The CEO of Women 2.0 on her company's plans for tackling gender inequality in the tech worl

Vieira, Helena

LSE Research Online

5/20/2017Kate Brodock: ‘Some Silicon Valley firms are leaders inparental leave’blogs.lse.ac.uk /businessreview/2017/05/20/kate-brodock-some-silicon-valley-firms-are-leaders-in-parental-leave/Women 2.0 is a for-profit company founded in 2006 as a hub where women in the technology field could networkand help each other professionally. Today it has expanded into a media company whose goal is “to close the gendergaps in founding, investing, the workplace and leadership.” LSE Business Review managing editor Helena Vieiraspoke with CEO Kate Brodock on 3 May during a tech conference in New Orleans.What exactly does Women 2.0 do?Women 2 dot 0, I’ll give you the cliff-notes version, started about a decade ago in San Francisco, Silicon Valleyarea, very much grassroots. Several women got together, started out some small gatherings that grew into what forseveral years was a very robust events network. We were actually in 35 chapters around the world, in 35 cities. Theevents were everything from panel discussions, job recruitment, pitch competitions. We actually have some amazingstart-ups, well known in food spotting, who ran through our programme.Then, about three years ago that event structure was dialled down and the content piece, which naturally grew outof this event structure, started to be organised and created into sort of a burgeoning media property. I stepped intothe company last August. So this is new leadership and what we’re doing is that we’re taking that media property,ramping it up, adding a whole bunch of sophistication to it. Our main goal is to use that engagement we have fromthe community to create products and services around it to help women and organisations dig into immediate,tangible products, and so they can create a lot of the change we have been talking about for women in the techspace.How is Women 2.0 fighting for equality?We break down our audience into four ‘pipelines’ in the tech space: female technologists, female founders, femaleand female-friendly investors, and female leaders. You could slice and dice this a hundred different ways. We’ve1/3chosen these four because of our strengths in the past decade and because of some of the clear areas that we feelwe can have an impact on. Our goals cover a lot of different areas of equality: the gender pay gap, diversity in techteams, the amount of funding that is given every year to women versus men…Why aren’t more women taking up STEM subjects?It’s a very multifaceted issue and there are many different schools of thought on this. For me some of the mostdifficult issues to look at are the ingrained, long-term, structural issues. A lot of what we talk about is really analysingthe structure that is in place. Just to mention one aspect, look at the pre-university phase in education. In theclassroom, women are more likely to raise their hands if the classroom is set up in a circle versus straight rows.These are things that a lot of people don’t think about. Unconscious biases are some of the most difficult things tochange, and that’s what I think would be really interesting to focus on. Forward that to the university phase, becauseif you can tackle some of these issues before women go to university there’s such an increased chance that they’llmake it through. Their confidence will be higher, they’ll have more opportunities, their level of engagement will beincreased.Do you think there has been change in the past few years with the push for gender equality?What we’ve seen is that the discussion has gotten really fantastic. We feel that we’ve been at the forefront of a lot ofthat discussion, which is happening in the right places, in Silicon Valley, in major tech hubs, inside major techcompanies. We feel that the ‘walking the walk’ part really has yet to be realised. And that is the core piece of ourmission. We’re trying to help move forward the discussion that we’re all having and reading about in the news. Itneeds to be translated into actual impact at the company level, and we feel that the change is coming.Women bear children, and we hear a lot about how Silicon Valley is not exactly family friendly.I could wax poetic about this. This again has a lot of different layers. Everything from national, state level andcompany policies. The inequalities that are built into the tech industry are all things that we have up against us. Wewant to have future generations, and it’s very obvious that it’s women who bear them. And it seems silly that there isstill not enough space for that to happen in the workplace, that childbearing isn’t supported.Silicon Valley has both ends of the spectrum. Some companies are doing horribly, others are leaders in terms ofparental leave, parental support, the ability to go and have a child and still come back to your employment. 500Startups is a great example of that. They have a great parental leave policy, which also includes paternity leave, notjust maternity. The CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, actually was in a position in leadership when she had childrenand she was able to set company policy to allow for six months of maternity leave and paternity leave. There arepeople who are very conscious of this, but the company’s philosophy needs to support that, the leader’s philosophyneed to support that, and there’s still a lot of work to be done.What’s up next for Women 2.0?We have three goals. One is that we feel pretty strongly that this isn’t just a women’s issue. Men are 50 per cent ofthe population, so it’s a requirement that they support us in this effort. We’d like to find ways to bring them morecomfortably into this whole conversation and into this process.Two, I think it’s really important for us to communicate the actual benefits of equality, diversity and inclusion for acompany, as opposed to just “doing the right thing” argument. No, it’s not only the right thing, but the company’sbottom line, performance and dynamics will be affected. That’s also important for men to understand. Yes, itabsolutely is the right thing to do and we support that, but we have to understand it’s also going to be a reallypositive benefit for the company.Lastly, we function as a for-profit, for-good company. We always have and we’re going be going out for a B Corpstatus at the end of this year. We really want to be a champion for that model, and say that it’s ok for us to have a2/3scalable, revenue-generating, sustainable business model, that is something we all feel passionate about and fromour mission standpoint it’s really important. That’s a structural framework that we really want to support, and we’ll bedoing that in the next year or so.♣♣♣This Q&A was done during the Collision conference in New Orleans, 2-4 May 2017.The post gives the views of the interviewee, not the position of LSE Business Review or of the London Schoolof Economics and Political Science.Before commenting, please read our Comment Policy.Copyright © 2015 London School of Economics3/3

Kate Brodock: ‘Some Silicon Valley firms are leaders in parental leave’

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

LSE Research Online