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The Women’s Forum is excited to partner with Megan Costello, an experienced public and political manager and strategist, who will lead a feasibility study aimed at eliminating the wage gap by 2030. After graduating this past year with her MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Megan is eager to return to the work of eliminating the women’s wage gap in Massachusetts. Megan’s career has focused on advancing women’s rights, most recently as the Executive Director for the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, an office she started under the leadership of Mayor Martin J. Walsh. Megan also worked on the campaigns of Martin Walsh, Ed Markey, President Barack Obama, and Secretary Hillary Clinton.  She is a former board member of the Massachusetts chapter of NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Political Action Committee and a former board member of the External Advisory Board of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston.  

Megan is familiar with much of the exciting work happening for women, especially the work helping to close the women’s wage and power gap. She is looking to build on the great work being done rather than reinvent the wheel. She will be reaching out to many of you in the coming months, but if you have ideas please feel free to reach out to her. 

We sat down with Megan, to hear more about her goals for the project.

Massachusetts is Ready for Change

During her time in Mayor Walsh’s office, Megan led an effort to create a national model for closing the wage gap, by working with employers, individual women, and on important legislation. Partnering with the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, she worked with employers to report real wage data anonymously. She managed the City of Boston’s partnership with the American Association of University Women to offer free salary negotiation workshops to Boston’s working women, the program has trained over 10,000 women so far.  And Megan also collaborated with lawmakers and activists on Mayor Walsh’s behalf to support the passage of the equal pay act in Massachusetts. These experiences only strengthened her belief that Boston and Massachusetts are the perfect places to push big change around the pay gap, with all the momentum and support for the cause building. Boston has been leading the way. It’s time to build on that work and take this all around the State. 

Women’s Equity is Good for Business

For Megan and a lot of us, eliminating the wage gap is not only about dollars and cents, but also getting more women into leadership positions.  This requires asking organizations to be intentional about hiring processes and making sure they have a diverse group of candidates. Many of us have read the reports, we know the data and many businesses are interested in making changes but don’t know how to move forward. What’s stopping them? The case will be different for everyone. She hopes to help organizations look back 10 years, see where they have been, where they are now, and what their goals are for the future.  Passing laws is important to create equity, but eliminating the wage gap will require changing the culture of workplaces. The initiative will need people’s buy-in. We know that when women are paid, businesses have a stronger bottom line so they question here is, “What’s stopping us from achieving it and how can we all play a role?” 

Bringing Groups Together will be Crucial

Megan is excited about the prospects of bringing together organizations that have traditionally supported women and women’s causes with business, nonprofit, public sector, and community leaders, to come at the issue from multiple angles. It will be key to engage organizations like the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, the Eos Foundation, and the Commonwealth Institute that have taken the lead in data collection and reporting, and TCI, YW, and the Partnership, the Center for Women and Work, who focus on advancing women up the ranks of leadership. To name just a few. Pooling reports, resources, and strategies from these organizations will create an incredible body of knowledge and partnerships will map the way forward. Additionally, local leaders can provide insider knowledge and bring connections to the table. Megan believes we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but rather find out what is happening, how we can add to it and how can we really dig in to have lasting and meaningful impact. 

Powerhouse Women Leading the Way

Attending the MWF event Women Opening Doors for Women five years ago, Megan remembers looking around the room and seeing all the amazing women that have broken barriers for the next generations. She recognized that this powerhouse group, that had paved the way for women, knew that their success should not end with them. They understood the importance of positions of power for women remaining and growing, and Megan is excited to see the Forum playing a key role in leading this initiative.  

Please welcome Megan.

Linda Rossetti is a Harvard MBA, serial entrepreneur and expert on transition and its impact on individuals and organizations. Her work on transition, and the incredible energy that she brings to it, coalesced after an uncertain and surprising period she experienced nearly a decade ago. At forty-five, the long-time MWF member caught herself saying, “This is it? You must be kidding. I’ve worked this hard for this?” That internal dialogue occurred during her CEO’s all-day staff meeting at Iron Mountain, a Fortune 500 company with 21,000 employees in thirty-seven countries where Rossetti served as an EVP and C Suite member. The internal dialogue unexpectedly challenged Rossetti to revisit her assumptions about work and the desired impact she hoped to have.

“Today, I think about my career impact in very simple terms. I want to change how the world thinks about transitions.” said Rossetti with a broad smile.

Rossetti believes that the topic of transition found her even though she was no stranger to transitions. Earlier she served as the CEO of EMaven, Inc., a venture-capital backed technology company that was acquired by publicly traded Perot Systems, now Dell EMC. Following that acquisition, she was recruited by an EMaven Advisory Board member to join Iron Mountain, a highly-acquisitive company that had completed more than two hundred acquisitions.

Like many of us in uncertain times, Rossetti searched for resources to help her make sense of how she might move forward. “I was surprised at how little I found that spoke to the enormity of what I was experiencing,” she said. Instead of caving, Rossetti doubled-down. She initiated research, a step that ultimately included hundreds of people from all walks of life who participated in two eighteen-month research cycles. “People seemed to show up. Serendipitously. For example, a professional colleague who happened to run a well-known national outplacement firm said, ‘We will be your learning lab. Let us know what you need.’” Thanks to this type of support, Rossetti’s research yielded groundbreaking insights on transitions and the skills required to navigate it successfully.

“I discovered that we grossly misunderstand transition as a society,” said Rossetti. “Very often the first question people ask me once they hear about my work is, “What type of transition?’” Her research revealed that a wide variety of life experiences – from job loss to divorce to remarriage to sudden success – can serve as a catalyst to transitioning although none guarantee such an action.

Captivated by her research findings, Rossetti initiated a series of activities designed to address her important conclusions. She founded The Transition Institute, LLC, an organization that is dedicated to supporting individuals and organizations as they navigate transition. Her clients include Merrill Lynch, the US Air Force, Analog Devices, Harvard University, and many others. Her first book, Women & Transition: Reinventing Work and Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), is a 5-star rated Amazon top seller.  Most importantly, Rossetti and her organization collaborate with a number of organizations to advance thinking about transition through curriculum design, additional research and other multi-disciplinary pursuits. She hosts the podcast Destination Unknown – a field guide; and has been featured on NPR, NECN, CBS/WBZ, Money Magazine, The Boston Business Journal, SMARTBrief and other outlets.

“I view my work now more expansively than when I was in the C Suite. I think about my work in transition in terms of an enlivening value proposition, one that bestows individuals – and organizations – with the confidence to make different choices in times of uncertainty. Choices not driven by fear or perceived barriers or constraints but choices that allow them to identify opportunities, pursue dreams that felt previously impossible, and ultimately live the life they’ve imagined. It is a long way from the conference room at Iron Mountain. Thanks to my willingness to not run the other way in the face of uncertainty, I feel as if I uncovered the work I was put on the planet to do.”