Consuelo Intro
Women hold the 3rd largest financial wealth in the world. They own 40% of the world’s wealth… Care to make that 51%? Then make sure you are buying from women, financing women, raising women into government leadership and corporate management. Advocating for women will bring validation to us as individuals and in a world setting.
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HOLA CHICAS!
I am Consuelo Crosby – born with both sides of my brain fighting for attention.. structural engineer & creative, mother & mentor, center of any spontaneous fiesta if I’ve had my morning latte… I give it all to being a 1st generation Peruvian badass chica!
So grateful you’re here today, wanting to shed that armor, relax into your truth, your value… pick up your salsa step, tune out what’s getting to you and be lifted from goddesses in generations past that taught us to live life large and out loud… cuz we’re not blending in…
LIFE LNXX… knowledge you didn’t even know you had TO BE THE BADASS CHICA YOU WERE BORN TO BE!
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Hola Chicas!
First off, my apologies for the monotone of that last episode. Schmolies! I think there was a variation of maybe three notes. I realized afterwards that I was just trying to hold it all together that day because I had just received an unexpected phone call and tried to record after it was like when you are trying to be cool and pull off something you aren’t ready for… and you get through it and think, yes! I nailed it. Only to realize later, you didn’t?
Oh, the call? It was from my younger daughter’s boyfriend sharing his intent to propose to her! It’s time to start the party prep all over again! And that emotional ramp back up, I was not prepared for.
Last week began a month of celebrating our Hispanic – LatinX Heritage during which we recognize and honor the contributions of the culture and people that have made our daily lives so full, and beautiful and sassy, so intelligent and changed this society from its beginnings.
Women Role Models
I hope the sincerity and importance of that episode did come through and you took some time to think about the women who you resonate with because of their personalities. Take a look at my current role models that I have on my WOW, my wall of women, that remind me of how far I’ve come, who I stand with and who are way out of my league. I talked about it in the last episode and we put it up on the website. So you could read the blog at TheLnxx.com, that’s L-N-Double X, and learn about my choices and how they may affect your own role model choices.
Isn’t Dolores Huerta fricking amazing and so beautiful still, at 91 years old? She is something else. We have to do her justice by picking up her fight. We need to continue it. That’s what a lot of this episode is going to be about.
So, welcome to another Wednesday of celebration! It’s the first day of the Autumn Equinox, that sultry time of year here in San Francisco when you experience the entire year of seasons in one day. I swear I didn’t plan this out when I decided to drop these episodes on Wednesdays, but boy, 2021 tends to be some life filling days on hump day!
You don’t need to give us Latinas much reason to gather and live life large so it’s always good to structure some dedicated time to the ideal and break up our intensity over work and scheduled demands. Oof! Whatever!
Women Gather to Advocate for Each Other
Gathering is the purpose of this episode today. It’s in gathering, whether in person or virtually, that we support each other and learn of the true narrative that another person is experiencing. For women, spending time together gives us the time to speak freely and be understood instantly rather than endure the blank stare from someone who just doesn’t get it, who doesn’t comprehend what it’s like for us.
We gather excitedly, with hope and determination to be heard, a sense of validation and in turn create advocacy for each other. This is our life journey if we stay focused on who we are and how our unique selves have a dedicated purpose in our lifetime, a purpose that impacts the greater good rather than just our immediate self. That’s what we are going to be talking about today, gathering to secure validation and advocate for women to create a system in which we are valued and in leadership.
We have been talking about the opportunity to gather at work, pre-pandemic, being difficult since the population of women in career positions remains at 20% on average. Now, with the workplace being disrupted for the near future, there is little if any opportunity to gather except via a screen. And that screen time, it only has a certain purpose, and that is to get through a meeting, which I hear, there are way too many meetings.
Like an email could have been okay. But maybe people are just starving to see other faces, beyond their cat or beyond their boyfriend, who’s sitting across from them, or staring at a blank wall. I don’t know, but it seems like the screen time is becoming endless.
And, we’re stuck in this state of stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic threat and shut down. We haven’t healed from any of it. We remain in a state of stress, and we’re removed from our peers at work and relying on after work hours or weekends for some freedom. And then those may be sucked away by family responsibilities or even more work. The current system does not support women in the career and life roles they have set for themselves and through which, everyone else benefits, leaving the full burden on women to succeed in an isolated sense. We’re disconnected right now. And we’re overburdened even more than usual.
Business Built to Prevent Women Ownership
It’s this burden that has threatened the advancement of women into leadership positions. There will come a time when a woman has to choose between family and career because this system was not created to support her career goals. If anything, it was created without her in mind at all. Women from the start were prevented from owning property, owning their own income… That’s right. They made money, but they had to hand it over to their husband or if they were single, they had to hand it over to their father, their brother, anybody, but them, and they couldn’t start a business. This only shifted really recently, ladies,1975. 1975 was when married women gained rights to the assets of the couple and single women, including divorced and widowed women, could apply for credit without a man co-signing for them. 1975… that was probably just years prior to you being born. Imagine all the women who were denied their own livelihood because they were tethered to the male structured system.
When my mother started the engineering corporation in 1969 so that my father could have a job. Now, he was brilliant; a licensed geo-technical engineer and geologist. But, she was required to have him sign for everything, from credit to corporate documents because she was a woman. Even an unemployed man was more powerful than a woman earning income. In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 – 1988! – that women entrepreneurs were supported when Reagan signed the Women’s Business Ownership Act into law. This Act eliminated the need for women entrepreneurs to have a male co-signer for financial loans and credit. This explains so much of your lives today, especially why you don’t have long standing female mentors in your industry. And, why there aren’t established women-owned corporations because it wasn’t 33 years ago that women were finally allowed to have their own sense of finance.
Disparity in Funding Women-Owned Businesses
Still, women, being badass chicas, now account for 42% of businesses in the U.S and women of color own 50% of these businesses and currently – okay, this is a big number – 89% of new women-owned businesses are by women of color. That is some major leaps and bounds. Together, all these businesses generate almost $2 trillion dollars annually.
And yet, according to the U.S. Committee for Small Business and Entrepreneurship report, only 4%!…. a lousy 4% of the total value of all the small business loans they give out to women entrepreneurs. There’s another single digit value, for you, like the 3% of black or Hispanic professionals in leadership positions in major tech companies. This is the 21st century you live in. It’s okay to ask the system change, try to engage men that understand the justice of equity and the power of diversity. But, we don’t wait for it to change, especially on their terms.
This is why I continue to emphasize the need for women, especially women of color, to rise into leadership to create our own system that supports and advocates for women so that collectively we are independent and can live true to who we are born to be. The pandemic was such a spotlight on the realities of women having to choose between themselves and their families. It was really horrific.
How is it that we are the majority of the population, we are almost 60% of the workforce and yet, over 50% of us had to leave the workforce during the pandemic. Not because women were inadequate or of lesser importance, but because the pandemic placed even higher demand on women to sustain the economic workplace without any additional compensation. So much so that women in the workforce are as few as in 1988… 1988 there’s that year again, the year that women were first “allowed” to have financial independence to receive financial support for business. We have fallen 33 years backwards, just from one lousy pandemic.
Society Overburdens Women, Disrupting Their Career Goals
It is all these little pieces that add up to the big problem for women to gain financial status with men and what leads men to believe they are superior to women, whether in the workplace or in society. Think about it: Women business owners only receive 4% of the total loan value dispersed to businesses; women do not receive equal pay for equal jobs; women are expected to create the life for their families and their social presence without additional pay; women are expected to care for children and parents without additional pay; women are laid off of work or passed over for jobs or promotions for wanting or having children. All of these pieces have us collapsing under the burden for being who we are in a society that doesn’t support us or losing our identity in order to fit into a system that denies us.
Can you tell I am trying to fire you up? Can you tell I am trying to draw out that sassy, badass chica to make the move to something other than the system that is in place now?
It’s absolutely necessary and especially at this moment when young women and girls are rising at an astonishing rate in their own rights. They are going into their own ventures on their own terms. Now is the time to create a system that provides economic autonomy and generational wealth for women. Now is the time to be creative with your intent and focus more of your energy, and money, and presence just to other women; whether it’s in person, or through business or legal action, place your emphasis on women businesses, women cause women laws. Because if you have joined the hamster wheel in a cage set up by a male construct and have no plan to get off that wheel and use your energy towards getting out of the fracking cage, then we are destined to keep returning to 1988, where you had no financial autonomy.
But, how do we do this? How do we gain financial independence in a society set against us? How do we avoid slipping back into 1988? Actually, that was the year I went independent to get off the hamster wheel of the all male engineering company.
How do we do it?
Women Have Majority to Build Financial Autonomy
We advocate for each other. We collectively gather and advocate for each other across all generations, across economic earnings and across the world. Advocating for women adds the powerful component of validation that elusive yet necessary piece that will empower women to succeed. Advocating for a women-owned business by purchasing from them solely will not just bring financial stability but add validation to the owner that yes, regardless of what society is saying, she can be a successful business woman. Unlike Sheryl Sandberg, I don’t believe we hold ourselves back in the workplace, the workplace is established to work against us. Instead, we are still culpable, we are not collectively gathering and pushing ourselves forward. After all, we are the majority population; together we have more presence to make change in our favor.
Men have stopped short of creating a world where women are successful, respected, valued, cared for and viewed as equals. If anything, they have stripped the success of women by becoming the decision-makers that choose to select, oh, i don’t know, other men. You probably see this on any given day at work. We know the inequity in pay and promotion. We know the disparity in representation, the almost non-existence of black and hispanic leadership in corporations.
It’s especially seen in the entertainment and financial circles, too. If the entertainment industry were again female led, and I say again because in the beginning, in the moment of silent pictures, there was actually a lot of equity. If women were leading, then there would be no sexual assault, no threat to perform off the stage, if you know what I mean, no blocking out of female professionals to perpetuate the power system. I’d like to believe there would be no cultural assignment to actors so that we don’t have to wait for a movie on slavery to see black actors or a movie of poverty stricken immigrants to see Latinx actors.
We must be more successful than men but not on their scale. We can’t compare ourselves to men as to whether or not we’re being successful. We must create our own scale to ensure the power of women and the spirituality of women that secures our civilized humanity. We are on the brink of losing our humanity. I know you feel it.
Our lives would change instantly, dramatically, if we implemented a system where women are valued and respected for their intelligence and spirituality. And when we consider women, then we automatically consider the children, whether you are a mother or not. Women will care for the children of the world and their future because we have such a deep capacity to love and the men know this; they benefit from it.
Entertainment Industry Cheated Women of Their Livelihood
Let’s go back to the entertainment industry. I know most of you are not employed by it but it affects you from the day you are born, both intimately and as a member of society. The industry is an indicator of both the power we have as women and the power held over us. A great capture of this is seen in the 2019 documentary, ‘This Changes Everything’, and it’s streaming now on Netflix so please go watch it. Geena Davis, the fabulous actor who won me over in ‘Thelma & Louis’ with Susan Sarandon, is the executive producer. She also started the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media when she realized the widening disparity in female roles and management positions in the media. The gender discrimination was, and still is, rampant. And again, we all had a role in creating this disparity.
Being a woman in the Boomer Generation, this documentary really struck my heart. I won’t do any spoilers but seriously, seeing and listening to the industry women, who are around my age, although the documentary does have full representation of new on the scene actors to women my age, and they are speaking about being pushed out of their own success, and this was just heart wrenching t o me. You could see where their financial wealth was deprived of them,especially when they were pushed out for a mediocre man to take their place.
The most striking element in the documentary is how much power we have as individuals to change the entertainment system in our favor. Again, no spoilers, you have to watch it. Think about it though. For as much as we want to be part of our pop culture and be able to take part in discussions by staying current on movies, shows and even our children’s media, do we actively understand what we are watching and who is behind the concept and vision? Or, do we just go along with the masses, overwhelmed by FOMO who feel that we won’t be part of the crowd?
But we are part of the crowd, we are the dominant part of the crowd, the more prominent decision making crowd. We have the power to rewrite how society views us, treats us – if we were to unite across the generations.
Stop Supporting the Male Modeled Media
In the U.S. alone, we have 124 million women between the ages of 15 and 74. Now I stop at 74, not because women are not powerful beyond that. We see Dolores Huerta still fighting at 91. But seriously, by 75, I think we deserve a break. We deserve to pass over the baton and say, okay, it’s your turn. 124 million decision makers to create a new system of who gets funded, what products to purchase, what companies to support. If we were to collectively pull half the earnings from the system now and place it in women-owned businesses, think of the immediate impact we could create. It takes us staying true to who we are and what we stand for and to do that, we need the support and empowerment from each other.
Going back to the documentary, ‘This Changes Everything’, it really made me reflect on my own part in the media system we have now. I think I have done a pretty good job to avoid supporting the male minded media even though I did give in to watching Michael B. Jordan in ‘Creed’. I mean, I am human. But, I also started boycotting the Batman movies after taking my young daughters to ‘Batman Forever’.
I claim all responsibility for the horrible choice but I was going off two ideals: 1. I grew up on the zany Adam West version of Batman and Robin; they were a dynamic duo of Kapows and Whams in their tidy tights. I really had no knowledge of the personality crafted for the original character. My bad! Totally!
And then, 2. The movie had Nicole Kidman, Jim Carey and Tommy Lee Jones, all of my favorites of mine at the time. Yes, granted, they had some dark character roles in their history, but collectively could they create something so grossly psychotic? The answer is yes. And, I am totally embarrassed that I contributed both to the financial gain of this movie and the dents in my daughters psyche!
Can we stop focusing on Batman’s festering emotional pain that he continues to bury by being the White Knight, aka Dark Knight? I would put a whole other demand on Batman creators. Instead of him saving women and children from the too close-to-reality creepozoids in society, glorifying the need for those creepozoids, let’s get to Bruce Wayne healing his childhood trauma. Let’s support a movie that has him in therapy, unwinding his childhood and realizing his anger is contributing to Gotham, not saving it. We need a character in the movie saying, “Bruce, you are over dramatizing the ugliness in society and feeding off of it. It’s time for you to watch some feel-good movies. Maybe a good rom-com. One that won’t have scenes of stabbing a teddy bear to shreds..” And we sure as heck don’t need any more Joker characters, … ever!
Are you thinking I’m a prude? A total killjoy? Maybe…? But still, aren’t you tired of being quote/unquote “entertained” by scenes of women being kidnapped and bad things happening to them? It’s as though the male dominated media empire has 3 ideas for movies: War movies, women getting rescued movies and women suffering an awful existence in these movies.
So, don’t watch them. Stop putting your hard earned dollars in the pockets of the people who think this is entertainment and a good synopsis of our society. Put your money and advocacy towards the media that supports women and promotes a societal vision of women empowerment, and humor and intelligence.
You still think I’m a prude. That’s ok. I did allow some leeway for my daughters to still relate to their peer group. They weren’t showing up in bonnets and braids with home churned butter, although they did show up with homemade doughnut holes, which made them superstars at school!
Women Own 40% of the World’s Wealth
Getting back to Geena Davis again, badass chica, consider her as one of your role models. Take note of how she advocated for women across her entire industry, not just for the actors. Understand the power she created by financing the data accumulation to prove to the industry that it was blocking out women. Her passion for justice is as infectious as Dolores Huerta’s. Consider what action you can take within your company to advocate for women by collectively gathering together and making the demand. It is futile these days for management to avoid the scrutiny of its decision. We have the eyes of social media. Your voice will still be heard regardless of whether it’s met and your voice for others will be greatly appreciated and start things in motion to make change for women.
So, frame yourself from the beginning, staying true to who you are and perhaps developing other sides you didn’t know you had. Create an intentional life that has a conscience to advocate for women even if in arenas that you may not journey through. The power of numbers, of which we have the greater value, gives us the power to make change by creating our own system. Society refuses to train us in this thinking because it holds so much power. But, we found the loophole, didn’t we? We don’t need to wait for change on the existing system’s terms, sprinkling out little crumbs to us. We can create it ourselves.
After all, women, as a global population, are the third largest financial entity in the world after the U.S. and China. Oh, did I forget to mention that to you. Yes, women hold the 3rd largest financial wealth in the world. They own 40% of the world’s wealth… Care to make that 51%? Then make sure you are buying from women, financing women, raising women into government leadership and corporate management. Advocating for women will bring validation to us as individuals and in a world setting and we won’t have to waste our energy and our mental bandwidth over these Texas issues. We will just squash it.. like a bug on a windshield, ladies, bug on a windshield.
Okay, I’ve got you fired up. Let’s go do this. Until next week, ciao!
Outro
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I really appreciate the time you take to rate and review the podcast. Get the backstory and what you’ve heard here today, and reach out to us at TheLnxx.com. That’s L N double X, because it’s about time, it’’s about us. Stay in the groove on our social media @LifeLinks and get ready to make your move, ladies.
Viva!
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