Welcome to Amplify with Jess Ekstrom, a show designed to help women get out of their head and into their zone of influence.

Happy Monday, everyone. Here’s some food for thought to start your week. Sometimes I think about, with Mic Drop Workshop, if by bringing together a women’s group and by separating women speakers from men speakers, am I just furthering the narrative that genders need to be separate in order to be heard? But then I think about where I was a kindergartner and all of a sudden you start learning the presidents. And I remember my classroom had pictures of the timeline of presidents all around the room. And of course, you start to think to yourself, well, there’s no women up here. And so in order to be a president or in order to do something big, I have to be a man or I have to look a certain way. And that’s where I realized that, no, right now in this season, in this era that we’re in, Mic Drop Workshop being exclusively for women and helping them get their voices heard on stage when historically we haven’t done that is totally necessary. And I want to use this episode to talk a little bit more around the facts around not just women’s empowerment, but just like a state of the union for women right now. So I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer, but at the current rate of progress, it may take close to 300 years to achieve full gender equality. There was this progress on the sustainable development goals. It was a gender snapshot in 2022. And at the current rate of progress, the report estimates that it will take up to 286 years to close the gap in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and at least 40 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments. More so. This report highlighted that in 2020, school and preschool closures required 672 billion hours of additional unpaid child care globally. And then assuming the gender divide in care work remained the same as before the pandemic, women would have shouldered 502 billion of those hours. And globally, women lost an estimated 800 billion in income in 2020 due to the pandemic. I mean, I think we can all think about like the impact that the pandemic had on us, whether we’re, you know, we left our job, whether we had to take care of our kids and whatever that might have been. But the reality of how far back it set women is the numbers don’t lie. So you might be thinking to yourself like, well, thank you for the depressing women’s history lesson. And the update of where we are, but what does all of this have to do with public speaking or like, with what I want to do for a living, sharing my words as a thought leader? All of this has to do with public speaking for two main reasons. One, it’s important to note that you’re living in a society that has historically suppressed women’s voices. And when we know that the chess pieces are strategically placed against us, then we can go onto the board with eyes wide open and knock them down. Two, you’re not only helping yourself grow personally and professionally by getting more confident with speaking, you’re showing future generations of women what is possible. Girls need to be able to see themselves in the roles that they want to be in. I. Know that going back to that kindergarten classroom where myself and millions of other girls are scratching their head, learning about the presidents or people who have shaped history that don’t look like them. And now I’m not saying that you need to learn to speak to run for president, although that would be great, or even get political or commit to any kind of world-changing advocacy. But what I am saying is that just by speaking up, whether it’s in line at the airport, when a man cuts in front of you, or in front of a board committee, you are putting a tally on the scoreboard for women’s equality, and you’re showing young girls what’s possible for them. So I will leave you with this. Change happens when we change the conversation. And to change the conversation, we need new people in the dialogue. So who can you invite to the table? Thanks for listening to Amplify.