Women · Work · Evidence · Change
Be more confident. Speak up. Be resilient. Adapt. What if we asked as much of the conditions around her?
Women shouldn't have to keep getting better at adapting to conditions that could be changed. Understand what is happening to you. Find out what could change, and who could change it.
One woman can help change the law. And the law can change to help every woman.
Understand what's happening. Explore what could change. Act only if you choose.
The wider mission
One woman's experience matters, even when it never becomes anything more.
But when women encounter the same pressures repeatedly, their experiences can help us ask bigger questions about workplaces, leadership, institutions and the rules that shape women's opportunities.
That is the wider mission of this site: from one woman, toward better systems, and back to one woman.
Houston itself remains separate: a private, personally reviewed $97 USD Workplace Read to help you understand what's happening at work and decide what makes sense for you.
Two kinds of work
Houston is a private Workplace Read for one woman. This website is where I'm developing the wider research: how change happened before, what the evidence shows today, and how women can use AI to look into the systems shaping their working lives.
The public research and practical resources are free to explore. You don't need to buy a Read or share your story to use them.
Who this is for
Help women understand what is happening. Help the people who support them work more effectively. Help organizations and institutions examine what needs to change.
For women
Free questions, research with stated sources and limitations, and original documents. No account, payment or personal story needed.
Use the eight questions →For coaches, consultants and mentors
Questions, evidence and law histories for coaches, consultants, mentors, educators and others who support women.
Resources for your work →For male allies
Examine decisions, opportunities, credit and accountability within your influence. Support women's choices without speaking for them.
Explore practical ways to contribute →For associations, networks and unions
See how recurring concerns have been documented, advocated and sometimes addressed, with original documents.
For associations →For organizations, industries and researchers
Explore research, original sources and questions about whether concerns reach decision-makers.
For organizations →These are ways in, not a ranking of whose participation matters, and not a path anyone has to follow.
Start here
History and law
Three laws that changed women's working lives, and how to trace them in both directions: from the law back to the women, and from women's experiences forward to a remedy.
Read →Practical, free
Eight questions a woman or a group can work through without paying or sharing anything personal.
Use the questions →Purpose and power
Not only whether women adopt AI at work, but what women want AI to help them understand, decide, create or change.
Read →Seven topics
The glass ceiling, the glass cliff, director to vice president, women in leadership, women using AI, engineering and STEM, and everyday workplace experiences, with sources, limitations and research status made clear.
Read →Where this started
In 2011 I commissioned a study of discussions in a LinkedIn group with about 450,000 members. I expected the most popular conversations to be about their businesses. They weren't. They were about the challenges of being a woman at work.
That led to nearly a decade at women's leadership and start-up conferences in Vancouver, as a listener. The talks were far more personal stories than business ones. Most women had the work itself covered. What they carried was everything around it, and much of it they carried alone.
Since then I've studied women's posts, comments and talks, read many of the global reports on women's working lives, and spoken with many women directly. I see this work as adding to the women's movement, not leading it.
Ways to take part
A private, personally reviewed read of your own workplace situation. $97 USD, paid only after you've shared your story. Buying a Read doesn't enrol you in research.
A free way for women to add their experience to the research. Being planned. Please don't send private workplace accounts yet.
Optional financial support for the research, kept separate from Houston and from any decision about findings.
If you support women at work, or have responsibility for conditions affecting them, and see a useful connection, I'd be glad to talk. Please don't send confidential workplace accounts through a general inquiry.
Other work
Framework in development
Whether a concern raised by the people closest to the work reaches someone who can act on it, and arrives intact.
About XRAY →Whether you're a woman working something through, someone who supports women at work, or part of an organization that wants to hear its people more clearly, I'd be glad to talk.