Ezinne Ibe founded The Female Professionals (TFP) Book Club in 2017 and it has turned out to be a forum where female professionals share workplace experiences while enjoying their passion: reading. She tells SAM NWAOKO about the club and issues related to their exciting club. Excerpts:
What brought about the idea of The Female Professionals’ Book Club? What is it about?
TFP Book Club started in 2017. It all started when I read a book titled “Uplift Your Productivity” written by Molofuwaso Ilevbare. The book has nine strategies to maximise your potentials and your productivity as a professional woman. I found the book quite interesting and apt for today’s workplace environment. So, I desired to share what I had learnt with others. Then, what I had in mind was younger people, younger female professionals – more like a mentoring thing. But over time I thought it might become boring at a time, why not open it up to more people so that everyone would have opportunity to participate. So, as at today I’ve gifted over 25 copies of that book to young female professionals in my network. The book club itself has become a thriving community of women who love to read and exchange ideas and share knowledge, talk about their experiences, talk about what they are reading – discuss books across borders. We now have membership from over 33 professions cutting across eight cities in Nigeria and four countries. So, you can imagine the kind of diversity in such a group, apart from the diversity of the different professions and diversity of people from different parts of the world coming together on a platform to talk about one common thing. So, the basic thing is reading – people that have passion to read. Over the years, we have some Harvard Business Reviews, we’ve read things on precision, strategy, we’ve read fictions, autobiographies and memoirs. We have had quite interesting reads. It’s a platform to learn, to share and to have fun.
How do you recruit into the club? What does it take to be a member of the club?
Membership is open to every professional woman. We are on various social media channels but the main digital platform where we interact is WhatsApp. That is where we have over 110 women currently interacting on a daily basis. But if you want to become a member, you ask to join any of the social media groups through the platforms and from there, we do a documentation of who you are, what you do and then, you are added to the group.
As a group of professional women who have found themselves in the workplace, where do the men come in terms of partnership or support?
Currently, as women who have found themselves to be professionals or to be in the workplace, we’ve identified things that are common to us, factors that are common to our success in the workplace and also common to our success in other spheres of our life and that basically is, apart from sharing ideas, experiences and knowledge, we have people who are in their 60s, we have those who are grandmothers and we have those who are in their 40s, 30s and in their 20s. The common thing is that we all find ourselves in the workplace but the challenges we face on a daily basis are not the same because we work across borders, across countries, across industries. Any way you look at it, there is one knowledge shared somewhere, somehow that may help you to surmount your challenges and then you would know that somebody had done this or had passed through it before or is currently dealing with this. By the time you voice it out, that thing that didn’t seem to have a form, you will see how to tackle it.
How do the men come in? One of the writers told me that her sons and husband were the first to read the book and they said ‘oh, mummy this happened to you? So you will see that apart from creating that bonding in the home, family and circle of people, some of us also used the book to immortalise some people. I for one used it to immortalise my grandma and my mum. I feel anything written in black and white has been put down forever. They might not have done those large notable things, but in my life they have done something worth acknowledging. So, for the men it also makes them to see the point from where the women are coming from. They say it’s a man’s world but a lot of men take things for granted when it comes to working with women in a group. For instance, if there is a group of men that does something and there is a woman in that group and they have a female; if they are deciding on what to wear, you see them put on a white shirt and black trouser and a black jacket but and nobody remembers that there is one woman in the team who may probably want to appear for that event in a skirt. So, what stops you from putting trouser/skirt? It is not about stamping authority or pressurising, it’s about being felt where you are. There are very competent women in work places but they are not recognised due to their competence. An elderly female professor told of how she went out with a male colleague years ago, she said the people there were all greeting the man and nobody looked in her direction. The, the professor they were greeting then said ‘let me introduce to you Professor so and so-and-so, she is the Dean of this-and-that” and they all went ‘oh, sorry ma’ and the reaction to her changed. It shouldn’t be like that. When you see someone, see the person for who the person is. Do not wait until you hear titles because titles do not matter for me; it is your work that places value on you.
Is your club not elitist, one made up of women of means or on the higher economic pedestal?
Not exactly. It has to do with women who have passion for reading and people who have passion for sharing knowledge. So, if I happen to be the one on board, it is most likely that the people in my circle will know. If it happens to be someone else from different background or experience, maybe a medical doctor or HR person, people in that person’s circle may know. One of the things that make me know it is not an elitist thing is that every year, we agree on the books that we are going to read and we agree on a reading plan. Some people for some reason will say they don’t want the hard copy book either because it is expensive or because some say they don’t like reading hard copies but soft copies. You can find a hard copy that sells for N5,000 and the soft copy, if you purchase online, sells for N1,000. I noticed that is what some of the younger people in the group go for. So, nobody feels the difference in the copy that you have. What matters is what you are able to bring to the table as regards the content of the book and applying it to everyday living. Of a fact, we have never had a physical meeting as it were; our book launch scheduled for Saturday, June 24th will be the first time most of us would be meeting. The title of the book is ‘We Live These Lives” and
Do you look at socio-economic realities and how do you think some of the cultural things inhibit the women?
I will use a programme we organised recently as an example to answer this question. We called it “Menstrual Hygiene” and we targetted girls in public secondary schools because we felt they were the crop of people we wanted and needed to reach out to at that particular time. When we needed to reach out to children below 12 on reading, we targetted a different set of children; when we held a seminar we called “Mum Is It About All the As?”, we targetted a particular group. We know we cannot impact the whole nation but little by little, we want to impact as much as we can do. So, in that particular event, we spent quality time with the secondary school girls, explaining to them what they might never know or which people might not tell them. Medical doctors in the group were the ones that talked to them. It took us almost one year to get approval from the ministry of education to hold that programme on menstrual hygiene for girls. If it was something we were not passionate about, we might just have given up. It took a lot of time and pursuit to get an approval. Last year, we did something on cultural diversity. We have members of the book club form Liberia and Sierra Leone who told us about their culture and tradition when it comes to marriage, food and perceptions about women. Those are some of the things we are doing in our own little community. We do these to see how we can reach out to ourselves. We have also done something on money and it was based on the book “The Smart Money Woman”. Some of the books we read have movies. When we are reading books, cultural perspectives are brought in.
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