TEDx Talks - One Women Army Breaking Barriers | Ms. Labhanshi Mittal | TEDxJIMS Vasant Kunj Women
The speaker shares their journey, emphasizing that failures have been more defining than successes. They discuss their background in educational psychology and soft skills training, highlighting the importance of skills like adaptability and creativity for future job markets. Despite possessing these skills, the speaker notes the societal challenges women face, particularly in male-dominated fields like photography. They stress the importance of passion over profit, sharing personal experiences of pursuing photography despite societal barriers. The speaker encourages others to evaluate their own definitions of success and to challenge societal norms that hold them back. They advocate for changing narratives and perspectives to empower women and create environments where they can thrive professionally. The speaker concludes by urging women to dream, challenge, evaluate, and change, drawing inspiration from figures like Priyanka Chopra and Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.
Key Points:
- Failures are valuable learning experiences that shape personal growth.
- Soft skills like adaptability and creativity are crucial for future job markets.
- Women face significant challenges in male-dominated fields, impacting professional growth.
- Passion should drive career choices, not just profit.
- Changing societal narratives can empower women to overcome professional barriers.
Details:
1. 🌟 Embracing Failures for Growth
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of learning from failures rather than just celebrating successes.
- Failures are positioned as a key component of personal and professional growth, suggesting a shift in perspective on how we view setbacks.
- The speaker promises that by the end of the talk, the audience will gain a new understanding and a personal mantra related to growth through failure.
2. 📚 Educational Psychology Journey
- Collaborated with multiple schools in both tier 1 and tier 2 cities, offering a diverse range of educational environments.
- Developed resilience and a growth mindset by addressing diverse student needs and fostering an inclusive learning atmosphere.
- Identified common educational goals among students, which helped align personal aspirations with academic achievements.
- Recognized the intrinsic motivation or 'spark' in students, crucial for nurturing educational passion and long-term engagement.
- Utilized student-centered approaches to tailor learning experiences, significantly improving student engagement and performance.
3. 🛠️ Future-Proof Skills
- Listening, observation, adaptivity, and creativity are crucial soft skills for future success. These skills help individuals navigate complex work environments, solve problems innovatively, and collaborate effectively with diverse teams.
- The World Economic Forum predicts these skills will be top priorities for recruiters by 2030, indicating a significant shift in hiring practices towards valuing cognitive and interpersonal abilities over technical skills alone.
- Educational psychology emphasizes the importance of these skills in student growth and employability. Programs that integrate these skills into their curriculum report higher student engagement and better preparation for the workforce. For example, schools that focus on project-based learning often see a measurable increase in students' creative problem-solving abilities.
4. 👩🎓 Women's Professional Challenges
- Women's professional growth is often impeded by societal biases in male-dominated environments, despite having essential skills.
- Gender-based biases significantly affect women's professional and personal well-being.
- For instance, women in tech fields report facing stereotyping and lack of mentorship, which can hinder career advancement.
- Studies show that companies with higher gender diversity often outperform those with less diversity, yet women continue to encounter barriers to entering and advancing in these environments.
- Implementing mentorship programs and diversity training can help mitigate these biases and improve women's career prospects.
5. 📸 Creative Field Struggles for Women
- Despite efforts towards equality, significant pay disparity persists for women in creative fields, such as photography. For instance, women photographers earn approximately 20% less than their male counterparts, illustrating the gap between the ideal of equal opportunities and the current reality.
- Factors contributing to this disparity include gender bias in hiring and promotion, lack of transparency in pay structures, and fewer opportunities for women to work on high-profile projects.
- A study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that female artists earn an average of $0.81 for every dollar earned by male artists, highlighting systemic issues in pay equity.
- Addressing these challenges requires implementing transparent pay practices, promoting women to leadership roles, and ensuring equal access to opportunities and resources in creative industries.
6. 🔐 Balancing Safety and Opportunity
- Safety concerns significantly impact professional opportunities for women, especially in fields requiring night work or visiting unsafe areas, such as photojournalism. For example, women may avoid these fields due to potential dangers.
- The need for personal safety can lead women to alter career paths. The speaker illustrates this by choosing educational psychology over a potentially unsafe profession, highlighting a common dilemma faced by women.
- Educational psychology is viewed as a way to empower students, allowing them to safely achieve their potential, demonstrating the speaker's strategic choice for personal and societal safety.
- The speaker acknowledges a trade-off between pursuing personal passion and ensuring safety, ultimately prioritizing safety, which is a common experience among women.
- The speaker's career choice reflects a broader societal trend where women may sacrifice personal professional opportunities to enable others to pursue their passions safely. This highlights the gender-specific challenges in balancing safety and opportunity.
7. 🏫 Gender Bias in Educational Leadership
- Despite progress in gender equality, women in educational leadership roles often face significant biases, with a preference for males in positions such as principals and department heads.
- A detailed study by McKenzie and Company in 2024 found that women encounter more obstacles than men in leadership roles, with specific challenges including institutional biases and stereotypes.
- The persistent bias against women in educational settings is evident even as other stereotypical barriers become less visible, affecting both career advancement opportunities and workplace dynamics.
- For example, women are less likely to be considered for high-stakes leadership roles, often requiring more credentials and experience than their male counterparts to be seen as equally competent.
- Statistical data show that women hold only 30% of top leadership positions in educational institutions, despite representing 70% of the teaching workforce.
8. 🔄 Redefining Success Through Resilience
- The speaker emphasizes that their journey is characterized more by failures than successes, underlining the crucial role of resilience and learning from setbacks.
- In the commercialized education sector, the speaker observed a misalignment between profit motives and genuine student growth, prompting a reevaluation of what success means in this context.
- A critical reflection led the speaker to redefine success not as personal achievement but as empowering others to accomplish what they themselves could not, shifting the focus from financial metrics to broader growth and empowerment.
- The speaker's experience serves as a practical example of how resilience and a reevaluation of success can lead to meaningful change and empowerment in both personal and professional realms.
9. 🔥 Pursuing Passion Over Profit
- Evaluate personal definitions of success by distinguishing between natural inclinations and external expectations.
- Challenge oneself by exploring different projects to discover true interests.
- Recognize that commercial success and happiness do not equate to fulfillment if passion is absent.
- Choose passion over profit as a primary motivator for long-term satisfaction and drive.
- Balance passion and profit by strategically integrating personal interests into professional goals.
- Consider practical examples, such as choosing projects that align with personal values or passions, even if they offer less immediate financial gain, to achieve long-term fulfillment.
10. 🌍 Transforming Work Environments
- Evaluate if your workplace is empowering or limiting to your growth.
- Shift perspectives and change narratives to overcome a limiting environment.
- Example: A Ted club engagement showed students they could pursue dreams despite barriers.
- Highlight that passion can drive change, even against barriers like parental disapproval.
11. 📷 Journey in Photography
11.1. Early Interest in Photography
11.2. Founding and Leading Photography Societies
11.3. Leadership and Recognition in Photography Clubs
12. 🚀 Dream, Challenge, Evaluate, Change
- The National Geographic Channel acknowledges the challenges women face in photography, highlighting their limited presence and struggles for access in the field.
- Despite safety concerns in unfamiliar locations, women can succeed in photography with passion and determination.
- Priyanka Chopra advocates for creating environments that allow women to grow professionally, emphasizing that women can balance family and career without apology.
- Women are often conditioned to apologize, affecting their confidence and presence in professional settings.
- The Association of Psychological Science found women in education and workplaces tend to apologize more, which can hinder their growth.
- The guiding principle of 'Dream, Challenge, Evaluate, Change' encourages dreaming big, challenging oneself, evaluating progress, and adapting for success.
- Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam's philosophy of 'Dare To Dream' is highlighted as a motivation for personal and professional growth.
- The final reflection questions how the world would look without limitations for girls, suggesting a potential for boundless growth.