Letter from Founder

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My name is Emily Donahoe-O'Keefe, and I founded WOMENSPEAK Training in 2007. This is our 19th year of work with thousands of clients across industries and around the world.​

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Working with university students, clients, and colleagues, I kept noticing a pattern: women spoke less than men in public settings, and it was costing them professionally, organizationally, and in terms of whose ideas actually shaped decisions. I wanted to know whether what I was observing was real, how deep it ran, and what could actually be done about it.

 

The research confirmed what I had seen, and then some. Women speak less than men in virtually every documented public arena: in workplaces, classrooms, academic conferences, committee meetings, and media. Linguist Deborah Cameron's research shows the pattern is consistent and statistically robust across settings. Deborah Tannen at Georgetown finds that ways of speaking directly affect who gets credit, who gets heard, and who gets promoted.

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But here is what the research also makes clear: the problem is not that women lack something. Women speak less in public, in part because they are both socialized differently and often penalized for speaking up. They are spoken over, interrupted, and ignored. They navigate double-bind obstacles that men in the same rooms do not face. The bias is structural as much as it is individual.

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And organizations pay for it. When women's voices are absent or discounted, organizations lose access to the intellectual capital sitting right inside their own talent pools. Research is consistent that companies with greater women's representation in leadership significantly outperform those without it. Women are a competitive advantage. Diversity drives performance and innovation.

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This is why WOMENSPEAK Training was built the way it was. Our Collective Responsibility Model places accountability on the whole organization. It's not just on individual women to speak differently, but also on colleagues, managers, and institutions to listen better, interrupt bias actively, and build systems that sustain inclusion over time. Practical tools for women. Ally training for the room. Structural practices for the organization. All three are working together.

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We align with the DEI strategies of forward-thinking organizations. In an era when those strategies are under pressure, we offer something durable: a business case grounded in performance data and a methodology grounded in the best available evidence for what actually works.

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This is the work. We're glad you're here.

 

Emily Donahoe-O'Keefe

Founder / Principal

WOMENSPEAK Training