Is your career disrupted? How you can regroup, refresh, and rewire for success

Issue 135 — July 13, 2020

What had you planned to do in 2020?

I could hardly wait for 2020. It was going to be an epic year. The 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote. So many events were already being planned that my calendar was filled with places I wanted to go to join the celebration. It was to be the year that Take The Lead was finally poised to scale up with our strategy to achieve gender parity in leadership by 2025.

I had so many plans. Just the sound of those round numbers 2020 were enough to signal a special year.

We were about to find out just how special.

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There’s Power in Naming and Power in Knowing your Name

Issue 134— July 6, 2020

My cousin Elizabeth is making good use of this time of sheltering during the pandemic to dig into our family history. It was rooted in the small town of Birzai, Lithuania for hundreds of years until two world wars either killed them or dispersed them to many corners of the world. One of the most intriguing and yet exasperating parts of this exploration is getting the names right as spellings varied from language to language. Vinn became Vinh or Bein, Henne to Hannah, and even some in the same nuclear family some people spelled their last names differently.

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Imagine a World…

Imagine for a moment what the world would be like if men and women held fair and equal shares of top leadership positions across every sector. What are the words you would use to describe such a world?

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Why Take The Lead?

I talked with Ms. Magazine’s Carmen Rios about why I pivoted one my career to women’s leadership parity, why Take The Lead focuses it’s 50 Women Can programs on depth and impact rather than mere numbers, and much more.

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She's Done It: Betty Friedan, Sheryl Sandberg, and You

Consider this your Women’s History Month bonus post. In the heated contemporary debate about whether Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s exhortation to women to Lean In will help women in less elevated positions, Ruth Nemzoff, Resident Scholar at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and author of Don’t Roll Your Eyes: Making In-Laws Into Family reminds us that this dispute is hardly new. You could substitute “Sandberg” for “Friedan” in most of Nemzoff’s article. And the takeaway lessons for women remain the same too.friedan-collage

Let’s not waste our time denigrating Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique because it focused only on the problems of affluent women, rather, let us praise her for starting a revolution.

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Women’s History Month: The Many Takes of Women in the Entertainment Industry

Making a box-office success movie or TV series without a woman in a sexualized or type-cast bimbo role has historically been hard to impossible. (Read “Leadership Fictions:Gender, Leadership, and the Media”, Take The Lead’s special report on how media influences women’s perceptions of themselves as leaders and others’ ideas about them for some shocking statistics.)

That’s why women today who create media by producing, writing, and directing are of the utmost importance to creating the future of our choice.

Some women in leading roles on and off screen—like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Lena Dunham, and Shonda Rhimes—use their writing to make women the protagonists of their stories. Their takes on what those roles mean to women and feminism, however, are quite diverse.

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