Skip NavigationErica Dhawan with Gloria Steinem in 2004.Photo: Erica Dhawan
When I think of Gloria Steinem, I hear the four words she said to me in 2004 that I’ll never forget: “You can create change.”
I was a 19-year-old undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. In college, I had gotten involved with Steinem’s youth-focused organization ChoiceUSA (which later rebranded as URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity). And in 2004, I was a Pennsylvania organizer for the March for Women’s Lives. It was one of the largest women’s marches in history, and it gave me my first real opportunity to use my voice to make a difference.
That year, I met Steinem at a ChoiceUSA meeting. I was super clumsy and emotional, but I wanted to thank her for her work. I assumed she would simply nod and move on.
Her response surprised me. The ideas weren’t hers, she said. They came from a group of Black and Latina women who had been fighting for civil rights for four decades. She said they had taught her about pursuing justice and using her voice as power. Her role was to give them a microphone through her writing and speeches. And, she told me, I could also create change.
Her words has stayed with me for over 20 years. Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday at age 92, was one of the most recognizable faces of American feminism. But she used this moment to point past herself, give credit where credit was due and encourage me to harness my voice.
With those four words, she taught me that I could, as she said, create change: by doing the work, learning from those who came before me, and treating every interaction — even one with a starstruck college college student like I was at the time — as an opportunity to pay the lessons forward.
‘I felt like the lone voice’
I started volunteering in college for reasons I couldn’t explain back then. I grew up in Pittsburgh, a shy and introverted girl in an Indian American family.
I love my culture, but I also watched so many women in my community give their choices away: what they would study, who they would marry, when they would stop working. These women I watched growing up never complained. They accepted their realities. Some were proud of what they sacrificed and sometimes judged others who didn’t.
At first, I felt like I was the one with the problem. Who was I, as the first generation in a new country, to bring grievances home, question traditions, and ask if there was another way?
But when I started working with ChoiceUSA, I realized that just because I felt like the lone voice asking these questions in my community, that didn’t mean that I was alone.
‘Steinem taught me that you shouldn’t be afraid’
One of the principles Steinem championed was activist Carol Hanisch’s argument that the personal is political. When we feel something in our gut and intuition, it’s data. Change happens when we use this data, along with the wisdom of those who came before us, to take action.
In my career as an author and keynote speaker, I’ve spent the last 20 years studying how people connect, make decisions, build community and achieve a shared purpose. I also research leadership and coach C-suite executives.
The biggest obstacle even the most successful leaders face is the same one that I struggled with at 19: They often wait for permission to share what matters to them and do something about it.
In the age of consensus and algorithms, it’s harder to listen to your own intuition and find your original voice. But Steinem taught me that you shouldn’t be afraid to try, or to get advice from people who’ve been doing the work longer than you.
Gloria Steinem probably had no idea what she did that day in 2004 — or maybe she did. Most of us underestimate how far a single sentence travels. But I learned from Steinem that just one small interaction can have an enduring impact. And today, in her honor, I’ll pass it on: You can create change, too.
Erica Dhawan is a leadership expert, keynote speaker and the author of “Digital Body Language” and the forthcoming “Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot” (St. Martin’s Press, January 2027).
