Damsels In Success: Ratify Me

There's a New Damsel in Town

To take the daily pulse in business, you have your morning coffee with the online business section of your newspaper of choice. Plus, you probably get breaking news e-mails throughout your workday. Obviously, these essential virtual destinations are where the old boys -- and their savvy female colleagues -- congregate to keep themselves up to the minute.

But where can you go to find sophisticated content on professional development custom-tailored for women?

Which site can you tap for a powerful social network of big-dreaming, savvy professional women who specifically want to talk shop with other women who take each other seriously about professional goals?

Where can you go to read in-depth, hard-core gold-standard advice about setting your career bar higher and figuring out how to successfully run the female ambition obstacle course?

Where can you find job opportunities posted by companies that are specifically trying to attract, develop and retain female talent?

Meet DamselsInSuccess.com

Described by Forbes.com as an online destination that is "shattering the glass ceiling, Web 2.0 style," DamselsInSuccess.com is generating a revolution among professional women eager to interact in the spirit of nurturing ambition, mentoring, and career advancement.


A College Drop-Out-Turned-Entrepreneur Whose Last Name Isn't Gates

Harleen Kahlon, the CEO and Founder of DamselsInSuccess.com, created the site because she was fed up with the media assumption that women care more about sex, dieting, and shopping than propelling their careers:

"Serious professional women are egregiously under-served by the existing fashion / love focus of women's print and online media," she says. "Women have changed over the decades, but content created for and, in some cases, by us has not."

Kahlon wanted to create the kind of site for online support and advice that wasn't available to her when she was running her own idiosyncratic career obstacle course.

At U.C. Berkeley, she dropped out after her freshman year (she chalks it up to being young, naive and having an over-booked social calendar). She did manage to return and earn her undergraduate degree, then got on track to law school when she managed to convince three federal judges to let her work for them as a pseudo-law clerk, even though she had no legal training. All three recommended her to law school.

Later, after graduating from Yale Law School, she passed the Bar and practiced as an attorney in New York for three years.

After hearing the constant complaints of her female colleague and friends that "existing online professional networking sites don't appeal to the needs of ambitious working women, " she decided to reinvent herself at age 34 as an entrepreneur. After all, having gone from drop-out to Yale Law School graduate, Kahlon understood by now that we create our own opportunities, and she envisioned a place where women would be inspired to create their own.

DamselsInSuccess.com was born.


Forget About Cute Shoes, Carbs and Clothes -- Let's Talk About Ambition

Put a group of high-achieving women together to brainstorm and watch the ideas fly across the room. These women crave motivational think tanks that get who they are and that ratify their career ambitions.

The Damsel's Professional Women's Forum, a section of the site resembling a group blog, is a virtual think tank. Fifty or so accomplished, interesting women in their 20s to 50s and from a wide variety of industries--among them a Wall Street investment manager, TV journalist, Yale professor, CMO, law firm partner, and a fashion designer--have been pre-selected to serve as Forum members. Each member contributes a cutting-edge monthly post in which she comments on important professional topics or shares an instructive and inspiring professional experience.

[In the interest of transparency, this is a great place to say that I am a Forum contributor, and also write a career advice column for Damsels. As founder and executive director of the Women's Business Alliance--an organization that has served as a motivational think tank for 2500 women over thirteen years--I was thrilled to learn about Kahlon's wholly unique business venture addressing online the professional interests of ambitious women.]

The Damsels Forum is growing daily, with more women applying to join every day.

The conversations taking place in the Forum are unprecedented. Women are candidly talking about hitting the maternal wall on Wall Street, managing the male ego's response to their ambition, staking their financial futures on starting their own companies, the correlation between beauty and success, and myriad parenting issues that arise when you're a working mom.

Kahlon says, "Participating in DamselsInSuccess should be a fun conversation, but we also hope that it's transformative. At Damsels, we believe it's important for high-achieving women to be in the company of other like-minded women who are dedicated to making the contributions they were born to make. We also believe that women deserve to work for employers who not only value those contributions, but also understand the needs of professional women and seek to fulfill them."

A First: A Social Network Just for Professional Women

Damsels also features a social network just for professional women.

For those familiar with Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn, the Damsels network will work in a similar way, with women able to customize their professional profiles and connect directly with other women to discuss word-of-mouth job opportunities, entrepreneurship, mentoring, returning to work after parenting, work/life balance, gender issues in the workplace, and other topics.

Already, women from Goldman Sachs, Jones Day, MySpace, AOL, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, KPMG, Deloitte, Microsoft, Intel, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, etc., have signed up.

Elsewhere, visitors to the site will find sophisticated feature-length columns loaded with expert advice and stories from the trenches covering a wide array of professional matters. The goal is to provide readers with in-depth advice that actually works in their day-to-day lives.

In a section called "Stories," users of the site are invited to respond to important career-related questions:

-What's your professional fantasy?

-Have you experienced sexual harassment or gender discrimination?

-When is the right time to have kids?

-What's one piece of professional advice you wish someone had given you when you were 20?

In the next few weeks, DamselsInSuccess.com will roll out a lineup of new content as the site begins to address other aspects of the lives of busy, professional women. New topics slated to debut include: personal finance, navigating relationships and ambition, parenting, and workplace fashion.

Targeting the Most Female-Friendly Companies

Damsels has positioned its site as a unique opportunity for women-friendly corporations to support the development and advancement of women. Heavyweights including UBS and MTV are already posting opportunities on the Damsels job board to connect with and recruit professional women.

Companies posting on the Forum are invited to submit logos to be featured under a banner which reads, "Employers Who Support the Advancement of Women" with logos linking to information about women-friendly policies the company has institutes.

The Damsel's job board also offers employers a resume search function.

A Damsel on a Mission: Getting the Word Out That, Finally, There's a Place That Understands That Career Is Important, Too

Telling stories and listening to others' tales is a very natural way for women to talk about how they've succeeded in realizing their ambitions, or the lessons they learned when failing.

Kahlon's hope is that these tales from the trenches will help break the isolation that so many professional women experience, no matter what their industry.

Of course, the best conversations will happen when Damsels reaches critical mass so Kahlon is now on a mission to get the word out to professional women that, finally, there's a place that understands that career is important, too.

A Surprise Reaction

Although Damsels has managed to get some excellent press in its first few weeks - the site's been in the New York Times, Forbes, The Boston Globe, TechCrunch, on FOX News, Kahlon has been surprised by the number of people who have responded to news of the Damsels launch with, "Aren't there hundreds of sites for women about career?"

The answer is a resounding, "No".

That Gnawing Feeling that Something Big Was Missing

It's not entirely clear why there's a perception that women's professional content needs are being adequately served when, in fact, such content is tough-to-impossible to find online or in print.

Kahlon says that she's gotten mail from hundreds of women who have been frustrated by the lack of resources for us.

One woman wrote:

"I feel so validated by everything I am reading here. Every time I open a magazine or go online, I see nothing that talks about the 9-5 (truthfully, 9-9) part of my life--ANYWHERE."

What's striking, says Kahlon, is that most of these women had an "a-ha" moment when they first saw the site:

"It made perfect sense to them once they saw it, but before it existed, they hardly realized they wanted or needed something like this. Many of them only had a gnawing feeling that something big was missing when they would flip through magazines or go to popular women's sites, but they weren't quite sure what."

So, Kahlon wonders, what else are we missing?

Kahlon hopes that conversations on Damsels will begin generating some answers.

Comments

[wagadog]

Nice site, but I'm curious. Why does "success" seem to always mean *business* success when applied to women -- and not technical, scientific or professional success?

Where are the engineers, the architects, the physicists, the software developers, the biochemists, the robotics experts? All of the women "in IT" seem to be from marketing, i.e. making money from the technology, not building the technology that makes the money.

[bellaisa]

Every time someone does something specific to a minority group or women, some fool (from the majority) jumps up and immediately expresses the view that the primary problem the minority group has is that they act like they are a minority group and should ignore differences altogether, blend in, and play by the rules established by the majority - in this case, since we're talking about business, that would be men. It's so stupid! Like another commenter pointed out, this guy just doesn't get it.

[Brianwilk]

I told my wife about the site and she loves it. Can't stop talking about, in fact. We even ended up having a heated discussion about the need for this kind of thing. In the end, because she's a woman, if she thinks there's a need for this, then I guess I have to agree.

[thehuff]

How does this compare with Ladies Who Launch???

[jeskiley]

Looks very interesting, now I can live vicariously in all worlds. I'm instantly fulfilled!

[jspiritis]

I checked out the site and it's not at all an angry site that promotes gender separation or isolationism in the work place. It doesn't advocate different or preferential treatment for women and just seems to acknowledge (unlike the above commentator) that women encounter career issues and problems that are unique to women, i.e., aggressive is viewed as bitchy versus assertive, compensation inequities, etc. I think sites like this actually help women become businesspeople as opposed to businesswomen. Women are getting together and talking about the issues that create division so they can address them with the hope that, one day, the issues just won't exist anymore. And, as a professional woman, I also thought the site looks like fun. Chatting with and learning about other smart and successful women is not just enlightening, it's enjoyable!

[lo1219]

Kirotahoe: There's nothing wrong with a place where women can talk about work issues that are unique to them. The fact is that there are some work issues that are interesting to women (maternity leave for example) and not to men and acknowledging that doesn't mean that women are not businesspeople. In fact, women can't be businesspeople unless they get maternity leave. I don't think this site is trying to make some big statement about how women are such different beings in the workplace, it just acknowledges that they might have different conversations and gives them a place for that. And, not to be rude, but I think your comment is ridiculous and lacks insight. You don't sound like someone who is in touch with how the world works. You actually sound like a privileged white male who thinks it's still 1956.

[lk5287]

I just went to the site and had my own a-ha moment. I think it's a great idea and the site is very interesting. I spent some time reading some of the posts in the Forum and they are unique. I really enjoyed my visit and will be back!

[kirotahoe]

why is it that everything has to be tailored for women? if women truly want to be equal, quit looking at everything from a woman's point of view. in business there should only be businesspeople, not men and women. or are women "separate but equal"?