Transcripts For CSPAN2 Janice Kaplan The Genius Of Women 20240713

Wonderful Committee Partners and all these organizations for helping us get the word out. I want to introduce janice and kelly and just minute that i want to ask you to silence your phones or any other noisemakers he might have with you tonight so we can just share everything. I hope many of you have visited gramercy books. We are right down the street. We invite any of you who have not been there before to come in we have been open for just over three years and we have hosted 300 events during that period. [applause] besides being a fullservice independent bookstore we intend to connect the community with authors launching important books and thats exactly what we are doing tonight. You receive a program when he came in and i want to quickly give a shoutout to three other events that are listed there. We have eight events every month per first two legend james ride. His latest novel won the National Book award for fiction. Hes also the author of the 1995 classic the color of water one of the best memoirs in a generation. Its a hilarious tapestry featuring an eclectic group of individuals that bear witness to the shooting. Thursday march 5 at 7 00 p. M. And tickets are through the event. We feature them memoirs by italys goldberg. Mm wired stealing grit. The people that she sees as the unsung bat ground backbone of our country. It will be held down the street at gramercy books. Finally i want to do a shoutout for march 30. The will feature Jerry Mitchell to hear his courageous story bringing to justice the klansmen responsible for the notorious crimes of the civil rights area priest going to share his memoir race against time the unsolved murder cases of the Civil Rights Era and helping conversation with Ohio State University historian. Onto tonight. Youll be hearing about women geniuses. Even in the time of rethinking womens roles we defined genius almost exclusively through male achievement. Most people mention Albert Einstein. Janice kaplan decided to find out why, why have the extraordinary works of some women are brushed aside. Her results as they were workable book the genius of women to return mix of memoirs and inspiration janice makes surprising discoveries about women geniuses now and throughout history from music to robotics. Her research is expensive shes done interviews with neuroscientist psychologists and dozens of women geniuses throughout the world today. Her insights will be at the center of tonights program. Janice kaplan has enjoyed wide successes of Magazine Editor and journalist. She works with Major Political figures including president raqqa obama she interviewed Barbara Streisand and max didnt shoot the Deputy Editor of Tv Guide Magazine and executive producer of Tv Guide Television group where she created more than 30 Television Shows that aired primetime on net maker networks which began her career as an awardwinning producer. She has authored or coauthored 14 books including New York Times bestseller. Janice kaplan is clearly able genius. Joining janice in conversation is Kelly Friedman herself a women geniuses while bushs presidency of the womens fund of central ohio Public Foundation is seriously committed to igniting social change toward gender equity. Kelly is deeply committed to this work and is volunteered for many years while she worked as a partner with chief operating operator is peloton nia. After the conversation to be able to ask jenna some questions and you can do so by lining up right here to my right in your left and we will bring the microphone up this ill so we could have questions afterward. After the question and answer you can purchase a book and get a signed copy. Please give a warm welcome to Janice Kaplan and kara burisma. [applause] do we need this one or this one cracks do we need this one at all . Here we go. Welcome janice. Thank you. Its nice to be here. [applause] is hard to imagine someone who thinks about the bias and gender norms as much as i do so you can imagine what a fan woman i am of this author for having spent the time and the vulnerability to write this book thank you again for being here tonight and i want to do justice to the one thing i think we all have to realize sitting here today i said to genesis we were coming up here, today marks the passing of Katharine Johnson at 101 years old. For those of you who that name doesnt ring a bell i hope it will from this day forward. She is the hidden figure that was at the center of the movie Hidden Figures and helped our own john glenn go into space. My for today has been no more hidden fingers and i think janice shares a map. So thank you kathryn for everything she did to pave the way for all of us. So Janice Hughes spent a lot of time thinking about people like kathryn johnson. What inspired you to take on the genius of women as a topic of this 15th book . Ive been thinking about womens issues for a long time in my career but the particular for this was a survey done by a friend of mine. He was a strategist and he did a survey where he found 90 of americans think geniuses tend to be men. You dont get 90 of americans say they like so we went out to lunch and mike presented his findings to me and he said what do you think is going on . I really had no idea. Mike paid for lunch and i spent the next two years trying to come up with an answer. There was another part of your but the said they asked people what it took to be a genius and 15 of men said i might be a genius. How many women said so . Zero. There was not a single woman in the survey who said she might be a genius. Lets admit 15 of men who said they were geniuses are possibly delusional. But thats okay because you have to think you can do something before you can actually do it. I actually think its much better and i would like to hear a lot more women say well, yeah abim. And its stunning. Im just going to play little game. I want someone to be very brave quickly. Name a woman genius right now. Madam curie. Isnt that the number one answer . In that same survey mike found when asked to name a female genius the only one anybody could name was madam curie and there were a couple of others thrown in there. Why is that . Why do we not know these names and why have we never heard of Katharine Johnson until somebody did a movie about her . Part of the excitement for me in doing this book was uncovering some of these people from the past and looking at the people from the president. Different geniuses and learn from them. Instead you opened up this thought process for me over the course of the various chapters about what is a genius . How has the definition of genius been shaped by society so share with us a little bit about, i said that the definition of genius is exceptional, intellectual, or Creative Power or other natural ability, would you think about that . I tried to change the definition of genius and rethink what we think of genius. I started my research in london and i spoke to a professor of cambridge and we also went out to lunch. He gave a lot of good lunches when your writer. I told him i was thinking about genius and what that meant. Heat took a couple sips of his chardonnay and a very pluming english accent, which i wont try to imitate, he said, genius, that would be where extraordinary talent meets celebrity. I was really taken aback by that. Meets celebrity . This is a cambridge professor this guy is whitehaired academic he did not mean celebrity in the kardashian sort of way. He has never seen reality tv, believe me, but as i thought about it i realized what he meant was getting your work noticed. Getting your work recognized. Whether you are in corporation academia science and the arts there are a lot of people who do great works but if its not noticed if its not recognized if nobody is paying attention to it, it cant have an impact on the current generation or future generations. I think for too much of history and even probably up until this very moment women have had half of the equation. Theyve had the extraordinary talent and they havent had the notice. The celebrity the recognition. We will talk about why people dont notice that in a minute. I know that there has been a little bit of that equation that has to do with the nurturer side of things, the encouragement. Talk a little bit about how i guess genius is born. We tend to think of genius as a natural state, either you are or you arent. As i did this research i realize its not true. Being genius is not like being class president murray name appears in the yearbook forever. Who we consider genius changes over time. Genius needs to be nurtured. Genius doesnt appear fullblown. I tell about the story in the book of mozart and mozart sister his sister was great genius also. When they were young she was equally a child prodigy and when they were young they toured together and some people said she was a better musician than she was. Once she hit her early teens her father told her it was time to go home it would be scandalous for her to continue being a musician in public and she had to go home and be married, which was the only proper thing for an early teenager of the time in the 1600s. Mozart got to go on his talent was nurtured he most met composers and conductors of people who helped him put them into great positions. If mozart had been sent home and only got to play his music in his living room would we consider him a genius . If you never got to compose because it was scandalous for a mans work to be played in public we wouldnt consider him a genius either. Genius needs to be the two points of genius are not that its natural but that it needs to be nurtured and it needs to be recognized. What we call in the Dictionary Company as well. [laughter] please. You just said it, its not a zerosum game. I think whenever we get into the organization i work we spent a lot of time talking about gender norms a lot of times the first thing people want to say to us is, i hate men, i hate men. People, why are there not more men in this room because its intimidating we are going to be upset with them . I think what we all realize is that this biased, this is a generations old problem. This started with the beginning of time you cited to an early socrates time that was just as talented as everyone else. So lets talk a little bit about implicit bias which we know i think we all have to be vulnerable in the beginning to say we all have about certain things but there is something a way about the way that biases have affected a womans ability to be a genius. As he looked at that when did you become aware of the bias issue . Was it something you are already thinking about before you wrote the book or something you thought even more deeply about what you got into it . First to say what you are saying about the angry man, its not an angry book. My husband assures you, men come you can read this book you will not get upset by it. I think a lot of women who know about womens issues are surprised when they read the book because it brings out a lot of things they hadnt expected before. Implicit bias is really important. Another way i started to think of it is as confirmation bias. Psychologists refer to confirmation bias to say that when you have an idea about something when you have a belief when there is something you already think, its really hard to change that idea. I wont give a political example, i will give an example about cars. If you just bought a new car because you think its the very best car out there, once you get it you start looking for all the articles and advertisements and the friends who bought the same car to tell you its the best car. If somebody tells you its not a good car, you are pretty sure they are wrong and you dont pay too much attention to them. We do the same thing with men and women. We have our ideas about what they are so the new stereotype, which i think is as damaging as the old one, is that women are collegial and cooperative, and men are leaders. Is that true . Of course its not true. We all know women who are leaders and women who are collegial and women who are loners and men who are exactly the same. Because that becomes a belief when you see a woman whos collegial or you see a man who is a leader even when you see it in yourself you immediately start to notice that when you discard all the others. It becomes a selffulfilling prophecy what we expect to see becomes what we do become in many ways. I noted when you said that in the book that women do have learned behaviors to succeed in many ways i dont know many of us a better choice but to be legal. When we are not thats really a problem. Of course its a learned behavior. Shirley tolman, the former president of princeton, a microbiologist, told me that when she was younger and a scientist, she used to close her eyes and tried to imagine a scientist and when she was able to picture a man as often as she could picture a woman she knew she was okay. I told that story to another woman scientist who was interviewing later and she said thats amazing because when i close my eyes i cant even picture myself. I think thats what happens i think the external messages become very deeply embedded in terms of your question also about women being collegial, i think women have always had to do the great work around, if youre not in power and somebody else is in power and control your life, you got to figure out how to make it work. Sometimes that does mean by playing by somebody elses rules and i dont think thats a bad thing. I think women throughout history have done it, they figured out ways around obstacles and you got to do that. I dont have a problem with that. To speak about another genius you cover in your book that many of us are so culturally now a piece of our lives, ruth Bader Ginsburg, rgb, a lot of people, i think you use her as an example in the book as someone who has allowed herself in some ways to become, you said the carly goat because abthe qaeda league guilt because she knows in a way that she is getting what she needs by becoming endearing to people and her story becoming what it is about a man who wanted to tend to his mother the idea of caretaking the first case had to do with men not women. Can you talk a little bit about her and how she participates . Ruth Bader Ginsburg did have to do the great work around also. While she was at harvard law school, one of the very few women in the class her husband was also there. She was applying and she was asked why she wanted to go to law school. Im sure she wanted to throw up when she said that because of course its not why she wanted to go to law school so she could understand what her husband was doing she wanted to be a lawyer. And she wanted to become Supreme Court justice. She knew thats what she needed to say. She knew thats what she needed to say to get into law school. If youre able to do Something Like that and it leads to your being the powerful person you are, i think you have to recognize the times. Its interesting to see i think the ways we can think about biased and how people interact on a daily basis but theres the unwritten ways i think things that saturate our lives. You point out at one point in the book some examples, i think at the very beginning, that Something Like wikipedia only has like 15 percent of it focuses on women or in the New York Times obituaries i think it was Something Like 10 of them have ever been about women. These are things that are embedded in our culture as the marker by which we judge whats important and i dont think anyone thinks that none of us are realizing that by reading New York Times obituaries we are reinforcing the bias that women are an important but thats exactly what it does, doesnt it . Absolutely. The times to the credit the New York Times started something a couple years ago called overlooked. Which is a column of all the people who should have had obituaries in the times and didnt. They started with i think five women to launch this column and when you look at those women who were there you are stunned. It was charlotte brontc who wrote jane eyre and sylvia plass, famous for the bell jar. Dorothy elaine who was a great photographer. You go, what were they thinking . How was it that charlotte brontc died with this fabulously successful book even at the time nobody thought she deserved an obituary at the times. It was simply because theres nothing else to say shes a woman and so she just wasnt seen. They wouldnt even think of it. There was also a story early in the book about a woman who won the nobel prize a couple years ago in chemistry and thats kind of a big deal when you win the nobel prize. You might have wanted to look her up and get more information on her but she didnt have a Wikipedia Page. It wasnt because she had somebody had submitted one for her but the gatekeepers at wikipedia who for various reasons tend to be mostly men just ignored her and headed thought this could possibly be important. She won the nobel prize and got a Wikipedia Page. That is a very high bar for a woman. To get a Wikipedia Page when you win the nobel prize. If you think who else is on wikipedia. Its run by a woman. It is. She wrote beautifully about the incident and explained and she said, this is not meant to be a criticism of wikipedia, i love wikipedia. She pointed out that wikipedia is not setting the rules its representing what society thinks is important. Sometimes we want to say wikipedia is causing this problem when really i think what she said is its a reflection of whats in all of us. I think thats the easy game we play. Lets put wikipedia out of business. Really thats not gonna solve everything because everyone thinks the same after its gone. Its absolutely good point these are reflections. In the times or wikipedia or whatever else is reflecting what we all think and what we all expect or what we expect at the time. Times start to change and we expect some things. Lets talk about the brain. There have been people who said there is a difference you talk a lot in the book about people have written about the difference between women and men and some people made a lot of money thinking they can describe this and i think its lee elliott and she study this and what did she find about the difference between men and womens brains . She started out wanting to do the book about the difference between men and women because its always in the headlines. You hear over and over again, as i said to her, people always tend to you i treat my children exactly the same and the boys and girls clubs behave differently this must be hardwired. She buried her head when i said this. She said the only thing thats hardwired is the brainstem. Which is what controls our instincts. Everything else when the baby is born it struck me after i spoke to her that why is it we only use the phrase hardwired when we are talking about gender issues. If i told you by the time children are 18 months some of them speak german and some of them speak spanish and some speak italian so that must be proof its hardwired you would say janice, dont be ridiculous, theyre picking up from what their parents speak. So why do we understand that . We dont understand that liking pink or liking blue or liking barbie dolls versus liking legos why would we think thats hardwired. Its a lot harder to pick up the social cues to learn how to speak spanish or french or italian then it is to pick up social cues that tell you you look so darn cute in that little pink outfit. Is interesting because we see marketers trying to have the same things for boys and girls but if the chemistry kit to create beauty tools. Its not just the chemistry kit, its lets make perfume or so that is still that bias coming out. If you try to get a toy that is not male or female, its really hard to find. People talk a lot about the progress we are making and i think we are making huge progress. Thats an area i think we will go hugely backwards. The toys are becoming more and more and clothes are becoming more and more divided by gender. Thats not terribly helpful. We could gender reveal parties. What is that about . [laughter] other than saying, this is the most important thing about this child and this announces what my child is going to become a guess what, maybe you will have a boy who likes poetry and maybe a girl who wants to play rugby so that gender reveal party is only saying, heres how im going to stereotype my child from birth. [laughter] i tried to buy a pair of white pants for a boy in a play one time and it was impossible. There are no white pants for boys. A couple years ago the gap had a tshirt, a toddler tshirt which was really cute and spell that genius. Each letter of genius was one of the boxes from the periodic table. It only came in blue and you can only find it under boys clothes, toddler boys clothes. They couldve had the same tshirt and blue and you couldve found it if you are searching under toddler girls but it was not there. Lets talk even though i know its not a book about profiles, there are some Amazing Stories of women we should know about and i think you and i talked about a few that we like to talk about and i was excited because kind of you get some favorites. Tell us about lisa meitner and what she did and how shes being honored in the rear view as you would put it. Lisa meisner was this amazing woman in the 1930s who discovered Nuclear Fission. The first person to understand that when you split and adam the nucleus of an atom of uranium it was a big explosion of energy. That led to nuclear energy, and led unfortunately to Nuclear Weapons which she was not willing to have part of. It was also something that turned physics on its head. It won the nobel prize i said it won the nobel prize because lisa meisner did not win it. It went to a lab partner, he was a very nice man, a very good chemist, and maybe he even deserved the nobel prize for Something Else but he sure didnt deserve it for Nuclear Fission because he didnt understand Nuclear Fission. But the men and of course they were men on the Nobel Committee, couldnt wrap their heads around the idea that couldve been a woman responsible for this enormous likebreakthrough. They gave the nobel prize to the man. Many years later the proceedings of the Nobel Committee were released a certain number of years the nobel proceedings are released. A group of physicists looked at that and called it the most egregious and indefensible oversight ever. Believe me, for egregious and indefensible oversight there is a lot of competition. [laughter] but what kelly was referring to is that many physicists sense have tried to make it up to lees meisner and others an asteroid named for her. There are statues of her all over berlin where she did her work. My favorite the periodic table, as i mentioned before, there is now an element on the periodic table named a but she will never know that. You will never know that. Is important because we talk i think later when youre talking about what helps women geniuses succeed, is that they need to have seen something that gives them the confidence to keep pressing on and there were so few of them that even even though they will never know but theres something important about us actually seeing these women even today. I interviewed maia beyond the actress who had been the star blossom when she was a teenager. And amy on the Big Bang Theory. In between those two shows she got her phd in neuroscience. Funny story when she went to do her audition for the Big Bang Theory, she had been out of acting for very long time, she spent the last seven years getting her phd in neuroscience. She turned in her headshot, the sheet that has your picture and resume on it, she didnt know where to put that she was a phd in neuroscience so she put it under other. Where you would say, good at skateboarding. [laughter] the producers knowing this was for the Big Bang Theory they said is this a joke . She said no its true. They made the character a neuroscientist so she could correct any mistakes but what is going to say is that when we spoke, she talked about how important it is to her that she has this role. And that she can present a neuroscientist as being somebody who can have a full life and she gets married on the show. It starts to get images of different kinds of lives that women can have and to say that there are Different Things that are in Popular Culture that its okay to be. Its interesting when you bring up the issue about marriage and family because i think you noted that as you met a lot of these women, very many of them have families, children that they are juggling, partners, and recently was introducing someone at ohio state a fellowship in the name of the first head of surgery. Someone looked at the wall and said why is there a picture of everyone else and not her . When i was talking about the importance of us seeing her and why its important to have a fellowship in her name, someone in the back would work with her stood up and said she wouldve never wanted this. She never saw herself, she married surgery. I thought, thats another one of those biases that if you are a woman genius and succeeded you mustve given up everything else. All the things that our body is made to do, you give that up to actually focus on your brain because you couldnt possibly do both. You think thats a little bit of that may be sensitivity on the other side that we can do both . You never want to focus on the fact that we managed to pull it off. I had it gone out looking for women married and had children but i did turn out that almost all of the genius women the modern genius woman i spoke to did have these multidimensional lives. Many had toddler children, some had gross children obviously depending on the women themselves. See on by like the president of Barnard College told me she thinks its really important for women to have many ashe didnt need it and three faces of many months suggesting schizophrenia. She mentioned you have many different roles. Shes a psychology researcher. The president of the university. A mom, shes a wife. Shes a collie, shes a friend. She said some days she thinks shes the most important psychology researcher in making these great breakthroughs and some days she thinks shes just the worst mom in the world because she forgot to pack her daughters lunch. Thats okay and its really helpful when you have these many different roles she says if you slip up in one you can always fall back into the other. Weve always assumed that men are going to have careers and families and lives and i think that women find great richness to their lives when they recognize that its okay to have many parts to your life. One of our other favorites i think because even of the introduction we all think i think i tested it today i looked up wikipedia and the photo of the genius next to the click on this with Albert Einstein so it turns out, i may have i started telling this Albert Einsteins first wife i think its important i dont even know that i will say it right, maleta merrick, we should hear her name and not just think of her as einsteins first wife because she was important potentially to some of the things that he discovered. Right. She was a great scientist and a great mathematician in her own right before they got married and i did a lot of research and theres been a lot of discussion over the years as to how much she contributed to this theory of relativity to this greatest discovery. There is some suggestion that they were True Partners in this and he had written her letters talking about when our discovery gets known and when we win the nobel prize for this. In various other suggestions that they really worked very closely together. Im unable to make a determination on exactly how much she contributed. I dont know whether they were actual colleagues partners or just disgusted in bed at night. This is not something i can determine. What i found really fascinating was how upset people get at the suggestion that maleta merrick mightve participated in the discovery of relativity. Theres like people who are Team Einstein all the way, no, no, he did this alone. Everybody knows that einstein was not actually a great mathematician with certain things and that he turned to some wellknown mathematicians of the time to help with some of the things within his other great discoveries that he couldnt do. Thats what scientists do. Thats what academics do. The fact that its so shocking and upsetting to people that mightve been his wife i find kind of funny. When i saw that these are his own writings and given sort of the cultural confirmation bias that exists, i did think as i was reading that it seems remarkable he would be so open about our discovery if she wasnt a little bit involved because the confirmation bias was it like, give half your credit to your wife, that wasnt really the natural thing. He did give her half the money and they said they became divorced maybe that was what he did give her half of the nobel prize money, didnt he . Promised her that. If you won the nobel prize he would give her half the money. Not to be ignored. I agree we dont know is a former lawyer its all circumstantial evidence. [laughter] im good to go with it. There are so many great examples i know we have only so much time tonight but i do think that i know a few more will probably come up, roslyn franklin, we talked a little about joe dunkley. We talked about what was the realization you had upon meeting joe dunkley . Joe doug lee is a tenured professor of physics at seems to be having a lot of physicists tonight, there were a lot of other people in the book. She had been hired away from oxford where she was a tenured professor of physics at oxford. I was going down early and fixed assistance to interview her and everyone really studied really hard for this interview. Youre talking to this great physicist she was quite famous for some of the things shes done including putting age on the universe and i really wanted to be paired, is 13. 8 billion years in case youre wondering. I really wanted to be prepared for this interview. I go down im all set i read her research i knocked on her door and this very very pretty woman in her late 30s opens the door she has a big smile shes wearing a pretty floral dress and she says, come in, may i get you some tea and we sat down and we talked about her two toddler daughters. Maybe when i said to you that i was going to interview a tenured professor of physics at princeton, thats exactly the image you had, if so, youre a better person than i am because i was working on the subject this is what i was doing and yet i realized as i opened up the door that somewhere in the back of my head i did expect to see Albert Einstein. I think thats the importance the vulnerability of us. I shared some similar examples that you can think about these things all the time so would you coworkers or the people we meet that we are just chatting with and all of a sudden they dont understand what we are talking about we have to remember if we think hard, weve done it too. Ntu the patriarchy lives in us and all of us and the vulnerability would help us break the ice. Its very hard to stand up against the whole society until you stand up against the things you been hearing since you are very young. The tell the story in the book about being a little girl about nine years old and what with my mom to our Family Doctor and he told my mom he thought i was reading too much. She got a little worried and said is there something wrong with her eyes . He said no, your i abher eyes are fine but a girl can get too smart for her own good. My mom seems to understand exactly what he meant and she just nodded and those of the kind of things that stay in your mind for a very long time. I think we are probably hopeful and wise enough we dont say things like that to girls directly anymore but has one of the women i interviewed said we live in the time of a thousand nudges. We are always nudging girls in a slightly different direction then we are nudging boys. Yes. Since we have a few minutes left to talk about then how do we help more women see their genius and or even if you are thinking about your own genius, what can you do to bring it out and i think you focused a little bit on the things that help. One of the things before i get to the points you shared at the very end of the book i did find one thing, sorry if this is a spoiler alert for hamilton but its been a out for a minute. [laughter] and watch the whole thing i loved it it was my 50th birthday trip, this is what im going to do, i did not for a minute think i was there to learn anything about women. Yet there is part of the story that is about who tells your story. And hamilton would not be who hamilton is in history perhaps had the women in his life not told his story. Is that right . [applause] thats how i read it. That in the book. But who tells your story really matters. Thats why i wrote this book because i wanted to be able to tell the stories and i wanted to be able to hear the stories a little bit differently and one of the things that i realized so much as i was writing this is that the real difference between genius men and genius women is not natural ability its not talent its not even hard work. Its being in a position to set the rules. And men have always been able to do that and women have it. Men have that power and women have it. Naturally as you were suggesting before about all this implicit bias, you look at people who are like you and you think they must be the talented one. You anoint them as the great artist. We were talking just before about the fact that when you go into so many museums there are almost no Women Artists on the walls. Women have been painting for a long time and i talked in the book about some of the genius women painters of the renaissance whose work was spectacular. And it gets written out of history and ignore. There was a wonderful story about a woman there rediscovered after 400 years she had a solo show at the prado museum and i was so excited about that and i saw some of her work when i went to the prado but it kinda makes you wonder if her work is great now, if it deserves a solo show at the museum, hasnt it been great for the last 400 years . Why didnt we notice it . Its a question of who gets to say its great. I think thats where its really important for us to realize that the we talk about gender so much, there is an intersection that complicates this so much more because i think its even harder for a woman of color to be recognized. Because of the inability to be heard and nurtured and perhaps you run into examples of that as well. Or maybe its even harder because there story my son took a class in one of the authors was a woman who was living as a slave and wrote a book at Brown University actually managed to find the book and had to verify it was her work but it actually exists and being studied in 11th grade class out there somewhere. Have you thought a little bit about even the intersection that we how these things all come together. I did. I didnt write extensively about that because i didnt think it was the right person to do it but i did interview a wonderful woman named carol edison the head of the African American studies department at emory university. I hope you will read about her in the book because i was so struck by her and our conversation and i met her actually by chance at an evening events and i liked her so much we had such a fabulous conversation we agreed to talk the next day and i quickly bought one of her books and read it as much of it is i could we set down the next day and i said, i love your book is amazing. I also noticed you had 15 footnotes in the first two pages. She said, im a black woman, and not allowed to make any mistakes. Nobody believes what i say anyway so everything i say has to be completely backed up and completely supported. She tells many more stories like that but i was very struck with that. Being a white woman that wouldnt have occurred to me. I tried to take readers along with me as i make what may be a very nacve discovery maybe i shouldve known all of that before but hearing it from her and seeing some specifics really moved me enormously. It really is that vulnerability to realize that the stuff we are missing. You do at the end of the book come up with about six things you think women geniuses, what will help them flourish, he said one supportive person. What kind of person does that have to be . Way back in history often it was a father or brother because those women in the renaissance had no place to paint unless they had a father or brother who let them into the studio, more recently of course often its a parent or individual mentor or teacher. I was struck by the fact that often it was just one person. The whole world is not going to be on your side and sometimes just having that one person is enough. Blinders to bias, that doesnt mean a⌟ no. There are a lot of obstacles everybody faces and i found over and over again to my surprise that so many of the women as they were on their way up this didnt see the problem. They told themselves there were no problems. Only when they got to a position they could actually make some change today to still do so . There are a lot of structural problems to be made. You also only have one life and you kids only have one life. If you encourage yourself to have that passion and focus, it does help a little bit to push the obstacles away until somebody else is going to be able to push them for you. I did think it was interesting because you said for women who is so much that a woman who has all this talent also has to have a rebel heart. And we all dont. So maybe seeing the others is a phil dunkley who we are talking about said that when she had at oxford as an undergraduate she never went to the women in physics programs because she didnt see herself as a woman in physics. She saw herself as a physicist. Now shes in the position where she could do something, she does. I said to her when she first told me that story i said, if you are able to succeed doesnt mean all women should be able to do what you did and just ignore it . She said no you shouldnt have to have my personality to be a great scientist. It has nothing to do with being a great scientist. Had been in many a room of especially i think this comes up in the legal field they will say i dont understand, i dont see it . I think sometimes just the success makes you think we are all is we are all on the same profession we must all be the same and we are not. Seeing beyond gender was another one you mentioned. And what you just said, thinking we are all the same. Tina landa was a wonderful broadway director told me she never likes to be called a woman director, shes a woman who directs. It sounds like a very subtle distinction but its actually a big one. As soon as you say women director you are lumping all women together. You are saying that all women direct the same. We say im a woman who directs im dumb like you are saying a woman, i love being a woman, and a director i love that too. The prehave pretty much nothing to do with each other. The word, tell me again . Things dont always go together. Theres a fascinating chapter of the book there to talk about it. That was the beauty chapter. The question is whether beauty and genius are connected and i was making the argument that they are and absaid they are orthogonal which means they have nothing to do with each other. It comes down to shoot sometimes. A positive approach. I wrote the gratitude diaries, i look for positivity everywhere. I had never met a group of women more positive and had a more wonderful outlook. Doctor Francis Arnold at caltech and did win a nobel prize in chemistry couple years ago came up with an incredibly new way of designing enzymes. Of course it takes a really long time to win the nobel prize so she started this two or three decades ago she was a young women and everybody told her she was crazy. Everybody told her this wouldnt work. I said, how did you have the courage to go ahead and do it anyway . She said, i did not doubt myself. It kind of gives me chills. I think you win the nobel prize just for being a woman who can say i do not doubt myself. That positivity that sort of core belief that you are okay and things are going to be okay, i heard again and again from these genius women. One of the other things you talked about was and we wont do it again, the issues of multitudes and what you mentioned about women being willing to have a multifaceted life. The last one was one that really struck me. Its because we know that women who are geniuses have to be willing to be outliers to a certain extent because the world is it ready for them in some ways. On the other side he said they have to have a core belief that they belong. I believe we all really want to belong. What is it, what does that mean when these women tend to have a belief they belong . I think its a sense that you have as much right to be a part of your field as anybody else does or a part of this world is anybody else does and women dont always feel that way. Faye fay lee who is one of the worlds experts in Artificial Intelligence and has created a new way to teach computers being used for things like Driverless Cars and Francis Arnold when she started out people were telling her this could it work. She doesnt have that great confidence that Francis Arnold does come she grew up in a small town in china shes a little more demure though extraordinarily brilliant. She said, she listened to what everybody was telling her and saying was wrong and she thought, i think im right. If im not right, whats the worst that could happen . I will just go on and try Something Else. That again to me is that wonderful sense of, im part of this community discovering Artificial Intelligence and i have as much right as anybody else to come up with my own ideas. I think if we can in any way part that sense to our children that its okay sometimes to be a little bit different, its okay to be not the exact same as everybody in your class but care about what you are doing and be passionate about it. We are going to ask for questions but there is one quote that if i would say should stick with you in this book, she said historically womens potential winners because nobody was willing to recognize or encourage it. But social change brings powerful results. As an organization very interested in social change for women and girls, i want to thank you for saying that because i think what you all may be heard tonight is that you need to tell the stories of these women you know or are the ones that you are hearing about and think about the stories of these women around you in your own life if you cant name a woman genius that you currently know, youre probably not looking very hard. Janice, any closing thoughts you have . Thank you for the great work you are doing with your Organization Also and bring these topics to peoples attention because talking about them and recognizing them is what makes change. [applause] thank you anyone who would like to ask questions, i would ask you to come to the aisle behind me. [inaudible] [inaudible] it struck me that in our times celebrities monetize your genius and did you run across a thought that women might not be able to monetize their genius the same way men do and is that in past our view of genius . Thats a great question, which i have not heard before. I dont think that most of the geniuses necessarily think about their work in terms of monetizing it. I think often they are passionate about their work and thats almost a side effect of it. I did speak to one woman in business in the book, her name is Monica Mandel he she was a managing director at Goldman Sachs and now at kkr at the big private equity firm. She did talk about one of the things she finds herself doing much of her time is encouraging young women and telling them its okay, recognize your amazing. Recognize you can do good work and dont let anyone stop you. Define genius from your perspective. [inaudible question] i think the point is that junior is abgenius is a lot wider than we understood before. My point here is extra new woman doing extraordinary things. Because we define as a geniuses always been just by who gets to say who is a genus. We will take a couple here. I bet there are and one of the things that are particularly delightful for me as when i was finishing the book and word of the book started getting out. I hope by using these women as examples we all start doing if the book inspires that feeling thats exactly what i hope it will do. [applause] as the nonauthor i would only say what i found very interesting about this is that if you look in the book theres a lot about is it really who gets recognized einstein we all decided he is the most important person on the earth it shows that he wasnt that great at math. What we assume is a genus is not what it is. I pulled a list today of the 50 greatest living geniuses it was according to who cares. On the list of 50 today there was eight women and it included michael jordan, tony hawk, my point is, its not just us broadening the definition to include women. Theres plenty of people willing to say tony hawk a skateboard writer the bigger the head the more likely they were to be a genius. [laughter] as one professor said, that would mean that whales are the geniuses. Iq continues to be proven over and over again to be a measure of how good you are at taking iq tests and nothing to do with genius. There is no absolute measure for it. [inaudible question] sounds like you had a great upbringing. [laughter] i think one of the things that is really important is that we can start integrating boys and much earlier than we do. We can expect of the time were in the workplace fear in a law firm men and women can be colleagues. A young friend of mine was telling me she just enrolled her son, who is three years old, in day camp. She wrote to the director a couple of friends who shed like to be in his group and he called her to say, im sorry they cant be in his grip, they are girls and we separate the boys and gross. Why are we separating boys and girls club age 3 . Appendix assuming age 30 they can get along. [inaudible question] [inaudible question]. [applause] youve obviously done it. If your son was able to say that and recognize that. I think raising boys the online used to be raise your sons to be the man you wanted to marry. Having those conversations with boys and not just girls is really important. Some of the things we might be naturally talking to girls about, lets talk to boys about them too. You are clearly on the right track and keep doing that with your son and hopefully others will follow. Thank you for being here. I heard its collegial. Myself and a couple my friends are in the process of writing a book as well about women. What i would like to ask is when you are talking to interview how has your women had each others backs and where have they helped other women Going Forward and i mean by that. My experiences there has been a huge awareness of what they need to help other women and that women are doing that and as i said, sometimes theyre not necessarily doing it on their way up but doing it in a position when they can. What i was suggesting about being collegial or cooperative is not necessarily being collegial to other women. I was saying thats what the new stereotype here is a women is that, its meant to be a positive and its meant to be used in politics and in boards that women are so collegial thats why we need to have them thats a diversity. I think its a danger because as soon as you announce women are something you announce they are not Something Else. As soon as you say women are collegial, almost by definition means they are not leaders, they like to Work Together but they dont lead. I think we start to lose the distinctiveness of what we each are. And what we can each do. We are starting lumping people together as woman versus man. Just lets stop doing that, but stopped recognizing our individual abilities, our individual talents and recognizing that its time to tell people that what matters is what each of us can do and the power we can bring to the world that way. [applause] [inaudible] thank you all for being here. Absolutely. Read it [applause] that was great. You are watching booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend on cspan2. Your programs watch out for. New york city deputy chief Technology Officer alexis which ski talks about the power dynamic between Big Tech Companies and governments around the world. Turning point usa founder charlie kirk offers his thoughts on what he calls the new conservative agenda. Georgetown University Ben buchanan reports on the normalizing of cyber warfare as a geopolitical tool and on our weekly Author Interview program afterwards, former Deputy National security adviser Katie Mcfarlane reflects on her time of the trump administration. Heres a look at some books being published this week, New York Times Editorial Board member jesse wegman argues the United States should get rid of the Electoral College and let the people pick the president. In some assembly required, university of chicago biology and anatomy professor neil shubin reports on how new science is helping to explain the evolution of different species. In ending parkinsons disease neurologist ray dorsey and todd share ceo of the Michael J Fox foundation for Parkinsons Research offers a plan to help prevent disease and improve treatment and care. Also being published this week, university of Illinois History professor Peter Fritzsche recounts how a fractured germany led to the rise of the third right in hitlers first hundred days. In the book pastor neil bascom chronicles the life of 1930s french racecar driver rence dreyfus who was prohibited from joining german race teams considered to have the top drivers and cars at the time due to his jewish heritage