The Truth About What Women Want Conversation

For centuries, society has doled out mixed messages for women. We are meant to be “good girls” and “pleasers”, often unable to express our real hopes and desires as a result. Women of all ages report they have felt judged and typecast. To this end, we have kept quiet about our victories and our disappointments.

With women’s labor participation at 57.5 % presently and women outnumbering men in undergraduate and graduate programs across the country, female agency is on the rise. As women attain more professionally and personally, they have shed passivity for respect and recognition. While challenges remain, we are entering an era of women’s voices, a time when women are being embraced. Today women not only know what they want but can get what they want. This boldness affects us all—women, children and men alike.

Join us in conversation with Susan Shapiro Barash, Author and Gender Expert, and Jodi Fitzgerald, Senior Director of Member Experience at the YMCA of Greenwich, as they discuss Susan’s latest research on the progress we have made and what is ahead.

Susan Shapiro Barash has written over a dozen nonfiction books, including Tripping the Prom Queen, You’re Grounded Forever, But First Let’s Go Shopping and A Passion for More: Affairs that Make or Break Us. For more than twenty years she taught gender studies in the Writing Department at Marymount Manhattan College and has guest taught creative nonfiction at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. For her fiction, Between the Tides, A Palm Beach Wife, A Palm Beach Scandal, and Maribelle’s Shadow, she writes as Susannah Marren.

She has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Elle, Marie Claire, and has appeared on national television including the Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC. Barash has been a guest on national radio including NPR and Sirius Radio. Speaking appearances include Credit Suisse, Bayer Diagnostics, UBS, United Way, Kravis Center and the Society of the Four Arts. Several of her titles have been optioned by Lifetime and HBO.

She has served as a literary panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts, as a judge for the International Emmys, and as Vice Chair of the Mentoring Committee of the Women’s Leadership Board at the JFK School of Government, Harvard.