To succeed, women need strong networks. This platform wants to help build them.

The news about women in tech – and women in business in general – were not the best in recent weeks: Women in tech opened up about the persisting culture of harassment; according to a UK study, men feel distracted by women in the workplace (just to make clear: not because of any actions these women take); and in Germany, female executives still make less money but do more household chores when they come home from work. Welcome to 2017!

So what can we do? I tried to find an answer to this question talking to Natasha Birnbaum a couple of weeks ago. Nathasha is part of the founding team of Mogul, a platform that wants to help women all over the world to build their network, share information and exchange knowledge.

It's all about learning from each other – to one day have the same opportunities as men.

I talked to her about the importance for women to build a network and how Mogul wants to help with creating more equality in the business world.

How do you see the role of women in business?

I was part of the founding team of Mogul and had collaborated with every person on the founding team in the past.

What we were realizing was that women didn't have that much of a voice. They weren't really participating in society to the same extent that men were, they didn't have as much access to opportunities or to education around the world.

When you look at content sharing platforms like Reddit, they have 90 percent male users; Wikipedia has 91 percent male editors. Women's voices were not being heard. We were really looking at ways to increase women's share of voice, their access to educational and economic opportunities. The idea behind it was really to democratize media, to make something accessible to women all around the world where they could upload any kind of content: articles, jobs, stories, videos, products. And then you could see what was trending across women's issues, women's stories globally.

Our CEO taught herself how to code and built the very first version: it was super simple, you could just upload something and share it with women. Obviously, it now looks very different and is a lot more polished, but it's still the same initial concept: The idea is to empower women through the information access and for them to be able to connect to other women.

Why is that so important?

What you keep seeing is women are not connecting with each other, they are not sharing their experiences with each other. If you could enable that transaction and exchange, you can then help them grow and become really powerful leaders.

Aside from that, if you can help companies tap into this, and source top female talent through it. You can then increase diversity and inclusion in the workplace all the while helping those companies with employer branding, and helping them realize how to appeal more to women and change their workplace to appeal more to women.

Do you think that companies are appealing to women, especially in the tech scene, which is still very male-dominated and male-focused?

Obviously it's extremely male-focused, especially in top leadership positions. If you look at companies that are founded by women, you see much larger representation of women through all ranks. There is definitely a lot of work that needs to be done but I think at least in the US, there is a lot of attention on this. They are starting to change things a lot and create more opportunities for women. 

Still, it's not easy and things are changing slowly. If you could give one piece of advice to women who are not sure how to advance, what would it be?

Our entire founding team always looked up to certain leaders and tried to connect with them. What we all at Mogul try to encourage you is to contact people you admire and ask them to collaborate on something with them. Whenever you look at people who are super busy, who are powerful, who are in leadership positions, they are always working on tons of projects, so undoubtedly they have something you can help them with.

Through that collaboration, you wind up learning a ton and then they wind up becoming really invested in you. A ton of women that we collaborated with in the past became investors in Mogul or our advisors. Creating those connections is super important and that's one thing that Mogul really enables women to do, because we have so many influencers on the platform, powerful business leaders like Kelly Osbourne, Rebecca Minkoff, Katie Couric and Chelsea Clinton. So you can really begin to connect with them, ask them, solicit them for advice, reach out to as many people as possible and then from there, you continue to build your network.

How important is it for women to have a network? I feel that women have their natural networks, but it’s still more difficult for them to move up the ladder because women are still not in the room where it happens.

Absolutely. That's why it's important to have a platform where anyone can reach out to anyone else, because how are you going to get into a closed-off room? Just knock on the door and say, “hi, here I am?” In a way, a tech-enabled platform is helping advance that change; and being able to create those authentic connections virtually is really important.

Do you think we'll see a lot of things changing in the next 5 to 10 years?

If you look at the current rate of change, they say it'll take until 2085 for women to reach parity in the workplace. That being said, I think there are a lot of companies that are women-focused, there is more and more awareness around it, you have places like us and we help accelerate the change so it hopefully doesn't take until 2085...

It's obviously not only one thing that's going to make the change. And it's important to realize that and it's important for everyone to participate in it, to connect with younger talent. Everyone on our team tries to encourage any young talent that we see or anyone that asks us for advice to connect with older people that they admire, learn from them, learn from that diversity of thought. And obviously there are learnings you can get on both ends, there's reverse-mentorship as well. And that's what's going to create all that change.