Women on the Move Podcast

Mentor Moment: Leaving your job after a short period of time

How soon can I leave a job without it reflecting negatively on my resume?

In a special edition of Mentor Moment, Women on The Move host Sam Saperstein and Rabia Baig, a member of the campus recruiting team at JPMorgan Chase share how important it is to make sure your resume and interview showcase the right reasons for leaving your job to new employers.

 

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JPMorgan Chase Global Head of EAP talks about prioritizing mental health and encouraging connection

This podcast is for informational purposes only. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your mental health professional or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding your condition.

 

There’s no doubt in Judith Bess’s mind that the past two years of pandemic living have been traumatic for nearly all of us. As global head of the employee assistance and work life program at JP Morgan Chase, Judith has been privileged to witness and assist JP Morgan Chase employees as they navigate the impacts on their mental health. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss her journey to leadership, how the pandemic gave people permission to be vulnerable, and how connections with others are so critical to our wellbeing.

Two leadership lessons

With a social work background, Judith started at JPMorgan Chase early in her career expecting to stay for a short time. Instead, she fell in love with the work and the firm and has stayed for nearly three decades. She’s found her background a perfect fit for the employee assistance and work-life programs she heads. “When you’re working within an industry like ours, every management triangle is a family. And so you can apply the same systems that you would in a family, right to the corporation,” she tells Sam.

Judith discusses her transition from being an EAP counselor to heading the firm’s global program, and she shares two invaluable lessons she learned. The first was from a senior HR leader who told her, as she was taking over the management position, that she could build on what had been working well but she could also assess what wasn’t working well and what she wanted to do differently; she gave Judith permission to make changes.

The second lesson came from outside the firm, from a book by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign marketing director. “Her book really talked a little bit more about how for Hillary Clinton, they marketed her like they would market a man and they left off her female characteristics, her warmth, her familial attention, her endurance, her ability to bring the community together,” Judith recalls. “And I thought, you know what? I don’t have to do it that way. I can come into this with me being a woman and being okay, but being a woman of color and coming into this role.”

EAPs and the pandemic

Assuming her leadership role just before the pandemic broke out means that “COVID kind of took over my first two years,” Judith says. For one thing, the pandemic highlighted the importance of the assistance program that had been in place for decades. “Once COVID hit in 2020, I think the recognition of the impact to our mental health and our wellbeing became so very clear, and the need for something to really help us learn and not isolate and be able to heal and find coping tips along the way, shot EAP out of a cannon,” she says.

One response to the increased need brought on by the pandemic was the introduction of Coping Connections, an online group support model. “We came into Zoom rooms—and still do every week—to support one another, to allow for people to come into the room and say, you know what? I'm not doing great today. And how are you doing? And to really share with one another and break the seal on having to feel like we had to pull it all together all the time,” she describes. “And I saw thousands of people come through. It was amazing.”

As employees return to the office, Judith hopes the increased focus on and awareness of the importance of mental health will continue—and that more employees will recognize and utilize the convenience of the EAP. She hopes employees will bring with them the lessons learned from remote work: “You may have 20 things on your to-do list, but how can you listen to good music while you're doing it? Or how can you bring a little bit of sunshine into your day?”

In the future, she says, we all have the possibility of changing. “Look what we did to the business world,” she notes. “We're in a hybrid work environment. We can do this. We can make sure that we have an adjustment to our life and our lifestyle, and we can get things done yet push the envelope on what might have been something that was just antiquated at this point. COVID taught us that we could do anything anywhere. So I’m really, really hopeful that we can get creative about what our needs are. How do we bring more joy into everything we do?”

 

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Mentor Moment: Gaining an internship as a college student

How do I get an internship?

 

In a special edition of Mentor Moment, Women on The Move host Sam Saperstein and Rabia Baig, a member of the campus recruiting team at JPMorgan Chase give tips to college students on how to secure an internship, as well as how companies can go about offering them.

 

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Preparing young women for political leadership, with Ignite CEO Sara Guillermo

Sara Guillermo wants to build a pipeline of young women who are ready and eager to become the next generation of political leaders. As the CEO of Ignite, the largest young women's political leadership organization in the country, she’s fulfilling that goal: Ignite has already trained 20,000-plus young women from all over the country. In this episode she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss what she loves about her work and how she sees the future of women in politics.

From kindergarten organizer to CEO

Sara started running for office in the first grade. Her elected role as Class Organizer was everything she’d dreamed it could be: she got to hand out all the classroom papers, make sure all of the colored pencils were in their particular bin, and most impressively, join with the leaders of the older grades to plan schoolwide events. Her excitement was two-fold: the excitement of being a leader but also the thrill, as an immigrant from the Philippines, of representing people who looked like her. 

Sara says that experience in first grade launched her career in leadership. It also got her thinking more and more about how who sits at the table is important. “I kept running [for leadership positions] all through my education and actually now serve on a community board here in my county,” she tells Sam. 

She earned her master’s in social work and began working with after-school school programs in San Francisco in the late 2000s. She met Ignite’s founder, Ann Moses, before the nonprofit was even established. “But she was starting to share this idea,” Sara recalls. “And I was like, okay, cool. Well, I ran for office, I'm a student leader. I can do that here. And so Ignite was quickly embodied into our after school programs.” She started with Ignite as a program facilitator in Oakland schools and moved into a full-time position in 2015 before moving up to Executive Director, and then becoming CEO in 2021.

Many sides of political leadership

Sara talks about how being a leader not just during a pandemic but also at a time of such intense civil unrest has really opened her eyes to how eager young women are to claim their political power. “I just spent an entire day yesterday in Sacramento with middle schoolers and high school students and college women from all across the state of California to identify the policies that matter to them and advocate on those policies,” she recalls. “One of the questions I asked yesterday is, What is something you want to change in your community? And it's everything: I want to feel safe riding the bus. I want to make sure that I have access to clean water. I do not want to pay a hundred thousand dollars to go to college.”

Throughout Ignite’s first ten years, Sara says, they were hyper-focused on preparing young women to run for office. “And what we discovered from the 2016 and the 2018 election is that young women were really joining other forces,” she tells Sam. “They were joining campaigns, they were getting on commissions at the most local level. They were mobilizing voters and then they were policy makers. And what we discovered is that all of those roles paired with candidates and elected [officials].”

Women’s political participation

Sara and Sam also discuss the barriers that continue to prevent more women from entering the political sector. One important aspect is intersectional issues such as lack of visibility of many women, and especially women of color. Another barrier is a lack of knowledge—young women simply aren’t aware of the variety and levels of political offices and participation.

And a huge barrier, both Sara and Sam agree, is the doubt that many young women face: doubt of their abilities or about their place at the table. “And I think a lot of what I've learned in policy and political leadership and campaign work prior to my work at Ignite is like, you just have to be consistent as change [happens]. Unfortunately it doesn't happen overnight and you have to keep pushing for it, whatever role you want to play. And we can all tap in and out of our roles throughout a generation, but we're gonna need all of us in order to move this movement forward. And that is really the critical need to support this particular generation of gen Z young women.”

 

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Mentor Moment: Getting a head start with your Finances

What are realistic ways to start saving as a young person?

In today’s Mentor Moment, Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein outlines financial tips for young adults.

 

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. Climate Scientist sees hope for the future

Dr. Sarah Kapnick wants to make sure that climate is at the forefront of everyone’s thinking, planning, and decision-making. As Senior Climate Scientist and Sustainability Strategist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Sarah is charged with providing subject matter expertise around climate to the firm and its clients. In this episode, she sits down with her colleague and Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss her role, her belief that climate is woven into every aspect of our lives, and her hopes for the future.

 

Combining a love for science and math

Sarah grew up in the Midwest and took her love of science to Princeton University. “I loved math and math puzzles, but realized in my initial research that only a few people in the world would understand what I was really working on,” she recalls. “And I was really interested in applying math to the real world.” That desire led her to obtaining a certificate in finance along with her degree in math and studies in the geographical sciences.

Her path after college included investment banking at Goldman Sachs, a PhD at UCLA in Atmospheric Oceanic Sciences, time at a renewable energy forecasting startup, and 10 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). She joined JPMorgan Chase in 2021 and has found her niche.

“Many people realize as they were trying to start doing investing and planning around climate, they didn't have enough information on the science and it wasn't something that they could easily pick up by reading a few papers or a few research reports,” she tells Sam. “So I produce research reports on climate and how it's interacting with different sectors or thinking about investments and how it'll change the future of investing. I also advise our clients in asset and wealth management to be able to explain how climate affects all of their investments.”

 

On being a woman in STEM

Throughout her career path, Sarah took strength from the women she befriended. As an undergraduate studying math and science at Princeton, she was one of only a few women. But, she tells Sam, in her PhD program, she had several other women in her cohort who were all very close and supported each other a lot. At the NOAA, she was elevated to a senior deputy division level as part of the first group of women in leadership. “Strides are being made,” she says. “I got a lot of encouragement from my peers and from some really good mentors along the way.”

Because of that isolation that can come with being a woman in STEM, Sarah says, connecting with the other women you do find can be a lifeline. “And so if you talk to each other about the problems that you're facing as a woman in science, and then seeing that they're also facing it, it becomes a lot less isolating,” she says.

That’s why her advice for other women STEM is to network. “And then you can build your team, your team that you talk to,” she says.

Hope for the future

Sarah feels she’s right where she should be in her current role. “I'm thinking about how to explain to [clients] how climate is going to affect the things that they care about and how it can help them be more informed about those different issues,” she says. Many of these discussions have been successful in helping clients understand that climate is something they need to be thinking about. “Whereas when we first started the conversation,” she says, “they were extremely curious, but didn't think that it would affect them at all.”

Today, Sarah says, the thought that keeps her up at night is, Am I doing enough? “Because climate change is going to continue,” she tells Sam. “It's actually going to accelerate in the coming years and decades. And so we need to be prepared for that.”

Sarah believes that every individual can impact climate change. Investors and philanthropists can make decisions based on encouraging climate improvements. Individuals can not only recycle, but also be intentional about reducing their consumer footprint, for example by cutting back on airline travel. And individual choices such as the hobbies you practice can impact climate too. As an example, she describes how her daughter really likes gardening. “We are putting out plants that are important for a habitat for butterflies,” she says. “And then we also put plants out in the front of our yard in Brooklyn that also help filtrate water to make cleaner water going into the sewers. So you can think about what are the things you care about, and then you can look it up and find things that relate to climate and sustainability within that.”

 

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Mentor Moment: Giving feedback that matters without offense

How do you overcome hesitation to provide a colleague with feedback when it's more constructive in nature, and you do not have the strongest lines of communication with them?

 

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares to give constructive feedback without stepping toes, in today’s Mentor Moment.

 

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WIE Suite founder talks community building and helping other women advance

Dee Poku founded the WIE Suite to bring together ambitious women leaders and creators who work to drive action for themselves and for each other. In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, she sits down to discuss community building and why she encourages women to be more transactional.

The WIE Suite

Dee first recognized the need for an organization like the WIE Suite many years ago. “There are so many wonderful women's conferences, but as someone who cares so deeply about women's advancement, what I felt was missing was that sort of true deal making that would really sort of catapult us to success” she says. “When I look at someone like my husband, within five minutes of meeting someone, they've exchanged business cards and they found a deal to do. And I think that to broadly generalize with women, we’re relationship builders, it takes us a little bit longer.”

She realized that instead of large, anonymous conferences, women would benefit from more intimate, curated spaces. She started the WIE Suite as a sort of “informational exchange.” When members join, they fill out a form about their goals, and they get placed in a cohort that meets every four to five weeks. “We're very thoughtful about how we put women together,” she says. “There are these sort of invisible lines in the sand that we [women] draw around conversations about business and money. And I just wanted to get rid of all of that and create a space where women have permission to ask.”

She describes the ethos of the WIE Suite as providing a space where women can be more actionable and transactional in their relationships. “It's a lot of referrals, introductions, check writing,” she notes. “It's very, very transactional in that way. And I feel like people just get truly tangible results. It's basically like having your own personal advisory board.”

Lessons from the entertainment industry

Dee didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur or to create spaces for women to grow. As a math major in college, she was on the hunt for a way to express her artistic side. She began her career in marketing and soon worked her way up in the entertainment business, becoming Director of International Marketing for a large film company.

In that intense landscape, Dee says she learned about intentionality and community building. Today, whenever she has an idea, she thinks first about the people she can reach out to for help bringing her idea to fruition. “And so when we hosted those early conferences, we were very successful at getting some really huge names,” she tells Sam. “And it was very much the same strategy of thinking about who comes first and then who follows.”

Dee describes herself as a big believer in intentional community, by which she means being thoughtful and intentional about who's in her life. “I think that so many people just kind of stumble around, and it's really about who just happens to be [there],” she says. “I think that the most successful people are really intentional about how they build their careers and who can sort of support that.”

Community building practice and advice

One way that Dee has put her intentions into action was creating an initiative called 2 Million Mentor Minutes during the pandemic, which lets women (WIE members and nonmembers alike) donate time to mentor other women, especially those forced to leave the workforce during the pandemic. She notes the pandemic impacted everybody but especially women—and specifically Black and Brown women. “Everybody wanted to do something,” she recalls. “We all felt so helpless. Just being able to just post to your platform or send a note to your network to say, Hey, I have 60 minutes to give or 120 minutes to give, take advantage. I think was just a simple, effective idea.”

Dee advises women just starting out in their careers to be intentional from the beginning about building their community. “I think it starts early. So often when we are thinking about building relationships, we're looking sort of ahead, like who is important or like who can bring value,” she says. “It's really about building that community around you, being thoughtful and intentional about having good people around you, people who build you up and make you the best version of you, people who you share ideas and who inspire you.”

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Anita Hill on combating gender violence and her hope for the future

More than 30 years after she became a national figure during the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings, Anita Hill is now one the nation’s fiercest activists for the eradication of gender-based violence. In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, Anita talks with Natalie Williams, General Counsel for card services at JPMorgan Chase & Co., for a special Women’s History Month event. The two discuss Anita’s activism journey and her new book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.

Answering a call

Anita tells Natalie that folding activism into her ongoing work as a lawyer, professor, and author was a natural choice. She describes it as a decision to not ignore the reality she was faced with. After the hearings ended and Thomas was confirmed despite Anita’s accusations of sexual harassment, she received many thousands of letters of support. She says she felt a sense of responsibility to not let those supporters down.

Growing up black in the 1950s and 1960s with 10 older siblings who attended segregated schools, Anita says she also keenly appreciated that she benefitted from the civil rights movement and had the opportunity to go to law school. “It was my responsibility, but also it was something that I had the opportunity [and] the chance to do, to make a difference in the world that people had already changed for me,” she tells Natalie. 

Addressing the structural institution of gender violence

Once she made the decision to lean into her role as a voice against gender-based violence, Anita says she found support from her friends, her family, her students, and complete strangers. Her work often focuses on what she calls “mini manifestations of gender violence”, and the many ways that our institutions, including schools and workplaces, enable that violence. She describes how, from a young age, girls and women are told that small acts of harassment or violence are not important, and that they should be able to brush them off.

“We've been given stories that tell us that either the problem isn't as big as people think it is, or they tell us that, oh, it's the victim's fault, or they tell us that, you know, it's not so bad,” she says.  “And those have been part of our thinking for all of our lives.” Anita says this type of minimizing, or saying the problem isn’t as big as some people make it out to be, was part of the resistance to her testimony in 1991.

And although resistance and minimizing starts as early as grade school, it continues into universities and workplaces. One of the reasons that sexual harassment continues to be widespread despite more media attention in recent years is because of the way institutions and workplaces operate, she says. They tend to develop policies and procedures focused on compliance rather than culture, and until the culture of minimizing harassment is changed, gender violence will continue to grow. Anita calls it institutional denial that begins with leadership. “And what I say in the book is that if it's going to change, the leadership attitude has to be changed and it has to be intentional and vocal,” she tells Natalie.

Support and hope for the future

In recent years, Anita has focused on combating gender violence in the entertainment industry, leading the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace. She describes how that experience has changed some of her thinking on how to best combat gender violence. Where she had once been focused on the structural impediments of protecting people, she came to see that in Hollywood and the largely unregulated entertainment industry, it’s the informal structures that perpetuate violence. 

“In Hollywood, you're not just talking about one individual in one workplace, you're usually talking about multiple workplaces,” she says. “And when it comes to serial abuse, you have people moving around from location to location and doing the same bad deeds, and you don’t have any way of tracking it. And we’re developing a platform to identify who those people are, by allowing people to come in and be empowered to file complaints.”

Anita and Natalie discuss other recent events that Anita says give her hope for the future, including the Supreme court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson and President Biden’s support for strengthening the Violence Against Women Act. In terms of looking forward, Anita says she draws big inspiration from her students: “It is a blessing to be a teacher because every day I get to look at the possibility for the future. And so I don’t lose hope because I’m seeing my students and what they can do and what they want to do and how they see the world.”

To hear more from Anita Hill, please listen to her podcast, Getting Even with Anita Hill, found wherever you get your podcasts.

 

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Mentor Moment: How learning new things can push career development

What traits, professional qualities, et cetera, should I develop to be ready for the new market realities in ever-changing landscape?

 

In this Mentor Moment, Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares how being a lifelong learner can help you to excel in an ever-evolving workforce.

 

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