Women in Lions celebrate 35 years of success!

In 1987, Lions Clubs International voted to allow women to join the Lions family. And join they did.

Today, women are the fastest growing segment of Lions, with more than 425,000 women serving around the world.

In Latin America, 41% of club presidents are women, and so are 43% of district governors in Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia. Of course, this was also the year Gudrun Yngvadottir became the first woman elected international president.

“Our clubs and organization have certainly been strengthened since women have joined,” says Lions Clubs International 3rd Vice President Brian Sheehan. Speaking for his Bird Island, Minnesota club, he says, “They have brought new and vibrant ideas to our club in what we should accomplish for our community and how we can contribute outside of our community. It has made us an extremely strong and diverse club, with a great mix of seasoned and new, younger Lions members.”

The idea that a diverse room of voices create a more robust organization is borne out in recent research, which shows that companies with more gender parity perform better. “They’ve expanded our scope of service, our perspective of service, greatly,” said Past International President Judge Brian Stevenson in a 2018 interview.

And as the number of women leaders in Lions grows, the ways in which they can use their unique perspectives to find innovative ways to serve will continue to grow as well.