Fourth Meeting of the Bipartisan Feminist Project

Thank you to everyone who came to the fourth meeting of the Bipartisan Feminist Project this Tuesday!

Especially, thank you to our guest speaker Carla Zilka, author of Business Restructuring and founder of NexGen Advisers, for sharing her knowledge and experience as a woman in the workplace. Carla shared some important takeaways with the group:

• Diversity and Inclusion Groups can play and have played an important role in increasing inclusion of women in the workplace. These organizations share information on how to achieve workplace equality and the unique characteristics women bring to the workplace.

• Women can bring empathy to leadership positions that it is more difficult for men to develop. Empathy allows leaders to help employees feel valued, but not overloaded with work. Data has shown that empathetic leadership drive two times greater economic growth for companies.

• Sexism is often not overt in the workplace. In Carla’s experience working at General Electric, there were many women on boards; However, older white males still ran the show. Getting more women on board is the first step, but we still have far to go.

• Women can combat sexism by seeing themselves as holistic persons rather than women alone. Rather than thinking about being the only woman in the room, one can focus on how much she has in common with others, and how much she deserves to be equal.

The workplace is the primary forum in which people are forced to deal with those who have rejected feminism, either because of their political party or personal beliefs.

At the Bipartisan Feminist Project, we try to understand the roles women play in the workplace to encourage more women to get involved, and help men understand the importance of workplace equality.