Episode 221: Sharing Women’s Success – Who is a Torchbearer? with Wamite Muthura
There are women that stand beside us and there are women that go before us, and there are women that are coming behind us. If you feel alone, know that you are surrounded, whether you believe it or not, by torchbearers or mini torches behind you, trying to make the path better.
Wamite Muthura is the founder and chief storyteller of Career Safari, a platform that spotlights and celebrates the diverse career journeys of women.
Career Safari brings together a global community of women who are seeking a healthier relationship with their careers. It offers authentic advice and resources to help women more boldly navigate the challenges of career life and redefine their own personal definition of success.
If you've been looking for permission to expand where you are right now, or to maybe break some of the molds that you're seeing in front of you, the Career Safari and this conversation with Wamite might make a difference in how you're viewing your next career moves.
Sharing torchbearer success stories
When Wamite started Career Safari, she was lost and trying to define what success looked like for her. She had found passion very early on working at an NGO, but was at a point where she knew she didn’t want to do that anymore.
“So much of my identity was tied into what I was doing,” says Wamite. “It took a lot of unwinding, and there was several little things that happened to kind of help me understand who I am.”
Ultimately, it was the stories from women she was working with who gave her hope and light. These torchbearers were vulnerable about their career stories and lives – facing divorce, leaving countries, and changing careers.
“I want to give diverse stories a platform … and I want them to have evidence and proof that there are people that look like you, that are probably doing things that you're already doing, or something similar to what you want to do,” says Wamite. “And we're not alone in this journey.”
Facing gender barriers
She notes that no matter what industry, most of the women she’s meeting are still facing gender barriers. Even in fields that tend to be women-dominated such as teaching and nursing, when you reach the leadership levels where decisions are being made, they’re facing those barriers.
“If there are millions of us that are out there starting podcasts, starting businesses, whatever it may be, starting media channels that are focused solely on women's empowerment, that's still not enough,” says Wamite. “We are dealing with generations of toxic images that we are trying to basically counteract and change.”
One torchbearer story that really resonates with Wamite was of a doctor attending a global health conference who realized there were no women on stage. She started a hashtag that became a global movement and eventually founded Women in Global Health.
Wamite says the doctor originally went to another woman leader and asked what are we going to do about this? And the woman’s wise response was, why don’t you do something about it?
It was that nudge inside her that fueled her passion to make the change. Those little nudges can guide us. For Wamite, she doesn’t like how women are treated in the workplace, which is why she built her platform to share the community that helps empower women.
Let’s get to it!
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