One recent evening, Alicia Glen, the New York City deputy mayor for housing and economic development, was sitting in a black S.U.V. that had pulled over near Washington Square Park. She was on her way to celebrate the launch of a new initiative focussed on women, and she had come directly from her office, in City Hall. An aide appeared at the vehicle’s tinted rear window, which Glen rolled down to receive what she’d been waiting for: a black T-shirt that said “Women.nyc.” She threw it on under her dark blazer. “Norma Kamali, an icon of feminism, made these T-shirts for us,” she said.
Women.nyc is both a Web site and the name of an ad campaign meant to provide a boost to New York’s female residents. The site offers information on processes such as hiring a lawyer, starting a business, and applying for affordable housing, in the tone of an after-work pep talk over Martinis: “Women of NYC, make your power move.”
Glen, a cheerful former Goldman Sachs executive with a board-meeting cadence, explained that the campaign was part of a broader push by the city to persuade businesses to adopt policies like pay transparency, equal hiring, and paid parental leave. It came together, like many political projects these days, in response to the 2016 Presidential election. “In city government, on the one hand, we were all really depressed and miserable and wanted to just drink for the next month,” Glen said. “But we also thought, Here’s an opportunity to prove that cities are innovators, and we can really try to take actions into our own hands.”
In the shadow of the Washington Square Arch, the evening’s musical entertainment was setting up: the drummers of Fogo Azul, which bills itself as New York City’s “only all-women Brazilian drum line.” They wore blue and carried instruments adorned with blue flames. Behind them, the slogans of the Women.nyc campaign were projected onto the stone legs of the arch. One leg began “How Does a City” and the other continued “Work for Women?”
As the sun set, the program started. Glen spoke, followed by, among others, Jessica González-Rojas, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health; Erin Vilardi, the C.E.O. of VoteRunLead, which helps women run for office; and Sophia Chang, a writer and a former manager of some of the Wu-Tang Clan. A crowd gathered, and several women of New York City stopped to see what the fuss was about.
Nicole Corbett, the C.E.O. of a Union Square-based firm called Worn, which had worked on the site, was in the crowd. “We’re a mission-based creative agency, focussed on women-led companies and women-led campaigns,” Corbett said. (Her firm’s clients include Planned Parenthood and the dating-and-networking app Bumble.) She described some ads that had been designed for the city’s free-Wi-Fi kiosks and a billboard at the Port Authority Bus Terminal: “You’re not going to see pictures of women in these ads. It’s all about the power of words. Words like ‘We know you can do it alone, but you don’t have to.’ That’s coming from talking to women around the city, saying, ‘What’s real? What do you want to hear?’ ”
Stacey Gordon, a mother of three, said that she’d happened on the event after picking up dinner at By Chloe, a vegan café and juice bar on Bleecker Street. “I thought they must be a high-school band,” Gordon said, of Fogo Azul. “And then I saw this ‘Women-dot-New York City,’ and I was sort of blown away.” Gordon is launching a nonprofit called the Wrinkle Project to “change the way people see aging,” and she’d already tapped the Women.nyc URL into her iPhone. Standing nearby was Gabriella Verdugo, who had recently graduated from Northern Arizona University with a major in strategic communication. She said that she’d recently moved to the city (“for, hopefully, work”) and had found an apartment just south of Washington Square (“which is awesome”). Verdugo had learned about the event on Instagram, and made a mental note to go—but then forgot about it until she heard the drumming. “I was in my apartment, and I heard cheering and screaming, and I thought, Ah, it’s tonight! I have to go!” She planned to visit the Web site when she got home to scour it for job leads.
In the front row, close to the dais, stood Nicole Doz, a sanitation worker who was recently crowned Miss Staten Island 2018. She is one of only about two hundred women in the Department of Sanitation, out of some seven thousand six hundred uniformed employees. “Day to day, I drive a street sweeper or I am out on collection, picking up either garbage or recycling,” Doz said. She had come to the Women.nyc event at the suggestion of the sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, and she was wearing a green Sanitation Department hoodie, a Miss Staten Island sash, and a tiara. She said, “I hope that when I’m out doing my job, and when I’m at events like these, I can inspire someone to take a different path.” ♦
