Box of delight

Often when I tell people that we have filled half of the top leadership positions at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering with women, I can almost see the unspoken assumption in many of their eyes: They think we did it by passing over better-qualified male candidates.

At the 10 U.S. engineering schools with the largest research budgets, women make up about 17 percent of the faculty. It’s always noticed when women constitute a higher-than-usual proportion of an engineering college’s leadership, but somehow we don’t make the same assumptions about talent when all of a school’s top positions are filled by men.

Learning to say no is tough. It can mean you’ll be seen as not a team player, as not wanting to do “what’s right for kids” (my favorite education guilt trip), or as not being “one of the guys” (always an odd one for the many women in education).

Several years ago, my principal asked me to be the school assessment coordinator,

The most powerful woman in global football is not the chief executive of a top team, a high-flying financier, or a close advisor of a club-owning oligarch.
Rather she is an administrator who has spent two decades working for the United Nations, and who now - as secretary general of world football body Fifa - has the power to shape the game and its position in society and industry for years to come.

More and more companies want to lessen gender bias in the workplace, but I contend they may be overlooking one of the most obvious, everyday breeding grounds for sexism: meetings.  In my just-released TEDx talk, I offer 3 ways that men and women can reduce gender bias through better meeting culture.

My eldest son has long been irresistibly drawn to danger. At 6 months old he rolled across the entire expanse of the living room in…

It was my first meeting with a new potential client, and they tossed out a number. It was a good number, but I recently vowed to negotiate more. So I threw out a higher number, then held my breath through the awkward silence. I hate the anxiety-ridden, nerve-wracking process of negotiating, but here’s why I’ve learned to embrace it despite the fact.

For 240 years, America has toyed with the idea of a woman becoming president. This year, for an all too brief moment, it looked as if the idea might become a reality. But the dream of a female president has remained just that, a disingenuous myth America occasionally serves up in fictions, but never permits to spill into its facts. Instead of witnessing the landmark moment of a woman moving into the Oval Office, we can now see the all-too-real misogyny that became a feature of the 2016 presidential campaign bedding down in the corridors of power. When Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” in the final debate, only a few days after a series of recordings revealed him admitting to a series of sexual aggressions and assaults, many people thought it was the end of his bid for the presidency. Instead, social media during election night revealed Trump supporters – male and female – voicing the diehard view that a woman is simply not capable of being president, too weak to stand up to foreign leaders and the military.