Dymphna Cordova usually spends her Thursday mornings deep in meeting mode to untangle work priorities with her team or manage complex employee issues at her company.
But on this particular Thursday morning, Cordova, 57, is at LA’s Trinity Boxing Club breaking a sweat. The chief people officer of Squire, a business management platform, has never so much as tried on boxing gloves before, but now she’s on her second day of learning how to string together punches into basic combinations.
Elsewhere in the gym, about a dozen other women are shadow boxing, while some face off with punching bags. The women, ranging in age from their 30s to 50s, make up the second cohort of a retreat series from Fight Co.Lab, a program that aims to marry boxing training with leadership strategy for executive-level women across the U.S.
The retreat is happening at a complex time for professional women, even at the highest levels.
Women remain underrepresented at every level of the leadership pipeline. Just 93 women are promoted to manager roles for every 100 men, according to Lean In and McKinsey & Company’s latest Women in the Workplace report, and only 29% of C-suite roles are held by women. Six in 10 senior-level women report frequently feeling burned out, according to McKinsey.
