TAKE THE LEAD® CELEBRATES 10th ANNIVERSARY ACCELERATING GENDER PARITY

NEW YORK (February 14, 2024) — Take The Lead® , a nationally recognized non-profit dedicated to achieving gender parity in leadership by 2025, launches its 10th anniversary year with a free virtual event on Monday, February 19 at 2:00pm ET that will convene leading voices in the women’s movement in a candid discussion: Women, Power, and Leadership: A Conversation with Gloria Feldt and Gloria Steinem, Facilitated by Jamia Wilson.

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From Lucy to Leadership Part 2: Our Origins’ Central Question

Issue 252 — February 11, 2024

Last weekend, I went to see the movie I think should win Academy Awards in every category: Ava DuVernay’s rendition of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

After writing last week about the discovery of the 3.2 million year old hominid fossil Lucy in Hadar, Ethiopia 50 years ago by paleoanthropologist and founder of the Institute of Human Origins Donald Johanson, I wanted to explore further the question of why we humans are the way we are.

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See How She Runs: Emerge America President On Urgent Need For Women To Run For Office

As a young girl of 7,  A’shanti Gholar discovered C-SPAN and was hooked on watching political discussions. Now president of Emerge America, Gholar says, “I didn’t see a lot of people who look like me—women, Black or Brown people.”

Her parents were not politically minded she says, though they voted. But she got encouragement at school. “I took an 11th grade government class and the teacher brought in the candidates to come speak to the class.”

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Black History Month: 8 Black Women Leaders You Need To Know

In 1976, 50 years after the first celebrations, President Gerald R. Ford made Black History Month official. Ford said, It is time to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history," History.com reports.

This year, the Smithsonian Museum is celebrating Black History Month with leaders in the arts, highlighting the “art of resistance and the artists who used their crafts to uplift the race, speak truth to power and inspire a nation.”

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Start Now: 5 Steps to Unleashing Your Peak Potential In 2024

Leadership in 2024 will require your next level of resilience, navigating challenges and uncertainty with a positive mindset, emotional strength and agility.  McKinsey recently named Resilience as the top focus at The World Economic Forum’s 2024 conference in Davos in Switzerland. 

Below are the 5 steps you need to take in order to overcome adversity in the workplace as a woman in leadership and navigate uncertainty and change with ease.

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Amy LooperComment
Pitch Perfect: Take The Lead’s Entrepreneur Winners Share Success

All they had was 90 seconds. The 11 women leaders who pitched their new ventures at the recent 50 Women Can Change The World in Entrepreneurship graduation event to a panel of judges kept it short and sweet.

Lisa Gates, CEO and founder of Concierge 4 B2B, won first place in the pitch competition.  

“The pitch experience was a fantastic experience,” says Gates, who won the $2,500 prize for her company, Concierge 4 B2B, that she describes as a human resources, payroll strategy, executive support and recruiting business. With 160 full-time employees, Gates says she has a $1.5 million monthly payroll.

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Social Justice and Fairness: Author, Journalist on Journey to Tell Buried Truths

“You are your sibling’s keeper.”

Antonia Hylton says that growing up outside of Boston in Lincoln, Mass. (a half mile from where Paul Revere was arrested) as one of only a few Black families in a white town, her law school professor parents instilled in her and her six siblings a sense of responsibility, accountability and social justice.

Now an award-winning journalist, author, documentarian, podcaster and advocate, Hylton says, “I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but I was interested in justice and fairness. I feel I am responsible to those who come after me.”

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Where Are The Best Jobs? 5 Strategies for New Grads Landing Tech Careers

 

It’s job application season for those who are graduating this winter and spring.

 

The good news is newly minted students graduating now with undergraduate and graduate degrees are finding high paying jobs in engineering, computer and IT, plus transportation, according to new data from QRFY.

 

But for many women and those identifying as women, the work cultures of engineering and tech jobs are steeped in gender and racial bias.

 But where there is disruption, there is opportunity to change the culture.

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Transformation Time: 4 Ways To End Centuries of Gender, Race Bias in Leadership

Change the work culture, change the system, change the path forward for all female leaders and it is possible to change not only the workplace, but the world.

A new study in Nature outlines distinct patterns of attitudes and behaviors in organizations that prevent and stymie a fair and inclusive workplace for women of color, particularly Black women.

“Our findings suggest that the compound influence of racial and gender biases hinders the advancement of minority female leadership by perpetuating stereotypical behavioral schemas, leading to persistent discriminatory outcomes. We argue for the necessity of organizations to initiate a cultural transformation that fosters positive experiences for future generations of female leaders, recommending a shift in focus from improving outcomes for specific groups to creating an inclusive leadership culture,” the report shows.

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