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

Action's Antidotes

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,