The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination.
Interpretation
The lack of women in leadership roles is primarily caused by discrimination in society and the workplace.
This quote highlights the systemic barriers that women face in achieving leadership positions, attributing their underrepresentation to discrimination both in social contexts and professional environments. It suggests that addressing these biases is crucial for empowering women and enabling their advancement in leadership roles.
In practice
In a speech about gender equality in the workplace.
The only difference between men and women in science is that the women have the babies. This makes it more difficult for women in science but should not be seen as a barrier, for it is merely another challenge to be overcome.
We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home.
We bequeath to you, the next generation, our knowledge but also our problems. While we still live, let us join hands, hearts and minds to work together for their solution so that your world will be better than ours and the world of your children even better.
I feel it is now my duty to speak to young women, to encourage them to have careers and, particularly, careers in science.
I wasn't handed college or graduate school or anything else on a silver platter. I had to work very hard, but I did it because I wanted to. That's the real key to happiness. I think unhappy people are those who feel that circumstances are forcing them into a pattern. Happy people are not slaves to the system.
They told me that, as a woman, I'd never get into graduate school in physics, so they got me a job as a secretary at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and promised that, if I were a good girl, I would take courses there.
Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.
If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.
Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles.
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.
A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, 'If you don't know how to make the right decision, you're not a director.'
I want to stand up for people who look like me and feel like they don't have a voice. And I'm lucky enough that some people in the world care about what I have to say. So I try to make sure that I say it and say in a correct way, or in a way that people understand.
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