What I'm Reading: “How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids”

Last month I wrote about the invisible workload that women carry and how I personally try to counteract it, which prompted a slew of messages from friends sharing their stories and perspectives. One of these friends, a great friend of mine from high school and new mom of a perfect baby boy, sent me a recommendation to check out a book she was reading: Jancee Dunn’s How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids. While I can confidently say that I have never hated my husband, my baby is only 18 months– there is still plenty of time for resentment to fester. In the spirit of research, I dove right in, and I’m glad that I did. 

Case Study: UC Emergency Medicine Women's Initiative

We continued our work with the Emergency Medicine Department at the University of Cincinnati with a session for the department’s women’s initiative. Our workshop topic was Developing Solutions for Gender Issues and during the session we worked through the topics that rose to the top for participants in a pre-sessions survey. The topics we covered were on work / life balance or integration, advocating for others, and building confidence.

Lack of Visibility of Women in Leadership: Why Does it Matter?

We know that women are underrepresented in leadership across the board in this country. In the 2018 Women in the Workplace study our suspicions were confirmed when we learned that across industries progress toward gender equity in leadership has stalled nationwide. The chart below shows that women make up only 22% of the “C-Suite” level positions in this country, with women of color drastically less represented than that at only 4%.

Emotional Labor: Lightening the Invisible Workload

My simplest description of emotional labor is to call it “invisible work”: The work that goes into managing households and relationships to make them run smoothly. It was first introduced and has been studied for many years as a workplace issue in sociology as the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. Of course the idea of managing feelings and expressions and fulfilling emotional requirements applies to the “jobs” we do at home as well, and the “invisible work” I described of managing households and relationships applies to the workplace. These two definitions complement and intertwine with one another and bleed into almost all aspects of life for many women. I can, of course, speak to emotional labor best from my personal worldview, which is that of a white, middle-class, heterosexual wife, mother, and business owner. Women of color, trans women, female immigrants, lesbian women, bisexual women, and impoverished women must navigate the complexities of marginalization (often several layers of it at once) along with their emotional labor. I cannot begin to understand the level of exhaustion that must bring. 

2019: The Year of Saying No

In order to get specific about goal setting, we must look realistically at our plans and evaluate what we are willing to – or in some cases, excited to – give up in order to achieve our goals. We must firmly say “no” to many things in order to have maximum focus on what we want to say “yes” to.

Case Study: Xavier Alumni Women's Leadership Series – International Women's Day

We celebrated International Women’s Day with Xavier University’s Alumni Office for their Women’s Leadership Series. Together with this dynamic group of Xavier alumnae we took time to celebrate the progress that has been made for gender equity worldwide, while also recognizing the remaining work to be done from the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Gender Gap Report.

Case Study: Xavier Office of Alumni Engagement, International Women's Day "Visualize your Success" Workshop

This year we continued our partnership with the Xavier University Office of Alumni Engagement to kick off International Women’s Day’s 2019 Theme, #BalanceForBetter. This workshop focused on creating a gender-balanced world by examining the progress that has been made and recognizing all that is yet to be done to reach parity.

Case Study: CBRE Women's Initiative

The Women’s Initiative at CBRE hosted Gild Collective for a Mapping Career Strategy workshop to kick off the year with a clear plan for participants. In addition to developing individual strategy maps, participants also made their own Leather Traveler’s Journal to embed their strategy map into for daily reference.

Case Study: Jones Day Women's Affinity Leader Group

The Women’s Affinity Leader Group at Jones Day hosted a session focused on Communicating Effectively for all employees. The session had a great mix of participants from new law-school grads to partners in the organization—both female and male—all together for an interactive session to develop communication tools.

#BalanceforBetter – International Women's Day 2019

On March 8, 2019 people all around the world will celebrate International Women’s Day and its 2019 theme: #BalanceforBetter. At it’s core, International Women’s Day (IWD) is a celebration of women– where we have been and what we have achieved socially, economically, politically, and culturally. However, in addition to celebrating how far we have come, IWD also calls us to look at how far we have yet to go on the path to gender parity, and what actions must we all take as individuals to increase the pace of progress?

What I’m Reading: We Should All Be Feminists

There it is again, that word—feminist. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2012 TEDx talk, adapted to a published essay in 2014, she relays her early justifications of the term. “At one point, I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself and not for men,” she says. “That word is so heavy with baggage—negative baggage.”

Case Study: WillowWood

We partnered with WillowWood, an organization that designs and manufactures comfortable, functional prosthetics and orthotics, and their recently formed Women in Leadership initiative to present a workshop titled: Uncovering Unconscious Bias to Communicate Effectively. The event’s focus was on understanding unconscious bias and its impact on women in the workplace, and how to communicate effectively to overcome the barriers that bias builds for women progressing to leadership. We were thrilled to see the number of motivated and curious men who attended this training. \

Case Study: Kao NOW

Our January workshop with Kao NOW, the women’s initiative at Kao, was a long-time coming as we had been planning with the initiative’s leaders for over a year to make the event a success. The topic selected by the group was Communicating Confidence for Achievement, which was paired with the creation of vision boards to kick off the new year.

Case Study: Small Team Workshop in Medical Technology Industry – Creating Communication Solutions and Team Understanding

In January we had the opportunity to work with an intimate group of sales managers who, while located across the country and managing different regions, work closely (although remotely) together on a daily basis. These managers all have highly scientific backgrounds but less experience in managing teams and co-leading management initiatives. We were asked to create a highly tailored workshop session with the goals of building a culture of mutual respect for one another’s unique management styles and creating communication pathways going forward.

Case Study: Women in Bio Webinar

This month we partnered with Women in Bio to deliver a webinar to its members on Uncovering Unconscious Bias. Women in Bio is an “organization of professional women from all career walks in the field of life sciences. We are all volunteers and we all share the goal of enabling and empowering women to reach the highest levels of leadership, and  -- more importantly -- to fulfill their own career aspirations.”

Climbing Kilimanjaro: Mental Training Plan

In October, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I won’t lie to you and tell you that I was doing daily meditations on the mountain and having an Eat, Pray, Love experience. It was, however, one of the most fun, exciting, and challenging experiences of my life. While I did a lot of physical training, I think the most useful training came in the form of another fun, exciting, and challenging experience—starting Gild Collective.