“Never underestimate your abilities”: Three local women leaders reflect on Women’s Equality Day and voting

This year, Women’s Equality Day on Aug. 26 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.

Ratification of that amendment took a lot of campaigning by women and the amendment actually only gave white women voting rights. Black women wouldn’t really be able to vote until The Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Though most women gained voting equality in 1920, today women still lag behind men economically and socially, getting paid less for the same work, carrying the burden of domestic chores and suffering most of the brunt of domestic violence.

Nevertheless, women have made great strides in leadership thanks to predecessors who fought for equal voice and representation.

Locally, three women leaders– Signal Hill City Manager Hannah Shin-Heydorn, Arts Council for Long Beach Executive Director Griselda Suarez and Long Beach Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Jill Baker– shared with the Signal Tribune how they navigated to their influential roles and the importance of voting.

Hannah Shin-Heydorn​
The Signal Hill City Council appointed Hannah Shin-Heydorn as Signal Hill’s first female city manager last year, following Charlie Honeycutt’s retirement, after she’d been serving as deputy city manager for three years.

Since then, Shin-Heydorn not only manages the city’s administrative affairs– which includes personnel and economic development– but has been the city’s emergency-services director during the current COVID-19 crisis, with the authority to make life-saving decisions on behalf of the city without council approval.

Shin-Heydorn told the Signal Tribune that she’d always been interested in a career in public service and began working with the Department of Defense the Monday after she graduated from UC Berkeley.

After five years in that job, earning a master’s degree in management along the way, Shin-Heydorn worked in the LA area for another five years, including with USC and Northrop Grumman, before finally switching into city government so she could make a difference in people’s lives at a local level.

“With the impending arrival of my second child, I took a hard look at my career,” she said. “To continue working full time while raising a family, I knew I had to be in a position that I was passionate about and believed in, and would make worthwhile the inevitable sacrifices that come with balancing work and life.”

Shin-Heydorn worked for seven years with the City of Lake Forest in Orange County, growing to become its Director of Management Services, before being hired as Deputy City Manager for Signal Hill in 2016.

“I was ready for an opportunity to serve at a higher level, taking on more responsibility in service to a community,” she said of the move. “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the city over the last four years.”

However, Shin-Heydorn’s stellar career progress while juggling the needs of her family has not always been easy as a woman, she said. All of the industries she’s worked in have been male-dominated, including city government.

“I have always felt the need to be ‘more’ to prove myself– more productive, more prepared, more dedicated, more flexible and more strategic,” she said. “I have been fortunate to have had mentors and champions along the way who believed in me, encouraged me and promoted me.”

Though she’s seen a shift in recent years in the numbers of women and people of color appointed to city-manager positions in California, Shin-Heydorn says she wishes to see more such change.

“The profession will only continue to benefit from diversity of thought, experience and representation,” Shin-Heydorn said. “My hope is that today’s leaders continue creating a new workplace reality– one that recognizes individual talents, abilities and efforts and no longer has room for sexism or discrimination in any of its insidious forms.”

Female leadership has always been beneficial to Signal Hill, Shin-Heydorn says, noting that Jessie Nelson served as the city’s first mayor in 1924. Nelson also helped incorporate the 2.2 square-mile city after saving it from being annexed by the surrounding City of Long Beach.

Two of Signal Hill’s current elected city-council members are women.

“I believe female leadership brings a different perspective that allows us to deconstruct stereotypes and grow to be a more inclusive community that reflects the needs, concerns and ​lived experiences of women,” Shin-Heydorn says. “When female leaders have a seat at the table, I believe we see more equitable policies and practices for all community members.”

Looking ahead, Shin-Heydorn says Signal Hill needs to promote more gender equality through city planning.

“We can no longer plan and design for the city in response to existing historical uses,” she said.

“Rather, we must look forward and create environments that support and facilitate new behaviors and opportunities. All community members should be able to use public spaces in a manner that meets their individual needs.”

Shin-Heydorn says she will advise her 11-year-old daughter to make conscious and deliberate decisions as she navigates her own career path.

“Don’t be afraid of the twists and turns along the way,” Shin-Heydorn says. “And most importantly, never underestimate your abilities.”

Griselda Suarez
Equity and inclusion is not only tied to gender but also race for Griselda Suarez, the executive director of the Arts Council for Long Beach for the past four years.

Under her leadership, the Arts Council– founded by the City of Long Beach in 1976 to support the arts– coordinated a collaborative exhibition series in 2018 for artists who were mostly people of color and women at a time when there were very few women’s art collections across the country, Suarez told the Signal Tribune.

“We’re really proud of that,” Suarez said.

The Arts Council also revamped its artist registry during her tenure so it can more easily gather data and try to get more artists of color involved.

“Right now, there are a lot of city entities and private businesses who want to act on social justice and being inclusive,” Suarez said. “So we’re getting more phone calls particularly on identifying artists of color– Latino artists, Black artists. We can do that now. We couldn’t do that four years ago.”

The next step is to use the registry as a tool to create more change, she added.

The Arts Council also expanded its grants program and diversified its Professional Artist Fellows program, Suarez said. And it has more partnerships and collaborations within grassroots organizations across the city.

“It takes time,” Suarez said of the changes she has implemented.

While female administration is common in the arts world, the three executive directors of the Arts Council before Suarez were white, she said.

With a background in digital art and creative writing, Suarez– who also teaches at Cal State Long Beach– said she applied for her position knowing that the Arts Council board had a new strategic plan.

“One of those changes was to be more inclusive,” Suarez said. “I was part of that plan.”

Suarez said the Arts Council also wanted more diversity and she told the board she was going to be vocal about arts equity. Once hired, she quickly connected the Arts Council with LA County’s Cultural Equity & Inclusion Initiative, and she now serves as an advisor on that board.

“It’s really one of the pillars of my leadership,” Suarez said. “Everything intersects with equity.”

Among the equity questions she tracks is how many artists are getting paid, who’s getting ​contracts and commissions, who’s involved in events, who’s being exhibited and who gets grants.

“All of these are questions that we continue to tackle,” Suarez said. “I haven’t found the perfect answer or solution, but we tackle it every day at the Arts Council.”

The Arts Council is also currently working on art projects throughout Long Beach related to women’s suffrage to mark the 100th anniversary of the voting amendment, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Symbolically, women got the right to vote in 1920,” Suarez said. “But really, it was white women that got the right to vote. So many women continue to do suffrage work to this day.”

Suarez pointed to Stacey Abrams, an African-American Representative from Georgia, as an example of an activist trying to prevent voter suppression, especially among women of color.
She also pointed to the local Long Beach Suffrage 100 group that continues to do suffrage work and is promoting events to mark this year’s 19th Amendment centennial.

“Voting this year is not just about a four-year position,” Suarez said. “Voting this year is really about changing up the status. I think a lot of women understand that, that they’re not voting for themselves, but also others.”

Jill Baker
The new first female superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD), Dr. Jill Baker, says women today are often more prepared and more highly educated than men for the positions they seek.

Though she herself holds a master’s and doctoral degree, Baker told the Signal Tribune that she faced backlash over her salary by teacher unions after the LBUSD Board appointed her superintendent as of Aug 1., even though her pay is commensurate with her education and experience as measured by a national survey of superintendents.

“There’s a gender aspect to that,” Baker said. “I wonder, if the board had selected a man from out of town, would they have said anything?”

Baker had started teaching LBUSD in 1992 after earning a sociology degree in college. She didn’t know what she wanted to do initially, but her mother was a teacher.

“I didn’t know if I would love teaching, but I knew I wanted to make a difference,” Baker said of starting her education journey.

She taught for only five years before becoming an administrator while she was still in her twenties after others encouraged her to share her teaching practices.

“I had some great mentors who saw something in me that I hadn’t yet seen in myself,” Baker said.

Though there were more women in K-12 education than men, there were fewer women in administrative ranks at that time and Baker had to gain the respect of men and women teachers who were twice her age.

“You have to maintain your teacher self,” Baker says of being an administrator. “In everything I do, I need to think about the perspective of teachers and I need to be learning like I expect our teachers to be learning.”

Baker says she loved being a school principal– creating a sense of teamwork among teachers and connecting with students and their families, seeing them overcome struggles– until she was called on to create a leadership-development program for LBUSD for a year, which then led to 15 years as assistant and deputy superintendent.

Baker says LBUSD is doing well in fostering more girls to become leaders and use their voices.

Many district schools have female-leadership academies, some of which encourage girls toward careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).

“I think the schools do a good job of girls having a seat at the table,” Baker said.

She also believes girls see diverse female role models both in the classroom and in administration and that female leadership is more normalized in the education curriculum rather than treated as an aberration.

And Baker is cognizant of herself as a role model as well, especially after participating in an LBUSD podcast with high-school girls.

“I’ve had fabulous opportunities to talk to girls about their perspective,” Baker said. “It’s humbling to me because it seems more important to them to see a woman leading than I might have thought.”

Baker also says that her son, who is now 20, has seen his mother as a working mom and school administrator and it has changed the way he thinks about women in society and in his personal life.

“As much as I think role modeling is great for young women, […] it’s also important for young men,” Baker says.

She encourages all those eligible to vote to use their voices and to make it a habit rather than a one-time event, describing it as the first adult expression of civic engagement.

She encouraged women especially not to take the 19th Amendment for granted.

“And if you vote this year, you have a chance to elect a female vice president,” Baker said. “A female African-American vice president.”