“What we don’t see, what we don’t hear, we cannot humanize,” says Nakisha M. Lewis, the new president and CEO of Breakthrough, a global nonprofit that uses the power of media, technology and popular culture to transform systems around gender, race, sexuality and immigrant rights.
Read MoreIssue 185 — November 22, 2021
Before holiday season gatherings (in person or virtual — please stay safe), I’m taking a moment to say how grateful I am for all we have accomplished together despite pandemic-induced setbacks. Seriously, it has been amazing to look back at 2021 and realize that thanks entirely to your support, Take The Lead has provided over 10,000 women with resources and actionable tools to navigate career challenges and changes. You helped us help women rethink, refresh, retool, or revise their career intentions. And those are just the ones we can count.
Read MoreIt was early on Thanksgiving morning a few years back and I had just placed a stuffed 24-pound turkey in the oven. I called my mom to double check how long to bake the extra stuffing in a separate casserole dish. After I dialed her familiar number, I could not believe I momentarily forgot she passed a month earlier and this would be my first holiday without her culinary help.
Sure, I had her cookbooks, my cookbooks and boxes filled with stain-splashed recipe cards, but calling my mom was easier, until it wasn’t.
Read MoreIssue 184 — November 15, 2021
The Microsoft Work Trend Index says over 40% of the global workforce is considering leaving their current employer, and 46% plan to make a significant career pivot.
This and other recent studies have pundits and business leaders wringing their hands about the difficulty of filling jobs in the wake of the pandemic’s massive economic disruption.
Read MoreIt is likely that if many of us had a nickel for every time someone questioned our authority or expertise, many of us would not be too concerned about having enough saved for retirement.
Yes, those moments when your title and role are announced and the naysayers shrink in the back of the room, can be satisfying, but the consistent presumption of a lack of authority and credibility based on gender is far too prevalent and costly. It hinders not just acknowledgment, but advancement, opportunity, income and quality of life.
Read MoreIssue 183 — November 8, 2021
Don’t you love the day each year that we get an extra hour?
Well, maybe not so much if you have small children whose body clocks still awaken them and their parents, at what will now be one hour earlier than before.
And maybe you’d prefer to keep daylight saving time all year to stave off darkness in the late afternoon, thus reducing seasonal affective disorders while avoiding the complications of a mid-year time change.
Read MoreAround the world, women in their 20s are shaping their professional careers, embracing the freedom and liberation that comes with completing school, gaining financial independence, and customizing their futures of work. Still, many twenty-somethings may still depend on families, particularly due to COVID restrictions and a shift to moving back into the family home.
Being financially independent gives many a chance to develop valuable money management skills, and to foster the confidence needed to voice your own opinions and desires. This is a global concern.
Read MoreTreat yourself before the holidays or treat a close friend as a gift for the holidays with one or many of these new books from authors you have grown to revere and perhaps a few whose work is new to you.
Before the year ends, you will want to dive into this curated collection of the latest fiction, nonfiction, business, leadership and books that offer lessons in leadership, life, work and more. This sterling and diverse selection of essays, novels, memoirs, biographies and instructional guides span a range of interests and deliver the immense talents of writers we already know and those we want to know better.
Read MoreWhen was the last time—if ever—you were part of a venture when a leader pronounced that joy was an integral part of the mission?
“We built into our mission that joy underlines our ethos,” says Deborah Douglas, co-editor-in-chief of The Emancipator, the new journalistic venture from Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research and the Boston Globe’s opinion team resurrecting the 200-year old abolitionist newspaper. “Journalists should not have to create from tension.”
Read MoreIssue 182 — October 25, 2021
The buzz is everywhere now. Are you in the office yet? As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the Shecession and the Great Resignation, now comes the Great Returnship.
And since women have lost or left more jobs than men and have been slower to return, special emphasis must be placed on Take The Lead’s goal to #putwomenatthecenter of the recovery. There are so many questions.
Is your workplace ready? Does your boss want you to come back to work in person but you aren’t so sure you are ready? Are you anxious about getting back among larger groups of people?
Read MoreCall someone a genius and it’s a lofty compliment. But Sarah Ruhl, prolific playwright, poet and author, is officially a genius, as a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award, as well as two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
The author of Smile: The Story of A Face, was on stage at the Chicago Humanities Festival recently, speaking with her friend and colleague, Jessica Thebus, artist and Director of the Northwestern University MFA Program.
They discussed the gendered agency and ownership of your own body as a woman, as a human, and as someone who loses control of its ability to move and to respond as intended in the workplace and in the world.
Read MoreIssue 181 — October 18, 2021
Dear Reader,
It made me as happy as a pumpkin spice cupcake to see this sign on the carousel in Central Park when I walked by it this week…
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