Women · Work · Evidence · Change
Understand what is happening to you. Find out what could change, and who could change it. Women shouldn't have to keep getting better at adapting to conditions that could be changed.
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.
You don't have to buy a Read or share a personal story to use anything on this site.
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, using only checked figures.
Read →Where this started
In 2011 I commissioned a study of a LinkedIn group of about 450,000 professional women. 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, 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're part of a women's organization, union, professional association, research group or policy role and see a 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 →Exploratory research · under review
An earlier analysis of one company from public information, now being reviewed before it's republished.
Status →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.