The Thoughtful Co. Interview Series
Part 1. The Thoughtful Co. Begins - From Accountability Partners to Entrepreneurs
The Thoughtful Co. supports women in negotiating their compensation and advises employers on attracting and retaining women. We met Jill Climie and Sophie Warwick, co-founders of The Thoughtful Co. on February 9th, 2022.
Q: Can you please introduce yourselves and tell us how you met?
Sophie: Hi, I'm Sophie Warwick. I'm originally from Ottawa. I did my undergraduate degree in structural engineering at Western University in London, Ontario, where I met Jill. We were doing different degrees, but Jill and my now partner were in the same business school at Western. Later I moved to Vancouver, where I've been for just over five years. A few years after I moved, Jill moved back to Vancouver, where she's originally from. We had always talked about women and their roles in the workplace and our hopes for women and equity.
Being in engineering and then ultimately working in engineering, I noticed women's challenges in the workplace. I would look around my office and see no senior women, which made me think: "Who was my mentor going to be?"
In 2018, I co-founded a non-profit for women in consulting engineering to help more women connect within the community of engineering. Once my board term ended there, I wanted to pursue this passion for gender equity further, making positive changes for women across all areas. I eventually reached out to Jill. And that's kind of how the Thoughtful Co. has spiraled from there.
Jill : I'll jump in on my stories. My name is Jillian, and I've spent my career in executive compensation. I started in consulting and then worked in-house at Aritzia, a Canadian retailer. I recently worked at Lululemon, where I led the global executive compensation teams and global equity compensation teams.
The gender pay gap has always been frustrating to me, and I'm passionate about reducing it. I realized that I could use my skill set to support women in negotiating their compensation. Sophie's experience in structurally helping and changing organizations to work for women in engineering works well with my compensation and benefits background, where we can focus on issues such as pay equity.
So it all just kind of fit together. And it wasn't like we sat down one day and said, "We're gonna start a company." It was like, "We are starting a blog." Our first meeting was just holding each other accountable for writing articles about equity for women. Then it evolved into, "Yeah, let's help women negotiate, and let's help companies work better with each of our backgrounds." And now we're here, and we're in it. It's been a great journey. It was very different for me, leaving my corporate job and becoming an entrepreneur, which I didn't expect, but it's been a really fun ride.
Q: Amazing. I love how being accountability partners evolved into a full-time job and entrepreneurship. That's very inspiring. Can you tell me a little bit more about The Thoughtful Co.?
Sophie: As Jill mentioned, when we sort of first started, we were kind of working on sharing articles about issues that were important to us, what we thought would resonate with women in the workplace. That slowly evolved to "We're really passionate about this. How can we actually make this change versus just maybe educating and sharing stories?"
That turned into a three-pronged approach. First, we help companies implement policies that will attract and retain women. This might translate to promotional structures and looking at equity within their firms, and then various groups and policies they can implement. Second, we coach individuals in their compensation negotiation to help in a performance review, or looking at a new job offer, helping them negotiate the compensation for that offer, ultimately reducing the gender pay gap further. The final piece is the original theme of creating data and research and publishing articles so we can help educate people about issues that are important to us.
Q: What do you think made you focus on equity for women in the workplace?
Jill : I was always shy growing up, but for some reason, when it comes to equity for women, I've just always been very fierce about it. I knew I always wanted to be supporting women in some way. I've been fortunate to work at companies like Lululemon, where they do things really well in terms of pay equity and have a lot of women, which is amazing. But I've also seen, through consulting in broader industries, where it's not very equitable.
Just knowing the stats on the gender pay gap is infuriating for me. For every dollar a man makes, a woman makes about 84 cents. And it hasn't changed over the last fifteen years or so. We are equal, but we still can't get equal pay. These facts have motivated me to be doing things that are helping change it.
Sophie: Focusing on women's equity is not in terms of any level of priority; it's more about being very targeted in approach. With a lot of discussion on equity, diversity, and inclusion, people are starting to recognize its value. They might still not know how to translate that into how to fix the problem within their organization, but they realize that there's value in diversity that reduces groupthink. Diversity can make companies more competitive and more innovative. Focusing on diversity is not just the right thing to do; it is financially helpful for the companies. So a lot of that education exists right now. We are trying to help an organization with a targeted, specific approach to help them make that change.
Interview date: February 9, 2021
Interviewed by Jiyoon Yoo and Doyeon Kim
