Women Count

A Guide to Changing the World

Susan Bulkeley Butler, Bob Keefe

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781557535696
• eBook ISBN: 9781612490076
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Throughout history, women have struggled to change the workplace, change government, change society. So what's next? It's time for women to change the world! Whether on the job, in politics, or in their community, there has never been a better time for women to make a difference in the world, contends author, mentor, and corporate pioneer Susan Bulkeley Butler in Women Count: A Guide to Changing the World. Through her experience as the first female partner of a major consulting firm and founder of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Institute for the Development of Women Leaders, Butler's unique insights have changed the lives of countless women. In Women Count, she shows readers how to change the world through a series of inspiring case studies that chronicle how she and other pioneering women in a range of fields have done so in years past. Women represent half of the country's population, half of the country's college graduates, and around 50 percent of the country's workforce. Butler envisions a day when they will also make up their fair share of elected and appointed positions, including in corporate boardrooms. Amid financial meltdowns, wars, and societal struggles, never before has the world so greatly needed the unique abilities of women to lead the way. But as history has shown, to make change, women must step into their power and become "women who count," Butler contends. Then and only then, she argues, can women truly change the world.

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[SECTION THREE]

Change Is
Happening

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I WAS WRITING this chapter as the 2009 Nobel Prizes were announced in Norway. It was an impressive year for women, with more women among the recipients of the world’s highest civilian honors for research and societal contributions than ever before.

With my “counting women” hat on, there were five women among the 2009 Nobel laureates. They won for economics (Elinor Ostrom); literature (Herta Muller); chemistry (Ada Yonath); and medicine (Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider).

The good news is that the 2009 Nobel Prizes showed that women are finally beginning to join in the upper ranks of science and academia. In 2009, 38 percent of the Nobel winners were women. These are women who are truly changing their worlds. Could you imagine if an equal percentage of CEOs, government officials, or other leaders were women?

Education is the key to keep the pipeline flowing and spread the influence of women into those other areas. We need to get more girls more education. And to do that, we have to start early, and we have to start at the very foundations of society.

Women’s rights issues are high on many lists these days, from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the United Nations, to authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Kristof and WuDunn’s 2009 book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Random House, 2009), outlined the importance of improving the education of women in developing nations to improve their and their countries’ opportunities. The authors gave a call for all of us to address women’s rights as we hear the cries of oppression from the women and girls they introduce in their book.

After reading many of the women’s stories in Kristof and WuDunn’s book, I particularly was touched by the story of Saima Muhammad. Saima used to break down into tears every night as she coped with her husband beating her each afternoon, with her house falling apart, and with her daughter forced to live with an aunt because Saima didn’t have enough food to feed her. People made fun of Saima. In addition to her husband, her brother-in-law also beat her. Without a grandson, her mother-in-law encouraged her son to find a new wife. After the story got worse, it did get better. Saima signed up with the Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that gave her a loan and helped teach her how to start her own business making beautiful embroidered cloth. She got her daughter back, she paid off her husband’s debts, and now she has members of thirty families working for her, including her husband.

How can we, in Kristof and WuDunn’s words, take the “female half ” of the population into the world’s economy? How can we give them all the same opportunities, the same abilities as the “male half ” of the world’s population?

Let’s look at how some people are doing it:

PAYING RENT FOR LIVING ON THIS EARTH

As a social justice activist who starts programs focused on literacy, closing the achievement gap, and issues of race, Karen Kalish believes this: To whom much is given, much is required.

Karen is the founder of The Teacher Home Visit Program in St. Louis, Missouri. On its surface, the program is simply designed to introduce teachers to the parents/guardians of their students in their home environment, but it does much more than that. The program could be the missing link for a successful education. It fulfills Karen’s passion to create a different future for the low-income children in under-performing schools, to end the cycle of poverty, and to level the playing field for African-American children.

When I asked Karen why she had such a passion for inner-city students, she said she is not sure. She feels that doing for others is “the rent we pay for living on this earth.”

The education system is broken, Karen says. About 50 percent of the inner-city students drop out of schools. If they do graduate, they typically have an eighth grade reading level. The missing link, according to Karen: Parent/guardian involvement. When Karen sees a problem, she gets two or three allies, rolls up her sleeves, and gets to work finding a solution.

The result: Children who have home visits have higher grades and test scores, better discipline, better attendance, better homework completion rates, and better attitudes toward education.

Nine-year-old Vincent described the impact of having his teachers come to his house: “I’m a better person now because they came over. I now have goals in my life and I have gone from getting Fs to Bs.”

Karen “thinks big.” She has discovered an opportunity to help a great number of students to be workplace ready or college ready when they graduate from high school. Can you image if the Teacher Home Visit Program was required in every school in the nation? What an impact Karen’s program would have on the world.

MENTORS CHANGE LIVES

A mentor changed her life, and now Erin Slater is changing the lives of others. Erin is CEO of College Mentors for Kids, a nonprofit organization that pairs kids in grades 1-8 with college student mentors who expose them to the opportunities that can come with higher education.

Erin lost her mother in a car accident when she was five. Her dad passed away when she was sixteen. By the time she finally graduated from high school (a little late, she would admit), she was a mess. Purdue University rejected her because of her grades. Her life was in shambles.

She began waiting tables at a restaurant and thought that maybe she would own a restaurant one day. And then a woman who had been a mentor in the College Mentors for Kids program came into her life. She convinced Erin to think about getting into school again. Erin went to a community college to complete the basic courses. She reapplied to Purdue, and this time, she got in.

During the mentoring program, the kids learn all about college buildings, living at school, professors, majors, and diplomas. They explore what they want to be and what they need to do to get into college—all of this by the time they graduate from the eighth grade. The result: They constantly talk about going to college, they see themselves as college students, they want to be like their mentors, and they have a different attitude about going to school.

The mentors themselves become rising leaders in the program and on campus. Stephanie, one mentor who was thinking about dropping out of college, decided to stay. How could she tell her buddies to go to college when she was not setting an example herself? Many become education majors, wanting to take their newfound teaching skills even further. Some join Teach for America, a program that enlists future leaders to be teachers for two years in the highest-need schools around the country.

Erin is “thinking big” about expanding the program because she knows the impact of College Mentors on the kids, the parents/guardians, their families, and their communities to a future they might never have known. Others, like Martha Stewart, know the difference that Erin is making. Erin was recently the winner of Martha Stewart’s 2009 Dreamers into Doers award.

COLLEGE PREPARATION FOR WOMEN, BY WOMEN

There’s a particular part of our declining education system that is perhaps the most troubling. Educators and policy makers refer to it as STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Simply put, our young people are not graduating with the STEM skills necessary to be the next generation of inventors, creators, and groundbreaking scientists—the next leaders of the twenty-first century.

In 2000, Joan Hall helped create a public charter school, the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School (YWLCS) in Chicago. To Joan, it was her answer to preparing under-served female students to graduate from high school, excel in college, and lead productive and fulfilling lives. She has found an educational model for these young girls to say, “It’s cool to be smart.” The students, who are in grades 7-12, embark on a rigorous college preparation curriculum based on science, math, and technology. By 2009, over 90 percent of the class graduated and over 85 percent were accepted to college.

When La Shenna Clark was in the seventh grade, her teacher told her about YWLCS. With her mother, La Shenna met with Joan. She fell in love with the school and its mission and vision. She was hooked. With her mom and founder Joan in her corner, La Shenna discovered the doors to go through to excel and expand her options, and she went to college. After a difficult freshman year, La Shenna was really pleased with herself. “I even graduated on time (four years),” she told me. She is a determined young woman and is now studying to get a graduate degree in marriage and family counseling. What makes the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School so special? With roughly fifty girls in each class in grades 7-12, students and their parents learn two things very quickly: They learn to believe in themselves, and they learn the value of hard work.

LAUNCHING TOMORROW’S LEADERS

Meet Dr. France Córdova, president of Purdue University.

In 1969, the world was watching Neil Armstrong (a Purdue graduate) take his first steps onto the moon. Among those glued to their television was France Córdova, a newly-minted Stanford University graduate with an English degree. She was inspired by the nation’s response to Sputnik and the race to put a man on the moon—so much so, that she changed her career path and earned a PhD in physics. She spent many years researching astrophysics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, became the first female chief scientist at NASA, and eventually was selected as the first woman president of Purdue University.

Dr. Córdova is the oldest of twelve children and was born in Paris, France. “When I went to school, teachers felt certain studies—like physics—were only for boys,” she told me. “Girls didn’t go to graduate school. And, if you went to college, you got married afterwards. In fact, my mother told me the most important degree to earn in college was an ‘Mrs.’ degree!”

Dr. Córdova works directly with her students to enhance their academic excellence and leadership potential. She encourages them to become leaders from the moment they step onto campus as freshmen. She particularly wants to attract more students into careers in science and engineering, believing that it is such fields that can keep our nation innovative and competitive globally.

Dr. Córdova wants students to develop their math and science skills early, so she has encouraged Purdue’s interest in providing more qualified science and math teachers in the K-12 classrooms. To support this focus, Purdue is a part of the Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellow Program, which will send specially trained math and science teachers into Indiana rural schools to strengthen STEM instruction. Dr. Córdova hopes this will increase the pipeline of students interested and prepared in math and science.

With her background as a scientist, Dr. Córdova is also passionate about increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities in the STEM disciplines. She wants them to be prepared for what she knows personally to be exciting careers—as professors, university administrators, government advisors, and policy leaders—and be prepared to impact critical issues like education, energy, the environment, health, and security.

Dr. Córdova has certainly been one of those “change agents” for women—in fact, for all students—with her focus on “Launching Tomorrow’s Leaders.”

CREATING IMPACTFUL EXPERIENCES

Speaking of launches, another important person we all know as the first American woman in space is Sally Ride. Did you know she left college to pursue a professional career in tennis? When tennis didn’t work out as planned, she went back to Stanford University and earned several degrees, including a postdoctorate in astrophysics.

As a result, Dr. Ride had a successful career as an astronaut and helped change the opportunities for women in the field of aerospace. Now, she is trying to influence even more young girls and get them excited about science. Dr. Ride provides them the opportunity to experience science personally at her Sally Ride Science Camps.

When she was in the eighth grade in Indianapolis, Reedi Garrett attended a Sally Ride-sponsored camp at Stanford University. She told me it was a life-changing experience. When Reedi went to the camp, it was her first plane ride and her first trip to California. She was away from home for the first time, living on a college campus. Once at camp, she spent the days doing hands-on experiments. She particularly remembers the “build your dream home” project. The assignment was to create a blueprint and then build a house with construction paper, wooden sticks, and glue. In reflecting on this later, she found she liked the “hands-on” part of what she later would discover to be a simple form of engineering.

The camp wasn’t all about engineering and science. There was the talent show that helped Reedi get comfortable with some of the girls and step out of her normal comfort zone. And then there was the nature walk at night where she had to walk a small section by herself. She felt that if she could walk by herself in California in the dark woods, she could do anything.

Meg Whitman, then the CEO of eBay, also talked to the girls about the importance of being a leader and described her experiences running the giant Internet auction site. Lastly, Reedi felt very special and important when she saw Sally Ride and received a signed picture.

What was the result of that week? Reedi graduated from high school and went on to study mechanical engineering technology at Purdue. By the time she was a junior, she had many work experiences and had already accepted an offer of employment for a job she will start after graduation.

With her camp, Dr. Ride is doing her part to turn the tide and to increase the number of young girls like Reedi who are studying STEM-related courses...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Section One: The New Math
• Section Two: The Pioneers
• Section Three: Change is Happening
• Section Four: Now It’s Your Turn
• Guide To Further Reading
• Acknowledgments