Power Tools
Bring Gloria to Speak at Your Women’s History Month Event
Bring Gloria Feldt to speak to your women’s ERG, DEI program, or the entire organization during Women’s History Month
Read MoreHow Jacinda Ardern Took Down a Reporter’s Sexist Question and Showed Us Three Ways to Outsmart Implicit Bias
Issue 213— December 5, 2022
You really must watch this video to get your hackles up at the hapless reporter who asked New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern if she was meeting Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin because they are “similar in age.”
Read MoreIs 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.
Read MoreThere’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.
Read MoreIt’s 2020: New decade, old secrets from the trail of life.
Issue 118— January 20, 2020
It was a gorgeous Arizona Sunday, not yet two weeks into the new year and the new decade. The 2020s. I love that nice round number. I was lighthearted, with the sense of optimism I get at such a time, when it seems like the slate is clean and the future open to our intentions.
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?
Read MoreWhy 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.
Read MoreStuck? Meet Jake and the Power of Letting Go to Move Forward
I’m just back from a great vacation in Croatia, Petra, and Israel. Seeing so many beautiful and historic places, I vacated my mind, let go of worries
Read MoreShe'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.
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.
Read MoreWomen’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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