The Stevie Awards for Women in Business honor women executives, entrepreneurs, employees, and the companies they run — worldwide. The Stevie Awards have been hailed as the world’s premier business awards. More than 1,500 entries were submitted this year for consideration in more than 90 categories, including Executive of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, Women Helping Women, and Women Run Workplace of the Year.
A former executive at Oracle, Yahoo! and eBay, Narayan founded Zūm when she couldn’t find safe and reliable rides for her own children without sacrificing her career.
41% of U.S. women say it’s hard to advance their careers due to childcare issues, and 10 million women have already left the workforce due to a lack of safe and reliable options.
Ritu’s mission was to create a seamless service that makes child transportation easier, safer and more transparent for families and schools.
“As both a female entrepreneur and a working mother, this recognition is very meaningful for me,” says Ritu Narayan, co-founder, and CEO of Zum. “What started as solving a problem for me and my family is now disrupting an entrenched but severely outdated transportation system built around a fleet of 500,000+ yellow buses nationally. We are helping both schools and working parents address the needs of today’s busy schedules and wider transportation needs.”
Under Ritu’s leadership, Zūm continues to fulfill its mission to be the leader in safe and reliable rides for kids, with 3X YoY growth. The company has also doubled its number of employees during the past year, with women now making up around 50% of the Zūm team.
In a market with a lot of untapped opportunity, Zūm is poised for exponential growth and might just be poised to become the next woman-led Unicorn startup! Move over, Uber.
About Zūm Zūm solves transportation challenges facing schools and families by providing a modern ride service for children. The use of Zum’s technology significantly reduces school overhead and commute times by providing the right vehicle for every trip while also providing real-time tracking of rides so parents know where their student is at all times. Zum drivers have clean driving records, several years of childcare experience and earn the highest hourly rate in the industry. Zum, founded in 2015, and based in Silicon Valley, is backed by notable investors including Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, and BMW iVentures. www.ridezum.com
About the Stevie Awards Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 nominations each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at www.StevieAwards.com.
In continuing our Podcast Highlights mini series, this week, we’re sharing 9 quick takeaways from the Girl Geek X podcast that employees and managers everywhere can benefit from!
This week, Girl Geek X COO Gretchen DeKnikker is breaking out quotes and insights from her favorite release on the Girl Geek X Podcast — Episode 12: Intersectionality. (Apologies for the sound quality on this one, we’re still learning!)
Why this topic matters, and why it’s her favorite episode:
Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
“This was an important episode because we’d been hearing intersectionality as a buzzword, often erroneously used as a synonym for inclusion, and wanted to offer clarification. Understanding how various parts of our identities intersect in both oppressive and privileged ways is absolutely critical in building workplaces where everyone can thrive. Solving the issues of the most marginalized among us raises up everyone. It’s absolutely essential that we have acute awareness around this as we do the work.”
9 Key Takeaways
9. “We need to move away from ‘diversity,’ which has a limited meaning and actually is not aligned with the goals that we’re trying to build. We need to build balance in our organizations. We also need to move away from ‘inclusion’. Inclusion assumes that I can fit like an add-on into a power structure that was built for straight white men, and I have no interest in doing that. I’m not any of those things and I don’t know how to show up that way. I wanna actually build belonging, I wanna show up in a space where I was considered and where I was thought of.
Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Belonging at Atlassian
It can be the littlest things that show consideration. You’ll see here, research shows that women feel like they belong when there’s more plants in an office. You’ll see that our bathrooms, even the ones that because of building codes have to have gendered words on them, do not actually contain pictures of what a man or a woman looks like. That might not matter to a lot of you. But to folks who are gender-nonconforming or non-binary or transgender, that has huge meaning. That little subtle clue actually tells their brain that they belong in that space, and that’s what we’re trying to build at Atlassian. I think we can all resonate with wanting to feel like we belong.” —Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diveristy and Belonging at Atlassian
8. “Silly pop culture example that I always think of, there’s an episode of Scrubs where Elliot, who’s a white female doctor, and Turk, who’s a black man, are having this debate about who has it harder, black doctors or female doctors, and then thankfully a black woman doctor walks by and they’re both like ‘Ooh. Wow. This argument is dumb for the two of us to be having.’” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
7. “When you’re talking about privilege and talking about intersectionality and diversity and inclusion, I think sometimes they all get swirled together and you can lose sight of what those things are individually and what they mean individually, and that they are very unique distinctive things. —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
6. “I think it’s important when you’re trying to create an equal environment that there’s no one definition of equal, right? That’s the whole problem when you assume there’s one definition of what it means to feel marginalized or to feel like a minority, so you have to identify where you stand and what the differences in experiences are for other people.
Learn more about other people’s experiences, especially when they’re different from yours so you can be more informed when you’re trying to create a more equal environment. But you have to have a good understanding of what it means and not have a blanket, oversimplified definition of what intersectionality is in the first place.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce
5. “If I — as a queer Latina woman — can succeed in the organization, any changes that are made are definitely gonna benefit straight white women, too. But when we start with ‘diversity = women’, we only build programs, processes, and structures that help straight, white, economically-privileged women succeed.” —Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diveristy and Belonging at Atlassian
4. “I think intersectionality reminds us how much further we have to go and be open to continuing to learn about each other, this evolving conversation and just keep trying to be curious about other people.” —Angie Chang, Co-Founder & CEO at Girl Geek X
3. “Psychological safety more than anything else is critical to making a team work. And so what is psychological safety? It’s the shared belief held by members of the team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.
Psychological safety may sound like it’s all about the emotions or about the mental aspect of the game, but really it’s the way that you encourage and promote behaviors that reinforce trust and respect and mutual empathy and authenticity, and discourage behaviors that tear those down.” —Heidi Williams, CEO & Co-Founder of tEQuitable
2. “I think white people in this country, myself included, need to get very comfortable with the fact that we are all racist on some level, and that everyone has racist behaviors… and that while the word is really powerful, we need to actually think about the definition of it and what that means, and how to correct those behaviors. Because even a racist will tell you they’re not racist, they’re just separatists. They just want you live over there. ‘I don’t not like you, I just don’t wanna live with you!’ kind of a thing. So just understanding there are racist behaviors is important. We all have them every single day, and we need to be open to hearing that feedback.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
1. “You’re setting yourself up to fail if you’re using definitions of these things that are empty or you’re using solutions that only work for the group that’s struggling the least out of everyone. We’re at a point where people can very easily see through these things when they are bullshit. People aren’t just gonna say ‘we have a culture committee’ and take that to mean the work is done. People actually want to see tangible results. Hold people accountable to do the actual work and not just fly a diversity flag and say the work is done.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.
Whew! We just wrapped our 20th podcast episode, and now we’re taking a look back over the past few months at all of the amazing conversations we’ve had, the laughs we’ve shared, and the tough topics we’ve tackled… and we figured it’s the perfect time for the Girl Geek X team to share our top takeaways that women in tech and allies everywhere can benefit from!
We’ll be doing this via a mini-series of blog posts in the coming weeks, where we’ll break down our key learnings, salient moments, and hard-hitting realizations and share them with the community as bite-sized nuggets that you can quickly devour while waiting for everyone to join your morning conference call. (Can you hear me now? Everyone please mute!)
First up, Girl Geek X CEO & Co-Founder Angie Chang is delving into her favorite (and our most recent!) release on the Girl Geek X Podcast — Episode 20: Branding to Stand Out.
Why this topic matters, and why it’s her favorite episode:
Angie Chang, CEO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
“I enjoy how we as the Girl Geek X team can talk thru the uncomfortable reality of branding for women in their work lives and work places. Each place and situation is different, so it was fun to hear the diverse perspectives we all have, and share some common themes in how we feel we show up at work and how to be most effective while being true to our selves.”
6 Quick Takeaways
6.“Part of what a brand is, is an emotional connection. It’s how you’re perceived. It’s how we’re perceived in the workplace. And I would say, as a woman in business, and as women often are told in tech companies, you’re either too nice or too aggressive. Or, you’re too mean. Or, you’re too sloppy. Or you’re too proper, or whatever. The list can go on and on. Everybody in this room has some anecdote of a time when they felt they got conflicting messages or they weren’t quite sure ‘how do I show up in this meeting?’
I think for a lot of us, throughout our career we’ve found a way to find that balance of, how can we show up at work in a way to be super effective and so that people listen and we can do really good work? And how do we stay true to who we are?” —Khobi Brooklyn, VP of Communications at Aurora
Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
5. “When I was very deliberate about what brand I wanted for myself or what I wanted to be known for, I then was very clear about what opportunities I wanted to seek out for myself, in addition to what I was already doing. That helped me.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce
4. When I was earlier in my career as a Girl Geek, I would run from the idea and the topic of branding. Because I’m like, ‘That’s just marketing.’ I didn’t want to deal with that.
As you get more experienced in your career, you start to see the bigger picture and how your manager or other people need to be able to pick you out from a crowd. And then the branding issue becomes something that you actually pay attention to — what you want to be known for, and then tying it to your authentic self and making sure it’s aligned.” —–Angie Chang, Co-Founder & CEO at Girl Geek X
Leah McGowan-Hare, VP of Trailhead Evangelism at Salesforce
3. “Focus on the value you add and everything else will begin to fall in place. It’s really easy to get caught up in that branding piece, particularly with social media and all this good stuff. And I’m always like, well, let’s take step back. What is your story? What are you trying to build? What is the story you’re trying to create?” —Leah McGowen-Hare, VP of Trailhead Evangelism at Salesforce
2. “Your brand goes so much farther beyond the one specific company that you’re working in. It really exists in your whole network. It’s how you represent yourself to your whole network. Within your job, outside of your job.
I think what’s tied all the things that I do together is definitely storytelling and social impact. With everything that I’ve done in my career and all the outside of work things that I’ve been doing, those are the threads that tie them together. That’s how people view me. Regardless of what aspect of my career I’m showing up in.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
1. “Your brand in college is not the brand you had in your 20s, and is not the brand you had in your 30s, in your 40s, in your 50s and 60s. Your personal brand is going to continually be a work in progress.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.
I recently logged into LinkedIn to find yet another spammy InMail message from someone trying to sell me something. Shocker. Unlike most that go straight to trash, however, this one caught my attention: it was a free invitation for the Girl Geek X team and our community to attend a local tech conference!
Sounds pretty cool, huh? We love having the opportunity to share relevant networking opportunities with the Girl Geek X community, and as a team tasked with hosting and selling out 40+ tech events every year, we’re naturally curious about what others in the event space are doing — especially when it comes to showcasing diverse perspectives on stage!
But once I clicked over to the site and saw the male-dominated speaker list, and manel after manel on the agenda, my interest and excitement quickly turned to disappointment.
Among the 14 speakers, the lone woman stood out like a sore thumb, and the totality of the situation spoke volumes about the priorities of the company producing the event. They clearly wanted women to attend (hence the comped tickets), but they weren’t willing to put them on stage.
Yuck.
For perspective, several members of the Girl Geek X team helped build the SaaStr brand, home to the leading conference for the cloud, hosting upwards of 10,000 founders & execs from SaaS companies at their annual event in addition to multiple smaller events throughout the year. While working together at SaaStr, we shared a team-wide mission of making our events as inclusive as possible. Our first event was pretty sad from that perspective, but once we prioritized it, the diversity both on stage and in the audience improved each year, achieving a ratio of about 30% women speakers in 2016, over 45% in 2017, and 50% in 2018.
We know it’s possible to be inclusive at scale without sacrificing content quality — because we’ve done it.
Here at Girl Geek X, we very much depend on our mission-aligned partners and event hosts to invite women of diverse backgrounds to speak at their events, and we aim to keep the events we produce ourselves as balanced as possible. The ratios aren’t always quite where we’d like them to be, but during the planning of each event, we encourage our partners to prioritize diversity and give the mic to women who aren’t often invited to hold it.
Over the past 10 years, Girl Geek X has provided a forum for more than 1,000 women and non-binary tech innovators to speak at our events. Accomplished and experienced women leaders are out there. They’re ready to share their learnings with the world, and the world WANTS to hear from them!
It’s time for event planners and speakers across the industry to make inclusivity and speaker diversity a priority, so that we all have the opportunity to learn from and celebrate their accomplishments.
The next time you’re planning an event, consider inviting speakers from varied backgrounds, aim for a gender-balanced speaker lineup, and ensure that you’re including people of varying levels of experience. Racism, sexism, ageism, sizeism, and ableism all rear their heads when we look at the speaker lineups we’re accustomed to seeing, and each deserves consideration.
As an individual, when you are invited to speak or are applying to speak at an event, think about which of your colleagues might make a good co-panelist, and take the initiative to include them.
Below, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite female and non-binary speakers from our database to help make your job of building a diverse speaker lineup just a little bit easier.
Here are 240 women leaders, managers and experienced senior technologists you can invite to speak at your next technology event, conference, or webinar… which means that content strategists and speaker managers have NO MORE EXCUSES for all-male panels!
Didn’t find what you were looking for, or want to make your agenda even stronger?
The Girl Geek X Speaker Database features over 1,000 women in technology and leadership roles who have spoken at past Girl Geek X events. Use the category toggles on the left to filter by role or function, and identify speakers who are ready to share their insights and experiences with your audience!
Do you have a favorite woman in tech or in a leadership role that you’d like to recommend to those slotting speakers for their events? Send us your suggestions as a reply to this article on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and we’ll include them in our next speaker roundup!
Author
Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.
What’s better than a free Girl Geek Dinner? A whole year of free Girl Geek Dinners! And that’s exactly what’s in store for FIVE lucky girl geeks next month!
We’re super excited to announce that we’re giving away an entire YEAR of totally FREE Girl Geek Dinner passes in our August contest — which we’re launching a couple days early since so many girl geeks are on vacation next month!
The first prize (2 tickets to every dinner for a year, so you can always bring a plus one!) will go to the entrant who has referred the most friends to enter the contest & sign up for the Girl Geek X weekly newsletter during the contest period, which ends on August 30, 2019 at 11:59pm PST.
The next 4 winners (of 1 ticket to every dinner for a year) will be selected at random.
To improve your odds of winning, you can earn extra entries for every person you refer, or for sharing the contest with your Bay Area friends & colleagues via the widget below!
Girl Geek Dinners are hosted throughout the Bay Area year-round, and winners will have the opportunity to attend as many as they want — you can come to just handful, or you can make a bunch of new besties and attend them all!
Good luck, and we hope to see you at a dinner soon!
Long before she ever started obsessing over product features and worrying about design deadlines, Nupur Srivastavaspent her days — and evenings, weekends and holidays — obsessing over her jump shot and running drills in her hometown of Qurain. Her hard work and dedication to the sport took her all the way to the Kuwait National Basketball team, where she played from 1999-2002 and learned the value of teamwork and how fun it is to win!
After earning her Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Michigan, Nupur began her tech career as a Wireless Hardware Design Engineer at Cisco. She then pursued an MBA from Stanford and transitioned into product management, finding her passion in the health tech space. Over the past eight years, she managed teams ranging in size from 5 to as many as 50 people. Driven by her upbringing and desire to help people, she launched Impactreview (acquired by MaterNova), a community for reviews of maternal and child health products for the developing world.
Today, Nupur is the Chief Operating Officer at Included Health in San Francisco, where she leads the company’s product management and design teams. As Nupur explains, “the company is on a mission to raise the standard of healthcare for everyone, everywhere. The team goes above and beyond to connect and guide people to the highest quality healthcare available for themselves and their loved ones. By leveraging the power of data and technology, we create products and services that make it easy for everyone to get the best possible healthcare experience.
When the Girl Geek X team sat down with Nupur during our ELEVATE 2019 virtual event on International Women’s Day, we wanted to pick her brain and hear her biggest mistakes and learnings as a health tech product leader and people manager. She shared some great advice:
1. Hire slow and fire fast.
Nupur confessed that she made a lot of classic hiring mistakes with her first hire. She was at a small startup, strapped for resources (we’ve all been there!), and there was a lot of work to be done. Feeling stressed for help, she hired very quickly without thinking through the long-term impact.
“Basically, I hired the first person who I thought could do the job from a technical standpoint,” she shared, “…but one thing that I didn’t focus on was whether there was strong alignment with the company’s values and where we were growing. Unfortunately, a year later, I had to let this person go because it was a mismatch. I really wish I had spent time understanding upfront whether they were a good fit for what the company needed at the time.”
The classic saying that you need to “hire slowly and fire quickly” rings true here.
2. Ask the right questions.
“A lot comes down to the types of questions you ask in the interview process as well as what you get from the references.” Finding the right fit is less about technical proficiency, and more about who they are as a person, why they have made the decisions they have in the past, and what they are optimizing for in their upcoming role.
You want to ask questions about how they’ve made decisions in their career to date, what drives them, what motivates them. What wakes them up in the morning? When they’re put in a difficult situation, what value system is driving their decision-making?
Nupur stresses that what you’re looking for in a team member will be different for different stages of the company, and for each company’s unique values and mission.
It’s important to tailor your approach to your individual situation, because the perfect hire on paper might actually be a perfect hire for a different environment, but a poor hire once your own values and needs are considered.
3. Hire for impact: seek out people who are hungry, humble and smart.
Many of Nupur’s favorite hiring and interviewing strategies came from a book that CTO Wade Chambers recommended, called Ideal Team Player. “It focuses on this notion of hiring people that are hungry, humble, and smart, and that concept has really resonated with me.”
“We want to raise the standard of care for everyone everywhere, so we need to make sure that people are hungry for that impact,” she explained.
“The humble component is self-explanatory. People that are low ego and prioritize the company above self are great to have on the team. In addition, if you’re hiring someone to work in healthcare, you need to be sure they appreciate that the patients we serve are suffering through things that we may not totally understand. They need humility to empathize with that struggle and build the right products for those patients.”
“And then smart is not actually what you think it may be. It’s not IQ smart, but rather people smart. There’s a base level assumption that you’ll be able to do the job, but it’s incredibly important that you do it in a way that brings people along — that makes you a teammate that people actually want to work for and with.”
One of the things Nupur has been using in her recent interviews is simply asking everyone, “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” Their response typically gives you a sense of their work ethic and insight into what they consider difficult. Sometimes they’ll even answer with a personal response, and it offers a good window into who the person is, and whether they’re someone you want on your team.
4. Accept that your top performers will always eventually leave.
“As painful as it is, top performers will leave you at some point. With all members of my team, I try to develop trust, care deeply about their career, and truly understand where they want to go long-term. This way, when they eventually decide to pursue another opportunity, I’m not surprised because there’s openness and transparency in the relationships.”
The week before we sat down with Nupur, someone she’d worked with for four years left the company. She was an extremely high performer, and she let Nupur know of her intentions to leave four months in advance because they were actively talking about where she wanted to go and what drives her. The team member had joined a 50-person company. With headcount now over 500, she was ready for something different.
“I think the most important thing is to have that level of trust with your team members, such that you understand what their career goals are and you’re together making the decision about when is the right time for them to leave. If you adopt this approach, you can prepare for their departure in a way that is not disruptive.”
“It can feel like a painful punch in the gut when someone tells you they’re leaving,” she lamented, “but I think the least we can do is just not be surprised by the decision. At some point, maybe for their own career growth or evolution, or other things that they are optimizing for in their lives, you want them to leave. And as long as you are open and honest with each other and there is trust and transparency, it’s not the end of the world.”
Nupur’s general philosophy is one we could all benefit from adopting: “Everyone has different goals in life. The most we can do is be an advocate and great manager for our direct reports when they work for us, and help influence what they do next, so that you and the business are prepared for employee departures.”
5. Create an environment that welcomes diversity of thought and personality types.
“One of my biggest learnings as a leader over the years has been … beyond diversity based on race and gender, there’s tons of diversity in personality types and the way people like to do work.”
The Head of Data Science asked various team members to take a StrengthsFinder questionnaire, then put everyone into groups of people that are alike so they could discuss things they wanted to teach other groups who were different from them.
The entire product team has also used the DiSC assessment to better understand their behavioral differences. “This exercise gives you empathy for how different people want to show up, and how they want to debate ideas.”
“Not everybody is comfortable being presented a problem and immediately jumping in and giving their thoughts. Some people want to think about a problem, spend a day organizing their ideas, and come back with their thoughts prepared.”
“For me,” Nupur admitted, “the first step in improving my communication and collaboration with others is simply awareness. Where do people fall either in the DiSC profile or with StrengthsFinder? What do I need to be aware of as their leader so that I’m creating a comfortable environment for them to speak up?”
“I can remember the first realization I had when I recognized, ‘Oh, everybody doesn’t like coming into a room and talking loudly about their ideas? That’s interesting. I thought everyone was exactly like me!’ and that’s obviously not the case.”
“Using some of these frameworks has been incredibly important because it not only helps you understand others, but it also helps you realize how your type may be showing up for that person and what things you may need to temper, especially as a leader, because you’re setting the tone for the team.”
Nupur has a team member opposite her on the DiSC profile, and she’s started running ideas by him to make sure that he can offer feedback and criticism before she takes it to the team, because as she says, “I’m just hyper-excited and trying to tell everybody everything as soon as the thought occurs.” And that freaks some people out. It is important to understand where others in your team sit in the DiSC profile so that you can personalize your leadership style with them.
6. Let people know where you want to go!
One of the questions we hear asked at Girl Geek X events time and time again is about how to get ahead or move into a management role when you don’t have previous managerial experience.
Nupur’s advice is to make your manager aware that you want to be a manager, and make your goals explicit. “If someone wants to be a manager, you need to make sure that there’s an opportunity and a business need, and an opening in the company for a manager. Have open conversations, and make sure that you have the skills, training, and support of your manager.”
“The biggest thing is raising your hand and making it clear that that’s the path you want to go. Then hopefully if you have a good manager, and you are ready, they’ll make that opportunity for you.”
If you’re having open conversations about your goals regularly — say once per quarter — and you find yourself in a situation where the promotion doesn’t feel like it’s ever going to happen, or you start to feel like you’d be better off somewhere else, you’ll be in a better position to move on gracefully and with a reference you can count on time and time again.
Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.
The driving force behind Salesforce’s $8.7M commitment to closing the gender wage gap, Leyla Seka built AppExchange from its earliest days, served as General Manager of Desk.com and then Executive Vice President of Mobile and was one of the most senior female leaders in Salesforce company history. In a rare Girl Geek X interview, Leyla recently dished out some much-needed advice for working women: “always ask for more.”
There’s an element of luck to success.
When asked how she got to where she is in her career, Leyla was quick to admit that luck played a role in her success. “Anyone that says they’re successful without acknowledging the luck of being at the right place at the right time, I think is a bit too much of a narcissist.”
Former Salesforce EVP and GM of Desk.com, Leyla Seka
“I also worked my butt off and I pushed,” she added. “I just didn’t settle for anything. I just pushed, and pushed and pushed.”
“A lot of it was really, really hard, but it was totally worth it. I don’t sit around and wish or wonder about what if I had asked for this or what if I had asked for that anymore, which is a nice change.”
Despite her success, over time, throughout many companies and throughout her career, she had the sense that the men made more money. It wasn’t something she’d confirmed or had sophisticated research to back up — just a feeling.
Then Salesforce gave her the opportunity to run their Desk.com division. “It was probably the best thing I’ve ever done in my career,” she said, “I had so much fun. I had a team of four people and we grew like crazy.”
The first two years included unbelievable growth. Leyla had a team of four people: two men, two women. When bonus time rolled around, she fought hard to get a lot of money for everyone on her team.
“I really just thought they all deserved an equal amount, so I gave them all the same and I gave them a lot — a lot more than any of them had ever earned before. I worked hard.”
Then she had meetings with the people on her team. Her assistant set up the meetings, and it just happened to be the two women that went first.
In the first meeting, she shared that the woman receiving her bonus was appreciative and overjoyed, thanking her and gushing over the amount.
Then it was the second woman’s turn, and her reaction was similar.
When she told her first male team member the amount of his bonus, she was shocked to hear his response: “I want more.”
Leyla was in disbelief. “I thought in my head, ‘What? What? What?! How could you want more? You’ve never gotten this much!’ But I thought ‘Okay, I’ll ponder that.'”
Then the second man who was akin to a COO and her partner in running the business — her primary partner — was told his bonus amount. He looked right at her, and said, “I want more.”
When Leyla paused to ask him what was going on, he didn’t hesitate. He quipped, “We’ve always been taught to ask for more.”
There was no uncertainty, no doubt or reluctance in his voice. He didn’t shy away from it. He wasn’t scared or embarrassed to ask, and he certainly didn’t fear her response.
Women haven’t been conditioned to ask for anything, let alone MORE.
“It was sort of like someone slapped me across the face because I thought of all the times that I had gotten a bonus or promotion, or a job, or any of these things and I had been like, ‘Thank you,’ because that was the way my mother had raised me.”
Women aren’t accustomed to pushing for more. We’ve been told that it’s “unladylike,” and that NO means NO — in EVERY situation.
We don’t question the seemingly “generous” salaries we’re offered, as long as they’re close to or slightly above what we earned previously. We don’t asked for the bigger bonus when we put in more work, and we often don’t ask for the raise or promotion as our responsibilities increase.
Women need to start asking for more, because men already are — and they aren’t second-guessing themselves about it.
Around the same time Leyla was having this realization, one of her friends was promoted within Salesforce’s HR department. After many discussions on the topic, they scheduled a meeting with their boss, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and joined forced to make a presentation that questioned pay disparities at Salesforce.
In their presentation, they noted that addressing the wage gap could be very expensive for the company, but now that they’d become aware of it, they felt strongly that it needed to be fixed.
Leyla stressed that Marc Benioff is an amazing ally and someone that’s not afraid to do great stuff, so he was like, “Go for it. Do it.”, she said.
They completed the audit, and many amazing things have come from it: it led to Salesforce creating a position for a Chief Equality Officer, the Office of Equality, hosting the first Women’s Summit, and they’ve paid over $8.7 million to reduce the wage gap.
Salesforce has made incredible progress… but it wouldn’t have happened if no one had asked.
In a conversation with former Salesforce SVP of Product Management Jennifer Taylor, who now serves as Head of Products at Cloudflare, both women lamented some of the opportunities they and others missed because they simply hadn’t asked or pushed hard enough.
Jennifer Taylor, Head of Products at Cloudflare and former SVP of Product Management at Salesforce
“I often find when I’m working with people, whether it’s men or women, people sometimes forget that hearing ‘no’ is the beginning of a conversation,” Jennifer shared. “If I had gotten up and walked out of a room every time I heard a no, I think I would have missed a lot of opportunities for growth.”
Leyla in part credits Salesforce’s culture for teaching her the valuable lesson: “Salesforce is a company that definitely teaches us all to push, to keep trying for the next goal. And I do think it’s so funny how many things I didn’t ask for that I would have gotten — and once I did ask, I did get.”
“The dialogue we have inside of our heads often hurts us more than what’s actually going on.”
Jennifer’s closing remarks certainly left an impression on this Girl Geek: “My advice is to ask and put yourself on that journey. Take those risks in asking, because you will learn and grow no matter what the response is.”
Leyla wrapped up the conversation with her own poignant advice for individuals working everywhere, and especially those working in tech leadership roles: “You have a platform, whether you think you do or you don’t. I would actually even challenge you further to ask, how are you using your platform to help people? Are you sponsoring a woman of color, are you trying to mentor a woman of color, are you thinking even beyond just our own fight? Equal pay is super important, but the work I’ve done with BOLDforce [Black Organization for Leadership and Development at Salesforce] in many ways is probably some of the most cutting edge and interesting stuff we’re doing, because we’re really trying to tackle the notion of allyship inside of corporate America.”
“We all can be allies, there’s always someone that can use your help, so it’s important to give that forward. That really helps you find your own path as well.”
The full transcript and video interview these excerpts were taken from is available here.
To hear more from Leyla Seka and other women who are passionate about having a positive impact on the evolution of America’s corporate landscape, check out the dozens of tech talks and interviews shared on the Girl Geek X YouTube channel, and subscribe to the Girl Geek X newsletter.
About the Author
Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, where she helps companies hand the mic to hundreds of women in tech across 40+ tech talks & dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area each year. She previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community and conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Executives and VCs from $0 to $10M. She also served as Director of Marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.
Over 2500 tuned in live to hear from senior tech leaders & engineers as the Girl Geek X Community came together to celebrate International Women’s Day with over a dozen talks, interviews & panels at the Elevate 2019 virtual conference. Everyone at Girl Geek X had a blast learning, laughing and sharing with our speakers, and we’re excited to share the videos with everyone who couldn’t make it!
Enjoy the talks below! If you are looking for a new job or career opportunity, check out these open roles at our Girl Geek X Trusted Partners: Grand Rounds, Intel AI, Palo Alto Networks, U.S. Digital Service, Netflix, The Climate Corporation and Guidewire!
Not only has Sandra Lopez been named one of the 50 most powerful women in tech by the National Diversity Council and one of Latina Style’s Top 10 Latina executives, she’s also the VP and GM for Intel Sports. In other words, #boss. In this Girl Geek Elevate 2019 session, Sandra Lopez shared the advice she shares with the women she mentors on being unapologetically you, being kind, and networking while prioritizing support over competition. Read the transcript or watch on YouTube.
“Always Ask For More” – Leyla Seka (Salesforce EVP) & Jennifer Taylor (Head of Product at Cloudflare) Fireside Chat
The driving force behind Salesforce’s $8.7M commitment to closing the gender wage gap, Leyla Seka built AppExchange from its earliest days, served as GM of Desk.com and is now EVP of Mobile and one of the most senior female leaders at Salesforce. Tune in to this rare interview along with Cloudflare’s Head of Product, Jennifer Taylor, and get Leyla’s advice on how to always ask for more, help others, and scare the crap out of yourself at least once a year.
“Building High Performance Teams” – Panel Discussion with Nupur Srivastava (Grand Rounds Vice President), Citlalli Solani (Palo Alto Networks Director of Engineering), Colleen Bashar (Guidewire Vice President)
You think the transition from IC to a manager is the hardest part of your career – until you become a manager of managers. From advancing your hiring skills to their worst hiring and management mistakes, join these amazing women as they share their learnings as they’ve evolved from managers to leaders.
Speakers include: Nupur Srivastava (Grand Rounds Vice President of Product Management), Citlalli Solano (Palo Alto Networks Director of Engineering), Colleen Bashar (Guidewire Vice President) and the talk is moderated by Gretchen DeKnikker (Girl Geek X Chief Operating Officer).
“Data Science & Climate Change” – Janet George (Western Digital Chief Data Scientist)
For the very first time in our history, we can collect incredible amounts of data at scale. Modern data infrastructure enables the documentation and recording of billions of species and data science allows us to collect, analyze, predict and slow down the speed of extinction. Western Digital Chief Data Scientist Janet George walked us through her extensive research and shared tips on infrastructure stacks and strategies for processing massive amounts of information.
“Tech Leavers and Tech Stayers” – Lili Gangas (Kapor Center Chief Technology Community Officer)
In 2017, the Kapor Center published the first-of-its-kind Tech Leavers Study why people voluntarily left their jobs in tech. In this session,Kapor Center Chief Technology Community Officer Lili Gangas will walk us through the findings, shattering the myth that women leave to spend time with their family among others, and will provide some ideas for how you can ensure an environment where all employees feel valued, appreciated, welcomed and heard.
“Intersectionality and Systemic Change” – Heidi Williams (tEQuitable Chief Technology Officer)
As we journey into fourth-wave feminism, join tEUitable CTO Heidi Williams for this important session on intersectionality and systemic change. Navigating the challenging terrain to ensure that as we gain seats at the table, that the voices of all women are heard. She’ll share tips on how to engage allies and advocates, recognize privilege, and lead both up and down the organization.
“The Gendered Project” – Omayeli Arenyeka (LinkedIn Software Engineer)
When you think of the word “superhero” what do you imagine? Language reflects and reinforces social norms; ungendering language is a vital part of interrogating sexism. However, there’s no dataset of gendered words. This tech talk is about data – where to get it and how to create it if it doesn’t exist. In her talk, LinkedIn software engineer Omayeli Arenyeka creates the dataset for The Gendered Project, showing how to view unavailable data as an opportunity rather than an obstacle to answering questions.
Grand Rounds Coffee Break Panel!
During this Grand Rounds Coffee Break at Elevate 2019, we heard from Jayodita Sanghvi (Director of Data Science), Megan Marquardt (Engineering Manager), Mary Reynolds (Senior Product Manager) and Stacy Vorkink (Senior Director, Employee Experience) about what they are working on at Grand Rounds.
“Office Manager to CPO in 1356* Steps” – Shawna Wolverton (Zendesk SVP Product Management) Keynote
Shawna Wolverton is a self-proclaimed nerd for good product design. Starting at Salesforce in 2003, Shawna worked her way up to SVP Product Management, influencing $30M/yr in revenue before she left to do it all over again as CPO at Planet and now SVP Product Management at Zendesk. Don’t miss this session as Shawna shares the lessons she learned both personally and professionally in her 25 year career.
“Every Day is Important in the Life of a Strawberry” – Sheri Bernard Trivedi (USDS Content Strategist)
Documentation is just a mirror held up to a product. If you think of government services as some of the most crucial products we encounter at the United States Digital Service, then user-centered documentation becomes all the more interesting.
In this talk, Sheri Bernard Trivedi tells a story about writing docs for farmers, one of her favorite projects in her career thus far. She is an Instructional Content Strategist at the United States Digital Service (or USDS for short). Watch on YouTube or Read the USDS Transcript.
“Creating an AI for Social Good Program” – Anna Bethke (Intel AI for Social Good)
Data scientist Anna Bethke had approached management with a new position – to become the head of AI for Social Good to bring in new positively impactful projects to the group and company as a whole. Since then, she has created the role at Intel and the AI for Social Good program ever since. Anna shares her story and lessons learned along the way.
“A/B Testing with Open Source” – Dena Metili Mwangi (Sentry Software Engineer)
Quick experimentation in your application can turn feelings-driven development into data-driven wins. Beyond blue buttons or red buttons, A/B testing can answer key questions on how best to serve your users by offering sometimes surprising insights into how they interact with your product.
In this talk, Dena Metili Mwangi will get the first experiment up and running with PlanOut, a Python-based open-source framework. It’s cheap & easy to begin A/B testing with open source.
“Unconventional Journeys in Tech” – Panel Discussion with Rosie Sennett (Splunk Staff Sales Engineer), Shanea Leven (Cloudflare Director) and Farnaz Ronaghi (NovoEd Chief Technology Officer)
The tech industry is full of misfits. Contrary to the myth, not everyone has a computer science degree and went to a fancy university. Hear from ambitious women who built tech careers on their own terms by leveraging their strengths and creating opportunities for themselves to succeed in roles from sales and engineering to product management, from entrepreneurship to corporate ladder climbing.
Girl Geek X CEO Angie Chang speaks with Farnaz Ronaghi (NovoEd CTO & Co-Founder), Rosie Sennett (Splunk Staff Sales Engineer), and Shanea Leven (Cloudflare Director of Product Management) in this exciting panel discussion at Elevate 2019.
“Coding Strong at Age 60” – Akilah Monifa (ARISE Global Media SVP)
At age 40, Akilah Monifa stopped practicing law to do what her younger self had wanted to do: become a full-time writer. She received an Amazon Echo as a gift and made another pivot at age 60. This time, she decided she would learn to build for voice. Her motivation: give voice to a subject dear to her heart and build an Alexa skill called Black History Everyday.
“Enterprise to Computer (a Star Trek Chatbot)” – Grishma Jena (IBM Software Engineer)
Personality and emotions play a vital role in defining human interactions. Enterprise to Computer (or “E2Cbot”) was created with the premise of adding a personality to a chatbot. This helps in making it appear human-like and contributes to a better and engaging user experience.
Developed as an Amazon Alexa skill, E2Cbot uses neural networks to capture the style of Star Trek by incorporating references from the show along with peculiar tones of the characters. In this talk, Girl Geek X CTO Sukrutha Bhadouria interviews Grishma Jena, a Cognitive Software Engineer working on IBM Watson and applying Machine Learning to chatbots.
On Friday, March 8th, 20 senior tech leaders & engineers came together to celebrate International Women’s Day with over a dozen tech talks & panels during the Elevate 2019 virtual conference. Everyone here at Girl Geek X had a blast learning, laughing and sharing with our speakers & over 2500 live viewers! A huge thank you goes out to all who participated!
And while the video recordings and transcripts will be released in the coming weeks, we just couldn’t wait any longer to share some of our favorite advice & inspiration with the world! Enjoy some of our favorite quotes below.
“What makes us super special is our individuality. Embrace your individuality.”
“I’m the middle child of a Mexican-American family. Growing up, I never felt like I was American enough for my American friends, and I wasn’t Mexican enough for my Mexican friends. That stayed with me, but I knew it was important to accept my ‘never enough-ness.’ I had to accept that I would never be enough, and acknowledge that maybe in this world, I was never going to fit in. Yet… I wasn’t going to let that stop me.”
“You’re the CEO of your own career.”
“Be fearless, be the CEO of your career, be unapologetically you.”
“I attribute 30% of my success to brain power, 10% to luck, 60% to networking. All the jobs I’ve secured are because of my network.”
“Network inward, outward, and wide.”
“Discover the power of ‘NO.'”
Leyla Seka, EVP, Salesforce
“Hearing ‘No’ is the beginning of a conversation.”
On why we make time to mentor others: “If we don’t help each other, it won’t change.”
“I didn’t settle for anything. I pushed and pushed and pushed. It wasn’t always easy, but I pushed. I don’t sit around and ask ‘What if I’d asked for this or what if I’d asked for that?’ anymore. That’s different. I used to do that, but now I always ask for more.”
“We are all defining new archetypes of women. When I look at Millenials and younger generations, their expectations are at a different level when it comes to equality. Young people expect equality today, and that gets me fired up!”
Lili Gangas, CTCO, Kapor Center
“37% of surveyed professionals left their careers in tech due to some for of injustice or unfairness. To directly help create a more level playing field, executives can focus on several things, especially equal pay and equal opportunity (promotions) for ALL employees.”
“Psychological safety is the idea that individual members of a team feel safe to be themselves, to share ideas, to take risks and to fail. All employees should be valued, respected, encouraged to participate and given opportunities for advancement. If you’ve created a space that’s psychologically safe, people feel comfortable speaking up when they see or hear something wrong.They’re empowered to be better allies and better coworkers.”
Jayodita Sanghvi, Director of Data Science, Grand Rounds
“Do something that matters. You’re smart and capable, so apply it to something you believe in. If you do that, you’ll start each day knowing you want to be at work. That positivity impacts everything you do in your career.”
Shanea (King-Roberson) Leven, Director of Product, CloudFlare
“I fail all the time. Every time I start a new job or a new thing, right at the beginning, there’s always a setback. I took the risk, and after seeing it through, I kind of failed up… and that’s okay. It’s okay to fail forward. I was challenged, and I couldn’t be happier that I did it. But every day, it felt like the worst struggle ever.”
“Take bold steps. They are scary. But ask really bold questions and do really bold things, because you can completely surprise yourself.”
“I ask for more all the time. I had no idea what the context was for asking for more when I worked at Google. Then I realized I felt like I was underpaid. I’d missed my opportunity, and I swore I’d never let that happen again. So the next time I was able to negotiate for salary, I asked for a lot more, and I got it. The time after that, I asked for a lot more again. And again, I got it. Ask the bold questions, and ask the right questions.”
“As a PM, it’s kind of a skill to keep asking for more, and more, and more all the time.”
“You never know how people will respond unless you ask. Dare to put yourself out there.”
Angie Chang, CEO & Founder, Girl Geek X
“We hear from a lot of people who are looking to break into a new career and keep hitting a wall. There are smaller companies you should look into — look somewhere like AngelList. Startups and smaller companies are often more willing to take a chance on someone with different work experiences, life experiences — a less traditional background. Think about trying those roles for a couple years to get experience first.”
Rosie Sennett, Staff Sales Engineer, Splunk
“Build a network of people who you know from cocktail parties and business conferences. You might not be close, but you do one day get to call them up and say ‘Hey, I’m looking to hire this person and you’re connected, do you know them? Would you work with them again?’ It’s a good thing to have those common connections. I’ve helped people get jobs.”
“If a role is of interest to you, boldly go forward. Push through. We live in a world now where you can just teach yourself stuff. Teach yourself enough stuff to boldly say ‘I know how to do this.'”
“It’s just women who think they need to know ALL of it in order to say ‘I know how to do that.’ You can go forward just saying you know how, and then eventually, you WILL know how to do it.”
Shawna Wolverton, SVP Product, Zendesk
“I spent the first 20 years of my life thinking I was going to be a physician. There was no Product Manager Barbie when I was a kid.”
“A lot of women look back and find an acceleration in their careers after having children. The J curve in my own career was certainly after having my daughter.”
“Success is not a limited pie, its more like π — an infinite amount that can be grown and shared with others!”
Find your dream job, working for a company that values inclusion! Check out the dozens of newly posted mission-aligned job opportunities from the Trusted Partners who made Elevate 2019 possible.
United States Digital Service (USDS) is a tech start up in the federal government dedicated to improving the digital services the government delivers using modern technology practices. USDS is hiring for Washington D.C.:
Every time I start a new job or a new thing, right at the beginning, there’s always a setback. I took the risk, and after seeing it through, I kind of failed up… and that’s okay. It’s okay to fail forward. I was challenged, and I couldn’t be happier that I did it. But every day, it felt like the worst struggle ever.”
