Stacey Engle, president of Fierce Conversations, understands perfectly the double meaning of the word. “Fierce to me is what you think of when someone is fiercely loyal, passionate, caring, courageous and getting to the heart of something.” She adds, “Someone can also interpret fierce as aggressive or too intense.” The two interpretations offer the opportunity to address what it means to be effective.
Read MoreTaylor Swift had it right. In her performance at the recent American Music Awards, where she won Artist of The Decade as well as Artist of The Year, she sang, “The Man,” with particularly fitting lyrics. “If I was the man, I’d be the man,” she sang, surrounded by a choir of young girls. Alas, she is not. And the gender gap in all music is wide.
Read MoreVirginia Woolf famously said, “For most of history, anonymous was a woman.” A new effort launched by Take The Lead’s 50 Women in Journalism Can Change The World cohort, Women Do News, is out to give credit to women journalists where credit is due, particularly in the pages of Wikipedia.
Read MoreSuper good news for your wallet if you work in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin or Pittsburgh. Awesome if you are in transportation, marketing and advertising, or IT. PayScale Inc.’s latest Q3 2019 PayScale Index, which tracks quarterly trends in compensation, shows that overall wages in the U.S. increased 2.6 percent in the past year, with job growth averaging 161,000 new jobs per month for the first nine months of the year.
Read MoreImagine for a moment what the world would be like if men and women held fair and equal shares of top leadership positions across every sector. What are the words you would use to describe such a world? Last weekend, I got to do one of the things that keeps me so powerfully committed to this mission of gender parity in leadership by 2025.
Read MoreThirty years ago this year The Women’s Bean Project started with $500 and a cup of bean soup. The idea that founder Josey Eyre had in 1989 was to transform the lives of homeless women in Colorado Springs to employed workers living independently with their families. So Eyre bought $500 in supplies to make bean soup mix and quickly sold $6,000 in mixes on the initial investment.
Read More“I am not CEO Susan; it sounds like a new version of Barbie,” says Susan Smith Richardson, CEO of the Center for Public Integrity. As keynote speaker at the recent Journalism & Women Symposium annual Conference and Mentoring Project in Williamsburg, Va. recently, Richardson, the award-winning former editorial director of Newsroom Practice Change at Solutions Journalism Network and former editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter, spoke of the value of using your power in service to fulfill a vision.
Read MoreI talked with Ms. Magazine’s Carmen Rios about why I pivoted one my career to women’s leadership parity, why Take The Lead focuses it’s 50 Women Can programs on depth and impact rather than mere numbers, and much more.
Read MoreAt business meetings, conferences and through email introductions, it is becoming more common to include pronouns of choice, identifying yourself as she/her, he/him or they/them. Misusing pronouns in speaking about a colleague or business associate has recently become a concern for some, sparking backlash for those unfamiliar with the necessity to be empathic about pronoun preference and choice.
Read MoreDeconstructing how we spend our entertainment time this fall whether it is reading books or watching films, documentaries and series on the big and small screens, shows some vast improvement moving toward gender parity in representation.
Read MoreNinety-nine years ago on August 26, women won the right to vote in the U.S., with the passage of the 19th Amendment. It wasn’t until Bella Abzug (D-NY) in 1971 proposed a Joint Resolution of Congress that that day be designating Women’s Equality Day. It was passed two years later in 1973.
Read More“Popularity is overrated.” This may be the best and most telling line for women looking for purpose in their work—in spite of a “likeability problem.” She admits at one point, “I’m nobody’s friend.” Spoken by Bernadette Fox, played by Cate Blanchett in the new film, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” these phrases are protest against shame, judgment, social ridicule and even mean girls.
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