Friday Round Up: Will Egyptian Women’s Revolt Sustain a Movement?

I was incredibly moved to see photos of Egyptian women marching in Tahrir Square earlier this week. A few hundred protesters were expected; thousands showed up. And they were angry.

Women figured prominently in the demonstrations that brought down Hosni Mubarak last February . But once the government toppled, they were pushed aside, and not included in the constitutional reform committee. Egyptian feminists warn that decades of painstaking advances could be reversed, as religious fundamentalists ascend to power in what has been a nominally secular state.

This week’s protest was spurred my pervasive police and military brutality to women. Attacks on women,

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Power Tool #7: Create a Movement

In this video, women wearing their virtual shirts put their convictions into action. But they didn’t do it alone.

In No Excuses, I show how to apply movement building principles to any area of life. Those principles can be described as Sister Courage: be a sister. Reach out and ask for help when you need it. give help when someone else needs it. Have the courage to raise issues. Put the two together with action and you have a movement.

Think about it. When you needed to plan Thanksgiving dinner, didn’t you call on your sisters to help you plan the menu and distribute the workload? Those same skills can be incorporated into the workplace and in politics.

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Do You Value Yourself?

Nicole Baute from The Star asked me to share some of the central messages of No Excuses when she interviewed me last week. I posted part of the interview Tuesday on the 9 Ways Blog. Here is another excerpt from that interview.

One of the things in the book that struck me was the stat that women are four times less likely to ask for a raise. Why?

I don’t think we always value our worth as much as men value their worth. Men are pretty ruthless about valuing their worth, they’re not at all timid about it. In fact, they tend to overstate their worth. Women understate their worth.

Why do women isolate themselves and try to fix things on their own?

We’re working in a workplace culture that was designed by men for men, who could work day and night because they had a woman at home taking care of the house and the kids. And that paradigm no longer works for anybody, I don’t think. So as women have entered that workplace culture, if you’re the first one, if you’re the only one in a department, you tend to try to fit yourself into the predominant culture.

That’s exactly why we need to consciously un-isolate ourselves and reach out with what I call Sister Courage. Ask another woman for help if you need it. Ask a man for help if you need it. Offer help if you think someone else needs it.

Do you think that competition — women competing with each other and women competing with men — is a barrier to asking for help?

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Was Wooly Bully a Woman?

The recent New York Times article entitled “Backlash: Women Bullying Women” instantly reminded me of the 1960’s song, “Wooly Bully”*. Its logic was garbled and its presentation just plain silly, but it was nevertheless so entertainingly in tune with the culture of the day that it became a big hit.

Though the piece began by acknowledging that men are the majority (60%!) of workplace bulliers, that fact was quickly dismissed. Why wasn’t it the headline? Because it’s so obvious. It’s not a “man bites dog” story.

Instead, the reporter zeroed in on the finding that of women who do bully, 70% choose other women as their targets. Then the article proceeded to analyze this through the lens of a recurring cultural narrative, far too often embraced by even the New York Times despite evidence to the contrary, that women can’t get along, that women don’t support other women, that women are their own worst enemies when it comes to fostering workplace advancement.

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Speech: “Sister Courage: What it will take for women to make it to the top in radio once and for all”


It was a real treat to speak at the National Association of Broadcasters Radio Show in Charlotte NC on one of my favorite topics, “Sister Courage.” Women’s advancement to the executive offices in radio has stalled. There are many women and men who want to change that, so they asked me to address how women can make it to the top once and for all. We had a spirited conversation about fresh solutions for getting ahead personally while breaking glass ceilings for all women using principles of movement building.

“This was not a speech, it was a conversation, a story-telling, a wake-up call and an inspiration. I can’t tell you how many people came up to me afterward and said ‘she should be our keynote speaker to several thousand broadcasters!'”
–Joan Gerberding, President, Local Focus; Founder, Mentoring and Inspiring Women in Radio

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