For many women in the supply chain space, entering this industry was accidental. It resulted from a job opening or a friend of a friend. It was almost never, “I went to school for supply chain.”
Such was not the case for Liz Raman, founder of Supply Chain Gals, a professional development community, who earned a master's degree in supply chain management from MIT in 2020 and has worked her way up in managerial positions at Home Depot, Nike and Amazon.
“I was early in my career and kept having the same realization: the things that actually moved me forward were never taught anywhere. Not in school, not in onboarding. They came from someone senior deciding to tell me the truth over coffee. That access is unevenly distributed, and I did not want it to stay that way,” she says.
Supply Chain Gals started in 2022 as an Instagram page, created to cultivate community for women in the supply chain. The mission was to help more women start and grow their careers.
Today, Supply Chain Gals hosts global virtual events, including career workshops, networking nights, and mentorship circles, with 150 active members and a community of more than 30,000 followers, from college students to industry professionals, and runs a scholarship fund in collaboration with Lenovo. The Liz Raman Scholarship offers a one-time $2,500 award presented to a currently enrolled college student studying supply chain or a related field who demonstrates strong academic achievement, financial need, ambition, and a commitment to building a future in the supply chain industry.
Despite Raman’s success in building a virtual networking community, doing so doesn’t come without the same barriers and challenges many of today’s women in supply chain face.
“The barrier I hear most is not entry; it is the ceiling around the mid-career mark,” she says. “People get hired, perform well, and then find that the path from managing a process to owning a P&L is undefined.”
Raman refers to it as the “broken rung,” the first promotion to manager, identified in McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report.
“Nobody tells them what the next rung requires, so they either guess or leave for a function where the criteria are written down,” she adds. “The second barrier is sponsorship. Plenty of people have mentors who give advice. Far fewer have someone senior arguing for them in a room they are not in, and that is the relationship that actually changes trajectories.”
When it comes to advice for students, Raman encourages young female professionals to “build real expertise in something that becomes your unfair advantage.”
“For me, that was data analytics. It meant I could walk into a room where everyone had an opinion and be the person who could actually show what was happening,” she says. “Pick the thing that does that for you and go deep on it.”
What’s more is, the world of mentorship has evolved; it’s become less formal but more useful.
“The old model was an assigned pairing, a quarterly meeting, and a lot of general encouragement,” says Raman. “What works now is smaller, more frequent, and more specific. Our mentorship circles put people at different career stages in the same room, which means the advice is concrete and the senior person gets something out of it too.”
What can organizations do to attract, retain, and develop talent in supply chain roles?
It’s simple -- people follow people they know.
“If your senior leaders are invisible outside the company, you are asking candidates to commit to a logo, and that is a much weaker pitch than committing to someone whose thinking they already follow,” says Raman.
Retention, on the other hand, comes from giving people opportunities to speak up and shine wherever you can find them, she adds.
Whatever happens next, whatever the job is or however you get from Point A to Point B, “do not shrink the version of yourself that got you into the room,” Raman says.
“The instinct to soften, to over qualify, to make yourself easier to be around is strong, and it costs you the thing that made you valuable in the first place. Being excellent at your job is necessary and not sufficient,” she adds. “I spent years assuming the work would speak for itself, and it does not. It needs someone to speak for it. I would tell myself to build those relationships years earlier than I did, and to stop asking for things as an imposition. I would also say that the discomfort of being the only person like you in the room does not fully go away, but it stops being the loudest thing you notice.”
