Leadership Pipelines

 From Forbes:

 From the Women's Media Center:

 From the news release:

"It is abundantly clear that our girls have a vision of their leadership potential that is incompatible with what we know they can achieve," says Anna Maria Chávez, CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA. "The ToGetHerThere campaign is the launch of a cause to impact our girls now, so that we can inspire them to achieve leadership roles in all aspects of society."

Girl Scouts has launched a $1 billion philanthropic campaign for girls to fuel this effort, and to fund opportunities that enable girls to lead. Ninety percent of funds raised will go directly to services and programs for girls across the nation and in 94 countries globally to help fill critical talent gaps in finance, science, technology, environmental, and global leadership arenas.

[...]

 From USA Today:

The moniker was famously applied in 1992 when four women were elected to the Senate, a high watermark for the chamber that has never been surpassed.

This year, however, a notable number of candidates are running in potentially competitive races in both the House of Representatives and Senate that could send a wave of female lawmakers to Washington in November. If so, it would reverse the 2010 election trend that saw the first dip in female representation in the House since 1978 and only sent one woman, New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte, to the Senate.

In the 2012 Senate lineup, there are 10 female candidates — four Republicans and six Democrats — seeking office. Of the six states with female Democratic candidates — Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Dakota and Wisconsin — none has ever elected a woman to the Senate.

Republican women are running in Connecticut, Hawaii, Missouri and New Mexico.

"Both parties have made a concerted effort to attract more women candidates," said Jessica Taylor, a senior analyst for the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report. Taylor said campaign operations are cognizant of seeking out diverse candidates and female candidates can be particularly appealing because independent female voters are often a decisive voting bloc in elections.

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 From the Green Bay Press-Gazette:

Modeled on a national program, the Madison-based nonprofit is training a generation of progressive Democratic women how to run for public office and win.

The program "helped me to consolidate the campaign structure, and it helped me to be more effective in my message," said state Rep. Penny Bernard Schaber, D-Appleton, who completed the training alongside state Sen. Jessica King, D-Oshkosh, in 2007.

The six-month program covers everything from building a field operations team to the fine print of campaign finance, and each class is limited to 25 women, who must apply for a spot in the program.

[...]

Valerie Keller, the Founder and CEO of Veritas, on being a female CEO:

 From the Huffington Post:

Perhaps because I was a young CEO, I never paid much attention before to the 'glass ceiling' or other woes of women in the workplace... until a mid-career MBA at Oxford recently woke me up. A meager 10% of my classmates were women. As it turns out, that is pretty high. In 2011, women held 7.5% of executive officer top earner positions at Fortune 500 companies and a miniscule 3.6% of those firms have women as CEOs. According to a study by Pax World, Calvert and Walden Asset Management, a paltry 9.4% of directors on global corporate boards are women. We make up 46.7% of the US labor force, but in keeping with the global trend we hold fewer positions of responsibility and work part-time more frequently. And of course we're paid less than male peers: 17.2% less in the U.S., 18% less in the EU. According to Linda Basch, National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) President, the guy who sat next to me at Oxford is statistically likely to make $2M more than me over our lifetimes.

What is the problem? Nature or nurture? Are most of our sisters genetically hardwired to not seek out positions of power and influence -- and/or are there cultural and systemic blockages? What solutions are working to increase numbers of women leading in corporations and how can those be amplified and accelerated?

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