2019: The Year of Saying No

In order to get specific about goal setting, we must look realistically at our plans and evaluate what we are willing to – or in some cases, excited to – give up in order to achieve our goals. We must firmly say “no” to many things in order to have maximum focus on what we want to say “yes” to.

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Case Study: Xavier Alumni Women's Leadership Series – International Women's Day

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We celebrated International Women’s Day with Xavier University’s Alumni Office for their Women’s Leadership Series. Together with this dynamic group of Xavier alumnae we took time to celebrate the progress that has been made for gender equity worldwide, while also recognizing the remaining work to be done from the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Gender Gap Report.

Case Study: Xavier Office of Alumni Engagement, International Women's Day "Visualize your Success" Workshop

This year we continued our partnership with the Xavier University Office of Alumni Engagement to kick off International Women’s Day’s 2019 Theme, #BalanceForBetter. This workshop focused on creating a gender-balanced world by examining the progress that has been made and recognizing all that is yet to be done to reach parity.

Case Study: CBRE Women's Initiative

The Women’s Initiative at CBRE hosted Gild Collective for a Mapping Career Strategy workshop to kick off the year with a clear plan for participants. In addition to developing individual strategy maps, participants also made their own Leather Traveler’s Journal to embed their strategy map into for daily reference.

Case Study: Jones Day Women's Affinity Leader Group

The Women’s Affinity Leader Group at Jones Day hosted a session focused on Communicating Effectively for all employees. The session had a great mix of participants from new law-school grads to partners in the organization—both female and male—all together for an interactive session to develop communication tools.

#BalanceforBetter – International Women's Day 2019

On March 8, 2019 people all around the world will celebrate International Women’s Day and its 2019 theme: #BalanceforBetter. At it’s core, International Women’s Day (IWD) is a celebration of women– where we have been and what we have achieved socially, economically, politically, and culturally. However, in addition to celebrating how far we have come, IWD also calls us to look at how far we have yet to go on the path to gender parity, and what actions must we all take as individuals to increase the pace of progress?

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What I’m Reading: We Should All Be Feminists

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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.”

Case Study: WillowWood

We partnered with WillowWood, an organization that designs and manufactures comfortable, functional prosthetics and orthotics, and their recently formed Women in Leadership initiative to present a workshop titled: Uncovering Unconscious Bias to Communicate Effectively. The event’s focus was on understanding unconscious bias and its impact on women in the workplace, and how to communicate effectively to overcome the barriers that bias builds for women progressing to leadership. We were thrilled to see the number of motivated and curious men who attended this training. \

Case Study: Kao NOW

Our January workshop with Kao NOW, the women’s initiative at Kao, was a long-time coming as we had been planning with the initiative’s leaders for over a year to make the event a success. The topic selected by the group was Communicating Confidence for Achievement, which was paired with the creation of vision boards to kick off the new year.

Case Study: Small Team Workshop in Medical Technology Industry – Creating Communication Solutions and Team Understanding

In January we had the opportunity to work with an intimate group of sales managers who, while located across the country and managing different regions, work closely (although remotely) together on a daily basis. These managers all have highly scientific backgrounds but less experience in managing teams and co-leading management initiatives. We were asked to create a highly tailored workshop session with the goals of building a culture of mutual respect for one another’s unique management styles and creating communication pathways going forward.

Case Study: Women in Bio Webinar

This month we partnered with Women in Bio to deliver a webinar to its members on Uncovering Unconscious Bias. Women in Bio is an “organization of professional women from all career walks in the field of life sciences. We are all volunteers and we all share the goal of enabling and empowering women to reach the highest levels of leadership, and  -- more importantly -- to fulfill their own career aspirations.”

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.

Case Study: Greater Cincinnati Association of Training and Development

In December we had the opportunity to partner with GCATD for a program titled “No Permission Necessary: Demanding the Respect You Deserve.” In the workshop we blended real experiences heard from past workshop attendees and current data from the Women in the Workplace Report to identify the key issues that women in the workplace are facing. Together with the participants we dug into the root cause of these issues, reflected on our standard responses, and developed solutions. We loved the opportunity to work with a group of women so focused on how to best develop their teams.

Case Study: University of Cincinnati Emergency Medicine

We were invited to deliver an initial foundational overview of unconscious bias and bias interrupters that can be used within the department to continue driving gender equity and representation forward. With this understanding, we will return in July to do a follow up applied learning session. Not only can we see how interrupters have impacted the department over the past 7 months, but we can also implement new tools for greater impact.

Case Study: Tech Company Women's Program

In December 2018, Gild Collective facilitated a 2-day program for a cohort of under-represented minority (URM) women at Intel. The participants came from a variety of departments and positions within the organization and many had never met previously. Beyond the action-oriented programming during the session, we organized opportunities for connection and network building to create support networks within the organization.

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.