Paul KeijzerNews revolving around LinkedIn and women has taken an interesting turn. One of the major stories going around is when a Barrister received sexist comments from older lawyers on LinkedIn. It’s gone to the extent where some women have been saying they started uploading “ugly” pictures to stop being preyed upon for dates on a network that is supposed to be strictly professional.
All that said, LinkedIn still is the number one professional social networking site. It’s still the place to turn to find support, mentorship and simple life lessons for working women. Even though there’s much to be said about the number of groups for business women, the three groups below are definitely on the right track to provide the right networking opportunities.
As one of the older groups on Linked in, this group has more than 486,000 members whom you can connect with to create a powerful professional network. This is a great place to stay on top of all the articles and posts that you should read to keep a pulse check of what’s important to working women in the workplace. The members are awesome at providing a summary of the most important articles on the topic.
Even though it’s more established, this one has a smaller size at just under 38,000 members. However they do have an entire website revolving around community-driven media branding. They simply don’t believe in barriers or boundaries. With the challenges that women face in the IT Industry it’s important to have networks who muscle conferences, startup competitions and full scale city meetups to provide the support that women need in this industry.
You’ll have to get approval to join this group but it’s the best one if you’re in the process of, or have already started your own business. All entrepreneurs know that there are endless challenges in starting your own business, even though most people would agree that the excitement is worth it. But I’ve talked to women who have started their own ventures and honestly, they do face more challenges then men do, especially in frontier regions. I highly recommend women entrepreneurs to join this network to learn and teach through their experiences.
I’ll say this – as I was researching different group to feature for this post, I was quite surprised at the low number of established networks to support working women. That’s not to say that they simply didn’t exist, but they just didn’t have the power and expertise that women could truly benefit from. So, not only do I think these groups are valuable to join for networking, but I recommend you seriously consider taking the time out to contribute your experiences, stories and lessons. Perhaps something you learned could help someone else.
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