particular role for women in business. and that is the organizational structure of a "b" corporation. has anyone heard of a "b" corporation in the audience? that's a lot actually. so "b" corporations are businesses, for-profit businesses, that are structured in order to deliver values and complex deliverables. it's not just about money. you're certified in order to be a "b" corporation through something called the gear certification process which is a little bit complicated, but it's worth it. they look at your holistic position in the world. they want to know you're respectful of the communities you rate in, how many women on your board, how many women executive, how many women, period. what kind of benefits do you have for people who have children. there's this very complex package that you're certified

through in order to be a "b" corporation, but i think it does something really important. i think it announces the presence of business that's actually built to achieve good. not businesses doing good on the side which i argue is the case in many corporate social responsibility examples, big companies doing the same old same old can take a tiny portion of profit and put it into something really pretty and green and clean and exciting and progressive as a distraction from their core operations which actually don't have a lot of integrity. but "b" corporations are designed to have that value proposition sewn in and a lot of the leaders in the "b" corporation world are women. and so it's a really sort of phenomenal community to play in. the last thing i want to say to wrap up is when i first got into this sort of space of progressive business and particularly the terrain of

social entrepreneurship and then learned about impact investing, i got really excited. i thought, oh, finally, there's these incredible opportunities for women's businesses to really grow and become the new mainstream, and there's now capital that wants to flow into this sector, and then i learned something really important. while women are 50% of the entrepreneurs in the impact space, in the social entrepreneurship space, 7% of the deals go to women. and so i just want to leave you with that particular piece because i'm determined to fundamentally change that, and i invite all of you to work with me to change that. thank you. >> i think i'll start by saying 40 years ago, my arrival in america gave me a fabulous gift. and that gift was that they told me i couldn't teach because i wasn't a citizen of the country.

i could teach the language i spoke, but that didn't go down too well. i come from australia and i still believe i speak english regardless of what you may think. what that did for me was totally changed my career direction. and it shook me up in terms of my career. and i got a job as a computer programmer in 1968 here at penn state university. and it breathed in to me a love of technology and a love of what technology could bring to our society that we could actually use technology to change the way we learn, the way we think and the way we play. that has borne through over the last 40 years to be true, and

i'm really excited that i was able to be on that ride. i want to fast forward a little. i've got wonderful stories about a year in portugal and no running water, but i'm not going there. i joined what was a distributor for apple before apple came to australia, and i think it's fair to say that i learned over the first ten years at apple that being a woman in the i.t. industry which was mainly alpha male required me in terms of success to build a wall around myself in terms of my own personality. and it took the next ten years to disconnect that wall and find

another person, as well. and i still battle with that. so when i left apple, i started a company called explore for success, and we provide programs for young women in some of the biggest corporations in australia. and it is set up, as you say, we have ten women facilitators. all of whom work as much or as little as they want. and in fact one of the women that i interviewed and selected announced she was pregnant with twins about two weeks after i'd said it would be really good if you joined us. so each of those people can work as they want. they can be in sales. they can be in business development. they can be in the facilitation of those programs. they can come up with new ideas for programs. and it is a very different business model. perhaps i'm fortunate that i'm at a stage in my life that money certainly isn't anywhere near number one in my categories of drivers, but either way i think one of the things women do is they weigh up the outcomes of their entrepreneurship in terms of the outcomes they see in social change or some other

change. and i've been talking with ernst & young who have their entrepreneur of the year. unfortunately, the first thing is your growth in revenue. well, i'm sorry, men women entrepreneurs aren't going to talk about that and, b, it's not their driving force. so i don't take a lot of money out of my company. the money is shared around with the people who win the business, deliver the business that way, and we have people who are working in different places remotely. we do have an office. i don't go there because i have a room that looks out over city harbor and a husband who makes fantastic coffee. so i've moved forward in that way, and i absolutely agree with you that corporate social responsibility is often that little tip. but when i look at my work with dress for success, which centers

around fund-raising, the thing that frustrates me is everyone wants to support something new. what i actually need is $200,000 to pay for the rent and pay for the administrators. and try to get corporations to see that sustainability and giving us rental money is just as important as the brand new programming to the jails or the brand new programming with the indigenous women is something i beat my head against every day. so the questions i'd like you to think about, why as a society do we waste talent? why do we waste 50% of the people who put through university? i actually sat across the table from a ceo and i said, you know, you should make one of two decisions. you should either work out why the women are leaving your organization in hoards long before they consider having children or quite seriously why employ them in the first place.

he was a little taken aback, but again, once you've got lots of gray hair, you can take people aback. australia is number one in the world for educating women, and way down the list in terms of senior women in senior positions in australia. i was the first managing director of an australian i.t. company who was female. i hadn't really thought about it because, you know, it was just kind of working forward on things i loved doing, but the press certainly asked me about it, and it took me aback. why do we accept that? why don't our organizations challenge at the senior level the subconscious bias that senior managers have, who are 90% men, but there are some pretty solid women up there, too, who for some reason seem to think that when they got to a

senior position, they should lift up the draw bridge after them. why do we accept it as a community? and why don't we have the passion to really change it? what is wrong? i look at this audience. why is it 90% women? why don't the men at this conference care enough to be here to find out the situation for women? what's driving us? what are our passions, and where do we want to go? so i would challenge that the biggest challenge for us is finding men who will push the agenda. and i'm very proud that in australia, there is a woman who has started a group called the male champions of change. and she has got 12 ceos of significant organizations in australia who have said they're prepared to stand up in the press, in their organization,

and talk about why wasting talent has to stop. and until we get women on four different areas, politics, company boards, senior management positions, and academics, in places that can change our community and the values about community and the way we operate in a consensus way, then i feel sorry for the social area that i have left for my children who are now in their 30s and as i watch my four, nearly five grandchildren coming new and guess what? after two boys, i now have three granddaughters and one grandson. and i'm really serious that i want the situation to be different for them.

they should be able to have families, be in businesses, and on the other hand, men should be able to also do things with their careers that allow them to show a very different side of their character. thank you. [ applause ] >> what would happen if men, >> what were to happen if men, women, blacks, hispanic, whites, asians and every flavor in between got together and went to work and actually could do their best work because the one thing that they had to carry with them was respect for one another? sounds like a simple experiment. i've been doing that now for 22 years -- actually 26 years. and here's what i found out.

one, that there's really no reason to quantify, stipulate, administrate something that i will never quite understand, diversity. i don't even know if it's inclusion. it just seems to me that's the way everything already is. not regionality. i'm not talking about whether we're all sitting here at the same level of population and concentration here in boulder, colorado. no. i'm saying on the world, in the world, there's certainly enough of us to get together and do the work that we do without much concern for things like gender, things like ethnicity, things like race.

now, here's what i found out also in this experiment of ours. people act badly. doesn't matter what color and race they are. i've had african-american men be 13-year-olds with one another. or white guys appear to be well understood but chastised by the rest of the population. or women who use their bodies to achieve without much consideration for whether or not that was right or that was wrong, and the one thing that i've determined is that if there was some rule against a-holes working in business, we all would be unemployed. it's okay to have those kinds of sides of ours show up. i also think that if what you do is allow people to achieve and you make some flexibility for the station in life they are, maybe you would still get great work.

for example, what would i do if one of my best copywriters was intoxicated one night and ran his car into a barrier and ended up let's say in jail? he's okay. nobody died. nobody got hurt. and i needed work. would i slip him a piece of paper and pencil like they did martin luther king in the jail in birmingham? you bet i would. you bet i would. same thing applies to women. just because a woman has two

children, sick husband, and wants to write copy doesn't mean that when she goes home and she can't drink beer in a bar with the boys that she can't do her best work. on the contrary. sometimes the work is extraordinary. sometimes the work is extraordinary when you're in the bus and you're on the way to a meeting. it really doesn't depend on the circumstantial evidence of work. work is what it is when it's presented. leadership. some interesting challenges with leadership, and we have a bunch of them of different flavors in our group. i can say that for women for the most part, whatever the challenges are, they seem to be driven by a bit more emotion than men. men's inabilities are pretty much based on their own physical

and mental stupidity. you know. emotion doesn't figure into it. it's kind of over the top. so in some ways it's easier to conduct business with a guy who has a problem with listening if what you're able to do is find that moment where he listens. as opposed to a woman who may have a problem with the leadership and the cultural distinction of leading when she has a pull based on culture to be a bit more submissive. now, i don't think you can change either one of them. >> i do think that tolerane as

an executive and the commitment that you hold for that person to achieve can give you just a good a results as beating them over the head and threatening with being terminated. sometimes patience and held commitment is all that it takes to give rise to opportunity and to advancement. and sometimes there's just getting fired. it's okay. you know, first black coach of baseball was frank robinson, and i think when frank robinson was chosen as a coach, one of the astute sportscasters said he'll be the first black manager fired, and, of course, he was. i think two or three times. so it's not the end of the world to be bad at something or to be chosen as being a failure. sometimes it's a bigger opportunity. so here's what i say in closing.

the women who have any interests in the work i do, in communication, i offer you a challenge. 80% some of all products and services in the world are bought by women, decision--makers, to some degree, and maybe 6% of the creative population who make those ads, the creative directors in advertising agencies around the world, are women. now, how does a woman become a creative director? di, you're a creative director. that's as simple as it is. it's an advancement in perception. and the men are the ones who are able to do it. so having men be more involved in advancement is the key to diversity on all fronts. you know, wouldn't it be great if we had two token white guys on this panel who ran

corporations who felt the same way? maybe not. maybe this is the way it should be. but in the interest of time, in time i'll consider it. that's it for that. [ applause ] >> this is my second -- well, this is my sixth panel of batting cleanup so i've sat by jo twice and one more tomorrow and i told him i hated that because he just says it because it's his life, and you can't actually say it better than people who do it because it's what they do, so to speak. and i want to actually say something more about that because what we're missing right now, we have very ambitious and talented women, but holding men accountable is scary to people. they don't want to blame men. they think to hold men

accountable is to blame men, so we need male allies who say men can do this, you know, and that's great. and i thank diana for calling attention to the fact that we needed to have men in this room. she actually does say it like it is which is very good. and we do need to have men in this room. thank you, men, that are here. we should acknowledge the men that are here. i actually hate to thank the men that are here, but in this case, okay. i just hate it. but i'm glad you're here. and i want to appreciate donna for lots of things. i share with you a career in entrepreneurship and getting women into entrepreneurship and diversity, et cetera, but i appreciate that you talked about the brain, because i think one of the things, one of the things that i've been looking at a great deal is the fact that i've been working on this issue of women's leadership for a long time, and i find how hard it is to go into companies and to talk to men because they immediately feel like you're against them and react. but what i found is with the new neuroscience, if you go in and

start to talk about -- we start with gendered brains and, you know, 80% of i think of us it is start with gendered brains, and this is coming so we have to look at it. i'm always scared about gendered and whatever that's in the brain. however, what i've found that's very promising about all this new research is that the breaks are so collaborative. male and female brains are so collaborative. i mean, working together gets you exactly a much better thing. and i was telling my host the other day who brought me in who was here -- i'll give you this as a bonus because it's helped me so much. what we also find out historically is that male brains have learned to rest and women's brains never rest. and partly because of the history. i mean, as the anthropologist who taught me this said men were standing actually behind a tree trying to hit something with a rock for a long time, you know, and so they had to rest, and

women were always in the -- you know, working around the area, and, therefore, they just never rested. and it's so helpful to my relationship with men because i've spent years asking men what they're thinking. and they always say nothing. and i always say -- and i have lost relationships by saying i know you're thinking something, and they say, no, i'm not. and then i say you don't want to tell me what you're thinking. and then they say, well, nothing. so anyway, it's helped me a great deal with my relationships. i've been working actually since leaving the foundation for 20 years, i got tired of women who had great ideas and were changing policy around work and changing the very things that we're dealing with in this country. we were funding them, and they came up with living wage campaigns, and they changed the things that helped men and women be able to have family medical leave. they made amazing changes in pay

having -- and in how work is done, as has been said. but i got really tired of them not being in the seats of power alongside men. so that we could change things permanently. because we keep putting women into advocacy positions and so i started advocating differently. which is training women to run for office, training women in corporate america. and really looking at the media that doesn't show enough women in leadership. you can't be what you can't see. and if women are not shown as leaders, they don't see them in corporate america and they don't see them. and men see them, and so they think it's normal for it to be done. i work across race and gender and class because if you don't work across those three things, you don't get a great deal done either. what i've found, though, in this country is this is an auspicious time in the world and this country for women's leadership. a very auspicious time. what is needed is women. but you have to know the time you're in. and i'm afraid we will not use it because there's so much

pushback and fear about women coming into power, and i'm thinking that we need to think about the business we're in. for instance, i could tell you all the stats because we've benchmarked women's leadership for years, and america does believe it's a fair country. it doesn't want to think in this country that there are differences. that's a horrible thing. i didn't realize that there are so many people who think women are in leadership who don't know they're dropping out in mid-level management like in every company in the country. and that it's not about child care. it's about the fact that they don't see opportunity and people at the top. and so they finally go and start a small business or do something that allows them to do things. this is an urgent issue. this is not an issue of fairness anymore. this is an urgent issue because we need people who have different kinds of thinking at the table. or we're never going to get out of the morass that we're in. you have to watch the trends.

and the railroad business, that was his families thing, the railroad business failed because it thought it was still in the transportation business. i mean, the railroad business. it didn't understand that it was moving to the transportation business. it didn't know that it had moved from the railroad business over. and we are not in the gender business anymore. we're in the transformation business. and so if we want to transform anything in this country, we have got to take on this issue of women's leadership. because i have a limited time, i'll just remind you -- maybe you have to hear these numbers one more time. we're only 15% of boards, only 13% -- 13% of boards have no women on them. we're only 16% of corporate officers and only 3%, you know, of fortune 500 companies in leadership in that way. we are the majority of education, of people getting degrees, but in every mba program across the world, across the world, the brightest and the best women and men have a

differential of $4,600 worth that they start at in terms of where they enter and they never catch up. and they never catch up. so we have got to start to do differently if we want to change things. i want to focus again, because we can have lots of conversation and having trained -- it has to be a diverse group of women. i know diverse is not as great a term as we would like it to be, but there's got to be difference at the table, not just any women. there's got to be diverse women at table because, again, it has to mirror the kind of changes that we need and make it normal. i have thought as was said years and years ago at harvard to get numbers, because numbers make it normal, and then you stop thinking about gender. i've done research on women running for office. one woman has got to always be man enough on the job and we report on our hair hemlines and

husband. two women is a cat fight. or in comparison, three women, it messes the press up. they actually have to focus on their agenda, so we have to get enough women. it's a matter of numbers to get enough women to where we can focus on an agenda and not gender. finally, i want to say something about boards. we have opportunity because of what started in europe. what europe and australia are doing is wonderful, getting women on boards now, because boards have a lot of power and executive groups in offices -- in companies have a lot of power. so because there has been initiatives asking for quotas. and by the way, i don't believe quotas are bad. we don't get this on merit. if we called it quota, would you feel better? we don't get there on merit. we're not a meritocracy, i'm sorry. we put people in power who we

know. therefore, i just want to tell you that we have an opportunity now. more men are putting women on boards and i've actually heard white men stand in front of audiences and say i love this. they're not as interested in being right as doing the right thing, and it has been great, and i want to just announce that there is a campaign called face it facebook because i want you to know young women started this, and they are trying to get zuckerberg to actually put a woman on his board, two women, three men. they have an all-male board, therefore an all-male board, and he's about to do this huge going public with no women on his board, and he says he's a company that's about the values of society and fairness, so i just want to alert you to this because we have a campaign, these young women and young women are like go young women so you should go on facebook and ultraviolet will help you sign on to help mark do the right thing. thank you. [ applause ]

>> i would like to ask the panelists if you have any comments, anything else you'd like to add on the discussion so far. >> i wanted to just add to what was said about percentages on boards. australia had not managed in our top 100, 200 companies to get above 10% of women on boards until they were told, you know, the quota target thing. they were told that they would have to report this year at the end of our financial year in june on what they were doing to move to get more women on boards, and they were warn that had if there wasn't a significant change, then it would be mandated. the interesting thing was having spent the last five years saying we can't find suitably qualified women, in the first year of this threat, 25% of the new board