In the midst of economic hardship for the working class and a climate emergency, the last place any usable good should go is a landfill. Donations are a great way to connect with your community, give back, and earn write–offs for your taxable income (although not every organization offers tax receipts). They also can extend the life of your purchases so that other people and the planet can both benefit as less refuse winds up in the ocean and underground. While this piece will focus on office supplies, you can also use a lot of these resources to find places that accept all sorts of donations or goods to recycle. 

Please note: While donations and recycling are great options, the BEST way to reduce waste is to REDUCE our consumption.  

Donate 

Salvation Army
The good old Salvation Army can handle a variety of pickups for a range of good like furniture, appliances, and clothing. 

Savers
Savers partners with a range of non-profits (including some of the ones on this list) by paying them for the donated products and then selling them in their thrift stores. They accept books, electronics, small furniture and appliances, clothes and more. 

Habitat for Humanity
Your local ReStore will happily take items that can be resold to raise funds for builds. This is a great option if you have leftover building materials after a renovation or build out. 

Human IT
Human IT accepts most electronics, and office and warehouse equipment. They have a nationwide pick-up and delivery network and repair, refurbish, and repurpose all donations when necessary. They also provide discounted internet access and digital literacy training. 

Computers with Causes
Computers with Causes allows you to donate computers, scanners, routers, and other electronics. They repair and refurbish the donations so that they can help their national network of organizations. 

Local Schools
You can use this nifty resource to find schools in your area in need of supplies like pens, art supplies, or organizational materials.  

Vietnam Veterans of America
You can support veterans across the US by donating your furniture and other supplies to the Vietnam Veterans of America. With networks in over 30 states, they can more likely than not pick up your items, too. 

The Freecycle Network
You can use The Freecycle Network to offer up anything that may be of use to someone else. It’s like a Craigslist where people can post what they need, you can post what you have to give, and make the connections to get these items redistributed.   

Donate by Location

New York
Donate NYC is an online directory that will connect you with organizations that will accept anything you’d like to donate. You can search by the kinds of items and see locations all around the city to select the cause you’d like to support. 

San Francisco
Scrap takes a variety of materials from textiles to office supplies and breathes new life into them through art, while financial donations support a range of creative programming.  

Los Angeles
LA Shares takes donated furniture and supplies from local businesses and redistributes them free of charge to local non-profits. 

Chicago
The WasteShed in Chicago has a similar mission to SF’s Scrap, taking office supplies and art supplies and repurposing them for art projects. If they can’t take what you have to give, they’ll do their best to redirect you to an organization that can. 

Washington, DC
Zero Waste DC provides a list of resources specific to the DC area for all your donation and recycling needs. 

Philadelphia
The Career Wardrobe resells business attire at a discount, so if you’ve been looking for a place for your tired blazers to find new life, this is the place. They also may take office supplies from time to time. 

Miami
In the Greater Miami area, Miami Rescue Mission will take all sorts of office supplies and other items either in their offices or to sell in their thrift stores. They serve the unhoused population in Miami and are an extremely kind group of people. (I dropped a few boxes of excess office supplies to them last year and it was so easy.) 

Toronto
I haven’t forgotten about our Canada-based readers! The Toronto Wildlife Centre accepts a range of office supplies and electronics. Specifics are in their wishlist. 

Austin
Another haven for the arts, Austin Creative Reuse will take most office supplies with some exceptions that are outlined on their website. They are currently accepting donations by appointment only. 

Phoenix
AZ Central has a list of resources of places to donate your used goods in Phoenix. You can also give travel relief directly to the Navajo Nation through the Phoenix Indian Center. 

Develop Africa
Develop Africa helps 87 schools in Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leon, and Tanzania supply their classrooms with a range of supplies necessary for an effective classroom experience.   

Pens for Kids
Founded in Switzerland, Pens for Kids coordinates the delivery of pens and other school supplies to their liaisons in Africa that distribute them to school–age children. You can send directly to Africa or to the coordination center in Switzerland. 

Recycle 

Not everything is fit to be donated. If it can’t be reused or donated, we can find ways to recycle these goods. Recycling doesn’t have to be a hassle, either; if your office building or city doesn’t have a way to recycle paper, you can hire some outside help. Plenty of companies offer bulk recycling for larger corporations that produce a lot of paper waste. Here are some other options for your recycling search. 

Earth 911
You can use a nifty search tool like Earth 911 to find places where you can recycle everything from paper to batteries and everything in between. Many of these places will offer pick up services for a large enough load. 

TerraCycle
TerraCycle is an amazing resource for finding free, national recycling programs for a range of hard-to–recycle products. From toothpaste and coffee pods to stationery and Solo cups, you can find a program for almost anything you’d prefer to recycle instead of throw away. 

Recycle by City
If you’re located in Austin, Chicago, Flagstaff, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Sedona or West Hollywood, Recycle by City can help you find the right facilities to recycle all sorts of supplies and goods. 

Go forth and de-clutter knowing you’re doing so more responsibly. Spring cleaning never felt so good.

About the author. 
Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed.

Murasaki Shikibu (973 or 978–1014 or 1031) is the penname of a Japanese writer and Imperial lady-in-waiting, best known for penning The Tales of Genji, which is considered the oldest completed novel in the world. Her true identity remains unknown although there have been speculations that she may have been Fujiwara no Kaoriko. 

Queen Nanny of the Maroons (1686–1755) remains a bit of a legend, as most knowledge of her comes from oral history. She was born in Ghana and lead the Jamaican Maroons in guerrilla warfare against the British. In 1975 she was declared a national hero. Her troops excelled in long-range communication and camouflage, giving them an advantage over the British in addition to their innovations in guerrilla warfare. Nanny and her Maroons won their freedom and a parcel of land in a time where slavery remained common. 

Anne Bonny (1697–1733) and Mary Read (1685–1721) were the most famous lady pirates of the Caribbean. Born in Ireland and England, respectively, Bonny and Read were likely lovers, in addition to Bonny’s marriage to the notorious Jack Calico. All three were captured after stealing a Nassau ship. Calico was executed immediately, Read died in prison, and Bonny’s death remains a mystery. 

Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814–1904) was an entrepreneur and abolitionist who owned several businesses and financed the freedom of hundreds of slaves and won several civil rights victories after the civil war. Often passing for white, Pleasant used her light skin tone to her advantage in business, amassing a hefty fortune before declaring herself as a Black woman and using her means to support well known abolitionist John Brown who was also her friend and lover. When he was hanged, a letter of hers was found on him, although no one suspected her. Pleasant came clean before her death, admitting to donating $900,000 in today’s dollars to Brown’s abolitionist pursuits. She additionally worked on the Underground Railroad and sued over streetcar segregation. She has been called the “Mother of Human Rights in California.” 

Sarah Winnemucca (1844–1891) wrote the first known memoir by a Native American woman, Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). Hailing from the Northern Paiute tribe, Winnemucca, also known as Thocmentony meaning “Shell Flower,” she worked as a teacher and interpreter, and played pivotal roles in wartime. With her command of the English language, she often served as a mediator between her tribe and Anglo-Americans, and advocated for the sovereignty of her people, particularly after their move to the Yakama Reservation, which has been described as a concentration camp. Her writing has been a key tool for modern historians and sociologists. While her social activism was a prominent part of her legacy, she has also been criticized for helping the US military.  

Madam CJ Walker (1867–1919) is the first female self-made millionaire in America according to the Guinness Book of World Records. After a childhood spent on a cotton plantation, Walker amassed her fortune through a line of cosmetics and hair products specifically marketed to Black women. As the brand grew, Madam CJ Walker Manufacturing Company trained nearly 20,000 women as sales agents and eventually started selling abroad in Central America and the Caribbean. Walker was also known as an activist and philanthropist, establishing a YMCA in Indianapolis’s Black community, and eventually moved to New York where her activism grew — particularly when she joined the executive committee that organized the Silent Protest Parade which drew a crowd of over 8,000 to protest the East St. Louis race riots. Her daughter, A’Lelia Walker (1885 – 1931) was an openly bisexual patron of the arts in Harlem, who traveled to Paris and spent time with Josephine Baker, who you’ll learn more about later. 

Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) wrote controversial tanka poetry and stood strong as an anti-war pacifist and feminist in late Meiji Japan. She completed an estimated 20–50,000 poems and gave birth to 13 children. Her feminist stances deviated from her Japanese contemporaries with regards to financial independence and motherhood. While many Japanese women advocated for government assistance for mothers, Akiko argued that dependence on the government is equivalent to dependence on a man in an essay titled “Women’s Complete Freedom.” She also wrote about the importance of women having identity beyond motherhood. In her later years into the Taisho period, her commentary took a turn to the right in support of war against China and the US. 

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas (1890–1998) saved the Florida Everglades. While working as a journalist, she wrote The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) which brought national attention to the importance of the swampland and prevented it from being used for land development. She was also a suffrage advocate and served as a charter member of the ACLU. Douglas had been recognized for her work with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton and an award in her name through the National Parks Association. She was also inducted into various halls of fame. She continued her work as a conservationist until her death at 108. 

Maria Orosa e Ylagan (1892–1945) developed nutrient–dense food products like Soyalac and Darak in the Philippines, as well as banana ketchup. In addition to her work as a pharmaceutical chemist, Orosa was a humanitarian and war heroine. Her canning techniques and food inventions saved hundreds of lives and aided guerrilla warriors fighting the Japanese during World War II. One of her goals was to help develop food self-sufficiency in the Philippines. She died of shrapnel wounds in Manila after contributing over 700 recipes and to the war effort. She is recognized by the Philippines and the American Red Cross for her invaluable knowledge and innovations.  

Chief Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900–1978) played a pivotal role in the Nigerian independence movement as an educator, political campaigner, suffragist, and activist. She was the first female student admitted to the Abeokuta Grammar School and worked promote literacy among lower income women. Ransome-Kuti also established the Abeokuta Woman’s Union while fighting for women’s rights and better government representation. She believed in socialist principals and caught the attention of the British and US who feared her communist connections, although her passport was eventually restored. She became president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1963 and received several honors and awards for her activism—including the honor of membership to the Order of Nigeria and the Lenin Peace Prize.  

Josephine Baker (1906–1975) collected intelligence about the Nazis and their collaborators while performing in Paris. She smuggled her information to the British with invisible ink on sheet music. She was also the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, Siren of the Tropics (1927). Born in the US, she renounced her citizenship and became a French national. She rose to fame with her erotic dances and stage shows, often accompanied by her signature banana costume and her pet cheetah, Chiquita. Yes, a cheetah, that would sometimes escape to the dismay of her musicians. Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw” and Picasso painted her. She used her celebrity to serve as an “honorable correspondent” during the German occupation of France, for which she received the highest medals and honors. Baker went on to support the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s. She spoke at the March on Washington and was approached by Coretta Scott King after her husband’s death to replace him as the leader of the movement, which she declined.  

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) authored Silent Spring, which resulted in a nationwide ban of certain pesticides, including DDT, in the United States. The book also inspired the grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. While her initial research focused on marine biology with the bestsellers The Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind, her study and advocacy of environmental conservation played a pivotal role in bringing attention to the damage humanity was causing the planet it inhabits. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter. The surviving letters she exchanged with lifelong partner, Dorothy Freeman, have been published since her death. 

Chien-Shiun Wu (1912–1997) made significant contributions to nuclear and particle physics and worked on the Manhattan Project, developing the process for separating uranium. Sometimes known as the “First Lady of Physics,” the Chinese-American experimental physicist is best known for the Wu experiment which figured out something about the conservation of parity which may mean something to you if you studied physics, but I never did. While her role in the discovery was mentioned in the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics acceptance speech, the prize was not awarded to her but rather the physicists who originated the idea of parity nonconservation. Wu was honored in 1978 with the inaugural Wolf Prize. 

Ludmilla Pavilchenko (1916–1974) accumulated 309 confirmed kills as a Soviet sniper during World War II. Nicknamed “Lady Death,” she is the most lethal female sniper in recorded history. In 1942, she was injured by a mortar shell and spent the rest of the war training snipers and touring allied nations to secure a second front against Nazi Germany. At an assembly in Chicago, after reporters failed to take her seriously, she famously stated, “Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?” She received the Gold Star hero of the Soviet Union, and the Order of Lenin twice.  

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) was the first African woman and environmentalist to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She studied in the U.S. and eventually earned a Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Nairobi, becoming the first woman in east and central Africa to do so. She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, a non-profit which enabled women to replant devastated areas with trees, and promoted both women’s rights and environmental conservation. She fiercely protested government attempts to privatize public lands and was arrested more than once for it. She was later elected to parliament before winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She went on to work on waste-reduction programs and served on the Eminent Advisory Board of AWEPA until her death. 

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943–Present) discovered the first radio pulsars, “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century.” The astrophysicist hails from Northern Ireland and made her discovery as a postgrad in 1967 which has become an extremely useful tool for astronomers because of the ways they emit electromagnetic radiation. (Or something. Again, not something I have studied.) Her thesis advisor, Anthony Hewish, was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1974. While many criticized her omission, she has said herself that the omission was justified because of her status as an undergrad. Regardless, she has gone on to serve as president of the Royal Astronomy Society and was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018.  

Marsha P Johnson (1945–1992) and Sylvia Rivera (1951–2002) were prominent figures in the fight for gay and trans liberation and co-founders of the radical activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Orphaned by her father’s abandonment and mother’s suicide, Rivera was living on the streets by age 11 and forced into child prostitution until she was taken in by the local drag community. Johnson, on the other hand, remained closeted within her religious family until she moved to New York and started performing as a drag queen. Both saw their gender as something varied and fluid, not necessarily landing on “womanhood” specifically. During the Stonewall Riots, Johnson threw “the shot glass that was heard around the world,” while Rivera was uptown despite claiming to have been there. Regardless, the two founded STAR, an organization for homeless queer youth. When Johnson’s body was found in the Hudson River, Rivera and Johnson’s other friends insisted that Johnson was not suicidal when police jumped to rule out foul play. Rivera’s activism only strengthened after her friend’s murder, solidifying the transgender movement that continues to this day.  

Judith Heumann (1947–Present) became the first wheelchair user to teach in New York City after winning Heumann v. Board of Education of the City of New York in 1970. She has since made immense strides for the disabled community with a range of non-profits, NGOs, and the government. She contributed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and lead the 504 sit-in, the longest federal building sit-in, which convinced Joseph Califano to sign the 504 section of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—adding significant civil rights protection to citizens with disabilities. She served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, with the World Bank Group as their first Advisory on Disability and Development, and most recently as a senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation. 

Maya Lin (1959–Present) designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial after submitting her design in a public design competition while still an undergraduate at Yale University. The contest was blind, so the judges were unaware of her race, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, or her gender. Once revealed, she and her work faced controversy, but ultimately persevered and remains a landmark in Washington DC—ranked 10 in a 2010 poll of America’s Favorite Architecture. She has since created many installations, often with a focus on nature, like her 2010 interactive memorial “What Is Missing?” which laments the loss of biodiversity across the globe. President Barack Obama awarded her with the National Medal of the Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lin has four honorary doctorates and is represented by the Pace Gallery. 

Claudia Paz y Paz (1966–Present) became the first female Attorney General of Guatemala in 2010. She made unprecedented strides in criminal justice and human rights, including the prosecution of Efrain Ríos Montt for genocide, whose name you might recognize because Rigoberta Menchú advocated for his trial. She aggressively prosecuted organized criminals and human rights violators, making her the first law enforcement official to bring justice to civil rights abusers in Guatemala. In spite of the threats to her life, Paz y Paz sought justice in an unjust world, and actually succeeded. Forbes named her one of the “five most powerful women in the world” in 2012, and she was a leading candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. Now, she serves as a member of the Justice Leadership Initiative, and a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. 

Ali Stroker (1987–Present) played Anna in Deaf West’s revival of Spring Awakening and Ado Annie Caries in the 2018 revival on Oklahoma! for which she won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Spring Awakening, which incorporates deaf actors, made her the first Broadway performer to use a wheelchair for mobility on stage, while Oklahoma! made her the first one to win a Tony. Stroker is a co-chair of Women Who Care, supporting cerebral palsy, a founding member of anti-bullying campaign, Be More Heroic, and has traveled to South Africa to partner with ARTS InsideOut—holding theater classes for women and children affected by AIDS. She is openly bisexual, a founding director of ATTENTION Theater, and at 33, has plenty more road ahead to trod. 

About the author.
Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed.

In 1995, Hillary Clinton famously championed global gender equality at a United Nations Conference in Beijing: “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” And by some measures, we have made strides in the last 25 years. But by others, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. At that conference, the No Ceilings: The Full Participation Report, produced in partnership with the Gates Foundation, was presented — and one of the hallmarks of the report was highlighting that the United States is the only industrialized nation to not have a mandated paid maternal leave, along with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Tonga.

You’d think that perhaps this might have changed since then, but we are still sans mandated paid parental leave in 2021. “Labor policies that facilitate or hinder working adults’ ability to balance jobs and caregiving have a tremendous impact on women,” the report states. “Paid maternal leave supports women’s continued employment, job stability, and longer-term wage growth.”

Let’s talk some quick $ and sense

Women are not paid the same as their male peers.
In tech, the median male makes 61% more than the median female, and minority women fare even worse concerning the gender pay gap. Studies peg the discrepancy for women in computer or math-related fields as earning 80 cents to the dollar a man makes from doing the same job—and it adds up: $317 per weekly paycheck or $16,484 per year.

Women are awarded far less equity.
Women in tech don’t just earn less than their male counterparts in $ and ¢, but in shares as well, according to a study released by software platform Carta. Findings showed that overall, men own 91 percent of employee and founder equity in Silicon Valley, leaving women a meager 9 percent.

Motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus.
When it comes to kids, moms lose 4 percent of their hourly earnings on average for every child they have, while men make 6 percent more. As you might imagine, this kind of wage gap leads to significant income loss for women — especially since, as of 2017, 41 percent of mothers were the sole or primary breadwinner for their families.

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall?
At this rate, barring legislative action, like an Equal Rights Amendment, it will take another 99.5 years to close the gender gap globally, according to the 2020 Global Gender Gap Report, an annual report released by the World Economic Forum. And we just don’t have that kind of time. For women, and frankly, the overall success of business and culture, we need to grease the wheels of change.

Let’s look at how far we have come through the lens of three different job titles to help trace the arc: Software Developer, Web Developer, and Marketing Research Analyst.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

Women in tech — are we breaking through the glass ceiling, or are we banging our heads? Frankly, it’s sometimes hard to tell. Another International Women’s Day has come and gone in a flurry of feel good Instagram posts, but the conversation around whether inroads are being made remains. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the percentage of women software developers has barely budged despite all the efforts, growing from 19% in 2011 to 19.4% in 2020. The saving grace is that the market itself has grown 57% in that timeframe, which means the total number of female software developers has gone from 198,360 to 365,302.

In the United States, women hold just 25% of the overall jobs in computing and leave the tech sector at twice the rate as men. Just close to 5% occupy leadership positions—and these numbers shrink even further when looking at women of color. Black and Latina women held only 6.2% and 5.9% respectively in 2020. But there is light breaking through the clouds.

Collective action has helped call attention to inequity. 20,000 Google employees staged a walkout in 2018 to protest the company’s payouts to execs accused of sexual harassment, along with Google’s policy of forced arbitration. And it caused a ripple effect throughout the tech industry. Google nixed its policy of forced arbitration, with AirBnB and Facebook swiftly following suit. But to effect lasting change, execs need to chart a real path forward that considers the cultural change required to make a workplace truly more inclusive. The good news? Inclusivity benefits the bottom line.

WEB DEVELOPERS

It’s important to remember that the digital landscape is a built environment. Developers create the websites we visit and code our cyber experiences. As more businesses move to be digital-first, having women at the forefront of curating our digital journeys is critical. We don’t want the digital world to become one designed by only men. The numbers, however, paint a story of stasis. The field has experienced just a small amount of overall growth, with the total number of web developers numbering 182,000 in 2011, growing to only 193,000 in 2019. The percentage of women-identified web developers increased from 38.6% to 41.4% in that same timeframe, which in real number terms means that there are just 9,650 more in 2019 than in 2011. Phew.

Tech folks in web dev distinguish between front-end, back-end, and full-stack development. Here’s what that means: front-end developers are those who design and implement what you see in your web browser, while back-end developers do the programming behind the scenes. And full-stack developers, well, they do it all. Once upon a time, the distinction between front and back-end development was less rigid. In the first decade of the web, every developer had to be full-stack, but web work became more specialized over time. By 2010, the profession had begun to stratify, with developers who had computer science degrees (mostly men) sashaying into back-end roles while more auto-didactic coders and designers stepped into the front.

Tropes emerged. Back-end developers sometimes attribute front-end prowess less to technical skill and more to some web juju comprised of feeling, rather than logic-ing — a mastery, if you will, of the “soft” things that women are “supposed to” excel at. Of course, this thinking in and of itself is fallacious — nothing in the land of computers is any more or less logical than something else. All this erroneous thinking has succeeded in feminizing a subfield of web development and by proxy, masculinizing another. Prestige and labor scarcity dance a tight capital tango, and all too often, masculinity is seizing the prestige.

Underrepresentation of women in tech is a titanic liability for the industry. Why? Because diversity = profitability. Diverse companies tend to report higher growth, perform better, be more innovative, and have an amplified competitive edge. It’s not just about equity; parity is also good for the bottom line. Companies like 23andMe, Pinterest, and Slack are helping lead the way towards true inclusivity that extends into the management and executive levels — we need more businesses to join them.

MARKET RESEARCH ANALYSTS + MARKETING SPECIALISTS

Market research — or data-driven consumer insights — is a STEM field whose purpose is to uncover insights and explore consumer desires and needs. And, as you might suspect, this mathematically oriented career was once dominated by men. But here, the numbers tell a more uplifting story. As data analytics becomes a more prominent part of marketing, women have comprised a growing segment of this space. In 2011, there were 117,875 female market research analysts, but that number leapfrogged to 256,668 in 2020. Here’s why this matters so much: women now drive the world economy. Globally, they controlled about $24 trillion in consumer spending in 2020, up from $20 trillion in 2018. To paint a more vivid picture, in aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined — actually more than twice as big.

Given the numbers, it’s clear that ignoring women comes at a costly peril. And yet, many companies do just that. Part of the challenge comes from who is doing the research. When experts examine what a market needs and wants, the researchers must reflect those they are studying, lest unconscious biases creep in and distort the data.

Companies have a lot to learn about selling to women.
Despite remarkable strides in market power and social position that have been made in the last 100 years, women are routinely undervalued in the marketplace and underestimated in the workplace. With too many claims on their time, it’s often a circus of juggling work, family, and home — made all the more acute by the pandemic. Few companies are heeding the need to create time-saving products or services that speak to women’s lived experiences and needs. Expanding the number of women who run the underlying research that shapes which products make it to market mean more on-target consumer insights. All of which brings us to…

HOW WE CAN ALL HELP TO REDUCE THE GENDER GAP

There are many ways to help reduce the gender gap; here’s a simple one we can all do: amplify women’s voices.

Get out your megaphones. A critical component of championing women at work is equalizing voices. Interrupting, mansplaining, and having others take credit for their ideas are all serious problems that women experience in the workplace. During the Obama administration, female Whitehouse staffers, after having to muscle their way into meetings and vying to be heard, developed the amplification strategy to lift and strengthen one another’s voices. Frustrated by their male peers garnering more attention and seeing their idea take flight more quickly, women in the Obama administration initiated an echoing support technique they dubbed “amplification.”

What began as women supporting women grew into female staffers acknowledging each other’s contributions, which gave way to more of them being consulted in discussions and growing parity with men concerning who sat in the president’s inner circle.

While amplification developed in the White House, this technique can be put to great use in any workplace by both men and women. Role-play these sample statements, shared by DreamHost, to get a sense of how to amplify:

• As ____ said, we can improve in this area by ____.
• ____’s idea of ____ could be the solution to ____.
• I want to emphasize what _____ said. It really demonstrated how _____.
• I really appreciate your comment, ____. Your idea could really help us ____.

Mentoring is another highly effective way to amplify women’s voices. Sharing knowledge, connections, and shortcuts is a powerful way to facilitate someone having their ideas heard. Every business needs more good ideas from diverse sources, help give them voice.

About the author.
An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist—Karina writes, produces, and edits compelling content across multiple platforms—including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Yahoo News, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties and has spanned insight pieces on psychedelic toad medicine to forecasting the future of work to why sustainability needs to become more sustainable.