A Message From The Creator

“If you focus on success, you’ll have stress. But if you pursue excellence, success will be guaranteed.” 
― Deepak Chopra

Inspirational Woman Of The Day

Nancy Brinker

Nancy G. Brinker ignited the global breast cancer movement 27 years ago by promising her sister, Susan G. Komen, who died at age 36 of the disease, that she would put an end to the shame, pain, fear and hopelessness caused by breast cancer. 

In 1982, Ambassador Brinker with a handful of dedicated friends founded Susan G. Komen for the Cure in her sister’s memory. At that time, there was an enormous stigma around breast cancer—newspaper editors told her they would not print the words “breast cancer,” no one talked openly about the disease, and there were few, if any, support groups. Few treatment options existed for breast cancer patients and hardly any researchers focused on the disease. Within a few years, Ambassador Brinker, who led a relentless, one-woman breast cancer information and awareness campaign, succeeded in breaching the silence surrounding the disease, fundamentally changing the way it is talked about and treated. Susan G. Komen for the Cure is now the world’s largest grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists fighting to save lives, empower people, ensure quality care for all and energize science to find the cures. 

A year after creating the organization, Ambassador Brinker started the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure®, the most successful fundraising and education event for charity ever created. Additionally, she pioneered cause-related marketing, which has enabled millions more people—from top executives to everyday consumers—to join the fight against breast cancer. Her unwavering advocacy was instrumental in the development of many new treatment options and a higher quality of life for patients diagnosed with breast cancer as well as long-term survivors. To date, Komen for the Cure has played a role in every major advance in breast cancer and is now the world’s largest source of nonprofit funds dedicated to the fight against breast cancer.

Ambassador Brinker’s determination to create a world without breast cancer is matched by her passion for enlisting every segment of society to participate in the elimination of this disease. She continues her mission to ensure that everyone, from sitting United States presidents and members of Congress, to top global medical experts and social leaders, understands and addresses the heavy toll breast cancer takes on our society, our families, our economy and our future. An outspoken champion of all people with breast cancer as well as those who are at risk for developing the disease, Ambassador Brinker takes her cause and her passion all over the world, seeking the fresh input and international partnerships essential to ending breast cancer forever.

Globally known as a change agent, Ambassador Brinker was included in TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2008. She served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Hungary from 2001-2003 and most recently served as U.S. Chief of Protocol from 2007-2008 where she was responsible for coordinating ceremonial events for visiting heads of state as well as overseeing all protocol matters for Presidential or Vice Presidential travel abroad. In 2008, President George W. Bush appointed her to The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees.

Ambassador Brinker has received numerous accolades for her work, including the prestigious Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service, the Trumpet Foundation’s President’s Award, the Independent Women’s Forum Barbara K. Olson Woman of Valor Award, the Champions of Excellence Award presented by the Centers for Disease Control, the Forbes Trailblazer Award, Ladies Home Journal’s 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century and Biography Magazine’s 25 Most Powerful Women in America.

Women In The News

Women making a difference

Ian Munro

March 8, 2012

Today  the world is reminded of the gap between the ideal of gender equality and the realities that many women still experience in their working and domestic lives.  Fortunately, women here and in neighbouring countries are striving to achieve that ideal.

Jill Walsh businesswoman, Melbourne

SO MUCH has changed, and yet so much remains the same. Around the time Germaine Greer was becoming a household name, Jill Walsh was making her way in a world so devoid of role models for women in business that she could not imagine actually running a business herself.

She was, in her words, ”self-levelling” – working to a set of artificially diminished expectations for lack of evidence of what might be possible. ”At that point I did not know one woman manager,” she says.

But times have changed and Walsh is now general manager of ARM Group, the heavy engineering consortium that is about to start building Melbourne’s new generation of trams. The group also built Victoria’s regional trains for V/Line.

”It was very difficult to picture yourself managing a business. You just really aspired to having a management role at some level.

”The other thing that stands out from that time is sexual harassment, which was rampant in the workplace, and there was literally no [method of] appeal. Even reasonably enlightened managers thought you should laugh it off and take it as a compliment.”

It was a revelation when, in her mid-20s, she joined Lawford’s Furniture where women held management roles in advertising and purchasing. ”David Lawford was a very enlightened boss. I was amazed there. I loved the confidence those women had and they inspired me to be more lateral thinking.”

Walsh says that these days women in business are afforded more confidence; there is a more natural acceptance of them as managers, and less of the ”controlling put-downs … the small ways that you were made to feel inadequate, such as the assumed inability of women to follow a technical conversation”.

What remains the same, however, is the relative scarcity of women in senior roles in heavy manufacturing, particularly rail transport. There are women engineers, or at least a few, but none working at Walsh’s level. The challenge she says is to see young women pursue an education in areas traditionally closed off to them. It is one thing to be accepted as a lawyer or doctor, but engineering is something else entirely.

”In my role, no, I don’t know of another woman. There are women in engineering, but not a lot of women in rail. In certain types of engineering, there are just not the women graduates coming through. I don’t think we do enough in manufacturing at that level to involve women. The travel associated with a lot of roles makes it difficult when you have children and responsibilities,” she says.

”The downside of being a woman, and an older woman, in management is that there is far more pressure on a person to stay young than there is on a man. Age is not respected. There is certainly no perception that there’s a getting of wisdom as you get older.

”On the plus side, as a woman you get consideration and 90 per cent of the time you would not cop abuse of the same intensity [as a man would] when things go wrong. You get appreciation because you bring a different perspective to a meeting. I have never sat down and analysed the way forward for women in industry … I think being a woman has worked more in my favour than against.”

As well as the restrictions concerning family responsibilities, Walsh is also conscious of male resentment in response to programs that seek to impose quotas on women’s representation. ”Men resent it and I resent it,” she says. ”I want to be in positions because I am good at what I do, not because I am a woman and I meet a quota.”

Inspiration Of Motherhood

By Abha Bhattarai, Published: May 20

 

 

Company: PricewaterhouseCoopers.

 

Location: Tysons Corner.

Number of employees: 2,260 locally; 35,000 nationally.

 

It may not be as difficult as having the baby, but returning to work after maternity leave is no picnic either, said Jennifer Allyn, a managing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“The critical moment is the transition back to work,” she said. “The first weeks back are very tough — you’re emotional and you’re tired because, as we all know, babies don’t sleep.”

About four years ago, the accounting firm created Mentor Moms, a program that pairs pregnant employees with working mothers, to help ease that transition.

“We have a lot of role models here, but it can be hard to make connections in a large, decentralized firm,” Allyn said, “We felt like women needed someone to talk to.”

 

The London-based firm also allows parents — both mothers and fathers — to leave the company for as many as five years to be with their children. Employees are assigned an internal mentor to correspond with, and offered annual training so they can stay up-to-date on their licenses and credentials.

“We want our employees to know that they can have the best of both worlds: Parenthood and a career,” Allyn said, adding that between 600 and 700 women at the company take maternity leave every year.

Employees in the Mentor Moms program can choose their mentors from an internal database that includes photos and biographies of about 400 volunteers. Participants meet with their mentors before their maternity leave to discuss how they’d like to keep in touch during their absence.

“Being a new mom is a very personal experience,” said Stephanie Wolf, a manager at the company’s Tysons Corner office who also serves as a Mentor Mom. “Some might want to chat online every week, or talk by phone every month. Others might want to meet in person.”

There are certain issues Wolf says she regularly addresses: the logistics of nursing at work, creating a flexible work schedule and letting go of the guilt of leaving your baby.

“It’s about knowing when to be flexible and when to push harder,” Wolf said. “I mean, what’s the point of having kids if you don’t ever see them?”