Modern Heroes of Women Empowerment Stand Together
Famous Women Inspire Women Empowerment through Action
Champions fighting for women empowerment by being excellent in their chosen fields –not excellent “women” but just excellent – Sarah Brown Arianna Huffington were two of the three hosts of the September 2010 WIE (Women, Inspiration, Enterprise) Symposium in New York. These modern inspirational women represented the organization, a media company and web presence with the purpose of inspiring social change through yearly symposiums and a related network dedicated primarily to causes related to women’s health.
The founders of WIE and the symposium have their own inspirational stories of excellence and a continued commitment to women’s issues, but the hosts offer quite a show of empowered women. One of the worst things to happen to the goals of empowering women in the workplace was the mantra that behaving more like man at work was the path to professional success and empowerment. Strategies such as exerting your will to support your opinions, taking aggressive risks, taking charge and brooking no conversation were all touted as important. The result, of course, was a new set of stereotypes that pigeonholed women who successfully used these strategies as unfeminine, or worse.
Juxtapose that reality with the modern examples of Brown and Huffington. Brown is the wife of Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and during his time in office she often hosted the world’s most powerful, such as during the 2009 G8 summit. She has made herself and international figure through her effective use of social media such as Twitter, and become a central advocate for the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent. She is at the same time internationally relevant and comfortable playing to her own strengths as a global dignitary and as a woman.
Arianna Huffington hardly needs any introduction. She was instrumental in the launch of The Huffington Post, the news website that is among the most influential on the web. Huffington was a media presence before HuffPost, and has only increased her influence through the various action groups and the popularity of the online journal. Her support for a broad spectrum of issues and content is just another example of how successful and inspirational women can be a part of indirectly and directly empowering women.
