12/27/2023 0 Comments First female vice president smuIn the federal government, where Democrats have held onto their majority in the House but control of the Senate is still unclear, women like Cori Bush-the first Black woman elected to Congress by Missouri-and the newly-reelected members of “The Squad” (Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib) can use their personal experiences and political sway to advocate for these policies, too. Koval notes that fairly or unfairly, all eyes will be on Harris when it comes to these issues this level of scrutiny and pressure is one of the well-documented downsides of being a “first” or “only” within an organization. “For me the big impact of choosing a woman in the White House is that that comes with a perspective that I think that we haven't seen enough of, or enough understanding at a federal level from lawmakers who have not taken those concerns into account have not addressed issues such as childcare and the funding of schools,” Koval says. But for Aimee Koval, cofounder and president of Metis Consulting, a B-corp and certified disability-owned enterprise that provides technology and management consulting, Harris’s experience as a daughter, aunt and stepmother makes her more qualified than previous White House occupants to understand the unique challenges facing women. The childcare and remote learning demands on mothers working from home stand to erase close to a decade of gains for women in the workplace unless spouses, employers and the government work to find solutions and provide support. Women have been disproportionately affected: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 865,000 women dropped out of the labor force in September, compared to 216,000 men. Senator Harris’s election to the vice presidency comes at a moment when a pandemic has killed more than 200,000 Americans and forced thousands more out of work. “And that's what's so important to me and to a lot of women, but especially for me as a South Asian woman.” “We talk a lot about these women trailblazers, like Kamala Harris who are the historic first, but they're also paving the way for pulling other girls and women up with them,” Parikh says. Henah Parikh, development and communications manager at She’s the First, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to fighting gender inequality through education, puts it this way: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” She points to research that shows that, without female role models, girls stop believing they can be anything they want to be as early as 5 years old. Sometimes we don't even quite notice that until we see something different,” she says. “The images of leadership and power that we see are overwhelmingly white and male. Ammerman points to research that has shown how female role models and mentors, as well as mere exposure to portraits of female leaders, can help encourage women to speak up, stand up and perhaps achieve more. “No one can deny the power of seeing somebody who shares an identity, like your gender or your race, which are so salient in American society, certainly, in a position of power,” says Colleen Ammerman, director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. But her impending presence in the executive branch of government has the potential to be as instructive as inspirational. attorney general Jeff Sessions and now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Senate hearings in 20 were similar showcases of feminine confidence and capability. The American public has already witnessed Harris asserting her expertise and authority on the national stage: her use of “I’m speaking” during the vice presidential debate last month was a master class in dealing with a male interrupter, and her questioning of then-U.S. “There's something to actually seeing it.” “But this is the highest position in our country that a woman has held,” she says. “And so I think being able to see someone who looks like me, in one of those positions, it's just a level of pride that I don't even know if I can fully express.”ĭaniels notes that because we’ve seen women attain powerful positions in the private sector over the past few decades-consider former Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi, or General Motors chief Mary Barra, to name a few boundary-breaking corporate leaders-it can be all too easy to take female leadership for granted. “It's a kind of beautiful, full circle moment for the story of America, because I think women, and more specifically Black women, have done so much work-and are sort of the backbone of this country-without the acknowledgement of the work that we've done,” says Alia Daniels, cofounder of the global queer digital media network Revry.
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