Embracing Controversy Means Standing By Your Convictions
Tuesday’s elections were disappointing, to say the least, for me as a progressive woman. But this isn’t the time to throw up our hands in defeat. It’s time to regroup and lead ourselves forward. Today I listened and tweeted up with the Name It Change It campaign. I learned that their polling data backs up my contention that it’s a good thing to embrace controversy, rather than run away from it, if you’re a woman in politics (Republican or Democrat–as pollster Celinda Lake commented “Sexism is one of the very few bipartisan things”).:
Celinda Lake, of Lake Research Associates, spearheaded research measuring how gender-based attacks negatively affect voter perception of female candidates…Lake explains, “Up until this research was conducted, I often advised women to ignore toxic media sexism. But now, women candidates are equipped with evidence that shows they can recover voter confidence from sexist media coverage by directly addressing it, and standing up for all current and future women leaders.”
Isn’t it great to know that if we stand firm in our convictions, we not only gain supporters but maintain our own integrity and get to express our true beliefs?
Let’s encourage the women in our lives to embrace their power. Download the No Excuses postcard and send it to 10 women in your life. It’s time for us to embrace our power, step up and hold the Democrats accountable for squandering the past two years.
If you missed them earlier the 9 Ways blog posts earlier this week, here’s more discussion of Power Tool #4: Embrace Controversy, and Different Approaches to Controversy Yield Different Results.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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Gloria, I share your disappointment about how women fared in this week’s elections. We need to do better!
Thanks for the comment, Colette.The more I think about it the more I am convinced this was a seachange election for women. I’ll have more to say about that in next week’s posts.
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