Mandatory 8 a.m. in-office meetings. Required weekday dinner and evening events. Weekend projects and overnight trips. Team retreats over a stretch of three days or more. No flexible hours allowed. Hybrid work is not an option.

These are every working mother’s –and parent’s--nightmare. Opting out is seen as a failure to comply with organizational demands and a lack of ambition and goodwill. This can result in lower pay, lack of promotion, training and an assumption of carelessness.

Happy Mother’s Day in the age of the Motherhood Penalty.

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Art imitates life—always and forever.

But that particularly rings true now in the U.S. as the urgency to establish gender parity across all leadership sectors is amplified as women’s cultural, economic, civil and human rights erode and are rescinded. This is at the same time as a popular fictional series articulates the reality almost too well.

In the new Hulu series, “The Testaments,” based on literary icon Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel, the culture of the dystopian Gilead honors the glory of men, and the use of women mostly as heir-producing wives and mothers only—though some roles are for cooks, teachers and beekeepers.

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The crisis of affordability reverberating across the U.S. is attributed to a mélange of factors including rising prices of gas, food, healthcare, insurance, childcare, eldercare, housing and more due to tariffs, conflict in the Middle East and other influences.

This new economic reality affects everyone on the career ladder from early career to the top—where C-suite management must be empathetic and compassionate in dealing with the struggles of so many in their organizations.

Read more in Take The Lead on managing stress at work for your team

The gender pay gap notwithstanding, leaders are needing to listen to and address issues from their teams of employees as well as tending to the costs of doing business that are rising and unpredictable as well.

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"Power is power," Margaret Atwood tells an audience recently at Syracuse University. "If you give some people more than others, they'll take it."

She says she is the “same type of feminist as Anita Hill-- one who believes in improving process and laws.” Atwood adds, "The more gender equality there is in a society, the less abuse there is."

This is why Atwood, 86, who has published more than 50 books of fiction, essays, poetry and a more recent memoir, is the keynote speaker at Take The Lead’s Power Up Conference 2026 in Washington, D.C. on Women’s Equality Day.

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The gender gap in AI adoption, exclusion, effects and economic impact is real, global and immediate. It is caused by many factors including reticence to embrace, sexism in human leaders and discrimination emerging in the technology itself. The systems and the culture in AI and tech need to change.

A recent report from Harvard Business School with researchers from Harvard, Stanfrod and Berkeley universities shows, “Gender gaps in generative AI use are nearly universal. Synthesizing data from 18 studies covering more than 140,000 individuals across the world, combined with estimates of the gender share of the hundreds of millions of users of popular generative AI platforms, we demonstrate that the gender gap in generative AI usage holds across nearly all regions, sectors, and occupations.”

As the mission of Take The Lead since it’s founding is gender parity in leadership across all sectors, the urgency of meeting that goal in AI leadership is even more apparent.

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