By Isabella Ying
For all the women and girls in our Lovett community, March is an especially sacred time. Because from the days of Sunday, March first to Tuesday, March thirty-first, the United States observes a period of remembrance, recognition, and appreciation for the countless accomplishments of Women in history. From March first to the thirty-first, we celebrate Women’s History Month.
Women have been underrepresented throughout history. Our society is deeply rooted in patriarchy, and when one half of the world wants strongly enough to utterly quash the other half, they will find a way. From antiquity, when women were viewed as legal property of their husbands or fathers to the modern day, ever-present wage gap, the theme has been subordination. Even the mythical Penelope has overarchingly been attributed as a model, an ideal, of submissive obedience, and never her own woman.
But women, as reduced and obfuscated as we are, have certainly done many things. We can thank Ada Lovelace for the inception of computer programming in the 19th century and Rosa Parks for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, just to highlight a couple names.
At Lovett, seniors Christina Dahabreh and Katherine Molner formed a unique, all-girls club to stake feminine claim in the world’s most prolific major. Founded in their sophomore year, the Girls in Business club is one of a kind. As tenth graders, Christina and Katherine recognized that they shared a passion in business, and although neither was incredibly knowledgeable in the field, they were certain they wanted to learn more about business. And so was born Girls in Business.
Before GIB’s inception, Lovett already had business-oriented clubs such as LERIG (Lovett Environmentally Responsible Investment Group), or the Wharton Investment Competition. Christina and Katherine realized that if they were to form a business club, it would be overrun by boys, and “the male demographic can’t understand females in the workplace,” Christina knew. This is where Girls in Business stands apart: with “Girls” premier in the title, the club is all-female.
With such a new, radical approach to business at Lovett, it is obvious that Christina and Katherine intended for their organization to turn corners. Since Christina acknowledged that “there are a lot of women who are in the business sector, but not in C-suite,” she wanted GIB to create an environment for Lovett’s girls to learn and thrive comfortably. She affirmed that “you can’t just say ‘there’s equality in business and women and men.’”
For Christina, “ever since I was younger, I knew I wanted to be into business.” Her parents have a family business, and she is their only child. While history says that the son should take over the family enterprise, she has always known that someday, that job will be hers.
At Lovett daily operations depend on female staffing, whether teachers or administration. On March 11th, however, GIB used community time to spotlight a different, equally prominent group of women affiliated with our school: moms. Moms who, in particular, are highly regarded female business leaders. Girls in Business hosted five unique women for the panel on March 11th. These women are Virginia Adams of Ernst & Young, Alicia Tilman of Delta, Alice Park, Wanda Morris, and Deneta Sells.
This panel was the final flourish of the pair of senior leaders’ two years of hard work. In the club’s first year, “we had a lot of people in our club. We met, I think, twice a month, Monday during lunch and we watched Shark Tank videos. We dissected them and it was just like a friendly community,” said Christina.
But the club quickly realized that they could actually have a voice. The first speaker that they hosted was Amy French, who works in real estate. Ms. French is, according to Christina, “ranked up in the top 2% in Atlanta for real estate agents. And so she came in and that really pushed the needle for our club.” After that, GIB experienced significantly more recognition. Their second speaker was Rebecca Fondell, a vice president at Papa John’s and Lovett mom. Instead of Christina, Katherine, and GIB reaching out to her as they’d reached out to Ms. French, Ms. Fondell inquired first.
Come 11th grade, with the duo taking American Studies and focusing on college applications, the club began winding down. Still, “we wanted to have it in the back of our minds,” Christina said. “Since our junior year, we’ve been thinking about the women’s panel.”
Luckily, Ms. Catherine Jackson, co-founder and president of Mission Mighty Me, a baby food company, also came in to talk to the club. This prompted Ms. Cole to “really get on board with us because we wanted to really expand,” Christina said.
The panel’s planning was no small feat with roots traceable to last November, far before the allotted date in March. “We would love to have a panel where it’s not just a club setting, but we can actually promote our club to the entire school,” they told Ms. Cole over lunch.
Once Ms. Cole gave them the go-ahead, Christina consistently communicated from November to February in preparation for the date that Ms. Cole set for Women’s History Month.
Finally, on March 11th, the time for the panel arrived.
Virginia Adams
The first panelist was Ms. Virginia Adams. Ms. Adams is a Forensic & Integrity Services Partner at Ernst and Young, where she’s been for over two decades. She has a fifth grader, Mitchell, and seventh grader, Hudson, at Lovett. As a graduate of the University of Georgia, Ms. Adams studied international business and finance. She has been at Ernst and Young for over two decades now.
Ms. Adams entered public accounting over 20 years ago at a time when there were not many female partners. In the beginning of her career, “I thought I always had to be out golfing,” she said. Being “the only woman at the table once I got to a certain level in my career,” she felt the need to match the activities of her male counterparts.
But Ms. Adams has never been a golfer, and it never hurt her. Two of her peers at the beginning of her career, also vying for a partner position, golfed while she did not.
But, “many years later, those two individuals, well, one of them actually got demoted, and the other one ended up being asked to leave the firm.” Meanwhile, for Ms. Adams, “here I am in this leadership role that I have for being myself.” The takeaway? “Stay true to your own identity, and not try to be someone that you’re not,” she said. With that in mind, she believes she has found success.
Alice Park
Ms. Alice Park, sitting to the left of Ms. Adams, has been a photographer for the past 20 plus years. Ms. Park’s son Lyon is a freshman, and her daughter Elise is a fifth grader.
When the time came for college Ms. Park chose engineering. But sitting in statistics class in her freshman year, her boredom drove her to existentialism.
“This is so boring,” she remembers thinking. “And I was like, ‘I am so miserable. I picked the wrong school. I picked the wrong degree. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’”
She remembers being at her first job, “walking at the edge of a window one day at that beautiful, tall building,” and “thinking that there must be something more to life with this.” Most of all, she remembers how “I felt completely soulless at that moment because I was so utterly unhappy.”
Following endless pondering how “there is so much more in life,” the man who’d eventually become her husband asked her, “if you didn’t have to think about money, if you didn’t have to think about responsibilities, if you didn’t have to think about the expectations from your parents,” what would Ms. Park do with the rest of her life?
She thought back to being twelve years old and holding a camera for the first time. Without a doubt, “‘I would be a photographer.’ And so that is when I took the big leap.” She left the stability of her tall building and corporate pursuits, and leaned into photography. Still pursuing her passion today, Ms. Park could not be happier.
Alicia Tillman
This panel pulled Ms. Alicia Tillman, Chief Marketing Officer of Delta, back to her own high school days. Mother of freshman Will, and junior Riley, in high school she heard that “the most intelligent people in the world are the most well read people in the world.” So Ms. Tillman immersed herself in English.
But “what do I do with English?” she wondered. To this, there was more advice. “You need to pursue a focus in marketing,” her teacher told her. “Because marketing is essentially about telling a story to help someone invest in a product or a service so that it sells a company.”
“I’ve gone through 25 years of business, I was generally one of only a few women in the room,” Ms. Tillman said. Throughout those years, she has learned to not get caught up in her head because that always holds her back. Nowadays, she appreciates how, “women are gaining more prominence and taking on more leadership skills in life, and that is just such a beautiful thing.”
To all the boys in the room, “when you see a girl doing something really well, applaud her, celebrate her, invite her into the room,” Ms. Tillman asks. “Because that is going to make a difference in our ability for women to achieve that level of status that we certainly deserve.”
Wanda Morris
Ms. Wanda Morris began in pre-med, then pursued finance, becoming the first in her family to graduate from college. Then, she studied law. But in the end, she finally found true love in literature as a novelist, and has lived somewhat of a life out of a novel herself. Ms. Morris is the mother of Ashton Hightower, a junior.
Much like Ms. Park, she found in her sophomore year of college that the path she’d set her sights on was not the fate she desired. Sitting in organic chemistry class, Ms. Morris realized that she was not going to become a doctor. Always in the back of her mind lingered her love for reading and writing—but so did her parents’ caution that writers did not make money.
So she sprung for a completely different path. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting, but “the whole reading, writing thing that I always loved to do as a kid, I was not getting enough of it as an accountant.”
One day, her friend advised her to go to law school. “Bet,” she said. “I’m going to law school” and quit her job, much to the disdain of her parents.
Her secret desire to write a book persisted. After a particularly harrowing day, she decided that she would write just one scene. That scene turned out to be a portal, unlocking something in her brain. “I love, love, love this,” she’d thought. So in secret, she continued. Now she is an award-winning novelist. “You don’t have to be one thing all your life. You keep evolving,” she learned. “I’ve been an attorney, I’ve been an accountant, I’m a writer, and who knows what I’ll be in my next chapter.”
Deneta Sells
Dr. Deneta Sells sat next to Katherine Molner on the panel’s other side. Dr. Sells is a Harvard and University of Tennessee graduate, founder of Intown Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, and now the mother of first grader Sarah Elizabeth Sells.
All along, Dr. Sells knew that she wanted to change the world. In her junior year of college, she read a book that said “if you could help little children see and hear and be healthy, then they could be more successful,” she said.
In Atlanta, her neighbors constantly told her that “we don’t have local healthcare and we’re driving to the suburbs. We can’t find anyone who’s nearby.” Meanwhile, all her job offers were 50 miles away. She thought her husband was crazy when he recommended her to start her own practice as a third year resident at Morehouse. But now, her practice encompasses three locations and over 50 employees.
Although she’s faced difficulties being a woman in her field, she’s always knowing that her hard work and training brought her to where she is today. “I belonged,” she had to remind herself.
A sentiment that all these women echoed is that success evolves over time. It is a “continuous quest of defining what makes me happy,” Ms. Tillman articulated.
At this point, for all of the women, success means finding a balance in pursuing their careers and fulfilling their roles as moms. As Dr. Sells put it, “I’m going to do the best I can in all areas that I can take care of people I love, take care of my community and take care of my practice, and for me, that’s success.”
Another group that hosted a panel to highlight women in the Lovett community is SDLC. We got to hear from Ms. Gray, Dr. Lamar, Dr. Harris, Ms. Sant, Ms. Modak, and Ms. Jesperson while enjoying breakfast foods from the Black and female-owned Bomb Biscuits.
Physics teacher Dr. Lamar, history teacher Ms. Gray and history teacher Ms. Jesperson all revealed that at first, they did not want to be teachers. “Never doing that,” Dr. Lamar had emphatically stated. “Famous last words,” she joked. At first, Dr. Lamar wanted to earn her PhD in electrical engineering. Soon, she ventured away from that path and toward psychology and a physics degree.
Seeing so few women in her field, she realized that “a lot of times you see the people who’ve already arrived and you don’t realize that they were in the exact same place, they had the same fears.”
Ms. Jesperson first believed that she wanted to work in public history at a museum. However, she “could not afford to stay at my job and pay my bills and my student loans when I got out of school.”
She then pivoted to Bristol Myers Squibb Company and Cigna Healthcare, but after acquiring a part-time job teaching world history to 8th graders and American history to 11th graders, she wondered, “‘What was I thinking with all this drug stuff?’ No, I want to be a teacher,” she said. “And so here I am.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Harris and Ms. Modak both knew that one day, they would be teachers.
Dr. Harris grew greatly as she studied math, statistics, and education, all to prepare herself to be a teacher. “Women who have the foresight to say there’s more life beyond what you see right now was really helpful,” said Dr. Harris, reflecting on how she originally wanted to rush a sorority. She also learned to let go of things, leaving Atlanta and her “Morehouse man” to pursue her PhD in Boston.
Ms. Modak’s mother was a teacher, and so she always admired the beautiful connections she made with her students. After majoring in English in college, she earned her master’s in education and taught for many years at an underserved school in Denver.
Ms. Sant is the outlier of this group, not a teacher in the traditional sense. She interned for the mayor of Athens, but eventually fell into a role in undergraduate admissions, where she learned she loved working with children, in particular by hosting prospective students.
So when she was offered a job with the Governor of Georgia, Ms. Sant declined and opted instead for higher education. Fifteen years ago, she arrived at Lovett, where she worked in college counseling and served as head of the department. For the past five years, she has operated as Chief Engagement Officer.
Something that Ms. Sant has noticed at Lovett is that “when you move up into those leadership-level roles, you see more and more men.” But with Ms. Cole being head of school, Ms. Sant is infinitely grateful “to have a boss who has experienced those parts of life too,” from womanhood to motherhood, she said.
Ms. Gray also spoke of the vastness of male-dominated fields. First, in law school, Ms. Gray’s space was male-dominated. Then, once she decided to focus on history, she was one of the only three females in the 33 person program. But she paid this little heed, because “I was always focused on competing with myself and being my best self and being excellent at whatever I did,” she said. “I wasn’t really paying attention to who else was in that space.”
At the end of the panel, each woman left us with a piece of advice. Ms. Jesperson advised us to “see people for who they are and not as representatives of somebody else.” By this she meant, essentially, to not judge a book by its cover.
The advice that Ms. Modak shared brought tears to her own eyes when she first heard it from Mr. Reed. “You can’t be a whole teacher and you can’t teach the whole child unless you bring yourself as a whole person to the classroom,” he had said.
Ms. Sant channeled her inner college counselor with the snippet she shared. “You have so much say in how you live your life every day,” she said. “You don’t have to live at the mercy of what you think other people want for you.” Ms. Gray shared words similar to Ms. Sant’s. “You have agency over your life at this very moment. Take it for all it’s worth,” she said. She emphasized that although you can’t control the world around you, you can control how you react to it.
When the mic passed to Dr. Harris, she read her advice off of a napkin, having jotted down the exact wording just moments earlier. “It’ll all be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end,” she shared, earning a nod of appreciation from Dr. Lamar.
Dr. Lamar told the room it’s all about making space for growth. “You can be many things,” she said. “Whatever you think that you are interested in, pursue and don’t think you have to be good at it from the get-go because most of us aren’t.”
