Brag books, confidence logs are techniques experts recommend to bolster self-confidence.

An inclusion rider leverages the power of a person — or a team — that is in high demand. Given the intense competition for skilled, experienced talent, an inclusion rider is a way to expand from the singular success of “rockstars” toward a scalable, group impact. Here are suggestions from Nicole Sanchez for what to request in a speaking gig opportunity. Not all of us are invited to speak at conferences that require a contract and, therefore, the opportunity for a rider. Still, it’s worth mentioning that conferences should be mindful of the following. If we all ask for these things, we can push toward a more inclusive baseline.

The biggest impact, the study says, comes from increasing the proportion of women on a leadership team from none to a third. How to get companies to take that first step? Hold the leadership team accountable. Workplaces in which senior executives’ feet are put to the fire on gender diversity are 60% more likely to have a greater share of women in executive leadership roles.

New Stanford research shows how companies alienate women while they’re still in school, during recruiting sessions. The chilling effect starts with the people companies send to staff recruiting sessions. As students entered, women were often setting up refreshments or raffles and doling out the swag in the back; the presenters were often men. If the company sent a female engineer, she often had no speaking role; alternatively, her role was to speak about the company’s culture, while her male peer tackled the tech challenges.

If you’ve never driven your car into a lake, thank Gladys West. She is one of the mathematicians responsible for developing the global positioning system, better known as GPS. Like many of the black women responsible for American achievements in math and science, she isn’t exactly a household name. Her community turned their attention to this local “hidden figure.”

Silicon Valley engineer Tracy Chou recounts from the moment she set foot in the offices of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, she felt deeply uncomfortable being a woman in a sea of white men, with multiple episodes of harassment at work. She learned to question the myth of meritocracy, the book on luck that changed her worldview, and believes you should “carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.”

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic writing about qualified people who happen to be women. Luckily, it’s getting increasingly easier to find such people. Journalist Christina Selby, writing at the Open Notebook, compiled a list of tips for diversifying sources. Journalist Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato created Diverse Sources, a searchable database of underrepresented experts in science. 500 Women Scientists, a nonprofit, created Request a Woman Scientist, a similar (and larger) database. Both can be filtered by country, specialty, and more… And if these all fail, the most basic journalistic method always works: Ask someone. Get people in the field to suggest names.

America is built on rags-to-riches tales. But how does ‘class-passing’ actually work – and how to navigate your new life and your old? When Nancy Reyes was 11 she was selected for a diversity initiative called Prep for Prep. The program identifies promising students of colour in New York and sends them to private schools. She was living in Queens at the time. Her dad was a taxi driver and her mom was a cleaner: it was “a very paycheck-to-paycheck kind of life.” She credits Prep for Prep for where she is today:  a Harvard graduate and the managing director of New York ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day, and one of the most respected women in advertising. 

The path to CEO rarely runs in a straight line; sometimes you have to move backward or sideways in order to get ahead. More than 60% of sprinters took a smaller role at some point in their career. They may have started something new within their company (by launching a new product or division, for example), moved to a smaller company to take on a greater set of responsibilities, or started their own business. In each case, they used the opportunity to build something from the ground up and make an outsize impact.