On a Mission
A few months ago, we started working with Stacy Kessler, a consultant who helps entrepreneurs find clarity in their business strategy. After a lot of whiteboarding, deep discussion and tweaking, we developed four elements to drive Gild Collective in its fifth year (!)—our vision, mission, purpose and core values.
What I'm Reading: “How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids”
Last month I wrote about the invisible workload that women carry and how I personally try to counteract it, which prompted a slew of messages from friends sharing their stories and perspectives. One of these friends, a great friend of mine from high school and new mom of a perfect baby boy, sent me a recommendation to check out a book she was reading: Jancee Dunn’s How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids. While I can confidently say that I have never hated my husband, my baby is only 18 months– there is still plenty of time for resentment to fester. In the spirit of research, I dove right in, and I’m glad that I did.
Lack of Visibility of Women in Leadership: Why Does it Matter?
We know that women are underrepresented in leadership across the board in this country. In the 2018 Women in the Workplace study our suspicions were confirmed when we learned that across industries progress toward gender equity in leadership has stalled nationwide. The chart below shows that women make up only 22% of the “C-Suite” level positions in this country, with women of color drastically less represented than that at only 4%.
Emotional Labor: Lightening the Invisible Workload
My simplest description of emotional labor is to call it “invisible work”: The work that goes into managing households and relationships to make them run smoothly. It was first introduced and has been studied for many years as a workplace issue in sociology as the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. Of course the idea of managing feelings and expressions and fulfilling emotional requirements applies to the “jobs” we do at home as well, and the “invisible work” I described of managing households and relationships applies to the workplace. These two definitions complement and intertwine with one another and bleed into almost all aspects of life for many women. I can, of course, speak to emotional labor best from my personal worldview, which is that of a white, middle-class, heterosexual wife, mother, and business owner. Women of color, trans women, female immigrants, lesbian women, bisexual women, and impoverished women must navigate the complexities of marginalization (often several layers of it at once) along with their emotional labor. I cannot begin to understand the level of exhaustion that must bring.
2019: The Year of Saying No
What I’m Reading: We Should All Be Feminists
There it is again, that word—feminist. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2012 TEDx talk, adapted to a published essay in 2014, she relays her early justifications of the term. “At one point, I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself and not for men,” she says. “That word is so heavy with baggage—negative baggage.”
Still a Feminist
Climbing Kilimanjaro: Mental Training Plan
In October, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I won’t lie to you and tell you that I was doing daily meditations on the mountain and having an Eat, Pray, Love experience. It was, however, one of the most fun, exciting, and challenging experiences of my life. While I did a lot of physical training, I think the most useful training came in the form of another fun, exciting, and challenging experience—starting Gild Collective.
Balancing the Scales: A Look at Gender Bias in the Legal Industry
According to a study published on PayScale, the legal industry has one of the highest wage gaps not influenced by education or experience, as high as 38.6 percent. While this gap is outrageous at first glance and may appear to never close, there are some noticeable caveats to that statistic. First, while there are more women working in legal professions than men (at 68 percent), men dominate the higher-paying and higher-ranking legal jobs. This statistic also includes legal support workers, paralegals, and secretaries, which slightly skew the statistics because these lower-status jobs are more likely to be filled by women.
thankful
What I'm Listening To: Katie's Crib Podcast
Know Your Worth: The Importance of Negotiating
Asking for a promotion, higher compensation or even partnership in an organization is a highly marketable skill. Yet it is a well-known fact that there is a huge gap in pay and representation between women and men in senior positions. There are a variety of factors that may contribute to this gap, but one potential answer is that women don't negotiate as hard, or as often, as men.
That’s not the whole story. The real question is: why don't women negotiate more?
4 Reasons Female Mentorship is Important
It is rare to hear anyone dispute the benefits of having a mentor in the workplace. Mentors help guide you along the path of your career and advocate for you when you need them. Having a mentor can be the difference between getting ahead in your career and staying stagnant. However, of people being mentored, very few are being mentored by women. It’s important for women to act as mentors, not only to lift up future leaders but to also improve their own leadership skills.
Unconscious Bias and Its Effect on Business Decisions: Spotlight on Starbucks
When Starbucks began their run to success in the early 1990s, it was clear the brand wasn’t simply about coffee and over the last year, we have seen many headlines highlighting their hits and misses in an effort to shift their culture. Such indications include their announcement of equal pay as well as their all-staff diversity and inclusion training. If Starbucks has taught us anything in the past year, it is that bringing awareness to unconscious bias and how it affects businesses is imperative.
Making the Most of Your Sorority Experience
A Thank You Letter to Childcare Providers
Mind the Gap: A Closer Look at Women in Accounting
Similar to the statistics in the legal profession, women have made up 50% of the accounting talent pool for over 20 years, but that representation doesn’t translate to the partner level. Women only represent 21% of partners at firms with 100+ CPAs. At smaller firms, representation increases to 42%, signaling that some smaller firms have prioritized key strategies for recruiting and developing critical talent. How can more firms follow their lead to meet the demands of the talent gap in the coming years?
Creating a Healthy Balance While Working From Home
Through clever scheduling, a few ground rules and some hard core flexible thinking, I have figured out how to share my workspace with the (not-so)-little ones. When you exclusively work from home, physical boundaries between work and personal life can feel virtually nonexistent. Even the most organized can still find difficulty successfully managing a career and a household in the same space.
The following are a few key strategies I implement throughout the day to be successful, bring my whole self to work, and be present in my life. Over the years these have changed a bit, but the idea of creating a healthy balance for me to feel successful remains the same.