Blog — Gild Collective

Katie Main

Balancing the Scales: A Look at Gender Bias in the Legal Industry

According to a study published on PayScale, the legal industry has one of the highest wage gaps not influenced by education or experience, as high as 38.6 percent. While this gap is outrageous at first glance and may appear to never close, there are some noticeable caveats to that statistic. First, while there are more women working in legal professions than men (at 68 percent), men dominate the higher-paying and higher-ranking legal jobs. This statistic also includes legal support workers, paralegals, and secretaries, which slightly skew the statistics because these lower-status jobs are more likely to be filled by women.

Know Your Worth: The Importance of Negotiating

Asking for a promotion, higher compensation or even partnership in an organization is a highly marketable skill. Yet it is a well-known fact that there is a huge gap in pay and representation between women and men in senior positions. There are a variety of factors that may contribute to this gap, but one potential answer is that women don't negotiate as hard, or as often, as men.

That’s not the whole story. The real question is: why don't women negotiate more?

4 Reasons Female Mentorship is Important

It is rare to hear anyone dispute the benefits of having a mentor in the workplace. Mentors help guide you along the path of your career and advocate for you when you need them. Having a mentor can be the difference between getting ahead in your career and staying stagnant. However, of people being mentored, very few are being mentored by women. It’s important for women to act as mentors, not only to lift up future leaders but to also improve their own leadership skills.

Unconscious Bias and Its Effect on Business Decisions: Spotlight on Starbucks

When Starbucks began their run to success in the early 1990s, it was clear the brand wasn’t simply about coffee and over the last year, we have seen many headlines highlighting their hits and misses in an effort to shift their culture. Such indications include their announcement of equal pay as well as their all-staff diversity and inclusion training. If Starbucks has taught us anything in the past year, it is that bringing awareness to unconscious bias and how it affects businesses is imperative.

Creating a Healthy Balance While Working From Home

Through clever scheduling, a few ground rules and some hard core flexible thinking, I have figured out how to share my workspace with the (not-so)-little ones. When you exclusively work from home, physical boundaries between work and personal life can feel virtually nonexistent. Even the most organized can still find difficulty successfully managing a career and a household in the same space.

The following are a few key strategies I implement throughout the day to be successful, bring my whole self to work, and be present in my life. Over the years these have changed a bit, but the idea of creating a healthy balance for me to feel successful remains the same.

Ask These Questions In Your Next Interview To Find The Right Fit For You

Whether you’re interviewing for an internship or an executive-level management position, asking questions is something you should do in every interview. However, thinking up questions when you’re in the hot seat can be a challenge, which is why there is often a long, lingering pause as an answer to the dreaded “got any questions for us?” Be prepared the next time with a handful of these questions in your arsenal.

4 Skills Successful Female Leaders Have

There are many qualities accomplished female bosses have in their success arsenal. With these in tow, they’re able to set out into the world and lead with confidence. Have a look at Gild Collective’s top four leadership skills outlined below: do you recognize these traits in yourself?

Inspiring Future Female Business Leaders

Women are great leaders because they are great at building relationships, empowering others, tuning into people’s needs, and just being awesome. Once you have made it to the top, don’t forget those behind you, following the path you have blazed through. Be you, and lead courageously...like a girl. 

Find Your Voice and Own It

Having women in leadership actually encourages other women to speak up and bring their ideas forward. So speak up and encourage your fellow female leaders to do so. Speak with passion and authority and please don’t apologize. 

How to Bring Your Whole Self to Work and Life

Work-life balance. That ever-elusive goal we are all working towards achieving. We hear all the time at our women’s initiatives workshops how this obsessive pursuit can be exhausting, frustrating and alienating. What we at Gild have come to realize is this: We are not alone. Successful women in workplaces everywhere struggle to find the right balance. We have to ask ourselves, does it even exist?

Empathy: A Female Leader’s Greatest Superpower

We all know the stereotype: Successful leaders are rational, assertive, linear and in complete control of their emotions. But who said empathy wasn’t a necessary skill to be successful?

We are obviously huge fans of Wonder Woman here at Gild. In Wonder Woman: The Art and Making of the Film, Patty Jenkins reflected on the greatest superpower of all: "...to be strong enough to love in the face of darkness is the thing that sets Wonder Woman apart from so many before her.” Empathy was Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower.

Use the First Hour of Your Day to Set the Tone for Success

Successful female business leaders understand how you spend the first hour of your work day can dictate the productivity level for the the rest of the day. Before chaos ensues and your brain is here, there and everywhere in between, use that crucial bucket of time to shift your focus and prepare yourself to crush your to-do list and end your day feeling like the strong woman you are.

Morning Habits of a Successful Woman

We’ll start with what we have found to be a recurring theme for many successful women: The morning ritual. Regardless if you are a night owl or morning person, we all start our day at some point, albeit a little differently. And while we realize no routine is a one-size fits all, we can learn a lot from the morning habits of highly-successful women.