About us

In 2007, Galia Barhava-Monteith and Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes founded Professionelle, a social venture dedicated to researching, understanding and addressing the needs of all professional working women in New Zealand.  We started this venture through our realisation that professional working women face unique challenges in the workplace and often feel isolated and unable to discuss them freely with peers and colleagues.  We believe that by bringing together from all professions and industry sectors we can tap into their collective wisdom and experience to generate smart and practical solutions that materially assist women's career progress.

Professionelle is New Zealand's first and only enterprise of its kind and is targeted at women in large public and private organisations and in professional service firms. At Professionelle's heart is its website www.professionelle.co.nz, offering a wealth of free resources that cover the real issues professional women face in their careers - and beyond.  In our first three years, Professionelle gathered over 2000 members, mostly women. Our members are typically in their thirties and forties, with two thirds in full time employment 75% tertiary educated. Professionelle is open to all (women and men) who wish to become members, and membership on our website is free.  

Professionelle specialises in developing highly relevant, tailored offerings for professional working women. Offline, we offer research-based networking seminars both in-house to corporate and professional service clients and publicly. Seminar topics range from 'Mentoring as a key ingredient for women's career success' to 'Living our values at work and beyond'.  Professionelle recently launched a South Island Chapter currently offering our networking seminars in Christchurch, and we plan to expand our regional presence to Wellington, Hamilton and Tauranga over the next 12 months. In addition, in 2011, Professionelle will be offering a 'Peers and Careers' programme for women with at least 10 years work experience.  Online, we are steadily building our professional development and support products offer. We also plan to harness ever improving web-based technologies to bring professional women together to learn about and discuss key issues, regardless of location.

Underlying all our work is extensive research into the most up-to-date thinking about what works for professional women. Our research combines academic thinking with practical solutions garnered from our ongoing interactions with our membership base.  Professionelle has also conducted original research on this topic for leading organisations in this field, such as Global Women, as well as for local media.

Love your work - there has been so much that has been bang on with what is going on in my life.

Galia Barhava-Monteith

Galia holds a Masters in Developmental Psychology with First Class Honours from Auckland University. Her local work history spans corporate and professional service sectors. She began her career with The Boston Consulting Group, where she and Sarah met while sharing an office together and working all hours of many nights.

Later, Galia was appointed as HR coordinator in the merger that created Fonterra.  Her last corporate role was as Ethics and Community Relations Manager for Fonterra.  

Nowadays, as well as being a Director of Professionelle, Galia works independently as an executive coach specialising in transition coaching.  She holds a not-for-profit directorship in education. Also, since the inception of Fonterra's Candidate Assessment Panel, Galia has acted as its independent coordinator, working directly with the Chairmen of Fonterra and Fonterra's Shareholders Council.

Galia is married with two young, school age children.  She is very serious about taking exercise and is an avid Yoga practioner.  She has a soft spot for the great outdoors and tramping as she first arrived here as a backpacker, drawn by the luscious New Zealand bush.

Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

Sarah arrived in New Zealand twenty years ago, with an MBA from London Business School and a background in European marketing with Unilever.  She worked as a strategic business consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, becoming a senior Manager, before negotiating a shift to contracting after the birth of her first child.

More recently, in parallel with developing Professionelle, she has focused on her independent consulting portfolio, chiefly in her preferred industries of consumer goods and retail. She reckons that toilet paper and diamonds can be equally fascinating markets if you enjoy knotty problems and pattern recognition...

Through her children, Sarah garnered seven years' experience in education governance with a Montessori Primary Trust. She relaxes by rowing and writing romantic fiction.

Lynda Fairweather, Administrator

Lynda joined Professionelle as the new site was going live, just in time to help upgrade our backend systems to cope with growth.

Lynda is an Auckland-based working mum with two boys and she has years of valuable experience in adminstration, website and database management and accounts. She is also an avid golfer - and says she has a standing order for fine Thursday mornings!