Go Lead Idaho

Motivating women to lead and demonstrating why it matters

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Women & Leadership: Idaho Women Pacesetters

While the Andrus Center’s Women & Leadership conference has primarily packed the stage with national women leaders at the podium from business, non-profits and media, the final panel of the event featured a collection of Idaho Women Pacesetters.

Among them:

Cherie Buckner Webb | Idaho State Senator

Linda Copple-Trout | Former Chief Justice, Idaho Supreme Court

Nancy Lemas |  President and CEO, Lemas Investment Group

Dee Sarton | KTVB Anchor

Luci Willits | Chief of Staff, Superintendent Tom Luna

How do you define your success?

Justice Copple-Trout – Being the first Chief Justice, it demonstrated to women and especially female law students, that it was indeed possible. I encourage all of you to do what you think would be important to accomplish.

Dee Sarton – Being able to be in an industry where I was able to do important work, and to be part of telling the story. I started out trying to be a man-woman in the media and then became a woman in the media with a female perspective, perhaps different, perhaps the same but important that it is at the table. The female perspective is not only valid, it’s important.

Nancy Lemas – I know I’ve made a difference in all the industries I’ve been involved in. I was often the first women in those positions in the industries I worked in. Through my success, I have opened doors. Also, how many times I’ve been knocked down over the years, picked myself up and dusted myself off and moved forward. What I was sure to do with my children growing up, was always put a mentor in front of them. With my daughters, seeing women in positions of professional leadership.

Luci Willits – Success has meant survival. For women, the days are long and the years are short. If you survive and are a survivor you are successful. If I can make a difference for my children and your children then life is a beautiful thing.

Cherie Buckner-Webb – I have this amazing heritage, an inheritance – of all the women who came before me and the sisterhood of the women empowering and supporting me by my side. Success is being here today and being able to pass that on. Success for me is that I learned some lessons. I need to show up, stand up, speak up and sometimes, shut up.  (Makes me think back on her keynote at Go Lead’s Spring Conference a few years ago)

Other insights shared:

Cherie Buckner-Webb – As women we need to learn how to have conflict. There is no term like “cat fight” for men. Let’s learn how to have conflict. Sometimes the answer is ‘no’

Nancy Lemas – We can’t take conflict personally in businesses.

Luci Willits – I never felt like I had to behave like a man. I’ve often felt pressure as a young, married mother and the choices I made. I have learned to embrace that and to make that part of me and bring that up in business and to be true to my values.

Dee Sarton: I do see myself as a role model, because I interact with so many young women who come through our station. And I think it is a wonderful thing to think I’ve been part of such a change in our society. Young women must figure out how to balance career and family, if family is important to them. As a role model now, what I hope I can impart is doing the job – but also ‘doing your life’  – and important that is. (2 degrees of separation, Luci interned with Dee while in college and through having that work/life conversation with Lee, Luci changed her career path)

Luci Willits: Idaho is a very patriarchal society and a very male dominated state. The best thing we can do is to get women in positions of hiring.

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Women & Leadership: Anne Taylor Fleming

The second day of the Andrus Center’s Transforming America: Women & Leadership in the 21st Century event kicked off with an irreverent take on women’s lives by writer and commentator Anne Taylor Fleming titled, Ten Things We Should Tell Our Daughters.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a nationally recognized writer and television commentator. For two decades she was an on-camera essayist for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and the author of two works of fiction: Marriage: A Duet and As If Love Were Enough, a deep exploration of family, divorce, infidelity and redemption—a book writer Mark Salzman calls “daring, original, surprising and wise.” Her previous non-fiction book, Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey, is a passionate exploration of the choices made by women of her baby boom generation. For her TV essays Fleming received a 2006 Gracie Allen award given by the American Women in Radio and Television.

Before she even took the stage, her words were projected to the audience. “It’s strange to realize that one of the dominant battlegrounds in one’s lifetime is not some exotic place like Iraq – or even the war on terror. No, the ultimate battlefield has been the female body.”

Then she launched into her Top 10 list. While it was titled for younger women, it resonated across the generations of women in the room.

Imagine a Big Life
Don’t see barriers, don’t plan for the hitches. Don’t be small, don’t think small, don’t let anybody make you small.

Find Something You’re Passionate About AND Can Get Paid For
Find something that moves you, a reason to get up every day. The point is, do what you want to do and find out how to make money from it.

Find A Cause You Believe In
Something that engages you beyond the boundaries of your work. It’s not just giving back, it’s part of being alive, it’s part of breathing.

Don’t Be Too Nice
Kindness is underrated, niceness is not. It can be a trap. Don’t be too perky.

Hold Onto Your Friends
They are our lifeline. It is the gift. Life gets complicated, but hold onto your friends. Stay in touch – they know your life and they are your soul. Social media is an illusion of authenticity – you want to, need to hear their voices and their tears and their guffaws.

Learn to Live With Your Regrets
How do you assimilate your regrets and not let them tear you down. You don’t get over it, you live with it and move forward.

Beware of the Caregiving Trap  
How much of our self affirmation do we want to draw from caregiving. Do it, but pay attention to your boundaries. Do it with eyes open. We as women need to talk about it – caregiving can be an isolating experience.

Don’t Be Afraid to Make A Fool of Yourself
We get cut off from the fact that we’re supposed to be fun, have fun, be silly. Don’t take yourself too seriously as you are taking the world seriously.

Age On Your Own Terms
60 is not the new 40. It’s great that women are aging with energy and verve, but we give away so much while acceding to that myth. Remember and honor this – you have history, you have wounds, you have wisdom, you have authority.

Get A Dog
All women need dogs. We have so much unused love that gets damaged and siphoned off. Dogs just want to take all the joy and love you can give them.

 

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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: Deanna Oppenheimer

“You just don’t get to be in venues and places with these people. Take this time as a privilege and an honor and a personal call to action to take something away from it.”

A good reminder from Deanna Oppenheimer as she took the stage for her talk  ‘Leading on the Diagonal in a Vertically Challenged World.’

Deanna’s story is one that began in Parma, Idaho and led to her being a global financial powerhouse.

Recognized globally as one of the decade’s most influential leaders in
financial services, Deanna Oppenheimer is an acclaimed turnaround
strategist known for her ability to transform entrenched institutions
into customer-centric champions.

Hired by Barclays in 2005 to renovate its very British, 350-year old
retail bank from the inside out, Deanna joined the company at a time
most employees were not expecting or ready for that. Six years later,
the once staid organization had blossomed into a Retail Banking
powerhouse, and Deanna was ranked as one of the two most powerful
women in banking.

On Business Success 

One of the most important things you will get out of any type of business career is a mentor – being one or being mentored. Because it is a two way street. But another important aspect is the move from mentorship to sponsorship.

The women reason fall out of big corporate jobs, is not because they can’t get their start, it is not to do so much with their quality of work. It is all the other stuff of life that goes on. And their lack of a sponsor relationship in their career.

What Deanna identified as key to career success:

  • A curiosity to love solving problems
  • A curiosity to love diverse people
  • A curiosity to add more skillsets that keep you relevant and current

And if you have all of those attributes it’s exciting, and people want to give you opportunities and follow you for solutions.

On Leadership

There is now a real shift in society that is demanding a new leadership style and change. A tipping point has arrived.

There is a radical shift of control from the few elite at the top to the masses.

There is a vacuum of leadership that requires new skills and motivations.

Those we are leading are demanding it. They are demanding greater accountability. And they have more power than ever at their fingertips.

Success comes when those that are lead feel empowered, inspired and indeed…led. It’s not about the leaders, it is about those we lead.

Companies are experiencing a shift from an internal controlling culture to one of engagement.

On Diagonal Leadership

Traditionally companies organize themselves vertically. But now, the diagonal has come into effect. You have to have real information sharing and transparency. In the old world, information hoarded is power. In the new world, information shared is power. Hierarchy is useful and necessary, but informal networks lead to most strategic change

(Here is a presentation Deanna gave recently explaining the diagonal leadership approach.)

She left the audience with some pointed and practical thoughts on what will make a difference in a woman’s career:

  • Be authentic and demonstrate real expertise: don’t get there on the back of a quota, don’t undersell what you can deliver
  • Don’t try to out-man a man: enjoy your femininity
  • Have a set of icebreaker topics that appeal to a diverse group of business people
  • Document your results and in a factual way, SHARE THEM. Don’t wait for someone to recognize your performance, inform them of it
  • Your family is your backbone. But approach it as a team and share in responsibilities
  • Don’t undershoot your career aspirations.

And her parting words of inspiration…

Go forth and be a leader of one.

Fire your engine, stay on the tracks and keep moving forward.

Best way to predict the future is for you to be the one to create it.

 

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