Workplace
How to Unlock Potential: The Key to Thriving Business Success
Issue 2837 — February 3, 2025 You are incredibly, beautifully diverse. Think about it. A friend once observed to me that we are all made up of many tribes, each of which brings a piece of our identity to life. How many tribes do you belong to? What characteristics of yourself do you identify with? I…
Read MoreIt’s Your Turn, Now What?
There is a fire that erupts when women REmember who they are AND know that it’s their time to step up and fully own their authority to lead.
Yes, I’m talking about you because you are that woman!
You are the woman that The Big RE Conference was created for because we know that on the other side of spending two days immersed in the power-packed agenda we have in store for you, you are going to leave knowing what it takes to…
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 MoreDana Kaplan: How Community College Helped Her Change Careers
Most of our talk about women’s career advancement seems to focus on elite colleges and high profile professions such as corporate leadership. Yet there are many jobs open to women who want to try less obvious routes to career success.
AAUW has long been a leader in workplace advancement and pay equity for women.Their recent research into the higher student loan debt burden women experience due to the gender pay gap found that many women – more than 4 million – view community college as their best, and most affordable, option after high school.
Dana Kaplan’s story of how she succeeded in a typically all-male field is a fascinating example of how community colleges can help women change careers or to gain the skills they need to advance in any chosen profession.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
Like a lot of recent graduates, Kaplan had trouble getting work in her chosen field — philosophy — after college. She realized she needed a change when she found herself stuck “9 to 5 in a cubicle. I couldn’t stand it.”Or, if you’re an auto mechanic and 2011–12 AAUW Career Development Grantee Dana Kaplan, try something completely different!
I asked Kaplan how she made the jump from one career to the next. “I always knew I wanted to work with my hands,” she said. For a while she considered going into construction, to which people generally responded, “You’re too smart; you’re too pretty [for a job like that].”
Read MoreSandberg: Are You Bossy or Merely Showing Leadership Skills?
I shared this photo of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg from the Take The Lead Facebook page (please go like the page right now, so that Take The Lead will earn a dollar!) onto my own Facebook page.
It has sparked an interesting and somewhat contentious conversation
Read MoreJoin The Conversation: Is It Time To Lean In To Feminism?
A very interesting conversation between InPower founder Dana Theus and myself led to this upcoming webcast. I hope you will join and put in your two cents worth. Women are making history every day. But we don’t always realize that. On the other hand, we do love to analyze ourselves, and the topic of intergenerational communication about feminism is always a hot one. See all the details and join up for the live broadcast or via replay!
Our Panelists include YOU and:
Gloria Feldt– Past President of Planned Parenthood and Author of No Excuses: 9 Ways WOMEN Can Change How We Think About POWER
Emily Bennington – Author of Who Says It’s a Man’s World?
Eva Swanson – Student and Women’s Advocate at the College of William & Mary
Dana Theus – Founder, InPower Women (Moderator)
Questions we’ll explore:
Read MoreSmart Women Take the Lead
Smart Women Take The Lead monthly global webcast by Smartwomen Smartconversations (SWSC) and Take The Lead for women in the workplace to launch Friday March 15 at 2:30 pm EDT
Perhaps you want a promotion, or a raise, or you feel ‘stuck’ in your career?
Maybe you’re going on maternity leave or returning to work after a few years?
Or perhaps you want to talk to your boss about flexible working, or you want to get on the fast-track for a leadership position?
SWTTL is a live monthly webcast and community for women who want to get ahead. Our aim is to help accelerate effective change for women in the workplace by addressing key issues and creating real breakthroughs!
And our two organizations are modeling the kind of collaboration we think women individually and women’s organizations collectively must if we are to move the dial of leadership parity forward for women.
Read MoreI'm Doing It: Wireless Activism for Social Change
Being an activist does not always mean being political. Recently, I served as the moderator for a panel of media innovators who discussed how wireless technology is bringing about social change.
It was exciting to explore the tools currently being used, invented and dreamed of to create a better world at CTIA Wireless 2012, the international wireless association conference in New Orleans. CTIA hosts this premiere industry conference for wireless, telecom and broadband as well as the key vertical markets that have entered into wireless. Forty thousand service providers, manufacturers, developers, retailers, enterprise end-users and media attend the conference.
The all-woman panel on “Wireless Activism”, presented by the Women’s Media Center, focused on how wireless tools are used by activists to create local and global transformation.
(Click here to read the full article)
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What's The Next Great Leap For Women?
You can now find me on ForbesWoman.com. My first post will tell you why it took me so long to get started. And now that I’ve jumped into the deep end of the pool, I want to share what I think is the Next Great Leap for women. I’d love to know what your thoughts are. Victoria Pynchon has already weighed in with an amazing piece about sponsorship.
Because my book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, came out officially in paperback on Leap Day—a perfect day for a book about women’s relationship with power, no?—I’ve been thinking hard about what the next great leap forward for women should be. So I thought I’d better check out the history of the every-fourth-year calendar adjustment that gives us February 29.
Leap Day inspired a leap of vision and blazing hope for women in 5th Century Ireland when St. Bridget persuaded St. Patrick to declare a woman could do the unthinkable: ask a man to marry her.
At a time when a woman was, for all practical purposes, owned first by her father and then by her husband, marriage meant not love but economic survival for her and her children. No doubt many seized their one chance to override gendered power norms and choose their own fates.
The tradition continued, with merry belittlements to remind women how little power they had the rest of the time. Men had to pay a fine or give a silk dress if they refused marriage proposals. Women on the prowl for husbands sported red petticoats as warning so poor beleaguered men could dash in the other direction. Haha.
You may be laughing because Leap Day privilege now seems an amusing anachronism. Not only do the majority of men and women think it’s perfectly fine for a female to propose marriage, the End of Men has been proclaimed, Women’s Nation declared, and New York Times columnist Nick Kristof dubs women “Mistresses of the Universe.”
But such puffery masks how far women have yet to go to achieve genuine parity. The next norm-changing leap must be women creating and earning wealth that places the female 51 percent of the population into power balance with their male counterparts.
Read MoreShe’s Doing It: Shoshana Weinberg Finds Spa Everywhere
Read MoreHow in the world did Shoshana Weinberg get from the “tiny country town” of Clarksville MD to Hong Kong? How in the world did this director of the Four Seasons Spa Hong Kong happen upon my 9 Ways Blog? And what in the world does she mean when she says, “Spa is everywhere?”
I asked those and other questions when Shoshana e-mailed me out of the blue saying she’d found my blog to be inspirational and wanted to be profiled as a “She’s Doing It” woman. I think you’ll find her answers fascinating as she tells her story (that’s No Excuses Power Tool #9 of course!) here…