Focusing on the ability of women to move from the nurturing care taker of home and family, to the “taking care of business” professional, who understands the importance of community, service and a sound bottom line, is often how articles on women in the work force begin.  However, since our 9-11 reality adjustment, work place, community, volunteering, commerce and “how we do business” is moving into a new paradigm.

Like everyone, especially those of us who were personally impacted at “ground zero,” we have become both introspective and demonstrative. And to varying degrees, frightened.  Do we fight or take flight? Who do we fight and where do we hide? Certainly the metaphor of flying to safety has morphed into a strange new vision of cocooning.

But whatever we do, we cannot retreat or be assuaged into thinking that women should not continue our activism as leaders in business.  If “we” have come so far and influenced business practices, opened careers and opportunities for our daughters, then why was the media coverage focused so totally on men?  Where were women firefighters? Women EMT’s?  Women members of the Bush Team? Women business people? Women doctors? Where were the women survivors?

In the images that flooded my grief, I kept searching the TV news coverage for evidence of women. I expected to see them helping, working, volunteering, searching and sharing their experience. Surely, if the glass ceiling is only a figment of feminist imagination, then there were women business people who survived! Women who helped? Women who are going to rebuild?

Unfortunately, the only images of women I saw repeatedly were the newscasters and the Aphganistan veiled apparitions that represented tyranny and suppression so horrible, that newscasters openly voiced: “How much freedom and opportunity women have in our free society in comparison with …….women who suffer the total absence of mobility and opportunity.” 

Yes, compared with NONE, we have some.  I wonder if women had more influence in our world, in world politics, in world business,  if the “veiled secrets” of the Middle East would still have nothing.

The tradition of women leaders has to be : MORE.  More opportunities, more awareness, more volunteering, more working , and more caring.  Caring about ourselves, our female co-workers, our daughters, our sisters, and the other half of our world population.

So, while I originally thought of this article as a recognition of the strength and determination that women have exercised through volunteering, educating- themselves and others-, serving the community, working hard, achieving, mentoring, investing and  participating, it is apparent that our struggle has merely begun.

As always, women are part of the solution and hopefully, we are half of the solution.  That of course, is what we must continue to do.  Women in leadership roles, and with opportunity, must continue to Care, Serve and Give to the Tradition of FUTURE Women Leaders, so that our global community and our global competency is enjoyed and recognized as half of the whole.

Protecting what we have is meaningless, if we don’t share.  Taking care of others will not be possible, if we don’t take better care of ourselves. Serving the community and the business world has been our history, serving the future must be our legacy.  Opportunities for ourselves are only as valuable as the power it gives us to provide opportunities for others.

Caring, Serving, Giving is how we got here…now we need to get there.

   * Light a candle; the candle symbolizes eternal life.  Our world is in mourning.

Deb Nyberg, Webmistress
Web design, graphics and programming by On Tap Web Development
All Contents and Images copyright © 1995-2008.