Posts Tagged ‘women and power’
She’s Doing It: Eve Ellis to Komen Leader Nancy Brinker: Relinquish Power for Real
Former Susan G. Komen for the Cure NYC board member Eve Ellis became devoted to the cause of finding a cure for breast cancer after her sister, sister-in-law, and one niece all battled breast cancer. They survived.
But her other niece, Hally Yaccino Steiner, wasn’t so fortunate. She died of breast cancer 6 years ago at age 36.
Every year since she became a Komen NYC board member in 2004, Ellis, a wealth advisor who lives in NYC with her spouse, theater producer Annette Niemtzow, raised money for them enthusiastically, and since 2006 she raised it to honor Hally’s memory.
Every year until this one, that is, joining many thousands of people who have withdrawn their support for Komen since it created a tsunami of protest by discontinuing funding of Planned Parenthood at the behest of a politically motivated staff and board members.
I wrote about the incident for the Daily Beast in case you need to review the gory details that saturated the media.
In that showdown, at least for the short term, Planned Parenthood won. And recently, founder and CEO of the national Komen for the Cure Nancy Brinker stepped aside from her top leadership post, no doubt under severe pressure. However, she remains chair of the executive committee.
So this year, instead of her annual appeal for funds, Ellis is asking people to sign this petition urging Brinker to step out of all powerful leadership roles.
I signed the petition and hope you will too. If you have reservations, here are Ellis’s reasons why she hopes you reconsider:
Read MoreVictory! Augusta National Golf Club Admits Women At Last
Martha Burke has balls. And thanks to her leadership, now at least two women will have the privilege of chasing golf balls around the Augusta National Golf Club’s manicured course.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina financier and former banker Darla Moore have become the first female members in the club’s 80-year history.
Burk, who for the last nine years persisted in organizing to gain membership for women in the club that represents the pinnacle of power and influence, can finally, deservedly, celebrate success.
Burk explained the history in Women’s eNews last April when the august male-only golf club once again refused to let a woman wear its vaunted green members’ jacket at its annual Masters Tournament:
Well, the big day for the big boys at Augusta National Golf Club came and went without a woman showing up in the green jacket that denotes membership. The particular woman in question was Virginia Rometty, CEO of IBM, the leading corporate sponsor of Augusta’s Masters Golf Tournament.
For those who don’t follow news of puffed-up men chasing little balls around a green course, the club has always been male-only, and resisted extreme pressure nine years ago from women’s groups, led by the National Council of Women’s Organizations, to open up to female members.
The debate raged for nearly a year, complete with death threats to the NCWO chair, yours truly.
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She’s Doing It: 5 Things Candy Crowley and Helen Gurley Brown Have in Common – and One Thing They Couldn’t
Aside from Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s frighteningly extreme position on Medicare, the top news this week has been all women all the time.
On Monday, August 13, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that for the first time since Carole Simpson in 1992, a woman—CNN’s “State of the Union” host and chief political correspondent Candy Crowley—will moderate a presidential debate.
Crowley, 61, has won many awards for political reporting during stellar career. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College—my friend Amy Litzenberger is sure that women find their voices in all-female college settings—and rose from a Washington DC radio newsroom assistant through the Associated Press and NBC ranks before joining CNN news in 1987. Along the way, she covered every presidential campaign and convention since Jimmy Carter.
On the same day Crowley’s selection was announced, Cosmopolitan Magazine’s iconic former editor-in-chief and the author of the 1962 game-changing best seller Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown, died in Manhattan at age 90.
Read MoreShe's Doing It: Women’s Golf Evangelist Joan Cavanaugh
I get the power of golf. That’s why I took it as my physical education in college. And I garnered the only “C” in my life. I’d have failed had it not been for the written final exam that brought my dismal playing score up from the tank.
So I chuckled when I received this e-mail from Joan Cavanaugh, former Dominican nun, creator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recorded tours, teacher, entrepreneur, and the founder of the Boardroom Golf Institute:
“I listened to you on the Takeaway and thought this is a woman who should and would enjoy the benefits of the golf game…I would really like you to join me next Thursday at the business golf workshop. Golf is a great strategy for making new business relationships with men as well as women. It will be a fun packed day and you will go away educated about the game, elevate and empowered to play the game.”
Oh, if she only knew, I thought. I politely declined and thought that would be that.
Instead, she wrote back, and I discovered one of the most fascinating women around.
Her second epistle began cheerily, “I just opened a fortune cookie at lunch and I think the message has always been my mantra. ‘Enthusiasm is the greatest asset in the world. It beats money, power, and influence.’”
Read MoreShe’s Doing It With Money: Tamia Gallego and Women in the Black
Did you know? Today, August 1, is National Girlfriends Day .
Google it. You can find suggestions for sharing tips with your girlfriends about their personal health, 10 Ways to Celebrate — fun things like going to a spa and niceties like writing a personal thank you note — and even girlfriend humor about why it’s better to be a female (“We got off the Titanic first.” “We don’t look like a frog in a blender when we dance.”).
But if you really want to do something of lasting value for your girlfriends, you might want to turn them onto Tamia Gallego’s blog. It’s called Women In The Black and it’s a self-described “community where like minded women discuss personal finance, saving, investing and building wealth.”
Come to think about it, do it for yourself too!
A banker with a CPA by day and an advocate for women’s financial literacy by night, Tamia lives in Sydney, Australia. Her information and advice are valuable for all of us girlfriends around the globe. In addition to her website, she offers a free daily newsletter with practical tips on personal finance and encouragement for the women (and she says also some men) who subscribe.
Tamia hopes eventually to secure corporate sponsors for her work, but for now she and her husband are supporting the “passion project” as she calls it.
Tamia’s posts are especially aimed at younger women in order to help them get on the best financial foot for life. She pointed out to me in an e-mail that because women typically earn less than men, we also end up with less in our retirement funds. Ouch—I can vouch for that.
I recommend you return to Women in the Black periodically for useful posts on personal finance ranging from advice about buying a business to tips for maximizing the money that is available to us but that we sometimes fail to collect.
I asked if I could repost her piece called “Know Your Worth” to share with all my, um, girlfriends, and she graciously agreed.
Here’s the post in full, with a big thanks to Tamia for kind words about No Excuses
Read MoreInterview: How to Be Self-Conscious
As the absurdity of right-wing political figures’ pathological obsession with women’s uteruses continues, many people ask why this is happening now and what to do about it. In this Woman of the Week interview with Anna Louie Sussman for the Women in the World Foundation, Gloria speaks about how women can act, using what we’ve got (that’s Power Tool #3) to embrace our power to insist on our right to our bodies, our right to financial stability.
The article, excerpted here, was originally published January 24, 2012, and can be read in full on the Women in the World website.
Everything you need to know about Gloria Feldt can be gleaned from her email signature: “Warmest Regards and No Excuses, Gloria.” Her superlative compassion and conviction, combined with her intelligence and charisma, have carried her from teenage motherhood in West Texas to a thirty-year career with the reproductive health provider and advocacy group Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which she directed from 1996 until 2005, when she resigned.
Her most recent book, No Excuses, examines women’s relationship to power with an honesty and nuance often glossed over in media discussions. We talked with her about the current state of reproductive freedom in America and how women can transform their relationship with power.
Women in the World Foundation: What led you to this issue of women and power?
Gloria Feldt: In 2008, I was writing an article for Elle magazine about the many organizations that help women run for office. They are legion, and they raise millions of dollars, but women are still less than half as likely to even think about running for office as men. What I found was that the problem is no longer that women have a hard time running: the doors are open. Voters trust women more, women are now as capable of raising money, and when they do run, they are just as likely to win.
But not enough of them are running,
Read MoreShe's Doing It: Jane Roberts' 10 Years Making Global Women's Rights Reality
This is a guest post by a courageous leader for women globally. Jane Roberts saw an injustice and took action to set things right. On this July 11, World Population Day, join me in support of her efforts to raise awareness and money to ensure that women around the world can have healthy pregnancies when they choose and access to preventive family planning services to plan and space their childbearing.
Also on 11 July, the UK Government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with UNFPA and other partners, will host the London Summit on Family Planning, a groundbreaking convocation on family planning. The aim of the summit it to mobilize global policy, financing, commodity, political will, and service delivery commitments to support the rights of an additional 120 million women and girls in the world’s poorest countries to use contraceptive information, services and supplies, without coercion or discrimination, by 2020.
July 22, 2002, ten years ago this month, I read in the Los Angeles Times Colin Powell’s announcement that the United States of America, my country, was not going to release the $34 million Congress had approved for the U.N. Population Fund. Powell, a proponent of UNFPA, sold his soul.
Read MoreIs 2012 the Breakthrough Moment f or Women Leaders?
After a week in which women debated Anne-Marie Slaughter’s contention about Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, a wave of powerful articles challenging Slaughter are finally appearing. Dana Theus says that women who are at or as near the top as Facebook COO (and its latest board member) Sheryl Sandberg and Slaughter need to woman up and “own this power they have to choose how to spend their energy, and talk about it in powerful ways that honor people’s choices, then we’ll begin to build a culture that honors, supports and encourages the ‘balance of powers‘ needed at the top.”
And Gayle Tzemach Lemmon says we should be teaching girls they CAN have it all—even if they can’t.
I believe that following Theus’s and Lemmon’s advice would change everything. And more importantly, this is the moment to do so.
It’s the moment when women can lead and live without limits.
Why am I so confident?
Read MoreIn Which I Reveal a Painful Salary (non) Negotiation Truth
Census Bureau statistics cite that women on average earn about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. On Tuesday, the Senate GOP blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act, introduced by Democrats to the senate floor.
This promising legislation would have bolstered the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, barring employers from retaliating against workers who inquire about pay disparities.
What can we as individual women do retroactively to create a work life for ourselves in which we don’t have to resort to investigating discrimination by our employers?
In this interview, Gloria encourages women to define their own terms: at meetings, “Say the first word, say the last word and establish yourself as an authority.”
Meg McSherry Breslin: For women who feel frustrated and unable to move up in their companies, what are some concrete things they can do?
Read MoreThink Women Can't Have It All? She Means Business Aims for More
There’s big buzz about Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article in The Atlantic rehashing the tired trope that women “can’t have it all.”
Personally, I think, most people, male and female, would love to have this high-powered woman’s problems (She was the first female director of policy planning at the U. S. State Department and is currently a Princeton University professor, author, and public speaker with a professor husband who shares child raising responsibilities).
All of life is about making choices. Everyone struggles. So I wish Slaughter, and others who lay the responsibility on women for difficulties we didn’t create, would quit whining already and tackle the real problems like pay inequity, implicit gender biases, and the need for structural change in the workplace so everyone can have a life and earn a living.
That’s why I’m impressed with an extraordinary group of women venture investors and entrepreneurs at She Means Business. They’ve launched a new campaign that when funded will do far more to create new solutions than Slaughter’s public angst about her personal life choices.
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