Brains, Beauty, Boss: The Ultimate Guide for Women in the Workplace

By Barbara Euripides

According to NatWest, 60% of women who have considered starting a business did not; due to a lack of self-worth and confidence.

Brains, Beauty, Boss: The Ultimate Guide for Women in the Workplace explores the intersection between female empowerment, entrepreneurship and career advancement. Sharing the incredib

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636760384

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Brains, Beauty, Boss

Brains, Beauty, Boss

The Ultimate Guide for Women in the Workplace

Barbara Euripides

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Barbara Euripides

All rights reserved.

Brains, Beauty, Boss

The Ultimate Guide for Women in the Workplace

ISBN 978-1-63676-513-6 Paperback

978-1-63676-037-7 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-038-4 Ebook

I dedicate this book to my mom, Joanne Euripides. Ever since the day I was born, my mom has taught me what it means to be a powerful, resilient woman in the workplace. From leading international STEM conferences weeks after giving birth, to patenting innovative chemical solutions in her twenties, my mom has defined what it truly means to be a trailblazer.

I am incredibly grateful to have been raised by a woman who champions female empowerment, standing up for what you believe in, and most importantly, standing up for yourself. I would not have the confidence I have today if it wasn’t for my mom.

Mom, thank you for everything.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Part 1.

Brains, Beauty, BoSS: A Lifestyle

Chapter 1.

The InSPIRATION BEHIND IT ALL

Chapter 2.

Impostor Alert!

Part 2.

The Iconic TRailblazers

Chapter 3.

Wolf of Wall STREET…Who?

Chapter 4.

GoinG viral

Chapter 5.

Producing Your Own Path

Chapter 6.

From Backstage To The front Page

Chapter 7.

Baby fever

Chapter 8.

TRansforming the World of clean Energy

Chapter 9.

The Revolution Against E-Waste

Chapter 10.

Changing the way america pays for college

Chapter 11.

Coding for girls is ~cool~

Chapter 12.

REporting From A Revolution

Chapter 13.

Clapping with two hands

Chapter 14.

From Corporate america to the Start-up World

Chapter 15.

The Era of sustainable fashion

Chapter 16.

building brands and Becoming bosses

Part 3.

The Grand finale

Chapter 17.

Owning the impostor

Chapter 18.

APPENDIX

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I’d like to thank my family. Mom, Dad, Elefteria, and Charlie, thank you for the constant love and support throughout this entire journey. You were all there for me from the day I jokingly brought up the idea I wanted to write a book, and you have been the most amazing support system since.

Theio John, Theia Voula, Yiorgo, and Yiayia, thank you for always being there for me, and for instilling confidence within me through each step of this journey.

Pappou, Uncle Richard, Theio Michael, Theia Evanthia, Aunt Mel, Theio Chris, Theia Sophia, Evan, Chrysanthi, Maria, and Evi, thank you for cheering me on and for always supporting me.

Theio George, thank you for mentoring me throughout this entire process.

Thank you to all of my interviewees from the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to speak with me about your pathways, and for sharing important advice that can help all women in the workplace.

Thank you to all of my friends from Duke to Myers Park, to Ionian Village, to everywhere in between. I’m forever grateful for your support, for promoting my book to everyone, and for always being there for me.

Lastly, thank you to the team at New Degree Press, especially Eric Koester, Brian Bies, Sarah Lobrot, and Margaret Danko, for helping me turn my childhood dream into a reality.

I would also like to acknowledge all of my beta readers and early supporters who helped me transform Brains, Beauty, Boss from an idea into a published book. I could not have done this without you.

Joanne Euripides

Charles Euripides

Elefteria Euripides

Charlie Euripides

John Maheras

Bessie Maheras

Maria Tassopoulos

George Kroustalis

Vivian Diatzikis

Yiorgo Diatzikis

Mel Gibson

Evanthia and Michael Euripides

Sophia and Chris Euripides

George and Pitsa Diatzikis

Phyllis Kaperonis

Anna Maria Minakakis

Loula Minakakis

Hannah Perkins

Rachel Perkins

Karen Perkins

Kaya Scheman

Ann Chanler

Eleni Navrosidis

Brina Melton

Marisa Aleguas

Hayden Manseau

Effie Ypsilantis

Amanda Gavco

Victoria LePore

Matthew Holcomb

James Vounessea

Rebecca Erebaum

Katelyn Gallanty

Kyra McDonald

Victoria Sorhegui

Elizabeth Bartzokis

Amy Chen

Anna Moratis

Montana Lee

Christianna Brotsis

Ann Mariah Burton

Zoe Nikolos

Olivia Palamaris

Kyle Sharp

Mike Kim

Stephanie Kontos

Sophie Behdani

Mary Grace Parker

Angelika Ballas

Courtney Sherbal

Lucy McLeod

Isabelle McMullen

Ellis Ewert

Michaela Kortaba

Adrielle Lee

Allison Parkhill

Caroline Kuhn

Erica Kontos

Sophia Roth

Landon Shelley

Jacqueline Contento

Julia Henegar

Grace Malakelis

Neha Kukreja

Lizzy Davidson

Clare Downey

Camille Monceaux

Riley Blair

Kit McNiff

Julia Weidman

Sara Tavakolian

Sara Evall

Isabella Reynolds

Andrew Elcock

Valerie Athanailos

Logan Welborn

Trinette Atri

Rachel Huang

Casey Chanler

Caroline Smith

Vasiliki Argeroplos

Valerie Athanailos

Lee Smallwood

Gabrielle Athanasia

Audrey Magnuson

Amelia Hunt

Helen Moffat

Renee Weisz

Abbie Gatewood

Meredith Vaughn

Anna Alexia Markouizos

Mary Kate Viceconte

Helen McGinnis

Bre Welles

Irena Pantazis

Part One

Brains, Beauty, BoSS: A Lifestyle

chapter 1

The InSPIRATION BEHIND IT ALL

There is no perfect fit when you’re looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.

—Sheryl Sandberg¹

In 1975, Meryl Streep was rejected from acting in the renowned film King Kong after being rudely scoffed at by director Dino De Laurentiis. Today, Streep holds the record number of Academy Award nominations out of any actor in the entire world.²

Tina Fey, the comedy queen of American television, began her career as a receptionist. She was nearly thirty years old when she became the first female head writer for Saturday Night Live.³

When young Anna Wintour worked for Harper’s Bazaar, she was fired after nine months. For the past thirty years, she has been the editor-in-chief of Vogue US, one of the most iconic fashion magazines of the world.⁴

Let’s also take a second to talk about Lizzo, the singer of the chart-topping hit Truth Hurts. Lizzo lived out of her car for an entire year while trying to break into the music industry. Now, she is a three-time Grammy winner and an international figure for female empowerment.⁵

These stories not only highlight resilience, hard work, and passion, but they also display something society tends to overlook: the power of unconventionality.

From the start of our education, we are taught to follow conventional pathways to reach success. In kindergarten, we are taught we must color within the lines. In middle school, we are taught how to structure our essays with an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion—but don’t worry, you can go wild with your one-line hook statement. In high school, we take standardized tests that rank us against each other on our ability to answer generic reading comprehension passages and questions on basic trigonometry. These standardized tests help determine our fate in the college admissions process.

Unfortunately, this trend also continues at the undergraduate level. In Elite Universities Don’t Get Failure, Joshua Spodek highlights how our education system values intellectual growth at all costs, compromising our ability to focus on connecting emotionally and socially with others. Instead of learning important skills for the workplace, we are taught to follow schedules, focus on facts, and choose our learning path from a list of subject areas. According to Spodek, "the behavior we teach is compliance, the opposite of thinking and acting for yourself."⁶

Given these circumstances, it is no wonder Gen Z strives to follow similar pathways to reach their career goals. Conventionality and following the status quo are ingrained within our minds from day one. Whether we realize it or not, the conventionality we are accustomed to can be very destructive for our careers, particularly among women.

According to a Hewlett Packard report, men will typically apply for a job if they meet 60 percent of the qualifications, while women will usually only apply to the same job if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications, implying women are less confident in the job application process than men.⁷ Some researchers have expressed if women were more confident, they would apply to jobs at the same rate as their male counterparts and ultimately enter job pipelines at similar rates.

When Harvard Business Review journalist, Tara Mohr, dug deeper to understand the intrinsic meaning behind this statistic, she found the issue was not confidence. In a survey of over one thousand men and women, predominately American professionals, she found that most women would not apply to roles because they did not meet all of the specific requirements on the checklist, not because they weren’t confident. According to Mohr, They didn’t see the hiring process as one where advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experience outlined in the job qualifications.⁸

Having the need to check off every item on a list of qualifications is solely one example of how conventionality can be detrimental for a woman’s career trajectory. So many of our everyday choices and actions are inherently influenced by the institutional structures we have grown up with. From being taught to color within the lines to holding the misconception we must have a certain grade point average or academic background to win over an interviewer, conventionality inevitably impacts so many life decisions.

How do we change this? How can we reverse the conventionality we have known our entire lives? How can we become the leaders we aspire to be? Is there a true pathway to success?

Success is not formulaic. It is not the same for everyone, and no two people have the same expectations or pathway to success. Conforming to the same notions we have been accustomed to our entire lives will not help us become extraordinary thinkers, just people who follow the rules extremely well.

* * *

Instead of trying to map out our futures, we must learn lessons from people who have served as mentors, people who have overcome obstacles, people who have completely shattered the status quo, and people who did so in a way that made lasting impacts in their respective industries.

Ironically enough, I initially experienced this realization in my junior year of high school on a bright pink futon. On a Sunday afternoon, I cracked open an ice-cold Diet Coke and began my pre-homework ritual of the week: I made myself comfortable on the futon, gathered my pens and highlighters, and opened up my laptop to read the latest news on Cosmopolitan.com. As I scrolled through celebrity gossip, lifestyle tips, and beauty advice, I came across an article called Get That Life: How I Became the CEO of SoulCycle.⁹

Standing powerfully in her office space was Melanie Whelan, the CEO of SoulCycle. Her story was about resilience, hard work, and difficult career choices that ultimately led to her becoming the CEO of a high growth fitness company and brand.¹⁰ As a woman seeking to enter the business world, I was immediately intrigued. Melanie never had a list to check off, nor a specific pathway she anticipated. She followed her intuition and worked extremely hard.

Melanie’s story led me to an entire subsection of Cosmopolitan.com called Get That Life with dozens of short articles about amazing women sharing their secrets to success with all of the Cosmo readers.¹¹ I was introduced to powerful stories behind famous astrophysicists, celebrity manicurists, top executives, and even the story behind the editor of Cosmopolitan.com itself, Amy Odell. Each story I read was equally fascinating and inspiring. Soon after this discovery, my Sunday pre-homework routine became a little bit different. Instead of looking for the newest celebrity gossip or filling out quizzes on topics like which Kardashian child I identified with the most, I looked for the newest article in the Get That Life series.

As a sixteen-year-old girl whose last Google search was How to Avoid Failing Your Driver’s License Test Again, (it happened three times, oops), the Get That Life stories were truly inspirational. These stories were not just appealing to me because of their easy-to-read style and comical nature—they were so much more. These stories talked about women breaking into roles that had never been occupied by women before, real struggles among women in the workplace, and important lessons on resilience and self-discovery.

Fast forward two years: I was walking around the club fair at Duke University as an overly eager first-year student. I was immediately interested in Duke Association for Business Oriented Women, an organization promoting the intersection between female empowerment and the professional world.

Through each new speaker, workshop, and forum, I had access to new, exciting ideas about inclusion in the workplace, pathways to success, and what it truly meant to be a go-getter in modern times. After hearing certain speakers, I could even see some of them as young sixteen-year-olds who were once in my shoes, sitting on their futon couches surrounded by gum wrappers with no idea how their careers would ultimately pan out.

Soon enough, the key takeaways from the stories I read and events I attended began to connect together in surprising ways. Hearing and reading the success stories behind powerful women in business taught me more about discovering my own pathway and excelling as an entrepreneurial woman than any class had taught me. The stories entailed unconventionality, creative thinking, and challenging the status quo, notions I would have never followed in middle school while writing my perfect five-paragraph essays.

The same way narratives of success continue to shape my ideas and choices, I want these narratives to also shape the lives of women all across the world. From young Gen Z women eager to launch their own clothing start-ups to middle-aged women wanting to shift from mechanical engineer, to social media star, to everyone in between, inspirational firsthand accounts can be instrumental in peoples’ lives. These accounts can help you learn how to overcome obstacles, how to build confidence, and when to put your foot down if you think something is wrong.

Brains, Beauty, Boss is dedicated to sharing the powerful stories of women who have inspired me and are continuing to pave the way for women in their respective industries. I believe each and every woman has the brains to make an impact, their own authentic beauty, and the boss mentality to chase after their dreams like no other. In my book, I had the opportunity to dive deep into the pathways of Forbes 30 Under 30 women to capture their mentalities, their approaches to success, and the struggles they faced in reaching their goals.¹²

Each year, Forbes receives thousands of nominations, which are then narrowed down and sent to a group of judges for each specific industry. Anyone has the opportunity to be nominated for one of Forbes 30 Under 30 awards, and I had the chance to hear from self-made stars who truly stood out to me.

Through interviewing powerful women on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, I heard the fascinating stories of women making FAFSA forms accessible to the most underprivileged populations of the world, women who are developing innovative clean energy solutions, women who have become international media icons, and many, many more. I have even spoken with the former editor of Cosmopolitan.com, the same website that inspired me to write this book. Each individual story not only provides insight toward the principles of success, but also emphasizes there is no formulaic path or system for young women to reach their goals.

While examining different pathways to success, these stories also outline how different women have overcome obstacles in the workplace, from the many facets of Impostor Syndrome, to systematic flaws present in many industries. Each chapter highlights the mindset the Forbes women have used to build confidence, achieve their goals, and reign over Impostor Syndrome. In