Women Gone WILD: Empowering Leaders at Menlo College

By Chara Higaki ’22, President, Womxn in Leadership Development

Womxn In Leadership Development (WILD), founded in 2019 by Bianca Barros, aims to help womxn fight oppression, stigmas, and constraints that stop them from achieving their full potential. Our activities help empower womxn to be impactful, conscious, and innovative leaders. We also emphasize the importance of mental health, making WILD a safe place for womxn to express themselves.

As a club, some of our goals include: promoting innovative leadership, in order to equip womxn with the confidence they need to navigate this complex world; empowering womxn with the necessary skills to identify and address discrimination and inequality in the professional world beyond the Menlo community; and fostering connections within the womxn of Menlo College.

For instance, during the pandemic, WILD hosted a Galentines Day Event as a celebration of thyself. Participants munched on chocolate-covered strawberries and played an icebreaker game of We’re Not Really Strangers to discover commonalities and to become more aware of their worth. This event is a celebration for womxn to feel worthy of love, whether or not they have a partner, with the help of a community of womxn doing the same. We want members to embody confidence that radiates to those around them.

The Womxn In Leadership board meets once a week on Monday nights to plan events and potentially collaborate with other schools. Last year, the event series included a presentation by Rika Nakazawa, the vice president, and client partner at Conduent, and the CEO and co-founder of BoardSeatMeet. She spoke powerfully about breaking through glass, bamboo, silicon ceilings of the enterprise landscape.

This year WILD, along with the Alumni Engagement and Development office, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the admittance of womxn. Along with empowering current womxn at Menlo college by offering off-campus opportunities and speaker events. WILD plans to take its members to the Women’s March in San Francisco. We will stand with other individuals who move with the feminist movement. WILD is also included in a network with other womxn led groups at different institutions, including De Anza College, to provide virtual events for each other’s members.

We want to empower womxn and encourage anyone that identifies as a womxn to join our club. We hope members of WILD feel that this time and space are safe. WILD also promotes inclusion and is open for anyone who identifies as an ally to womxn. Our society will be facing deep problems in the next decades and we will need to rely on thoughtful, powerful authorities. WILD is helping to develop rising leaders.

WILD creates frequent opportunities for students and faculty to come together. Here, Dean Melissa Michelson congratulates Sigrid Eriksson Loid ’22 at a recent event honoring students who have made contributions to gender equity.