Here are my last two sets of notes/insights from the TEDWomen conference last week. For the first two sets of insights, check here and here.

Courtney Martin

• A lot of growing up has been about rejecting the past, and then reclaiming it.
• Part of the work of women is to highlight that aesthetics matter.
• We don’t want just one hero, one icon, or one face.
• Sobering up to reality is about accepting our smallness.
• Our (her) generation is not apathetic, they’re deeply overwhelmed. They feel a huge amount of obligation to “change things,” yet there are so many things to change.
• She always aims to succeed wildly, but is fulfilled when she fails really well.

Sheryl Sandberg – CMO of Facebook

• Women are not making it to the top positions in the world.
• If you’re a women who wants to stay in the workforce you need to:
  • Sit at the table: Women underestimate their own abilities, they don’t negotiate. While men attribute their success to themselves, women attribute it to external forces, but no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the sidelines. They have to take ownership and sit at the table.
  • Make your partner a real one: If you have a family at home, you and your partner need to commit to being equal – time, energy, and emotion.
  • Don’t leave before you leave: Don’t start retracting when things like childbirth or parental care pop up. It’s natural to want to plan, but you can’t mentally leave your post.

Lauren Zalaznick – President of NBC Universal Women & Lifestyle Network

• The average American watches ~5hrs a day (jeez really?!?)
• How do the top Nielsen-rated shows reflect our society? Is TV functioning as our conscious?
• Moral ambiguity began to dominate in TV after the 90s. You went from shows like Leave it to Beaver to reality shows, where the idea of what’s “right” and “wrong” was blurred.
• Social commentary and Irreverence began to dominate after the 70s – overtaking comfort.
• Fantasy follows closely with unemployment trends.
• Judging overtook humor in 2001, with more shows like American Idol and Bachelor coming through.

Tony Porter – A Call to Men

• A summary of this talk won’t do it justice, but the main idea is that men have got to learn how to get out of their “Man Box,” the collective socialization of men and what it “means” to be a man. Liberating a man is tied to liberating a woman.

Elizabeth Lesser

• She’s a proud “I don’t know it all.”
• She’s always had a Warrior vs Mystic inside her, and feels everyone has the capacity for both, for “knowing what their talking about” and accepting/bring open.
• Hates how everyone is demonizing “the other”…. It’s turned into violent extremism.
• Why doesn’t everyone try the Take the Other to Lunch approach. The goblins to get to know a person from a group you may think shares very different views from yourself. Don’t spend your time trying to persuade or defend yourself to the other person, but be real and listen, listen, listen. Share your life experiences and talk about the issues that deeply concern you. Ask questions you’ve always wanted to ask of “the other.”

Amber Case – Cyborg Anthropologist

• We’re all cyborgs. The tools we were using before were physical modifications of ourselves. But today, we’re using tools that are virtual modifications of ourselves, such as Facebook. We have our second selves online, and we’re interacting with others while we’re not actually there…..we have to maintain our second selves for public life.
• People aren’t taking time for reflection with all the instantaneous button-clicking.
• But if we think about it differently, technology does help us connect as humans.

Cynthia Breazeal - MIT MediaLab

• She’s been looking at robots as a helpful, trusted sidekick. Until now, it’s been about interacting with things, not people.
• Robots are a social technology, they push our social buttons and help us understand ourselves.
• Imagine robots in society, with empathy, collaboration, and engagement.
• Robots touch something human inside us, it’s all about people.

Annet Namayanja

• Her mother always told her that if she ate beans, she’d never get sick!
• They’re 45% of the protein intake of the people of Uganda.
• They take 3-4 months to grow.
• They are the major source of income for the women.
• She works on trying to figure out the best strain of bean, one that’s easy to reproduce, disease resistant, and has a high yield.  There are challenges with drought, and a changing marketplace.
• Food security, nutrition and income are major issues in most of Africa.

Fiona Eberts

• She spoe of the “Miracle Tree” – moringa oleifera, which is incredibly high in protein, has all 9 essential amino acids, vitamins and calcium in each serving, as well as very productive, drought and heat resistant.

Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe & Deqo Mohamed – Mother and daughter team of Somali doctors

• Malnourishment in Africa is rampant, as well as civil wars, which effect women & children immensely.  In the civil wars, women were not just victim, they were helpless.
• This team started a refugee center of sorts, where they offer medical needs to the victimized community.
• There are two rules:
  • No political divisions inside the camp.
  • No man can beat his wife, or he’ll be jailed.
• They also work on empowering women

Penelope Jagessar Chaffer & Tyrone Hayes

• We’ve got 30-50K more chemicals in our bodies than our grandparents had.
• As parents, it starts with us.  Sometimes it’s only our own awareness that can protect our children and prevent them from chemical exposure.  As women, we’re at the vanguard of cleansing our children.
• We assume that we’re masters of our environment, rather than just a part.

Hillary Clinton

• Empowering women and girls is a peace issue, and a vital interest of the United States of America.
• The State Department aims to have Global Development and Diplomacy on par with Defense.
• We need women at the table at every discussion.
• The key to maternal health is family planning.
• The mWomen initiative is designed to close the gap on mobile ownership.
• She hopes to persuade societies and girls to value themselves.  A small intervention can change a girls life.

Alton Brown

• We’re growing more cliquey. Humans need commonality.  We crave it.  One commonality is food.
• In the home, there as been a blurring of the roles.  There are fewer women cooking, which is liberating, but has one downfall: children tend to learn less about cooking.
• When kids take ownership of cooking, they’ll eat more things. They have a connection to their food source.
• You’re always better off getting fed by someone who loves you than from someone you don’t know (e.g. homemade meals vs prepared).

Kira Bedi – India’s first female police chief

• Considered “India’s Most Trusted Person.”
• The 50s and 60s in India belonged to boys.  You don’t choose your parents… and you don’t choose your school.
• She converted a prison into an Ashram through education.
• There’s a movement for education of underserved children and anti-corruption that she’s leading.

Jody Williams

• We need to reclaim what peace really means.  It needs to be a sustainable peace with justice and equality.  There also needs to be Human Security.  We need to redefine what it means to make ourselves secure in this world.
• It’s about action.
• If we all got up and volunteered as much as we could, we’d all change a lot.

Jacqueline Novogratz – Acumen Fund

• Your job is not to be perfect, but to be human.
• Power can be negative.  Young men are highly malleable and easily preyed upon with power (discussing Africa).
• At the Acumen, even the smallest investment can lead to a huge liberation and a feeling of worth and direction. Those who went through the program “used to feel like nobodies, now [they] feel like somebodies.”
• The goal is to make philanthropy more effective and finance more philosophical. To raise the standard of moral living through action ad words.

Joan Halifax – Zen priest

• Having compassion is not weak. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries, and without them, we cannot survive.
• Around the world, people are dying and we don’t realize it could happen to us.
• That capacity to see clearer into the nature of suffering and to understand, we aspire to transfer suffering.  The essential component is that we can’t be attached to the outcome.
• Compassion is an inherent human quality, but the conditions for it to be aroused are particular.
• In a society of fear, our compassion is paralyzed.  Compassion touches all neurons of the brain.  It even enhances the immune system!
• We need to train our children to be compassionate.
• In the words of Buddhism, “it takes a strong back and a soft front.”
• Women and girls today have to partner in a powerful army with men.

Sejal Hathi

• She made her flaws (eating disorder) were a vessel for, instead of a burden.  She created a sisterhood of change makers with several of her friends, to give girls around the world a space to innovate.

Madelaine Albright

• Women’s issues are sometimes the hardest because they’re about life and death in many areas of the world.
• It helps to have a critical mass of women in foreign policy positions.
• We get a balance of more women, with more men supporting them.
• Best quote of the conference: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.

Joanna Blakely – Norman Lear Center

For this write up, check out Ad Your Comments Here. Joanna discusses how social media tools could help break down gender stereotypes in media and advertising.

Stephen Lewis – UN

• As of a few years ago, there was no UN agency specifically for women, they were just not on the agenda of anything.
• So he decided to make it impossible to overlook, with intense lobbying for an agency dedicated to women’s issues.
• It’s now functioning as an agency, and he hopes to grow it!