Jackson Hole News & Guide Contributor Tibby Plasse interviewed workshop Facilitator Jennifer Ford about Womentum’s Empowerment in the Workplace workshop “Womentum encourages workplace action” in the April 16, 2025 weekly paper.
This week’s Womentum workshop, “Empowerment in the Workplace,” offers a toolkit for change. Led by local facilitator and president of Frederick Mountain Group, Jennifer Ford, tonight’s event will help Jackson women take an audit of their professional journey.
Ford will help attendees identify barriers and what those barriers mean for historically marginalized groups, and talk about “imposter syndrome” where people feel like a fraud. Ford loves a new frontier for good dialogue. She questions whether people are taking steps that go beyond awareness to action.
“Are we going through the motions and doing the courses but not actually applying the work,” she said, “because the anecdotal stories I hear from young people, and especially young brown people, is it’s not good.”
She says what she hears often are solutions that she refers to as “it’s a lot of make nice” and what she called one of her favorite phrases is “let’s find a both/and solution.”
Combating systemic social and economic challenges is not the same for everyone. Ford hopes that through this workshop, women can walk away with a toolkit that helps them ask the right questions.
“What the data says, is that women are not shrinking violets,” Ford said. “They are asking for raises and time off but when you look at how that’s playing out, it’s not happening at the C-Suite level.”
Ford also understands that this kind of work requires a realistic accounting of options. But knowing there’s a cohort that understands these challenges is a core asset that Womentum wants women to realize they have.
Attendees should check out the pre-reading on the website:
- Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome (Harvard Business Review)
- Stop Blaming Women for the Gender Pay Gap (Vanderbilt University)