joyce chang. >> hello and welcome, i am joyce chang, and i'm the editor in chief of "self" magazine. i just want to thank you so much for joining us today at one world trade. it is our pleasure at "self" and with the clinton foundation to host you guys here in our semi- new home. i thought this would be the perfect place for us to hold an event like this, because i believe that big ideas on expansive topics like this deserve air, light, and great

heights. and though this is a skyscraper of glass, there are no glass ceilings here. it's not a coincidence that one of the most meaningful partnerships that i've had in my first year here at "self" has been the one that we formed with the clinton foundation in support of the nee ceilings initiative. they hit on two of the things that we care about most. advancing the full participation of women and girls in all aspects of life and promoting their health and well-being, so that they can achieve their utmost. we kicked off last fall with a women's series where we challenged female developers to create original apps to focus on three health areas. nutrition, physical activity, and mental health. we wanted to empower women to be part of their own health solutions and i'm proud to say that some of those apps are

being developed for market. to build on that success, we wanted to convene this panel today so that we can further the discussion on women in tech, by bringing together the leading advoca advocates to discuss the challenges, the opportunities, and the innovations in the field. so that we can continue to advance leadership in the field. for us, at "self," we celebrate the idea of being self-made. and it's -- makes me feel so warm inside to see so many women and men who embody that drive and ambition. one of the best qualities of self-made individuals, i think, is their willingness to share their experiences and their knowledge. and i believe that the social

media reach in this room is probably ridiculously high. and so i encourage you to share your thoughts and comments on the discussion and your own calls to action, using the #self made in tech. and tag "self" magazine and clinton foundation in your posts. such a pleasure to introduce our panelists today. they are all doing their part to bring more women up in the tech sector, and they are committed and inspiring. we have alexis von tobl, who is the founder and ceo of learn batch. our own andrew seegel, edp of strategy and corporate development for us at advance publications. kia williams, who is the co-founder of sirrium. >> and rachel squire, who is the co-founder of change the ratio and bliss. so we're thrilled to have them.

without further adieu, i'm thrilled to introduce our speaker and our moderator, chelsea clinton, the vice chair of the clinton foundation. [ applause ] >> thank you, joyce, for that terrific introduction. i apologize for my unusually husky voice. i'm a bit under the weather. so i also won't shake any hands or give any hugs. that's not about you, that's just about me. even though i washed my hands right before i came into the room. and i want to echo what joyce said from the clinton foundation's perspective and just say what a tremendously meaningful partnership it's been to have with "self" over the last year as we've worked to upend the normal paradigm of the existence and demographic that generally attract 70 to 80% men and we're so proud that we've

had 70 to 80% women at all of our codaathon series focused on women's health. it may seem obvious that women should be innovating on women's mental health and women's heart health, but that wasn't always the case. it's so important for women to be innovating and leading in these areas. we think conversations like this today are so important, not only to highlight individual success stories and to hopefully learn together what has and continues to work to empower and support women leaders in technology, but also to help close the imagination gap for those who aren't in the room today. there's probably a pretty clear selection bias for those who came this afternoon, women and men. and it's always good to see so many men in conversations like this. and yet we know for so many, the image that comes to mind when we

think of technology is someone who looks more like mark zuckerberg than looks like most of you sitting in the audience today. and that's unacceptable, if we want to build the world that i know we want to live in, that we want little ruby here, who is being so well behaved at 7 months, to grow up in, and certainly one that i want my daughter charlotte, who is 13 months, to grow up and grow old in. so i'm so thrilled that we're going to talk today about some of the different challenges that still exist for women, leaders in technology, but also what's really working in the van gard as demonstrated by the stories of our panelists this afternoon. without further adieu, i want to invite to the suite of directors chairs, kia williams, the co-founder of sirrium, as you heard joyce mention. alexa van topel, the foundered of ceo and learn vest.

and also andrew seegel, executive vice president of strategy and corporate development here at conde nast and while they're joining me in the chairs, i want to ask all of you to give a big round of applause to "self" for hosting us here this afternoon. [ applause ] >> if my daughter were here, i'd also want a bird's eye view of her as well. so to continue a little bit from my early introductory remarks, i want to ask each of you why you think this conversation is so important and what we can do to help others understand why we

all have a vested interest in this conversation. and i'm asking this, admittedly from a self-interested perspective because i often find people's eyes glaze over, like, oh, my god, there she is again talking about women in technology. so what can you do to help me and everyone in the room today with why this conversation isn't just a nice to have, but a must to have? alexa, you were nodding, so, please. >> i can only sort of speak from my own experience, which is, as a woman running -- first i worked in finance out of college. went to, school, dropped out to start a company in technology and finance. truly very few women in either of those industries, but once you put them on top of each other, i'm pretty sure i was the only woman. i just had a genuinely unique experience, which was 24 years old, dropping out of business school to try to start a fin tech company and it would have

been in so many ways, being an entrepreneur is so hard in so many ways, raising money, getting a company up and running, attracting talent. it's hard for anyone. but wow, it would have been so much better if i wasn't, you know, constantly feeling like i was a lone wolf in this fight. and i think there's so many things that we can do to try to advance -- hi, ruby. -- i think there's so many things we could do to try to advance this, so that i didn't have to be -- the most common question i got is what's it like to be a woman in fin/tech? what's it like to be a woman in technology? wow, that's the first question i keep going. we have to get past this question so we can start to get to other questions, like, alexa, what are your ideas. so again, it was a lonely place to be. i think my personal experience, thank goodness it's turned out pretty okay so far. but i think we really just need

to -- we need to change the dynamics. the other thing is, women are amazing at everything, so why wouldn't they be in technology? why wouldn't they be in innocence? why wouldn't they be in all these other industries? >> in case you have to go coddle ruby, why don't you share your thoughts. >> first of all, i want to say thank you for inviting me, not only to be on this panel, but also letting me bring my daughter, and show that you can be a woman in business and be a professional and still be a mom and have a child with you even if it can sometimes be a little bit noisy. so, thank you for that. so, my own journey it took me a long time for me to consider myself a woman in tech. i was a woman in media working for start-ups, before the notion of media start-ups was popularized. i was at media bistro, then the

huffington post, and then at media-ite, i was like, oh, this is a thing. but i didn't really understand it. and despite the fact that i am, you know, at that time i was in my mid 30s, i was a former lawyer. so i was as sophisticated as a person could be, but i didn't really have the information flow about what it meant to be in a start-up, what it meant to be an early employee in a start-up and what titles mattered. when i started getting into the tech world, it took me a while to come up the curve and realize, oh, i was -- you know, i was employee number one, i've been part of starting numerous media start-ups, and i had no idea that i should have had equity, that i -- that there was a pattern that is followed for early employees and, you know, arguably, people who are

founder-like. i didn't know that i should ask for that title where media-ite was concerned. so there was this unbelievable informational asymmetry for me, and considering the fact that i was -- again, mid 30s, former lawyer, really felt like i should have known this stuff. i said to myself, okay, if it's like this for me, if i feel so clueless, if i left all this money on the table, and you know, and i didn't take the title that i ought to have taken and sort of assumed the position of a leader early on, then what's it gonna be like for women who are in their 20s and really don't have the same sort of access to information? because as clueless as i may have been in my 30s, i definitely was way more clueless in my 20s. now i'm in my early 40s and maybe i know something now. so i think that this conversation is important for a number of reasons. number one, it's to not question

that women are in tech and that they belong in tech and they're in tech as leaders. but also, with that acknowledgement, to really get to the expansion on the definition of what it means to be in tech, because i don't code. i do hgml, i rock the hgml, but i don't know how to code. but that doesn't mean i wasn't an international part of building the huffington post, at numerous tech start-ups and i look around and i see all these women who have similar roles, yet when it comes to the question of who gets to be in tech, the definition gelts narrowed. but you don't see that happen with men. the example i like to use is the example of someone like ben layer or gary vander shock, i'm pretty sure none of them code, but nobody would question they are in tech. so when we have this conversation, i usually come at it from a slightly defensive position, as you may be able to

tell, because i have seen the way women tend to be marginalized so i try to head that off at the pass and start off with a reminder that women are there at the beginning building and ought to be recognized for that. whether or not they are, you know, actually coding the code. because women have to be viewed and treated in exactly the same way as their male counterparts. >> that's great. thank you for your candor. i think that's what struck me more than any sort of defensive posture. so thank you for sharing. andrew, how do you think about this question from your perspective, given that you're in the position to hire, to support, so many different women, either formally in tech -- it's fine. oh, thank you. -- or as we were just hearing, maybe not thought of in tech, but still very much being in related fields, whether media or otherwise?

>> i guess for me, i'm lucky because it's natural. two generations of women went to college in my family before the first man did. i was mentored by three women leaders who were tops in their field. nancy lieberman, carol barts at yahoo. i'm the father of two daughters. every so often it will cross my mind to say to them, you can be anything you want to be. and i stop myself, because no one would ever say that to a boy. i want them to grow up in a world where nobody says that to a girl. now, as it relates to technology, we live in a time where technology has sort of jumped out of this vertical where it was, very specialized and now it runs under everything that you do as a consumer, as an executive, is touched by technology. and so we need women leaders in technology, because it's no longer just this vertical, but it's touching everything we do. and as a result, to the point you made about health care, for

instance, you all need to be part of the solutions that are going to get created through technology. >> women make 80% of the health care decisions in our country, and yet kind of our partnership with "self," is viewed as insoivative because it's so singular. just like you hope no one says to your daughters, you can be anything you want to be, i don't want us to be innovative in this dimension in a year or two. what has your experience been like? >> so as a founder in technology in their 20s, you know, every day i wake up and think about my company's core mission, which is to get surplus medicine to people who can't afford it, and using technology to redistribute the vital medicines that we have available for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to get it. but when i think about coming to this, being a part of this, you don't get a lot of time out as a founder running a business that

is growing, that is scaling, that is, you know, all consuming, to pick your head up and think about, where do i fit in the world, in the atmosphere? you know, i think a lot about, what is my identity in this sector. i'm a social entrepreneur, a woman in technology, i'm a black woman in technology. i think a lot about the intersectionality and the reason this conversation is so important is because we have to be able to identify and embrace multiple identities. and i think until you kind of create a space where someone can say, yes, i'm a woman in technology, even though i'm not a programmer, or yes, i'm a woman in technology and media, or yes, i am a black woman in technology who is running a social entrepreneurial endeavor, i think until you're able to identify and embrace all the different identities, i think that's the importance of this conversation. creating a space where we can do

that and talk about that as a part of who we are as people. >> do you find that space more organic and natural in some places than others? >> yeah, so i live in the san francisco bay area, you know, the kind of big hub of technology. and i definitely think, there are small pockets, you know, for sure, we're having, for example, i was invited to a friends giving for women of color technology. you know, there are pockets of folks who are identifying as women in technology or women of color in technology or person of color in technology. there are a lot of different groups and it is more organic rather than facilitated by organizations. sometimes that can be really positive because you naturally meet someone at an event and you start up a really genuine friendship with them. but i think there needs to be more infrastructure for people who aren't able to attend an event like this. >> i agree with that, and i do want to open the floor to

questions, but before we do that, i want to ask how we try to solve not only the definitional challenge that clearly all of you raise, but also the pipeline challenge that we know is a continued conundrum of whether we think of women in technology as being narrowly defined through the stem fields or more broadly. andrew, i was listening to you, i don't know how old your daughters are, but i'm obsessed with middle school. and i'm obsessed with middle school and already worried about my daughter's middle school, even though at the moment she's trying to learn to walk, so i should be more concerned about that. but i am so worried about middle school for charlotte for a few reasons. you know, in kindergarten through third grade, in studies that are done across the country, you know, in urban areas, rural areas, across the socio-economic spectrum, for children of color, you know,

every study yields pretty much similar results for the ambitions of girls and boys. girls want to be ceos. they may not know what that means, but they want to be ceos. they want to be president, they want to be inventors. they want to be astronauts. they want to build and design things. so they have all these ambitions that we can largely group together under leadership and that relate to technology. whether or not they're going to create the bounds of the market in which technology would be used or actually be innovators in technology or using technology clearly if they're going to be astronauts. but at fourth grade that really starts to deteriorate, and by eighth grade the skism on all of those dimensions is immense, where girls no longer want to be innovators or leaders in whatever field or profession they might be aspiring to.

and we know that's happening for a few reasons. in middle school, math and science teachers start calling on girls less, both female and male teachers call on girls less. that's the age where we know now from cognitive science that girls start to impose themselves into the stories that they're kind of absorbing. so the movies they're watching, the television shows they're watching. what they're seeing on reality tv, what they're seeingn the news and not their own imaginations. so we know that part of fixing the pipeline challenge is changing that dynamic in middle school so that more girls have parents like andrew, but also parents and teachers in an eco-system that's supporting their dreams, whatever those dreams may be. but we also know we have pipeline challenges at the high school, college and professional levels as well. so could you talk about what each of you are trying to do to ensure that your pipeline is full of the most talented people possible, including women,

including women of color? alexa? >> i should have started when you asked what my experience was like. i started from the beginning of my experience, being a lone dropout at 24, woman, trying to start a tech company. six years later, which was just a few months ago, my management team, got acquired by northwestern mutual, which was one of the bigger -- just a wonderful event, but what was coolest about it, half the reason why we got acquired was because of who the management team was. and it's a female cto, a female coo, a female head of talent, and she came from ebay and hired tech talent, a female head of financial planning, and a male cfo. and i think one of the things that -- and my board was all female, minus one male. so it was three females and one male. and that never struck me as odd,

to be honest as anything. i was always hiring whoever is going to be best for the roles. but i think one of the things that's helping the pipeline change and talking about where you're seeing really good progress and no one ever said, oh, wow, your whole team's almost female or what does this mean? they said, your team's really talented. and half the reason we're excited about the future is because of the talent around the table. and so i think as we're starting to seize that change and even in my own trajectory, feeling alone, but going to so many people to bring in and help alongside and to really be a team. so i will say that one of the ways to change the pipeline and talk about the progress is not only in what we do and thinking and saying to little girls, you can be what you want, because of course they can be what they want, and kind of thinking of that as the obvious. but just seeing the success happen. and i think the more we see success, and the more we get to

talk about it, i think the more normal it's going to be. the more it's going to be less women in tech and black women in tech, just people doing great things. that's kind of the way i've always thought about it. >> kia? >> so i run a very, very small, we're a five-person start-up team that's working across four states. >> the good, old days. >> great things happen. i hope to at some point get to the point where i call that the good old days. but even as a small teams, there's things you have to think about in terms of building culture. i have two co-founders who are both males and there are really interesting conversations that arise because of that. when we're talking to investors, i've been told in meetings that i should try to be softer, by investors, in particular. and it's a really interesting thing to kind of have this experience. >> and what do you say to that? [ laughter ] >> when you're a start-up who is trying to get funding in some

respects, there's a little bit of a power mismatch. and you pick and choose your battles on when you're going to say something, and when you're going to let it roll, and when you're going to let your white mail co-founder do the talking. but these are real changes. >> and it's better to be candid about them, rather than pretend they're not there. so i totally appreciate the candor. clearly collectively hurts the room, as you heard in the collective groan that you have to defer when you should never have to defer. >> true. i will say for every one of these conversations, i've probably had 8 to 10 amazing conversations where people are really enthusiastic about our team, our talent and it's a non-issue. but what i think about a lot, as we're hiring and growing, how do we do so in a way that's purposeful in bringing in talent, but also recognizing

that we don't live in a clrls or genderless world. so we have to be intentional to get applications in the forethat reflect the that we want to have. and ultimately for us, because we're trying to serve low-income communities, trying to grow a culture of people who understand, and maybe even come from similar backgrounds. i think some things as a small business that we try to do, get applications in, remove names, and college, without looking at gender, and some other tell-tale signs of things like socio-economic status, et cetera. once you get a good group -- you have to be really pro active about it. proactively outreach to the community that you want to get applications from. you then need to realize everyone has bias. me as a stanford graduate loves

that. i have on to recognize that i have biases to maybe people who look like me. and the best thing you can do is put systems in place to try to minimize some of the biases that we all naturally have. >> thank you. >> i can't believe, i should be able to believe it. but you are so impressive, from stanford, like the whole package, if you still get that crap, then we really have a long way to go. and, wow, so, collecting my thoughts here. so that actually leads me into my answer to your question, chelsea, which was sort of like, how do we do this? what do we do for the pipeline? so i can't go back in time and go back to high school and college and take computer science, can't do that. all i can do right now is focus on being the tide that lifts as many boats as i can.

so i started something called change the ratio, not just change the ratio of women in tech and new media because they were already there, but change the ratio of their visibility, their access, and their opportunity. and the way that i found that worked best was with networking. i just want to -- how many people here have seen a hamilton? do we love hamilton? everybody see it. i didn't grow up with american history, i'm canadian. >> we're happy to have you. [ laughter ] >> thank you very much. so the part where george washington tasks alexander hamilton to be his deputy and he says, great, here are my people, i've got lafayette, i've got hercules mulligan. is it john lawrence? yes? and i go, oh, my god, i do that. i know this amazing woman, i know this amazing woman, i know

this amazing woman. that is networking. men have been doing that for centuries. they've been tapped with responsibility and they go, i know this amazing guy, i know this amazing guy, these are my bros, so let's bring them in. so i did that with women. i'm a huge fan of squads. huge fan of interlocking -- i went from hamilton to taylor swift. that's a win. >> and you have your daughter raising both hands for you. [ laughter ] >> so you have to get a posse who will think of you, recommend you, who will know -- who will be able to draw upon you. so when something like that happens to you, i mean, i have women, i tell them, because now, like i said, i care a lot less. come to me, i have no problem smacking people down. you do it in public, on twitter, by backing up your sisters. you do it in private by sending

the awkward e-mail that you might not want to send. it's about having a posse, having a network, having each other's backs. so that's how the tide will lift the boats and i think we can do it because that's how you get role models in place. >> i think mentorship, just to add to that. one thing that was invaluable to me and i think definitely to rachel's point of just being able to like, give someone an extra hand or arm, i definitely had mentors that helped me enormously and i will say there were female mentors who went really out of their way to make my life a little bit easier. and i think that's one thing we can do. we all get e-mails about something, hey, can you help me with this? what i found was just on fridays, i try to take an hour and a half, and i will just fill up with 15 quick phone calls, saying what can i do? and if i can send one e-mail to

help somebody, i think that's something that can help the pipeline. >> back to your point about middle school. my daughters are in middle school. i was very lucky male friends turned me on to a couple of books. i came home one night to put my older girl to sleep, and i caught her reading this book, about what girls go through in teenage years, when societal pressures take over. i said, what are you doing? and she said, i want to know what's coming dad. but what you have to do as a mentor and a role model and a parent, you have to personally change that behavior. so she's lucky enough to live in a town where the library has 3d printing. she's been able to go to the library and learn what it's like to code a little bit of software and do that, and there are now a lot of programs in town, both with means and without means, for robotics.

it's not just the school system. because they're not funding this, they don't have the money to. so it's organizations who do this. but luckily we have people who understand it's about rolling up your sleeves and being hands on. so this morning, i actually posed this question to the chief product officer of one of the companies in our portfolio called compass. and this woman's name and christina allen. she's one of the great product people. she just moved to new york. she's a computer scientist. her daughter's a mechanical engineer. she said the difference is, you get your daughters working early, building things. they have to be building, they have to be making. and that becomes their narrative. and she says, if you're going to retweet this, give her credit. she says that her motto is, don't consume, create. >> thank you. do we have any questions from the audience? i would ask that you focus your questions on women in

technology, but that's a pretty broad aegis. yes, ma'am. >> my name is lorraine, i'm with the new york academy of sciences. and i also graduated 1976 with a degree in computer science in stamford, and i ran tech companies in the internet era in 2000. the sad part about this, the numbers are actually better when i was going through school than they are now. i think most up there probably know this is the case. what we're doing at the new york academy of science, we're focused on informal, generational mentoring. because the role models are not there. in fact, in the '80s, when the computer went into the home, that's when the computer got associated with men. that's when it got associated with gaming. so it actually has affected the whole culture. so i think that women who have been successful in tech, can do a lot to help other young girls

in middle school move forward. so that's the type of thing we're involved in. >> great, thank you. i'm obsessed with that narrative admitly, because the peak years of women in computer science at the college university levels were in the mid 1980s, and i got a computer from santa claus in 1987. and in 1987, women were more than 1/3 of computer science graduates. and the year i graduated in 2001, women were more than 1 in 4. last year, women were less than 1 in 5. so the denominator has expanded. there are more university level spaces for women to engage in computer science. women are participating at lower levels. and we know that's largely what's happening in high school. also over the last couple of years, there have been three states where not a single young woman has taken the computer science ap exam. so we know we have a lot to fix.

so there's a lot inside the school system, but also outside the school system here in new york city and elsewhere upon. >> i think stanford just released that there's definitely progress being made. >> but that happened partly because stanford started an effort literally a decade ago. so that's a product of something that started a few years after i left. and they made a decade-long commitment to do a better job of recruiting students to apply to stanford and reporting female students in their first year which is so often when girls were discouraged by the culture that they were immersed in. they were determined to not have the drop-off that was so often happening even for freshmen, young women who were interested in computer science. >> because the one thing i wanted to add, pipeline building is so important, but there are so many roles in technology besides being a programmer.

and i think it's really important that we embrace the fact that weem can be a technologist. you can be someone in technology and not necessarily be a developer. you can be a product manager. you can be in the media side of things. so many different roles. so i also don't want us to get boxed into this whole notion that unless we have x percent of programmers in a company, then we failed. and i also want to lift up the fact that there are amazing women right now in technology who are not necessarily getting the recognition or getting, you know, into leadership roles. and i think there's obviously a pipeline of getting women educated in stem fields, but there's another pipeline which addresses, how do we create more women founders, who aren't necessarily the developer, but maybe you're the non-technical co-founder. how do you develop women leadership in tech companies? i think that's a whole nother pipeline of women in their 20s, who are here, hungry, and ready.

and we need to also be able to have that conversation as well. >> andrew? >> and if i can just add to that, five of eight of our best performing portfolio companies, as venture capitalists were founded by or run by women. it wasn't a conscious choice on our part to fund those businesses and none of those women are what you would consider technical. the lead sentence of the report that your foundation issued on this subject, says there's never been a better time to be born women. i don't think there's a better time to start a company. there's so much capital and so much opportunities that technology provides, that you don't necessarily have to be a technical person to start a company. and i would encourage you to trust in yourself if the idea is a good one. i know it's much easier said than done. but it's a wonderful time to be out getting financing. trust that you understand the market. the reason why we backed these people, if it's any help to

anybody who is thinking about starting their own business, is, they were their own best consumer. they literally said, wouldn't it be great if somebody invented x? and when nobody did, they did. >> can i just follow-up on trust. you should trust -- not to quote reagan here, but i like to quote trust but verify. sorry, i just -- [ laughter ] trust but verify. trust that the market is there, but verify it, because women just do have to be more prepared going in than sort of their similarly situated male counterparts, because of what kia just said. so know your numbers. know what people are getting funded and know what the other investors, what they've funded, what they passed on. have a sense of what exactly your needs are when you go in. so that you can go in and know your numbers cold. because if you don't know your numbers cold, then you can't be

the fabulous, confident, dazzling entrepreneur that we all know you are inside. but if you're bogged down by being called out on a stupid number, then it will shoot your confidence. so i do always try and tell people that there's no substitute for being super-duper prepared, and it is still a fact that women do -- let's just generalize -- tend to have to be more prepared than similarly situated men, across the board. so as long as we're speaking an unvarnished truth, i did want to jump on the word trust. because it's your life. so, yes, trust is awesome. but verify. >> other questions or thoughts? in the back, yes, ma'am. >> i'm sam articlin, tech editor for black enterprise magazine and my question is for kia. kia, do you feel there are

unique challenges for women of color in tech, as opposed to women of non-color? >> i think that being a woman of color, period, there are more challenges in life. so i don't think it's necessarily linked to technology in particular. i also think you add on. so we talk about a lot of identities i have. i also am a social entrepreneur, so my company is one with a social mission. and in particular, you end up with this weird -- you end up -- you're kinda between these two worlds where traditional foundations, a lot of larger funders, are very risk averse. and they want to fund a lot of very proven models. on the flip side, you have venture capital dollar that's taking a lot of risks, but not necessarily in things like serum, which are ultimately going to be very beneficial for lower income and communities of color. so the challenges that we face

as serum and i face as a woman of color entrepreneur, it's just -- it has to do a lot with the intersectionality of the fact that i'm not just a woman, i'm not just a person of color, i'm not just in the social sector. i have all of these identities. you know, that gets messy for people who are used to looking at a person who looks different than me, who's running a different type of company. it is inherent in the life that i've chosen, you know, i'm kind of just determined to make it work and continue to grow in scale. >> other questions? yes. gosh, we have so -- in the red, yes. >> hi, okay, my name is mariana from she's the first. so my question is kinda -- so how do you think improving the level of interest and access to technology for women and girls would help improve, you know, kind of like their communities, like globally? bring up their communities,

bring up their education, how do you -- what are your thoughts on that? like improving access and interest in it? >> well, we know that if every woman in the world just learned to read, just learned to read, that 170 million people would be lifted out of poverty. right? women and their families. and given the gap that exists in the world right now, between kids and also adults who want to go to school. and school buildings and teachers and materials, and safe and sanitary facilities to support teachers and students in schools, we know that technology has to be part of closing the literacy and education gap. so, to me, when you ask that question, i immediately thought of that challenge. but also that as of yet discovered solution, but also

real important. and it's particularly important for women, because there's literally hundreds of millions of women around the world, in places where there aren't available technologies, who don't have access to those technologi technologies, who don't have access to the same mobile technologies that their fathers or their husbands do. who even if they have access to a mobile phone, often still are on a 2-g phone not a smartphone. because the men in their families are uncomfortable with them having unfettered free access to information to answer questions about their own lives, and in the whole veil of candor, even their own bodies. so it's crucially important to empower women and to educate women and children in a way that will help ameliorate poverty, help themselves, but also help their communities.

yes, in blue. >> so i'm in my 20s. i'm a non-technical co-founder. i'm the prime demographic for the mentorship question. and i wanted to raise an uncomfortable hypothesis, something that i'm struggling with, and when i talk to my peers, they sort of echo the same thing in a different variation. so what do you think of the hypothesis that women who are successful in technology, specifically, are less willing or able to help their younger cohort, either because they don't know other people, because they decided to have family, they just don't have time, or because they were just so focused on themselves because it was so difficult to get access and opportunity that they just don't have the habit of doi that as men do? >> rachel? >> i like to address the trop of women don't help women, because it's not been true in my life at all. and therefore, that must be wrong, because it's my life.

[ laughter ] but i do think it's a trop. i think the reasons that you cite are legitimate. i will say i have less time to engage with people and less time to mentor and to devote to mentorship right now than i did six months ago. i'm a single mom, my baby's somewhere, i hope she's -- >> i hear her. >> no, there's another baby. it's a baby palooza. yay! but i do reject the notion that women are less likely to help other women because of my experience being mentored, mentoring other people. and the list is -- the whole point of the list is for mentoring and for lifting up women. so if you are having difficulty finding mentors, there's a couple things i would suggest. the first would be sort of find

yourself digital mentors. there's unbelievable writing now. there's so much more out there from women entrepreneurs, amazing women, that you can be mentored by just by reading. so that's passive mentoring. obviously if you read something that i wrote, that's very different than us having a frank conversation. but if you engage people on social media, you will find that not everybody will be receptive. you will find some people who will be receptive and you can build organic relationships that way. i have made lots of sort of online friends. i've given money to people that i have met online, that i still haven't met. and it's not because i'm that crazy, but it's because i actually built a legitimate relationship through social media. and so it really can be done now more than ever. and the third way is by coming to events like this and getting up and raising your hand and asking a question. because now we've seen you and

we know who you are. what is your company, actually? >> um, well, it's digital network for the 2016 elections. >> oh, those? okay. cool. does it have a name? >> well, there's a -- [ inaudible ] -- support hillary clinton. the name is madam president. >> and what's your name? >> my name is ashley beal. >> ashley beal. i like it. let's talk after, ashley. >> there you go, ashley. >> i think we have some mentors. >> the one other thing i want to bring up is the importance of alliship. obviously this audience is skewing female, which is great. but just be aware and try to create is more ally-ship.

some of my mentors are men. >> mine too. >> and my two co-founders are men. and i think that, one, bringing allies into the space, making them feel comfortable being uncomfortable, i think, is important. bringing them into these discussions and dialogues. as your company is getting started and thinking about your own company culture. i'm not married, i don't have children. my co-founder who is a man is married now with two children. and we've had to -- you know, part of it has been saying, we want you to be a good father. we don't want to shoulder all the burden to your wife to take care of your children. we'll adjust meeting times. you're going to leave at 5:00 because you want to pick up your kids and maybe you'll be back online at 8:00 after they're in bed. but creating a culture where it's not the responsibility of women to be the only caregivers and making that intentional in your company, and bringing allies on board who are men into that discussion and creating a

space for them as well. it's been super important. it's been a little bit trance -- transformative for me as a person, you might think, how come your wife doesn't do that? but when the rubber hit the road, yes, we want george to be a good father. i want him to be involved in his daughter's life. i need to come in earlier to have a meeting with him, so we can get him out the door at 5:00, and create that reciprocity in the company. so ally-ship comes in multiple forms. it's getting male mentors, potentially. but it's also creating a space in the company that you're building, to make sure you're treating men and women as equal caregivers in their families' lives. >> in the back. >> hi, i'm dalia, the founder of the women's choice award, we're a mission-driven organization to empower women to make smart consumer choices.

i want to address you, because i was also the publisher of working woman and working woman magazine. mentors are easy enough to find, but they take work to find. so one of the things i'm going to share because i mentor a number of women through the years, is that when you go to speaking engagements like this, find the people who are speaking. circle them on the brochures, make a note to reach out to them beforehand, saying, do you think we can grab a cup of coffee, or let them know you're interested in them, try to meet them, follow up with an e-mail, be persistent. i've had women who have 20 times over tried to reach me, finally they did. i had one woman, ya ya whines, she was so diligent, that i finally started to mentor her how to build a business and i got her into walmart, because somebody on my board works there. don't be specific on who you want. we're there. we're going to help you.

so good luck, i just wanted to share that story, because it does work. >> thank you very much. >> other thoughts or questions? yes, ma'am. >> hi, i'm karen paige. i'm a former teacher and i now produce professional development for teachers in technology teaching and learning with tech. especially in sub saharan africa. but i wanted to pose the question that i think that our education system is really responsible for, a lack of confidence in women. and you guys have talked about middle school. i was a middle schoolteacher for a long time. and i feel like we need to take the start-up culture of paying attention to culture and bring that to education. because until we do, until we completely move away from a test-driven, sort of breeding ground of competition, and in especially the public schools

where there's not a lot of making, a lot of the work and creativity and confidence is coming outside. so i'm just curious if anybody's doing any work with the schools in hopefully a national approach, because i think we need serious professional development for women and men teachers here in order to help women, young women grow. >> this is an area where there's lots of innovation and maybe it's also kind of more apt to say innovation and experimentation happening at the local level across the country. we have mit media lab working with the boston public school district on all sorts of different technology programs. longitudinal tracking study of. whether it's working with certain clusters of schools to have everything be moved to tablets and kids having the right to take those tablets home and those being kind of wi-fi accessible so they can also learn, explore on their own,

while still doing their homework, to iowa, building kind of networks of teachers who are really interested in helping to ensure that girls engage in the sciences and stay engaged in the sciences. so aggregate middle school and high school teachers to support the same girls as they transition from middle school to high school, who have shown an expressed interest and kind of aptitude in the maths and sciences. so we have so much innovation happening, some that's really built around technology, and some built around pedagogy. i don't think we know enough yet to know what's really working, but i think in a decade and hopefully even sooner, we're going to know a lot more than we know now. and then hopefully those of us as citizens can put positive pressure on our local school districts, because this really is something that's determined at the local level, not the

national level, to hopefully take the best of out of what we're learning from across the country. but i just don't think we know enough yet. but there's some really amazing and very different programs looking to solve these exact questions. >> i think we have time for one more question. ma'am, over there in the white, yes, ma'am. >> thank you for the opportunity to ask my final question. my name is lillian and i'm the founder and executive director of global connection for women. it's aabbreviated gc 4 w. the organization is three years old and we just won 2016 best charity organization manhattan, which is a big deal, because three years ago when we started, i was very unsure. it's a social enterprise. our mission is to connect, educate, empower women and youth. my question is, now that we're

kind of becoming more popular, right, there's a lot of organizations both here in the u.s. and abroad, that's wanting to partner with us, right? so we're at a different level, not that we've hit all of our goals in terms of what we want to achieve as an organization, but we do want to be able to work with other organizations, especially younger ones. so my question to you is, when do you choose? how do you make a decision on who do you want to partner with next? because you don't have enough band width to help everybody. and i recently did an interview on television in nigeria and i have 200 e-mails that i have to respond to on a daily basis, because people want to partner with us. and i feel bad that i don't have enough staff to help everyone. so when do you know when to partner and how do you make that selection? >> rachel, kia? >> this is the continuous

question, i think, you will have, forever. you know, i think i'm right in the midst of this past year has been incredible for serum. we went from a california-based program to a program that's redistributed almost $5 million of medicine, enough for 80 million people. that's awesome. but i spend pretty much all of my time trying to grow that business. and i think to some extent, you have to really -- this is where it gets difficult. you have to learn when to trim and to really maintain focus. we get inquiries from other countries who want to use our software, and we had to make some strategic decisions and say, we're a 5-person team. we don't have the band width right now to work in south america. that's just not where we're at. i think you can carve out some time in your own personal schedule to, you know, really carve out maybe a couple hours a week, setting up a dedicated time for you to work on kind of

these out of the box ideas and these partnerships which maybe will go nowhere, but maybe could be fantastic. as a social enterprise, i totally feel you. the challenge is always you're up against, my funder wants me to do these metrics, a, b, and cp but we have all these other potential opportunities that could be amazing for the business. i think the best you can do is carve out and be intentional about how much time and resources you're going to put into that. i don't think you can ignore them. but you also cannot lose sight of -- seems like you're in a great opportunity for growth now, so you can't lose sight of your core mission and focus. because the businesses that fail at that juncture is because you're just too all over the place. >> i would add, our investment is now 200 people and going from 5 to 200 people, you need to make sure that you pick one partner, two partners, max. and then focus, you know, almost

obsessively, we call it maniacal focus and make a really big impact. because trying to have ten partnerships that are running you all over the place that get you nowhere, your core business can't possibly run, much less you're not taking a step forward. it's a great question. it's a really hard one, it doesn't go away. but maniacal focus. and the last thing i'll add for entrepreneurs and people in tech and trying to do really hard things, sometimes i think up with -- one of the best things, getting one or two people moving forward, they'll tell you the tough stuff you have to do to get better. give it to me straight, tell me the hard news. don't tell me everything's great. and being less defensive about taking really good feedback has helped me move myself forward as a leader, my business forward. but surrounding yourself with

people that are much smarter, and help you evolve your thinking and help evolve all of us trying to do tough things. being an entrepreneur is, i think, as you said beautifully back there. you need tough skin, you need resilience, and i think you need to fight every day. so, good question. >> i want to ask our panelists for brief, closing thoughts either with the conversation or anything they want to leave all of us with as food for thought. so, rachel, you can also feel free to use your minute to respond to the last conversation. >> all i was going to say, is decision fatigue is real. it's something i've noticed in my life since every decision i have to make about my daughter seems so weighty and huge. so if you can out-source some of your decision-making, you don't have to review every single one of the 3,000 e-mails in your inbox. i know you want to, but in order to move forward, we have to allow yourself to get away from the feeling that we have to make all the decisions all the time.

but more generally, we're talking about how to, you know, how to lift up women leaders in technology and it's -- so i think it's not about -- only about like taking the advice, how can i make myself more of a leader, what can i do for myself? if i leave you with one thing, i really want to leave you with the notion that the rising tide really does lift all boats. so if your mission is not only to lift yourself up, but if it's to lift the community up, and the community of women up, amplify the women around you, support them, and start twitter fights with conferences that only have line-ups with all white dudes. all of that. that's important. it's making a difference and i really want to just leave you guys with that -- you ladies with that. >> i think we all know that we don't live in a colorless, genderless society. i think that each of us have a role to play in leveling -- in

creating more equality and more equity and more opportunity for women, for people of color, for women of color, and i think you have to be a little bit intentional about creating -- carving out a space for what is your own personal impact going to be. not everyone can create a fabulous network of women that's going to rise the tide for all of us. but we all have a role to play, even in our own daily lives. it might just be you bringing one or two more people into this conversation. having a conversation with a male colleague. having a conversation with an investor or with your boss or with an employee. you know, i think the conversation has to get bigger, it has to include not just people who look like us. it has to include people who don't even know this is an issue. and i think that as a very minimum, each of us knows someone who probably has no idea that this is all going on and that is a struggle. so i would say at the very least, we each have a role to

play in our daily lives, in bringing more people to the table. >> alexa? >> and so having been one of the people in the audience on so many different occasions listening to a panel like this, one thing that has been tremendous to helping me in my own career was that the big gap is acknowledged. it's belief in guts. it's having the belief in yourself and the guts to take the jump. so i'll share with you one thing that has changed my life. when i was an undergrad, i worked in the happiness lab -- i won't go there, but it was an interesting experience for me. but we took people who had to look back at their life, and they never regretted the person they dated, x, y and z. what they always regretted were the things they didn't do. i always wished i had the guts to do this thing. 9-year-old alexa sits on my shoulder, and i'm like, alexa,

when you're 90, and you look back, are you going to regret this? and if the answer is yes, and this is the most amazing time for innovation, i don't think we've seen a decade like this, put your 9-year-old self on your shoulder, do write the plan, you can't jump off the cliff with no parachute, write the plan, have belief and knowledge and then have guts. >> my advice is to never let a guy have the last word. [ laughter ] so i'm going to follow -- i'm going to give the remainder of my time to our esteemed moderator. >> thank you, andrew. yes, thank you. your daughters are very lucky to have you. [ laughter ] i want to thank all of you for joining us today. i want to thank joyce for hosting us this afternoon and to thank our panelists for being so remarkably candid, but also clear in their candor and in their advice.