Speaker 1: Let's start with a brain exercise. I'm going to ask you to visualize three scenarios. The visualization part is very important, so please close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine you're late to catch a flight. You rush through the airport, you make it through security, you run to the gate, you make it down the jetway, you step on the plane just as they close the door behind you, and the pilot steps out of the cockpit to say hi. You get to your destination, you go to a local restaurant, and you have the best meal of your life. I mean, really enjoy this. There's no calories in visualization. And at the table next to you is a couple happily celebrating their anniversary. The next morning, you go to the biggest technology conference in the world, and the CEO of this year's hottest tech startup just took the stage to speak. Now you should have a solid picture of all of that, so open your eyes, because I have some questions for you. In your mental image, was the pilot black? Was the married couple two men? Did the tech CEO on stage look like me? It's okay if one or all of your answers is no. Your brain creates images of what's familiar. It's less of a fan of what's not familiar. The things I mentioned are generally less familiar. The black pilot, the same-sex married couple, the female tech CEO. No matter how much you might love the idea of those things, when immediately confronted with them, the amygdala, that's the most ancient part of your brain, signals the hypothalamus to fire up the hypothalamic pituitary axis, which is where the brain and the endocrine system intersect. So at this point, your adrenal glands release cortisol into your bloodstream, which triggers your stress response. This is the physiology of stress, according to the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, and it happens in a matter of milliseconds, long before you have the chance to consciously think, I'm so happy these two men have the freedom to marry who they love. As Dr. Susan Fisk explains, when it comes to unfamiliar social situations, there is ample evidence that encountering something fundamentally different from what we expect elicits a stronger activation in the amygdala than encountering something or someone we perceive as the norm. This is what kept our species alive for millions of years. This instantaneous instinctive response triggers fight or flight, which is what kept us from being eaten by saber-toothed tigers or killed by a member of a foreign tribe. But in modern society, our brains still do this. When we encounter the unexpected, our heart races slightly, our blood pressure goes up, we sweat a little, and for no discernible reason, we just feel stressed out. There's a Chinese blessing that doubles as a curse. May you live in interesting times. I am the CEO of a tech company right now, which makes these some very interesting times. I recently had a call with a potential investor in which everything clicked. He got the concept, he loved what we were building, he had key insight about our tech, and so we agreed on a day to speak again, and he said, great, why don't you ping me then? And I said, you got it. And then he said, oh, wait, is that one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use with you? Because he's a man and I'm a woman, and in the tech world right now, careers are being destroyed and entire venture funds collapsing because some men have behaved incredibly inappropriately towards women. He was afraid of using the phrase ping me. Now, that might seem ridiculous, but we now live in a world where words and phrases rapidly take on new meaning. If you need proof, just look at the Facebook post of any guy who got a text from his mom that says, hi, honey, if you want to come over tonight, we can Netflix and chill. If you don't understand why that's funny, Google Netflix and chill. He asked, is that one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use with you? And there it was. I could practically hear the cortisol coursing through his bloodstream. No matter how well we clicked or what he thought of my company, it was still in his brain that I'm not just a CEO, I'm a female CEO. And working with me might be a minefield of dangers he has to think about. Not because of anything he would ever do or anything I would ever do, but because men neither of us had ever met couldn't control their bro-havior. And women we both respect bravely chose not to remain silent. Because speaking up is the only way we're going to make progress. So in addition to all the risks inherent in investing in an early stage startup company, there's an added layer of much scarier risks that come from working with me. The irony is that while some investors might feel that way, for another cohort, because I'm over 40, they don't even see me. I am simultaneously both highly dangerous and invisible. Who knew that at this stage in my career I'd become a ninja? Is that one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use with you? I'm so grateful that he asked. I'm happy that he felt safe enough to ask and know that I wouldn't pummel him for it. If we're going to get anywhere close to equality, let's stop attacking our allies. When someone is willing to admit and discuss that there might be a problem with their own behavior, we can't penalize them for that. How would any of us feel to be excluded from the equality conversation because of what we visualized at the start of this talk? By asking the question, I knew this man was willing to examine his own behavior. And I believe that the biggest stumbling block to achieving true equality is unexamined behavior. When men in the startup world start to wonder, if I work with women, am I going to someday be the subject of an incendiary blog post, the answer is no, just continue to examine your behavior. When working with female founders and colleagues and executives, ask yourself, if this was a man, would I gently stroke his shoulder as I suggest we meet again? Would I comment on how well his T-shirt flatters his figure? Would I place a higher value on his appearance than his experience in determining his probability of success? If not, don't do it to her. It's that simple. Sadly, the much simpler response to the female threat is, no, you will not be the subject of an angry blog post. Just don't work with women. Of course, no one would ever say that out loud. But somewhere in that amygdala, a synapse fires towards flight in the face of an unnamed potential danger, and stress hormones flood the bloodstream. Can't explain it. Don't know why. But whatever makes you feel happy and comfortable around people who look and act like you is the same thing that makes you come up with logical, explicable, totally defensible reasons not to work with someone you just don't click with. And when it comes to equality, examining our own behavior applies to women too. I started my career as a securities lawyer in the Silicon Valley at the dawn of the internet era. It was an insane time to be there. As a first-year associate, I billed 2,800 hours. One night, I left the office around 2 a.m., which was typical, and so I left my timesheets for my assistant to process because she got in in the mornings before I did. So the next day, when I got to my desk, about five minutes later, my assistant walks in holding my timesheets, and she said, would you like me to show you how to enter these into the billing system? I mean, sweet as pie. And I sat stunned for a moment, then politely declined her kind offer, but that question really started to bother me. Why would my assistant ask the attorney she works for if I want to learn how to do her job? So I started asking around. Of the 14 male attorneys in our group, none had ever been asked if he wanted to learn how to use the billing system. We had a partner who didn't know there was a billing system. But of the six female attorneys, I was the only one who had never entered her own timesheets. Some of them did it regularly, and some just once or twice, but they all knew how. So again, I asked why. Why would you spend a resource as precious as your time on work someone else is already getting paid to do? One answer was, oh, it's not that hard. Women do this to ourselves a lot. We do work that's someone else's job because we're capable and we just want it to get done. If a task is on someone else's to-do list, please don't be the first person in line to do it for them. Not only does that hurt you, it sets an expectation that hurts all other women. The other answer to my question was, it's just easier. The knowing laugh. Translation, it's just easier to do my assistant's work than to make my assistant do it. When we talk about gender disparity in the workplace, we discuss the different treatment women receive in performance reviews and promotions, or in hiring and salary negotiations. But we rarely discuss the treatment women receive from subordinates. We fail to acknowledge how exhausting it is to not get the basic level of support needed to do our jobs, and that our male colleagues enjoy without even thinking twice about it. Or to get it but only because we demanded it and risked being labeled a certain word or two. So we give in. We pile more on our own plates because in the short term, it's just easier. And in the long term, we burn out and leave. And in hindsight, everyone wonders why there aren't more women in higher-ranking positions. Because no one ever examined the behavior. The funny thing about my situation is that if you asked the assistants in that group if they treated male attorneys and female attorneys differently, I'm pretty sure every one of them would have said, no way. And yet, no male attorney had ever been asked if he wanted to learn how to do administrative work, and every female attorney had. That's the real danger of unexamined behavior. The belief that we're treating everyone equally, when in reality, we're not. When we stop and examine our own behavior, we can catch ourselves having different reactions to and expectations of people, simply because they don't look like us. Or worse, because they do. The human brain is a remarkable achievement in evolution. The prefrontal cortex evolved itself into existence when we needed more processing capacity. How amazing is that? But the amygdala, that's been there since the earliest records of human existence. When it encounters the unexpected, it floods your system with stress hormones. Fight or flight is what kept our species alive for millions of years. None of us in 100 lifetimes will ever be able to change that trigger inside our brains. So our only solution is to change what's outside our brains. To consciously turn the unexpected into the expected, so that we don't have unconscious hormonal reactions that keep our society from moving forward. How do you do that? How do you change the unexpected to the expected? Well, there are three things you can try. One, as you go about your day, visualize situations before they happen. The meeting you're about to walk into, the new doctor you're seeing, the driver you just pulled over for having a broken taillight. And whatever mental picture you get, change it. Open yourself to different possibilities. The second thing, when we do encounter the unexpected, have the courage to examine your own behavior. Ask yourself, is this how I would handle this interaction if this person looked like me? Or if this person didn't look like me? Third, make a conscious effort to expose yourself and your children and others to that which is currently unexpected and doesn't need to be. Hire the employees, patronize the businesses, vote for the candidates who have earned the position and are also challenging the norms. There are enormous and long-ranging consequences when we can change the unexpected to the expected. Consider this. We have two entire generations in the world whose first visual image of a United States president is black. It doesn't matter what kind of hate or ugliness might have been spoken in their homes. That picture is always within the realm of the expected for them. We normalize things by making them expected. That is the first step towards keeping all women from being seen as higher-risk investments. And women of a certain age from becoming ninjas. Let's do another visualization. Once again, please, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Now imagine you're sitting in a college class on computer programming and the professor just walked in. Picture the Facebook post of a friend congratulating a couple who just adopted a baby. Visualize your state swearing in a new governor. Now open your eyes and raise your hand if your mental image differed substantially now than it did at the beginning of this talk. That earlier brain exercise we did is something I do at the start of most investor meetings. It's my way of tricking them into examining their own behavior, but it's also how I consciously turn the unexpected into the expected before we get to the point in my pitch where I share with them that when we complete a series A round of venture financing, the chief financial officer we're bringing on board is black. And the story of my company starts with two happily married men. And the CEO of this year's hottest tech startup looks exactly like me. Thank you.