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Sheila Robinson left corporate America to start a magazine she feels answers the career-advice needs of women. Now her audience is going to have the added benefit of finding the best jobs out there.
Diversity Woman magazine has joined the DiversityInc Recruitment Network (DRN), the largest online diversity network connecting underrepresented groups to companies that value and understand the benefits of diversity. The DRN includes three other sites: HBCUConnect.com, the largest online community of HBCU students, faculty and staff members, alumni and parents; Babbalu.com, the fastest-growing online community for Latinos; and ASCENT, an organization designed to work with multicultural women seeking senior positions in corporate America.
In 2004, Sheila Robinson’s employer of 14 years, DuPont, sold its textiles division and offered her and many others a buyout. Robinson, then the North American marketing communications director, looked around for similar positions but ran into “some diversity issues.”
At a Fortune 500 company, she was interviewed by three vice presidents, two directors and the president of the company, and she was told by the president “that I had all the experience they would ever need.” She would have had 25 white men reporting to her.
There was one big “BUT.” The president said he had an obligation to the employees who had been there a long time and that she “was not the right fit.”
“That was really the last straw,” she recalls. “That day, I told my husband, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to do something creative. I’m going to pursue my idea of starting a publication.’”
She tried to turn all her anger and negative energy into something positive. She had been responsible for placing advertisements for DuPont in publications. “I always thought there were not enough business magazines that focused on your career,” she recalls. “A lot of them focused on what’s happening in the business world but not on individual career development and individual performance.”
And so in 2004 she became the publisher of a quarterly magazine, North Carolina Career Network Magazine, which provided career advice and resources to business professionals. She soon realized that the type of stories she wanted to focus on–career advice, especially for women of color–had a much more national audience and more appeal to national advertisers.
She studied the market to devise a unique product and came up with Diversity Woman, a national publication that offers professional women career advice they can use. “I’ve always had a need to advance in my career. And I was always the type of person that took responsibility for my own professional development,” says Robinson.
The web site, www.DiversityWoman.com, is up. She anticipates the initial controlled circulation of the print magazine at about 100,000. She’s funding the publication through loans and personal investments.
“Entrepreneurship is one of the most rewarding things that I have done,” she says.
If she could give her younger self one piece of advice, this is what she’d say: “Start a business earlier and have multiple projects. I have so many ideas on things that I could have learned from a business standpoint; there are so many things I’m passionate about.”
The most common problem Black, Latina, Asian and American Indian women face in corporate America, she believes, is that “they don’t support each other. They are so busy, or so afraid. I think sometimes we are not really aware … we are working so hard to keep our heads above water that we sometimes forget that if we lift others up while we are lifting ourselves, we all win.”
