Stepping Up the Growth in Women's Careers

Welcome to our panelists.

Thank you.

Yale Law School. We all know that's a really difficult school to get into. Yes.

Yeah.

Well, we met an incredibly talented woman who told us that it was easier to get into Yale Law School than it was for her to return after a career break. While this seems heartbreaking, while this seems shocking, we know that this is a story that happens over and over and over again. And certainly in the different roles that I have played, Today as a public company board director, as a VC and the first female investment partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, and before that as a tech executive, employee number one for Facebook in India and the managing director of the country, I have seen the story repeat over and over and over again. As Jeff Bezos says, lots of good intention. Everyone understands the problem, everyone wants to solve it. but very poor mechanisms. So when I met Ashutosh as part of our— of SoftBank's investment in Eightfold, and by the way, someone told me yesterday, so it's really SoftBank and you are paying for this event, so likely true. But in Ashutosh, I met a kindred spirit soul and we really bonded about this issue. Uh, and we are thrilled to anchor a social impact initiative called Ladder, And our goal is to enable 10 million moms over the globe to have the careers that they would if not for the motherhood penalty that mothers go through. Just like climate activists wake up every single day and think about planting 10 million plants, Ashutosh and I wake up and Ashutosh first thinks about Eightfold and then thinks about how is it that we can enable 10 million moms across the globe to have the careers that they, that they would and they deserve. And I'm thrilled today to be joined by 3 incredible leaders who are deeply committed to the cause, are practitioners, and are leading the way in different ways in companies, in organizations, and really thinking about the entire infrastructure that we need to rethink and reimagine as we make the world a better place where a woman does not have to make a choice between a thriving career, and ambitious family goals. So with that, so delighted to welcome Joanna Yasi Madan. If you would just go around and introduce yourself, what do you do and what brings you here and what brings you to this, this passion?

So I'm Joanna Strober and I'm the founder of Mitty Health. We are the only digital health platform specifically focused on women 40 and up, helping them manage all of the health issues that happen to them during this time. anxiety, sleep, migraines, painful sex, all those things that happen. And we are all covered by insurance. So it is not seen as an extra part of their life, but an integral part of their life. And we'll talk about it more, but I started it because I saw all my friends and what was happening to them in their 40s where they were really getting debilitated by things that kind of just hit them out of surprise. And they didn't— they weren't prepared for these things to happen to their bodies, and they were really struggling with it. There was actually a recent study that said that 50% of women don't apply for promotions because of the issues that they're having. So we've set up a company to stop that.

Incredible. Yasi.

Awesome. My name is Yasi Baiani. I always say the most important job I have is to be a mother of 2, a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old. But beyond that, I also have the honor to lead product and member marketing at Clio. Clio is the only global end-to-end caregiving platform that supports families and caregivers, particularly women, through all stages and ages of their family creation journey and also caregiving journey. We have over 130 clients, we have representation in 60+ countries, and we have over 1 million lives under cover. So excited to be here.

Hi, my name is Madan Nagaldini. I'm the Chief People Officer for Paxos. We're based out of Manhattan. We're a regulated blockchain infrastructure company, at it for the last almost 8 years, one of the oldest in this space, and very regulation-first, about 350 people. And prior to Paxos, I kind of spent my 15-plus years or so learning from 2 of the most amazing companies that I got to work with. One was at Facebook when we were very tiny. Keerthika and I were a part of the first 10 people at Facebook in Asia, looking at each other and saying, OK, where have we come out here? But it was fun in building that. business out over many years. And then prior to that, at Amazon, where I got to head HR for all of their Asian operations, specifically focused on, at that point in time, on Amazon India and Southeast Asia. Amazon was tiny still, 2006 and '07. When I say tiny, not really big. And just seeing those companies grow rapidly were my early kind of HR experiences. I'm very passionate about this topic, as Kirtika has mentioned. Great, great mechanism. Poor mechanisms and great intentions don't lead us anywhere but just a bunch of talk. And how do we come together as a community out here to solve for this problem? I think it's an incredible opportunity as well. If you, if you are in HR struggling to hire great talent, this is extremely underrepresented, ignored pool of phenomenal talent that we should come together as a community to solve.

Phenomenal. And we have leaders in this audience who really I had many conversations last evening around this cause, so we know that we are one preaching to the choir, but also looking to rally this community towards this cause. Let's start at a personal level. Each of us also happens to be parents, and Yasi, you already spoke about your most important role. I actually often talk about at any one point of time, I am a full-time mom, a full-time professional, a full-time wife, a full-time daughter. We play all of these roles. Was there a time where you first felt, or a memorable time where you felt that tug between your personal goals and your professional goals?

Yeah, I definitely felt it many times, but I think one of the most vivid moments I remember is when I was pregnant with my first baby and I was actually up for promotion and there was conversation about that. And as soon as the manager learned that I'm pregnant, we kind of came out of that room and the promotion decision went on hold and actually was communicated with me that we can revisit that decision when we come back and I'm back from maternity leave. I don't think my experience is by any ways unique. This is something that many women experience and it's common, unfortunately. But that's why I'm actually very excited about the work that I'm doing to create awareness, to enable the conversations to make sure that women can continue to grow their families while they're also thriving and growing their career.

Yes, we're gonna come back to that, and we would love to know more about that. Joanna.

So Karthika asked me this question, and I've been thinking a lot about the times when there was— it was most painful. And I think for me, there was 2. The first was when my son, who was around 7, was diagnosed with a learning disability. And I started thinking a lot about can I keep working and also give him the attention that he needs. And I remember calling my mom and I was like, wait, can I do this? Do I need to quit? And she's like, well, don't you think you could probably pay for that and you might be better off staying working? I'll help. But not everyone has a mom who can do that. And so I'm incredibly grateful to her, but that was a difficult time and I still remember how close I came to giving a really amazing career up To go help him. And by the way, he's in college and doing great, so it worked out.

Awesome.

But for me, the second time was when I was 46 and I stopped sleeping. And I started waking up every night at 3 o'clock in the morning and just not falling back asleep, which meant that when I showed up at work the next day, I was pretty flummoxed. I would eat to try to stay awake, which meant that I was gaining weight, and I was a little harsh with people, and I was definitely not my best. It took me a long time to get the right care. Once I did find the right specialist and they explained to me that it was a hormone imbalance and got me on the right treatment, my life changed. But there was a few-month period in time where I really was thinking that I wasn't going to be able to make it.

Joanna, thank you for sharing. And I'm just shuddering to think about what would have happened if you had taken that choice to drop off. We wouldn't have seen incredible companies. Joanna is a serial entrepreneur, built Kerbose, sold to Weight Watchers, now on to her next company. about that lost opportunity. And I'm so grateful to your mom.

Me too.

And the decisions that you made.

Madhav. I want to start by saying, look, I think for men, it's a very different experience. We just take it very clinically. It's going to happen or not. It's too black and white. I went through this during COVID when I had a chance to spend the next many years in Germany working with 2 large investors, top 3 VC firms investing in in Germany, in Berlin specifically, where I had a chance to move myself and the family. And then when the family moved, or they came to see whether this was the right place for them or not, they just decided that this is not the right place. And for me, it was, oh, you're not going in. It was very clinical, yes or no. But I did not, or I failed to estimate the emotional toll it took on my wife, who was much more like, we put the kids through all these changes. We got them here. We confused them. They're in the middle of high school. And now we're making another decision. That's when I realized that I just have a very different— and unfortunately, at that point in time, a very clinical and not an empathetic point of view, which I've now learned to change and acknowledge. Kirtika, you helped me a lot during the process in terms of just thinking through how I should be a much more supportive both parent and a partner to her. So I think this is a very important topic. And so then we had to come back and— Till about last year, it was a very zero-one decision for me, but the toll it took on the family was much more than it took on me.

Again, thank you for all of your vulnerable sharing. Manal, let's stay with you. You have led global organizations. You have led organizations that have been unprecedented in terms of scale, size. There's always the tension of we need to hire, we need to hire quickly, And how does that interleave with women, their careers, and the lifecycle stages that they go through? What have you found as best practices, and what have you personally led and driven for this balance?

Yeah, I think you could do a lot of things, but actually, based on my experience, there are about 3 or 4 things that have an outsized impact on how you can bring this topic into your workforce and have a positive change. And I'll share those 3 or 4 things.

Please.

One is it needs to be a conversation at the top, which is if you're not having a conversation at your exec team meeting about this concept about diversity, women back at work, and how the company is shaping up on these topics, then it's going to be somebody else's problem way down the totem pole. And that person has no either kind of power or positional power to make a lasting change. If you downgrade this to a recruiter problem— oh, let's go hire a bunch of recruiters 30% of their roles should be diversity roles, it's not going to happen. So that's number one. This needs to be a conversation at the very top. I think, uh, Kirtika, you and I both experienced this. Sheryl Sandberg makes this a huge part of how she runs her meetings, how she runs Facebook. So this is a conversation at the very top. If you're not having it at your exec team meeting— not every, every single time— but if you're not reviewing this and goals against this, and if the CEO and his or her team is not focused on it, it won't get done. It doesn't matter how many good intentions you have on that. I think the second one as a best practice is make it somebody's entire problem, not somebody's partial problem. So I learned this at Facebook when we had this amazing global head of diversity who joined us. And she said, I'm going to take recruiting under me, as opposed to making it somebody else's 20%. Problem. Now this is 100% of somebody's time is focused on this topic. That's a game changer because that's an investment, uh, and you're not going to get your ROI on it right away. It'll take you about 3, 6, 9 months to really get to some level of momentum. But if you don't do that, again, it goes back to recruiters have great intentions, but their number one job, their, their goal on the number of recs that they close, so they're going to focus on that. And then they're going to kind of come across people who've taken breaks, et cetera. They don't have the framework and the training to think through, oh, this is an incredible person who's taken a break, would be fantastic for this role, and kind of shepherd the person through that because that's not their full-time job. So that's an incredibly important best practice. Have the conversation at the top. Make it somebody's entire problem. And then you start to get momentum on this.

Well, and I'm going to push one time though. There are deliverables. Things need to be done yesterday. There are managers making decisions. And, you know, we do have Commissioner Sonderling from Equal Employment Opportunity here. And although there's all of the conversation about not discriminating around things like pregnancy, there are real conversations that happen in hiring rooms that says, oh, you know, this woman will come, maybe she's pregnant, or we can't afford this gap, how do you train your leaders and your managers through those conversations?

I think, uh, so if you really look at how it happens in organizations, it's a recruiter surfacing this up to a hiring manager who then brings it up to somebody in HR and saying, to your example, oh, this person is 7 months pregnant, should we hire or not? Now, if the HR person's like, no, let's kind of, you know, slow down this, that's when you— it breaks. You have to hold the line. As an HR leader, you have to train your HR VPs and your recruiting managers and your leadership on your team to hold the line, to say this cannot be a factor in deciding whether someone gets hired or not. If you start to allow for these, these kind of edge cases saying, ah, now we're going to slow down, etc., that's when you really kill the whole thing. So I think holding the line is very, very important. And to hold the line again cannot happen at a very junior level. It has to be kicked up. the head of HR or the head of recruiting who needs to say, we truly mean this. It doesn't matter what your status is in terms of are you pregnant or not. It has no bearing on our decision. And if there is a conversation that comes up, you gotta squash it apart from training and everything else that could be done.

Yasi, let's talk about mechanisms. How do we systematize some of those things that we hear? How does Clio and broadly what should people do?

Absolutely. 2 ways that we really come into play. First of all, like, I think it's important to understand why anyone drops out of a job, particularly women or minorities. Focusing on the reasons and trying to solve for that really matters. We know that, for instance, when women are going through pregnancy, that's a kind of very fragile time. A lot of women don't come back to work. We know that if people have kids with special needs, that's just one reason. That will be another sensitive time that people make a decision because there's just a lot more to do with a kid with a special need. Or if you have a teen that's going through a lot of mental health and anxiety and stress, parents, particularly women, data shows drop out of job market to support the caregiving responsibilities that they have on the family side. Understanding those and creating awareness both for the individuals to how to have those conversations at work environment, to how how to have those conversations with their managers to ask for more flexibility, to ask what they need to go to those doctor visits are critical. But that's a two-sided equation. We at Clio empower individuals to do those conversations, to identify those conversations, to facilitate access to childcare, to health for individuals. So that's part of our offering. But on the other hand, our Clio for Work offerings really does a lot of the things that Madan mentioned as part of educating managers to be able to understand what's needed for a woman that goes through pregnancy, what is needed for a person that's going through fertility challenges, giving them more flexibility, giving them time off, or when you have special needs kids or someone in your team with that kind of setup, how do you support them? Or sandwich generation families who have kids' responsibility but also have elderly responsibilities. So the career framework offering that we have really enables managers to understand those situations, equip them with tools and techniques and programs to then come in and have those difficult conversations with their employees, and also work with, as part of the Clio for Work offering, we work with executives and HR leaders to help them to cultivate and create environments that allow and encourage inclusive, diverse environments for all people. particularly, again, women, minorities, which we saw a lot of dropouts out of the job market. And if anything, pandemic was another kind of factor, again, showing those data. We saw majority of the people who dropped out, unfortunately, were women and minorities. So I know that, Krithika, you mentioned ladder is broken. I do think our ladder is broken and there's a lot of work to be done. Particularly, we know people, women as equally coming to job market, when it's a starting point, but we see a lot more faster dropout as we go above and to the higher-level roles. So how could we all be aware of that, enable those conversations, and actively make decisions, whether it be for hiring or for promotion, to make sure like those minorities and women and minorities of all sorts and backgrounds are included in those decisions because we need to have more diversity at the top to really impact the bottom line. We all, again, know that that's the data that's been shown. So we just need to work towards that actively. And everyone is part of that conversation. This is not only women's issues or minority issues. And that's why I love, Madan, you're so actively working towards that. And we need everyone, every decision maker, men, women, people from different backgrounds and ethnicities to really participate in that.

Yeah, someone was telling me yesterday about how ironic it is that in order to solve this woman's problem, people tend to go to then the women leaders in the organization who already have 5 other things and already have 5x more workload at home, et cetera. So really, I mean, male allies play such an important role. And Madan, your commitment and the commitment of everyone in this room is much needed as we change the— shift the needle. Joanna.

So, You know, you can look at this in a lot of ways, right? From the caregiving— the caregiving perspective is super important. And then I would say that the health is equally important. And historically, our health system has been oriented around the standard person, which is the standard man. And there are lots of issues that happen to women during their lifetime that are related to women's bodies that are just mostly not served. And those things end up derailing them. The research is actually super clear on this. I mean, they've shown that in the United States, 75% of women who try to get help for these women— for these issues don't get the help that they need. And as I mentioned, 50% of women say that these issues actually stop them from asking for a raise, and 20% of women actually consider quitting their jobs because of them. So it is actually a work challenge because these are things that women have no control over that are derailing them. just at the time when it's time for their careers to thrive and the male colleagues are thriving and applying for promotions and rising that ladder, women are getting stopped. And so what we've looked at is, you know, how do you stop that? And it's a complicated challenge because it's actually a training problem. Only 10% of OB-GYNs have any training in menopause. And these are the only doctors who— the only doctors who were available to help. So you actually have to start from the training. You have to actually start training more practitioners who know how to take care of these issues. And then you have to look at the payments and you have to figure out how those things get paid for because the hormone specialists who you hear about get paid $800 an hour. That's not scalable. So what we've tried to do is say, okay, we're going to start from the beginning. We are training practitioners in this. We went out to the top practitioners in the world actually because it's actually People experience these issues differently as a cultural matter. And we have gotten their protocols. And essentially what we're doing is using technology and AI to scale those protocols and then training practitioners to use those protocols. And it's a lot of work doing this, I will tell you. But, you know, we are— we're really excited because now we can actually show clinical outcomes and we can use this to have insurance coverage pay for our services. And that's really what this all takes. It's a systematic thing. You have to do the training, you have to do the insurance, you have to do it all. And that— it's a lot, but it's really the only way to support people through this process.

Well, we've heard so many different aspects, from training the individual themselves to training the organization, training the manager. Madan, it looks like you have something you really want to chime in. I will give it to you in a second. And to the whole ecosystem around And questions that people are not even asking at an individual level and at an organizational level. Madan, did you want to—

No, I was just agreeing with her. Her stats were perfect. I mean, very— yeah, I think especially the impact of, uh, on women during the pandemic, the stats are pretty, pretty sad.

2 million less people, 2 million less women in the workforce today than in 2020, which is staggering, right? And, uh, there is a 39% penalty for a woman who takes even a year's gap off of work. And this is studies across 45 years. In comparison, by the way, fatherhood, just the act of having a baby increases your pay by 6%. And I see nods here, right? So that's pretty staggering. So, Ashutosh, I think I'm seeing nods of, okay, people of who, if you wanna increase your pay, you know, just go have another baby. That's the message for fathers here. But there's a lot of attention being paid to what happens after the woman drops off and what do we think about things like returnships and there are many returnship programs of different sizes or scales. You know, Matt Kranz, who leads global DEI for BCG, was highlighting what do we do at the start of this and, you know, Yasi already touched upon this. How do we prevent that drop-off? Would love, Madan, to hear your thoughts on both the returnship side as well as the earlier side of that curve.

I think the returnship, if you look at where it is in large companies, et cetera, it's a website where you can go and say, oh, I think this company wants to— or I can apply over here. But the process after the application, in terms of what happens, the resistance to that application flowing through all the way to the hiring manager and eventually an offer, et cetera, is just riddled with brick walls, right? Because then the people who are shepherding those people, number one, are not trained. Retention becomes a nice website or a nice webpage to have as a part of your career page that you truly mean it, and many companies do mean it, but the resistance to making that change happen is pretty significant. So if you are a leader and you're thinking of the returnship program, that's a good place to start as to defining what your returnship objectives are, but you need to have those goals saying, you know, I'm going to commit 8% of my hires this quarter are going to come from that channel. Just like you start to commit saying, I need women leaders across the board, I need to increase my diversity at the top, you need to commit to a returnship number. If you're committing to a webpage, And it's, again, one of those mechanisms that doesn't work. I think the second piece is on the returnship. It need not be like, oh, this is a full-time job. Exploring, saying, in your company, are there opportunities for people through this channel to come and do some specific work? It could be 4 hours, it could be a returnship internship. You could get really creative about this. It's not hard to implement. And you've got to be thinking about, okay, who on the exec team is owning this? Who is the exec team sponsor? If you don't have a sponsor on the exec team on your returnship, I've just found talking to a lot of people that it ends up as a webpage with good intentions and not much action from there on. So that's one way to think about this, and the second piece is what I call— I like to use this phrase, holding the line. Where you as a CEO or as an exec team, you want to hold your line on certain roles purely based on talent density. So let's say you're a CEO, you've got about 6 direct reports or 8 direct reports. You first want to ask yourself, saying, where can I find— or which roles have more talent density where I can find truly an exceptional, let's say, a woman leader? Then you're like, okay, it's in marketing and in people where the talent density is much higher than in technology. And then if you're— then you hold the line over there. And as opposed to saying, you know, I think I just need great women leaders on my exec team and hope that it will happen. It won't, right? Because you do not hold the line. You just then eventually found an amazing man and you said, oh, this is, you know, my marketing or my people function is on fire. You know what, the next person we're going to get will be a great woman leader. That's because you failed to hold the line. Once you hold the line, it becomes very, very powerful. easy for you, and then it becomes also very intentional in the organization to now say, okay, this is serious. My CEO is not going to kind of let this pass. So that's one of the things that I've found, that as more CEOs— and if you are an executive leader, you hold the line, you demand that this get done, then it will get done.

Great. Joanne, I want to go back to— you wrote a book, a really incredible book about Getting to 50/50, which spoke about women having thriving careers and ambitious family goals. Any takeaways that you want to share from there?

That book came out in 2008 and I think we thought that those things would change, it would get easier. And I think now there is a lot more attention paid to it and I'm so delighted by companies like Clio who are starting to help because we put very much the responsibility on the people, on the individual women. I would say in our book we gave the individual women a lot of suggestions on how to thrive rather than starting from the corporate level. And so I'm very excited that people are kind of starting from both sides. I think there are great things that you can help women to do. I think you can train them to think in certain ways to enable them to be more successful at work. And I mean, one of the things we said is if you keep on thinking it's a choice, do I want to work, do I not want to work, that's really stressful. So one of the things we really talked about is just think, okay, I'm going to work and how can I make it successful? And when you change that mindset, it was actually very effective for women.

And—

but what I'm excited about now is that companies are also starting to help because we really— we were thinking a lot of here's what you can do at home, here's what you can do with your spouse, here's what you can do in your own life with your own friends. But we were less focused on the company level. And I think it has to be both. It has to be a partnership between women and the companies to to take advantage of this incredible workforce. I mean, the women who we've interviewed over the past few years are so amazing and they don't want to quit their jobs. And so it's not like they're going to work and saying, I want to quit, right? They are incredible workers and they're really outperforming and they're finding obstacles. And I think it is really to companies' benefits to keep them. And I think the more that we as employers understand that and we want— if we work to keep them rather than just making it about individuals, it will— really pay off for everyone.

Um, could not agree more about the ambition that women have. There was a Lean In survey where they found that women, as you ask them, how many of you think of stepping off from your career after you have a baby, the number was 2%. 2%. And the number was actually not materially different from men. But what actually happens, as we all know, is very different. So there's a huge gap between intention and reality. Yasi, we're gonna rapidly come up to time, but anything that, you know, you're seeing in terms of differences between, you know, Gen Z, Gen X, Gen Y, anything there that we should be paying attention to?

Yeah, absolutely. I think first of all, like, the needs are different, like, in those, like, groups, right? So we see that, for instance, Gen X are now a lot of them sandwich generation. They have caregiver responsibilities for elderly, they have kids, teenagers to take care about. Gen Y and Gen Z may be more focused on fertility, egg freezing, other things of that nature. Again, all of those have a lot of emotional and physical burden and challenges. So understanding that, having an environment to have conversation is really critical. And I would say, like, I'm really encouraged by all the interest we are seeing in the market. First of all, we have many of our clients, they started with our baby product to really help women within that pregnancy stage. But they also kind of grew with us. We have really high retention with our clients, but also many of them expanding to our product line because they understand that when you have teenagers, caregiving doesn't get easier. Like, we all know that. Those people who have teenagers, it's a lot going on at those stages. When you have an elderly to take care about, again, it's uncharted territory you have never walked through. So there's a lot of logistical and health issues that you have to figure out on your own. So that's why a lot of our clients Clients are expanding to those product lines with us because they understand, particularly when they have diverse population, different age groups, they wanted to have support for everyone and wanted to have an inclusive support, which is really encouraging and exciting. And I love to see all of that reception from clients because it's impossible to do it alone. We can help employees and individuals, but we do it through amazing employers to provide this as a benefit to their employees. So excited to see the continuous growth.

Well, incredible. On that note, on that optimistic note of change and a change that we really need to see, I'm just gonna do a quick rapid-fire round for our wonderful panelists. Joanna, being an entrepreneur or an author?

Pick.

This is just a personal—

Entrepreneur, absolutely.

Okay, all right. Yasi, being a top LinkedIn voice or being the Business Insider top Harvard MBA student?

Any of the above. I think I'm just excited for really being able to help this mission because it's so critical and so key to my heart. So I'm just excited to get my voice out there and help, whether it be from LinkedIn or Business Insider or the work I'm doing day to day at Clio.

Incredible. Madan, you start your LinkedIn with saying student, and that's how you describe yourself. Tell us why.

Yeah, blockchain is such an incredibly interesting The next 20 years is going to redefine our lives. So if I don't learn, I'm dead in the water. So that's why I kind of think about it as a student and how do you build great organization in this industry.

Great. And I think as we wrap here, I think all of us are students here. Ashutosh, I'm so grateful for your commitment to the cause of 10 Million Moms and for you giving us this time to speak with this fabulous audience today. And we cannot be more excited with all of the efforts here and everyone that people are doing here to bring 10 million moms back to the workforce and have the careers that they would. Thank you all, and, uh, uh, we'll keep the discussion flowing outside of this panel as well. With that, a huge round of applause for Joanna, Yasi, and Mala.

Thank you.