Happy Monday!
For those of you that did not stay up last night and watch the Oscars (me included), Patricia Arquette used her acceptance speech time to call for equal rights and pay equality for women. Her speech is worth watching:http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/23/news/economy/patricia-arquette-pay-gap/index.html
As a follow up to last weeks’ article on gender bias found when rating professors, Nicholas Kristof wrote a great opinion piece in the NY Times titled “Straight Talk for White Men.” He notes that the evidence is overwhelming that unconscious bias is widespread and that the first step in combating it is acknowledgement. He challenges his fellow white men to: “trying not to hire people just because they look like us, avoiding telling a young girl she’s “beautiful” while her brother is “smart.” It means acknowledging systematic bias as a step toward correcting it.” The full article can be found here:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-straight-talk-for-white-men.html?_r=0
In case you had not heard, the long anticipated Kleiner Perkins bias trial starts this week. This is shining a light on the abject lack of diversity in the space. For instance, in a study of 1,562 venture firms, only 139 had a least 1 female partner. And this lack of diversity at the VC firms has a huge impact on who gets funded – 97% of VC-backed companies in the US have a male CEO. This contrasts with the experience of women-run businesses on Kickstarter and other crowd funding sites where women-run firms out raise and outperform when given access to capital. Two interesting articles here:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/kleiner-perkins-bias-trial-turns-new-focus-on-tech-gender-gap
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101963663#.
And lastly, we have our biggest event of the year coming up April 23rd in Dallas – you will not want to miss this as we have an all-star lineup of investors giving their global market outlook including Mary Erdoes of JP Morgan, Katie Stockton of BTIG, Elena Ranguelova of Investcorp and Lilian Zhou will be joining us from Shanghai. The event supports the Young Women’s College Preparatory network that supports 7 schools in Texas that provide a college preparatory education to underserved young girls across the state. And why is girls’ education so important? Studies show that if you change the outcome for a young girl, you change the outcome for future generations – an investment that pays dividends. And young girls trying to get an education are under siege: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/world/schoolgirls-are-facing-more-threats-united-nations-reports.html?_r=0
Men and women are welcome to attend the April 23rd event, so please help us get the word out – it is a great event with TWO cocktail hours, so plenty of great networking as well as great content!
We have lots in store for March. Come out and meet our new committee members and share your ideas for future events! Register early to avoid disappointment!
Kind regards
Christine
