Posts in Change Leadership
Voting Booths Half Empty: Call to Action for Women Voting 2020

Half of the women just didn’t show up.

Forty-nine million of the 118 million women eligible to vote in 2018 opted out. That can’t happen again in 2020.

Along with many other voting initiatives, TAG10 Women Vote is doing everything they can as a non-profit organization to make sure history does not repeat itself.

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Forever Legacy: Notorious RBG’s Drive For Equality in Law and Life

Thousands gathered for a vigil near the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court following the news of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, from complications from pancreatic cancer.

Men, women and children carried signs and lit candles in honor of the woman who spent a lifetime fighting for “the end of days when women appear in high places only as one-at-a- time performers.”

Linda Hirshman, author of Sisters in Law: How Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor Went To The Supreme Court and Changed The World, writes in Washington Post, “In her last years, people made songs and movies about her, and the public bought out her bobblehead dolls. None of that mattered to the real RBG. She cared about the Supreme Court, making it again the engine of an expanding legacy of American equality.”

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Is Awareness Enough? Economic, Political Growth 52 Years After Hispanic Heritage Launch

This must be about more than selling Frida Kahlo t-shirts once a year.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson initiated a week to honor the influence and legacies in the arts and culture of Americans with heritage origins in Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America. President Ronald Reagan turned it into a month celebrated from September 15 through October 15 by law, inaugurating Hispanic Heritage Awareness Month.

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North Star: Soledad O’Brien On Listening, Point of View, Stories, Fairness and Values

“As an organization and an individual, you have to stick to your North Star,” Soledad O’Brien, founder and CEO of Soledad O’Brien Productions, told a virtual convening of two cohorts of Take The Lead’s 50 Women in Journalism Can Change the World.

“The story of one’s arc of one’s life is to figure out what your values are,” says O’Brien, award-winning journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist who anchors and produces the Hearst Television political magazine program, “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien.”

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True Believer: CEO, Founder on Guiding Leaders Through A DEI Reckoning

From the age of five, Jennifer Brown was performing. On stage, she was singing and dancing as a child growing up in Southern California in a musical family, then as an adult pursuing a singing career.

“I love the adrenaline, I love being under pressure,” says Brown, the CEO and founder of Jennifer Brown Consulting, a global strategic leadership and diversity consulting firm that coaches business leaders on critical issues of talent and workplace strategy. “Which is good because I have three 90-minute keynotes online today,” Brown says.

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Read On: 10 New Books By Women Leaders For Your September Reading List

September is Literacy Month and also typically back to school month. But with school on hold, virtual, hybrid or postponed, we can still enjoy a robust reading month. And what possibilities you have with great new books by, for and about women and the issues and concerns facing all of us.

Take The Lead frequently highlights the latest books from women leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers and doers. It’s why Take The Lead has launched a new Book Club and why Take The Lead includes great reads from our leadership, staff and partners here.

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Calm Down: 5 Steps for Leaders To Reduce Employee Work Stress

How can women leaders deal with the issue of workplace stress among their employees?

Nearly every employee today is experiencing work stress, perhaps in varying degrees and in different forms. This is especially true given the current global health crisis brought on by COVID-19 and the resultant changes in today's workforce.

Even prior to COVID, a 2018 Fidelity Investments survey found that in America, the workplace has been deemed the top stress factor among employees. In the U.S. workplace stress is responsible for losses of up to $300 billion.

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Conventional Women: Non-Partisan RNC, DNC Highlights of Women Leaders

The 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.

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100 Years Of Progress? 19th Amendment Summit Reminds How Far To Go

A vibrant, virtual, free five-day summit is addressing where women are now and how women can move forward toward gender and racial equity begins August 10, thanks to The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization launched earlier this year.

“The centennial of The 19th Amendment — which gave white women in this country the right to vote — falls at a really pivotal moment in American history, where we're grappling with a global pandemic and navigating a modern-day civil rights movement. There's never been a more important time to spur critical conversations about the role of women in this work,” says Emily Ramshaw, co-founder and CEO of The 19th.

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Show Us All: Why Media Visuals Need To Reflect BIPOC Women

Simone Biles is on the new August cover of Vogue. Viola Davis is on the August cover of Vanity Fair. It’s a good month for visual representation of strong BIPOC women leaders in mainstream media. But it’s been a long time coming. And it’s not nearly enough.

Even as the Biles’ photo shoot was criticized for how the lighting reflected the athlete’s skin tone as photographed by Annie Liebowitz, the trend of celebrating a wider range of women leaders is positive. Davis’ cover story was the first ever by a Black photographer, Dario Calmese.

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She Could Be Next: Producer, Founder Drives For Race, Gender Equity

You can’t separate the need for race equity from the need for gender equity. Both movements need to work in tandem to change the world.

“Examining any institution through the lens of race and gender is essential; do not biforcate,” says Jyoti Sarda, producer of the two-part documentary, And She Could Be Next, a series that “follows a defiant movement led by women of color as they fight for a truly reflective democracy and transform politics from the ground up.”

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The Right Moves Now: 5 Tips For Hiring, Retaining For Gender, Racial Fairness

Gender discrimination in the workplace has been affecting women and underrepresented minorities for decades, but has become even more critical today as racial disparities across multiple systems are at the heart of global protests.

About her 2016 book, Women Matter: The Why and How of Gender Diversity in Financial Services, Daralee Barbera, co-author, tells Forbes, “A persistent obstacle is that our profession is primarily white, male, and older.”

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