Media
Lilly and Judy ✴️ Historic Calls to Action
Issue 2841 — March 10, 2025 What an amazing International Women’s Day 2025 I was privileged to experience! It was equal measure inspiring celebrations of women’s progress and passionate calls to action to change the state of the world for women, where rights won are being lost and many protections of equal treatment are being erased a…
Read MoreHammering Power: Part 1 of a 3 Part Series on how Kamala Harris Uses the 9 Leadership Power Tools
Issue 273 — September 16, 2024 “When the only tool you have is a hammer, you are likely to treat everything you see as a nail.” The hammer is a metaphor I use to deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of power, so that women will embrace their hammer of power with confidence, authenticity, and joy…
Read MoreThe Sum Volume #1: Wonder Woman
“The first responsibility of leadership is the creation of meaning.”—Warren Bennis. Welcome to the first Sum, where I’ll give my take on the meaning of the sum of the week’s parts. I want your voice too. Leave comments here or @GloriaFeldt. The Sum: This week it’s all #WonderWoman. And #WonderWomen. #WW for short. We’re all around.…
Read MoreTake The Lead Presented and Connected in 2014—and Wants Your Suggestions for 2015
Understanding the Role Confidence Plays Would workplaces become more balanced and society more equitable if women exhibited more confidence? Katty Kay and Claire Shipman created a stir with their book The Confidence Code and their article, “The Confidence Gap” in The Atlantic. To continue this important conversation, we were honored to have Shipman speak to the…
Read MoreJill Abramson and Gender Bilingual Communication
With hindsight, this 2013 article all but predicted Jill Abramson’s unceremonious fall. Though according to the New Yorker rendition, her demise was precipitated when Abramson, the New York Times’ first female executive editor, confronted her boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., after learning her pay was significantly less than her predecessor, I point the finger of firing fate much toward implicit cultural biases that influence behavior much more than any of us want to believe.
Women’s Leadership Stars on Broadway

I recently had my Broadway debut. No, seriously, check out this video of Feminomics, interviewing me and Susan Arnot Heaney at the Women Leadership Summit, just after we had both spoken on a panel smack in the middle of Times Square.
The Young Politica: Guns on Campus
If you, like me, have come to look forward to Maegan Vazquez’s “Young Politica” columns on Heartfeldt, you are going to miss her interesting take on the world through the students’ lens. During the past two semesters that she has interned for me, it has been my pleasure to see her grow and her writing develop.
Enjoy her last column here. I told her I predict we’ll be reading her in the Washington Post in a few years.
Today, airsoft rifles closely resembling AK-47s were found in the dorm room of a New York University student, according to the New York Post. The psychology student, Bernard Goal, 20, allegedly assembled and sold them for up to $500 each. 
The story may not have been at the top of my radar (nor on the radar of the New York Post a few weeks ago, but in a post-Boston Marathon and post-MIT shootout world, I have become hyperaware of all things ammunition on campus—especially when that campus is my own.
As a member of the media, it would be naive of me to cite this as a reason for stricter gun laws on campus. Even I know that when in search for stories, a journalist often writes about what is most concerning to their audience at that moment in time. Right now, almost anything guns is a-go.
Up until recent events, campus gun laws were not an issue I was concerned with; mainly because my college doesn’t have a real campus. Rather, students take classes in buildings scattered across lower-Manhattan.
Read MoreYou Never Really Hear About Mitt Romney’s Ankles
OK, I admit it: when I wrote about the sitcom Veep, I fretted over the less than buttoned up wardrobe that the first female vice president character, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, wears.
I’m looking forward to seeing the USA Network new series on Political Animals to see how they portray the Hillary-esque main character played by Sigourney Weaver. So much pop culture, so little time, and meanwhile a serious election is going on!
Recently when I talked with Americas Radio News network about how the media treats women candidates, I had a chance to say more about this fraught topic.
Read MoreHas the “War on Women” Gone Too Far?
Surely Politico jests. I’m sure you can add to my examples:
Politico Arena asks:
Democrats are raising money with a petition against the “Republican War on Women.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, repeated the jibe Sunday on “Meet the Press” when asked about Rush Limbaugh’s recent comments on contraception.
Now that Limbaugh has apologized, will voters see “war on women” language as overkill? Particularly those who oppose the Obama administration’s contraception coverage policy on moral/religious grounds?
My Response: You’re kidding, right? There’s hardly even a truce.
Rush Limbaugh calling Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute as she asked her university to cover hormonal birth-control and the subsequent fury that caused many of his advertisers to abandon him (and his very lame non-apology apology) was one small skirmish in the much larger and ongoing war on women being waged by an ideologically driven minority who would much prefer that women had remained barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
Just this past week, Roy Blunt and other Senate Republicans sought to pass legislation that would allow any employer to deny preventive contraceptive health services to their employees on the basis of any religious or “moral” objections. As though women are wanton hussies with no morals or religion.
Read MoreSexist Screed Gone Too Far-Now Rush Must Go
It’s Women’ History Month. Let’s make Rush Limbaugh history. Here’s one action you can take. Stay tuned, and scroll down to the bottom of the post for more every day.
Politico Arena asks:
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has been heavily criticized by the Georgetown University law student who he called a “slut” after she testified on Capitol Hill about women’s access to contraception.
“I’m not the first woman to be treated this way by numerous conservative media outlets, and hopefully I’ll be the last,” Sandra Fluke said on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.” “This is really inappropriate. This is outside the bounds of civil discourse.”
Although Limbaugh infuriated Democrats by calling Fluke both a “prostitute” and a “slut,” he has shown no signs that he’ll issue an apology.
Should Limbaugh issue an apology? Or will the media firestorm blow over?
My Response: No apology is good enough. Rush must go. Period.
Women have had to put up with his “feminazi” epithets for far too long,
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