I attended the American Mental Health Counselors Association (AMHCA) conference in Orlando on August 2 – 3, 2018. I met some wonderful colleagues who were doing great work in their communities, and my presentation on “Working with the Mother-Daughter Relationship” was well attended and sparked lively discussion. But as I listened to the male President, the male Past President, the male Executive Director/CEO take the stage and urge us to support the organization and our local regional branches, I felt deflated.

Where are the women in this organization? Why are they only visible as caretakers and not as leaders? I felt angry as I looked through the conference handbook and saw that only two of the nine Board Directors were female, and that the women held regional director positions, not top positions.

This is no longer okay. How does this resonate with today’s emphasis on women’s leadership and the increasing awareness of institutional sexism? And counseling is a highly female dominated profession. You would think that this makes it easier for a woman to rise to leadership roles. Something is obviously stopping women from running for office and being elected!

The gender inequality within AMHCA was glaring. Right from day one as I walked to the welcome table I noticed that it was manned by women, a strange word to use in this context. And I wasn’t alone in noticing this. The women I spoke to all commented on how women were doing all the running around and organizing and that the Board of Directors is a boy’s club. During the prize giving they gave each other awards and slapped each other on the back with congratulations. It was sickening to watch.

So where does this leave me as a woman? I have no aspirations to run for office because I have enough on my plate championing the still marginalized mother-daughter relationship. My calling is to lead the mother-daughter coaching community. Yet I also don’t want to support an organization that doesn’t give women an equal voice.

It is my duty to write this blog and call out this sexism because if I keep silent, my silence communicates an agreement and acceptance that it’s okay for men to dominate. If we have any hope in seeing the back of boy’s clubs that masquerade as Boards of Directors, we all have a duty to say; “Time’s Up”. We have a collective duty to uncover institutional sexism wherever it lurks.
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Rosjke Hasseldine is a mother-daughter relationship therapist, speaker, and author of The Silent Female Scream & The Mother-Daughter Puzzle. Rosjke teaches mental health professionals how to become a Certified Mother-Daughter Coach. www.rosjke.com