"Take Our Daughters to Work Now!"

Posted by: Diane Brady on April 01

Here’s a guest post from Nell Merlino, an author and creator of Take Our Daughters (and now Sons) to Work Day:

Women are on the verge of holding more jobs than men for the first time in our nation’s history. Reason to celebrate? Not really. Overnight, legions of women are sole breadwinners and families are having to deal squarely with the nasty fact that women continue, in 2009, to make 78 cents or less on the dollar!

Consider your daughters’ futures when only 243,000 women-owned businesses make over $1 million in annual revenue. That is out of a total of 10.5 million businesses now owned by women. Consider that less than 4% of all venture capital goes to women entrepreneurs.

If you want your daughter to be able to live up to her full potential and support herself and her family if need be, take her to work with you so she can see for herself where the opportunities are and the dead ends loom.

An unemployed legal assistant approached me recently at the podium after a talk I’d given at a Women for Hire job fair. I run a non profit called Count Me In that helps women with micro businesses try to grow them to million-dollar enterprises.

The legal assistant told me she loved Take Our Daughters To Work Day because her daughter saw what she did—clerical work assisting many lawyers—and the daughter told her mother she didn’t want to do that kind of work. She wanted to be the boss! The legal assistant’s daughter will graduate with an MBA this spring.

Girls learn everything from watching us. They’re watching a parade of male executives, who have done serious damage to our economy, worry about paying bonuses to mostly male talent they say they need while millions of people (mostly men) are thrown out of work. Now is the time to fully integrate all executive offices and board rooms everyday with an equal number of women to men so we can rebuild our economy together with integrity and fairness.

Take your daughters to work. The country needs them.

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