#MyIdeasToo — How to Steal a Woman’s Ideas and Get Away With it!

Years ago, when my Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model came into existence through my work with thousands of mothers and daughters from different countries and cultures, my clinical supervisor warned me to watch out. She said, “One day a man will come along and claim your ideas for himself, and no one will stop him.” Her warning worried me! It sounded prophetic, and entirely probable, since women’s ideas have been repeatedly stolen by men for centuries. James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s Nobel prize, for example, built their fame on Rosalind Franklin’s research on DNA. How many of Albert Einstein’s ideas were his wife’s, Mileva Maric’s ideas? And Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsars, but her male supervisor received the Nobel prize.

What woman doesn’t know what it feels like to present an original idea in a meeting, only for a male colleague to take her idea and receive credit for it. And when she complains, she’s ignored, silenced, and criticized for being difficult and not a team player.

A few years ago, as the faces of my new students appeared on my screen for their first Zoom lesson for my Mother-Daughter Attachment® Training Course for mental health professionals and coaches, a male student appeared in the class. And as I looked at his face my supervisor’s warning from years ago came to mind…