Feminist Icon Gloria Feldt on Reaching Gender Parity and Leading Like a Woman

New York Times Best-Selling Author and feminist Icon Gloria Feldt was named by Vanity Fair one of “America’s Top 200 Women Leaders, Legends, and Trailblazers,” Glamour’s “Woman of the Year,” a She Knows Media Inspiring Woman, a Women’s eNews 21 Leaders for the 21st century, and receivedthe Women’s Economic Forum Circle of Light award. She is also the former CEO and President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and in 2013, she co-founded Take The Lead, a nonprofit initiative with a goal to propel women to leadership parity by 2025. An ambitious goal, but one I fully support and connect with! 

I was first introduced to Gloria's philosophy and wisdom when I picked up her book No Excuses: Nine Ways Women Can Change How We Think About ,  which contends that the most vexing problems facing women today isn't that doors of opportunity aren't open but that not enough women are walking through them. In her forthcoming book, Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take the Lead for (Everyone’s) Good, she reveals how in the wake of two pandemics that shook our world to its core and revealed deep fault lines in our culture, we can seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity created by massive disruption to build ourselves back stronger with women at the center of the recovery. 

Through the lens of women’s stories, this book delivers a fresh and practical set of leadership tools, skills, and concepts that help women reach their own highest intentions, purposefully creating new norms while guiding institutions to break through the remaining barriers to gender and racial parity—for everyone’s good.   

It comes as no surprise that women flexed their formidable muscles when needed most, representing a disproportionate number of essential workers during the darkest days of the coronavirus global outbreak and leading the charge against racism in the U.S. And abroad, it was female national leaders who reined in infection and death rates in their countries to the lowest levels worldwide. 

But this book is decidedly about the future, taking the leadership lessons learned from this disruption and creating a better world for all through the power of intention.

Feldt not only unveils the next step in advancing gender parity in all spheres of business and life, she also lays out the vital next steps in the overall advancement of our economy and our civilization. 

The Lead Like a Woman framework and the 9 Leadership Intentioning Tools she presents through stories of women who have successfully leveraged them is designed to prepare, develop, inspire, and propel women of all diversities and intersectionalities now so that by 2025 women will have attained their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors of industry and society. 

We simply cannot squander women’s talents when so much hangs in the balance. Women must be at the vanguard of reimagining and constructing a vibrant and sustainable future for us all.  

…and what about men? 

Feldt shows how men can and do partner with women to achieve parity. Too many self-help books remain stuck on the tired question of whether women can have it all, either nudging women to make a grab for the tired old laundry list of goals (motherhood, corner office, thriving sex life, etc.) or accept limitations. Intentioning ditches that obsolete paradigm and shows how to rock the institutions we live and work in so that together we can all lead healthier, happier and more productive lives. 

This fresh, liberating approach to reaching gender parity helps women dream “impossible” dreams and gives them the actionable tools to intention them into reality. 

So I sat down with Gloria to learn more about her approach to intentioning , her leadership program, our relationship with power, and more... 

I wrote a previous book, No Excuses, to explore why women hadn’t reached parity in leadership positions in any sector despite earning the majority of college degrees, the business case that companies with more women in leadership are more profitable, and the fact we had opened doors and changed discriminatory laws. When I found that the biggest barrier was now in our own heads I was shocked. I found women had an ambivalent relationship with power that lowered their intentions for leadership. In that book, I created 9 Leadership Power Tools to help women thrive in the world as it is while changing it to the world they want. I showed them how to change the power paradigm in their thinking from oppressive power over to generative power to. People asked me to teach workshops with those ideas. I did. And I saw women have breakthroughs in their careers because they were able to embrace their power. That shift in the power paradigm is a core differentiator of Take The Lead, the nonprofit organization I cofounded in order to bring the curriculum I had developed to a larger number of women. Take The Lead is more comprehensive than most other programs and it focuses on solutions not problems. I believe it is necessary to put our energy into attaining gender parity in power, pay, and leadership positions or we will keep fighting and losing other battles for women’s rights. 

This is understandable. The implicit and explicit biases women experience can easily cause us to step back and consider ourselves less than worthy. By better understanding power, redefining it, and getting clear about your “power TO what?” we can elevate our level of intention. And with the 9 Leadership Intetioning Tools I provide in Intentioning, women will have what I call the VCA method of intentioning: vision, courage, and action. Then the locus of power is inside of you and you don’t get as deterred from the biases, microaggressions, or other external forces. 

If you wait till you feel 100% confident, you’ll never feel a need to improve or change anything. A little self doubt is the burr under the saddle that makes you want to improve, try something different, solve a problem. 

Gender is a social construct that influences us from the moment of birth. People interact differently based on the gender of the child. While it gets better with each generation, boys are still able to come out of the womb knowing they have full agency over their world; whereas girls are socialized to think first about what other people think of them. They are talked to in terms of their appearance not their strength, and are rewarded for being nice and quiet.  

Ambition is I wish, I want, I hope. It’s necessary fuel. But intention is I will, I am, I see it happening already. It takes the fuel and turns it into action. That action is what I call intentoning. I made up a verb form of intention! 

The two are joined at the head, along with homophobia, antisemitism, and other such prejudices. There are so many intersectionalities espcially between racism and sexism. If women and people of color work together to seek and support a more equitable workplace, it will happen because their talents are needed. 

We are in a time of disruption and a time of rebirth. When there are major disruptions, people and institutions are forced to loosen the boundaries of their thinking and let new ideas in. Innovation and change become survival mechanisms. For example now businesses know flexible work hours and locations (women have been asking for this for years) can be a positive policy that allows people to be as productive as ever while taking care of family responsibilities. And for the first time., child care is being talked about as essential infrastructure. That would be revolutionary. 

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Don't forgt to grab your copy of Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take the Lead for (Everyone’s) Good