Women’s Visibility with Lee Caraher

Jess and Margy are the co-owners of Interview Connections, the first and leading podcast booking agency. This is the podcast to teach you how to transform your business and life with the power of visibility and strategy!

On this episode of Monetize the Mic, Jess sits down with Lee Caraher to discuss women’s visibility!

Lee Caraher is the CEO of Double Forte, a national independent PR/Communications agency. An acclaimed communication strategist, Lee is known for her practical solutions to big problems. 

Lee has a reputation for building cohesive, high producing teams who have fun together at the same time and has authored two top-selling books about positive and profitable work culture. She is a straight talker who doesn't hold too many punches, although she does her best to be pleasant about it. Her big laugh and sense of humor have gotten her out of a lot of trouble. 

Her company works with some of the top consumer lifestyle, digital life, technology and wine brands in the country. Double Forte’s “Get on The Map” service is a foundation-building program that helps small businesses and individuals build authority and visibility to drive business success. Working with Lee and her senior team, small businesses and entrepreneurs learn how to “Show Up” and “Level Up” their footprints and influence to compete and grow their businesses. 

Jess wants to see more women investing in their visibility. 

In Jess’s experience, she finds that a lot of women feel like they’re not ready to increase their visibility. However, a lot of men have confidence at the start. Jess is passionate about seeing more women invest in their visibility, become featured in the media, and really become leaders of their industry. 

Jess asks, what is Lee’s perspective of women being featured in the media?

Lee explains that 70% of people quoted in the media as experts are men. 90% of people quoted in the first page or first 15 minutes of the media are men. Those statistics are even worse for BIPOC women. These numbers don’t reflect the number of actual business experts either. There are much more women running businesses than you’d think based on the number of women business experts quoted in the media.

Lee argues that you have to put yourself out there as an expert, and you have to be found. You have to make it so easy to find you, so that a reporter who has 2 seconds to find an expert can find you really fast. In Lee's experience, companies tend to invest more in men. Business owners who are men invest more time, money, and effort in putting themselves forward as experts. Because of this, the media can find men much easier than they can find women.

Reporters need to find people fast, and so if you're not able to be found quickly online you will not be found. This tends to diminish women in general, women’s authority in their categories, and women’s ability to implement their agenda. 

Lee introduces us to a concept called the Say Gap. The Say Gap is the difference between how many times men are quoted versus the amount of times women are quoted in the media. 70% of quotes are from men, and only 30% of quotes are from women. That is a gap of 40%!

There are things you can do to be known as an expert. There is time you can invest. But the most important thing is to change your mindset over who is an expert!

Lee was deciding whether she wanted to continue writing her second book. One night she was on the couch thinking about it, and watching the 2016 presidential debate. This debate was the one when the former president called the former secretary of state a “nasty woman.” After that moment, Lee immediately knew she was finishing this book. 

Lee knows that one thing she can do is make sure there is another book written by a woman CEO on an important topic. At that moment in time, Lee thought “I have something I can do to change this, to at least be another option in the world.” 

In Lee’s experience, she finds that women owned businesses typically underinvest in themselves. Her company helps put small businesses, with a particular focus on women owned businesses, on the map. She helps businesses achieve their goals through communication, messaging, and confidence.

Jess asks Lee, why is it so important that more women are leading and being visible?

Lee reminds us of the assumption that you can’t be a wife, mom, and run a successful business. That assumption is completely false. We should be declaring ourselves as women business owners! 

By declaring you’re a woman owned business, you’re not making the assumption that people don’t know it, you’re declaring the value of it. That declaration helps you in terms of authority and quotability. The more normal we make it to be women experts, the more normal we make it to be heard, the more normal we make it to be featured and visible in the media. It is not the norm to take our authority and declare our expertise. And that is doing ourselves and our industries a disservice! As women, we need to make sure the value that we have created is attributed to us.

Lee also discusses how podcasting can help anyone increase their visibility. By being a guest on podcasts, you’ll start appearing all over the internet. This increased findability drives authority through the roof. Lee recommends that you guest on as many podcasts as possible with several but specific topics. If you search Lee’s name, you will find hundreds of podcasts that she’s been on!

These podcasts are easy to find and easy to reference. By increasing your visibility online, you’ll start being known as an expert in your industry!

You can find Lee at double-forte.com!