My name is Deborah Vere Vicious and I am delighted to be here. I am living in Helsinki Finland after living for 16 years in New York City. And uh it's four pm here.It's a beautiful afternoon and, and I am just so honored to be part of this great movement, seeing all these other talks and whatnot. So I've created a jam packed session full of advice and I want to get to that super quickly because we only have 20 minutes. So I'm gonna share a little bit about myself, my story for a few minutes so that, you know, uh who's here on the other side, please do write uh your questions and comments and suggestions and then I'm gonna share my slides to give you uh uh uh a bit of advice when it comes to proactive leadership, which is what I'm trying to do these days.

So I grew up in Mexico City in a community that discouraged young women from pursuing careers in science. I was told from a very young age that because I was a girl, I shouldn't study math and physics because they were more for boys. And this was unfortunately a pretty typical, uh, thing to do. And, you know, you, I still find many, many households in, you know, more subtle ways than the way I went through it. But that discouraged women from pursuing careers in stem. And so I decided to hide behind everyone's back and I would read stories of physicists and mathematicians and just be incredibly curious about all of this. But I lost my confidence because I was constantly told by my family, by teachers in school, by friends that forget about studying physics. That's not only, you know, for geniuses, but also for, you know, men who can work in that and, and you know, as a woman, you better focus on creating a family and, and whatnot. So uh when it came time to go to college, I started studying philosophy because I was told that it was similar, I would ask questions about the world and the universe, but I wouldn't have the tough math that physics required.

So I lost all that confidence, which is unfortunately not that uncommon. And uh I, when I was in philosophy, I recall that I went to the library and I tried to find out what it was like to study in the US where you could study many subjects at once. I decided to send my applications to be become a transfer student after two years of studying in Mexico. But there was a huge problem. My family didn't have the money to pay for one of these American universities which cost eight times what we were paying in Mexico for a good private education. So I was out of luck and I thought there's no way that I'm going to be able to do it. Luckily BRANDEIS University, a small school in Massachusetts saw my enthusiasm for physics when I wrote my essay and wrote back to me and said, we have a full scholarship that we offer to international students per year. If you tell us more about what you want to do after you study physics and you take all these other tests, we'll consider you for it fast forward. And I was extremely fortunate but also very perseverant. And I won this scholarship. I had never seen the snow.

I said goodbye to my family. They understood that I wanted to take off and do this for myself. I arrived at BRANDEIS in the middle of the winter and I had the courage to take a very generic course, an astronomy class without any math. And I befriended the teaching assistant who was a graduate student in physics from India. His name is Rupe and Rupees. And I became very good friends. And for the first time, Rupees believed in me. He saw the passion in my eyes and he saw how much I wanted to study physics. So one day I told him I just don't want to die without trying. I don't want to die without trying to do physics. So we went to talk to his uh phd advisor. He said, come with me and his advisor said there's someone that did this before you. 20 years before Ed Witten, who I had heard the name is the father of string theory. Clearly a genius in physics had switched from history to physics. So we know what to do with you. I said, but I only have my scholarship for another, you know, for two years. And the total, you know, time to do a physics major takes four years. What am I going to do? So they handed me a book called Div Grad and Curl, which was basically alien language for me at the time, it was calculus in three dimensions.

And they said to me, if in two months at the end of the summer, you're able to master this material will let you skip through the first two years of the physics major. So Rupees decided to devote his entire summer to mentor me and to tutor me so that I could do that. And the reason why I tell the story of rupees is because years later I asked him, you know, it was you who enabled me to make my dream come true of becoming a physicist, but you never let me pay you. I always wanted to compensate you for all the tutoring that you did during that summer. He said to me that when he was growing up in India, in Darjeeling, like the tea, there was an old man that used to uh go up to his town and teach him and his sisters English math and tad the musical instrument. And when they wanted to pay this old man for all that he did for the family, he said no, the only way you could ever pay me back is if you do this with someone else in the world And that's how rupees passed the torch to me.

And my mission in life became to help other women who like myself feel attracted to stem but who for some reason, whether it be financial or social feel that they cannot achieve their dreams. I ended up uh fin finishing my degree at BRANDEIS in both physics and philosophy with highest honors and Suma cum laude. I went back to Mexico and then I applied to pursue my phd and the current Nobel Prize winner at the time, Steve Chu, who was later the Secretary of Energy under Obama's administration, ended up inviting me to pursue my phd with him at Stanford. And six years later, I became the first Mexican woman to finish her phd in physics at Stanford. And I say this and I say this very quickly, but it was actually a very demanding and an extremely challenging path for me. And that's why now I dedicate a lot of my time to uh create initiatives and workshops and help other women who like myself have reached up to a potential in their career, but who want to sort of break uh the glass ceiling and take it to the next level. And now that I share a little bit of my story and I know I did it very quickly.

I'm going to open my slides so that I can share with you a bit about how I teach women today who are in stem careers in technology engineering, any scientific research, et cetera, mathematics and who have been in the workforce for say 4 to 5 years. But then, you know, they start looking around and they see that overall the statistics are not great. Maybe men in their uh technology company or at the bank they work at have been promoted more speedily than the women that they look up to. Maybe they're seeking mentors that they're not finding very easily. Maybe they feel trapped in what's called the likability trap where women are, are unfortunately sometimes uh feeling or perceived that they have to choose between being perceived as competent in what they do or likable.

Whereas men can be both women, sometimes if they are clearly perceived as competent, then people are not very happy about it and they're not, you know, perceived as likable and women pay a penalty for that. Whereas, you know, men on the other hand, they can act, you know, very kind of uh coldly and not necessarily try to please others or be collegial in their workplace and, you know, being perceived as competent and they're still liked by most of their peers. You can look this up. It's called the likability trap. And it's a study that originated at NYU. So I want to talk a little bit about that and how I use these days proactive leadership to succeed in my career. Today, I am the lead scientist in quantum computing at V TT, which is the largest research center in Finland. But in my past, I have held positions of leadership in Wall Street as a quantitative researcher in at a data science company, as a chief data scientist and in other areas. So I have learned a lot through obstacles and challenges. And now I mentor a lot of uh women who are struggling, who are doing well in their careers, but are struggling to really make it in whatever they defined to make it, whether it is to be uh you know, to uh they aspire to have uh more promotions and have a bigger title, whether they aspire to create their own company, they aspire to make a, a more profitable career to sit in boards of public companies, et cetera, whatever it is that they decide.

So let me start by saying, you know, defining what is proactive uh leadership, it differs from regular leadership in that you, you're not only a leader when, if the opportunity comes, you actually seek that opportunity, you take the initiative all the time, you plan for the future, you make decisions today for how you're going to act in the future.

Whenever a situation arises, you think deeply about the people that you manage or the people that surround you and about yourself and you're constantly striving to create opportunities for you and for others. What does that mean in practice? You know, when I mentor people, I suggest things such as create your own job. Many times women look up uh a job board in whatever field or industry they wanna enter and they're like, oh, well, it doesn't quite, you know, I, I can't quite find the exact definition of a job that I want to do or I'm pretty senior in my career. So I want to find something that really, you know, uses, you know, many of the skills that I have learned, not just my quantitative part, for example. So I tell them most of the jobs in my past 10 or 15 years, I have created myself. When I arrived in Finland, I wrote to the CEO directly, a CEO that manages thousands of people at V TT. And I said, you know, what if I were to work for V TT? This is what I would do. I don't see it advertised out there. You may not need it, but this is what I would want to do.

I said that at a launch and the next week we started conversations about hiring me, you know, start with a concrete action no matter how small it is, you know, it could be pitching yourself to appear as an expert on TV or on a podcast, you know, kind of accumulate that experience that's going to cement your position as an expert.

And I say this because I ended up uh running and leading and hosting a TV show for the Discovery Channel for 11 years. It's called Outrageous Acts of Science and you can look it up and it started for me pitching myself, me and, and others get your university to write an article about your current work. You know, you can always use that and other things to say, hey, I'm an expert in my industry. Share an idea for a project that you have, share it with your colleagues or with your managers, have the courage to step outside of the normal box, so to speak, take a course, ask for a promotion, seize a professional opportunity. None of these things are going to happen just because you sit and wait, you have to be proactive about leading the future and the steps to get there that you want for your career, how to overcome this likability trap that I was telling before, you know, don't let I, I think this uh you know, happens in a lot of uh women's careers, especially in the beginning years, letting your behavior there be driven by whether you're liked or not.

It happened to me when I started in Wall Street. Unfortunately, I very much wanted to be liked because I had just entered a different industry coming from academia and I said yes, too much. And I lent my expertise to everybody who asked. And then when it came time at the end of that year for promotions, I was very sad to realize that a lot of the people I had helped, many of the men had taken credit for some of my work or simply had advanced more because they had enrolled everybody in helping them advance their projects.

They had accumulated, you know, a list uh of projects and accomplishments for the year whereas I didn't. And so I learned that I should say no more often and I had to balance this, you know, the act of being helpful and likable with the one of being perceived as a leader and managing my own career. And so I very much strive to, to show this uh uh to teach this to people how to balance this. Keep your integrity. Don't ever do things in a company where you, you don't feel that is supporting your end goals. Sometimes we get into a project because our boss, our manager or the company asks us to do, but we don't realize that that project is not really taking advantage of our skills, it's not positioning us in a way that we want to. Yes. Sometimes in the beginning, we do have to say yes to smaller projects. But I have seen many times how women with great skills, great energy, get sucked into doing a large, you know, multiyear project that eventually leads them in a very different direction that they want, they would have liked to go in.

So keep that in mind plan where you wanna go have a personal purpose and don't deviate too much from that, take that purpose and network, you know, get, get yourself known in the industry, not only for what you're doing in your company, for what, but for what your purpose is.

What is the big thing that you want to accomplish? Who do you want to help, who do you want to impact? It could be as simple as making a lot of money, but it could also be having it, you know, being, you know, the, the, the CEO of a company that is changing the role of women in technology and what's more important than what's most important. And that it gets often forgotten is be a champion for other women. I have taken the risk at times to uh vocalize that the women should come into more leadership positions to get higher salaries. And I've taken that risk with pride because it is part of my mission in life. And that way those other women later in the future will be able to help me whenever it is that I need their help. So I'm teaching a course. It's an online course called Lead the way it starts this coming September and you can find more about it by emailing me here or following me on all my socials which are Debbie Barry. Now, we have a couple of minutes left. I would love to stop sharing and I can keep talking as you can see, but I'd love to see if, uh, you know, there are questions, comment, anything that I can answer before I can continue, I'm just gonna give it like 30 seconds. OK?

My linkedin, you can just look it up with my name. Sorry, I'm not gonna uh take the, the, the time. OK? But in the three minutes left, I don't see any questions. But basically the message I would like to give here is do something concrete, do something that Sorry Debbie at Science with Debbie, which is my website. One thing that helped me enormously in my career is to have a journal and not a journal. And this, you know, kind of way of like writing things for my own reading. No, every time I had a challenge I wrote it down, I wrote down, what was the challenge, how I accomplished it and how did my managers and the people around me react to that? I also wrote my accomplishments and that was incredibly useful for a variety of reasons at the end of the year when you get a, a sort of uh this global review. When you, your work gets reviewed, that journal will be incredibly helpful when you come to us for a promotion. Do it go and list all of the things you did throughout the year, every single person that you help et cetera and then the challenges and how you overcame them will help you whenever you get stuck with something and you'll say, oh, I tried that method and it didn't quite work for me.

Well, actually I tried that and I was extremely successful. Many people say fake it till you make it. So act as a leader, act as a leader in, in different situations. But what does a leader act like in your opinion, with your own integrity, with your own values? Does a leader have a strong voice? Does a leader propose ideas or does a leader stay back and choose, chooses, you know, the right moments to interact and give uh product development advice or, or mentoring advice or what not choose your own style. But whatever you do don't stay passive, choose concrete actions. OK? We really have only one minute uh left. Um You can uh I have a youtube channel. You can uh obviously you can watch my show. But also um you know, look at the talks I've given with many other things that I think could be useful for you. And I wish you all the best of luck. Please. Please reach out to me. Should you need any personal one on one mentoring. I love working with young women and advancing their careers and really accelerating their success. Thank you so much for being in my session and I wish you continued success and a wonderful, wonderful uh rest of the year.