Women Authors From The United States

"After musicians started auditioning for orchestras from behind curtains, "the number of women in top U.S. orchestras increased five-fold."

"We have so many ways to favor those in the "in group" while excluding those who aren't, including keeping them in their place with subtle but often intentional "micro inequities." Regardless of the intention, the pain and the impact is the same."

"We want the straightest gay people, and the whitest black people. We want that first-generation immigrant to act like they've been chilling in this place forever."

"Go somewhere where you're the minority. Go to the 'black gay women with disabilities film festival, because this is where you can confront your biases."

"The most gratifying thing is the moment when you see someone realize they’re going to make it, when you see the fear disappear … and they realize how awesome they are.”"

"We were all the same, and then you had the nerve to be different."

"I have always been drawn to the idea of unconscious biases and blind spots and what happens in our unconscious mind. "Our brains are highly habitual. Our brains start reaching conclusions without immediately telling us that it's doing so," she said. "It's looking for things that go together; 'what have I been habituated to understand goes together?' We're backing up and moving toward people in social situations all the time."

"I think you've already said the wrong thing by not saying anything."

"Biases are the stories we make up about people before we learn who they are. They are especially apparent when things are high-risk, or you have to make quick decisions."

"What we learned after Michael Brown was shot is that police officers are deeply ingrained with erroneous ideas about who's dangerous. Looking at pictures of black kids, they're adding four years to their age, and are told that 'black people are crazy strong and have crazy [levels of] pain tolerance."

"Embracing inclusion requires "the institution's ability to fully integrate its understanding of and appreciation for the diverse cultures and backgrounds of its employees."

"I was selling outsmarting a system that’s trying to outsmart you."

"We can’t have a conversation about that in 2021 without talking about what happened in 2020, and the tragedy of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and whole bunch of people before and after them. What I think we have – and let’s hope we can hold on to it– is the understanding that this stuff is systemic. That it is built in, that there was a social hierarchy established a long time ago that hopefully most of us don’t believe in but is nonetheless alive and well and on automatic every day selecting the same people, positioning the same folks and disadvantaging the same folks over and over again. So the awareness around systems I think has been powerful."

"I will be returning to my consulting company working across global organizations and industries, while continuing to advise Netflix."

"If there's anyone out there who has taken extreme to a new level, its Joe De Sena - in adventure racing, in business, and ultimately in the business of adventure! Spartan Up! is must-read."

"We need to look as a society at the system that says to succeed you need a college education, but you have to sell your future to get it."

"I never saw it as a book that’s about giving up things."

"It’s hard to step away from the company and this role because of how much I love Netflix and the people here. I’m so excited for the talented Wade Davis who will be taking the lead of the I&D work along with our incredible Inclusion Strategy team and I can’t wait to see the continued progress we all will make together."

"This is quite frankly about people being in denial. The biggest barrier is that we're in denial about our unconscious bias,"This investment in our self-image as good people is preventing us from moving forward. We don't need any more good people; we need real, authentic people."

"Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance."

"I call money “national wealth” and this other “natural wealth.”"

"Absent any social or political critique. But “Your Money or Your Life” was never supposed to be just a self-help guide to saving your own financial life."

"There’s a lot of blather about meaningful work and purpose in life. It’s dangled out as a carrot, and I don’t know how many people actually get to do that."

"Spending money is not an assertion of your freedom. It is the key to your next enslavement."

"Nobility is one thing, but to die of frugality is another."

"Things that should happen because of justice and environmental sustainability, but will also benefit the FIRE people in the FIRE movement."

"A lot of people are stuck for their entire lives in jobs that do not agree with their souls because of college debt."

"I think a lot about how we welcome in people who are committed feminists but have not seen themselves as climate feminists or have felt like the climate space is not super welcoming. Like, if you don’t have a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, then thanks, we don’t need you. And of course, that couldn’t be couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re going to be a feminist on a hot planet, you have to be a climate feminist."

"The climate crisis is not gender-equal or gender-neutral."

"If you’re going to be a feminist on a hot planet, you have to be a climate feminist."

"That what could go right is “in the onslaught of the quest for power and profit and prestige, that maybe these things could actually be replaced with care and courage and connection and community and creativity."

"I think it’s part of why I’ve really chosen to focus on communication of various stripes and culture-making of various stripes as at least a good chunk of what I do professionally, and what I do on on climate, because I think that whether it’s poetry, whether it is film, any number of mediums can take us to a place that we might otherwise feel antsy about or resistant to. And we kind of settle in around story. There’s something, I don’t know whether it reminds us of childhood in some cases, whether it feels like some kind of ancient practice in some cases, but I think it helps us see differently. It helps us feel into different experiences, different scenarios."

"The “different kind of leadership that women are bringing in droves on climate”"

"That dialog about solutions is often about scale and speed; yet, we would benefit from considering solutions at depth with “heart-centered wisdom” and love as a powerful leverage point"

"The value of “making our hearts public”, bringing feelings and stories into climate conversation."

"That “at our very best, we as human beings are active and generative collaborators with lifeforce… in these relationships of reciprocity and almost play with the planet’s living systems.”"

"The acknowledgment of how much has been and will be lost in our current systems, but still showing up for the work of what we can save in “this hard and magnificent moment”"

"Support women smallholders, realize higher yields, avoid deforestation, and sustain the life-giving power of forests."

"If women’s farms yielded as much on average as farmers run by men across the world, it would stop approximately 2 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere between now and 2050. “That’s on par with the impact household recycling can have globally."

"Curbing growth of our human population is a side effect,” she says---one that would reduce global emissions."

"Instead of clear-cutting new land, why not work to make the existing farms run by women more efficient? “Close that gap and farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent."

"More than 130 million women worldwide are denied access to school. Yet the more education a woman attains, the fewer children she has. From a conservation perspective, empowering women to have smaller families is an objectively positive outcome. “The right to go to school effects how many human beings live on this planet."

"Gender equity is on par with wind turbines and solar panels and forests,” Wilkinson says, adding, “This does not mean women and girls are responsible for fixing everything. But we probably will."

"I think about the feminine as the life-giving energy that circulates through the world. It’s an appreciation for interdependence and the connectedness of all things. It’s about working with the living systems of the planet rather than trying to conquer or wrangle them. The Feminist Climate Renaissance is not a revolution or a takeover or a war, but rather an upwelling of a better way to do climate-oriented work."

"I got sort of politicized around environmental issues broadly in high school and kind of carried that student activism into my undergraduate years. And I remember at some point ... I want to say, maybe my second year or so in college, I realized that if I wanted to work on environmental issues, that probably meant working on climate change. I learned a lot from a friend of mine in college, Billy Parish, who really got the youth climate movement going. He was kind of my entry point."

"The first thing that Carol Emshwiller said to us when she began teaching in the final week of the 2000 Clarion West Writers Workshop was, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent." This was the first clue I had to the importance Carol places on precision and refinement."

"Don't put anything important in your stories you don't use all through. To me, this is what's fun for the writer and fun, too, in reading."

"I'm a firm believer that your ideas come from the writing itself. I never have any until I start to write. And my mind is on structure most of the time (and on linking). I used to say that kept my conscious mind busy so my subconscious mind could work on more important things."

"I don't know where my "meanings" come from. I just try to write a good well formed story. I guess the meaning is just part of me and pops out by itself."

"Emshwiller's readers know her to be a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction. But her books, mostly published by a good small press in San Francisco, Mercury House, don't get wide attention. Part of the problem may well be her calm originality. Most reviewers prefer pigeons that fit in holes and rabbits that redux. Emshwiller's like a wild mixture of Italo Calvino (intellectual games) and Grace Paley (perfect honesty) and Fay Weldon (outrageous wit) and Jorge Luis Borges (pure luminosity), but no—her voice is perfectly her own. She isn't like anybody. She's different."