What Skills Do Women Need to Change the World? An Interview with Professor Favorite
On the occasion of International Women’s Day on March 8, popular Italian magazine D Repubblica interviewed six successful women in order to ask for advice on how to promote self-empowerment, work effectively in teams, and transform the abilities associated with motherhood into the soft skills that are useful in the workplace.
One of the women interviewed was John Cabot University’s very own Michèle Favorite, Assistant Professor of Business and Communications and Associate Director for Italian Admissions.
Professor Michèle Favorite
In the article, Professor Favorite says “Women are often very competitive with each other in the workplace and this is a serious mistake because a woman who moves ahead alone by stepping on other women will never be able to truly change anything in society. It’s important to proceed together, support each other, and make use of a genuinely female trait, empathy. In this way we will understand that the challenges and difficulties that our colleagues are facing are the same ones that we may face, even though the modalities may differ. We need to learn to enjoy other women’s successes and see them as shared victories.”
Prof. Favorite, who teaches Business Communications at JCU, also explains how to write an effective resume and advises women to emphasize their soft skills by using details from personal life to reinforce professional experience. For example, if you want to highlight your ability to be a team leader, you can say, “I coordinate a team of five people and since taking on this role, efficiency has increased 20%,” followed by “In my private life, I manage a team of three children, a husband, and an elderly parent.”
The problem, according to Prof. Favorite, is that women, who are natural custodians of soft skills, are reluctant to emphasize them for fear of appearing unprofessional. Women should instead be proud of the abilities that they have acquired in their personal lives and should bring them to work without fear.
