Category: Career
Life Lessons from NFL Official #53 (the Only One Who Wears Mascara)
Many female firsts are lifetime dreams come true. But some are more a matter of chance, the happenstance of finding something you’re good at when barriers are coming down.
The latter was the case for Sarah Thomas, the first woman to be an NFL official. “I was working as a paralegal when my older brother said one day that he was going to a football officials’ meeting,” she recalls. “I thought it could be a way to give back to organized sports—I’d played basketball in college—while earning some extra cash.”
Immediately, she was enthralled. “It’s actually funny, because as an athlete, I hated the officials and they hated me,” Thomas says. “But I fell in love with studying the rulebook. It’s fascinating.” Read More
How She Got There: Micho Spring’s Path to Becoming Chair of Global Corporate Practice and New England for Weber Shandwick
Take a young woman coming of age in the 60s, when many careers were closed to her gender. Mix in political awareness from having fled communist Cuba as a child and add courage and flexibility from forging a new life with her family in New York. What you get: a college dropout, a 31-year-old deputy mayor of Boston, a top executive at one of the largest communications firms in the world—as well as a Massachusetts Conference for Women Board member.
In other words, you get Micho Spring, whose name ought to be under “maverick” in the thesaurus. Be inspired by the most unconventional career path of Weber Shandwick’s chair of global corporate practice and New England and the lessons she learned along the way: Read More
How Women Can Get Ahead in Technology
What’s really holding women back in technology? You may have read about the “pipeline problem”—girls don’t study science, technology, engineering or math in equal numbers to boys—but that’s a red herring, says Gina Helfrich, founder and organizer of Feminist Hack ATX.
“The biggest obstacle, in my opinion, is poor retention numbers,” Helfrich says. “Research shows that more than half of women in technology leave the field by mid-career.” Read More
Three Ways Women Hold Themselves Back
Fifteen years ago, Trudy Bourgeois resigned from her vice president job managing a $3 billion business unit—and walked away from a healthy six-figure salary, country club memberships, first class plane tickets to everywhere for her husband and herself and much, much more. “When I told my mom about my decision, she started to cry,” Bourgeois recalls. “She asked if she needed to get the sisters together to pray. I was living the dream for a lot of people.” Read More
When Bad Bosses Happen to Good People
If you’ve never had a bad boss, you must have spent your career…self-employed! Unfortunately, managers who are incompetent or otherwise awful are a fact of working life. Indeed, a whopping 568 of you responded to our call for bad boss stories and the lessons you learned from the experience. Read these cringe-worthy tales—and commiserate.
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So You Want to Job Share?
By Susan Lovegren, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Juniper Networks
Flexible work options. Choices about where, when and how to work are recurring themes in many of the “future of work” studies. While it’s been many years since I had a job share, I remember how flexibility was key to my ability to stay in the workforce and keep my sanity.
This resurfaced for me recently at Juniper Networks when we announced new maternity and paternity benefits and amplified our policies related to flexible work options, including job sharing. Read More
Glamour’s Cindi Leive on Courage, Confidence and What Mirror Selfies Are Good for
To talk to Cindi Leive about careers is to wish Glamour’s editor in chief were your boss—if not your best friend. She’s not just warm, funny and smart. She also telegraphs a big heart, the vibe that she cares and wants to help—women in general and those she personally knows.
It’s partly Leive’s candidness that conveys this generous spirit. Case in point: she freely admits that the secret to her confidence when she was 32 and at her first helm (at Self) was, “I didn’t know what I didn’t know!” Read More
The Very Best Career Advice
Over the past year, we asked past and future speakers at our conferences in Austin, Boston, Philadelphia and Silicon Valley for the best work or life advice they’ve ever received or given. Here’s the best of their best answers. Read More
Lessons from Off the Beaten (Career) Path
Borrowing clothes to put on models for photo shoots—in this behind-the-scenes-reality-TV-show world, we all know that’s what a stylist does. But back when Kemal Harris was quitting her day job to become a stylist in her small Canadian town, it was a far-fetched idea rather than an actual job description. “My parents didn’t understand it. They asked, ‘Are you making the clothes?’” recalls Harris, laughing. “They thought I was crazy.” Read More