This year's International Women's Day theme, ‘Give to Gain,’ resonates deeply with four senior HR leaders who are committed to making a real impact. Juliet Muheirwe, head of HR at Equity Bank Uganda, Lilian Makau, head of HR at Standard Chartered Bank Tanzania, Mumbi Kahindo, CPO at Absa Bank Kenya and Agnes Wachira, senior HR manager at CYBER RANGES, each have valuable insights that go far beyond the slogan.
Juliet Muheirwe, head of HR at Equity Bank Uganda, starts with something women rarely say out loud, that the voice telling them they do not belong is not always coming from outside.
Silencing the inner critic
“Something good comes up, an opportunity arises, and we default to self-sabotage. We start wondering if we're good enough or if it's really meant for us. It happens to all of us. Sometimes, even when you're in a powerful position, you can feel that complex—wondering if it's really you and if you truly belong here,” she says.
Juliet has a specific frustration with the gap between how women and men approach a job advertisement. A man, she says, will apply with twenty percent of the requirements and back himself. A woman will wait until she has a hundred percent and sometimes still hesitate.
“Let's embrace ourselves and our so-called perceived imperfections. We are different. We are uniquely made. Let's be better versions of ourselves,” she adds.
Lilian Makau, head of HR at Standard Chartered Bank Tanzania, knows exactly what it feels like to stand at the edge of an opportunity and talk yourself out of it. When she was a graduate trainee and told her father she wanted to apply for a role she felt unqualified for, he gave her three words.
“He asked me what the worst that could happen was, so I applied,” she says.
Lilian did not get the job, but the feedback she received had nothing to do with her capability. The team needed someone from a specific region. She moved on without internalising the rejection and has been applying that principle ever since. She tells the same thing to the women she works with now.
“What if the worst doesn't happen? What if the opposite were true, that you are the right person for the job? How will you know? The world has so much space for us. We just need to own it,” she adds.
Rethinking work and family
Mumbi Kahindo, chief people officer at Absa Bank Kenya, is clear that the conversation about work and family will not go away and she is equally clear that balance is the wrong word for what women are actually trying to achieve. When her son was young and the organisation was in a period of intense work, she went directly to her manager and negotiated.
“I negotiated with my boss to make sure I was home by 8pm every day, because I believed I needed to see my son before he went to bed, read a book together, hear about his day and say a prayer. And my boss was kind enough to say yes,” she recalls.
She delivered on every deadline regardless, sometimes picking up calls from 9:30 in the evening to finish a project. The structure worked because she had asked for it explicitly. Her message to other women is to have the same conversation, even if the answer is no.
“You will not achieve balance. Balance insinuates I can do twenty percent here and twenty percent there. But you can achieve integration. Be courageous enough to have the conversation,” she adds.
Agnes Wachira, senior HR Manager at CYBER RANGES, brings the conversation back to the everyday, the moment a woman returns to the office after four months away on maternity leave and finds herself feeling, as she puts it, like an old newbie on the first day of school.
She built a reintegration programme specifically for returning mothers: a personal briefing on what had changed, a pairing with a colleague who had been through maternity leave before, reset targets and a card and flowers from the team on the first day back.
“You've been away for four months. You come back and it's a whole new phenomenon. It becomes easier for the mother to reintegrate when you celebrate the milestones and help them plug in as easily as possible,” she says.
Her message for Women's Day is rooted in the same principle she applied to that programme, full presence, in every space, without apology.
"If you're in the office, give it your best shot. Don't be afraid to speak out. You don't have to be hundred percent right. Make your voice heard as long as it's making sense. And when you go home, be fully present there too,” she adds.
