Province of Manitoba

In this keynote delivered at the Province of Manitoba's official International Women's Day celebration, Liz moved between the personal and the political to examine what it actually takes to advance gender equity beyond the language of awareness and into the architecture of real change.

She introduced the distinction between glass ceilings and sticky floors, arguing that the conversation about women in leadership too often focuses on the top while ignoring the systemic forces keeping women rooted at the bottom. Grounded in data on the wage gap and the compounded inequities facing women of colour, the talk challenged the audience to move from acknowledgment to accountability.

At its heart, the speech was a tribute to two women who shaped her. Her mother, born in 1953 at the end of the Korean War, who sacrificed everything to send her daughters to Canada with no guarantee of what lay ahead. And Kathy, her late Canadian mother, a woman of no particular privilege who chose to see her students as human beings first and used everything she had to advocate for them. Both women, Liz argued, were privilege equalizers long before she had language for the concept.

The session closed with a call to stop breaking glass ceilings and start breaking ground entirely, building systems from scratch that do not require women to fight their way through the ones designed to exclude them.

Venue: Province of Manitoba Official Celebration

‍Audience: Provincial government leaders, ministers, community leaders, and women from across Manitoba, including Premier Heather Stefanson and members of the Legislative Assembly