Do you feel as though you are constantly ‘on’ and you want to find a way to switch off? Do you project as though everything is under control from the outside but on the inside you are barely keeping your head above water? That each day is a constant juggle of competing priorities?
Rather than juggling the two worlds of career and life, what if you could create a third alternative, your own, new evolved world: one that works for you rather than against you?
Breaking the Gender Code not only unpacks why we feel the constant pressure to keep all of the balls in the air but also where it all came from. It looks at how the cultural myths created and reinforced over millennia underpin our expectations today and aren’t serving us.
Over two years Danielle interviewed over 50 women (and a few men) in leadership roles – including the C-suite (CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CIOs), senior VPs, partners, directors, senior executives – who are also parents. The majority of the women work for large corporates including Westpac, CBA, HSBC, Macquarie, Caltex, Toyota, EY, Woolworths, Atlassian, SAP, Medibank and other well-known Australian international organisations.
What she unravels is that we are all operating under the Gender Code. It is a code embedded into our culture throughout history, perpetuated in philosophy, enlightenment science and patriarchal capitalism. The code dictates the rules of belonging based on gender and determines how we think, how we feel, what is acceptable and whats not. Its sometimes obvious, but mostly its insidious, lurking in families, workplaces and communities.
This book puts the Gender Code under the microscope and scrutinizes the equation of productivity + business = worthiness. In the process it dismantles outdated motherhood, superwoman and the having it all myths.
The Gender Code is driving high personal expectations, unconsciously holding women back and limiting potential.
This book challenges the reader to question, understand, ask, reorient, and create.
While it is a crucial first step to be aware of the Gender Code, it is also necessary to question, interpret and understand how it unintentionally scaffolds a personal code. Breaking the Gender Code helps women to ask if their code makes sense anymore and from there, decide if they want to value and keep the code that they have, delete parts that they dont want any more and/or create new code, one they actually want.
Breaking the Gender Code provides women with tools and strategies to create their own solutions for their unique context. In the process, they can let go of what is no longer helpful, use what they already have, bring that to everything they do and live life on their own terms. In doing so you can relieve the pressure, dial down the guilt and if it is a goal, progress to leadership, executive and board roles confidently and on your own terms.
Breaking the Gender Code encourages executive women to realise that their contribution is highly valuable in all their roles and that the skills and capabilities strengthened by being a parent and caring for others is a powerful adaptive leadership and career asset – not a liability as commonly believed.
In breaking the Gender Code that’s within us, every one of us can build confidence in who we truly are and write our own code. And in writing your own code, you create an environment for the next generation of code breakers.
