It has been a long time since I have attended a USC alumni event and I was curious to see how it would be.  Somehow, I managed to seat myself at the table with the speakers for lunch.  Tara Campbell is the mayor of Yorba Linda (she’s 25 guys), Jennifer Grasso, an LAPD SWAT officer (the first woman to do this EVER), and Heather Rim, the senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer of international infrastructure firm, AECOM (Heather is a fellow Communication Management alumnae and Rebecca Weintraub fan club member).

They are all women with very impressive professional credentials.  What stood out for me was how genuine they all were about mentoring, supporting, and empowering other women.  It’s important! We have all had our run-ins with those women at the top who thought they needed to protect their place by keeping other women out.  Our lovely panelists had too.  It was heartening to hear their commitment to turning around to offer a hand up to the women coming behind them.

Carol Geffner, a professor at the USC Price School gave the keynote.  She presented on her current research project concerning women in executive roles in patriarchal industries.  Her research questions pertained to how women in these roles find and learn to use their authentic voice, especially in male-dominated settings.  Although she is still in data-collection mode, she talked about four attributes that are trending in her early findings: curiosity, self-efficacy, cognitive resilience, and intention.

Leading with curiosity is more about the questions, and less about the answers. This is the inclination to ask, reframe, and re-ask questions until there is a satisfactory answer.  It isn’t about being right, or protecting a decision, but about learning and trying new things until the best possible outcome is achieved.

Self-efficacy is the internal sense of being capable of mastering something.  It is different from self-confidence, not, “I can do that,” but “I can figure that out.”

The ability to externalize and problem solve rather than taking something personally and getting upset is what Carol means by cognitive resilience.  This concept is a major component of Stoic philosophy which I have been reading and thinking about a lot lately (more on that in a future post). For me, employing cognitive resilience is something that I have to consciously practice every day.

And by intention, Carol means keeping an eye on the prize, knowing and not losing site of the end goal.  I think this is the underlying factor in being able to employ the other three tactics because when you are clear about what outcome you are working for, you are more inclined to utilize tools such as cognitive resilience, self-efficacy, and leading with curiosity to continue to work toward achieving your goal.

Then Carol moderated the panel with our esteemed panelists.

These women are all succeeding in arenas where gender parity is notably unbalanced.  The great thing to me was that they weren’t trying to pretend that they didn’t notice or that their gender wasn’t noted in relation to their position by others. I am so glad that it is starting to be ok to have these types of conversations because it does all of us a disservice when women pretend that their gender is a non-issue.

Thank you to all of the speakers for stepping up, speaking up, and turning around to help the women behind you.  Thank you for trailblazing.  It was a privilege to meet you.

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