Women are changing the face of the death care industry

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When Mallory Greene was growing up, dinner table talk with her family often centred on funerals and end-of-life planning.

Ms. Greene, who co-founded Eirene, Canada’s first online cremation arrangement service, had a father who was a funeral director and worked in the industry for 35 years. While others might have found this an odd upbringing, to Ms. Greene, it was just a normal part of childhood.

“Take your kid to work day was at a funeral home,” she laughs.

Ms. Greene originally intended to work in the financial industry after beginning her career as part of the inaugural WealthSimple team. But she began to feel a calling to work with bereaved families.

“I realized it was always in front of me,” she says. “My parents were always talking about the day-to-day in funeral services and what families were asking for. I realized there was a disconnect between the modern-day consumer experience versus what funeral homes were providing.”

That was the “lightbulb moment,” as Ms. Greene calls it, where she realized she had unique insight, both as a female leader and a fintech disrupter, to help change the death care business, which she calls “outdated” and “archaic.”

While most other industries had been brought online in some capacity, “I felt like funeral services was that last one that hadn’t,” she says.

Pushback from the old boys’ club

Women are changing the face of the death care industry, with increasing numbers owning funeral homes and making up the majority of graduates from college programs focused on funeral directing. At Ontario’s Humber College, which offers one of two such programs in the province, 70 per cent of students enrolled are women.

Ms. Greene launched Eirene with co-founder Faisal Abid in 2020 after a 10-month regulatory battle in Ontario. “We were told we wouldn’t get licensed in Ontario, that our idea was too disruptive and it would cause upheaval in the industry.”

With Eirene, clients connect with licensed funeral directors either online or by phone and choose either cremation or aquamation (an environmentally friendly, water-based alternative to flame cremation). Eirene’s employees, who are mostly female, guide clients through the process. The company works with third-party providers in Ontario as well as several other provinces to have the cremation done, then hand-delivers remains to families.

All pricing is available on the website – a conscious decision, says Ms. Greene. A 2020 report by Ontario’s Auditor General found that most of the province’s funeral homes do not make prices readily available to customers and often use high-pressure selling practices during a time when families are vulnerable due to grief.

The services Eirene offers could cost as much as $8,000 at a traditional funeral home, says Ms. Greene, but at Eirene, the typical cost is around $2,500, in part because of lower overheads.

Ms. Greene says she was confident the business would be viable because of her belief that the market needed more affordable services and online options. In addition, the cremation rate in Canada is close to 80 per cent, meaning fewer people are opting for traditional funerals with caskets held in funeral homes. Now, the business is growing. With more fundraising rounds to come, Eirene has raised $4.5-million in capital so far.

While launching Eirene has been rewarding, says Ms. Greene, making her way in a traditionally male-dominated space was a challenge.

“I received a tremendous amount of pushback from the old boys’ club,” she says. “Some funeral owners are not very happy with us [but] no one can say anything to me that won’t make me keep moving forward.”

‘Not a career for a woman’

Michelle Clarke, program co-ordinator and professor in Funeral Services Education at Humber College, says her fascination working in the bereavement industry began when she was a child. She remembers her elementary school called her parents, concerned because she was drawing pictures of people attending funerals.

“What I’ve always wanted to do was not encouraged,” she says. “My parents felt strongly that this was not a career for a woman.” Ms. Clarke began her undergrad intending to go into law but then took a summer job at a funeral home and enjoyed it so much that she became a licensed funeral director.

She says there can be obstacles to women taking on leadership roles due to “the unpredictable nature of the bereavement sector.” Calls can come in any time, including the middle of the night or on weekends, which can be more difficult for women who are taking on primary child-care duties. Also, part of the job for many funeral directors is transporting bodies, which requires a lot of physical strength.

But for women like Holly Fjeldsted, owner of Seasons Funeral Chapel in Oakbank, Man., the rewards of the job are worth the challenges. Ms. Fjeldsted says that like Ms. Clarke, she wanted to work in funerals ever since she was a child, having been “drawn to the beauty” of the services she attended. She began working at a funeral home as a teenager and was brought on as an apprentice before getting her funeral director’s licence.

When she decided to strike out on her own, Ms. Fjeldsted says there were some funeral directors “that didn’t think I could do it,” but that just fuelled her desire to prove them wrong. In her first year of business, Ms. Fjeldsted did 20 funeral services. In 2023, she served 140 families. “It keeps growing every year.”

Increasing opportunities

Sydney Eckert, who is enrolled in the funeral directing program at Humber, says she became interested in the sector because she was drawn to working with families and being part of a caring profession. Currently working at a funeral home as part of a placement, Ms. Eckert says she does encounter people who are reticent to discuss service options with her because she is a woman.

“A gentleman will come in and I will be answering his questions, I’ll be the one that’s supposed to help him. Then he’ll see another gentleman [employee] walk by and it’s like, ‘No I want to talk to him,’” she says.

“It’s tough and there is not a whole lot we can do about that as individuals, but I can always hope that in the next couple decades that improves for us.”

Ms. Greene believes that opportunity will only increase for women in the death care business, citing a U.S. study that found 56 per cent of funeral directors plan to retire in the next five years. She anticipates that as more women enter the space, “you will see more women in leadership positions.”

Her plan is for Eirene to become the next billion-dollar business in Canada and she plans to continue to push into the U.S. market.

“I’m really proud of what we’ve built, and it feels really cool to be part of this women-owned and operated business in such a male-dominated space.”

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