All posts by Cathy Light

CATHY LIGHT is CEO of Liderança Group, Inc., a Business and Workplace Acceleration Firm. Cathy’s award-winning entrepreneurial career spans decades in her multi-faceted ability to grow technology businesses and drive results across global organizations. Following her time at Apple in Marketing and PR, she led Global Sales and Marketing with Fuji Optical Systems, a Division of Fuji Film, and launched an innovative dental technology product for the company that became a $500M market in 5 years. Cathy also served as VP and GM of Sunrise Technologies, a publicly traded developer of lasers in the ophthalmology and dental industry. Cathy’s passion is to help organizations and individuals reach their highest potential. In 1998 Cathy founded Business Builders, a strategy advisory firm. In 2016 she established Liderança Group with four divisions: Leadership Balance® and three other growing enterprises: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Assessment Leaders, and Be Well Perform Well. In recognition of her extraordinary work, Smart Business nominated Ms. Light for the “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year”. In January 2020, she was recognized as an emerging Women in Cloud Microsoft Commercial Marketplace Enterprise.

A Post-Pandemic Recovery Playbook for Women  – by Cathy Light

As vaccines roll out, we turn our attention toward economic recovery. The traditional stimulus measures of the past, dominated by investment in infrastructure and construction, will not be effective in our post-pandemic world. Those sectors are male-majority employers, and COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on women.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, in one month (September 2020), more than 1 million Americans over the age of 20 left the U.S. workforce. Roughly 80% – over 865,000 of them – were women. There are now nearly 2.2 million fewer women in the labor force than there were in February 2020 before the pandemic. In October 2020, the U.S. retail trade sector gained 103,700 jobs. Women accounted for only 11.4% of those gains, despite making up 48.4% of the retail trade workforce. We must do better.
Continue reading A Post-Pandemic Recovery Playbook for Women  – by Cathy Light