The beauty industry predominantly caters to women, so that it has the lion’s share of women in leadership roles isn’t surprising. That said, the female-to-male ratio of C-suite beauty executives is still shockingly low. Per a 2016 report from the gender-disparity research group LedBetter, while the beauty industry boasted the highest percentage of women executives, the figure was a scant 29% (or less than a third of all top jobs), as reported by ABC News outlet FiveThirtyEight. For Amber Olson Rourke, chief sales and marketing officer and co-founder of the beauty and wellness brand Neora, addressing this disconnect in the power structure is built into her company’s DNA.
“Our mission statement is very simple: ‘Make people better.’ But it really dictates everything … we do — whether it’s for our products, for our employees, for our independent brand partners — we want to help make them the best version of themselves,” Olson Rourke explains. While Neora’s best-you-forward policy isn’t gender-specific, it speaks to a female audience in a language that connects with their true desires and core values. “We don’t do programs necessarily specific to women only,” Olson Rourke says, “but I think a lot of what we provide speaks to women and resonates [with] women.”
One of Olson Rourke’s proudest accomplishments is the “for us, by us” female-centric environment that’s allowed Neora to elevate everyone who works for and with the company. “It isn’t about competition; it’s about helping one another,” she says. “Everyone rises together, and so it creates a really fertile ground for women from different backgrounds, different ages, different education, socioeconomic starting points to be able to have something of their own, learn skill sets, be encouraged, share their passions, and grow from wherever they are.”
While every individual has a different starting point, Olson Rourke maintains the goal at Neora “is to help people grow in their confidence and their competency to do whatever it is that they want to do.” She notes many of the skills women learn as Neora brand partners are transferable to other facets of their careers. “I’ve had brand partners that got to really high levels of success,” she says, citing one woman who went on to start a thriving ministry for college kids and another who launched a lucrative restaurant franchise. “A lot of the intangible and tangible skills we teach … really do impact a lot of different areas of their lives.”
Neora’s Strong Female Leadership Models Change in the Workplace
Prior to starting up Neora with her dad, Amber Olson Rourke ran a medical spa. Even with her business savvy, being in charge of a new company was a novel experience. She admits, in the beginning, she used to second-guess herself.
“There was definitely a journey for me to trust my instinct and trust myself,” she concedes. “There’s so many times where we were sitting at a table and coming up with an idea and someone who maybe had more experience than me or was more outspoken than me would go one way. And I would just feel in my gut that wasn’t the right path, but I would kind of just let it go, [thinking,] ‘They must know better.’”
But time and again, when the scenario played out, Olson Rourke realized she’d been right all along. She believes her situation was typical for many women taking on leadership responsibilities for the first time. She accepts there might always be people who don’t want to take a woman in charge seriously; however, it’s up to women to change that dynamic.
“Most people will give you your seat at the table and your voice, but we have to learn to trust our own voice and to not assume that somebody else, just because they have more experience or they’re a male or they have a bigger title, knows more than we do. We have to confidently show up … at the table and act like we deserve that seat and have a confident voice in that seat. When women do that, I do feel like they are heard and that they are really great leaders.”
“Just take a look at most of the executive positions at Neora and you’ll see they are held by females: our CEO, our CMO, our head of operations, our head of legal, me as the head of product development, among others,” notes Juliana Rochelle. “I remember years back when my previous [human resources department] asked me where I saw myself in five years and I told them I didn’t know. I told them that as a Latina woman, I’d reached the ceiling. I had no one that I could relate to and say, ‘That’s what I want to achieve.’ This is not the case here. And that’s the best form of empowerment one can have.”