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As I pointed out in my last blog, the recent Harvard Business Review article, Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers, resonated with me. The strategies suggested by Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely, and Deborah Kolb are very much in sync with what we’ve been doing at WOMEN Unlimited, Inc. for nearly 20 years. In this blog, I’m…

In these next two blogs, I’m going to use Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers by Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely and Deborah Kolb, an article which appeared in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, as a springboard for sharing my perspective on barriers facing women in organizations. [click here for original article] In this…

Why take risks?  That’s a question many corporate women ask themselves, especially women who have attained a modicum of success. In their minds, risk taking can upset the apple cart and begin a downward spiral that undoes what they’ve worked so hard to achieve. Not so.  This is the reality: When you ignore an opportunity…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself: “Why do women shy away from job-related risk taking?” As a gender, women are not innately risk-averse. We willingly take risks that we perceive will improve our personal lot. We plunge into the unknown, getting into relationships and marriages—or out of them. To keep our…

In the last blog, I talked about the importance of forging corporate relationships, why it can be hard for women to do and offered specific tips from my interview published in the July 5, 2013 San Francisco Chronicle. In this blog, I’d like to focus on what seems to be an even more difficult challenge for…

As I work with women at all career levels, I spot patterns. Of course, no pattern is universally true, but most are true enough to pass along to career-minded women—either as a strategy to embrace or a pitfall to avoid. One tendency I’ve observed over and over: women are usually great at building strong personal…

We place great emphasis on “developing a personal brand” at our WOMEN Unlimited, Inc. programs. Why? Because, despite the critical importance of personal brands, women are often reluctant to look at themselves that way.  As we’ve seen from research, women tend to shy away from what they view as self-promotion or “tooting their own horn”.…

The debate about single-gender learning environments is an interesting one with many questions circling around it. Are women more likely to speak up when it’s just them?  Will they be more themselves? Learn better? Do better once the training is completed? …Or… Are such environments bubbles sheltering women from the real dual-gender world?  Do they…

On Tuesday, May 21st, WOMEN Unlimited, Inc. hosted a Twitter Chat to discuss how the concepts in Sheryl Sandberg’s runaway bestseller, Lean In, apply to women’s everyday work lives and dovetail with the principles and practices shared in WOMEN Unlimited programs over the past 19 years. A variety of women took the opportunity to tweet…