Issue 259— May 20, 2024
It’s challenging to think of an original idea when called upon to give a commencement speech, but my friend and International Women’s Forum colleague Dede Thompson Bartlett gave an outstanding address to the NYU Tandon School of Engineering class of 2024 on May 16, 2024.
Read MoreYou have likely heard the adage that a picture is worth 1,000 words. In the case of Annie Leibovitz, iconic photographer for more than 50 years, her pictures are priceless.
The legendary creative force and winner of the International Center of Photography Lifetime Achievement Award and the Centenary Medal of Royal Photographic Society, Leibovitz humbly graced the Chicago Humanities Festival stage recently to talk about how women are seen—and not seen authentically—and ultimately not known.
Read MoreAn Adrienne Rich poem inspired the title for the nonprofit, All We Can Save Project.
“My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed/ I have to cast my lot with those/ who age after age, perversely,/ with no extraordinary power,/ reconstitute the world.”
“That is my drumbeat. To have truth, courage and solutions, the trifecta,” says Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist, policy expert and founder of Urban Ocean Lab, who also co-founded All We Can Save with Dr. Katherine Wilkinson, author and editor-in-chief of Project Drawdown.
Read MoreGrowing up in rural eastern India, Rupa Dash would be the first girl in her family to get an education.
“The biggest dream girls would ever see and what she deserves is to find somebody or your parents find somebody who would own a truck and you would get married,” says Dash, co-founder and CEO of the World Woman Foundation, with the mission that “Equality for women is progress for all.”
That is an audacious success for someone who as a young girl explains, “I literally never get out of my home and played outside.”
Read MoreIssue 143 — September 28, 2020
She was tiny. She was mighty. She was a brilliant legal strategist. She was lovingly dubbed “notorious” for her groundbreaking advances for women’s equality, autonomy, and therefore our power within society.
Yet U. S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke boundaries gently. Never wavering from her revolutionary vision of gender equality, she believed in making big change in small increments.
“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”
Read MoreThe virtual national conventions for both the Democratic and Republican parties were unprecedented and historic in many ways.
Due to COVID-19, there were no in-person gatherings of throngs of delegates, speakers and supporters wearing funny hats and carrying signs. The handling of videos, recorded vignettes plus live and recorded speeches lent a tone of slick production values to both recent weeks of conventions.
Read MoreLeap Day is one day added to the calendar every four years “as a corrective measure,” because the earth’s orbit is not precisely completed in 365 days. Take The Lead is jumping on that opportunity on Leap Day this year for its own corrective measures moving the workplace and culture toward gender parity in leadership with the “Power Up: Igniting the Intentional Leader Within” conference February 28-29 in Scottsdale, Az.
Read MoreAt 34, Tania Luna has already held 30 jobs. Now co-CEO at LifeLabs Learning, the author, who also co-founded Surprise Enterprises, attributes her resilience to a complicated life viewed with gratitude and surprise. Luna thought the Brooklyn homeless shelter she and her family lived in during the early 90s was a hotel. They had arrived in New York when she was five years old from Ukraine seeking asylum after the devastating Chernobyl accident in 1986.
Read MoreSearch online for “women’s leadership books,” and the first four books that pop up are by men. Search again with the keywords “women business books” and you get offers for dozens of daily bound planners. And does anyone really use those anymore? Sigh. So Take The Lead took the lead on
Read More“If there were a chutzpah caucus in the United States Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) would be its natural leader,” wrote the New York Times last week in a profile of the senator.
Gillibrand aggressively fights for what she thinks is right, even if it means defying her party and bucking its leadership. As a fairly new and junior senator, she’s expected
Read MoreOn Wednesday I had the great privilege of attending the Make Progress National Summit 2013 hosted by Generation Progress in Washington DC.
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