DALLAS — This weekend, hundreds of women will come together in Dallas for the Women’s Leadership Summit with the common goal of empowering women.
Highly accomplished women will share their strategies for success at the summit on August 5 – 6 at the Renaissance Dallas Hotel.
Former State Rep. Helen Giddings helped found the summit in 2018, to educate, empower and strengthen women to be successful in today’s business environment. The summit provides an opportunity for successful women to help pave the way for emerging women entrepreneurs, business and community leaders by sharing information about their backgrounds that led to their successes.
One of the keynote speakers is former United States District Judge Vanessa Gilmore. She was a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas. Gilmore says she wants to help emerging women who are coming up in the ranks to have the same opportunities she had by sharing her experiences.
“I hope to share with the young women that none of us - not any of us got where we are, without the assistance or help of others. That other people laid stepping stones for us and that we are the beneficiaries of that, I mean in that regard, I think that some of the things that are going on now, in terms of attacks on women's independence are something that we need to make sure that the young women coming up behind us understand,” Judge Gilmore tells Inside Texas Politics.”
In light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Judge Gilmore thinks the women of her generation need to continue to offer support to younger women.
“I think it is an opportunity for us to make younger women aware of the need to fight for their own freedoms, their own bodily autonomy, and their own reproductive health choices -- because we were beneficiaries of that and it's not time for us to pull up the ladder behind us and say 'Oh well, hope it works out for you guys,” says Judge Gilmore.
And, Gilmore tells us a recent poll released by the Associated Press that shows a sharp increase in the number of people who have lost confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court documents and reinforces what she believes we’ve known for some time.
Gilmore says, “That's not the only poll in recent times that has looked at the public confidence in the Supreme Court over the last two or three years. Quinnipiac, Annenberg, and Gallop have all done polls. In fact, the Annenberg poll found that one-third of Americans wanted to abolish the Supreme Court.”
She also says that elections matter, and that she didn’t think we would be talking about the reversal of Roe v. Wade if Hillary Clinton had been elected President of the United States.
Among other featured Keynote speakers is Deryl McKissack, President/CEO of McKissack & McKissack which manages a $15 billion portfolio in U.S. projects. And Mayor Sharon Weston Broome, the first woman Mayor of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.