Women are cracking the glass ceiling and making it into top leadership positions amid the #MeToo Movement, according to new research, but the distribution of female replacements varies by geography and social sector.
In an article in the Houston Chronicle, authors Yan Zhang and Yoon Jung Kwon, a professor and Ph.D. student at Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business, argue that the phenomena of women replacing men in leadership roles holds great potential for signaling all sectors of society about changing gender norms. Even in heavily male-dominated sectors like major league men’s sports, a new era is dawning in which women’s leadership will provide a different paradigm.
Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation, and author of Be Fearless: Five Principles for a Lifetime of Breakthrough and Purpose.
Recently I interviewed Jean Case for Inside Philanthropy and learned about how her early years as a survivor of hardship helped her prepare for a lifetime of success in business and philanthropy. We also discussed how to maintain a fearless attitude in both business and philanthropy, so that you don’t become afraid of all the risks, hassles and pitfalls that drive a lot of people to drop out of pursuing plans in both spheres.
Toward the end of the interview, I asked Case about her perception of women in philanthropy and how their influence is shifting the landscape:
Guests on tomorrow evening’s Virtual Happy Hour with Gloria Feldt include Reshma Gopaldas, Mira Lowe, and Amy Emmerich.
Tomorrow evening’s Take the Lead Virtual Happy Hour will feature an exciting group of women talking about one of my favorite topics: journalism. Tomorrow’s event is called The Real Story: Women in Journalism Finding Fair Solutions.
The web call will discuss ways to promote change that will make for more equal representation and pay of women journalists. Given that Philanthropy Women is a journalism endeavor, I am planning to be on that call to see what I can learn for my work, and to discuss philanthropy’s current and future impact on these issues.
Impact Alpha is a digital media company that describes its mission as “redefining business journalism around social and environmental value.”
Recently, I listened in on a call hosted by Catalyst at Large Suzanne Biegel, and author David Bank of Impact Alpha. Guests on the call included Luisamaria Ruiz Carlile of Veris Wealth Partners, which specializes in gender lens investing and research.
The call provided fascinating insights into the world of gender lens investing. Though in its early formative years, gender lens investing is a growing area of financial investment that is destined for big things.
Biegel began the call by giving an overview of both the expanding language and the expanding financial investments in the gender lens investing sector. “Gender lens investing is still small in the relative scheme of things, but it’s so much bigger than it was,” said Biegel. She shared the latest statistics from Project SAGE at the Wharton School of Business Social Impact, which turned up a record 87 funds that are now investing with a gender lens, with 46 of those funds being new creations that occurred between 2017 and 2018.
This is just a quick post before taking a few days off to enjoy time with family and friends. We will be covering several important events in upcoming posts, including a fascinating call on Gender Alpha with Suzanne Biegel and David Bank, where they discussed how “Gender Alpha” is all about identifying the specific dividends that gender lens investing yields. Biegel and Bank are co-producers of November’s Gender-Smart Investing Summit in London. Guests on the call included Luisamaria Ruiz Carlile of Veris Wealth Partners, which specializes in gender lens investing and research.
And one other quick note to acknowledge the significance of the recent elections, where voter turnout was higher than it has been in 104 years. That’s right — the last time voter turnout was as high as it was in 2018 was in 1914, before women even had the right to vote. Now that women and millennials are getting into the driver’s seat with social change, we hope to see even better voter turnout in 2020. I don’t know about you, but I am mighty thankful that people are finally getting the message (it seems!) about the importance of civic engagement. That could mean in 2020 we elect a President that gets us back on track in terms of valuing safety, diversity, and systems change to address inequality.
Since 1998, Women’s Net has been providing grants to women entrepreneurs with no strings attached. This is an exceptionally successful model that could potentially be replicated in a world where women in business are rising.
One thing is for sure: there are not enough financial supports out there for women. As a woman myself developing the sustainability of my publishing work, I am always on the look-out for ways to get a stronger foothold in my own business/nonprofit niche, and I know many women who are in the same boat. Banks and investors routinely discriminate against women entrepreneurs when giving small business loans and venture capital, so where can women entrepreneurs turn when they are angling to start successful small businesses? But some women are starting businesses to offset all of this, and one of those businesses is WomensNet.
Gender Matters by Kathleen E. Loehr explores how fundraisers can widen the aperture on their lens for approaching donors in order to maximize women’s giving.
Once you study women’s philanthropy for long enough, you begin to recognize that a confluence of events relating to women and giving are changing the philanthropy landscape in significant ways. One of the scholars who has studied women’s philanthropy and done this dot-connecting is Kathleen E. Loehr. In her new book, Gender Matters: A Guide to Growing Women’s Philanthropy, Loehr addresses the important question of how fundraisers and those committed to women’s giving can take specific actions that will increase women’s philanthropy – already an area of giving scheduled for a large uptick in the near future.
“It is time to rumble with our stories about women’s philanthropy,” says Loehr in the first chapter of the book, referencing a Brené Brown concept about rumbling with the truth to find the real story. In the introduction, Loehr describes a method for asking questions called Appreciative Inquiry, which “involves the art and practice of asking unconditionally positive questions” as a way to increase potential, by maximizing imagination and innovation in the responses being elicited. Loehr has written the book with an Appreciative Inquiry framework, which informs much of what Loehr recommends in terms of a strategy for approaching women donors.
In the book, Loehr combines the ideas of Appreciative Inquiry with an approach to leadership that works to align strengths in an organization, so that weaknesses are so insignificant that they are not even worth noticing. With these approaches in mind, Loehr starts with a call to look more closely at the data about the donors you are trying to reach. With specific examples guided by fundraising campaigns of colleges like Duke and William & Mary, Loehr demonstrates how a closer look at the data yielded a decision to shift fundraising approaches in order to collect the unharvested revenue of women’s giving.
But research is, of course, not enough. Loehr then provides guidance around how to create a high-quality action plan that will increase your donor engagement with women. In part two of the book, entitled Dream, Loehr invited readers into transformative reflection where they can “create a compelling mental picture of what is possible.”
By doing so, Loehr helps drive readers toward the next big step in carrying out their plan: declaring a vision. Through the process of declaring a vision, Loehr shows how intention is amplified, resulting in a stronger approach that will pull in donors, particularly women. Loehr also calls on fundraisers to build networking and collaboration into their vision, since research shows that women are more receptive to giving when they see themselves as joining with other women on a similar mission and participating in design of the project.
What Happens When We Ask Big Questions
Loehr is particularly adept at providing questions in the book that will “prime the pump,” to so speak. She recommends questions that help prospective women donors articulate their own experiences with giving so that fundraisers can fully engage in appreciating those experiences and use them to create that compelling mental picture that will grow women’s support. Here is a small sample of some of those positive, open-ended questions you can pose to donors about their past giving experiences:
What has been your most exciting experience in giving? It does not need to be related to this organization.
Tell me the story. What happened?
What enabled this gift? What role did you play? What role did the organization play? What role did the staff person play in relationship to this experience?
What else made this experience possible?
Loehr suggests that asking these questions help women donors contextualize their giving experience and focus their attention on remembering what that experience was like for them. While such an approach might sound obvious, it is not in the old playbook of “best practices” for development and fundraising professionals.
Loehr also highlights significant research for guiding the ongoing donor-grantee relationship, including how much to communicate with women donors. “It is unlikely that women will feel they are getting too much communication,” writes Loehr, a research-based insight that is important to keep in mind when redesigning fundraising campaigns with women more in mind.
Gender Matters is an important new resource for those who see the potential for women’s giving to influence both philanthropy and civil society as a whole. The guide will help readers notice their own assumptions and how they might be driving their behavior, so they can imagine and explore better ways to reach women as philanthropists.
Jessica Houssian, Jacki Zehner, and Kathy LeMay, September 2018 Annual Women Moving Millions Summit in Seattle, sponsored by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Wow, what a read. I had to keep stopping at points to walk around the block and get my core energetics realigned. Jacki Zehner literally pours her heart out in this stunning blog post where she shares about her experiences rising to the C-Suite at Goldman Sachs, as well as her intense love for gender equality philanthropy, which has been expressed in over a decade of devotion to growing one of the most important organizations in gender equality philanthropy, Women Moving Millions.
Zehner starts by letting readers know that this writing is more or less automatic — that is, she is going for a Jacki Unfiltered here. What we learn by reading this piece is that Zehner is a complex leader with significant life experiences that inform her activism for women’s rights.
Ever-considerate of others, Jacki warns us that 14 pages have emerged from this attempt to shine a spotlight on her thinking and feeling life. She then goes on to enter into some of the most exciting (and sometimes painful) thoughts and memories. As just an example, check this out:
If there was such a thing as a ‘finance professional Olympics’, becoming a partner at Goldman, especially as a young woman, would represent a gold medal. Of course, I know that there may be someone who reads this and posts in the comments section something along the lines of “die you wall street whore” as they have in the past when I blog freely about Goldman, but so be it. To that potential person I say in advance, “I hope that has helped you feel better about yourself.” […]
Beyond unflinching glimpses like these into Zehner’s mind, the post also delves into many significant life events, including some serious traumas. Her writing is the kind of material that future (or present) movie-makers will want to read in order to gather key scene details for the inevitable biopic of Zehner’s life. For example, here is just one in a bulleted list breaking down the timeline of Zehner’s progression:
Finding Women Moving Millions – 2002 to 2009. As the years from 2002 onward moved forward, I was spending more and more time with philanthropic groups focused on girls and women, and in particular women’s funds. My interest in supporting women’s leadership poured in to my work with various non-profits, and one of the main reasons I loved Women’s Funds so much. I had joined the board of the Women’s Funding Network, and it was there that I got to the know the incredible Chris Grumm. She became, and still is, a role model for me for courageous leadership. She is the one who invited me to consider joining the Women Moving Millions Campaign, as she was a co-founder of it. WMM at the time was a campaign to encourage women to make million dollar commitments to women’s funds. Again, holy shit, I could go on and on and on right here, but I won’t. The need to know piece for the rest of this story is that this moment was transformational for me. Why? Because the act of making that commitment, the moment of stepping onto a stage at the Brooklyn Museum to have a group photo taken by Annie Leibowitz to mark that moment in history where for the first time women of means came together to fund women at the million dollar level, helped me to see clearly what the next stage of my life would be about: helping to unlock the resources of high-net worth women to support other women, and more broadly, gender equality. […]
It’s quite wonderful that Zehner has the clarity to speak about these experiences and mark how these transformations happened for her. By doing so, she is increasing the chances manyfold that other women will get up their courage to do the same.
One other sentence toward the end really popped out at me for how it evoked the shared effort that Women Moving Millions summits are, and how this results in shared experiences that can refuel our courage and make us more powerful. Zehner writes:
The WMM summit 2018 could not have been more incredible from start to finish. (My next long post will be about it all.) I am in awe of how beautiful the program was (thank you JESS), how perfectly it was executed (the WMM and TES team), how open people were (thank you attendees), how much people shared (thank you speakers), and how everyone trusted that we, WMM, had created a safe place for everyone to be their most vulnerable and by definition, their most powerful.
I don’t want to overshare or overanalyze here. I just want to thank Jacki Zehner (as I have privately and will now publicly) for her brave years of service to the community through Women Moving Millions. And then point everyone to Jacki’s blog to read the post and let it open your heart and mind.
Mothers of Invention, a new podcast featuring former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, and comedian Maeve Higgins, will celebrate the fascinating world of feminist climate change strategy.
The Guardian reports that former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, is launching a new initiative to call attention to feminist solutions to climate change.
Women around the world who are leading the fight against climate damage are to be highlighted by Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN high commissioner, in the hopes of building a new global movement that will create “a feminist solution for climate change”.
Perhaps more revolutionary still, the new initiative is light-hearted in tone, optimistic in outlook and presents positive stories in what the originators hope will be seen as a fun way.
Called Mothers of Invention, the initiative will kick off with a series of podcasts showcasing the work of grassroots climate activists at a local level, as well as globally resonant initiatives such as the legal challenges under way in numerous jurisdictions to force governments to adhere to the Paris agreement goals. Scientists and politicians feature alongside farmers and indigenous community leaders from Europe, the US and Australia to India, Kenya, South Africa and Peru.
The podcast is a first for Robinson, who has focused on climate justicefor the last 15 years through her charity, the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, and as one of the Elders group, after seeing at first-hand as UN commissioner for human rights the danger that global warming presents to women whose lives are already precarious.
Here at Philanthropy Women, we are tracking the grantmaking and strategizing that is happening in the ecofeminist space, from the new Roddenberry Prize seeking solutions to both climate change and advancement for women and girls, to the grantmaking done by the Gender Just Climate Solutions award, which makes grants that share both feminist and climate strategies. We’re also showing how women’s giving collectives like Rachel’s Network are bringing feminist philanthropists together who share a vision of how to integrate climate solutions with gender equality. Stay tuned!
The April 2018 issue of GreenMoney is entirely written by women leaders in the gender lens investing space.
Feminist philanthropists take note: The 25th Anniversary issue of GreenMoney is entitled Women and Investing, and is written entirely by women. Here are some quick summaries of the top articles.
Julie Gorte of Pax World/Impax AM:
In her piece, Gender Equality: With or Without the Federal Government, Gorte notes that the current GOP administration is less gender-diverse than the previous five (FIVE!) administrations. Gorte contends that there are many other ways that gender equality can be effected besides federal policy. She points to recent moves in corporations pushing for more board diversity, and provides evidence for gender equality being a significant stimulus to local economies.
Women are cracking the glass ceiling and making it into top leadership positions amid the #MeToo Movement, according to new research, but the distribution of female replacements varies by geography and social sector.
