In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re shining a spotlight on some of our amazing female volunteers and staff. Read our interviews to learn more about these female leaders who are helping the Y strengthen the foundations of community.

Interview with Mary Lou Schaalman, volunteer member of the Merrimack Valley YMCA Board of Directors and Andover/North Andover Board of Managers

How long have you been involved with the Merrimack Valley YMCA and what was your first role as a volunteer?

It’s about 15 years that I’ve been involved. And I was recruited to the Andover/North Andover board because there were very few women on the board at the time.

How has your experience been as a woman and a volunteer at the YMCA?

Well, first of all, I think the question made me think that you expected me to see my experience through the lens of being a female. I’ve never experienced it that way, never. And as we talk, you’ll discover that’s who I am.

I don’t see my experience as a female experience. By nature, I’m not reluctant to ask questions or to speak my mind. I’ve always felt respected and listened to when I joined a committee. I never felt in any way that I was anything other than welcomed. So I don’t see my experience as necessarily a female experience.

Over time, I have seen increasing numbers of women be recognized and elevated to positions of influence at the Y and on the boards.

So, for example, I saw the first female executive director come to Andover: Carrie Anderson. I was on the committee with the then CEO to screen people and select the candidate. Carrie, to my knowledge, was the first female executive director in Andover and Claudia (Soo Hoo) then ascended to that role and to her current role. They are recent, and I think they are noteworthy that they’re female, perhaps. On the Andover board, in the time that I’ve been involved, there have been three women chairs. Deb Hope was the chair of the corporate board during my tenure, so I have seen women rise to those positions of influence and be respected and do a good job.  To see people in roles that younger and other women might aspire to is always a positive thing because it helps with our self-perception of what we are capable of.

I think it’s critical for young women that they believe that their merit is neither more nor less because of their gender, and that they compete on merit, and that gender is a non-factor – or should be.

Who is your top female role model and how does she inspire you?

My role model was my mother. My mother was widowed at twenty nine with two children to raise, and she very much influenced how I see things and the choices I’ve made over time. She was educated and that enabled her to make choices when my dad passed about finding a job and how she was going to support and raise us. She never once in her life into her mid 80s played the victim card. She never said, “oh, if I had a man to do that” or, “oh, I can’t do that because I’m a female.” And when she was told she couldn’t do things, she just wanted to prove that she could. And she did. She ran the show, but she expected my brother and myself to pitch in; we had to contribute. It was not chores. It was not optional. It was, “this needs to get done and someone needs to do it…” and she never assigned tasks by gender.

Both of us did wash, did dishes, cut the lawn, shoveled the snow. This was the end of the 50s and in the early 60s. She was doing everything that might have been associated with a single gender and so she modeled that for us, and she expected that of us.

We never said, “yeah, but he’s the boy” or “well, Mary Lou has to do the dishes, I’ll go cut the grass.” In fact, I was really, really happy when he went off to college and I got to have the lawnmower; he’d had that responsibility because he was bigger and older than I was! It wasn’t about gender. It was about responsibility and accountability. And she expected us to contribute. It was never about gender.

What qualities do you believe make a great leader?

I was a human resources consultant and I have three degrees in psychology, including a Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, which is the study of individual differences and skills development in the work setting. So I did a lot of work with selection for promotions, succession plans for senior executives all the way down to front line recruiting for a lot of Wall Street firms, insurance and high tech firms and so forth. I also had a role in identifying the criteria and how to select people for different kinds of jobs, depending on what was needed for the job. One thing that was very clear to me over time is leadership. I believe leadership is not a skill. It is an outcome. What I’ve seen over time, looking at some of the best, across all kinds of companies, is that if you think of it like a tool box, depending on what the task at hand is, you need different tools.

So, for example, we worked with high-tech companies, the military and nonprofits. We worked with companies that were in competitive environments, anything from auto companies, big aluminum companies and high-tech companies like Cisco. They all face different strategic challenges. And so what the leader has to bring to bear and what they need to emphasize varies. Nonetheless across organizations, I would say that the true leaders provide focus, they provide clarity and they provide the inspiration needed to mobilize the organization to achieve its strategic goals.

Can you share an obstacle you have faced as a woman in a leadership role and how you successfully pushed past it?

When I was young, there was an instance where I specifically said, “no, not me,” when I was being asked to take a leadership role and be the president of something when there had never been a female president before. I remember saying, “No, no, no, not me. You sure you don’t want Ron?” In retrospect, I’m horrified by it but if I’m being philosophical at this stage of my life, it is because I hadn’t seen women accomplish that. We were still all girls, but I hadn’t seen women accomplish that.

I went to a college where the qualifications for getting in for women were much harder than for the men because the college was smaller. I went to Tufts, but at the time they still had a women’s college called Jackson. Tufts had been coed in all other manner of things, classes, housing, etc. for decades. However, they still had like an affinity group of women. Because they admitted fewer women, the SATs for the women were significantly higher than the SATs for the men. I never thought I was less . I never felt that women couldn’t achieve something because I just didn’t see the world that way.

Later in my career I was one female of five partners. I was an owner of a firm. Thanks to my mother and my college experience, being in the company of women who were some of the brightest in my class, it never occurred to me that I couldn’t speak up.  I had achieved in the company of men and I never doubted I could achieve in the company of men. That’s an important thing for women, because not all women have that exposure or have that belief shown to them day in and day out. I raised sons, but I have a brand new granddaughter and I’m hoping maybe that’s one thing that her grandmother can give her.

What advice would you give the next generation of women as they grow into leaders?

Build your skills and lead with them. I came of age professionally and studied a lot of equal employment opportunity laws and regulations when I was in graduate school because I was being trained in selection and recruiting. It was a very litigious environment at the time in terms of lawsuits about not promoting people because of race. The focus of my professional education at that time, and how I learned to view the world, is that gender doesn’t matter, race doesn’t matter: skills matter. And we need to build a workplace where, not only is it required by law, but it becomes best practice to only select people on their skills, their experience and their job related competencies. End of story. Not gender, not age, not religion, and the list goes on to all the protected classes that are protected under the law from discrimination. What has been clear to me through my professional life and personal experience is that it’s your skills that matter.

I believe that women are best served by leading with their skills and their training and that those who succeed at work are best positioned to earn other people’s respect, and accordingly, to get promoted to positions of greater responsibility, because they’ve earned the respect.

What part of your Y story do you believe resonates most with other women in a volunteer role?

I spent almost 25 years as a consultant and a wife and a mother of two and a business owner. Then, on 9/11, in 2001, I was across the street, at the window, when the second plane hit the towers. Just under a year later I made a choice to step back. I didn’t withdraw. I didn’t give up. I asked myself, “what’s important? How do I really want to spend my time at this point?” I left full time employment. As I was thinking about what to do next, I had a family member who had a health crisis, and I became a caregiver. To some that would be,  “oh,  she was on this track and now she’s going back to the traditional woman’s role.” Well, you know what? It was a choice and it was the right thing. It was what I needed to do. But I also needed things in my life that would fulfill the intellectual and interactive parts of my life that I was leaving behind by leaving full-time consulting. I became a board member in the Garden of Peace, which is the homicide memorial in Boston. We built that and we had a fight with Suffolk University about putting a dorm next to it. I became the chair of that group and I became very actively involved with the community of survivors of homicide victims. I joined the Y board. I became a literacy tutor. I come from a long line of teachers.

Many people, men and women, join the board when they reach a point at their life where things are auto pilot. Joining the Y board is an opportunity to put forward your strengths and your interests, to have them heard and then contribute to something that’s positive. I think it’s not surprising that more of us are older, because more of us have spare bandwidth.

I think that joining the Y board can give you something new and an opportunity where the things that were automatic pilot for you are valued because you bring something to the mix that may not have been in that environment before. And so I think that’s what a lot of us get by being involved in the Y.

Is there anything you would like to add on the topic of women in leadership?

The fact that there are an increasing number of women at all levels shows that women can and do bring value. Where women may once have been an underutilized resource, I believe we are undeniable assets across a large range of endeavors.

My quick example was when I was in graduate school, I was the only female in my class and my specialty and the men all went on to teach management or industrial psych on academic faculties, or they went into senior roles in corporate America.

And I was the only woman. There was only one other woman in the class behind me. There was no woman in the class ahead of me and one or two women in the class ahead of that.

I went back to do a colloquium 15 years later, and it had flipped. There were one or two men. So that’s an indication that  there are roles where women hadn’t been seen as credible and that’s changed. Where we were underutilized, people have realized that there’s value in women. There’s a whole range of things where women should be seen as legitimate, credible candidates and coworkers. But there’s a ways to go.