Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Erik Michielsen: What makes a women's professional network valuable?
Courtney Spence: Interestingly enough, our staff is 98% female. We work -- it's all women
and it's not purposeful it's just how its happened. It's been wonderful and I think
what I've realized is I think women -- everybody has their challenges and this is not a woe
is us, but women do have a lot more to balance, in a sense of, you know, this -- the urge
and desires to have a family and the urge and desires to have a career, and just by
default that women have to carry the babies for 9 months and deal with that repercussion,
there's a lot more to I think that struggle of I want -- if I wanna be a mother, I wanna
be a great mother. If I'm wanna be a professional, I'll be a great professional, and I wanna
do both. How in the hell am I gonna do both? I think that, you know, I look at my mother
and she was -- she's, I'm convinced, the best mother in the world. And I wanna be just like
her if I choose that path to have children but how am I gonna do that and do Students
of the World which is a child, and it's my child that I have had for 12 years. So how
do I do that? How do I struggle with the emotions that come with that? I think there's, again,
as you get into your 30's, you start to really -- you have to start making decisions that
will affect the rest of your life. You have to start living more consciously than you
did in your 20's, or at least I have, because you do recognize that, you know, life doesn't
go on forever and that there are certain phases to life and you have to prepare yourself for
those because you don't wanna wake up one day and be like, how did I -- I never made
a choice, and this is where I am. I wanna be a lot more an active participant in my
life personally. And so as I'm struggling through what does that mean and what does
that look like, finding other women to be supportive and give advice and go through
those trenches with me and me to do that with others is really important because I think
there's not just the need to be mentored and supported but as women, we feel the need to
support and mentor others in general, and there is great satisfaction that comes from
that. And I think that for me, the women -- the women's movement -- and, you know, this started,
you know, when I wrote a, you know, high school paper on the importance of first ladies, and
I remember I sent a copy to then first lady Hillary Clinton. And I realized that Hillary
has been such a really, really incredible role model for me, you know, that I, you know
particularly since 2008, have recognized the need to really bring women together and that
the importance of a woman's network and how difficult that is because, you know, unlike
other groups or cohorts, women are so diverse, you know, in physical locations, in socio-economic
situations, but we all have the commonality of being female, of being a woman, and how
do we bring that group together more effectively is a great challenge of our time I think.