Finding Community – and Ourselves – in Unlikely Places
Conferences and trade shows can feel like occupational hazards: The travel is grueling, the speakers often snoozy. At a conference last month, however, I had a different experience. The sessions I attended and the people I met opened new windows for me – professionally and personally – and provided the sense of belonging and community […]
Read MoreAchieving Resilience by Embracing Diversity
Curveballs have been a part of work since the very beginning. Some are huge – the steam engine, email, autonomous vehicles. Others are smaller but still pack a punch: a resignation, a public transportation strike, a last-minute request with a 60-minute turnaround time. Our Women Empowered committee brought together four of Cognizant’s fiercest female leaders […]
Read MoreSee My Abilities, Not My Disability
In 2009, just as I joined Cognizant through an acquisition, a car accident left me paralyzed from the neck down. At 29 years old, and in a split second, everything changed: I was completely paralyzed in my chest, abdomen, legs and hands, and partially paralyzed in my wrists and elbows. I still had full shoulder […]
Read MoreThe Way(s) to the Future of Work
In 2010, Martin Sheen starred in The Way, an underrated but beautiful film. His character is a curmudgeonly, set-in-his-ways, late-middle-age, Type A workaholic from Los Angeles. A series of events lands him on El Camino de Santiago (translated into English as “The Way”), where circumstances compel him to interact — in life-affirming ways — with […]
Read MoreForging Our Future: Five Lessons Learned from Women Driving Change in Business, Technology and Society
The website said: “The 2019 MAKERS Conference is a global women’s leadership event that brings together the most powerful names in business, entertainment, tech, and finance to explore ways to accelerate the movement with compelling videos, provocative conversations, and onstage pledges for change.” I read this as I was preparing to head to the MAKERS […]
Read MoreMaking the Future with the Lower Eastside Girls Club
I vividly remember my first visit to the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) in November 2015. My Uber driver inquired, “Does this look like the right place?” Looking around, I felt a bit swallowed up by the endless rows of ruddy-colored brick tenements lining the narrow streets that crisscross the Lower East Side. I thanked […]
Read MoreLeveraging Tech to Remove Hiring Bias
Organizations are on an ongoing mission to create inclusive and diverse workplaces; however, many are still struggling to make this happen — and, as a result, missing out on whole pools of talent. Both consciously and unconsciously, many organizations’ hiring processes still suffer from the “comfortable clone syndrome,” i.e., selecting talent that looks the same, […]
Read MoreAssistive Technologies Don’t Create an Inclusive Workplace — Committed Businesses Do
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29.3% of working-age disabled people are employed today, compared with 73.5% of those without a disability. What’s more, the unemployment rate for individuals with a disability was 9.2% in 2017, according to the BLS, more than twice that of those with no disability (4.2%). If only there […]
Read MoreGetting to Equal: The Myth of the Working Mom
Let’s flip the idea of the childrearing career penalty for women on its head: What if being a working mom was seen as a career enhancement? Think about it for a moment. When men become working dads, they’re seen as settling down, getting grounded, reaching maturity. We perceive their family focus as a step forward […]
Read MoreThe Challenge of Categorizing Gen Z: The Rise of the ‘Micro-gens’
As Generation Z enters the workforce, and surpasses millennials in overall world population in the next year, many are trying to label members of this demographic, just as we did with previous generations. Listicles are published every day espousing the top 10 traits of Gen Z (born roughly between 1995 and 2010) or the five […]
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