Entries from February 2010 ↓

The White House Project, a non-profit which aims to put a woman in The White House as President of the United States, has some great insight and advice on women’s relationship with personal finance.

Several different studies by researchers at Pepperdine University, McKinsey & Co., Catalyst and others—here and abroad—have found a strong, positive link between company profits and the number of women in senior positions.

Whether that means female managers elicit better performance—or that successful companies promote more women, it’s hard to say.

All we know is that the link between leadership and finance falls apart for many women when it comes to their personal finances.

Here we are, at the helm of our own lives, and the personal financial outlook for our gender could hardly be more bleak. Women lag behind men in terms of income, personal savings, retirement savings, general financial knowledge. Even now.

The underlying factors are too numerous for this email. But we’d like to draw attention to one that often afflicts female (and some male) leaders, especially in the public sector, where salaries are often sacrificed in the name of some greater good: meaningful work, civic duty, and so on.

Being able to value something above the number of zeros in your salary is wonderful, but not if you end up mired in what money coach Mikelann Valterra calls, “noble poverty.”

When you live in noble poverty, you tend to believe there is some unnamed virtue in not having money—or that Truly Good People shouldn’t want a lot of it. Your mantra could be something like: “I may be struggling, but my life is about more than money.”

The danger occurs when we deny ourselves the opportunity to earn what we need to thrive—and to truly give back to others.

Here’s the bottom line: No one is going to fix financial inequity for women. We have to recognize our own self-worth, ask for higher salaries, become confident investors, and build our own wealth — especially those of us who strive to lead.

Why? Because to be effective female leaders, it’s critical that we:

* Understand and manage systems. Systems enable order and growth, personally and organizationally.
* Be comfortable enough financially to make the choices, or take the risks that will best enable our success.
* Carve new paths away from the cultural patterns that leave millions of women in poverty (not just the noble kind).
* Offer young women and men a new model to emulate.

The email then goes on to encourage women to sign up for a newsletter about personal finance for women, DailyWorth.

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The proposed United States Budget, currently before Congress, includes a little-publicized, no-drama, brilliant piece of funding and legislation.

This is brilliant.

This is long overdue.

Currently, in the United States of America many disability insurance programs do not include pregnancy or birth, nor are they legally required to. Never mind that you’re not medically allowed to work for six to twelve weeks due to the fact that you pushed a human out of your vajayjay or the fact that they cut your stomach open to remove a future tax-payer, before sewing it back up. It’s currently legally allowed for employers to say, “too bad for you new mama.”

This causes unnecessary plunges into poverty for young families, increases the abortion rate, increases gender wage gaps, and discourages people from having children.

The President’s budget proposes a grant program which would cover the start-up costs if a state decides to start a family leave insurance program.

This empowers girls in two ways – first, their mothers and families benefit now by having mothers who are allowed paid leave to give birth to them, care for them, and bond with them during their first months as Citizens of the United States. Second, we as parents and citizens, acknowledge that many of our daughters will take advantage of family leave insurance programs when they themselves begin having children and taking time off work.

It is our obligation to our children to make it easier for our daughters to pursue both work and family.

Societies that value families and value motherhood provide the necessary support to mothers and families.

To write your legislator to encourage this portion of the bill be included in the final budget please click over to Momsrising.org. It takes two minutes to change the work/life balance of current and future generations of new moms and young families.

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Oprah’s discussion with sex offenders got me thinking.

Hopefully it had this effect on you.

Stranger Danger is . . . well, it’s very unlikely harm comes from a stranger. In fact less than 10% of all rape, molestation and battery of girls and women comes from a stranger.

So how do parents walk the fine line between protecting their children from friends and family without inhibiting all close relationships with men?

Certainly one can see that being hyper-vigilant and suspicious of all male contact will have a damaging effect on girls and their future, appropriate, grown-up relationships.

Still . . . no one wants to risk allowing a perpetrator free access to their daughters just because they have the title uncle, grandpa or cousin.

The weapon of choice for all four men on the Oprah show was Love Distortion in some form.

If you love me . . . you’ll let me touch, lick or have sex with you.

If you love me . . . you won’t tell.

I love you more than your parents. No one understands or loves you like I do.

I love you so much that I want to do these “loving” things with you.

When it comes down to it this is my primary complaint with the Disney Princess Culture and the Twilight Series. They distort what love looks like, what it should feel like, they misrepresent the cues and signals girls should be looking for.

Take Ariel who silences herself and gives up her family – she’s the perfect statutory rape victim really. She’s the ultimate battered girlfriend. Isolation is a perpetrator’s method and silencing her is how he gets her to give up her own power.

Or Belle. She’s kidnapped and falls in love with her own abuser. Turns him into a prince even. Um, held against your will should not be confused as a signal of “love,” but a signal of abuse. Yet, by three or four girls are inundated with the idea that kidnapping could be a very romantic scenario. Is it really a mystery why girls get confused when someone they love or someone who professes to love them while harming them touches them inappropriately? The promise of The Beast turn Prince is what every battered girlfriend and wife believes in.

Then there’s Edward of the Twilight series, who’s main desire is to destroy Belle. It’s his instinct, he can’t help it just like batterers claim.. All the erotic scenes describe in great detail how it would feel to her and to him for him to crush her fragile lovely body, for him to drain her of her life’s blood. And it made girls and women hot. We have a whole generation of girls who are now turned on by their own physical destruction and earthly demise. She begs him to kill her and he just won’t do it . . until what? Book three or four? Plus, that deathly-erotic description in book two about her near-death. Why, I have to ask, is it a turn-on for a guy to want to destroy you? Why are we training daughters to be desperate to give up their lives, futures, relationships with parents and friends, college, future jobs, and children for pretty boys or vampires?

As a survivor of dating violence myself, I can attest that the language of a violent boyfriend, and the lies I told myself about his behavior, is almost verbatim of the dialogue of Edward the die-worthy vampire and his suicidal girlfriend Bella.

Herstory – Ourstory – feeds the rapists, child molesters, girl friend and wife batterers. The fairy tales we read to our daughters at night groom them to believe in a really distorted and dangerous definition of Love.

When Oprah does a wife-battering episode she is known to say, Love doesn’t hurt. Yet in all the above examples we’ve, as a culture, romanticized a distorted version of love that does hurt. We glamorize the pain, make it romantic and sexualize it until it turns us on.

It would be so much smarter and beneficial to tell our daughters other, healthier things about love. Our sons too – so they don’t get confused and start hurting their girlfriends in a screwed up attempt to be a murderer/protector like Edward or an asshole who promises to change like The Beast.

Just yesterday a group of Junior High boys told me they pantsed a girl and it wasn’t wrong, or sexual assault, because she liked it. Gee, I wonder where boys might get the idea that girls like it when boys hurt them? Could it be our infatuation with the victimization in princess stories and Twilight?

It may seem obvious, but we need to talk to our kids about fundamental things like, What is love? What does it really feel like? How will they really know it’s True Love? What are the cues of boys who truly care about girls? What cues should boys put out when he cares about a girl? When a girl falls in love, what kinds of feelings can she really expect to feel?

1 Corinthians 13:4 describes Love: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

Other translations include: Love isn’t jealous. It doesn’t sing its own praises. It isn’t arrogant.

This is key because many, many abusive boys and men use jealousy and arrogance to put girls on the defensive and make them feel they “deserve” to be beaten or raped. They fly into jealous rages and become arrogantly possessive of their girlfriends, not allowing them to see friends or family.

I would encourage parents to sit down and think about what Love feels like to them. Does it feel like meaningful sacrifice, like methodical work, like a warm bed, like a soft place to land, like a physical rhythm or a shelter from a storm? Does it feel different from sexual arousal, different from primitive adolescent hormones, different from a new infatuation? How is it different? Then talk about it to both sons and daughters.

Love is not Disney. Love is not Twilight. Love is not Gossip Girl.

Do our kids even know that?

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Anyone who has children should watch the two hours of Oprah’s Conversation with Child Molesters.

The molesters are candid and as honest as they know how to be.

It should make parents Fear Less and tune into their Intuition More.

There are four molesters who confess a great deal: one old man who molested a five year old little girl who loved him enough to call him Grandpa, one adult man who used the words “I love you” to rape four teenagers, one boy/man who used his younger cousin’s parental manipulate, molest and rape her for nearly a decade, and one father who fantasized about performing oral sex on his 12-year-old daughter, until he began touching her in her sleep in real life.

The common themes among these molesters were fantasy first. They all said it stemmed from fantasy first. They all used their victim’s love for them and trust in them to manipulate them. They all lied to themselves about what they were doing, making them excellent liars to the girls’ parents.

When Oprah asked one man if he thought about what he had done to his victim he responded poignantly, “I killed who she would have been.”

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An International Violence Against Women Act has been introduced in Congress.

Any country that allows acts of violence and terrorism against its own girls and women is a country that would also commit an act of violence and terrorism against The United States and any other country it deems unacceptable.

Countries that educate girls, economically empower their women and acknowledge a woman’s physical and spiritual autonomy are economically prosperous and more likely to be Internationally peaceful and cooperative.

They are also less likely to be breeding grounds for religious and political extremists, including terrorists. It’s a fact.

Because this is so, the International Violence Against Women Act is not a “women’s issue” it is an International Security Issue.

Whatever we spend to educate girls and women, economically assist women in business development, strongly encourage legal autonomy for women even sanctioning countries that allow acts of violence against females will come back to us a hundred-fold in Peace, International trade, and third-world development and financial independence. Violence against women in much of the world includes: mass rape, throwing acid in girls faces, starving, medically neglecting, sex trafficking, manslaughter by AIDS and other STDs, infanticide, honor killings and forced and coerced abortion.

This must stop now. No more excuses.

Read Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
if you require further evidence that the International Violence Against Women Act is not only a moral imperative, but also the single most effective strategy to beat terrorism around the world.

Read Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Columns for more information about just how dangerous the world is if you’re born a girl. The fact that violence against females translates to terrorism around the world is a central narrative in his work.

Photo from Vital Voices Blog.

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