Lessons - The Only Way We’ll Achieve Equity | Julia Boorstin - CNBC’s Senior Media & Technology Reporter

So we have so there's like you mentioned before there's so many different like there's so many different issues we have to tackle but also levers that we can pull right so we have it so many reason to be optimistic and so optimistic even in these crazy times know what you should be you 100% should be like you can see you can see all the pieces when you see like a VC firm that's self-aware when you see community groups that remove social stigmas that can impede your performance when you talk about all these founders that have been exceptionally successful even though they only represent whatever 6% of 3% like there's obviously a lot of positive points however it's not where it should be in 2022 so how do we move like a little bit quicker how do we get towards equity maybe not in the next 50 years right oh gosh i hope in the next 50 years come on i hope things speed up i'm telling i'm being honest i'm being i'm saying how do we get it moving quicker right like we thought that we farther along in 2022 um i am optimistic that the business world will move towards equity and become more diverse both in terms of gender and in terms of race um and in terms of ability and in terms of everything because there are so many studies showing the diversity is better for business it's it's better for product development it's better for understanding your customers it's better for for management i mean there are all these stories about diverse management teams have better retention you know they they are more empathetic so i can go on and on about all the academic studies but i think i think that's why there's reason to be optimistic and then there's just this day-to-day thing like how are we all supposed to navigate the world especially if anyone i mean anyone feels like they're facing bias or they're facing stereotypes or they're there's a ceiling of how far people like them have gone in their organization and i think that's sort of the day-to-day like big picture i guess we can be optimistic but we all have to get up and go to work the next day um and when i was writing the chapter on how people are judge more you know women and people of color judge more harshly i was really depressed by the data this is the chapter i actually wrote last because i was so dreading getting dragged down by the negativity of all the ways women are judge more harshly women are judge more harshly if they use humor in the workforce women are more judge more harshly if they use anger if they give feedback to their employees that's critical they're judge more harshly i mean it's like a laundry list and i was losing my mind reading this data but i found a way to make it practical and constructive and it was this i realized that if you understand what you're up against and you understand what these challenges are that actually have nothing to do with you in your performance you can navigate around them there was a woman i a woman i interviewed named ayabadir and she founded a kids tech company called little bits which she then sold and she's Lebanese and she's a uh of of female founder and when she was raising money she said she faced the craziest kind of stereotypes and bias and we've got the rudest questions and she was telling me about some of these comments she heard i was like gosh how did you not get so discouraged that you gave up what did she what did she deal with like give us an example yeah i mean just wouldn't make rude comments her you know there were some women i interviewed one of them said she was an indian immigrant and someone asked her like when are you gonna hire a white male co-founder like you're obviously not gonna do this your own like no one's gonna ever like you run a company unless you hire a white man to go with you like just things and like that that just are so discouraged that's really messed up actually that somebody would say that it happens all the time it happens all the time and so i just want to say like i might have given up after the hat you know i don't know how you keep going and um i got this interesting message from a number of women and what they said is once you identify that this bias is like not about you you just like figure out how to go around it so i have a deer said i thought of it like remembering to bring a jacket when it's cold out you know it's gonna be cold you know you're gonna be uncomfortable but if you prepare yourself you put on the armor of a jacket you just don't let it bother you so she said i would go into the meetings i would listen to the feedback some of the comments would be constructive and things that could make my company better and some would be rude and useless and if i could figure out how to separate the ones that were rude and useless then i could actually learn and get value from the ones that were constructive and then i would let the negative stuff get me down and i think there's this idea of once you have and i put it this way in this book like once you can understand the contours of something that's gonna be um like an impediment to your growth you can better figure out your way around it and so that's something i like to think about a lot like okay you know maybe i can't change this thing like i used to say like oh my god i want to hear about if i can't control it if i can't change it like it's not my i'm not even gonna waste my time on it but actually it's good to know what the what the challenges are maybe it's good to know um do research and find out if your company um you know is and you know what what the pay gap is in your company that's valuable research maybe that will empower you to negotiate for more um i just think that again data data data but also using data to not be brought down by something that's challenging and to help forge your own path to success another option um that's sort of more of a career-focused option but if you're looking to raise money you may i guess research the the fund or the firm and see who else they've invested yeah i mean you can and also yeah you can find out what other if you're if you have any raising money um what firms have invested in and then there's you can get information from organizations like like all raise or hashtag angels to make sure you're not giving way to much of your company um at a lower uh you know and getting less for it so it's interesting because it shows that women hold fewer shares of startups even that they've found it and that means that they're not negotiating for as much uh so it's like a better deal when they're getting those investment checks and part of that is just a lack of transparency if everyone has more data about how things work how much people are likely to get paid then you're gonna have things end up more fair and more equitable um there's some companies that are starting to offer be very clear about what their salary ranges are and especially for entry-level jobs why let people negotiate and have the people who don't bother negotiate get paid much less they're saying this is our starting you know this is our starting level paid check and this is what it's gonna be and so later we'll we'll promote you based on performance but they create these very clear systems to strip out any buys and there are some amazing companies such as PayPal and Salesforce that have really led the way on using data to eliminate bias from hiring and promotion I think that um to to your point before like I also agree that it's not gonna be another 50 years I think a flywheel has started and I think that the more data the more exposure that we have the better people will be but it's about educating them and and also getting people to also help themselves I think it's a big piece of it so it's not always it's not always rainbows and unicorns when you go into these situations because not we're not 100% perfect like businesses are not a 100% perfect so like you said yeah and yourself you arm yourself yeah you arm yourself you put on the jacket figure what you need to have the jacket that's gonna protect you from the situation but you uh um earlier in the conversation you mentioned you know these women who are so exceptional you know how did they get the three percent of easy dollars and when I started this project I was like you know what I'm gonna find that these women just came out came out of the womb more one thing or another they came out of the womb more more you know empathetic or more insightful or better and managing people I just thought this is gonna be a born trait right that I mean I'm not I'm not a leader you know that but there must be these ingrained traits that some people are more likely to have and the thing that was true across the board is that none of these traits are born all of these things are developed and the most successful leaders are the ones that fail and learn from their success and get better and figure out what traits they want to develop and build on themselves care inside been becker may have been more likely to be over prepared from the time she was a kid she talked about how you know her grandfather had escaped the Holocaust and so she always had this idea of like belts and suspenders always be prepared to maybe that was like a familial thing that was in her head but she also had all these successes and failures along the way you know she she watched what happened in we know with 9-11 and that got her thinking about airplane safety she watched what happened with the 2008-2009 financial crash and she lost a lot of money for her clients then and she learned from it so there's amazing data about how people who do sports in like serious sports in high school and college are more likely to be leaders that is true of men and women I'm not an athlete I was not an athlete in in high score college but I was really interested in this data why is that do I have to go into a time machine and have been an athlete in high school to benefit from these from from that statistic and of course that's not possible unfortunately but what I found is there's actually this thing about athletes that is really wildly portable and that's this athletes study their failures when you get off the field you say what went wrong there is this amazing woman in the book named Christine Hunziger she was a tech company the retail space called the castle and she said after any work situation anything anything any negotiation anything they do a sort of a post event analysis they don't call it post post mortems she's like nobody died we don't have to make this negative let's just analyze what happened and she was a very serious athlete like in high school she did all the sports she she played field hockey and in college and rugby she was an amazing athlete and she she said you just have to analyze everything and what she taught me about the value of athletics is that it's all about measuring yourself against your own benchmarks I think about athletics as like people competing against each other but in business and in life that is not what you want to do you want to say I need as an athlete and Christine did this I need to push myself to be my best version of myself I'm not going to be a good teammate and we're not going to win let's I do my part and figure out where I'm now and where I want to go so none of these women came out as amazing leaders no one ever does but it's about figuring out your starting point and then creating benchmarks to create a path to success that's something we can all do