As part of the launch of Forbes‘ “50 Over 50” list, Vice President Kamala Harris sits down for an exclusive interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski to discuss not evaluating herself based on age, eating ‘No’ for breakfast, working with women-owned small businesses and encouraging women and girls to know their strength. Click here to watch.
The US Mint is creating some new designs – featuring women – for the “tails” sides of quarters that will start circulating in January 2022 and run through 2025. The first two honorees have already been chosen: poet Maya Angelou and astronaut Sally Ride.
The other female honorees will be decided by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen – with input from the American public. To read more about the initiative, check out this article from CNN. Want to submit a suggestion for a nominee? Fill out this brief form provided by the National Women’s History Museum.
There have long been claims that women’s and men’s brains were different. leading to differences in personalities and abilities. While men’s brains overall brain size is a little over 10% larger than women’s, no specific brain areas are disproportionately larger between the sexes. In fact, brains are proportional to body size and when properly controlled, no individual brain region varies by more than about 1% between men and women.
Why does this matter? Have you ever heard,”women aren’t as good at math”? Or, “women are natural caregivers”. Or, “men are better with tools”? Turns out that there are no data to support those statements. In fact, according to this article from The Conversation, each brain is a “mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself.”
There is certainly more work to be done – but untangling some of these long-held beliefs is a great place to begin.
This article from Fast Company shares an example of how many women feel they stand out like Big Bird (a 8’2″ bright yellow bird featured on the children’s program, Sesame Street) in the workplace. Whether they are presenting in a boardroom, returning from maternity leave or simply navigating the day-to-day, many women feel disproportionately affected by impostor syndrome.
In this piece, Mark McClain (CEO of SailPoint) shares three tips for how leaders can help their employees overcome impostor syndrome. Specifically, he mentions making space for people to share their authentic selves, encouraging balance and practicing small acts of kindness.
At the end of February, Rosalind Brewer, who is currently COO at Starbucks, will leave that position to become CEO of drugstore chain Walgreens. Once in this post, she will be the only Black woman currently serving as a Fortune 500 CEO, and just the third Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 firm in history. (There are currently only 37 women in CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies)
According to this CNBC article, during a recent speech, Brewer commented on the reality that many women experience bias and gender discrimination in the workplace. She said that her most critical message to women in business is to “stay steadfast” and know that “your voice matters.”
In this webinar from December 15, 2020, Professor Deborah Streeter had a conversation with Professor Courtney McCluney about the concept of codeswitching and how it affects the everyday realities of marginalized, devalued, and underrepresented employees at work. To view the recording, click this link
Resources mentioned during the discussion included:
“If your life is your currency, decide how you want to invest and spend it.”
Melanie Hart
In the W.O.C @ Work podcast, Rai King and Dr. Blanca Ruiz explore what it means to be a woman of color in the workplace by elevating the voices of female-identifying leaders of color in order to shed light on their common experiences as they push for transformational change in organizations across the country.
In this episode, Rai and Blanca talk with Melanie Hart ( Chief Diversity Officer and Sr. VP for Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice at The New School in New York City) about traversing white-dominant education spaces as a confident woman of color. Melanie also reveals what it looks like to take off that cape and rest to help heal from a traumatic event. This podcast is a must listen for all women.
Professor and best-selling author Brené Brown recently shared an Unlocking Us podcast where she interviewed author Elizabeth Lesser on her recent book entitled Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes.
Cassandra Speaks looks at the cultural stories we all know and often blindly believe – from famous myths to religious parables to fairy tales. Each story shares specific lessons about gender roles, power, leadership and other values. Yet all of these stories throughout history have mostly been written by men. Despite our evolution as a society, these stories and the way we carry the lessons within us endure. This book – as well as the podcast – is about what happens when women become the storytellers and explain what it is to be human from their perspective.
Growing research has found that COVID is having a disproportionate impact on women. Given the demands of modified work environments, hybrid/virtual schooling models, health concerns for self and family, as well as socioeconomic impact on employment and small businesses, it is not surprising that there would be an impact – though the numbers that are being shared are daunting.
According to this NPR piece, in September 2020, 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce – which was four times more than the number of men who left. The piece goes on to share that “the pandemic’s female exodus has decidedly turned back the clock by at least a generation, with the share of women in the workforce down to levels not seen since 1988.”
Another impact that the pandemic is having is inequality in workplace promotions. This recent piece in Forbes highlighted an August study which found that “men have been promoted three times more than women during the pandemic.”
Clearly, the pandemic is teaching us that “traditional” 9-to-5 structures don’t serve all workers equally and that there is a need for a more reliable home support structure if we are ever going to fully realize the advantage of having all willing workers active in our labor market.
On November 11, 2019, NPR posted an article about a question posed to 100 female chefs and food writers by author Charlotte Druckman in her new book Women on Food. Druckman asked if there were any words or phrases that should no longer be used to describe women in the culinary field. While many words made the list, one word sparked a lot of discussion: “badass”.
As Druckman shared with NPR, “Badass is a detonated way to describe a kind of cultural male whiteness — an aggressive, swaggering one…and then it gets put onto women, as what feels like a tarnished ‘badge of honor,’ or backhanded compliment. Calling a woman — chef or otherwise — ‘badass’ is a way to signify that she’s cool or relevant because she’s acting like a man (specifically, an aggressive, swaggering one); that she is only of interest or worth consideration because she’s going against whatever ‘type’ it is she’d otherwise be categorized as because she’s a woman.”