Taking Their Seat: Women Leading in Male-Dominated Industry with Rhonda Skallan

Despite being underrepresented, the truth is, women can thrive, excel, and lead. Their resilience, creativity, and determination often outshine the barriers they face. In this empowering episode, our guest, Rhonda Skallan founder of Spark Alchemy, is here to prove just that. She shares valuable insights and strategies on how women can not only survive but thrive in these challenging environments. Rhonda's passion lies in empowering women to not just join the conversation but to lead it with confidence and authority. Through her work, she ensures that women have a seat at the table and are equipped to make impactful contributions. Listen in as we discuss typical male-dominated industries, the experience of women in these fields, leadership barriers, and the power of building supportive networks. Tune in now and empower yourself to rise above limitations! --- Listen to the podcast here: Taking Their Seat: Women Leading in Male-Dominated Industry with Rhonda Skallan Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, we all have our dreams, we all have our passions, we all have what we want out of life, and, hopefully, some of the episodes you’ve already listened to is giving you a good idea of how to figure out what it is that you actually want. But once you figure out what it is you actually want, there’s many different barriers that can get in our way. Nothing is really that easy, especially developing a life that’s a little bit outside the box or outside of what’s expected. Some of these barriers could take the form of feeling like you don’t belong, feeling like you don’t really have the right to communicate. So, today, my guest is Rhonda Skallan. She is the founder of Spark Alchemy and she helps women in male-dominated industries. --- Rhonda, welcome to the program. Thank you, thank you, and thank you so much for having me here today. I really appreciate it, Stephen. Well, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to me and my audience today. So, first of all, I want to start off by asking what is a typical male-dominated industry and what does that feel like for some of your clients? That’s a great question because most industries are male dominated. My background tends to specifically be in construction, technology, finance as well as education, healthcare, and entertainment, and I would say all of those have a healthy dose of male dominance, especially when you think about combining them. So doing healthcare construction and technology construction. I decided I could go ahead and double down on that male dominance in a couple of those industries. Now, are there industries that are female dominant or are there industries that are balanced, that have found a way to kind of work through some of this? I really haven’t seen a balanced industry as much as maybe some female-dominated industries, maybe in the younger children, preschool, elementary-type education spaces, some of the service spaces of retail, sales, things like that, but I really haven’t seen a balance as much as I’ve seen one or the other. I will say what I know from some of the research that I’ve done with the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Women, the only industries where women make more money than men tend to be in childcare or those type of service-oriented businesses, which are also some of the lowest paying businesses. Now, you also talk a lot about how a woman feels in a male-dominated industry. Are there any industries out there that just the percentages work out one way but do a better job of preventing making people feel like outsiders, like a woman in construction versus technology versus a finance industry? Maybe healthcare, where you’re dealing with a lot of more traditional nurses, especially pediatric healthcare, which I have a pretty strong exposure to. I think, at some point, there are more women on the main work side so maybe 85 percent of women are workers, but as you crawl up the leadership ladder, it really does start to become more male dominated again. But do any of them do a better job than the other ones of when the women do crawl up the leadership ladder, making them feel less out of place, like just from your work with your clients and how they often feel in some of these boardrooms and stuff like that? Is there a way to culturally set it up so that people that are in a different group, whether it be gender or race or anything like that, but I know you specify on gender, not feel so out of place even though they’re still kind of in the minority? Is that possible? Is that something that anyone’s doing well? As far as individual companies or industries, no, I think it’s more on an individual basis. So, as women start to move up and building relationships with sponsors and really building relationships with men to help them. Most men want to help women in their careers, they just don’t necessarily know how so one of the things that I really focus on is helping women help men help them. That was a lot of helps but you get what I’m saying. I think we can follow that. I think that the more we can have women helping men help them, they can start to break down those barriers that have been something that have stopped it and there are going to be times where you run into men who don’t want to help you, the best thing to do is ignore that because trying to change people just is exhausting and doesn’t really work so find the people who want to help you and work with those people. That’s how you can get up that ladder and really start to make that difference and get where you want to go in your career. Now, let’s start with the experience of your clients. I’m sure there’s plenty of listeners out there that are 100 percent familiar with this experience so if it resonates with you, that’s great, but what does that experience feel like for your typical client in one of these industries? A lot of times, women are wondering what they’re doing wrong, wondering why they’re putting in so much effort, feel like they’re doing everything that they’re told to do, feel like following all the directions, following all the advice, following the mentor, and they’re still sitting there not moving up, not getting the new role, not getting the recognition, not getting the respect. So, a lot of times, it’s really wondering, “What am I doing wrong? I’m doing everything.” You’re also wondering why you feel like you’re running circles around other people and they seem to be getting the rewards and you don’t, and so you feel underappreciated, you feel not seen, you feel left out. Those are some of the big things that I think the women are experiencing. There’s continual things where you’ll get spoken over in a meeting, somebody else will take your idea and get credit for it. Those things are also pretty common, but I think, ultimately, that feeling inside of you of, “What am I doing wrong? Why is it not working?” that’s probably the thing that resonates the most with my clients. Why am I being passed over for job assignments? Why am I being passed over for promotions, raises, kind of like staying stagnant when they really want to be moving up. Do your clients tend to be women that have a desire to move up, that have thought out, “Okay, I want to move up because of this, this, and that”? Sometimes. Sometimes it’s about moving up, sometimes it’s about transitioning even into a parallel role. Lots of times, it’s about just the transformation of getting the next experience and moving up is often an answer in that but sometimes it’s just moving to a bigger project and it’s not necessarily a ladder climb as much as it’s an experiential climb. So, wondering how to get that next experience, wondering how to get recognized, those are the things where that transformational experience is really what they’re looking for. And then do you work with your clients on figuring out what it is that they want or do you tend to work with people who have already gone through that process, say, through a different coach or a different program, “I figured out what I want, now I need to do the relationship building,” that you’re talking about? So I’m going to answer that question by talking a little bit about how Spark Alchemy came about. It was very interesting coming up with the company itself because alchemy is that seemingly magical process of transformation or creation or both and when you start getting into the historics around the magic of it, you have to sit back and remind yourself that magic is just science that we haven’t proven yet. And I think that people are trying to find that transformation creation piece of themselves and that’s what I help them with.Share on X So they may come from previous experience with other coaches but, generally speaking, I’m starting with where do they want to go and a lot of self-discovery around who they are and how to uncover that journey for themselves. And when I created Spark Alchemy, if you think about even finding your perfect relationship, you have to ask yourself, “Is that magic? Is that science? Is that luck?” That’s the same with the relationship of yourself. How do we find that internal genuine self-discovery piece and is that magic, science, combination? Do you do it with blood tests or do you do it with a psychic reading or do you do it with every tool out there? So, really, in helping women in this transformative journey, guiding them in finding that space of where they want to go and how they want to go there and what masks they want to take off and what masks they want to keep on as they’re going through this journey. And what prompted you to start Spark Alchemy? What prompted you to decide that this was what business you want to bring to the world? ...