Rewatching it in 2026 I realize how much I have taken the efforts of trailblazing women for granted in my life and career. The characters in that movie, played by Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin were smart and hardworking and entirely at the mercy of their tyrannical male boss. It was their job to make him look good and he treated them with no respect at all. I was not in the workforce in 1980. At that age I did not have any big career plans, but I expected to go to college and get a job when I graduated, not go to school to find a husband. I heard my mother and aunts talk about Ms. Magazine and the efforts of advocates like Gloria Steinem.

This was all shaping the national conversation about women in the workforce and influencing my future in ways that I had no way of appreciating as a young teen. My mother shared her experiences about discrimination in even considering going to college, and then when she did there were limited career choices available to her. As an adult she was not able to have a credit card in her own name. She told me that she felt this limited her options and was supportive of the changes that were occurring. I definitely did not appreciate how important all of this would be to my future.

By 1988, when I entered the workforce, I did not worry about being taken seriously. I assumed I would be, and I felt I was. I never felt limited in my options. I chose to study engineering and math and had female professors and deans as role models. There were no obvious signs that I was doing anything extraordinary.

The reality is that twenty years earlier less than 1% of undergraduate engineering students at US universities were women. By the time I graduated it was around 15%. In 2026 it was just over 26% (including my niece, yeah Erin!).

That was the gift that Gloria Steinem gave me. A woman she never met but dedicated her life to advocating for. It was because of her efforts to use her voice and change the rhetoric around the role of women in society that I had the luxury of taking my opportunities and independence for granted. Her work enabled me to focus on being my best and letting my results speak for themselves. Yes, there were lots of places where this playing field was not even, especially when I became a mother. And there still are. But it never entered my mind that I could not be independent. The agency I have to live life on my terms was enabled by Ms. Steinem, Dolly Parton and others. Strong independent women who controlled their own destiny.

What this demonstrates to me is that when young people are made to feel that something is possible, they will be empowered to make choices that benefit not only themselves but also the workforce and the country as a whole. The data about the benefits of diversity to company performance overwhelmingly supports that. The best way to prevent “groupthink” is to include people with different perspectives and experiences.

That said, there is a lot more to do. Even with 26% of engineering graduates being women, data from the Society of Women Engineers shows that retention remains an issue. Only 15% of working engineers are women due to mid-career drop offs. As a consulting engineer, I know all too well the sacrifices you make at home to succeed at work. And the representation of Black and Hispanic women graduating with engineering degrees this year is 1% and 3% respectively according to alltogether.swe.org. This limits our potential as a country, and as humankind in addressing the myriad challenges that face us.

When companies and universities backtrack on programs that promote diversity they are doing more than making a political statement… they are hurting the future of the US economy and quality of life here and globally. I do not see this as a partisan or political issue. This world is changing at lightning speed, and we need every curious mind to allow us to navigate this to at least maintain the quality of life we have.

So, thank you Gloria and Dolly for leading by example and using your voices and talents to demonstrate how great the world can be when women have equal rights. It is now up to those of us who benefited from their efforts to create opportunities for these next generations to shine

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One of my summer beach reads when I was in college was Wanderlust by Danielle Steele. I had not heard that term before. The idea that there was some force that pulled you to travel and explore was fascinating to me, it was resonant. My mom loved to travel, as did her brothers, who were always off on a new global adventure bringing back tales of delicious foods and exotic gifts. It seems that it must run in the family.

In high school, at the age of sixteen, I had my first opportunity to travel out of the US to Spain as a summer exchange student. Living with another family was awkward for me, but I gained a confidence as I explored Madrid alone and navigated communicating in a foreign language. I fell in love with the culture and the people.

My next opportunity to travel was four years later when I chose to spend a semester abroad studying the formation of the European Union. It enabled me to travel across Europe and it was like living a dream. I did not know life could be so fun. We had classes four days a week, so we always had a long weekend. The train station in Freiburg, Germany where I was studying was an easy walk from our dorm, and served as a portal to endless options to experience different cultures and have new adventures. Cities and villages across France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, England, Netherlands, Italy became new playgrounds with new friends. Hanging out in different pubs, trying different foods, meeting students from all over the world in youth hostels, navigating different languages. It was heaven to me.

After graduating, travel became limited to what I could afford and fit into a week’s vacation. Later, when I worked as a consultant I traveled a lot. I did enjoy being in the variety of locations instead of sitting behind the same desk every day, but over time it came to feel like a burden. With small children at home there was a guilt with travel, missing family time.

Planning vacations was a favorite family past-time. It started when our daughter Hilary decided we needed to visit Disney World. She sat at our iMac and created a presentation to make her case. She even found flights and hotels. Her tenacity and creativity made me so proud, so of course we went. We had some wonderful trips as a family… sky diving in Hawaii, volunteering in Costa Rica, para-sailing in Mexico, sightseeing in London, exploring the California Coast, horseback riding and hot air ballooning in Colorado, Disney in Florida, beach combing in South Carolina and Martha’s Vineyard, Broadway shows in New York, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, skiing in Vermont, snowmobiling in Quebec, helicopter rides in Sedona. We just loved to travel and have adventures together. I could write an entire book on all of the funny experiences and encounters we had.

The memories are priceless. Every cent we spent on those trips was worth it. As hard as it felt to step away from work at the time, I have no memory of any work event that carried the same sense of fun and adventure as one of our family vacations.

After Hilary passed away it took years to feel up to a vacation again. She had always been my travel planning partner. It felt lonely to do that without her. Then my yoga teacher offered a retreat in Crete. Greece was a place that had always intrigued me so we went. It felt bittersweet to be traveling with my husband without our children. I had not traveled to Europe since Hilary and I went to Germany for cancer treatments, so the shadow of that memory hung over me as I boarded our international flight. Once there, exploring the ancient sites heightened my awareness of how fleeting each moment is across the span of history. These ancient places, some of them still in the process of being excavated and rediscovered, with walls where people once lived and art that adorned their walls. It made me consider what artifacts future humans might find of ours in a thousand years, undoubtedly plastic ones.

This trip reminded me how powerful travel can be. I felt rejuvenated by the authentic cultural experiences, foods, art and people. This all soaks in to you at some level so when you return home you are different. My wanderlust was reignited not just for the act of travel, but for the transformative power it had on me. On that trip I felt like I had begun to rediscover myself. I saw that I could experience joy. I felt like I was honoring Hilary’s memory and spirit by allowing myself to appreciate the incredible gifts of the world.

I reflected on this when I began to plan a bucket list trip to the Basque region this fall. Initially I was excited. There is an ancestral connection there for me, my paternal grandmother’s grandfather was born in Bilbao. Crazy fact, Basque people have the highest concentration of O negative blood in the world, at 25-30%. That is my blood-type. Across the rest of Europe, where the rest of my ancestors originated, it is 6-8%. It is no wonder why I am drawn to explore that area, it is literally in my blood.

And, I have one of those milestone birthdays coming up, so what better excuse to live it up with an amazing trip! Opportunities kept coming up to really take the trip to another level. I was already flying to Europe, why not join a dear friend on a bike trip to France? With my two week trip sketched out, I began to dive into details. Then a colleague told me about a sustainability conference in Rome that just so happened to begin two days after we planned on flying home. I submitted an abstract, it was accepted, and I was able to change our flights at no extra cost. Things could not have aligned more perfectly.

Guilt began to set in. Excessive was the word that kept coming to mind. Who am I to spend three weeks in three different European countries? It didn’t matter that this was a dream scenario for me, I felt like I was doing something wrong. What seemed like an educational and developmental opportunity when I was in high school and college feels indulgent now. Why?

Doing a little research I discovered that fun guilt is a real thing. Some psychology researchers have actually developed a Leisure Guilt Proneness Scale. The reasons take all shapes and forms including worries about not being productive, spending money, fear that you may be replaceable at work, enjoying things that others do not have the resources or ability to do…. and similar flavors of negative self-talk. No surprise, women are more prone to Leisure Guilt than men due to household responsibilities.

The thing is, I could not think of a single reason not to extend my trip. If I take each of the potential concerns one by one they don’t inhibit me. Layered together they still do not create a real barrier. In fact, I know it could be good for my health, my creativity and for the networking opportunities at the conference. I am well aware that life is fleeting and precious and that we all need more joy in our lives. And, I have no doubt it will be wonderful and fun.

So what is my hangup? Why won’t that little voice in my head shut-up? I can picture those frugal neural pathways in my brain. The ones that run really really deep and guide me to defer and deny enjoyment. They have been steering me along the same patterns of thought and behavior for too many decades to just let me skate a new pathway without any friction.

Fortunately, I have fun loving people in my life to encourage me to overcome those old habits. What is the point of taking a sabbatical but to explore new perspectives to spark inspiration? So I have done the mental work to override those negative voices and have almost turned them off. The last of the flights and most of the hotels have been booked, and I am ready to rediscover adventure again. Hilary would surely approve.

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One of the things I enjoy most is exploring the overlap between different fields of thought. That curiosity is what drew me to systems thinking in graduate school. When you take a systems perspective, you begin to see how intertwined everything is. Beneath the surface of different professional jargon, all disciplines are really talking about the same thing: how to make sense of life.

As I review and revisit the content of the decision‑making course I am teaching at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, I’m having fun weaving together ideas from economics, philosophy, business, environmental science, psychology, statistics, and neuroscience. I get to dabble in storytelling, art, and AI. For me, the overlaps are what make decision making such an interesting—and very human—area of study.

When you look at all the different fields of study—mathematics, science, medicine, philosophy, psychology, history, language, and the arts—they are all fundamentally striving to define our human truth. Each discipline approaches life from its own angle and creates models of reality using its frame of reference. Mathematicians develop formulas to describe and predict behavior. Scientists formulate laws to explain what we observe. Historians assemble facts and patterns to show how we arrived where we are today. Artists use paint, clay, music, and movement to express emotion. Psychologists define standards of behavior, “normal” and “abnormal,” to explain why humans act as they do.

Decision making is different in that it isn’t unique to any one field of study. It lives inside all of them. Mathematicians must decide what to include in their formulas. Scientists decide which experiments to run. Historians decide what to document and what to leave out. Artists choose their medium and how to combine elements to express themselves. Every discipline—and every person—makes countless choices.

Making choices is fundamental to life, and shapes our reality. Every person, community, and organization faces thousands of decisions each day: what time to get up, which toothpaste to buy, how long to brush your teeth, what to eat, what to wear. We build habits and standard procedures to take the effort out of many of these decisions, conserve energy, and free ourselves to do something more creative or productive. And we’ve all had days when simply brushing our teeth and getting dressed felt like plenty.

Each decision we make is informed by many disciplines of study. The language you use to frame the question, the history you’ve observed in similar situations, your values, the social norms you’ve adopted, the neural pathways in your mind, the economic implications, the sensory experience—all of these shape your choices. Think about it: when you go to purchase a new shirt, these threads are running through your mind, consciously or unconsciously. The style reflects art. The store choice might come from habit or marketing. The decision to buy involves your personal philosophy and psychology of choice (“Do I really need a new shirt?”). The amount you’ll spend involves mathematics (“Can I afford this?”) and economics (“Is this good value for me?”).

If you stopped to consciously process all of these inputs for every decision, you’d never leave your bed. That state is sometimes called analysis paralysis. Somewhere between rote action and analysis paralysis lies effective decision making. What is effective for you may be different than what is effective for me. Each of us has our own values and priorities that drive our decisions. It turns out that being “logical” is not a singular state.

When you look at the history of decision making, you find that philosophy and mathematics have long been intimately intertwined. Think of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. These philosophers shared a pursuit of truth, and many believed mathematics could lead to that truth.

My own “ah ha” moment writing this piece was realizing that I pursued a mathematical career because I was looking for certainty. I wanted, and still sometimes wish for, a formula that would tell me what the “right” choice is. That is why AI is so enticing.

That realization leads us to psychology. Human minds are wired to prefer certainty, and that preference can distort the way we make decisions. These distortions are known as cognitive biases. They include confirmation bias—looking for data that supports what you already believe—as well as heuristics such as representativeness and anchoring. These shortcuts help us conserve processing power in our brains, but they also tend to keep us close to our existing beliefs.

The result? We create mental models that give us permission to do what we already want to do. Whether we’re happy with the result is another matter. If you’re not satisfied with the results of your decisions, it may be time to pay more attention to your decision‑making process.

That starts with taking yourself off autopilot and becoming clear about the intention behind your decision. Why do you need to act? What outcome are you working toward? How do you want to feel after you’ve acted on your choice? Your answers to these questions can make an incredible difference in the options you consider and the alternative you ultimately select.

Next time you face a decision with implications for your wellbeing, try this simple thought exercise::

• Define your intention, being clear about how you want to feel.

• Ask yourself which “discipline lenses” might be most interesting to consider (art, history, math, science, philosophy, psychology, etc.)

• Choose one or two lenses and let them shape the options you generate (what might I do if I were a historian? painter? biologist? for example.)

When you take the time to consider a meaningful decision from multiple perspectives, you might discover something new about yourself—and about the patterns that guide your choices.

And if you’d like to explore your own mental models and biases more deeply, my decision‑making class next January will be a guided dive into the art and science of how we choose.

This is the first time since going to college that I have intentionally looked at my life as a clean slate. My latest consulting projects have wrapped up, the yoga studio is under new ownership, and the semester of teaching is complete until January. I am spending the next 4 months away from home, so there are no house projects or regular routines to follow. It is at once exciting and terrifying.

It is exciting to imagine the edges of this clean slate. How long will it be? How wide will it extend? How deep will it go? How high will it reach? What are the contours and textures of it? Yet I know enough about myself to know the slate is never totally clean. All of my habits and preferences remain, and my neural pathways will continue to draw me in comfortable directions.

One of my habits and preferences is to explore, which is a favorite way to spend my time. We had the opportunity this past week to get out and see some of the Low Country in South Carolina. While the heat and humidity take getting used to after living in the desert Southwest for years, the wide open expanses of wildlife and nature along the ocean are breathtaking. Obviously much different than desert and red rocks. And also different from the coast of New England that I am used too.

While there is plenty of development in Low Country, the expanses of marsh land create a kind of buffer for humanity. Spending time at Hunting State Park was a reminder of how beautiful things can be when they are not taken over by humans. There are trails and bridges, but at the end of those the area was it’s own clean slate. It was not empty, but people faded into the background and seemed insignificant once we were near the beach. It was not a mass of humans with coolers and radios. Car parking was a quarter of a mile away, making it feel remote. It was a magnificent expanse of sand, ocean, shells, birds and what is referred to as the “bone-yard”, remnants of giant trees scattered across the shore, left over from many years of storms, now home to bird nests and tide pools.

I feel like these tree bones are like my neural pathways. Everything around them can get cleared out. Uprooted and stripped of leaves. Life events upend expectations, and things get tossed around in a way that can not be controlled. Just like wildlife taking up residence in the “bones”, my mind works to make sense of it all and tries to organize my thoughts and actions into something useful. An old idea might get repurposed into a new creation. A memory might provide insight for a new story. Just like in nature at the beach, the cycles of the tides continually wash away some things, rearrange others and bring up new things. Moving with the flow peacefully, until the next storm.

Part of what is terrifying about this is the lack of identity. Unlike going to college with a clear purpose and stated outcome, this clean slate has total freedom. I have worn lots of hats in my life, student, parent, professor, manager, consultant, business owner, yoga teacher…. All of those hats are now sitting on a shelf in my self identify closet. I may take one of them out now and then, but I am free to create a new hat, or wear none at all. The hats, you see, are something to hide behind. They are both protection from the elements and a way to describe yourself to justify being on the planet.

I like to think that I am secure enough not to feel like I have to justify my worth. I honestly avoid being with people who require that of me. And there are plenty of ways to fill my time. But I don’t want to squander this opportunity either. I could recreate my old routine in this new place. I can create extensive to do lists to keep myself feeling productive. Or I can sit with this discomfort and explore it. I can let the elements have their effect.

My main intention behind giving myself this space is to create a new hat… writer. I don’t know what that looks like for me, or if I even need a hat for it at all. I am trying not to take this too seriously. Having fun is my primary intention for this clean slate. So, I keep reminding myself it is ok for it to be messy and unclear. It is ok to add to the slate, and let the tide wash things away, and bring me new ideas to explore. It is ok, and in fact, desirable to be uncomfortable with this freedom. I hope to build some new neural pathways just like the waves drawing in the sand.

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