Women in Leadership

This week during our class meeting, we had many different speakers come to visit us and talk to us about a variety of things. Out of all of them, my favorite was Melissa Gilbert who spoke about our peer mentoring program. She explained to us what our mentoring program would be about, which was very exciting for me because I have been wanting to know the details of it for a while. Then she made us do an activity that I found both thought provoking yet fun at the same time. She asked us to write down some of the obstacles that we had to overcome in high school as women trying to assert ourselves in leadership positions. I was expecting her to make us do something cliché with these problems, such as throwing them away to symbolize that those worries are behind us or tell each other our problems; but she did something more interesting. She had us form a human wall that symbolized our problems, each one building on the other and making the wall look even more indestructible and then brainstorm with each other to think of ways to break through that wall and start working towards becoming a better leader. I found this activity very interesting because it made me think not only about all of our different problems, but the solutions that we can use to solve them. It showed me that all of us as women have had to face difficulties in our leadership roles and how we can work together to try to solve them. I was actually relieved when I had heard other women had been shot down or criticized from a position due to their age or gender. It made me feel like the problems that I went through were shared with my fellow women and it made me excited to want to start changing these problems into solutions with the rest of the women leaders. I also liked this activity because it could be something that I could do with my girls because it can be adapted based on the ages of my girls.