Women are historically underrepresented in the manufacturing and construction industries, and Carlisle Companies recognized this disparity in establishment of the 30% gender diversity in director and above objective by 2025. To achieve this, it’s vital Carlisle engages, empowers, and supports women in the workplace while attracting new, exceptional, diverse candidates at all organizational levels.

In 2020, Carlisle founded its Women of Carlisle Employee Resource Group (ERG), spearheaded by Global Training Manager Kristin St. Marie. What began as a group of four women has blossomed into a widely popular initiative. The ERG’s objectives include fostering a safe environment for women to network with, learn from, and support one other; enhancing knowledge of gender differences and unconscious biases in the workplace; offering career growth opportunities to women in the organization; and providing women higher visibility to and from senior leaders.

To date, in addition to exponential growth, the Women of Carlisle boasts numerous opportunities for its members. Regularly, the ERG hosts guest speakers, covering a variety of relevant material. Speaker topics have included unconscious bias, microaggressions, work-life balance, the double bind dilemma, and domestic violence awareness, among many others.

The Women of Carlisle ERG has grown exponentially, now claiming 440 members across the organization. In 2023, the group sent 29 Carlisle women to the Women in Manufacturing Summit in San Diego, CA, with another 11 attending virtually. It currently tracks metrics on its membership and engagement and will soon introduce more complex measures to understand correlation between membership and things like promotion rates. The group also maintains excellent visibility within the organization, another contributing factor to its steady growth.

Andrew Razanauskas