Winding down 2025 is a good time to pick up a book for yourself, friend, family member or colleague that they can enjoy as keen insight into their working life, or an inspiration from historic and current women changing history, and an escape into fictional history of times that shape who we are and how we live. All are works that we benefit from as keepers of truth.

Take The Lead is choosing 11 books (for 11 years of operations) new this year that can be respite for your mind and heart, and also offer tangible steps for change through memoir, historical fiction, essays, deep research, strategic step by step nonfiction and  deeply emotional biography. Whether you are an ink on paper reader, audiobook listener or digital reader, all are ready to dig in and learn.

 The disruptive challenges of the past year culturally, economically and politically, highlight the fact that independent funding for resources aimed at improving the lives and livelihoods of women and girls makes a difference. More is needed.

Giving Tuesday, December 2, the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, is the vehicle that powers many non-profits, institutions and movements. That includes Take The Lead, with  the mission to “prepare, develop, inspire, and propels all women of all diversities and intersectionalities to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors.”

Individual donations make a huge difference.

What happens when you host more than 3,000 women in tech from across the globe in one place for the world’s largest conference for women in tech over three days with 300 sessions and more than 300 speakers?

You get unimaginable amounts of applause, laughter, mentorship, collaboration, learning, inspiration, brainstorming, friendship making, energy and action working for the good of women in tech fields and everywhere.

“It is so much harder to be a girl now than when I was growing up,” says Fran Liebowitz, 75, author and outspoken public speaker on the subjects of gender, bias, identity, work, democracy, popular culture and the future.

Today’s culture is perilous, she says, speaking in a packed Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium in Evanston outside of Chicago. “It is not perfect, it is not even good. It’s all misogyny.  A lot is about being anti-woke.”

“You really want to have a reason why you make art,” declares Sally Mann, who was speaking at the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall, built in 1916 as the women’s clubhouse and gymnasium.

This physical storied past was surrounding hundreds in the audience at the Chicago Humanities Festival, eager to hear from Mann, named America’s Best Photographer by Time magazine in 2001, a Guggenheim fellow, and author of the new book, Art Work: On The Creative Life.