Diversity Is the Fuel

During last month’s JPM Healthcare Conference, Flagship Pioneering hosted a panel on the power of diverse boards, featuring three extraordinary women with substantial board experience. I was especially struck by these words from Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold , a board member of Flagship-founded Generate:Biomedicines .

“If everybody thinks the same, that's a great way to go extinct. Diversity is the fuel that drives solutions, drives innovation. It could be diversity of experiences, but that often comes with having a different gender or a different color. When the board is diverse, solutions just pop up.”

As we look towards the 9th International Day of Women & Girls in Science, we celebrate the women in Flagship’s ecosystem and recommit to advancing efforts that add to their ranks. This is both the right thing to do and in our own best interest. Former Gates Foundation CEO and 辉瑞 board member Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann made this point on our JPM panel:

“There’s a lot of diverse talent. This isn’t a box ticking exercise, and it isn’t to seem like a good company. It’s because you want great voices in the boardroom to drive where your company is going and your values.”

If we’re to recruit the best board members – and scientists, entrepreneurs, and others essential to successful companies – we need to make bigger leaps, to propel ourselves to look far beyond familiar talent pools.

That we’re making progress here is largely due to Flagship women and men committed to going the extra mile to expand our networks –?people like JPM panelist Cynthia Patton , General Counsel for Flagship-founded Tessera Therapeutics , who underscored how “firsts” and “onlys” can play a crucial role in diversity efforts.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a time that I wasn’t either the first woman or the first African American in whatever setting I was in,” she observed. “My mentality is always to ask ‘Who’s not represented in the room? And how do I make sure that I’m helping them get into the room?’” ?

Failure to ask such questions carries a steep price. A 2022 New York Times piece recounts how Paula Hammond Cunningham – a nanotechology pioneer who was the first woman and person of color to head MIT’s chemical engineering department – was not approached about serving on a corporate board until 2019, despite qualifications that made her a natural choice. (I’m proud to say that Professor Hammond, now MIT’s vice provost for faculty, serves on the board of Flagship-founded Sail Biomedicines .)

Watching women scientists and engineers in my own family forge careers in industries dominated by men has challenged my own assumptions and broadened my perspectives. In this time of escalating global threats – a time of polycrisis – we need to take concerted action on the world’s most urgent problems: climate change, disease threats, a near-certain next pandemic. Combating these will require fresh perspectives, bold ideas, and diverse voices. To paraphrase Dr. Arnold, the alternative is extinction.

You can watch the complete panel here: https://www.flagshippioneering.com/stories/the-power-of-diverse-boards ??