Empowering International Women’s Day Event: Breaking Barriers and Building Confidence

By Jaden Hilkemann, Director of CAPE Project at Doane University

After graduating from Doane, I was nervous to embark on my professional journey as a young woman. My passion for helping others and bettering my community has always driven me. However, despite this enthusiasm, I often found myself lacking the confidence to apply for certain jobs, share my ideas, and try new things. The fear of not being perceived as intelligent enough, lacking experience and resources, and the fear of making mistakes weighed heavily on me as a young professional. Despite having a great support system at Doane, these feelings persisted.

Questions lingered in my mind:

Am I doing enough?

Are my peers, students, and male counterparts taking me seriously?

Am I intelligent enough for this job?

Thankfully, I know I am not alone in these feelings. Women across the country face similar concerns, often for legitimate reasons. Even in 2024, women continue to grapple with pay gaps, sexism, workplace harassment, a lack of female colleagues, bias, societal expectations, and the added challenges of caregiving and motherhood, not to mention living at the intersection of other identities.

As I worked on organizing this International Women’s Day event, my goal was to create an opportunity for young students who will soon enter the workforce to gain insights into what it means to be a woman in the workplace. This will involve hearing from women on Doane’s campus, each sharing their authentic stories of failures and triumphs. My hope for this event is not only for young women to learn from the professional women around them but also for women on campus to feel less isolated in their struggles and more proud of what they’ve accomplished despite the hurdles they may have had to overcome.

I genuinely believe that investing in, listening to, and caring about the women closest to us can have more of an impact than we might think. I encourage students, staff, and faculty to take advantage of this opportunity to learn more about the women who contribute to Doane University’s success and to hear their stories of how they’ve arrived at where they are today.

The blog posts in Forward. Together. are intended to foster an inclusive community of empathy and curiosity at Doane University by providing a glimpse into various individual identities and worldviews. These are community members’ unique stories and should not be presumed to be the experience of all who share the same identity.