More than a decade ago, Gloria Feldt had a question she couldn’t figure out the answer to: Why hadn’t women reached parity in leadership?
Despite making up roughly half the workforce and earning more than half the college degrees, Feldt says women had been stuck at comprising about 18% of leadership positions across all sectors for two decades.
So Feldt, an author and former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, decided to find answers to that question. That led her to co-found a group called Take the Lead around 11 years ago, which had the goal of reaching leadership parity by 2025.
Feldt joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
GLORIA FELDT: I was teaching a course at Arizona State University called Women, Power and Leadership, which I had made up, and that gave me a really good opportunity to do some research and try to figure out why this was happening. And as I dug into the research, I found that it said things like, well, women just have less ambition than men. And I thought, that is not it. There's something else going on.
And the more I really looked into it, I found that there are culturally learned ideas about power and intentionality that are inculcated very differently between boys and girls, men and women. Furthermore, women would often have a very negative attitude toward power, because the traditional narrative of power was fighting wars, the assumption of scarce resources, women bore the brunt of the most negative aspects of that kind of power. And why would they want it?
So I found that by simply helping women shift how they thought about power from that oppressive idea of power over to a generative idea, innovative, creative idea of power to the power to make your life better, your family's life better, the community, the world, whatever you wanted to do and to understand, there is no limit to there's no finite pie of the resources that matter now.
MARK BRODIE: Eleven years ago, your goal, as you said, was to have more women in leadership positions across various sectors by 2025. How much progress did you make?
FELDT: Well, we didn't do it by 2025. Well, that was a very ambitious stake in the ground, and we knew it at the time. But I'm a great believer that if you don't put an accountable stake in the ground, you will not get anywhere.
BRODIE: You need a goal, even if you don't know if you can actually hit it.
FELDT: And so, you know, so we didn't make it by 2025 but we are pushing on to 30% so that's not bad, that's not bad progress, that's almost doubling. And I truly believe that we are hitting critical mass now, and that we're at a place where we can move much farther, much faster, for several reasons.
Number one, companies have invested a lot in their female employees. Companies need female talent. Women buy, women's purchasing power is phenomenal. So there are so many reasons why I think we can move farther, faster. And I don't know exactly what that end date will be, but I think it will happen.
BRODIE: Are there particular sectors where you've seen more success than others?
FELDT: Yes, I've seen a lot of success in well, there's been a lot of success in journalism, for example. So that's one area. There has been some change in the medical field. Women are now over 50% of the medical school students, and so you're seeing vast changes in medicine. You're seeing changes in the political world. Where, when I started this, Congress was at that 18% mark, now it is also about 28%.
And so there are many different places that are small potatoes, progress. But when I started, women were maybe 3% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Now, they are over 10%. So you know, you take your progress where you can.
BRODIE: Yeah, what are you seeing in terms of as more and more women are getting the opportunity to have these leadership positions? What are you seeing in terms of pay equity? Because I know that's another big issue. There's a film coming out about Lilly Ledbetter, who was really a pioneer in that area.
FELDT: Well, thank you for mentioning Lily, because she is one of my heroes. So Lily was quite a fighter for equal pay, because she does. She discovered, after working for Goodyear Tire and Rubber for 30 years, that she had been being paid 30% less than her male colleagues.
BRODIE: Yeah.
FELDT: In the same job, with the same experience. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill that Barack Obama signed into law when he became president, and Lilly never stopped fighting for equal pay. And it has, it has gotten better, but it's still not there. Women are still paid about 18% less for the same job with the same experience.
BRODIE: Does that include leadership positions also?
FELDT: That includes everything across the board.
BRODIE: OK.
FELDT: Now, some of it is built-in bias, because the data shows that men are rewarded based on potential. Women are rewarded based on performance that they can already validate. And a big part of what we try to do at Take the Lead is help women know how to first of all, know their value, claim their value, and how to ask. And when women do that, they have much more success in getting their fair pay.
BRODIE: I want to ask you about what you have seen over the last 11 years since you started Take The Lead, sort of in a societal and to an extent political sense. Like in 2014 I'm sure you could not have forecast that Donald Trump would be president, for example, twice. You maybe couldn't have forecast that there would have been such an increase in, for example, DEI programs that really tried to, in part, help promote programs specifically for women and other traditionally underrepresented communities.
Given where we are right now in 2025, I'm curious what you see going forward, with a lot of these programs going away and coming under fire. And at the same time, you know, President Trump does have several women in leadership positions in his administration.
FELDT: I've had the wonderful experience of seeing that history goes up and down. And so, this is not the first time that we have had setbacks. This is not the, you know, this is these are, these are things that ebb and flow and go backwards and forwards. And people need to understand that that happens, but it doesn't just happen. People make these things happen. And so, we cannot not be engaged and involved in our professions, in our community life. We cannot not be involved. This is of the utmost importance. Whatever your position is, is it really important to be an engaged citizen.
No, I couldn't have predicted this, but I could have predicted something would happen. And the last book that I wrote is called "Intentioning," which is a word I made up because I wanted intention to be a verb, or an active verb. It's "Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone's) Good."
Well, one of the things I say in the book is there's always going to be something, it may not be a pandemic. There's going to be something that's going to create a disruption. So the point is to take that disruption, take the energy of it and use it to propel yourself forward. And that is the mindset that I teach women to have. Take that energy, turn it into something positive. How will you do that? Well, people are paying attention right now, so that's your opportunity to state your case.
BRODIE: So in that sense, then I wonder if you would consider a time like this maybe more important to the causes that you're promoting than maybe even the time in 2014, when you started this operation?
FELDT: I absolutely think that's correct, but it's not logical. It's not instinctive for people to think that way. You know, instinctively we back off. Instinctively, you see people wanting to resist. Well, I say resistance is futile. You have to set the agenda yourself. You have to have the vision of where you want to go and articulate that and not be afraid to do that.
