Movers and Shakers: Susan Harper, 2012-2013 President, Financial Women’s Association of New York, Inc.

 

Susan L. Harper, Director at the Bates Group LLC and President of the Financial Women’s Association of New York, Inc. (FWA) has always been a staunch supporter of women’s advancement. This year, she used her position within the FWA to draw a greater focus on the topics of women in the public and political realm and negotiation for women.

“The FWA has been a leader in the areas of mentoring programs and sponsorship initiatives,” Harper said. “But I truly believe for us to get ahead that we need to take ownership of our advancement, become self advocates and harness our own negotiation power.”

This has been one of Harper’s signature initiatives, with events designed around salary and severance negotiation, advocating for work position advancement, and skills development workshops for emerging leaders. She explained, “With respect to women and the pay gap, it’s very important that we understand that we do have the power to negotiate and ask for what we want and deserve. If you’re at that point where a company has made you an offer and they want you, they are more than likely open to negotiating with you.” She continued, “In terms of pay equity issues, the phrase I like to say is, ‘Debt does not discriminate.’ With all things being equal, no one’s going to say ‘Sorry you make 77 cents to every man’s dollar. No worries. We’ll discount your bill because of that. No business in its right mind would ever do something like that, barring extenuating circumstances. So let me ask you this, why should you allow your paycheck to be discounted?”

“Remember, what we negotiate today will impact us years down the road in our retirement years. You need to take the initiative,” she added “it will benefit you and your family.”

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Next Gen Allies – How to Make a Difference for LGBT Colleagues

Business teamThis article is part of our June Pride series – check back all month as we explore what it means to be an LGBT woman or ally in the professional workplace.

By Michelle Clark (Keene, NH)

Every minority group needs members of the majority in their corner. In the business world, the LGBT community looks to straight allies to provide public support for their cause. Straight allies in the workplace don’t necessarily hold the key to total inclusion and diversity, but their role is absolutely essential in advancing LGBT equality efforts in the corporate arena.

By getting involved with employee resource groups and being outspoken advocates for their LGBT colleagues, straight allies have the ability to help change the attitudes and strip away the preconceptions that impede the establishment of a global corporate culture ruled by acceptance rather than exclusion.

Straight allies have already made incredible strides on behalf of the LGBT community in the workplace through their supportive words and actions, but the next generation of workers will be even more influential, according to Tyronne Stoudemire, Principal at Mercer and expert in inclusion and diversity consulting. He says, “The next generation of workers is far more accepting of different backgrounds, cultures, and communities, and I think they welcome difference.”

Even though next gen straight allies will approach LGBT community with an open mind, the road to equality for LGBT workers is still going to be littered with plenty of opposition. This is due in part to the fact that the corporate world must still take many of its cues from the social and political arenas.

Stoudemire says, “Society will have to take the lead, and corporate America will follow.” He adds, “Until organizations can provide a safe place where people feel comfortable coming out at work, things will continue to be hard, and members of the LGBT community will still feel like coming out at work could be held against them amongst their managers and colleagues.”

Next gen allies can make that happen by vocally supporting LGBT colleagues, calling for equal policies and benefits, and standing up to correct less enlightened team-mates if they make a negative comment or joke about being gay.

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Passion and Purpose – Why Leadership Means Following Your Heart

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SHE Summit 2013By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Last week, thousands of women took part in S.H.E. Summit Week, a week-long event designed to empower women to take ownership of their careers and dreams. The week of pop-up events around the world culminated with a two-day conference on work and life in New York City. Speakers included people like Cindy Gallop, Joi Gordon, Gloria Feldt, Reshma Saujani, and John Gerzema, who examined the powerful and positive ways women leaders are reshaping the 21st century.

For Claudia Chan, the powerhouse behind the S.H.E. Summit, stepping into leadership meant following her true passion and purpose. Although she became a successful entrepreneur at 25 when she founded what would become the girls’ night out entertainment company Shecky’s, it wasn’t until she left her business nine years later that she began examining the greater impact she wanted to make for women and for the world as a leader. She explained, “During my latter few years of my last business, I had achieved material success but I wasn’t fulfilled on the inside because I lacked a deeper sense of purpose. Experiencing what I did as a female entrepreneur, I really started learning and thinking about the state of women. When the a-hah moment came that I needed to build a more purposeful women’s media business that would share and scale the advice of today’s female role models in a modern way, a whole new definition of leadership kicked in for me. To be the best leader I could be, I had to take the leap to pursue a vision that I believed could positively impact women at large, and I am extremely proud of what we have achieved since we launched just 15 months ago.”

Being a leader isn’t just about being successful in business, she explained. “It also means having a clear vision of what you want to build, knowing what is needed to achieve that vision at different building stages, acquiring and empowering talent where you have weakness, knowing when to fight versus be patient and humbled, never giving up even when it feels harder than ever, and building something profitable that improves the lives of everyone involved — from partners to clients to employees.” These are big themes for Chan – and they are themes of the S.H.E Summit as well.

“I had to ask myself, ‘Am I doing what I’m really passionate about? Why am I doing this? What am I doing this for?’ I realized I really lacked focus. And I really wasn’t doing something that was making me happy.” She continued, “It was going through those challenges, several years ago, that forced me to create positive change in my life and to create a platform that would inspire women to dream and do big with passion and purpose, just like in my experience.”

Leadership is often born out of turmoil, she explained. “It’s not the cliché of having success and making a lot of money and all of the sudden I became a great leader. I always say obstacles create opportunities, and the number one quality for leadership is humility. Going through challenges helped me become a leader.”

Chan says her goal with her business SHE Global Media (parent company to ClaudiaChan.com, and her global women’s week S.H.E. Summit), is to be the leadership and lifestyle media company that creates only positive and empowering content and products for women. “It’s about building a business that is of service to others – making a positive dent on this universe. That is really how I define great leadership.”

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Voice of Experience: Neeti Bhalla, Managing Director and Head of Tactical Asset Allocation, Private Wealth, Goldman Sachs

Bhalla NeetiWomen should aim to maintain a sense of authenticity while rising through the ranks of the investment industry, says Neeti Bhalla, Managing Director and Head of Tactical Asset Allocation in Goldman Sachs‘ Private Wealth business. “Have a sense of what your true north is, a sense of who you are and what you are trying to accomplish,” she explained. “As a young woman coming into the business, you see more successful men than successful women. There is a natural tendency to emulate the men, a tendency to embrace male attributes. But this is unsustainable for women. You have to think, ‘What can I take from the role models I see around me and apply to my situation?’”

Bhalla, who earned a master’s degree in Social Anthropology alongside her MBA at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, suggests that embracing one’s individuality can be a competitive advantage. “You have to develop what is unique and differentiating about you. You have to become “a go-to person” for something in your career.”

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Four Tips to Stay Focused at Work This Summer

iStock_000007154239XSmallBy Michelle Clark (Keene, New Hampshire)

It can be hard to keep your mind focused on work during the warm summer months when you can easily spout off a long list of things you would rather be doing or places you would rather be. And if you have children who are home for summer break, it adds an entirely new layer of distraction to infiltrate your thoughts throughout the work day.

While it may seem like an unfair sentence to be stuck in the office all day instead of basking in the warm summer sun with a cold drink and a good read, there are some things that you can do to make the best of the situation and enhance your career in the process.

Staying sharp and on point during vacation season can be accomplished in many different ways, but the best way to keep your brain focused on your task list is to set very specific goals for yourself to achieve before the end of summer. And because your attention span is already short, make sure your goals are varied enough to keep you interested and motivated to see them through to the end. Come up with a couple of simple and straightforward goals – one that you can measure and one that incorporates more intangible elements.

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Women of Vision Inspire Tech Millennials

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iStock_000006684238XSmallBy Robin Madell (San Francisco)

Last month nearly 1,000 people attended The Anita Borg Institute’s (ABI) 2013 Women of Vision (WOV) awards banquet held in Santa Clara, CA on May 9. Several hundred female college students also attended the event free of charge, sponsored by tech company representatives.

The event honored Intel as the Top Company for Technical Women award winner, as well as three visionary individuals: Genevieve Bell, Director of Interaction and Experience Research for Intel Labs, Intel; Vicki Hanson, Professor of Inclusive Technologies at the University of Dundee and Research Staff Member Emeritus from IBM Research; and Maja Matarić, professor and Chan Soon-Shiong Chair in Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California.

Intel was recognized for having achieved momentum on almost every Top Company metric, including recruitment, retention, and advancement of technical women at all levels—both in management and individual contributor pathways. Programs like the Command Presence Workshop, which helps women increase their visibility and effectiveness in the organization, and the Women Principal Engineers and Fellows Forum, which brings together senior individual contributors each year, are examples of the company’s commitment to fostering diversity through specific initiatives to attract, develop, and promote women.

Intel also boasts one of the lowest voluntary turnover rates among women in the industry, holding at 2 percent over the last three years. That’s in part because the company continuously experiments with new, innovative programs and practices aimed at leveraging the full benefits of a diverse technical workforce.

The night’s keynote speaker was Diane M. Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group (DCSG) for Intel Corporation. Bryant told the packed house that despite many gains for women in the tech industry, “there’s still a lot of work to be done,” citing a “horrible decline” in the number of engineering degrees awarded to women. This number peaked in the 1980s with women earning 30 percent or more of the degrees, but which has since plummeted to just 12 percent.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer also spoke, emphasizing that increasing representation of women drives diverse business perspectives that help to create better products. Schroepfer said that in celebrating the achievements of these three amazing women, “we acknowledge something even more important: the need to have more women driving the development of technology that shapes our future.”

Bell, the WOV award winner for leadership, is an anthropologist and researcher. She leads a team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers, and computer scientists to research new computing experiences centered around people’s needs and desires, which shapes and then helps to create new technologies and products.

Bell told the audience of her technology peers and students that if you set your mind to it, you can make big changes in the industry. She shared that her mother taught her, “If you see a better world, you’re morally obligated to create it.”

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Movers and Shakers: Valerie Grillo, Chief Diversity Officer at American Express

Valerie Grillo of American Express in New York, NY November 2010By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

When Valerie Grillo, now Chief Diversity Officer at American Express, entered the professional space fresh out of college, she wasn’t sure how to fit in. That led her to the realization that really helped her blossom at work. “It’s the importance of being true to yourself and being authentic,” she said.

“When I was coming out of university and into the corporate world, I felt I needed to dress a certain way and act a certain way,” Grillo recalled. But by cultivating a network of senior women she admired, she realized that being herself could help her advance.

“As I developed mentors and sponsors, I realized that the people I was connecting with were women who were very authentic – true to themselves, unique, and vocal in sharing their point of view that made them effective,” she continued. “I realized I did not need to fit into a box.”

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Double Jeopardy or Professional Advantage? LGBT Women at Work

iStock_000000227687XSmallThis article is part of our June Pride series – check back all month as we explore what it means to be an LGBT woman or ally in the professional workplace.

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

There’s no question that LGBT individuals face additional challenges in the workplace – after all, in 29 states, it’s still legal to get fired for being gay. That’s one reason why a recent study by the Center for Talent Innovation, The Power of “Out” 2.0, revealed that 41 percent of LGBT employees remain in the closet at work.

But according to Karen Sumberg, Executive Vice President at the Center for Talent Innovation and an author of the report, one of the main issues that two in five LGBT employees remain in the closet is simply a culture of intolerance. “The hurdle is the subtle comments, jokes, and assumptions that create an environment where people don’t want to come out.”

For LGBT women, this issue is compounded by the factors that keep women from advancing to leadership levels at work. This is the essence of the “double jeopardy” factor, or as some have called it the “double glazed glass ceiling” – since LGBT women face additional hurdles than men and straight women, they are more likely to stay in the closet at work, rather than come out.

But those views may be changing. Many LGBT women are beginning to view being gay as a strategic differentiator and a tool to help them advance. Here’s why.

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Peer Relationships: Key Factor in Retaining Mid-Career Women

iStock_000002351861XSmallBy Robin Madell (San Francisco)

Last year, the 2012 Accounting MOVE report investigated the role of community service for women in accounting. In the 2013 MOVE Project [PDF], Joanne Cleaver, author of The Career Lattice and the report’s creator, set out to understand why mid-career women in accounting firms either stay the course on the partnership track, or abandon their public accounting ambitions and leave for industry.

Patterns had started to emerge from previous years of research in this area. Cleaver notes that a trend was becoming clear: that women evaporate from the partnership pipeline at the senior manager level. Yet she noted a collective hunch about this “make or break point” was that women actually started to take their feet off the pedal much earlier than senior managers.

“We felt that the decision to stay the course was so complex and important, it deserved a deep dive,” says Cleaver. So in the fall of 2012, she conducted a survey of 440 women at all points in their accounting careers, and interviewed dozens of them to gain additional information about why, when, and how they decoupled their career ambitions from their public accounting firms.

The good news for firms is that women do spend a couple of years at the senior staff and new manager level wondering about the path to partnership. Therefore, Cleaver emphasizes that firm leaders have a generous opportunity to rekindle women’s ambitions to become partners. “You can change their minds!” says Cleaver. “But if you don’t even try, your apparent lack of commitment becomes one more reason why they should leave.”

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Success as a Journey: Work Life Trailblazers Discuss Big Dreams

iStock_000017642294XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Last week, the Families and Work Institute presented its Work Life Legacy Awards, marking ten years celebrating work life pioneers. The FWI, led by President and Co-Founder Ellen Galinsky, has spent the past few decades studying how families are affected by the demands of our rapidly evolving workplace.

During her remarks at the event, Galinsky recalled, “Dare to dream. Those were the exact words said to me by a gentleman at one of our founding companies, the Salt River Project.”

She continued, “And dream I did.”

Galinsky described the challenges the FWI faced as it grew, for example, convincing the Department of Labor it was the right group to take on the next iteration of its Quality of Employment Survey, first published in 1977, which, she remarked, “had been laying fallow for 11 years.” By 1992, the FWI had published “The National Study of the Changing Workforce,” a follow up to the QES, and has published a new version every four or five years.

The workforce and workplace are both rapidly transforming, and the FWI’s research has been an integral part of the conversation around shifting roles and responsibilities at work and home. But it didn’t happen overnight, Galinsky explained. At each phase of the organization’s growth, its members had to take a risk and reach higher.

“Turning dreams into reality is pretty hard,” she continued. “All of these dreams were – to use a corporate phrase – stretch opportunities.”

Galinsky’s remarks reflect that while the FWI is now considered a mainstay within the work life space, its success has been driven by passionate people overcoming obstacles and working toward a vision, much like the other trailblazers who were honored during the evening.

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