power

Women Shared Stories of Their Power Moves at the Brooklyn Museum Last Night

Photo: ED Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

To celebrate the launch of Women.NYC, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen joined 200 other guests at the Brooklyn Museum last night for an evening dedicated to women and work. Women.NYC is a new online portal launched by McCray and Glen providing resources and information about everything from running a company to working motherhood. Speakers included Sufia Hossain (who launched her own hot sauce company), Lida Orzeck and Gale Epstein (founders of Hanky Panky), and Rachel ten Brink (founder of Scentbird.)

The hot-sauce business “is a male-dominated industry, so people tend to brush me off,” Hossain told the Cut. She went on to describe how much easier it will be for her to access statistics about other business owners in the city through the portal. “I am extremely excited for Women.nyc and I know I will benefit from it; so will my fellow female entrepreneurs.”

Orzeck and Epstein found out about Women.NYC from Deputy Mayor Glen herself. “We recently met Alicia Glen, and invited her to a tour of our Queens warehouse/shipping/cutting facility,” they told me in an email that they typed out while riding the subway together. Yep, they manufacture in Queens! “The American Women’s Economic Development Corp. [AWED — now defunct] was an extremely valuable resource for us early on. Women.nyc is a much more robust version which has the capability of serving many more women who will feel secure reaching out to a resource tailored to their needs.”

Ten Brink was approached by the office of the First Lady, and felt strongly to get involved as a New Yorker, and as a female CEO. “I think that there are always challenges in terms of perception,” she told us as being a woman in boardrooms of men. Women.NYC is valuable to her because she thinks women should be brutally honest about career growth, becoming moms, and salary transparency. “All the things that you wanted to ask but were afraid to ask, are right there for you.”

Four Women on the Importance of the Launch of Women.NYC