Gender Equality in Action: The Role of Project Leaders

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International Women’s Day is a clarion call for gender equality—and project professionals around the globe are taking bold action to advance the cause. Our guests discuss the projects they’re leading to empower girls and women, how they ensure they’re delivering positive social impact, and how they keep themselves—and their teams—motivated in the face of adversity.

Our guests include Cecile Pilot, senior project and capacity building officer at Defense for Children International in Geneva, and Marwa Hammad, head of global gender strategy and the Youth Education and Entrepreneurship program at Schneider Electric Foundation in Cairo.

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CECILE PILOT
I envision a world where, really, gender equality is not just a distant goal, but a lived reality. A world where the rights of women and girls are upheld and where justice prevails over injustice.

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified^® we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
The push for gender equality persists. It takes different forms across industries, contexts and regions—but with common denominators. With the tireless work of people committed to helping women everywhere, we can see what’s needed to level the playing field. Today, we’ll meet two women who are fighting the good fight for gender equality across the globe.

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified^®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

The theme for International Women’s Day in 2025 is “accelerate action.” It’s a clarion call to pick up the pace for efforts to improve women’s economic empowerment and career development, among other issues. Of course, making those gains depends not only on working faster but also doing so effectively—and project leaders and their teams play a crucial role in ensuring that such initiatives deliver impact. Today we’ll meet two leaders whose projects are at the forefront of gender equality.

Before we dive in, if you enjoy Projectified, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us keep making this show.

Now, let’s go to our conversation. We spoke with Cecile Pilot, senior project and capacity-building officer at Defence for Children International, a global non-governmental organization focused on children’s rights. Cecile is in Geneva. Our second guest is Marwa Hammad, head of global gender strategy and the Youth Education & Entrepreneurship program at Schneider Electric Foundation. The program empowers youth through technical and vocational education and training in energy management. Marwa is in Cairo.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

Supporting young women to drive change

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Okay. Cecile, let’s start with you. Tell me about the program, what you’re trying to achieve. In your case, it very directly pushes for equality and empowerment of women and girls. But yeah, give me some sense of how you came to be involved in what you’re trying to do.

CECILE PILOT
Thank you so much for this opportunity. Indeed, at Defence for Children International, I’m in charge of the international advocacy for a big program called She Leads, which in fact is a consortium, joint initiative led by Plan International, Terre des Hommes, and Defence for Children as well as FEMNET (African Women’s Development and Communication Network), which is a feminist African network. We are supporting girls and young women and driving change in their communities. The program is really about influencing decision-making, especially at the local level, but also in regional and international spaces. We have created a youth cohort of young women, which on an annual basis are being trained at the local level, but then they are invited to Geneva to give testimonies at the Human Rights Council sessions.

To really ensure the voices of women and girls are prioritized, we try to make sure that women and girls are represented in our team, but also in leadership roles—for instance, through our board of our organization or through a specific committee that will guide our action in projects. And we also establish regular feedback sessions and surveys during our event and after our events to make sure that we captured also their experiences, their perspective and how we can do better.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
And how did you come to be involved in this?

STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s great. Okay, Greg, we’re turning it over to you. Tell us about the Refugee Employment Initiative.

CECILE PILOT
Previous to this role, I was really working on humanitarian affairs. I was based in Brussels in a consulting group, working in a monitoring and evaluation department. And I was going on a mission in West Africa, such as Burkina Faso, Niger countries. On the ground, I’ve been really touched by the many stories of young women and girls that I’ve met in the field. Especially migrants, but also girls who were victims and survivors of gender-based violence. So I really wanted to help reintegrate those girls into society, first of all to free them, to give them access to education, better opportunities.

The task is really huge, and if you read the Global Gender Gap Report of 2024, they say that if we continue at the current rate, it will take 134 years to achieve full gender parity. But I think courage is also contagious. By scaling up efforts, really by cooperating with other organizations, you can find innovative solutions, and you need to tackle the root causes of gender inequality. The importance is also to celebrate the progress we’ve made—and commit to accelerating action for a more equal world.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Thank you. Marwa let’s go to you. I’m really interested in your work at Schneider, and also just how you came to have such a voice in shaping gender strategy just like five minutes after university.

MARWA HAMMAD
I always felt a calling to work in education and women empowerment, because being a woman myself and actually knowing what it feels like to be deprived of a right as fundamental as access to education.

I had a mission in Senegal, and this is where I met my boss, and seeing her passion toward women empowerment and youth education and youth accessing this right actually had made me really interested in this. And that’s why we had the conversation around introducing the first-ever global gender strategy for Schneider Electric Foundation through the Youth Education & Entrepreneurship program. The idea got a lot of attention.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Tell me more about the Youth Education & Entrepreneurship program.

MARWA HAMMAD
It’s launched since 2009, and it’s about unlocking the potential and creating opportunities to youths. The program is supported by the Schneider Electric Foundation, and it aims to skill and empower 1 million youths globally by the end of 2025. It’s really specific to energy management. We are providing technical and vocational training, alongside with future-focused skills in energy management, in order to address the growing skills gap in the energy sector with all the transitions that we’re having at the moment. And also fostering this transition to be a just, inclusive and sustainable energy transition by including girls and women, by including youths, as well, in the decision making. It’s about how we empower individuals to take charge or to be part of this energy transition by building their technical expertise or actually supporting them to have an entrepreneurial spirit or simply just giving them the confidence to pursue better opportunities.

We are collaborating with over 400 organizations across 60 countries. So, we are creating this global network to establish the ground for a supportive ecosystem for girls and women. One example of our programs is called the DESFERS program. It’s in Senegal, Mali, Niger, in the three countries. It’s in partnership with Plan International in the European Union, and those actors actually work together and [are] trying to solve the problem from its roots. For this project, we have three levels of intervention. We have the training, we have the electrification of the region, and finally, the empowerment. We established six technical centers in these rural areas in order to deliver technical skills on solar energy to 7,000 women [entrepreneurs]. It doesn’t stop there. We have six micro grids there to provide this electrification needed for the region. And then finally, with the support of the partners, we supported these women through micro credit loans and business management and financial literacy training to enable women to create their own small and medium enterprises.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Units make sense, then, because you’re essentially saying that every unit that you put into the market, you are replacing one that doesn’t biodegrade as well. So therefore, there’s an impact. The second one also seems really important, which is making sure that your products have the positive effect that you want. How did you figure out how to track that progress? Like, how did you arrive at those tests, and so forth?

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let me ask a follow-up right there. That many countries, cultural contexts, individual partners—does everybody get a bespoke solution like you just described, or do you have a plan that you attempt to template and push out everywhere?

MARWA HAMMAD
We need to immerse ourselves in the local reality. So, we need to have visits with our leaders on [the] ground and trying our best to know more about what communities need and to co-create solutions with them. We have these focus groups—we’re having the girls and women, we’re having the governmental representatives and so on, [at] the table to ask and to listen. What do you need? So, this is actually central to the decision making and how we can tailor very specific solutions for girls and women.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
All right. So now, let’s get into what are the barriers—not just where you’re trying to go, but what are the hurdles you’re trying to overcome, the project management challenges? How does your project leadership specifically help your organizations achieve what they’re trying to do?

CECILE PILOT
In the context of NGOs, you see recurrent challenges. I think the first one is, of course, ensuring that you always have funding during your projects. But also, after [projects], not to let down the communities and the girls you have supported. For us, we always try to diversify the funding, because right now the humanitarian needs have never been so high. But unfortunately, when it comes to funding, it’s more and more difficult to find. So, we work with governments, the general public.

Another complex challenge we face is, of course, navigating the legal and social landscape in countries where I’m not based. But my colleagues in the field, who are really local colleagues, are so experienced. We work with lawyers, with psychologists, with community leaders, sometimes even religious leaders. We really try to push the government and the religious leaders to have new laws, to change also the traditional justice toward something more modern, and that really addresses the needs of people on the ground. Sometimes even pronouncing the word gender can be challenging due to cultural sensitivities, but also due to patriarchal views.

Our strategy is to build strong partnerships, often in coalition with other NGOs, but also with UNICEF, with partners on the ground, to really provide continuous training to our staff, but also to feminist groups, to girl's clubs, really to women and girls themselves.

MARWA HAMMAD
If you’re working with girls and women in the context of social impact, one of the biggest mistakes that we see in PR (public relations) and media, and even well-meaning advocacy campaigns, is the tendency to refer to women and girls as minorities or marginalized actors. In many countries, women make up to 51 percent of the population, if it’s not more.

The second challenge, the stereotyping or the cultural challenges that we’re facing whenever we are aiming to establish a new project, for example. The fact also that women are essential, not optional. So, another critical shift in mindset is understanding that including women in your strategy as a stakeholder, it’s actually about necessity. With our stakeholders or establishing a new partnership, we emphasize that achieving a just energy transition requires a skilled workforce, and statistically speaking, the situation is dire if you don’t include women. So, to meet the demand for skilled workers, women are an absolute necessity, not a secondary consideration, not only in social impact work that you are establishing, but you actually need it. So, if you are serious about sustainability, if you are serious about having a just transition, you cannot afford to leave half of your population out of this equation.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
I think the next one probably here is the very practical question around the skills and knowledge that project professionals need to be effective in roles like yours. Marwa, to you first: What are the key skills or subject matter expertise areas that you think you or someone else needs to be effective?

MARWA HAMMAD
You need to have this mindset of bottom-line intervention. Mobilize all these actors into one goal together—and this goal is not an easy one—but it’s about addressing systematic barriers and then creating opportunities.

And after creating the opportunities, you need to facilitate the access to the workforce or to have this exposure to opportunities. So you or any professional working in the field needs to be the [intermediary] and also to know what to say and when to say it. Because speaking to a government representative is quite different than speaking with other stakeholders. Speaking with the beneficiaries themselves also is really challenging. This cannot happen, actually, without immersing yourself in local reality, because we tend to lose the balance between having the global exposure and following the global trends.

If we are aiming to do advocacy, we need to shift the paradigms and shift the narrative. We need to take it into consideration, but when we are tailoring the solution, in this case, we need to immerse ourselves in the community, and as a first step to listen, to know what we have next to do in order to co-create the solutions with them.

Overcoming funding and legal challenges along with battling stereotypes

STEVE HENDERSHOT
All right, Cecile. So tell me what are the key skills and subject matter expertise areas needed to thrive in your role?

CECILE PILOT
You need, in a way, a black belt in bureaucracy to really make sure that you are being highly skilled in navigating complex administrative and also organizational processes. Project managers must be well-versed in the rules, regulations, policies that govern their projects. This knowledge really helps ensure compliance and smooth operation, because we work with donors such as the European Union, but also foreign affairs of different governments. So there is really a lot that is being asked in terms of reporting, but also security for your staff, capacity-building.

I think you also need to keep an eye on the different trends, as Marwa said, on funding opportunities. You need extremely good writing skills, also, to build project proposals that are engaging, concise. I think it’s also important to speak many languages in environments with multiple stakeholders, different cultures. And you need to have strong, effective communication skills to negotiate, to advocate with governments.

It’s also important that project managers are able to anticipate potential obstacles. As I said, strategic planning but also monitoring and evaluation is so important to really have another view of your activities or of your country portfolio, in the case of humanitarian action, for instance. And to make sure you have developed contingency plans, that your project is also aligned with broader organizational or government goals—so according to your strategic framework, for instance. And finally, I would say problem-solving also is so important on a day-to-day basis. We really are required to come with a lot of humility, listening, to be problem-solvers and to come with creative solutions to overcome those hurdles and keep projects moving forward.

How to stay motivated and—resilient—in the face of adversity

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Both of your work is so missional, so important to you, and that can lead to more of a sense of up and down. It’s hard to work when it feels like the world is on the line, day-to-day, for years. So how do you stay motivated amidst that cycle of inevitable wins, losses, advances, retreats and so forth? Marwa, let’s have you go first.

MARWA HAMMAD
Yeah, I totally agree with you. In fact, it’s very challenging and sometimes very disappointing because, as Cecile mentioned, having all these actors on the table, you could end up not having your project happening because of a disagreement of some part of the project. And actually, you need to immerse yourself in a very supportive environment to be able to move forward.

What inspires me in general is being a woman myself and my belief in the importance of education. Providing education is providing a new lifeline, if we can call it that way, because having this experience of education, it’s like one coin with two faces. One face is about accessing this education. But the other face of it is how to teach someone to be eager to learn or to gain knowledge, because learning is a skill in [and of] itself. Education, in this case, plays a very important role, which is resilience. Having someone being resilient is what matters the most. At the end of the day, we are not only looking if you’ve learned a skill—which is, yeah, really important—but actually, if now you have the confidence, you have the skills required and the resources to build or to have your own autonomy in decision making.

So, what we are seeking is not settling and not fighting, but actually having the resilience. You are able to make your own decisions and to have control over your quality of life. So this is what’s really inspiring me.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Cecile, let me ask a version of that original question to you, but maybe put a spin on it. Marwa took us toward how participants in those programs work to build resilience. Your work, we’re talking about life and death, really important issues with every single person. And yet you’ve got to prepare your team and yourself to be resilient for the long term. So how do you do that? How do you maintain, encourage, instill that long-term perspective with the ups and downs and just, I’m sure, temptation to get sucked into individual cases in a way that is both helpful but also exhausting?

CECILE PILOT
Steve, I think it’s natural to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task at hand. I think it’s one thing that deserves to be recognized. But I think as an activist and as a human rights defender, I would say it’s also important to recognize that even small changes can have a profound impact. So in my case, I know that if I can change the life of just one girl, to create a ripple effect, inspiring others, will contribute to a larger movement. This perspective helps to keep the focus on the positive outcome, no matter how incremental they may seem. So in fact, I’m always trying to see the positive impact.

I also try to remember really where I come from and where I learned all this, because I studied both project management but also I continued on [to] a human rights law degree. And I always remember that a professor in Strasbourg was telling us, the day that your NGO will receive death threats, it will be maybe a sign that you are on the right track. It’s this dark reality, but in fact it shows that you are touching this point where in fact a government or armed groups will maybe change their paths. This is the goal of advocacy also.

And to do that, I think we really rely on good data. So we collect data about all those cases. It helps us build a good narrative and sharing success stories. In fact, by regularly sharing these stories with our team, I think it can foster also a sense of community and shared purpose. And it really helps everyone to stay connected to the mission and see the collective impact of our work.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Speaking of data—measuring success or your positive impact is another important aspect of your work. Marwa, what are you measuring when it comes to your program?

MARWA HAMMAD
Actually, it’s one of the most debated topics when it comes to social impact. In project management, we are all a little obsessed with quantifiable metrics. So it’s all about numbers, the measurable goals, the dashboards and so on. And while that’s critical, and we are having it ourselves in Schneider with our 1 million goal, which we are almost there, we are [at] over 800,000 youths who benefited from the program. But actually, we risk losing sight of real human impact. So we cannot just track numbers. And even if you have these clear metrics, for example, that in our program, in order to be counted, you need to receive a minimum of 120 hours.

The vision for greater gender equality in the years ahead

STEVE HENDERSHOT
As we wrap up our conversation, Marwa, what advice do you have for other women or project professionals as we strive to accelerate action for greater gender parity?

MARWA HAMMAD
Embracing our identity as women can influence our career trajectory. We often might underestimate our capabilities. And actually, we are neglecting the fact that all the challenges that we overcame equip us with a unique set of strengths and skills that actually make us more resilient and help us and empower us to contribute meaningfully to the discussion and the decision-making [in] building a successful project.

We need to advocate for our own values, and we need to voice out our achievements and advocate for our space in the tech field and in the energy field, and all the other male-dominated fields. We need to leverage our insights. It’s really crucial for us to share this loudly, because we are able to craft the adaptable solutions and the relevant solutions for these issues. As a woman coming from the MENA region, I’m bringing invaluable perspective that is shaped by my unique background and experience. At 25 years old, in my lifetime, I’ve already witnessed two wars and the revolution and many more.

Embrace your identity and speak about it loudly, because it’s shaping the way that you are tackling the challenges. Also speaking about education in this context and sharing insights on project management, specifically in social impact, we need to always have an eye on what matters. With the loss and instability impacting young women, we need to step up and actually speak on their behalf and to take action in order to support them, because we cannot speak about International Day of Women without speaking on the current geopolitical context.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Thanks so much, Marwa. Cecile, I want to end our conversation with this: What is the future state that keeps you going? What do you hope is your legacy—and your program’s legacy—for women and girls in the future?

CECILE PILOT
Gender equality is a fundamental human right. The hope that fuels my pursuit of change is really the bravery of the girls and young women that inspire me on a daily basis to continue the fight for justice and equality. But also, I feel inspired by the partners such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, UNICEF. I really want to continue working with them.

So really what inspires me to lead these projects, and I’m sure in the future, is this unwavering resilience and strength of the girls we support. Their courage in the face of unimaginable adversity is really a testament to these indomitable human spirits. So these young girls who have endured so much, they really stand as beacons of hope and symbols of the fight for justice and freedom. I really hope if one day I have a little girl that the future we live in gives her the possibility to keep pursuing her dreams without fear and where her contribution in the community [is] also celebrated and valued.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
That is inspiring. Thanks for a great conversation.

MARWA HAMMAD
Thank you so much, Steve.

CECILE PILOT
Thank you so much.

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