Real House

But when the pandemic hit, she joined her virtual peer coaching group and listened in on high-profile remote speakers such as Cynthia Nixon or Martha Stewart. “We didn't know we needed this network until all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute. There's other incredibly senior women out there who have similar issues or concerns.”

At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, these include the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA). The GSA, through its External Affairs Committee, works to elevate the issues and concerns that are important to students at Carnegie Mellon, and ensure our constituents hear how the candidates plan to address them. For example, in every election, we reach out to all candidates with questionnaires geared towards student-specific issues and share their in-depth responses with students to help them cast an educated vote. Not only has this practice been lauded by the students—who feel that their concerns are not covered by the media—but also by the candidates themselves. Such nonpartisan advocacy is crucial to our efforts in improving voter engagement on our campus.

Unable to congregate over cocktails at bars or swap advice at in-person conferences, women were grappling with similar professional and personal demands, leading to record attendance at virtual events, says Kaplan, who herself was then juggling a newborn and 4-year-old at home. She even tried to get Childers, who was living solo in a New York apartment, to move into her basement. (“Spoiler alert: She refused,” says Kaplan of Childers, who’s currently riding out the pandemic in Florida.)

We were definitely at the top of lists of ‘what's going to happen with this business?’” says Childers. “There were big question marks because a lot of what we did was in-person.” As for the new leases? “All of that was kind of rendered useless in some ways,” at least at the time.