Go Lead Idaho

Motivating women to lead and demonstrating why it matters

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Go Lead Idaho Presents a Night of Inspiration and Celebration

Go Lead Idaho Presents a Night of Inspiration and Celebration  

March 13 event features national speaker Kathy Groob & Inaugural Leadership Awards

BOISE, Idaho –  Go Lead Idaho is proud to present a night of inspiration and celebration at its annual spring event Leading In on March 13 at the Riverside Hotel.

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Founded in 2010, Go Lead Idaho (http://www.goleadidaho.org) is committed to engaging women in leadership and civic participation through active involvement in the private, public and non-profit sectors.

The night features Kathy Groob, businesswoman, former elected official, political consultant, author, speaker and advocate for women’s issues. Groob inspires and motivates with stories of successful women creating and building their legacies while lending a hand to other women. She is the founder of ElectWomen (http://electwomen.com) and author of Pink Politics.

In recognition of the impact of involvement, Go Lead Idaho will also present its inaugural awards:

The Brenda Maynard Walters Award
Honoring those who keep their elbows down and reach their hands out. Those good sisters who lead with collaborative spirit over divisiveness; who see the good in the hard task and the hard work; who are leaning in while letting others lean on them for support.

Go Lead Early
Recognizing the emerging voices, the school-aged young women who don’t let age define the impact they can have by being vocal and visible and leading early.

The Idaho Woman Citizen
In the spirit of the state that was one of the first to adopt suffrage, honoring a woman who has worked towards the advancement of a public issue for the betterment of the state and its people.

The evening is possible thanks to the generous support of Platinum Sponsor Wells Fargo and Gold Sponsor Perkins Coie.

“Wells Fargo’s commitment to helping women succeed financially is longstanding, and women are an invaluable part of our company’s culture and leadership. About two-thirds of Wells Fargo team members are women, which includes regional, area and market presidents, as well as top-ranking senior executives,” said Don Melendez, Wells Fargo Idaho Regional Banking president. “Our commitment also includes supporting women as business owners and working with organizations that share our vision. Go Lead Idaho’s effort to get women more involved in leadership and civic roles goes nicely with our focus on women as critical members of our organization and community.”


MORE INFORMATION

Leading In – A Night of Inspiration and Celebration

When: March 13, 2014
5:30 pm Reception
6:30 – 8:30 pm Dinner & Program
Where: The Riverside Hotel (2900 W Chinden Blvd, Boise, ID 83714)
Cost: $45 (includes dinner and drink ticket)
To Register: http://www.goleadidaho.org/
Registration Deadline: March 9

About Go Lead Idaho
Go Lead Idaho is an organization comprised of professional volunteers from various industries believing that adding women to leadership and policy-making roles in public office, board and commissions, private industry and non-profits will enhance the long-term health and wealth of the State of Idaho and our communities.  We are committed to engaging women in leadership and civic participation through active participation in the political process, public office, public policy or advocacy. For more information visit http://www.goleadidaho.org/

 

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Women & Leadership: Dr Caroline Heldman

With perhaps the most tantalizing speech title, Dr Caroline Heldman took the stage to deliver her talk on The Sexy Lie: How Objectification Culture Harms Women Leadership 

Dr. Caroline Heldman is the chair of the Politics Department at Occidental College. She is also a political commentator for MSNBC, Fox Business News, RT America, and Al Jazeera English. Dr. Heldman’s work has been featured in the top journals in her field, including theAmerican Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, andPolitical Communications. She co-edited the popular book, Rethinking Madame President: Is the US Ready for a Woman in the White House? (2007). Dr. Heldman’s work has also been featured in popular publications, including the New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, Ms. Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast.

Andrew Crisp of Boise State’s Blue Review did a great preview piece on Caroline earlier this week where she addresses many of the barriers she discussed in today’s talk,

“There are lots of barriers to women getting into positions of leadership, which starts with the socialization of little girls. We often think of barriers to women in leadership as a glass ceiling right before women receive the top corporate position, but a better metaphor is a labyrinth: women are discouraged from being leaders at a very young age, whether it’s the careers that they’re tracked into, or their peers not supporting them being ambitious,”

Four Barriers to Women’s Leadership

Ambition Gap

People expect women to act modestly, even if they are already highly accomplished. Women are discouraged from being ambitious from a very early age. There is a lack of support for female ambition in all walks of life.

Leadership Evaluation Bias

Men are still seen as default leaders in the US and Europe (per Catalyst in 2012). Male college students are more likely to evaluate female leaders as submissive now than a decade ago.

The Double Bind

We equate leadership with male attributes. They have to perform certain attributes of masculinity to be seen as leaders. But when they do, they are evaluated poorly as not ‘properly feminine’. Women who ‘act female’ are rated negatively for being weak, but if they act ‘male’ they are rated negatively for being too tough (Belkin, 2007). Women are penalized for expressing anger in the workplace, while men are not.

The Sexy Lie

Caroline began the portion of the talk focused on her barrier of The Sexy lie by addressing our Objectification culture and sharing the Sex Object Test she has developed to help people understand what sexual objectification is.

The core of her argument – sexy is not empowering.

We have a subject/object dichotomy. And subjects act, and objects are acted upon. There are a slew of  internal effects of self-objectification

  • depression
  • habitual nody monitoring
  • eating disorders
  • body shape
  • depressed cognitive functioning
  • sexual dysfunction
  • lower self-esteem
  • lower GPA
  • lower political efficacy

External effects of objectification

  • female competition
  • erasure of middle aged women
  • lower perceptions of competence
  • dehumanization

As noted by Blue Review, and stated in Caroline’s TEDx talk on The Sexy Lie:

“We raise our little boys to view their bodies as tools to master their environments,” Heldman tells the audience early in her speech. “We raise our little girls to view their bodies as projects to constantly be improved. What if women started to view their bodies as tools to master their environment? As tools to get you from one place to the next? As these amazing vehicles for moving through the world in a new way?”

Caroline left the crowd with a great call to action – a list of personal actions we can take to curb the objectification culture:

  • Stop consuming toxic media
  • Stop playing ‘the tapes’ (tapes in our mind about imposter syndrome, body monitoring)
  • Stop seeking heterosexual male attention
  • Stop competing with other women
  • Start enjoying your body as a physical instrument
  • Start focusing on personal development that isn’t related to beauty culture
  • Start complimenting girls/women on their actions and accomplishments
  • Embrace ambition and encourage it in others

Political actions to take to combat objectification culture

  • A Journalist Code of Ethics for coverage of female candidates
  • Blog activism – the fourth wave of feminism
  • Consumer activism
Source: Ms.com blog

(Best and most random insight from Dr Caroline Heldman…she likes to parkour – ”the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment,” can be done any time, anywhere. I especially enjoy jumping off bike racks between classes while I’m dressed in a suit.)

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Women & Leadership: Karen Crouse

“I’m so used to being tolerated that being celebrated is a unique experience!” New York Times columnist Karen Crouse led off her talk ‘Lady in the Locker Room: The Bare Truth’ with an honest and humble insight.

Think she definitely deserved and received more than a polite golf clap. A bit about Karen:

Karen Crouse has been a sports columnist for The New York Times since June 2005. Prior to joining The Times, she worked as a sports columnist for four years at the Palm Beach Post.

Ms. Crouse is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where she majored in journalism and was a member of the Trojan women’s swim team. She grew up in Santa Clara, Calif., and started her newspaper career in Savannah, Ga., at the Savannah News-Press.

Karen led with a personal reflection on the quote we’ve heard several speakers share, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you realize why.”

She shared her lifechanging moment, when as a 13 year-old she realized the power of the written word, and how they could positively impact someone she looked up to.

Rather than trying to summarize her amazing story, I’ll link to this  great column she penned for the New York Times about it: Inspiration for a Swimmer and Writer

We build up the athletes and see what we want to see, we don’t see what is really there – and that’s the crux of a responsibility Karen feels to really tell the true stories, like those of Amanda Beard – For Champion Olympic Swimmer, A Simpler Time

I look at it as less of a sports assignment, but being an anthropologist who’s been assigned to this patriarchal tribe called golf. This is the last male bastion of chauvinism and sexism, the country club golf set.  I feel like I have to try and changes these people’s minds one person at a time. And that leads to Augusta…

Here is Karen’s column on the Masters: Touchy Day at August National Men’s Club

And then, this happened: New York Times reporter says she’d skip Masters to protest membership policies Karen shared the difficulty of covering the Masters that week and the tension in her newsroom in the days and weeks that followed.

But within the next year, August announced the admission of two female members. Karen noted, “I’d like to think that in some small way the discomfort I put myself through at Augusta was not for nought.”

We don’t only have to talk the talk but walk the walk – and that means not only participating in but supporting women in their endeavors in the sports realm.

If that means clicking on tht woman’s golf story so it gets one more page view, please do it!

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Women & Leadership: 50 Years of Feminism

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Tackling the topic of feminism and how far we have come in 50 years is Dr Stephanie Coontz.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She also serves as Co-Chair and Director of Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-profit, nonpartisan association of family researchers and practitioners based at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been featured in many newspapers such as The New York Times, as well as scholarly journals such as Journal of Marriage and Family, and she is frequently interviewed on national television and radio.

After reeling off a littany of facts, figures, stats and insights about where the woman’s movement stood 50 years ago, Dr Coontz jumped into the heart of her speech.

The reality that if we are to build a women’s movement – and lead a women’s movement – for the 21st century we must realize we face a different context of gender inequality.

Even today – In order to earn the same wage, women have to work 52 years vs. men working 40 years.

Motherhood Penalties: When a woman leaves the workforce, even just for a year, she loses 20% of her earning power. When a working woman becomes a mother, she is immediately perceived as less competent and less deserving of promotions and raises. They are held to higher standards of punctuality and work performance.

“I don’t believe that male privilege is still our main enemy. But that doesn’t mean that we still don’t need a movement that puts women’s needs front and center.”

We can’t tackle the most urgent problems facing American women if we can’t face the the broader problems facing men and women. Dr Coontz emphasized, and the audience responded to, the point that by helping women rise we will bring men up in the process.

Enhancing women’s interests under predominately female leadership is the best answer for the problems men are facing today as well as the problems women are facing today.

She identified three core issues that need to be addressed in our current times relating to gender inequality

– Ending the gender pay gap. Takes more than catching women up with men, it is also about the United States establishing wage rates on par with other wealthy companies.  Low skilled jobs are here to stay and if we can’t provide living wage to those in them we are condemning men women and children to a lifetime of poverty.

– Lack of family friendly work policies. The United States is one of only 8 countries in the world that does not mandate paid leave for new mothers

– Lack of a social safety net that reflects 21st century realities.

Dr Coontz closed with a call to action to pull from the front and center

We need a female movement, not just female leadership. An active, mobilized feminist movement. And we need women to be at least the majority of the movement and the leadership of it. Until women make up 60-80% of the room, they defer to male participants. Developing a movement that puts women’s issues and leadership first is paramount.

To construct policies for the 21st century citizen we must start with the woman – who has extensive responsibilities and understanding of the needs of family, children, community and work.

Dr Coontz’ passionate talk was tough to keep up with! Please share your insights, takeaways and thoughts.

Here is a comprehensive list of her articles, which she pulled from during her talk.

(The organizers tried to play a clip of Dr Coontz on the popular Colbert Report. Here it is:)

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Transforming America: Women & Leadership Conference

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Go Lead Idaho is proud to be a community sponsor of the Andrus Center’s Transforming America: Women and Leadership in the 21st Century event.

The conference is focused on the accomplishments of women leaders from business, government, science, the media and other fields and seeks to showcase their unique perspectives on women in leadership positions.

The conference will investigate the work that remains to create what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has called the opportunity for all women “to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability.”

Justice O’Connor spoke at a kickoff reception on Wednesday night, and we couldn’t help but think back on several of her amazing words of wisdom during her time on the bench…

We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone… and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.

I think the important thing about my appointment is not that I will decide cases as a woman, but that I am a woman who will get to decide cases.

Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom

And if you need to get chills to kickoff your conference experience, take a moment to listen to President Reagan making history by the appointment of Justice O’Connor

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