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Felicite Moorman

Felicite Moorman

Award-Winning​ ​Technology​ ​Entrepreneur​

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women in business

America’s First Female Recession

August 30, 2020 by Felicite Moorman Leave a Comment

Women’s entry to the workforce between the 1930s and 1950s introduced a new conception of family life: married-couple families with two working parents, rather than a sole (male) breadwinner. In tumultuous times, such as wars and recessions, women’s participation in the labor market has historically increased, and up until March 2020, women had lower unemployment rates than men. The COVID19 pandemic has hit the economy hard – and women are disproportionately affected by this economic downturn.

It is crucial to acknowledge the fact that domestic labor is a full-time unpaid job that many women perform in addition to their work responsibilities.

The cultural norm of a nuclear family, where women take on most of the domestic labor, is forcing women to make difficult career decisions. A 2012 research paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City observed the business cycle’s impact on men vs. women, finding that “when the economy gets worse, women’s contributions at home can be more valuable than their paychecks.” This isn’t entirely true, since women statistically work in industries less subject to the business cycle, and recessions tend to hit certain sectors harder than others. But the COVID19 pandemic is entirely unprecedented, and the complicated relationship between women’s careers and familial responsibilities is relevant. With childcare options such as babysitting, daycares, schools, and camps no longer available, many families, especially mothers, are juggling parenting and teleworking. It is crucial to acknowledge the fact that domestic labor is a full-time unpaid job that many women perform in addition to their work responsibilities.

That’s not the only setback for female professionals. During the Great Recession, male-dominated industries such as manufacturing and construction were most affected. Now, the industries that employ the most women – leisure and hospitality, retail, service, and government jobs – have been hit harder. Women of color are impacted even more: 14% of Black women are unemployed, while only 10.3% of White women are unemployed. And women of color, who already receive lesser salaries than White women, predominate service sectors – which are likely to be the slowest to re-employ workers. 

What questions does this raise for the future of female leadership and career growth? 2020 college graduates, and lower-wage majors, the majority of which are women, will feel the impact of this pandemic for the rest of their careers. Women are excluded from June’s economic rebound, having lost more than 12.1 million jobs because of COVID19 with only ⅓ of those jobs returning in May and June. Efforts towards women’s inclusion in the workforce over the past several decades have been wiped out over the course of just a few months. And with the inevitably slow return of the female-majority industries, combined with uncertainty around childcare, there is increasing concern over the “gap in leadership pipelines” as a result of women stepping out of the workforce.

Once you get through the hard part, you will recognize yourself stronger and more resilient and more capable - and still you.

A millionaire at 30 but financially decimated by 35, the 2008 global economic recession wasn’t just a blow to my career – it was a blow to my concept of self. I took the recession personally, and was devastated and ashamed to have lost what I worked so hard to build. That type of thinking is antithetical to action. We tie our identities to our careers in the US, and the loss of a job/career path/business is inextricably linked to our sense of self. It’s important to realize that once you get through the hard part, you will recognize yourself as stronger and more resilient and more capable – and still you.

In the coming months, we’re going to explore ways to accelerate and amplify each other’s efforts, actions, and even entrepreneurship – and take back our time. If you’ve had to reprioritize and drop your career, you don’t have to lose your traction. No mourning, no dropping skills. Now is the time to innovate.

The question we should be asking isn’t, “How do we get back what we lost?” Instead, how do we leapfrog from where we were, after so many hard-earned gains, and reach what we deserve: real equality and equity in our careers.

How do we accelerate beyond it? What can we eliminate in the systems that are crumbling? What can we do differently? The working mom’s pretty facade is crashing down, and it’s time to normalize children being part of the conversation about work and what the future of work looks like. Now is the time to reconsider our cultural notions of how a family should exist, and what work/life balance means for working moms (and dads!). Without women bearing the load of parenting responsibilities at the expense of their careers, how can we reinvent work around having kids? The compartmentalization of work responsibilities and familial responsibilities is undeniably rooted in archaic gender roles, a norm that is being proven obsolete in today’s climate. Now is a time for individuals, families, companies, and society as a whole to seek a more holistic approach to structuring work and family life.

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: women in business, workplace equality

Apply Early and Often

August 30, 2020 by Felicite Moorman Leave a Comment

A Hewlett Packard internal report has shown that men will apply to a position with just 60% of the requirements and qualifications, while women typically wait until they meet 100%. This creates a gender disparity when individuals begin to climb the corporate ranks.

You don’t need me to tell you this, but there isn’t an intrinsic lack of ambition in women. A variety of social factors contribute to this inequality and hesitation with regards to applying for jobs. Women face more social repercussions when negotiating their raises, often have to consider a company’s policies for working mothers and maternity leave and statistics show that employers expect male candidates to outperform women before considering an applicant’s qualifications, not to mention the variety of workplace power dynamics and microaggressions embedded in the experience of being a female professional. 

We need a thoughtful, constructive set of changes at the institutional level, along with mindful internal ways of rejecting the insecurities ingrained in us as women

Even before arriving at these institutional roadblocks, many women must face the limitations they impose upon themselves. Many of us grow up in social environments where we develop internalized misogyny, self-defeating thoughts, guilt for having ambition, and an entirely different understanding of ego than the men in our culture. 

For hundreds of years, self-sufficiency wasn’t considered a quality that women could possess, and we still see the ramifications of this mentality today through the perpetuation of gender roles in and outside of the workplace and in the behaviors that we, as a society, choose to reward or punish in women. To counteract this corporate gender paradigm, we need a thoughtful, constructive set of changes at the institutional level, along with mindful internal ways of rejecting the insecurities ingrained in us as women.

In Linda Nochlin’s famed 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Nochlin interrogates the issue of seeking out some inherent inadequacy in women that stunts their professional growth, whether that be talent, ambition, or genius, and instead frames the female experience within a sociocultural context, “by stressing the institutional, rather than the individual, or private preconditions for achievement or lack of it (…)”  

Recognition drives us to succeed. We respond to the conditions of our workplace culture – many of which need to change at a socio-structural level not to accommodate women, but to enable all genders to reach their full potential. The Harvard Business Review notes the importance of recognition as a “motivational engine” that many women don’t receive on par with men in their early development. 

With this, I stress the importance of having high-powered female colleagues, role models, and mentors. Leadership visibility is essential, as is representation. The interweaving of workplace changes that enable women to succeed, combined with the psychosocial push that “lean-in” feminism encourages, is crucial to seeing this cultural paradigm shift. Applying early and often – putting yourself out there and chasing your ambition exactly as your male colleagues are goes beyond serving your individual goals. It paves the way for the next generation of female professionals to change corporate culture and our culture at large. 

Filed Under: Business, Equality Tagged With: women in business, workplace equality

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Felicite Moorman is the Co-Founder and CEO of STRATIS and CEO of BuLogics, companies that pioneer groundbreaking IoT development across the globe.


STRATIS is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for access, energy, and automation management and control for multifamily and campus communities in Smart Cities.

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BuLogics designs, builds, and certifies wireless devices and solutions for the Internet of Things.

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