The Female Lead Page 5
As a journalist who has covered war for 15 years, I am aware of the risks when I go into a place. We were in Libya illegally – we snuck in without visas – and we were covering a war. In any war there is risk and, unfortunately, journalists have become targets. It was my choice to cover the uprising in Libya and I knew there was a chance I would get caught. I have spent my life photographing people who have survived horrific things – women who have been held captive and raped repeatedly in war. Luckily, I was spared rape and worse and, yes, it was terrifying, but I survived and our driver did not, so it is important to put what happened to me in perspective.
It was my choice to cover the uprising in Libya and I knew there was a chance I would get caught. I have spent my life photographing people who have survived horrific things – women who have been held captive and raped repeatedly in war.
When I was pregnant with my son, Lukas, I continued to work in countries that had been rife with war, although there was no fighting going on when I was there. It was a decision that I made with my husband and I felt comfortable with it. People who say, ‘You don’t go to Gaza or Somalia when you’re pregnant,’ fail to realise that there are hundreds and thousands of women living and giving birth in those places. So why is it not okay for a white woman from Connecticut to work there while pregnant? I always use the women whom I photograph as a source of strength and in Darfur I saw women who were six months pregnant walking for miles to go about their work, and carrying 50 pounds [22 kilos] of firewood on their heads.
Lynsey’s Object
My camera. It has enabled me to walk into intimate moments in people’s lives around the world. Without it people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ With a camera, you have a reason. I have been a photographer since I was 21 and it’s what I’ve built my life on, but I am not wedded to one particular model – it’s just a tool to tell a story and I go through them very quickly. When I was kidnapped in Libya, they took everything, including the shoes on my feet. As we were being taken, I was trying to pull the discs out of my camera – I wanted what I had shot. Cameras can always be replaced, but images cannot.
Every image is emotional, such as my photograph of Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle being carried by his friends, which I took in Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. In 2007 we spent almost two months with these young soldiers and, at the end of a big operation, we were being airlifted off the side of a mountain when we were ambushed by the Taliban. Rougle was shot and killed, which was tragic on many levels. It was very sad to see someone who was so vibrant one minute and dead the next, and he symbolised the greater tragedy. One has to wonder what the hell Americans were doing there, giving their lives to such a futile war.
LYNSEY ADDARIO
Photojournalist
LIMOR FRIED
Engineer Limor Fried is the founder of do-it-yourself electronics company Adafruit. Limor began Adafruit in 2005 while she was still studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics, and to offer the best-designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. The Adafruit factory in New York City now employs over 50 people and offers tools, equipment and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests and approves. The Adafruit YouTube channel is home to hundreds of unique open-source project tutorials. Limor is also known as Ladyada, and took that name in homage to Ada Lovelace. Lovelace, a mathematician born in 1815, worked on Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, an early mechanical computer, and wrote the first algorithm. She is regarded as the first-ever computer programmer. Limor was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012 by Entrepreneur magazine and is a member of the NYC Industrial Business Advisory Council. In 2014 Adafruit was ranked 11 in the top 20 US manufacturing companies and top in New York on the Inc.5000 list of fastest growing private companies.
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I’m a female engineer and I’m really interested in how I can get more young people, especially women and other under-represented groups, to learn engineering. We can do a lot to get those people to realise how cool it is to be an engineer, but not by beating them over the head with a textbook. The way to do it is to present engineering as relevant. Becky Stern [her colleague at Adafruit] is doing a lot of projects on wearable electronics. Every week on YouTube you can find out how to make things such as a dress that sparkles when you dance, a hat that reacts to music at a dance club and an umbrella that lights up when it’s going to rain. They’re really fun – and they’re complicated electronics projects, presented for people who think they aren’t that interested in electronics, but are interested in fashion. At New York Fashion Week [2015], Zac Posen had a special project using electronics from Adafruit. We try to do that for everything that young people are already into – fashion, sports, technology, dance, gaming.
I’m lucky to have parents and sisters who are very feminist. I expressed an interest in computers at a very young age and, at the time, that was weird, but they were totally fine about it. My parents said, ‘You don’t have to have a traditionally female-oriented career, that’s fine.’ Initially, I wanted to design video games; then I got more and more interested in the deep theory. Today, every kid has a laptop, an iPad, a smartphone. People have a lot more experience of technology at a young age, but they don’t necessarily know how it works. Back then, you had to do much more yourself. It wouldn’t be unusual to open up your computer and start messing around with it.
The best way to teach somebody something is this. If you want people to build a boat, you teach them to long for the sea; you don’t give them the task of building a boat.
Technology moves very fast and, to reach more people, it got kind of closed off. Nowadays, if you buy a laptop, you probably can’t even change the battery. Five years ago that was unheard of. If you have an iPad, you can’t put an app on it without going through the App Store. It’s very safe and easy for the user, but it’s getting harder to get creative with technology. The best way to teach somebody something is this. If you want people to build a boat, you teach them to long for the sea; you don’t give them the task of building a boat. For technology, you give them a project that’s so cool they will do whatever it takes to be able to do it. It’s very sneaky!
Then you start to learn how to modify things. Think about learning to cook. When you first start to cook, it’s terrifying. How do you boil water for spaghetti, what is a simmer, what is a full boil? When do I put the salt in? Olive oil or butter? When you make your first meal, if no one throws up, that’s good. Then you move on and try lasagne. Then you think, ‘I didn’t want it with beef, I wanted it with turkey,’ and that works, but when you try to swap ricotta with cream cheese, it doesn’t work. That’s exactly how it goes with engineering. You learn what’s going to work and what won’t.
When I started Adafruit, I was still in school, finishing my thesis. I was really bored with it, so I kept building projects for fun – a synthesiser, the Minty Boost [a small, powerful USB charger] – and I posted them on blogs. They got a lot of attention. Starting a company wasn’t my goal, but I kept getting emails saying, ‘We want to build these projects, can you sell us the parts?’ and after a while I put a PayPal button up.
It’s a challenge to start a company. I went in blindly, not thinking how hard it would be, but I’ve done it. We give everybody the opportunity to grow, half the directors are women, and we’re always hiring people and giving them a chance. What I like about running a company is that I get to make those decisions. If I had a venture company or investors backing me, they’d say, ‘This is too risky.’ Running a company is scary but if it’s your own company, you can run it how you want to, and all the things you hate about companies, you can choose not to do.
Adafruit is awesome. I enjoy going into the factory every day, working with amazing people, seeing them flourish. Everyone in the company gets along. At the end of meetings, tech companies normally have a bug report. We have a hug report, where people give a shout-out to someone wh
o’s helped them – covered their hours, helped them with a project. It’s really positive. Instead of creating a culture of backstabbing, if we all raise each other up, it’s better for everyone. We invite people to come and see these weekly meetings and they go away saying, ‘I’m going to do that in my company’ – we’re trying to create a viral model of not being crappy to each other.
I’m a leader, but I’m not the boss – the customers and the people I work with dictate what I do every day.
I’m a leader, but I’m not the boss – the customers and the people I work with dictate what I do every day. I’ve offloaded so much of my task to the people I work with but they still have to tell me what they need, and for the customers, it’s my job to give them a good experience. My philosophy is that the DNA of the company flows from the leadership – the owner sets the culture. It’s really important to set an example, because how the leader acts is how everyone is going to act.
Limor’s Object
An unassembled Minty Boost charger kit – an unassembled one has more promise. What the kit represents to me is an experience that someone’s going to have. They’re going to learn something about engineering, electrical resistance, soldering circuit boards. Even if it’s only a half-hour project, they have something they have built that has given them experience and knowledge. It’s scary at first if you don’t know anything about building electronics, but if you get over that fear and jump in, you can run with the project and move it forward – and that’s what learning is all about.
LIMOR FRIED
Electrical engineer and founder, Adafruit
SALLIE KRAWCHECK
Sallie Krawcheck is the owner and chair of Ellevate, a global professional network for women, and CEO and co-founder of Ellevest, a soon-to-be-launched digital investment platform for women. She has held more senior roles than any other woman on Wall Street, beginning as a research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, rising to CEO, and following this with equally prestigious positions in other blue-chip companies – chair and CEO at Smith Barney, chief financial officer at Citi, chair and CEO at Citi Wealth Management, and CEO at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, the largest wealth management business in the world. Ellevate supports businesswomen at all levels, from those starting out to those in senior positions, offering networking, learning and investment. A portion of the network’s revenue is invested in the Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Index Fund, the only mutual fund that invests in the top-rated companies in the world for advancing women.
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It’s hard to know at 18 what you will want to be doing at the age of 40. Sometimes it’s a case of making an educated guess – in my case, a wild guess. My journalism degree helped me enormously, though. The essence of journalism can be having lots of facts, information, sources, and cutting through to what really matters. The writing skills transferred perfectly to being a Wall Street research analyst. I was the fastest typist on the planet, which was also helpful. I had the choice of writing for a newspaper or writing for Wall Street and I chose Wall Street partly because Wall Street mania was prevalent at the time. There were jobs for everybody and I thought, ‘I’ll do that.’
One reason why there are so few women in finance is because we tend to know few women in finance. It’s not just that you can’t see the door, you don’t know where the door is – you don’t even know there’s a building. And once we know about it, it doesn’t speak to us very much. We are as good at math as men – we know that. The challenge is that the industry doesn’t present itself well. Young women perceive that the finance sector revolves around making money, scandal, gambling – and they go off to learn how to be, say, a paediatrician. I’d say finance is about helping families to live their lives, and pensioners to retire well. The industry has represented itself really badly as long as I’ve known it, but in fact there is a lot of purpose.
I firmly believe the businesses I was running were open to people from all sectors and backgrounds. However, the numbers on gender diversity in the US have not moved. If anything, they’ve gone backwards. I think that progress has been limited. I loved working on Wall Street. There was a straightforwardness to it, a sense of action, that I enjoyed for years. But Wall Street needs to be diverse and we need to provide a level playing field for everyone. We have a gender investing gap in this country – women do not invest like men do and you can’t tell me that’s not because of a gender gap in the industry.
In terms of women in business, we need to kiss the queen bee goodbye. We’ve had too many queen bees and I’ve been stung by them, as have my peers. I do get it. Historically, the research shows that if there was one woman at the table – and back then there probably was only one – you didn’t want another woman to take your spot. My generation and the next one are rejecting that. The table can be bigger, we can get more chairs, and if there aren’t enough chairs for us in corporate America, we can start our own businesses in a way we couldn’t have done even five years ago.
The number-one thing is networking and Ellevate provides that platform for women to meet, in person and online, to exchange ideas that help us all. There’s an incorrect view that if I’m mentoring, I’m investing my time and you’re getting something out of me. In fact, I get more out of mentoring than I ever expected. And people do find it easier with individuals of their own gender – guys have been doing it forever.
For entrepreneurs, their network is a key determinate of success – for raising money, getting together a board of advisors, finding customers and clients, hiring, knowing what competitors are doing. Women in their 20s say to me they don’t want to ‘cheat’, they want to do it on their own. That’s astonishing! Relationships are what drives everything – not just business, but personal life. We learn at school that we have to play by the rules, do the hard work. You study hard for a multiple-choice test that’s on Tuesday at 9am and you get your A grade. The workplace is not school. My big break came about when I was on the cover of Fortune magazine for being the last honest analyst. We had the right business plan, we did the right thing for our clients, we hadn’t got caught up in the research scandal, so I had my A grade. Then I was asked to fill in at the last minute on a conference panel and I said I would do it if the woman running it would consider looking at our business and writing a story on it. They wrote the story and put me on the cover, and the lesson was making that relationship – and not playing by the rules.
I never looked too far ahead. I never thought, ‘How will I do this when the kids are in kindergarten or in high school?’ I just got on with it. I never would have used the word at the time, but I was always authentic about it. The idea of hiding that I had kids or acting like it wasn’t hard never occurred to me. It can be a tough thing for women to navigate. The world still likes you to pretend that everything’s perfect, but I have found being honest works much better.
Relationships are what drives everything – not just business, but personal life.
A bunch of things make a good leader. You have to be smart enough. You have to work hard enough. You have to love it. Those are the prerequisites. One thing I think about a great deal is that you have to have a vision, and sometimes I don’t – I don’t always know which way this industry is going. You have to have strong communication skills because, if you have that vision but nobody understands it, that’s challenging. And you have to be risk-tolerant. That can be difficult for women. We tend to be quite risk-aware and leadership can mean sticking your neck out.
You might be a failure one day, but you can still be a success the next. You can fail and succeed every day.
Success and failure are viewed as end points, not a process. In fact, you might be a failure one day, but you can still be a success the next. You can fail and succeed every day. If I get fired from a job – which I have been! – I won’t like it but it’s OK. I will wake up next morning and I’ll do it all again – and approach it with a sense of joy.
Sallie’s Object
A guitar-shaped pin. It wa
s my grandmother’s and she gave it to me when I was about six. She passed away when I was in high school. It’s not real gold – the ‘gold’ is peeling off it – and I don’t wear it often because I’m nervous about losing it. My grandmother was so proud of me. She gave me unconditional love, and she believed in me. She was a professional woman, which was simply not done at the time in my home town in Carolina. My grandfather had a clothing store. She ran the women’s department, he ran the men’s, and they were true partners all their lives. She was my inspiration.
SALLIE KRAWCHECK
Financial advisor for women, CEO and co-founder of Ellevest
SISTER ROSEMARY NYIRUMBE
Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe is a Ugandan nun who has dedicated her life to helping women who were held captive by Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which fought government forces for over two decades. Sister Rosemary joined the Catholic order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at 15 and trained as a midwife. Since 2001 she has been director of St Monica’s, a vocational school for girls in Gulu, which has given refuge to more than 2,000 young women, many of whom were abducted, raped, tortured and even forced to kill members of their own family during their time in Kony’s army. In 2013, Sister Rosemary’s story was told in the documentary Sewing Hope, and the book of the same name.
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My childhood in Uganda was very simple. My mother was a housewife and my dad was a carpenter. Now I think he must have been the best carpenter in town because he managed to send all of us to school – and there were eight of us! I grew up in a culture that prefers boys to girls in terms of education. My dad believed that you should not let girls study – we should marry and look after the family. But, even though she was not educated, my mum was a very strong woman. She pressed the point that all her children must go to school and she said, ‘I will do everything to send my children to school, even if I have to sell all the clothes I have and walk naked.’ And so everybody in my family is educated.