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MAY FOCUS: ADVOCACY & COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT | ISSUE 3 OF 4 | 6.20.22
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Good morning and happy Monday! We’ve got lots of exciting news and things happening this week. I’ll do my best to sum it all up:
Have a great week!
– Emily Kestel, Fearless editor
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What are barriers to feeling confident that women and young girls currently face?
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Thoughts ahead of Fearless Focus event on confidence
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BY EMILY KESTEL, FEARLESS EDITOR
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From imposter syndrome to harmful effects of social media to social norms we learn as kids, women often find themselves on a constant journey to improving their confidence. Confidence can come in many forms – in our bodies, our intellectual abilities, our ability to try something new, pursuing our goals – and they all affect one another. Confidence plays a role in whether we speak up when our voice isn’t being heard, whether we negotiate our salaries or whether we do something that’s outside our comfort zone.
In our second event of the Fearless Focus series, we’ll talk about how we can empower ourselves or women we know in finding confidence in themselves as they work toward professional and personal goals.
To preview our discussion happening at noon on June 22, we asked our speakers to answer: "What’s one barrier that you continue to see for women and young girls in terms of confidence?"
Here’s what they said.
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Cheltzie Miller-Bailey, assistant director, Center for LGBTQIA+ Student Success, Iowa State University
Socialized norms create significant barriers for women and girls striving to develop confidence. Many of us have been instructed to follow an unwritten, arbitrary and commonly sexist, racist, classist set of rules and behaviors that dictate our choices in appearance, communication and engagement.
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Cyndi Nelson, owner, Hawks Coffee Shop and Gypsy Soul Boutique
Girls and women are programmed from the time they are little to take a back seat. It's something that isn't intentional (most of the time), and women are guilty of doing it to each other as well. We are subconsciously and unintentionally teaching our girls that having a voice, having an opinion, and standing up for yourself isn't something that's tolerated — and then we wonder why they don't feel confident asserting themselves when they get older.
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Beth Shelton, CEO, Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa
When girls and women feel a safe space to be authentically themselves, without expectation, judgment or bias, they thrive in the growth of confidence. One hurdle standing in the way today is the lack of intentional space for that social and emotional connection to one another.
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Gilmara Vila Nova-Mitchell, director of diversity, equity and inclusion, IMT Insurance
A huge challenge I see affecting girls’ confidence is the pressure to be perfect, because girls are constantly comparing themselves to Photoshopped, airbrushed images of perfection from social media. The pressure from unrealistic standards set by social media, in addition to cyber-bullying, have a direct impact on young girls’ happiness and confidence levels.
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JO ALLEN: 'I'm at a place where I love who I am'
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AS TOLD TO EMILY KESTEL, FEARLESS EDITOR
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Photo by Emily Kestel. Illustration by Kate Meyer.
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Jo Allen is a nonbinary entrepreneur who started their photography business, Jovisuals, primarily as a way to help LGBTQ people feel valued, empowered and visible. In 2016, they were diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s Burkitt lymphoma. They live in Des Moines.
The following story has been formatted to be entirely in their own words, and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I had to get the most aggressive chemo that you had to get. I had to drop out of college because every 21 days I would have to go to the hospital and stay there for five or six days for my round of chemo. I did that for nearly six months. I dropped out, went back to UNI that fall for two years and then transferred to Iowa State in 2019.
During cancer, the most important thing to me was my hair. I was so upset about losing my hair. It was down to my belly button. It was losing a part of my identity. It was like a security blanket.
I connected hair to being perceived as a woman. It was a thing that I thought made me attractive and made me look like who I was supposed to be. I was afraid of how I would look attraction-wise. Obviously, with chemo, you don’t look cute, you don’t feel hot. You look like a boiled egg.
I remember one thing my dad said to me at that time. I was crying and I said that I didn’t want to lose my hair. He said, "I’d rather have you alive and here with no hair than you buried with all your hair." At that point I had to say to myself, "It’s simply hair."
After I started my first round of chemo, my favorite nurse told me that I was going to lose my hair in a week. She was right. A week later, all of a sudden I started noticing a decent amount of hair falling out. I had naturally curly hair, so I couldn’t brush it. Because I couldn’t brush it, it had matted up. It had gotten to the point that I had to shave my hair off because it was a clump of hair on the top of my head, and if I were to brush it, I would risk pulling out more of my hair. That week, we got to the hair salon and I got my hair cut. It took 27 minutes. That’s what my ex always said: "I held your hand for 27 minutes while you lost your hair." I was crying. My identity was being taken away from me. I couldn’t hide behind my hair anymore.
Cancer for me was the moment I got to change who I was. There was a big fear of me dying and never fully being honest about who I was. I knew I was gay around the age of 15. By junior and senior year of high school, I was coming out to close friends and teachers that I was close with and could trust. I didn’t come out to my family until later. I was raised Catholic. So that intersecting identity of being Catholic and Black, where we don’t talk about queer people around here, that was hard.
I told my sister first. My brother was too young to understand. My mom had always supported queer people, so I already knew that she wouldn’t care. It was my dad that I was the most afraid of telling.
I came out to my father during my first round of chemo because I didn’t know if I would make it. And what’s the worst thing he could say? I’m dying at this point.
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Left: Singer and actress Jennifer Hudson. Center: Singer Lizzo. Right: Iowa Women's Foundation employer engagement director Sheri Penney.
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- Singer and actress Jennifer Hudson last week joined an exclusive group of now 17 people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony after winning a Tony for "A Strange Loop." Other performers who have EGOTs include John Legend, Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg, Mel Brooks and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
- After facing criticism online about ableist language in her new single "Grrrls," Lizzo re-recorded the song with a lyric change. Many members of the disability community had expressed concern over the word "spaz," which is often used in a derogatory way to describe people who are disabled. Lizzo released a statement saying, "As a fat black woman in America, I've had many hurtful words used against me so I overstand the power words can have (whether intentionally or in my case, unintentionally). … This is the result of me listening and taking action. As an influential artist I’m dedicated to being part of the change I’ve been waiting to see in the world."
- The Iowa Women’s Foundation in partnership with the Iowa Economic Development Authority announced a new full-time position dedicated to helping Iowa businesses develop child care policies for their employees, as part of a recommendation brought forth by Gov. Kim Reynolds’ Child Care Task Force. Sheri Penney will work as the Iowa Women’s Foundation’s employer engagement director.
- The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday overruled a 2018 decision that said the right to abortion was protected under the state constitution, but did not say what the new standard should be.
- Women aged 55 and older were the biggest demographic to drop out of Iowa's workforce since the start of the pandemic, according to an Iowa State University economist. Meanwhile, Iowa’s labor force participation rate rose for women under the age of 45, unlike the rest of the U.S.
- The latest product shortage affecting Americans is tampons, which is believed to stem from constraints around cotton and plastic. The price of menstrual products in the U.S. has risen 10.8% from a year ago. The shortage is the latest in a series of layered crises, which includes baby formula.
- Wells Fargo announced Tuesday it will expand its Connect to More program and its partnership with the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center with a goal of providing mentorship opportunities to more than 1,000 women entrepreneurs.
- Google has agreed to pay $118 million to settle a gender discrimination lawsuit that claimed the company discriminated against women in pay and promotions. Google did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, but a group of independent experts will now review hiring practices and pay equity studies.
- Women Lead Change has announced several speakers for its Central Iowa Conference, to be held in October. Headlining the event will be Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, founders of the Home Edit, a national home organization company.
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"DON'T LIVE DOWN TO EXPECTATIONS. GO OUT THERE AND DO SOMETHING REMARKABLE."
WENDY WASSERSTEIN
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America’s richest self-made women (Forbes). Always an outlier, Kelsie Whitmore just wants to play baseball (New York Times). Title IX aimed to get women into grad schools. Over 50 years, it shaped their role in sports (19th News). At-home abortion pill startups gain interest and funding as laws increasingly target access (CNN Business).
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Join us on June 22 from noon to 1 p.m. for a virtual conversation on confidence as part of our Fearless Focus event series.
From imposter syndrome to harmful effects of social media to social norms we learn as kids, women may be on a continuous journey to improving their confidence. Confidence can come in many forms – confidence in our bodies, confidence in our intellectual abilities, confidence in our ability to try something new, confidence in pursuing our goals – and they all affect one another. Confidence plays a role in whether we speak up when our voice isn’t being heard, whether we negotiate our salaries and whether we do something that’s outside our comfort zone. In this conversation, our speakers will talk about how we can empower ourselves or women we know in finding confidence in themselves as they work toward professional and personal goals. You’ll leave feeling energized with a better understanding of why confidence can at times be hard and strategies to inspire us to find ourselves worthy and in turn help others see that they are enough, too.
Our featured panelists are:
- Cyndi Nelson - owner, Hawks Coffee Shop and Gypsy Soul Boutique
- Gilmara Vila Nova Mitchell - director of diversity, equity and inclusion, IMT Insurance
- Beth Shelton - CEO, Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa
- Cheltzie Miller-Bailey - assistant director, Center for LGBTQIA+ Student Success, Iowa State University
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What progress has been made on the child care task force recommendations?
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BY EMILY KESTEL, FEARLESS EDITOR
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Child care workers care for toddlers at the Ann Wickman Child Development Center in Atlantic. Photo by Emily Kestel.
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In 2021, Gov. Kim Reynolds created the Child Care Task Force to address Iowa’s child care crisis.
Its 18 members were tasked with developing comprehensive recommendations that would be used as "a foundation for potential action by the Governor, legislature, communities and employers to reduce both short and long-term barriers" to child care in the state.
The task force produced a list of 15 recommendations. Since the release of those recommendations to the public in November 2021, 10 of them either have been enacted or have at least seen concrete progression. Several others remain in early planning stages.
In a statement on May 24, Reynolds said: "Already we’ve allocated over $500 million to support child care in our state and created more than 9,000 new child care spots in just one year. But we’re far from finished."
Now that the legislative session has ended, I took a look at what’s been done, and what’s still on the table.
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