I have spent more than four decades in this profession. I’ve seen it change in ways I never could have predicted, and I’ve stayed close enough to the ground to hear what’s really happening to the women trying to build careers within it.
That’s why I’m honored to share that my story, and my advocacy for women in funeral service and deathcare, have been featured in a sweeping Forbes profile by contributor Paula de la Cruz. The article, “Women Leading in the Death Business,” traces the full arc of the American funeral industry and places the structural challenges women face in the profession today at the center of a national conversation. And I want you to read it.
Here’s what I know to be true: over 78 percent of mortuary school graduates today are women. And yet, women are leaving this profession at a rate that should alarm every owner, manager, and leader who says they care about its future. They’re coming in with everything, their hearts, their education, their drive to serve families through the hardest moments of their lives, and far too many are walking out the door before they ever get the chance to lead.
That is a crisis. And it has a name: a profession that hasn’t caught up to the people it needs most.
The Forbes piece traces how death care became a business, how families like mine built something lasting, and how the industry now faces a pivotal question: will it finally make room for the women flooding into it, or keep losing them at the threshold?
I won’t spoil it. But I will tell you this, the story they’re telling is the same one I’ve been living, and the same one I wrote Wake-Up Calls to address.
Read it. Then come back, because there is so much more work to do.
