Speaker: Hanna Rosin
TEDWomen 2010
Date: December 2010
Location: Washington, D.C.
Description from TED website:
Hanna Rosin reviews startling new data that shows women actually surpassing men in several important measures, such as college graduation rates. Do these trends, both US-centric and global, signal the "end of men"? Probably not — but they point toward an important societal shift worth deep discussion.
My Review / Notes / Thoughts
Hanna Rosin is the author of “The End of Men and the Rise of Women.”
By: Hanna Rosin
The following paragraph really stood out to me in her talk:
“What it's about is that the economy has changed a lot. We used to have a manufacturing economy, which was about building goods and products, and now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy. Those two economies require very different skills, and as it happens, women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been. It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn't have a college degree, but you had a specific set of skills, and with the help of a union, you could make yourself a pretty good middle-class life. But that really isn't true anymore. This new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength, which is what's helped men along all these years. What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills. You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly, to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be, and those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing.” (emphasis added)
Wow – that a powerful message to me! The economy is not what it used to be and the new environment is naturally more suited to women.
Hanna Rosin talks more about the glass ceiling and how she doesn’t like that terminology because it puts men and women at odds. I believe she makes an excellent point in regards to that.
She says, that instead of a glass ceiling we should thing of a high bridge. While it may be terrifying to go on it, the point is that we “just have to have the confidence to know that [we] deserve to be on that bridge, that [we] have all the skills and experience [we] need in order to walk across the high bridge, but [we] just have to make the decision to take the first step and do it.”
In other words, we need to have confidence in ourselves, our skills, and our experiences. Then we just need to take action and step onto the bridge.
So are you going to take action? What is the ‘high bridge’ before you? Are you ready to take that first step?
Until next time … live long life-learner!