Why we need many more voices in the civic innovation debate By Dr. Jonathan Reichental, Chief Information Officer, City of Palo Alto “In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival.” – Cary Fowler As a technology leader in Silicon [...]
By Zach Perron, Lieutenant - Palo Alto, CA Police Department I think it’s time to rethink the way that police agencies attempt to recruit new police officers. Police departments across the country are having tremendous difficulty filling vacancies. As a result, many agencies are “working short,” with fewer officers on the books than are authorized, [...]
By League of Women in Government Editor Happy Almost New Year!! It's been a busy year for the League, not limited to its creation earlier in 2015. We've heard you loud and clear that having a spot where local government women AND men can visit to read content about advancing women in government is [...]
New mothers are often not ready to just pick up where they left off at work. Their employers need to know and respond to this. By Elaine Davidson, WorkingMother.com The weeks leading up to the end of maternity leave and the first weeks back at work are undoubtedly the most difficult for many working mothers. Organizations—and [...]
By Dave Smith, Chief Product Officer, Payscale Managers know that engaged employees are more effective. But despite the vast amount of employee engagement research out there, very little of it focuses on a person’s primary reason for employment in the first place: getting paid. PayScale, the compensation software company where I work, surveyed 71,000 employees [...]
ICMA Works to Advance Women in the Profession Reprinted from ICMA.org Photo: Women Leading Government - TX Chapter In September 2012, ICMA President-elect Bonnie Svrcek established a Task Force on Women in the Profession to evaluate the barriers facing women in the local government profession and to develop strategies to remove the barriers for those [...]
By Lisa K. Goldman, City Manager - Burlingame, CA A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were just back from Thanksgiving break and chatting about how we’d spent our day. Much to my horror, my colleague mentioned that she had purchased all the food and cooked Thanksgiving dinner for her boyfriend’s entire family of [...]
By Kathy Spillar, Executive Director, FMF (Parent group of National Center for Women & Policing) As the crisis continues to unfold in Baltimore and in communities across the country, it becomes increasingly clear that hiring the right types of police officers is imperative to improving police-community relations. In the Winter 2015 issue of Ms., I outlined why [...]
By Thomas I Miller, President - National Research Center, Inc. For generations, the pronoun for doctors and lawyers was “he.” In the last twenty years things changed. Most everyone would say “improved.” Recent statistics show that nearly half of all U.S. medical school graduates in 2014 were women and the same percentage applied to law [...]
Time Magazine Person of the Year 2015Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany