All right. Well, let's go ahead and get started. I am super excited to talk to you guys today about female leadership in tech. I am Nancy Stanton.I'm the Chief commercial Officer of Plansource and I've been in uh the technology, been on executive teams and technology companies for more than 15 years. Um first in product and later in marketing right now, I lead marketing and partnerships for a benefits technology company owned by vista equity partners. What we're gonna do in the short amount of time that we have is we're gonna talk about business benefits from females in leadership challenges for women in leadership, five hurtful habits we should lose and five awesome habits we should adopt. So let's get started with business benefits from females and leadership. So first, it's obviously there are differences in the genders and no gender is better or superior than the other. But a female executive is gonna bring a different approach to any situation compared to that of a male's uh approach. Not better, just different, a counterbalance of sorts.

It's more of an, it's not an either or it's more of an and, and so for this talk was I reached out to male and female leaders across a variety of different tech companies and asked them what unique qualities females typically bring to the table. And he here is the response. So the top three things that were mentioned were empathy, relationships and collaboration. And then there were other consistent themes as well, resilience, purpose, listening and communication, skills, and planning and organization skills. But how does this benefit businesses?

Well, let's hear from some of the the male leaders that I talked to. So about empathy. This is helpful for seeing the other perspective when there is disagreement or negotiation and progress and also helpful for dealing with a team member with performance issues or personal challenges.

Also, females tend to be more thoughtful about thinking through the impact and perception of a company's actions. And so they're, they're adept at thinking through human reactions, political implications and this is needed and makes for more successful companies. And the third quote I wanted to share with you is from an SVP of engineering. And he said female executives in tech have a more authentic leadership style. The authenticity comes through superior relationship, building and communication. They're open, engaging and willing to have a dialogue about any subject matter without their request of favors. And so these are important words and they bring a lot of value, but it's also telling what words are missing from this list. One notable word that's missing is risk taking a female chief of staff told me that women leaders tend to choose perfection over bravery and are hesitant to take chances. Confidence was also missing are more likely to have self limiting thought. And po and we're not great self promoters.

One head of engineering told me that he doesn't see his female colleagues taking credit for their work. And a Chief people officer told me that female executives tend to undersell themselves. Well, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the specific challenges that women face in leadership thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of female CEO S in the Fortune 500. So the first female CEO was 1972 that was Katherine Graham of the Washington Post. Then there were two, then there were three in the eighties and in 1997 Jill Bard became CEO of Mattel and it made, it was big news. I remember where I was because we talked about it um in my MB A class at Carnegie Mellon. And I remember thinking this is going to change as my generation um kind of takes charge. And so today we have 38 female CEO S and women are running companies like General Motors Northrop Grumman and Oracle. So it's been a ton of progress, but it's still only 8%. And when I was sitting there in that cmu class, I thought it would have been more. But there are a lot of factors. The average age of a CEO in the Fortune 500 is 58. So this is a lagging metric and is certainly going to continue to increase.

But secondly, women are dropping out of the career world and opting out of leadership and those are some of the challenges and we're going to dig into that here. So first, I want to acknowledge that when our grandmothers were growing up, there were different expectations for what they would be and what they would become if they were going to have a career at all, they were thinking of an admin role, nursing or education, which are great careers for women.

Women are great at those things. Um But now we know that we can do anything, we can be a pilot, an engineer, a CEO, there's really no limit to what women can be. So that has changed and take a look at Joan from Mad Men. If you watch that television series, it takes place in the sixties and it's filled with Martini lunches, gender stereotypes and accepted workplace, sexual harassment. Well, we've come a long way and sexual harassment is no longer tolerated now, it still happens on occasion. Um And we've all seen it and I just work in an environment that's accepting that um you wanna take action because there are tons of tech companies seeking out female talent and the market is super hot. Um So there's no reason to accept or tolerate that type of behavior anymore. The biggest challenge that women face today is this poll between family and career and women feel like they have to choose but do they and should they have to choose? I wanna dig into this in a little bit more detail. I do feel like it. That's an ago agonizing choice for anyone to have to make and nobody who makes it feels like they are confident in that choice. So let's talk about that in a little more detail. I feel like COVID has provided much needed flexibility and it actually helped in a way. Now we've all heard about how horrible COVID has been for working mothers. It's been impossible for some depending on the age of their kids, what industry they're in, what resources they had available.

But for those of us in tech, it's done a couple of interesting things. It's changed the environment to be more results focused, focus on facetime. It's also made it OK to be a parent. So to kind of not talk about the fact that I was mom around male executives because I just didn't want them to think of me differently. What do you, what do I think? Now? I think they're impressed that I can do what I do at work and also be a parent. So I'm not embarrassed when my daughter's little head pops into my video. Plus she's super cute. So it's, it's all of a sudden it's become ok to be a parent and people and companies and leaders understand that we're all struggling with balancing personal and work, which is what it's always been. It's just been accentuated by COVID. The other thing that COVID did was um to be a leader, it was pretty much required you had to be willing and able to travel and this is a hardship on families, um both moms and dads, but moms who tend to have more of the childcare duties, it tends to create even more hardship for them.

And so women can opt out of leadership roles because of the travel. Well, we just went an entire year without getting on planes to our partners and customers and we need to do that. But I, as we ramp up travel again, we should think about if it's really truly essential and if we are doing less of it, it will open things up and make it more likely that your women won't opt out of leadership roles or roles that require travel like sales if they have more flexibility.

And that's what I think COVID has done for us. So, back to this challenge, what I hope to do is show women where I work that you can do this, you can have a career and have a family without sacrificing your personal well being or sacrificing your family completely. Um Now it's messy, it's complicated. You need a good support structure and there are sacrifices, but it can be done. And I think companies can do a lot to help us with some of these challenges that we're facing. A big one is maternity leave. So there's a lot of practical challenges with maternity leave for the company. They've got to figure out who's gonna do your work while you're gone. They've got to hold your spot. They don't know for sure if you're coming back. That's a bit of a challenge, especially for smaller companies for the female who's about to go on leave. There's a lot of stress involved with the maternity leave and just being pregnant in general. When do I announce, am I going to look different? Are people gonna take me seriously? Am I still gonna get the promotion or assignment that I was hoping for? Will I be able to leave my child every morning?

Like these are agonizing things that the females are going through when they're thinking about and planning for their maternity leave. And I wanted to share this story. So when I went on maternity leave with my first child, I went for an unpaid leave. We didn't have paid 12 weeks, 12 weeks. It was very challenging for me. Much harder than work to um take care of a newborn. So when I got pregnant again with my second same company, I was a vice president at the time and I thought maybe I don't need all 12 weeks, maybe I can come back sooner because I'm in a leadership position. So I went and talked to the CEO and I said, do you want me to try to trim back my maternity leave? Since I'm a vice president? Now, there's a lot going on in the company. And he said, absolutely not, that time is worth way more to you than it is to us. And I hope you stay here for another 10 years, hopefully longer. Take as much time as you need. And I think what this emphasizes that we should take a long term view of our employees. And when we think about females taking a maternity leave, it's weeks and hopefully they stay with you for years. There are other benefits to maternity leaves too.

When women say they're, they're gonna be having a maternity leave. The first thing you can do is have them start working on their maternity leave plan. It's a productive exercise and people on their team will get cross trained on what she's doing. There'll be opportunities for other people to learn new things and figure out what it is that, that she does. And then when she comes back, she'll be loyal, focused, efficient and results oriented. She's not going to be taking long lunches and chatting at the water cooler. She's gonna get her job done because she knows she only has a few hours in the evening to, to take care of her small child. So there's a lot of different ways to think about maternity leave. And one thing that I feel really passionate about is the paid maternity leave. So I've never had a paid maternity leave. None of the companies I've worked for have offered it and it was OK for me. I waited till later. I was more established when I had kids. So I just planned for it. But for women throughout our organizations, many companies still you don't have a paid maternity leave. And this is very stressful and it's on the very foundation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And this is something that we need to make sure companies are offering and many companies even in tech are still not offering this foundational thing, which will make it much easier for women to leave and come back as gracefully as possible.

The other myth that I feel is damaging to women is this idea that you can't come back after taking time off, not the maternity leave. But let's say you took a couple years off to take care of your Children or three years off. Even this idea that you can never come back. And executive recruiters questioning whether you would be loyal um because you've taken time to, to take care of your kids isn't really rational when you think about the fact that we know people have to ramp up when they start a job we're supposed to hire for talent. This is the same talented person. Anyone you hire from another industry or even another company is gonna have a six month ramp up. That's pretty normal. So, is this person? So I want to encourage companies and leaders and even females to consider hiring people back who've taken a little bit of time off. And I think that will help women feel comfortable coming back into the workforce. All right. So what are some things we can do for ourselves? There's five hurtful habits we need to lose and I'll go over these quickly apologizing constantly. So I asked male and female leaders, what are women doing to shoot themselves in the foot? This was number one.

So what are we so sorry for, we're sorry for being too aggressive, not aggressive enough, eating a day off. Um Asking for help. We're sorry for all sorts of things. Now, if you've really done something you need to apologize for, that's fine. But this is not what I'm talking about. Secondly, and kind of related, we tend to diminish our own credibility. We say things like I'm not the expert, but I really don't know how it works, but this is how we make our points. Um This is gonna be a dumb idea, but let me go ahead and share it with you. I don't know why we do this. Um, n nobody knows if their idea is a good idea or not, but we're the only ones saying these things that take away our credibility. All right. So third habit to lose is hiding or minimizing your feminine qualities. So we don't need to act like a man dress like a man. Pretend we like sports if we don't, I mean, if you do love sports, that's awesome. But we can be who we are and just be authentic. And I used to not talk about feminine things in front of males, but I don't do that anymore. You can wear nail polish and you can be, you know who you are. I think that's, that's fine. And we need to stop minimizing those qualities about ourselves, hurtful habit.

Number four, this one is really important, having no boundaries or prioritizing yourself. Last um this is gonna mean different things to different people. So for me, prioritizing myself means getting a workout every day. Having no boundaries means not answering the phone during that workout and not traveling on my kids' birthdays or the first day of school. So you have to figure out what this means for you. The other thing you need to do is think about what tasks and committees and extra things you take on at work. Because if you take on a lot of extra things for the team or department don't contribute to the bottom line. First of all time is your most precious resource. You don't really have time for that probably. And secondly, it might important for you to be focused on for your career for the company's success maybe someone else can be on those committees and advisory boards and that kind of thing and hurtful habit. Number five is to carry bitterness with you. So, we've all seen awful things that have been said or done to women, um, in the workplace or maybe things have been done for yourself, but carrying bitterness is not actually going to help you. It's gonna make you not very fun to be around.

And, um, also, it's like carrying a back uh in a, a brick in your backpack on a long hike. It's just gonna slow you down and pull you back. All right. So what five awesome habits can we adopt that will help us? So, first of all, we want to support and mentor other women. I've seen so many women who are judgmental of other women and the choices that they've made and these are very difficult choices. So we should support and mentor each other. Um Regardless of the choices, whether people choose to stay home or be in the workforce, go for the promotion or not. Why are we so hard on each other? We're much harder on our female colleagues sometimes than our male colleagues. And this is kind of interesting. Lots of people mentioned that women look and feel like they're competing against each other assuming there's only room for one female leader and that's just not the case. So we need to as women look for mentors for ourselves, male, both male and female. And then even if you don't have time to officially be a mentor, I think it's great to um support and be kind to other women and just include them and support them in the workforce. Be your authentic self. Kind of talked about this already with not hiding your feminine qualities. This is really important. This is a really big one, be confident and speak up. So um we tend to get talked over in meetings and we, we need to have a voice.

We need to be showing value so you can try subtle ways of getting, getting to speak like clearing your throat. But if that doesn't work, you might wanna try being more direct and saying I'm not comfortable interrupting, but I have something to add and men acknowledge that this happens and they don't mean to, they know it's happening. They're trying not to, but we need to be more direct and make sure that our voice is heard. Yeah, this is important, understand and articulate your value. So there's so much that's been said about the gender pay gap, but we own a little bit of this. Hiring. Managers are saying that when they hire men at the time of hiring and every year at the performance review, they're negotiating and women are typically not, not all the time, but they're not as comfortable negotiating. Um This female uh sales leader said that her female sales reps are actually great at negotiating business contracts, but they have no idea and are completely unprepared for negotiating their own pay. We need to get comfortable talking about money and negotiating our compensation bridging on this to the last one. We also need to proactively plan and manage our careers.

So a lot of women think, well, if I'm just doing the right things, I'll get noticed if I'm doing a good job, I stay focused and that's good and true. But what our male colleagues are doing is they're thinking about what experiences do I need to get to get here eventually? And so do I need m and a experience? Do I need to know how to pitch to investors? Do I need PNL experience in order to get where I want to go? And so they're planning it, they're planning it, they're talking and coordinating with their boss. They're switching companies if that's what they need to do to hit their career goals and we're taking a more passive approach. All right. So we are about out of time and thank you guys so much for joining.