My article for Melinda Gates's Evoke website
I’ve been a content advisor to Melinda Gates’s Evoke website for a while now, but I recently had the honor of having my first byline on the site, with this article: To achieve gender equality, we need to tell our own stories.
I hope you’ll give it a read… but if you don’t have the time, scan below for key takeaways & advice for getting started.
Key takeaways on why women need to tell our stories
When women speak out, it can spark everything from disdain to death threats, so our fear is understandable. But it’s also an insidious tool that the patriarchy uses to keep us down. We have no alternative: We must make it our business to overcome our fear of expressing ourselves, and to hold accountable those who punish us for that expression.
If you have internet access, I call upon you to begin sharing your voice in intentional and powerful ways online. Publishers call this deliberate cultivation of an online following “building a platform”; your platform might include social media activity, a personal website, maybe even a newsletter. Once you have a platform, you can use it to lift up other women’s voices. But first, you have to be willing to take up space yourself.
“Women coming together, advocating for each other, and amplifying each other’s voices, are all paths to building women’s power. The internet lets us do all of these things at a scale that’s much harder to achieve in an analog way.”
How to get started telling your story
If you’re ready to create a stronger online presence, here are some tips to get you started:
Give yourself permission to write the way you actually talk. Let go of business jargon and tell me about yourself and your work the way you would in a conversation with a human being around whom you feel unjudged and at ease.
Also give yourself permission to follow people on social media who actually interest you. If you work in healthcare and the “top” healthcare accounts on Twitter leave you cold, then instead follow the economist whose posts you find thought-provoking and/or the poet whose posts move you. Trust that engaging with content that compels you will inspire you to share your own compelling content, in turn.
Pick a social network that makes you feel most at ease. Some of my clients feel completely stilted on Twitter but free-and-easy on Instagram; others take immediately to LinkedIn. Don’t try to be everywhere, certainly not at first. Yes, take into account which social network is most relevant for your industry, but above all, pick a place to be where you actually want to spend time—this will enable your best and most powerful self to come through.
Consider launching a website at yourname.com. Feminist entrepreneur and force of nature Cindy Gallop (her tagline: “I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.”) recommends this strategy in a video that I highly recommend watching; she notes that yourname.com is likely to come up high in the search results for your name, thus giving you a chance to influence the information people first see when they look you up. (I should note that Gallop uses the term “personal brand,” and I firmly believe brands are for companies and products; people, on the other hand, don’t have brands, they have stories. But her advice is still brilliant.)
Look for hashtags and other social media campaigns that offer an opportunity to amplify other women’s voices. A great example of using social media to lift each other up is the #WomentoFollow Twitter campaign started by journalist Rose Horowitz; as its name suggests, #WomentoFollow highlights women’s accounts on Twitter that other women recommend following. Another hashtag of note stems from the #SharetheMicNow campaign, where white women with large followings handed over the keys to their accounts to Black women for the day; this effort continues with #KeepSharingtheMic.
The words we use and the stories we tell shape our world. As Netflix’s Bozoma Saint John told Forbes magazine, “None of us will have any impact or influence if we are quiet. So don’t be quiet. Be loud as hell.”
See you online.
