Lisbeth Lyons Black: Attracting, Advancing, and Advocating Women in Print

From in-person and virtual events throughout the year to access to a members-only directory, we speak to Lisbeth Lyons Black, director of Women in Print Alliance about the new membership options available at Women in Print Alliance.

Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background in the print industry in general

I am Lisbeth Lyons Black and I am the director of Women in Print Alliance. I have been in and around the printing industry for over two decades and my background is in government affairs.

I have been the chief lobbyist for two trade associations: Printing Industries of America and Printing United Alliance, focused on niche industry issues and representing our advocacy interests before the US Congress and federal agencies. As part of that I have had labour and workforce development issues in my portfolio.

Before I got into Government affairs and representing the printing industry, many moons ago, I was a teacher and I spent three years in the classroom. I found that I loved educational policy so working for Printing Industries of America and Printing United Alliance there was a really great connection because labour and workforce development policy was such an important piece of the industry’s advocacy.

You mentioned that you’ve been in the industry for two decades, can you tell us a bit about how you’ve seen the topic of women and diversity in general evolve?

I think it’s important for us to remember that ‘women in the industry’ is not a new phenomenon, I know a lot of women who have been in the industry much longer than I’ve even been in my career and they certainly were pioneers and doing great things before there were groups like Women in Print Alliance.

But finding ways to support women in the industry so that they stay in the industry, I think is really what has driven the conversation in terms of workplace and really even sociology of work.

I know a lot of women who have been in the industry much longer than I’ve even been in my career and they certainly were pioneers and doing great things before there were groups like Women in Print Alliance

I haven’t experienced a hostile workplace in any respect but there were few and far women in between.

I was really excited to be at Printing Industries of America when the first woman, Janet Green who at the time was with Greens Printing became the first-ever female chair of a major printing trade association in the US.

A couple of years later, Laura Lawten with Lawten Printers whose father had been both government affairs and board chairman at Printing Industries of America, became the first father/daughter combo to chair a major trade association in the US. So, I’ve really seen the leadership change in that way.

Could you tell us a bit more about how Women in Print Alliance came about and how it became a formal alliance?

We’re very proud of our history because we were born out of a grassroots organisation. There was a small band of women who were very passionate about the idea and the value of women empowering women and creating an industry culture where women could see that there were rewarding, successful pathways to a career.

Those women were instrumental in starting an annual event that was generally held in conjunction with one of the major trade shows here in the US. What they started hearing was that women liked the opportunity for networking and community building, particularly to have that time to get together during a very large industry confab, but they wanted it to be more year-round.

That is what led to this formal launch of Women in Print Alliance and it’s been in stages. We launched our branded website, newsletter, and social media channels in 2023, and just served as a content provider and a community forum for women.

We heard a demand signal from women saying, ‘How can we join Women in Print Alliance? How can we be active in Women in Print Alliance?’, we launched a month ago a formal paid membership programme in Women in Print Alliance. 

We have two tiers of programming currently. The first tier is our free and accessible content and our newsletter remains available, free and accessible to women in the industry, but we now offer elevated benefits in the form of networking events, educational seminars and workshops, and opportunities to network on a deeper level.

How do you come up with the ideas for the initiatives and programmes that you offer?

That’s a really good question. We have been fortunate to have an advisory council who are rock star women in the printing industry and many of them were part of that original grassroots group that I told you about. They’re part of that origin story of Women in Print Alliance and they’re still with us as an advisory council.

We’re continuing to build out that advisory council and they have been phenomenal in the direction of programming, content, and topics. We have a broad range of topics so that we can always be on top of trends and talking about what’s in the national and global consciousness too.

We focus on the big topics like advocacy, career development, executive leadership, inclusion and diversity, and work/life balance and we also provide a forum for women to talk about business expertise, because that is something we continue to evolve by listening to our advisory council.

Could you touch on the different levels of membership and what each option entails?

Student Membership

It was very important to our founders and our advisory council that we offer a free student membership as a demonstration of our collective commitment to recruiting and then advancing the next generation of the workforce.

The reason we offer it as free, obviously we want students to be able to join and we know students are on a budget, but also we want students to be able to participate in our programming and see examples of role models of women who have found incredible and rewarding pathways in print.

Individual Membership

We also wanted an option for women to be able to sign up as individuals. It doesn’t matter if their company is sponsoring events or is a member of Women in Print Alliance. Any woman in the printing industry who’s working in any job function is welcome to join as an individual member.

The benefits fall into three main categories: events, both in-person and virtual; education whether it’s content, workshops, or speaker series; and enhanced networking with our members-only membership directory which I think is going to prove to be one of the most valuable assets of membership in Women in Print Alliance.

It’s laborious to find other women in your industry on LinkedIn or follow up after conferences so that’s something that we’re offering to our membership – an at your fingertips directory of other women who also have joined the organisation.

Corporate Membership

We also have amazing sponsors coming up for our big in-person events like at PRINTING United Expo and writing a cheque and sponsoring an event and allowing us to have really quality programming and speakers is vital to the programme.

But we also wanted a way for corporations to be able to involve their employees and go beyond just writing a cheque. So, we created a corporate membership option for that reason. A company can become a member of Women in Print Alliance and they can scale based on the number of women employees that they would like to essentially purchase seats for.

PRINTING United Expo is fast approaching and you will host your Annual Luncheon during the event. Can you tell us more about this and any other plans in the pipeline for the future?

Sure! Expo is driving the headlines right now in the industry because it’s a major industry show. We are going to have the largest presence ever that Women in Print Alliance has had at Expo to date. We have a specialised website with our guide to Expo for Women in Print Alliance and there are options for women to get together both informally and formally Monday through to Thursday of the show, so we’re really excited about that.

Our signature in-person event will be a Luncheon. It’s open to members and non-members, and it’s actually sold out! We will have 200 women gathered in a ballroom to network, sit down and enjoy a nice meal, away from the hectic and chaotic nature of the trade show floor and hear from our fabulous keynote speaker.

We know that not all of our members are going to be attending Expo and so that’s why we’ve designed both virtual and in-person events to really make our programming accessible to women across the country and as we talked about across the globe.

What’s exciting is that our keynote speaker who is delivering the address at the Expo, is also doing a deeper dive, online, virtual workshop on the same topic in October and that will be open to our members whether or not they were able to attend the Expo in Vegas.

We have other virtual events throughout the fourth quarter of the year including something that I don’t know has been done before in these groups and we’re really excited about it. Our advisory council came up with the idea of a Book Chat.

We’ve designed both virtual and in-person events to really make our programming accessible to women across the country and as we talked about across the globe

It’s like your ‘for fun’ book club but the titles are work-relevant and written by leading female business writers and it’s a non-fiction-based book club. We can all read the book at our own pace and then Women in Print Alliance is hosting a virtual chat with the author herself to again go a little deeper, explore the themes of the book, and do Q&A with our members and really make it an interactive discussion. That’s our signature event in November.

In December, because everybody wants to celebrate the end of the year, we are going purely social with our networking and doing a very fun virtual cocktail mocktail class online with a great women-owned company called BarBees. That’s just a sample of what we have for the rest of the year and going into 2025 we’re really looking to expand that.

I will say, a lot of our programming will depend on our corporate sponsors. Our membership fees are low, we want people to be able to afford memberships but we do need the industry’s support to create the quality programming and bring in in these kinds of speakers and authors and experts that will really contribute to the professional and personal development of our members.

And finally, what do you think we can do to encourage more women into the industry?

Our mission statement at Women in Print Alliance has three key words in it and that’s to Attract, Advance, and Advocate for women in the industry. I really think all three of those are necessary to continue attracting and advancing women in the printing industry.

I think the attracting part comes a little bit from what we talked about with the student level and reaching out even down to, in the US, to the high school level. Too often our industry, at least in the US, is considered a bit of a dinosaur or legacy industry that’s been here forever and people take it for granted.

So that’s the ‘attract’ portion, with the ‘retain’ and ‘advance’ portion, I think it’s important for the printing industry to look at what’s happening with women in the workforce broadly, at least in the US.

I think companies are really going to need to start paying attention to generational studies both for men and women because the Gen Z workforce has a completely different motivation level and set of expectations when they’re looking to go to work

I think companies are really going to need to start paying attention to generational studies both for men and women because the Gen Z workforce has a completely different motivation level and set of expectations when they’re looking to go to work and a lot of that is looking at workplaces and industries that align with their values.

Sustainability is a huge value for that generation and the printing industry has come so far in sustainability and actually has a great green story to tell and I think that’s important to look at too.

So, we have to look at gender in the workplace, the age factor and different generations in the workplace and really look at what a company or the industry broadly offers, and how they are positioning themselves to be attractive to the next generation of workforce.