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Part of the series “Women, Leadership and Vision”
This October, the Omega Women’s Leadership Center held its biennial Women & Power Retreat, focused on helping women #DoPowerDifferently. This year’s retreat brought together a diverse group of change leaders to explore themes such as turning pain into power, cultivating personal resilience, taking action in the face of adversity, and advocating for equality, justice, and healing.
Interested in what findings and insights emerged from this year’s retreat, I caught up with Carla Goldstein, who serves as Omega Institute’s chief external affairs officer connecting Omega to change-making efforts around the world. A pioneer in women’s leadership with 25 years of public policy experience, Carla is also co-founder of the Omega Women's Leadership Center, a hub for convening, inspiring, and training women to “do power differently.”
The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies receives more than 500 teachers and 23,000 people annually to attend its workshops, conferences, and retreats in Rhinebeck, New York.
Carla shares below her insights about the changing dynamics of women and power, and the key topics and trends that emerged from the retreat:
Kathy Caprino: Carla, what is "power" today in your view, and how has that definition changed for women and men?
Carla Goldstein: You can’t look at power without looking at patriarchy. Patriarchy -- domination of men over women-- has been around for about 5,000 years, which is relatively short in human history. It has been perpetuated by the idea that the inequality in power is inherent, and has been a foundation for dividing us in other ways, including race, class, country of origin, religion and sexuality. But patriarchy arose out of a complex set of historical conditions, overcoming the primarily egalitarian relationships of indigenous cultures that preceded it – therefore we know it can be transformed. At the Omega Women’s Leadership Center we believe it’s time to move away from “power over” to “power with.”
While our focus is on women’s leadership, including men in the movement for change is essential. It’s been heartening to see men’s responses to the #MeToo campaign and efforts to address the culture of hyper-masculinity which robs men from expressing emotional intelligence and other traditionally feminine forms of self-expression. Truly doing power differently would expand the possibilities for all people, because we all suffer from rigid gender roles.
As Gloria Steinem once said, when it comes to the power relationship between men and women, before the women’s movement women were completely dependent upon men. As a result of the women’s movement, women are becoming independent from men, and we are headed toward becoming interdependent and equal across the gender spectrum.
Caprino: What steps do women take now to advocate for equality, justice, and healing—not just in our own communities, but everywhere? And not just for women, but for everybody?
Goldstein: A thread throughout the retreat was the critical need to take an intersectional approach to advocacy. There is a quickening in our collective understanding of the ways that patriarchy, white privilege, racism, sexism, and class work together to create compound unjust conditions, and also a realization that our most challenging problems cannot be solved without healing historic breaches and addressing the whole system.
This means different things to different people in terms of the work ahead. White people need to do a lot of work understanding privilege and committing to undoing racism, and we need to find ways to create reconciliation for this country’s bleak history of the persecution of indigenous people and the institutionalization of slavery. Importantly we need to work at the roots of problems across multiple levels–personal, relational, and global–to create meaningful change.
Caprino: So, how do we move beyond our own limitations and biases?
Goldstein: It takes commitment and training to move beyond biases. We need to learn about the history of injustice. We need to learn about each other at a deeper level. We need to learn how to sit with discomfort and create greater self-awareness. Practices like meditation, mindfulness, and embodiment practices can help develop our capacity to be present and open in difficult situations so that we listen rather than react and so we can tend rather than defend. The only way to reach across divides is to acknowledge the humanity in the other person. This does not mean we loose our ability to discern whether we agree or not, but we can only heal beyond the fractures if we build up the strength of our human connections so that we can actually see each other.
Caprino: What are the most common challenges that women shared, around power?
Goldstein: Talking with women leaders from all fields—be they in non-profits or Fortune 500 businesses—the challenge seems to be finding ways to shape a new kind of leadership that is values-based and relationship-centered. Rather than just mimic the heroic leader archetype we inherited or grew up learning from—women are eager to use our unique experience to shift the way that power is expressed.
This shift won’t come just because more women gain power because it’s not just about making sure women get an equal piece of the pie. It’s about creating a new kind of pie—together, whatever our gender identity. We need to use our power to transform the very nature of power itself from a paradigm of dominance to cooperation. The work is about creating a global culture of caring for each other and the earth.
Caprino: What did the retreat yield in terms of answers to vital questions like these: How do we develop personal resilience and compassionate yet courageous action in the face of adversity?
Goldstein: Women often struggle with the idea that self-care is selfish, but radical self-care is key to sustained and courageous action. One of Omega’s teachers, reverend angel Kyodo Williams, describes the importance of self-care: “Real self-care is being responsive to this organism as a living, breathing, generative thing that feels and wants and is made happy by little things.” Especially for women leaders, taking time to be responsive to ourselves, and to acknowledge and address our own feelings and desires is necessary to continuing our outward progress.
Caprino: How do we use the strengths we have honed, not only in the workplace, but also as sisters, mothers, and caretakers, to upend a worn-out vision of power and leadership?
Goldstein: When women first began taking on non-traditional roles in the workforce, we were primarily in an adaptive relationship to power—folding into existing systems and working to prove that we can do what men can do.
As we joined in greater numbers and gained more power women began to move into a transformational relationship to power, bringing our fuller selves into leadership roles. Now research shows that the “feminine skills,” women have honed over millennia (by nature and/or nurture) are quite valuable in every field and across cultures. It turns out that competencies in empathy, flexibility, patience, intuition, and vulnerability are highly effective for managing and leading complex organizations.
Caprino: What are some of the most innovative and inspiring changes being made by women in the arts, economics, activism, business, philanthropy, healing, education, and other arenas?
Goldstein: Despite serious setbacks along the way, women in every corner of the world are doing amazing things! We are creating peace, protecting water, inventing technology, exploring space, forming companies, and leading countries. Women are building bridges across intractable political conflicts and healing some of the deepest fractures in humanity, like Noble Peace Prize winner Leymah Roberta Gbowee, who led a peace movement in Liberia that helped end that country’s Second Civil War; and Edit Schaffer, founder of Women without Borders, who is training mothers in war torn countries in alternative diplomacy. Their fortitude and faith that we can resolve human conflict without violence inspires me.
I am inspired by the new mass social change movements led by women of color, such as Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, #SayHerName, the Water Keeper Alliance at Standing Rock, and the #MeToo movement. These vast movements, spanning the globe, are creating a new level of resistance, accountability, and action to transform the old power paradigm.
Women are also reshaping economies both at the policy level and with their economic force. For example, Presidential candidate of Iceland, Halla Tómasdóttir, was among the group of women credited with turning the Icelandic economy around by bringing new levels of transparency, risk awareness, and looking at the social and environmental impact of profits. Dr. Riane Eisler, whose lifetime work as a social scientist, attorney, and author of The Real Wealth of Nations, has inspired a global coalition to build a “caring economy,” that has had serious impact. For example, , Ai Jen Poo, a leading member of that coalition and director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, helped pass the first ever Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.
Finally, new ideas coming from young women give me a great deal of hope. They are working to preserve and restore our environment, to develop new computer code to shape a safer future, and driving new ideas about moving beyond the gender binary. There’s a lot to be hopeful about and there is a lot of work to do.
For more information, visit eOmega.org/OWLC and see Carla’s S.H.E. Summit and TEDx talk.
For more from Kathy Caprino on accessing bravery to reach your highest potential, visit FindingBrave.org and KathyCaprino.com.
