A Woman's View from The Street 5/15/18

TXWSW, Limitless

Happy Tuesday!
Starting the week with good news, Edward Jones has named Penny Pennington as CEO. Ms. Pennington is the first woman ever to hold the post at a major Wall Street brokerage firm. Let’s hope this is a sign of good things to come! The article can be found here.
From the progress file, apparently an internal survey at Visa last year found that female employees were less satisfied with their jobs than their male counterparts. It seems the firm’s ‘bro’ culture and lack of advancement opportunities were to blame. The CEO called a meeting to hear his female executives’ views and established a women’s advisory group within the company. Kudos to Alfred Kelly for addressing the issue head on. The full article can be found here.
The news from the Cannes film festival included a protest by 82 prominent women in the film industry. The reason behind the specific number of protesters is that since 1946, only 82 movies by female directors have been in contention for prizes. It seems that from 2006 to 2016, 2,066 French directors produced films and of that total only 23% of those directors were women, so much like the VC world, women-led projects are not being financed, green-lit or distributed. The full article can be found here.
Evangelicals are now experiencing their #Me Too moment. Despite that fact that Jesus refused to treat women as inferior, the evangelical Protestant world has been rocked by revelations of sexual abuse and sexism. This is all the more horrifying because this attitude of disesteem towards women has discouraged abuse victims from coming forward to a place that should be a safe haven. The full article can be found here.
Five years ago, a freelance journalist and an MIT researcher analyzed the articles she had written over a year and noted that women were only mentioned 25% of the time, and this author was a woman! “It’s not that the cream has risen to the top and the cream is 100 percent male or 80 percent male,” Susan Hennessey, a national-security expert who organized the Brookings list, told me. “We’re failing to capture talent that exists.” The full article can be found here.
Finally, in honor of Mother’s Day last weekend, a tale about the bane of (almost) every professional woman’s existence – household drudgery. The next article addresses the issue of the lack of balance in most relationships when it comes to domestic duties. The advice from one of male advice columnists: “One of the most despicable tricks of the patriarchy is to peddle the myth that men can’t do more around the house because they weren’t raised doing so. Trace that logic out a bit, and you arrive at a kind of weaponized incompetence: Your husband isn’t good at certain tasks, so he shouldn’t have to do them. No. He should learn how to do them. Negligence as a domestic partner is unacceptable.” Now that is something we can all get behind. The full article can be found here.
We have some terrific events lined up for you in 2018 including our ten-year anniversary celebrations in August! We look forward to seeing you all at an event in 2018! To learn more about our 2018 events, please visit www.txwsw.com Please also scroll to the end of this newsletter to check out some interesting jobs from our network.
To help us celebrate our ten-year anniversary, I would ask each of you to consider corporate sponsorship of TXWSW. Benefits include attendance at our flagship events and recognition for your firm. To learn more, you may find our sponsor information here. Additionally, we would be happy to create a custom sponsorship for you. Please contact Bianca King atdevelopmentdirector@txwsw.com.
Kind regards
Christine

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