Former CEO & President of Planned Parenthood Gloria Feldt Teaches Women How to Take Back Their Power and Their Health
We sat down with the inspiring Gloria Feldt, the Former CEO and President of Planned Parenthood, to discuss the world of working women, burnout, empowerment, and her new book "INTENTIONING: Sex, Power, Pandemics, & How Women Will Take the Lead for (Everyone’s) Good.” In addition to her extensive resume in women’s health, Gloria is also the co-founder of Take The Lead, a nonprofit initiative with a goal to propel women to leadership parity by 2025. Take a listen.
Amy Cohen Epstein: I am very excited to be here with you today Gloria. This is a huge treat for me and I feel honored and just overwhelmed to be able to interview you. I don't even want to try to do your bio because it's enormous, but what I will say is you're one of those women who for so many years now has been at the forefront of helping to empower other women and it's an honor to be speaking with you today.
Gloria Feldt: Oh, my goodness. Thank you very much for that very warm introduction. I'll just say I'm Gloria Feldt, I am co-founder and president of Take The Lead. We are a nonprofit organization with the mission of preparing, developing, inspiring, and propelling women of all diversities and intersectionalities to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions across every sector by 2025. I know that people are always fascinated with the fact that I was CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. I had a 30-year career with the organization; I started out in West Texas in 1974. Writing books was always in my mind. I always thought one of these days I'm going to be an author, one of these days, one of these days, and life kept interfering with that.
At the 30 year mark with PP it seemed like if I was ever going to write those books, I needed to get with it. So I did. But the last one I wrote led me to co-found Take The Lead. I realized that until and unless women do take our fair and equal share of leadership positions, pay and power across every sector we're going to keep fighting the same battles over and over and over again. And that was the precursor for starting Take The Lead and focusing on the larger picture of gender parity and leadership.
Amy Cohen Epstein: Everything, yes. Obviously, as someone in the female healthcare space, I'm incredibly appreciative of the work you do. One of the things I found in what I do is that women have such a difficult time taking charge of their own health and wellness because they put everybody else first. So when we think about taking care of everybody and making sure your kids are okay, your spouse is okay, everyone around you – how do we do that while also getting ourselves to the top of the leadership poll? How do you recommend like, where do you see that fitting in?
Gloria Feldt: Great question. You've really covered a lot of what I found when I did my research for the book, No Excuses, which then led me to write the current new book. When I wrote that book I was obsessed with finding out why women hadn't reached parity in leadership even though we had opened doors, we had changed laws, and we had removed most of these systemic barriers — not that there aren't still some biases and barriers out there, there certainly are.
I don't think either men or women are better at anything; it's really about how we are socialized and there are very, even today, very major differences in how boys and girls men and women are socialized and also rewarded or punished in our society. So let me unpack that a little bit: much of these discrepancies are related to womens’ relationship with power. We have been socialized to take secondary positions, part of that secondary position is you're the caregiver, you're not the cared for….
“There are two things that everyone needs in order to be a full citizen, and one of them is you have to be able to own and control your body, and the other is you have to be able to earn money.”
There are two things that everyone needs in order to be a full citizen, and one of them is you have to be able to own and control your body, and the other is you have to be able to earn money. You have to be able to support yourself. If you have those two things, you then have the ability to not only be a full-fledged citizen, but you also don't have to stay in an abusive relationship, for example. You have the option to have relationships in your life that are nurturing to you so that you aren't always in that position of having to be the secondary person and the person who's only there to take care of other people. So these issues are complex, but they boil down to some very simple things. Everyone should have the opportunity to fulfill their dreams, to have dreams, to be able to give their gifts and their talents to society. And you can't do that if you are not afforded equal citizenship in the sense that I was just talking about.
Amy Cohen Epstein: Where do you think that women may reach new levels in the last decade or two decades that you are proud of, or that you can sit back and say like, "We've done it in this industry, or we've done it in this sector, where are we falling short in other sectors?" Have you seen that? Is that a relevant question?
Gloria Feldt: Yes. I have seen great progress. And what I've seen is that in the last decade, women went from 18% of the top leadership positions to right about 25%. And I really do believe that once you hit that 25% mark, it's easier to double to 50% than it was to have these incremental 1%-at-a-time increases. Now, the pundits say that the pandemic has set women back by at least 10 years. We know for example, that there are twice as many women out of work as men just for starters here. And women are slower getting back into the workplace for many different reasons. Apparently, the world didn't realize that women were employed in most of the lower-paid frontline jobs. And so they were the first to lose their jobs. And their pay was low enough that it didn't make sense for them to try to get back into the workforce when somebody had to be home taking care of the kids and doing home schooling.
“Now in order to bring women back into the workplace, companies have to do things women have been asking for, for years: Family leave, the ability to work flexible hours and flexible locations.”
Pandemics are moments of disruption, enormous disruption. And they are also moments of enormous rebirth. So you have a chance to rethink things. So when people say to me, the pandemic has set women back by 10 years, I say, yes, and this is exactly the kind of disruption that can cause us to rethink how our workplaces are designed. Because now in order to bring women back into the workplace, companies have to do things women have been asking for, for years: Family leave, the ability to work flexible hours and flexible locations. It's clear you can do those things and not only not reduce productivity, but you can even have a better workforce when you're willing to do that. So I think that we can take this moment of opportunity to make it better, to make the workplace more welcoming to families because men too would like to be more involved with their children. We need to take the opportunity to promote things like caregiving as infrastructure.
I mean, I never in my lifetime thought I would hear those two words in the same sentence…
Our economy is based on brains, not brawn. These are resources that are infinite, like human intelligence, and innovation, and creativity, and love, and empathy. I mean, those are the things that we need now more than physical strength. I hope to help women stop thinking about power as being an oppressive power and think about it as a generative, innovative, creative power. If I help you, and you help me; we both have more. Rather than fighting over the crumbs, we're going to get further if we collaborate.
“the business case is totally clear at this point, that companies with more women in their leadership are more profitable in every imaginable way.”
Those are skills that women have learned because they've been survival skills. These are now our superpowers. These are the reasons why companies with more women in their leadership make more money. I mean, the business case is totally clear at this point, that companies with more women in their leadership are more profitable in every imaginable way. So it's up to us as women to leverage that, not to take less. We have to study and assess our power, our worth, our value in the marketplace and ask for it and insist that we get it. And that part of it is not something that somebody else can do for us. Nobody's going to tap you on the shoulder and say, "I think you ought to become the executive vice president."
Women don't ask for as much as men do. And if you want to get to the root of the problem, you want to get to the root of the pay gap. We don't ask for as much. We don't negotiate as strongly for our first compensation, and every other compensation we have is built off of that. That the website, ZipRecruiter crunched about 100,000 job applications information, and they found that women on average asked over $11,000 less for the same job with the same experience as men, the same qualifications. We can start teaching young women from an early age, how to assess their value in the marketplace. We can teach them how to negotiate in a positive way to get paid what they're worth and to get promoted as they are worthy of being promoted.