good evening ladies and gentlemen. tonight i have the pleasure of introducing samantha as they join us to discuss the new book by former news correspondent adjunct professor at columbia university grad school of journalism and a woman at forbes contributor. and disney interactive so please join me in welcoming heather and samantha. [applause] >> thank you. >> we appreciate you coming out on a night like this this is an exciting moment for us because we are in the same city but this is the evening before it comes

out to two kick things off i want to show you a little book trailer first. i think that women understand we are not going to get ahead unless we help each other to get ahead. i have a female manager and pushed me beyond my roles. so many women have been able to work the typical jobs given the opportunity to travel and everything else they want [inaudible]

i've picked the groups up before and they don't necessarily get it. they see value in it and compassion i have focomepassiond immediately their offers are how can i help. [applause] ♪ ♪

the culmination of five years of reporting and research and more than 250 interviews with the when people start using the internet for consumer use, microsoft windows 95 came out so before that the internet was primarily -- now it is used by regular people for business and commerce etc..

i saw the rise and fall of the.com industry the stock shot up within six months it was down to two. so we were all rich and poor but it was fun. i made some lasting friendships during that time. in 2013, he was a.com survivor and said i've been working in the valley for over 15 years and she's the head of sales and software company and my manager told me even though they hate the number he said to me i've been told by some people in the group and company you are abrasive. would you mind toning it down a bit and by the way your lipstick

is to provide and you wear too much jewelry. she was horrified and didn't stay in the company very long but said it's unbelievable what the women are facing today. there is such unconscious bias and you need to write about it. i said i want to interview a couple more people to see what is going on so i went to other women i want to hear about the experience and the basic bias and discrimination is it really that bad. i've been researching out of silicon valley here in new york on a similar topic for yahoo!. i had amazin have amazing storim these female founders. we do face sexism in every

industry. it's a lot more positive than negative when it comes to starting companies so that is the story that we decided to tell the worklife balance, so we came together in 2013 to tell the story. so abc news correspondent and longtime reporter i had the wonderful opportunity to go to yahoo! for 2007 at the dawn of the iphone and the app store and my job fai there was to cover digital lifestyles essentially to look at how the internet was changing our day-to-day lives and put together stories i would then present on the today show.

it was a an eye opening experience because i kept meeting women who were starting companies. why is nobody telling their story i'm featuring them in these segments and their products, but i thought it was so interesting they were so successful and fearless. i knew because i had worked on a documentary right out of grad school about the gender gap in the '90s. i knew that it was a problem. i thought this is interesting there is a landscape of women that are doing well for themselves in spite of the sexism and the fact that it is a male-dominated industry. so what is it about them that has made them successful and enabled them to persist. what can we learn from them for

our daughters, i had 11-year-old twins, a girl and a boy. that certainly was an inspiration for the stories to figure out what is it from their backgrounds and childhoods and from all of their experiences to keep going. so during the time i started curating interviews with these women and sam said she was interested in doing the same, we realized we could cover so much more ground if we were working on the two and what we were able to do that is though cool at the time, there were so many outside of silicon valley that were starting to kind of bubble up and so it allowed us to go out there and spread ourselves as far and wide as possible to be able to track these women and get out of the coast and get into the middle of the country to find some of those stories.

first of all, we are writing for the good morning america audience. we are writing for the mainstream to take them inside the subculture and what the book strives to do is connect the dot across the system to take the audience to the front line where the women are working at the grassroots level to close the gap and closed the diversity gap. so the book is broken down into seven chapters and we kind of survey the landscape. so we profile activists and entrepreneurs and investors.

to understand the challenges that the women and the diverse backgrounds face we explain that to them and being part of the digital evolution. one of the things holding people back in the tech center is fear of failure. has anybody here heard of the syndrome or ever experience it each and every day? it is i am not good enough or smart enough, what am i doing here. she feels it to this day so what i want to read from you is don

donna, and she is currently a head engineer of microsoft and talks about fear and failure, but actually failing to computer science class at the university of michigan and went on to become the head engineer at microsoft. wearing leopard and owning it if was midnight in downtown seattle she was hosting a 48 hour session to try to make the first half for the augmented reality

device that enables the holograms to leak from computer screens into real life where it can be manipulated. at 36-years-old a hardware geek and a fashion designer in the outreach program confirming the status of the rising star in microsoft it is hard to believe she failed her first computer science class. the story of resilience is what she tells often inspiring young women to charge ahead in a long time developer for the windows operating system she likes to think of it as the invisible fairy godmother that makes things happen and was overseeing microsoft windows programs with millions of users getting feedback about the update. my biggest success microsoft is

the legendary software company being a principal level is a huge achievement. when i was growing up in detroit if someone told me you are going to be making a really good salary working at microsoft i would have laughed. she didn't know any women like the one she would one day become. her parents, immigrants from kathmandu worked in the auto industry and her grandmother a seamstress and a fashion designer. the computer lab at the high school consisted of teenage boys that left her out of the room when she approached about joining the computer club and she'd been fascinated ever since she had laid eyes on her classroom. her father who read the journal

encouraged donna from a classical career move and thought it. he scraped together the money at a college while she was still in high school but it wasn't enough to prepare her for computer science 100, the programming class at the university of michigan but crammed them into one semester. she felt like her male classmates had taken ap computer science in high school and they were speaking a foreign language as they paired up for assignments. i listened to them all the time and they would say i can't believe how easy this is. who doesn't know this. and i'm sitting there like i don't know any of this. i don't even know what this word means. they would say let's move on and

yell it out. she failed the course because she was too embarrassed to ask questions and didn't want anyone to think she was an airhead. immediately afterwards she thought about dropping altogether and then she started thinking about how she would ride her bike and asking her knees and cry a lot and now to never do this again only to get back on the saddle two days later. she took the class again and this time got a letter d.. -- b.

what are people talking about and a lot of people don't go for things unless they are guaranteed success. if you get 50% or 75 75% that is far better success than 0% of the way. one of the reasons we watched the digital platform is to highlight these stories because there is a visibility gap.

the. there were all these different women from different backgrounds all over the country to see how creative and collaborative model me their jobs are about how they are in their lives. it's cold and not collaborative and these are some of the things you hear from younger girls when you ask them about it.

but that is the complete opposite they were super creative and they were artsy and they care about fashion and family and they have these incredibly multifaceted lives and their jobs are very collaborative. there is a computer genius of the tech company, so the memo

park on the accelerator called the women's startup lab there were eight female founders who were technology founders living in the house and the interesting things i learned about researching this book is female entrepreneurs don't look like richard hendrix or act like the programmer type that you see on tv or hear about in the media. they are from all over the country, one in particular from santa fe new mexico with two little kids at home said this is the first time i've been able to breathe and not have my kids all over me, started a baby equipment rental company so when you go visit your parents across the country traveling with kids and have strollers and all these things you don't have to come

you can go from one state to another. so the first time i could read and focus on my company with these entrepreneurs we spent the week work shopping and training and learning to go out and pitch to investors to scale the business, so i spent the week with her and other entrepreneurs and the interesting thing about the program is that it was building a network. these women were working together, they were mentors and adult competence and her husband looked at her and said who are you. she was so confident and met the cofounder of match.com was one

of the advisors at the startup lab. he said i want to partner with you and to scale it out and make this into a billion-dollar company, so now this is her cofounder and ceo and it's now spread into 40 different markets around the country and its booming. you have this network of the support and we devote a whole chapter of entrepreneurs and investors is the fact that women founders were trying to scale the company is back.

we look at how female investors are starting to come into play. we were able to get inside of their world and meet them and get a sense of what it's like to be one of the partners in a silicon valley venture capital firm. the network is the key point because what these women are trying to do is not only start the company which is the hardest thing ever but trying to break into the boy's club. we talk about these underground secret handshake society is

bubbling up. women are coming together saying melissa and if we are not going to get in the traditional way we will make our own way. that is why we wanted to focus on what was happening at the grassroots level because it was a story that hadn't been told yet and we felt like the focus in the mainstream media had been on sexism in the industry which does need to change that at the same time we felt like there was some hope in this drives a lot of women have made by creating their own network. it's pretty impressive and i think that it is really inspiring. >> one of my favorite stories is an entrepreneur who is actually in san francisco and talks about the boys club and how she never felt what she was part of it and went to carnegie mellon undergrad and graduated she started her company while in

grad school at carnegie mellon. it was a gaming platform that build tools to help build up their games so she lost the company that she sold and went to work for google venture. that was the first time she realized what the boys club was a. she realized there are fewer women coming to pick further investment. this is really bad. she went back to the company that is a super cool virtual reality environment where you

can walk around a room and basically what you do is take for pictures of your living room from four corners of the room and they make a three d. model of your room that looks like your room and they give you different design concepts. you can actually do this walking around as an avatar on your computer so that super, duper cool, and it's raised i think $11 million now but she started this project and said there are so many interesting founders and investors along the way i'm going to invite everybody to park city utah to have a festival called the thin air innovation festival that takes place in april so she brought a

lot of friends and other advisers and they skied and had fun and networked and one that ran the farm at one point said i feel guilty i should be home with the kids working on my company. she said this is what the guys do. they play golf and go on these ski trips. this is the golf club. and she's doing this every year now to build her network. all of this stuff happens so she's doing her own grassroots club so this is what we thought about the book and the journey so they are creating opportunities where even beyond networking but to establish authentic relationships with each other that ultimately could

turn into business relationships. in the first chapter there is the girl's lounge which is essentially a pop-up salon india's male-dominated conferences around the world now, but it was most famous for the first one and basically what she does is create a comfortable place for women to come and hang out when they are at these business events where they are the only ones there and it's an amazing place to see these women not only bonding but actually doing business as well and her belief is that women need more opportunity to be able to collaborate. she believes that women have to socialize to be competitive, and she's trying to really dispel that notion and the fact that i spent some time with her at one of her conferences in germany last fall she had an entire

panel devoted to the theory if you surround yourself with women who are successful use your cell phone be successful as well like if you shine, i.e. shine and that is the mantra that we saw throughout whether it was in chattanooga tennessee or pittsburgh or seattle or los angeles for all these different places there seemed to be this mandate for women to lift each other up. i remember specifically when we went to the conference, one of the places we went early on in the reporting when we sold the book proposal we went to houston and we spent a few days at the celebration of women and computing which is the largest gathering of technologists in the world so for all these women suddenly appeared there with 15,000 from all over the world

together. every program was about how to help each other. helping people find internships it was amazing. we were interested in finding college students because we knew we wanted to do a chapter on college women and what was happening. this research compiled by the american association and it was one of the first times that researchers have actually highlighted things that were working to retain women in the computer sciences so it's not just that they expressed an interest in the computer science at the big issue is persisting and actually graduating so we went to grace harper because harvey not a college is one of the schools that actually pays

for freshmen women to go to grace hopper. they do that, it's a small school but they do that so that these women get connected to a network and so they can see there are other women like them and they get to meet professionals in the field so they can actually say okay they get role models that are related to them. those are not necessarily believable role models when you are a sophomore and engineering student. they need the chance to meet real women. it is a fantastic example of that so that is ultimately why we were there.

we have been easing the need for the when we went back. >> there is a group that is a play on the word c++ is a computer programming language. they were double majoring in english and computer science or information science sociology. more so if they had a program called the c+ ambassador program so what they were giving us paying it forward.

so they go to different communities from around the united states and to find high school girls that are interested in engineering and say i want you to start a program in your local community that encourages or inspires other kids to get involved. one of the girls i met started a robotics program at the school in my little town, the library in california and she's there with a couple other mentors, high school girls, a close high school to us, they worked with these young girls and it's free, they come and they are learning actually how to build a robot.

i think another important thing to remember is that communities and networks of women are there to pay it forward to inspire young girls to get involved. it's amazing what is happening. it's like it's changing the way we live and interact with each other. i think they are really vested in inspiring the next generation and we certainly saw that across the country when we spend time at carnegie mellon also we had a chance to follow students that were mentoring middle school girls and bringing them to campus and teaching them various skills not just in computer science but stand in general and i think the big thing we took away from that is the way they bonded. they were invested in helping the next generation but at the same time they were also solidifying their relationships

so that as they graduate and go on to that first job they still had ties to the students they left behind and what we are seeing is as they move on and on those relationships become incredibly helpful because again back to the original point about the network, it really comes down to having that network and that's why we call the book inside of a sisterhood. so we are absolutely happy to take some questions if anybody has any questions. what was the most interesting thing that you learned writing the book?

one of the interesting things to look a valley where i am all of the twentysomethings in the past ten years are now in their 30s and having kids so they are trading in their ping-pong tables and kegger readers for paid leave and worklife policies are to accommodate working parents and employees caring for aging parents. so she started her company alongside her husband with the intention very intentionally creating a workplace culture that values the whole person, not jus just to the employee see realize you might have issues outside of the house, you might have children, you might need to

take care of your own health and they offer that take the time you need a policy so whatever time you need you can take it. so there was a big change from when i was working at silicon valley and i had babies and the only bathroom we had for pumping when i was pumping milk for my newborn was a cold bathroom, and al gore bathroom, it was freezing cold and i would sit there with my palm and it was horrifying. engineers with more on the door, is everything okay in there what's that noise. now you go to these companies and they have nursing rooms and they really care about the whole person and that's something i haven't seen before and i was relieved and happy to see. breitbart is a shining example that is hopefully setting an example for other companies.

i was just going to say the biggest take away for me that i actually applied and i tried to apply in my own life is getting access to these amazing people one thing i noticed about all of them is when they had an idea, they went for it. so often you have an idea in the back of your head and it's like maybe i will work on it then you forget it or you worry that it's not fully formed, or you worry this isn't ready for primetime yet i need to work on is more and you don't do anything with it. for me in the process of working on this book was the lesson that sometimes you just have to get it down and put it out there because if you don't, you are never going to do it. time and time again we saw that with these different women whether they worked on it on the side they had a full-time job and at night they would work on

it, they found a group of friends and they would talk about it and find people that have an expertise to get smart on the topic they want to cover but they didn't let the fact that they didn't have all the answers stop them from moving forward and i think that is such an important life lesson for any idea regardless if you are starting a company or writing a book or starting a nonprofit or a neighborhood group, whatever it is. you will regret it later so that is what i took away from a chance to meet all of these amazing people. >> also, you don't have to be alone if you are a woman in technology or any industry that is male-dominated. if you can't find one, go build your own. it's no reason to feel that you

are on our own in this world. >> what are some of the other places that you visited throughout the country? i've heard people more and more say that the access is shifting from silicon valley in terms of the entrepreneurial activity. it's coming from wall street and media and fashion.

the expertise and the reality is if you are building a company you need all kind of expertise.

when you are in a sort of place like chattanooga you can write your own story and i think that is cool and that is why you are seeing places like detroit and cleveland and pittsburgh popping up around the country where there are more women and there's an openness to their background because they don't have a technical degree or a fancy degree quite frankly, there is that bias against people who didn't graduate from stanford or the ivy league u. don't necessarily have that in other parts of the country it's more about ideas and execution brinkley. >> one is in the south la. she's actually a fashion designer and started a company that connects designers and

manufacturers so if you don't know where to get your product made, she's starting an accelerator program called made in the south la which is her hometown and she's trying to help give life to her economy because this is a poor area so she's starting this accelerator program. cara calls herself the anti-bark, she's a female with no technical background and interesting in detroit there's all this activity because they are engineers, used to work in the auto industry without jobs and so the programs are popping up to try to train these people

and get them to work and start these technical jobs. >> [inaudible] are you seeing more and more women who are going into this industry from other industries who don't have those backgrounds? >> certainly among entrepreneu entrepreneurs. there are reasons for that when you talk about the consumer base you see women that are not necessarily technical that are starting these companies and one of the reasons for that, suzanne who is the founder of the aol backed fund startup she talked to us about the fact that when the storm came online and then you suddenly had this opportunity for people to be able to use open source tools, to be able to build a most viable product prototype of the

idea without having to raise millions of dollars were to be affiliated in the university suddenly that opened up the gates to anybody that have an idea but it didn't take billions of dollars to build a version of something you wanted to test out on the market you could build it for a couple thousand dollars, so once the costs started coming down it really democratized the ability for anybody to be able to get into this world and opened the gates for people coming out of business school or media. i think many of the founders that we spoke to didn't have technical backgrounds. they are starting a company that

is a recovery tool or platform for addicts whether this drug alcohol addiction and has no technical background but solve this problem. there is a problem that they are trying to solve and they will go to any means to get this problem solved. i was going to say i had the

chance last week to sit down with chief operating officer of the fastest growing career research platform today going head to head with linked in and said that if you don't love what you're doing and you don't thought you were put on the earth to solve this company that you are building you will never succeed because it is so hard to be an entrepreneur and three quarters of the startups fail. she was giving advice to a younger woman standing with us and basically said don't start a company just to start a company, started the company because you care about this problem you are trying to solve because you believe in it because the ups and downs are so extreme and the sacrifices our extreme. if you don't have that passion, you're not going to be successful.

>> [inaudible] cybersecurity co. company, web authentication company in san francisco. she said entrepreneurship is a roller coaster ride, but people pay to go on roller coasters. >> having read all these stories about women, what would you say stands out as the pieces of advice that you could share with us? >> definitely just start. if you have an idea, go for it. don't let being a woman or nontraditional founders and in norway. i think that is a big one. and then this idea of perfection and realizing that tact is inherently about degradation and testing and trial and error and seeing what works.

they will ship products with bugs in them and then they ship another version and another version. it's baked into the culture and it's important to realize that is part of the process if you stumbled and get rejected and the first version isn't what you thought it was going to be, don't give up. it's like you've got to keep going. that is a common theme among all of these whether they were entrepreneurs, investors, activists, technologist. all of them seem to have that quality that they could live with themselves if they made a mistake or stumbled because they believed in themselves and what they were trying to do so they kept coming. it's a big take away for me, t too. it is a universal take away. >> there's a program that

teaches girls to program the computer code. and she said something really great if we raise our boys come as parents, raise them to be fearless, we raise girls to be perfect and compliant and well-liked. she said that it's crap. we have to teach girls to be fearless, bold, it's okay to be messy and get your hands dirty, it's okay to try and fail. the boys were raised their hand whereas the girls had to be so prepared to raise their hand and give a perfect answer. as we are raising the next generation i think that we have to think about trying and failing and getting their hands dirty and making mistakes as part of the process, iterating, learning from mistakes and moving forward and that was a huge message for me as a recovering perfectionist. it's okay, i'm not perfect, move

on, learn from mistakes and move forward. >> we have the last question right here. >> that reminds me a lot of the book the curse of the good girl. it sounds like this book is part number two of the book with some answers of how to get around it. it totally resonates with video games as well. it was an incredibly engendered experience. but i wonder where does that idea to start. why do we think of it as male. it's as simplis it as simple ass and the story that we are telling or is there something

else? >> we both had the opportunity to interview engineers from other countries and talk to somebody from russia for example or israel. it's not the same stigma attached. it is very much a western thing and i think that it does have to do with the media. in our country the gender norms are so entrenched. it's hard to get away from that. there is research that shows that it's one of the reasons you have so few women wanting to pursue computer science engineering. the reality is there are women going into science and the women going into these others.

that was one of the only -- we profiled the people that created that game and there was one of the first that actually had a narrative and that is why girls like it because there was a story to it. and goldilocks in a lot of ways, that was actually the vision was to make that connection between buildings and a narrative and realizing we are different, we

learn differently and it's okay to try to appeal to us in different forms. there is less gender disparity in the field of coding that are not required courses in k-12.

in the chicago public schools new york must have it. it's going to make a big difference as less of a gendered issue. people that are involved in are still working on it that was interesting as they were able to get the college board to create a new computer science exam. so the original exam was only java. you were tested on that and that was it. the new test is a survey course. so you are learning a

programming language in the societal impact and implications of the code you are learning to read i might have the number wrong but there were 55,000 kids that took it this year. ..