Monday, October 08, 2007

Women and Power, part 1, Newsweek, Oct 15, 07

My Journey to the Top
These 11 women came from many different backgrounds, but they all had big dreams. The path to power meant facing obstacles and their biggest fears.
Peter Yang for Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21162321/site/newsweek/


Women & Power

Do Women Lead Differently Than Men?
My Journey to the Top
Now This Is Woman's Work
An Authentic Life
'You Do What You Have to Do'

What I Learned
Live Talk: Gov. Janet Napolitano on Leadership
Women Leaders' Paths to Power
Arianna Huffington
Julie Greenwald
Andrea Wong
Rachel Roy
Kyra Sedgwick
Lucy Jones
Shirley Franklin
Lorena Ochoa
Rachael Ray
Shonda Rhimes
Elaine Pagels
Women Leaders on Overcoming Obstacles
Amy Gutmann
Janet Murguia
Donna Orender
Ethel Person
Liz Cheney
Betsy Myers
Mich Mathews
Mara Brock Akil
Agnes Gund
Swanee Hunt
Sherry Lansing

Newsweek

Oct. 15, 2007 issue - Arianna Huffington
Cofounder and editor in chief, The Huffington Post

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident—all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.


In my case, I think I may have had an easier time dealing with this fear because my first taste of leadership came in a situation in which I was a blissfully ignorant outsider. It was in college, when I became president of the Cambridge Union debating society. Since I had grown up in Greece, I had never heard of the Cambridge Union or the Oxford Union and didn't know about their place in English culture, so I wasn't weighed down with the kinds of overwhelming notions that may have stopped British girls from even thinking about trying for such a position.

The same thing happened when my first book, "The Female Woman," came out. I was 23 and my U.S. publisher, Random House, flew me from London to New York. They handed me my schedule, and my first interview was with Barbara Walters on the "Today" show. This didn't faze me since I had no idea who Barbara Walters was, and had never heard of the "Today" show. So I was less nervous than if I had been on a local show in Athens that my family and classmates could have watched.

In this way, it was a blessing that I started my career outside my home environment. It had its own problems in that I was ridiculed for my accent and was demeaned as someone who spoke in a funny way. But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people's judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize.

From one perspective, it might look like I've had a number of careers. But the heart of it has always been communicating, whether it's communicating through books, through columns, and now through the Huffington Post. A big part of my personal evolution has come from responding to the spirit of our times, responding to the way our world is changing. So when I first fell in love with what was happening online it was when I recognized its power to empower people who might otherwise be locked out of the national conversation. I was struck by how often, when I asked women to blog for the Huffington Post, they had a hard time trusting that what they had to say was worthwhile, even established writers.

I don't think that anything I've done in my life would have been possible without my mother. She gave me what I am hoping to be able to give my daughters, which is a sense that I could aim for the stars combined with the knowledge that if I didn't reach them, she wouldn't love me any less. She helped me understand that failure was part of any life. So often, I think, we as women stop ourselves from trying because we don't want to risk failing. We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

My mother gave me that safe place, that sense that she would be there no matter what happened, whether I succeeded or failed. When I saw a picture of Cambridge in a magazine and I said I wanted to go there, everybody else in my life, including my father, said it was ridiculous. But my mother found out that I could apply for a scholarship and she even found some cheap tickets so we could go to England and see Cambridge in person. It was a perfect example of what we now call visualization. Visualize that you are going to Cambridge! It was a long flight to London and it rained the whole time we were in Cambridge. We didn't see any school officials or anything. We just walked and imagined me being there. Three years later, I got in and got a scholarship.

My greatest wish is for my daughters to discover their passion, whatever it is. It could be cooking or politics or art or anything. My oldest daughter just finished an internship with Sen. Harry Reid. Last summer, she did an internship at Vanity Fair. I won't pretend that it's not exciting to see your daughter being excited by the same things that excite you. But, at the same time, it's very important for them to feel the freedom to be excited by things that are not exciting to me. I will share that excitement.

Women are at the next stage of our evolution. In the early '70 s, in many circles, a woman was thought not to have value unless her life included a big career. Thankfully this has evolved to the point where we are now respecting a wider range of choices women can make.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, "If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others?" I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.