Issue 144 — October 5, 2020
I’ve gotta tell you, I get really tired of people complaining to me about something they saw in the news coverage of women. Whether it’s criticizing or loving Kamala Harris’s Chucks or the tone and timbre of a female leader’s voice, and don’t get me started on Hillary Clinton’s ankles and yellow pantsuit, women in leadership roles are scrutinized and stereotyped much more often than men. That’s surely true.
Read MoreOctober is Women’s Small Business Month, so Take The Lead honors the 11.6 million women small business owners in this country who are earning $1.9 trillion in revenue and employing 9.1 million people. Every day 825 women launch small businesses in the United States.
Yes, the numbers tell a story of perseverance and success. One quarter, or 20 % of all companies with $1 million in revenue are women-owned, with 39 % pf all small businesses owned by women. The fastest growth areas are Florida, Georgia, Texas, Michigan and South Carolina.
Read MoreNever mind your cat crawling over your keyboard or a partner walking behind you in pajamas—or less. But the new realities of working from home and zooming for most of your business day present challenges. And not just when you get the alert that your Internet connection is unstable.
When body language is literally unseen, and all someone can ascertain from you are facial expressions, business communication is fraught with possible landmines—and it is particularly perilous for women, who are judged more harshly on their appearance, their responses, even tone of voice.
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 MoreHalf 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.
Read MoreWith the projections that the “normal life” of pre-pandemic may not return until the end of 2021—if ever—is causing enormous anxiety, affecting most everyone from a remote contract freelancer to a CEO of a global enterprise.
“Are you OK?” is a question leaders can ask at the start of a Zoom conference calls, but it no longer affords a simple, quick response.
Read MoreThousands 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.”
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreIssue 142 — September 14, 2020
Don’t get the wrong idea. I have great respect for Hillary Clinton, and she has been a woman ahead of her time in many ways. But her recent essay shows she has caught up with my core message about women’s relationship with power. Let me roll back the tape and tell you what I mean.
You know that great song in the musical “Hamilton” — “The Room Where It Happens?”
I was in the room where it happened 25 years ago. Two rooms where it happened, actually.
And the experience was life changing. World changing even. But that was then.
Read More“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.”
Read MoreFrom 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.
Read MoreIssue 141— September 7, 2020
Drew Dixon’s resume includes Former Vice President of A&R at Arista Records, a former director of A&R at Def Jam Recordings, the former general manager of John Legend’s label Homeschool Records, and the former manager of recording artist Estelle. She produced more hit records than I can count with artists you know. Dixon is the founder of the independent label The Ninth Floor, the tech-enabled beauty start-up EverythingDid, and the co-creator of the TV series Reciprocity.
Definitely an ambitious and intentional woman who knew from her teenage years that working in the music business was her dream.
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