Transcript, E140: What one person can do

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For more on this episode of?Hello Monday,?check out this article on my conversation with Shelley and Gina ,?and leave your thoughts in the comments.

This episode of Hello Monday, "What One Person Can Do," first released on December 13, 2021.

Jessi Hempel: From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel and this is Hello Monday.

Several years ago, Shelley Zalis got an invitation. Shelley was a proven entrepreneur. She had built an online research company and she had sold it and this invitation was to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.?

Shelley Zalis: My invitation was as follows: "We want you to come to the World Economic Forum, but you might not feel welcome." That was my invitation.

Jessi Hempel: Now, why wouldn't she feel welcome? Well, that was the World Economic Forum acknowledging what everyone knew, Davos, as it's often called, it can be a boy's club, big time.

Shelley Zalis: And so (laughs) of course, I-

Jessi Hempel: (laughs)

Shelley Zalis: ... you know, had a choice. Don't go, 'cause that's not a very welcoming invitation, or do what I said, which was, "Great, I'll come." And I remember calling my girlfriend, who was the Chief Operating Officer of Bloomberg, and her name was Jacki Kelley. I said, "Jacki, you've gotta come with me to the World Economic Forum because I don't wanna go by myself."

Jessi Hempel: Today's episode is about the power one person has to make a difference. There's so much wrong with the world, some much that each of us wants to be different and sometimes those problems, like institutionalized sexism and racism and global warming and hunger, to name just a few, they are overwhelming. I feel powerless even thinking about it. So today, I bring you two stories from guests who decided to do something and then each of them did. We're gonna hear from Gina Glantz , who is a veteran political strategist. Gina got fed up that there were never any women on stages at the conferences she attended, so she came up with a quick and practical approach to change that and it's working.?

Jessi Hempel: But before we get to Gina, let's go back to Shelley because Shelley also was sick and tired of being the only women in the room. Davos is a particularly exclusive room. Or rather, a series of rooms behind a number of security barriers near the very top of the mountain, the very highest town in all of Europe.?

Shelley Zalis: So the World Economic Forum takes place in a small, little town called Davos, which is in Switzerland and it is a tiny, little city and world leaders go. So, it's invitation only and it is for the presidents of countries and the CEOs of Fortune 500 organizations. Invitation only and, um, to be invited, you, A, have to be either the president of a country or the CEO of Fortune 500 and the top five people of Fortune 500.?

Jessi Hempel: Right.?

Shelley Zalis: And so, who is the president of a country? A man.

Jessi Hempel: Right.

Shelley Zalis: And who is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company? A man. And who is the top five people in Fortune 500? A man, a man, a man, a man and a man. And what color is their skin? White, white, white, white, white. So when you show up in Davos, it's all white men.?

Jessi Hempel: I've attended Davos a couple of times as a journalist. And here's something else that's important to understand, Davos sets the agenda for business, culture and politics for the year. Full stop. No matter how you feel about it or even whether you knew this before, the ideas that you read in magazines, the stories you see on TV, even the political candidates that rise to power, these ideas all get set at this very small conference by a singular group of people gathering in basically the middle of nowhere. So when Shelley accepted this invitation, she also decided to take it upon herself to make Davos friendlier to women. She set up her own event just outside the conference gates and she called it The Equality Lounge.

Shelley Zalis: So when I came, I called my lounge “The Place for The 18%” because it was less than 18% women at Davos, so I called it “The Equality Lounge, The Place for the 18%”...

Jessi Hempel: I love that. I love that.

Shelley Zalis: ...So year one, I had a little hole in the wall thinking no one was gonna show up except Jacki and me, that both of us were gonna be sitting there. And I said, "Okay, we'll have a good time. We'll be in Switzerland, in, you know, a gorgeous place. Whatever." And lo and behold, everyone would come and peek in like, "What's this Equality Lounge?" and- and you know what? We were a little popular. You know, we got a little, you know, curiosity factor and year one was interesting.

Jessi Hempel: Shelley doubled her space in year two, she quadrupled it in year three. And then in her fourth year at Davos, Shelley brought 50 women to her lounge and something curious happened.?

Shelley Zalis: White badges started showing up.

Jessi Hempel: Those people with the white badges, they get to go to the main event. That main event is called Congress. Now, lots of other people come to Davos, lots of people who will never have white badges and never go to Congress, they just come to take meetings with attendees and do other business. These were the people who showed up at The Equality Lounge at first, but over time, it's become its own center of power. The white badges have shown up.

Shelley Zalis: The most important thing that I did, which I do at every place I host Equality Lounges, so I create pop up spaces called Equality Lounges at every major conference around the world; from CES to the World Economic Forum. And everywhere I go, I make sure I host the lounges in places that are non-badged 'cause I never wanna create a space that people can't attend, that is very important to me, so I will always hold it in a space that anyone is welcome period. Now, six years later, we are the destination for equality, everyone attends, we are standing room only, we have the best content, by the way, where Congress wants us to broadcast inside of Congress from a hole in the wall to a two story glass house.

We are not only hosting the most important conversations, defining and shaping policy around the globe, but it truly is the space where action happens, where we are closing the gaps, we are truly changing the equation, we are creating this space where women are visible, women are heard. We are creating the changes that are happening around the world, country by country and- and where the most important conversations truly are happening. They are happening in The Equality Lounge, more so than in Congress.

Jessi Hempel: Shelley turned a space design for equality into the room where it happens. She's created a place where everyone wants to be and her floor belongs to people who might never make it in to that main room, Congress, let alone on stage. I wanted to know what gave her the chutzpah basically, what made her think she could make a difference?

?Shelley Zalis: You know, Jessi, I just- I- I decided at this stage in my life, and this is why I love Gina, is I'm not gonna wait and watch, I am gonna create because if it's not gonna happen, when's it gonna happen? So if we don't start, it's not going to.?

Jessi Hempel: That was Shelley Zalis. She's CEO of The Female Quotient and her story, it's a lot like that of my second guest, Gina Glantz. Gina's a friend. She founded GenderAvenger . Gina's inspiration came from frustration, specifically she was fed up with an event held at Harvard. Here's her story.?

Gina Glantz: Every four years, the Kennedy School has a recap of the presidential race and they bring in the leadership of the campaigns and the press and they have an all day session. And that night, the cul- culminating event is at the Kennedy School Forum, mini Davos. (laughs) It's where the presidents of countries, where CEOs, where, you know, major figures, uh, around the world come and speak to students. Well, in 2012, I looked up on stage and there were five white men. We're talking about after the reelection of Barack Obama. Well, this sent me around the bend, so I went on my personal Facebook page and said-

Jessi Hempel: (laughs)

Gina Glantz: ... "I'm skipping the quadrennial Presidential Review, I'm tired of all white men all the time. You know, where's Qwen Ifill? Where's Stephanie Cutter? Where's Beth Myers?" All of whom I had seen during the day. And (laughs) I got an extraordinary response; loads of likes, many comments. Well, that night, there was a blackout and they had to cancel.

Jessi Hempel: (laughs)?

Gina Glantz: So the next morning, I went back on my Facebook page and I said, "God heard our plaintive cry, she turned off the lights." Well, hundreds of likes, dozens of comments, including some from individuals who were important to the Kennedy School; Hilary Clinton's chief of staff, I mean, a variety of people. So I received an email rebuking me, saying, "How could I do this?" and I wrote back and said, "It was easy. There were five white men on stage." I began to talk about it with young women whom I knew and, you know, was this just politics? And what I discovered was it was commonplace and the young women who I talked to were women of all ages, said the same thing, "If we speak up, we are dismissed, we are disparaged and we're not invited back to whatever the event is that we have complained about."

And so, you know, this really began not only to annoy me, but make me more aware as I looked at, back in those days, ads for conferences. I remember one for The Wall Street Journal, 17 men and not one woman to be featured on its first Wall Street Journal, you know, Techno Conference. And then, you know, I received an anthology about politics, 21 authors, 20 men, so, you know, I turned my annoyance into action.?

Jessi Hempel: I've known Gina's story for a long time and every time I hear it, I'm stunned. Public stages being monopolized by white male voices has been a problem for as long as there have been public stages. I wanted to understand what made Gina think that at this stage of the game something new could be done about it.

Gina Glantz: In part, it was because I was post-ambition. I didn't care who I would offend by going after the individuals who have some influence over my future potentially. And so, being able to find a platform to call out the lack of women on stages at major events or, you know, on lists, um, was easy because I was no longer taking any risk, in my view, by doing it.?

Jessi Hempel: I love the idea of being post-ambition. Gina had achieved a ton by this point, so if she pissed off the wrong people, it wouldn't really harm her and that made her powerful in a way that she thought we lost sight of.

Gina Glantz: You know, I lived through the 100,000 people signing petitions and all those things to make change and I had a sense that we lost the understanding of what an individual could do. And if I could create both awareness and tools for individuals to use, uh, to provoke a response and that it was backed by a community with aligned values that was perceived to be powerful, so that if someone sent a Tweet and it had the Gender Avenger hashtag and made a point about a conference, that there would be a sense by the conference organizers that maybe they should pay attention. And once that attention was paid and that individual who started it saw that they could have an impact, it just gave them a sense of accomplishment, which I thought was really important.?

Jessi Hempel: Not only was it important, it worked so well Gina managed to get giant tech conferences to confront and reformat the shamefully unbalanced slate of speakers they were offering. She has this great story about how she did this at a huge annual event conference in Las Vegas called the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. Here, I'll let her tell it.?

Gina Glantz: It was back in 2018 when CES had six men as their keynote speakers. And just as Gender Avenger had done for over a year- over two years, we, you know, sent out our blast and said, you know, "CES has no women on the main stage," and the response came not only from our fairly small community, but it came from, uh, CMOs from major organizations, from Twitter, from JP Morgan, from, uh, all sorts of places that CES was interested in. And so, it began on Twitter where I think actually, uh, the CMO from JP Morgan wrote and said, "I'm sitting here with my napkin writing down the names of six women who could have been on stage." And at that time, it garnered some press and Fast Company started writing about it. And I wrote an op-ed about the importance of women on stage, well beyond CES, but what it means to the perception of power. That is how we often measure power in this country is a public presence and that meant presence on stage.

The wonderful part about this story, as you know, Jessi, is that a year later, they were awarded a gold stamp of approval from GenderAvenger. They had reset their main stage speakers to include women and women of color and it began with just not 1,000 tweets, it began with maybe 50.

Jessi Hempel: We're gonna take a quick break here. When we come back, we'll hear how these two individual women joined forced to make an even bigger impact.

Jessi Hempel: And we're back. My guests today are Shelley Zalis and Gina Glantz. Shelley and Gina are both very focused on the importance of presence for women and people of color. I was curious about why getting these voices on stage and in public specifically felt so important. Here's Gina to start us off.

Gina Glantz: When you are on stage, you are perceived as powerful. So if you look up at a stage and it's all men, that's where the power lies. Equality comes from being an equal in the eyes of the beholder and stages are a place most often, whether it's at Davos or it's at CES or it's at The Wall Street Journal Conference, where people make those assessments. It's also how you feel as an individual when you're on stage. You recognize that you have the qualities that make you a leader because you're on stage speaking to an audience that's listening to you because of your presence.

Shelley Zalis: It's making the invisible visible and visibility, you know, obviously leads to notability. Notability leads to power. And power then leads to leadership. And, you know, all of these things, it's funny because when you look at CES, because of Gina's, you know, whole concept of Gender Avenger and calling out, it's not that these conferences are trying to not have women on stages, it's just making people aware, it's just making people aware. And so once we're making people aware, then they have the choice of activating change. And so once we made CES aware, you know what they did? They called us (laughs) and that's how we got together. And- and now, we are CES' equality experts. We have 8,500 topic experts, who, by the way, happen to be women across technology. We were able to fill the gap and they understood that.?

Jessi Hempel: Well, wh- what I love about what you just said there was this idea that awareness is so critical and it is very easy, it's too easy, to point fingers, to say, "Uh, you know, they're bad. It's- The problem is them and they're bad," but the things about institutionalized sexism is it exists within all of us and it something that we are all working to raise awareness around. And when we make the mistake of othering someone, pointing them out and pointing to them as bad, really, what that allows us to do is step back and feel momentarily good about ourselves, but it does nothing to solve any problem and both of your organizations really go into this with a collaborative, problem solving mindset. Let's use awareness to drive change.

Jessi Hempel: This collective commitment to raising awareness, that's the reason that Gina and Shelley are both with me for this episode. This past year, they joined forces, combining their efforts in service to greater change. They discovered their missions were very much aligned, centered around action. It's a way of making their tools more powerful; tools like Gender Avenger Tally. Now, this is one of my favorites. It's so darn simple. And like everything else these women produce, it's designed to raise awareness. It's an app that lets you track when people are speaking and then share that information.

Gina Glantz: What the Tally does, is, as you said, it puts in the hands of the individual the opportunity to, uh, demonstrate concern over what they are seeing or reading. And it's on all platforms, it's really simple to use. It has two features. One is called Who's Present, which means you can look up at a stage and you can put in the number of men, the number of women, the number of women of color, the number of non-binary individuals and the hashtag, if there is one, for what you are looking at, uh, and the name of the event and you can put in a photo or it will generate a pie chart. And that pie chart will show the balance. And (laughs) if, in fact, there are 50%, uh, women, and of the whole group there are a minimum of 15% women of color, then it pops up and says, you know, "The present and future is bright." However, if you have between 40 and 50% and, you know, few, if any, women of color, it might say, "Cloudy with a chance of patriarchy."

Jessi Hempel: (laughs)

Gina Glantz: Um, it might say (laughs), "Overcast without enough women of color." But in each case, it shows a chart and a quick, you know, identifying title that tells you what the noted organization, uh, is doing in terms of bringing women into the public dialogue. You can then instantly post it to Twitter, to Facebook. You can downlo- download it for Instagram and to email it and the feature that I think is really important is you can send it anonymously. So if you happen to work for the organization, who you've just created a Tally about, you can hit the anonymous button, it will go to someone at Gender Avenger who'll make sure it's a real event, who'll make sure it's a real hashtag and then Gender Avenger will post it. And that was something we added, which I thought was really important, because it then allowed individuals who were not post-ambition (laughs) to still make a statement.

Gina Glantz: So, uh, you can use the Who's Present feature or you can use the Who's Talking. So if you are in a meeting, and this can often happen, there might be pretty good gender balance, but who is dominating the conversation? Who's actually making the decisions? So you can go into the Tally and you can, you know, you hit whether a dude or not a dude is speaking and the tally will then, again, create a pie chart that will show you the balance of the men who are speaking and the women who are speaking and the women of color who are speaking.

Now, the unique part of this, Jessi, is an outcome we didn't expect, which is women are using this in their, you know, works or on their Zoom screens, taking the results and quietly sometimes bringing it to the attention of the leadership. And if- this happened in one major foundation where someone did it and I know that the leadership of that foundation, of course, was caught off guard because they thought of themselves as naturally, you know, uh, concerned about and- and worry about and acted on gender equality and they took it upon themselves to look at their meetings, the structure of their meetings, how they could change it. So one can actually help move the culture of an organization because you have data to show what happened in real time.

Jessi Hempel: That was Gina Glantz and Shelley Zalis. You can visit them online at genderavenger.com and thefemalequotient.com. And I wanna remind you of why I asked Shelley and Gina to come on the show.

Shelley Zalis: I always ask myself, um, "What can I do?" and the answer's always, "Do something. Be better. Be bold. Be brave. Be fearless and try. Because if you don't, you'll never know."

Jessi Hempel: Look, look at what each of them has done. Listening to this conversation, I wanna turn the question back to you. What matters to you? What change do you feel you want to see urgently? What are you doing about it? As our year wraps up, I'm taking stock personally. These days, I'm thinking about climate change, I'm thinking about social equality. I'm hoping as the holidays approach that my neighbors aren't hungry. Gina's story and Shelley's story, they're inspirations to me, as I hope they are to you. If you're a person with any resources, time, money, relationships, you can do something. It's incumbent upon you to try.

This week on Office Hours, we're gonna talk about it. We won't all reform big orgs like Davos, but there's something good we can do for ourselves and our communities. Come up with one thing, just one, and we'll share them when we go live from the LinkedIn News page, Wednesday at 3:00 PM Eastern.

And as always, if you liked the show, please rate and review us. It helps us so much. Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn.

The show was produced by Sarah Storm with help from Taisha Henry. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is Head of Original Audio and Video. Dave Pond is our Technical Director. Michaela Greer and Victoria Taylor are committed to making change. Our music was composed just for us by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Dan Roth is the Editor and Chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jessie Hempel. We're back next Monday. Thanks for listening.

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