Books

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Intentioning

Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good

Amazon 5-star review of Intentioning
5-star Amazon review of Intentioning by Gloria Feldt

In the wake of two pandemics that shook our world to its core and revealed deep fault lines in our culture, Intentioning shows how we can seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity created by massive disruption to build back stronger with women at the center of the recovery.

Through the lens of women’s stories, it delivers a fresh set of leadership tools, skills, and concepts that help all women reach their own highest intentions, purposefully creating new norms, while guiding institutions to break through the remaining barriers to gender and racial parity for everyone’s good.

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No Excuses

9 Ways Women Can Change
How We Think About Power

In 2008, just when it seemed we’d have our first female president—Feeling a bit of déjà vu?—Elle magazine asked me to write about women running for office.

Turned out the story was women don’t run. They are half as likely as men to think seriously about running for office, then must be asked multiple times, then think they should take courses to learn how, whereas men just do it. The pattern is the same in corporations, entrepreneurial businesses, and professions.

I’ve been an advocate for women for four decades, but it had never occurred to me that once doors were open, women wouldn’t rush through them. I was shocked. I kept digging and observed that the disparity is profoundly rooted in women’s culturally learned ambivalent relationship with power and intention.

It’s hard to change a culture while you’re living in it, and the combination of stereotype threat, implicit bias, fear of losing roles in which we are comfortable even though they limit us, and remaining structural barriers such as organizations designed for men by men with wives at home, conspire to make the pace toward parity somewhere between 63 and 500 years, by various estimates.

I can’t live 500 more years no matter how hard I try. So I had to do something to disrupt the pattern.

I wrote No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power to give women concrete tools—the 9 Leadership Power Tools--for breaking through the remaining barriers.

I was incredibly moved by the inspiring stories in No Excuses. To honor the women who came before us, we need to recognize each other and listen for our inherent wisdom. This is a book you’ll be quoting.

Rosario Dawson

An up-to-the-minute, indispensable book. This book is the coach young women need.

Gloria Steinem

 

Feldt is a feminist icon who is co-founder and president of Take the Lead and a former president of Planned Parenthood. Vanity Fair named Gloria as one of its Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders and Trailblazers and Glamour Magazine listed her as one of its Women of the Year. Gloria contends that the greatest problem today isn’t that doors of opportunity aren’t open, it’s that women aren’t walking through them. She urges women to shift the way they think in order to achieve true parity with their male counterparts and offers nine leadership power tools in this book. These include: Know Your History; Define Your Terms First; Embrace Controversy; Employ Every Medium and other ideas for using the tools and resources women already have to help equalize power at work, politics and at home.

[Feldt] manages to balance a generous feeling of support with a sense of urgency…she offers practical advice for women who want to be active in politics, business, or their personal lives. With heartfelt encouragement and a push for empowerment through equality (including strategies for including men in feminist causes), this guide is accessible to all.

Publishers Weekly

Gloria’s redefinition of power is exactly what the world needs today.

Peter Buffett, Composer, Philanthropist, Author of 'Life Is What You Make It'

One of those books that has the power to change your life. It’s challenging and smart, but most important, it gives you actual tools you can use to walk in your own power.

Jane Fonda

Feldt’s overall message is a sound one: While we can’t magically eliminate bias, we can work on self-imposed handicaps anytime we choose.

Leslie Bennetts, ELLE Magazine