Spring 2014
Women's Roundtable Group Discusses "Lean In"
Dr. Virginia Hardy, ECU vice chancellor for Student Affairs, enjoys a moment at the Women’s Roundtable book club.
“Sister Talk,” the book club of East Carolina University’s Women’s Roundtable, met April 9 for the second time since its founding fall semester 2013.
The book club is composed of female ECU students who read a selected book focused on the topic of women in leadership. The book club includes mostly Access Scholarship recipients, who once a semester gather in Chancellor Steve Ballard’s residence with Nancy Ballard; Valeria Lassiter, chair of the Women’s Roundtable; Dr. Virginia Hardy, vice chancellor of Student Affairs; Marcy Romary, director of Women’s Philanthropy at ECU; and other roundtable members.
At this book club meeting, the women leaned into each other as they discussed lessons and realizations from “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg is the chief operating officer at Facebook. In the book she tells the story of how she embraced leadership throughout her life.
The book was chosen after the club read about Sandberg in last semester’s book, “How Great Women Lead” written by Bonnie St. John and her teenage daughter Darcy Deane.
“As a young woman striving towards leadership positions, I feel alone in some of my experiences and this book reminds me I am in good company with powerful women with similar experience,” said Taylor Waters, ECU junior and member of the book club. Waters said that the women in the book club were insightful and she found the conversation enlightening.
The group is intended to open a dialogue on leadership between the women.
“What I enjoyed most about our discussion is the refreshing feeling of talking to women about real issues and changes that need to be made with women in society,” said Kenya Shakir, ECU junior and member of the book club.
Next semester, the book club will read “The Power of Nice” by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval. Thaler and Koval serve respectively as the chief executive officer and president of the advertising agency Kaplan Thaler Group.