in December talking candidly about her career journey and what it's like being a woman in tech within social care.
Lara Bywater, Co-Managing Director of LDC Care and one of the most recognised voices in the sector, shared perspectives that have stuck with our whole team.
Our own Board Chair, Arlene Adams, sat down with the team to talk about what leadership at that level really involves, bringing the same generosity and honesty she brings to The She Table itself.
Niki Wakelin of tech business Big Life Adventure gave the room plenty to reflect on with her insights on running a tech business inside a social care group.
And Hannah Millsted-Bowdery, CEO of the Millsted Group and a Non-Executive Director of the Surrey Care Association, talked about her journey through leadership and social care, and, by her own count, about seven different business hats, all while raising a young family.
Why we keep doing this
None of this is separate from how we run the business. We support women across Log my Care because roughly half of the people building this company are women, and because the sector we serve is overwhelmingly run and staffed by women. We believe it's important to give our team a chance to sit across the table from someone who's already done the hard parts, and ask her anything.
We'll keep doing both. If you're a woman in social care or care tech with a story you'd like to share with our team, we'd love to hear from you.
