Category: Personal Skills

New Work Rules For Marginalized People

This article featured in Fast Company highlights the five lessons from Alan Henry’s new book, Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized. His book is intended as a guide for employees who find themselves often marginalized – including people of color, women, and those in the LGBTQ+ community. It is also a great read for leaders who want to make sure that their companies and teams are serving all employees well. Some suggestions from the book include: learning to collaborate, leveraging remote work options to work best for you, acknowledging when it is time to leave toxic work environments that aren’t likely to change, and making sure to have a solid work-life balance as well as time for reflection.

When Women Step Into Executive Roles, Attitudes Towards Risk Change

Studies over time have found that when women step into executive roles at a company (CEO, CFO, director, etc), the company will experience an increase in profitability – in one study that increase was 15%. On NPR’s Planet Money podcast The Indicator, this reality is explored with Professor Corinne Post, a professor of management at the Villanova School of Business. One of the interesting findings in Professor Post’s research was that “after women were appointed to top executive positions, two things happened. A management team’s tendency to take risks dropped by between 13 to 14%, and then their willingness to become more innovative – their openness to new ideas – that increased by about 10%.” To hear more about the research and a discussion on the topic, listen to “The Indicator” podcast.

Data Bias and Women

The article “The Shocking Ways Data Bias Makes Women ‘Irrelevant,’ and What We Can Do to Stop It” in Entrepreneur shares some starling information about how data specific to women is often not analyzed or even captured — from business to technology to medicine and other practical aspects of life. The article explains why this has become the standard and then shares advice on how we can work to reverse this reality in our personal and professional lives.

Avoiding the “Motherhood Penalty”

There is an ongoing stigma that once a woman becomes a mother, she will stop caring about her professional responsibilities and be a less valuable employee. Interestingly, the same rules don’t apply to men – in fact, while women see their earnings drop by 4% for each child they have, men’s incomes increase by 6% per child that they have.  So what can be done? This piece in GoBankingRates discusses the issue in greater detail and shares recommendations on how to avoid this penalty.

Syrian Women Leading In Refugee Communities

Unconventional times can create impactful change. Syrian women have begun to be elected as camp leaders in their Lebanese refugee communities. While these women would have been expected to stay at home in their native Syria, the turmoil caused by war has begun to shift some of these traditional norms. One of the female leaders who heads up camp of hundreds of refugees, Hind Al-Haad, stated,”Circumstances can either form obstacles or push [women] forward.” Learn more about these amazing women in this BBC piece.

Becoming Helpable

Caroline Kim Oh is an executive and leadership coach with a focus on BIPOC and women leaders in diverse fields, including social impact, marketing, creativity, entrepreneurship, and technology. (She also served as a facilitator in the pilot program of the Women’s Entrepreneurship program) Caroline is especially energized by supporting her clients to become confident and high-performing leaders while enjoying the right mix of work-life-fulfillment ratios.

In this video (under three minutes long), Caroline shares some important messages about selfcare. (We love her phone analogy – so true!)

The Isolation Journals

The Isolation Journals is a site that was founded by Suleika Jaouad on the idea that life’s interruptions are invitations to deepen our creative practice. The Isolation Journals sends out free weekly journaling prompts. If you sign up, you will receive one in your inbox every Sunday. The website also contains journal entries from the community and provides the option to submit your work (you can even submit anonymously). Learn more and sign up for a weekly prompt here.

Remembering Betty White

While it may seem odd to have a post mentioning an Betty White, the reality is that over her SEVENTY year career as an actress, she perpetually ran into walls in the entertainment industry and just as quickly eliminated those barriers for women who will hopefully follow in her footsteps with equally long careers. Read more about this remarkable woman in this piece from Smithsonian.