Powertopia: Join Take The Lead Day Moving Women Leaders To Gender Parity
Take The Lead Day November 14 has the theme of Powertopia in 11 cities and virtual webinars.
What if you could take one day to change the world as we know it?
Imagine a day spent discovering solutions and employing specific strategies and tools to achieve gender equity in leadership across all fields and disciplines by 2025.
That is Take The Lead Day November 14 when more than 500,000 people are expected to participate in the first-ever Powertopia.
“Take The Lead Day is a global day of action to ensure women have the practical skills, knowledge and confidence to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions by 2025,” says Gloria Feldt, Take The Lead president and co-founder.
“Achieving parity by 2025 is not just achievable, it is essential,” Feldt says. “Our mission is to prepare, develop, inspire and propel women to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors by 2025.”
“#TakeTheLeadDay November 14 has the theme of Powertopia in 11 cities and virtual webinars”
Take The Lead Day November 14 offers a 24-hour roster of events, workshops and celebrations joining thousands of women in 11 cities across the country together to work toward achieving leadership equality, 70 years ahead of schedule.
“Gender equity means fairness of treatment for women and men, according to their respective needs. This may include equal treatment or treatment that is different, but which is considered equivalent in terms of rights, benefits, obligations, and opportunities,” Katica Roy, CEO of Pipeline, writes in Forbes.
Roy, who is a speaker at the Powertopia Symposium for Take The Lead Day, writes, “When we talk about opportunity, we’re talking about ensuring opportunity is not limited simply on the basis of gender. We are talking about correcting for gender biases so that economic outcomes improve for all.”
Roy writes, “If gender equity is about fairness, then what we are talking about here is making up for the gap between gender bias and reality. How can we hack the system to give women an equitable shot? Overall, gender mainstreaming is a very useful strategy. Why? It overlays the gender lens across any action, policy and more.”
In New York, the Powertopia Symposium for Take The Lead Day features presenters for the half-day of skill-building including Kathleen Turner, actress and activist; Katee VanHorn, vice president of GoDaddy; as well as Roy, CEO of Pipeline, and more.
Hosted at the Helen Mills Event Center, the Powertopia Symposium will offer 250 participants an opportunity to participate in workshops, networking circles and interactive discussions with thought leaders such as Georgene Huang and Gloria Feldt, Take The Lead Leadership Ambassadors, and other industry experts.
Workshops aligned with Take The Lead’s effective 9 Leadership Power Tools include: Employ Every Medium: Using Your Voice Powerfully; Define Your Own Terms: Negotiating for What’s Important; Wear The Shirt: Building the Brand of You; Embrace Controversy:How We Reach Gender Parity in Tech — the New Equality Frontier and Powertopia: What Would A Gender Balanced World Look Like?
Twenty in-person workshops and events are offered for Take The Lead Day in cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Phoenix, Springfield, Mo., Mankato, Minn., and Geneva, Switzerland.
The Chicago workshop, “No, Bro: Dealing With Gender Bias and Harassment In Tech and Beyond,” will be held at 1871, the tech incubator, in Chicago.
An additional 25 virtual events such as webinars, online salons and interactive panel discussions are on the schedule. Participants are invited to launch their own Take The Lead Day events with this Take The Lead Day Action Kit.
Take The Lead Day in New York will culminate in a celebration the evening of November 14 combining art, industry and advocacy in New York City for 140 supporters and guests with Women, Power and The Art of Leadership Equality.
The event includes a networking cocktail hour; interactive 90-minute program with music, theater and spoken word artists, along with short Q&A salons comprised of industry professionals, journalists and artists exchanging ideas on leadership parity.
“Achieving a fair and equal share of leadership roles for women will result in a more just and healthy world, with greater economic prosperity,” says Feldt.
In a recent study, the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that companies with more female leaders contributed to a company’s success and bottom line.
“Companies with more #femaleleaders contributed to a company’s success and bottom line”
That happens “with increased skill diversity within top management, effectiveness in monitoring staff performance, and less gender discrimination throughout the management ranks,” according to the Harvard Business Review. All this helps to recruit, promote, and retain talent.
Since its founding in 2014, Take The Lead has reached more than 1 million women with training resources in fewer than three years. More than 900 women were trained in person in 2017, leading to certification of more than 30 Leadership Ambassadors in 22 cities.
“Our training is unique in that it is developmental and transformational, while also providing a community of women who are committed to continuously uplifting one another,” says Feldt, who created the 9 Leadership Power Tools.
In the past three years, Take The Lead has launched 50 Women Can Change The World Programs in California and Arizona and through that delivered free weekly and monthly resources accessed by nearly 16,000 women, often multiplied by company and organization women’s initiatives and other group use.
“Take The Lead began as an idea — to provide a solution to change the leadership landscape — where women have stalled at occupying 18-20 percent of our country’s top leadership positions across all sectors,” Feldt says.
Take The Lead offers in-person training on the 9 Leadership Power Tools. Some trainings have been tailored to specific industries like finance, tech, public service, and hospitality. To broaden the reach, an accessible online self-study version of the course for mid-career women is in development, while also expanding in-person courses to more sectors and locations.
The outcomes of Take The Lead’s initiatives are specific and measurable. More than 76 percent of program participants have accessed Take The Lead’s free mentorship platform and/or received one-on-one coaching from a Take The Lead certified trainer or coach. More than 70 percent of program participant respondents say they had intentions to seek career advancement by the end of 2017 and have made a strategic plan to do so.
“The outcomes of #TakeTheLead’s initiatives are specific and measurable.”
In a new study from the Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion and the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, that “surveyed more than 1,300 full-time employees from a range of different sized organizations and industries across the United States,” the researchers found “today’s workforce prioritizes an inclusive culture, and what organizations can do to advance inclusion now and in the future.”
Efforts by organizations to be inclusive and to work to have more women in leadership have direct effects, the study shows. “Eighty percent of respondents indicated inclusion is important when choosing an employer. Thirty-nine percent of all respondents reported that they would leave their current organization for a more inclusive one. Twenty-three percent of respondents indicated they have already left an organization for a more inclusive one.”
A snapshot of some of the Take The Lead Day’s collaborative partners include Gore, American Express, Michael Stars, Go Daddy, Glassbreakers, She Negotiates, as well as Women Connect4Good and Arizona State University, LeanIn, Iowa Women Lead Change, Women’s Leadership Institute – Utah and Arizona Take The Lead Leadership Council.
“We are building foundational leadership structures for organizations and for women to emerge and become the leaders they want to be,” Feldt says.
“Take The Lead thinks like an entrepreneurial start up and functions as a movement — made possible through collaboration and multiplying our message,” Feldt says. “In just three years, we’ve created a movement and begun to act and make progress. How? Because we don’t do things the way they’ve always been done.”
For more information on Take The Lead Day’s #Powertopia, contact: info@taketheleadday.com
About the Author
Michele Weldon is editorial director of Take The Lead, an award-winning author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and a senior leader with The OpEd Project. @micheleweldon www.micheleweldon.com