Transcripts For CSPAN2 Janice Kaplan The Genius Of Women 20240713

Book dd continues now on cspan2, television for seriousreaders. Thank you jenny and thanks everyone for being here. I know the weather has been difficult. Sorry about that. We got parking challenges but i appreciate you all being. Ere tonight we are featuring acclaimed journalist and New York Times bestselling author Janice Kaplan and her fascinating book the genius of women fromoverlooked to changing the world. She will be in conversation with kelly, ceo for the womens fund of central ohio and this is going to be an illuminatingevening , ill say that right now. I want to thank iour partner the drexel theater, back at you jen. And our Wonderful Community partners, the Columbus School for girlsand all these organizations that helped us get the word out. Introduced janet and kelly in just a moment but first we ask you to silence your phones or any other noisemakers you might have with you tonight. So we can share everything. I hope many of you have visited, where right down the street and two blocks down who wed like any of you have not been here before to come and browse. Weve been open for just over three years and we posted 300 book related events during that period. [applause] besides being a curated fullservice independent bookstore in central ohio we connect the community with talented authors launching important books andthats what were doing tonight. You received the program when you came in and i want to give a shout out to three Upcoming Events listed there. He actually produce eight events every month. First, literally legend James Mcbride was then called in modern day marktwain by the New York Times. His latest model one the book award for fiction. Hes also the author of the 1995 really affecting classic the color of water, one of the best memoirs ina generation. Hes back with deacon king kong, a hilarious tapestry of late 60s brooklyn featuring a eclectic group of individuals bear witness to the shooting. Come meet James Mcbride in person at 7 pm at the king arts complex. Tickets are through event and we feature a wonderful memoir by elise goldblatt. Its an intimate look at goldblatts rust belt childhood and the people that he sees as the unsung backbone of our country. He will be in conversation with united ways michael will post and it will be held down the street at gramercy books and finally i just wanted to do a shout out for march 30. Were thrilled to feature Jerry Mitchell to hear about his courageous story bringing to justice the klansmen responsible for some of the most notorious crimes of the Civil Rights Era and he will share his memoir race against time where a reporter opened the unsolved murder cases of the Civil Rights Era and he will be in conversation with Ohio State University Professor James jeffrey at king arts and tickets are available through event bright. Onto tonight, you will be hearing about women geniuses. Even in this time of rethinking womens roles, we define genius almost exclusively through mail achievement. When asked to name a genius most people mention Albert Einstein or steve jobs. Janice kaplan decided to find e out why, why has the most extraordinary work of women been pushed aside . The result is a Remarkable Book the genius of women. Janice makes the surprising discoveries about women geniuses now and throughout history from music to robotics. Her research is extensive and she conducted interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists and dozens of women geniuses at work in the world today. Her insights will be at the center of tonights program. Janice kaplan has enjoyed wide success as a magazine editor, television proposed user and journalist and is a former editor in chief of gray magazine, the most widely read publication in america. There she worked with Major Political figures including president barack obama andshe interviewed also stars like Barbra Streisand and matt damon. She was Deputy Editor of Tv Guide Magazine and the Television Group where she created 30 Television Shows aired in primetime on major networks. She began a career as an awardwinning producer at abctvs Good Morning America eand has authored or coauthored besides the genius of women 14 books including New York Times bestseller the grassroots diary. Janice kaplan is clearly a woman genius. Joining her in conversation is atkelly reasoner, herself a woman genius as well. He is president and ceo of the womens fund of central ohio, a foundation usually committed to igniting social change for the sake of gender equity. Kelly is deeply committed to this work having been involved with the womens fund as a volunteer for many years while she worked as a partner with joan day as chief operating officer of california and a Senior Vice President of the columbus foundation. After their conversation you will be able to ask janice some questions and those wishing to ask questions and do so by lining oup right here to my right, youre left. And we will bring the microphone up in this aisle so that we can answer questionsafterwards. After the question and answer , if you havent received a copy of the book you can purchase one then and janice will also sign a copy so now give a warm welcome to Janice Kaplan and kelly griesmer. Okay. On mike. Do we need this one . I think we do. Am i doing anything here . Number there we go excellent. Welcome janice. Thank you all for being here. [applause] its hard to imagine someone who thinks about implicit bias and gender norms as much as i do you can imagine what a fan woman i am of this author for having spent the time and the vulnerability towrite this book. Thank you just for being here tonight and i want to do justice. The one thing i think we all have to realize sitting here today, i said to janice coming up here, today marks the passing of Catherine Johnson. And 101 years old. For those of you with 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. Helped our own john glenn go into space and a sort of my hashtag has been more Hidden Figures and i think that janice shares in that. So thank you catherine for everything she did to pavethe way for us. You spent a lot of time taking about people like Catherine Johnson. What inspired you to take on the genius of women as the topic of this 15thbook . I have been thinking about womens issues for a long time in my career but the impetus for this was the survey done by a friend of mine named mike berlin, a very note strategist and pollster and he did a survey where he found 90 percent of americans think that geniuses tend to be men. 90 percent. Dont get 90 percent of americans to say they like Chocolate Ice Cream so wewent out to lunch. Mike presented his findings to me and he said what do you think is going on . I really had no idea. So mike paid for lunch and i spent the next two years trying to come up with an answer. There was another statistic in your book that they said they asked people if they could be a genius and 15 percent of men said probably. I might be a genius. How many women said so . Zero. Wthere was not a single woman in the survey who said they might be a genius. The 15 percent of men who said they are geniuses are possibly delusional but thats okay because you have to think you can do something before you do it so its much better and i would like to hear a lot more women say ywell, yeah, maybe i have that zero did is stunning. So im just going to play a little game. I want someone to be brave quickly. Name a woman genius right now. Madame curie. Isnt that thenumber one answer . In that same survey mike am found when asked to name a female genius the only one anyone can name was madame curie and there were a couple of Rosalind Franklins thrown in there and why do we just not know these names . Why have we never heard of Catherine Johnson until about dy did a movie her and part of the excitement for me in doing this book was in uncovering some of these people from the past and looking at the people from the present t and the book is not profiles by any means. Its a narrative about women and womens issues but to be able to discover these people and weave their stories through was exciting. Thats a great point because i think what i loved so much about the book was i did expect when i first got i was going to read these wonderful stories of different geniuses and learn from them and 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. I said the definition of genius is exceptional intellectual or Creative Power ioor other natural ability, what do you think about that . I tried to change the definition of genius and to rethink what we think of genius and i started my research in london and i spoke to a professor at cambridge named Charles Jones and we also went out to d lunch, you do a lot of good lunches when your writer and i told him i was thinking about genius and what that meant and he sort of took a couple of sips of his chardonnay and in a very dreamy english accent was able to try to imitate he said genius, that would be where extraordinary talents meets celebrity. And i was taken aback by that. Meets celebrity. This is a cambridge professor. This guy is a whitehaired academic. He did not mean celebrity in the kardashian port of way. He has never seen reality tv but as i thought of it i realized what he meant was getting your work noticed. Getting your work recognized so whether youre in a corporation, in academia, in science, in the arts, there are a lot of people who do great work but if its not recognized and no ones paying attention it cant have an impact on the current generation or future generations and i think for too much of history and even probably up until this very moment, women have had half of the equation. They had the extraordinary talent and they havent had the notice, the celebrity, the recognition. Its hard to talk about why people dont notice that in a minute. I know theres been a little bit of that equation that has to do with the nurture side of things. The encouragement. Talk a little bit about how i guess a genius is born. We tend to think of genius as a natural state, either you are or you arent tuas i did this research i realized its not true. Being a genius isnt like beingelected class president where your name appears in a yearbook. Who we consider genius changes over time and genius needs to be nurtured, genius doesnt appear fullblown. I tell the story in the book of mozart mozarts sister. We all think of mozart as a great genius. He was a great genius, this is not a zerosum game but his sister was a great genius waalso and in fact when they were young she was equally a child prodigy and when they were young they toured together wand some people said she was a better musician than he waswhen she hit her early teens her father told her it was time to go home. It would be scandalous for toher to continue being a musician in public and she had to go home and be merry 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 met composers, other conductors, he met people who put him in great can position. Mozart had been sent home and only got to play his music in his living room when we consider him a genius . If he never got to compose because it was scandalous for a man and his work to be played in public, we wouldnt consider him a genius theater. The true point of genius are not a natural but that it needs to be nurtured and it needs to be recognized. We will be calling the Dictionary Company as well. And i think you just said it. Its not a zerosum game. And i think that whenever we get into the organization where i work, we spent a lot of time talking about implicit bias and gender norms and what does that mean and a lot of times the first thing that people want to say to us is you hate men. So you hate men. And people, why are there not more men in this room . Because its intimidating were going to be upset with them. But we all realize is this bias, this is a generations old problem. This started with the beginning of time and i think you cited an early summer, in socrates time that was just as talented as everyone else. So lets talk a 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, about the way biases have affected a womans ability to be a genius and so as you look at when did you sort of become aware of the bias issue . Was it something you were thinking about before you wrote the book but something you thought even more deeply about onceyou got into . First to say what youre saying about the anger and then, is not an angry book. Then, you can read this book and you will not get upset by it and 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 that they hadnt expected before. Implicit bias is really important. Another way i started to think of this as confirmation bias. Psychologists refer to confirmation bias to say that when you have an idea about something, when you have a belief or theres nothing you already think hard to change that idea. So i wont give a political example but ill give an example atabout cars. If you bought a new car because you think its the very best car out there. Once you get it you start looking for all of the articles and all of the advertisements and all of the friends who bought the same car that tell you the same best car and if somebody tells you that its not a good car, youre pretty sure that they are wrong and you dont pay to much attention. We do the same thing with men and women you have our ideas of what they are. So the new stereotype which bite by the way i think is a damaging as the old one is that women are collegial and cooperative men are leaders. Is that true . Of course its not true. We all know Women Leaders and women who are collegial and loners and men who are exactly the same but because that becomes thebelief , when you see a woman whose collegial or you see a man whos a leader or even when you see it in yourself to immediately start to notice that yoyou discard all of the others and so it becomes a selffulfilling prophecy that what we expect to be becomes what we see and then becomes what we become in many ways. Its interesting, 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 had a choice but to be collegial because when we are not, thats really a problem. So that politicians or women or a Business Leader tends to be more collegial or is that a Learned Behavior western mark we now see Learned Behavior is actually in nh behavior. Of course its a Learned Behavior and Shirley Tillman who was a former president of princeton and a microbiologist told me when she was younger and she was a scientist she used the closer eyes and tried to imagine a scientist and when she was able to picture a man as often as she could picture a s woman she knew that she was okay. And i told that story to another woman scientist who i was interviewing later and she said thats amazing because when i close my eyes i cant even picture myself. And i think thats what happens. I think those external messages become very deeply embedded in us. And i have a line at the beginning of the book is not just that we live in a patriarchy the patriarchy lives in us. We have accepted those messages. Its not just men who are causing a problem, its that we feel it very deeply too. 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 somebody else is in power and controlling your life, youve got to figure out how to make it work and so sometimes it does mean playing by somebody elses rules and i dont think thats a bad thing. I think women throughout history have done it. They have figured out ways around obstacles and youve got to do that so i dont have a problemwith that. To speak about another genius that you covered in your book that many of us, its so culturally now piece of our lives, ruth Bader Ginsburg. A lot of people i think user as an example in the book of someone had allowed herself in some ways become you said either a public vote because its something that she knows in a way that shes getting ow what she needs by becoming endearing to people and her story becoming what it is and even when you watch the movie her first case is about a man who wanted to tend to his mother. This whole idea of caretaking the first case had to do with men, not women so can you talk about her andhow he approaches it . Ruth Bader Ginsburg did have to do the great work around and when she was a Harvard Law School and one of the very few women in the class and her husbandwas also there , they had a Group Meeting or she was applying i believe and she was asked why she wanted to go to law school and she swallowed hard and said so i can support my husband better and understand what hes doing. Im sure she wanted to throw up when she said that because of course thats not why she wanted to go to law school showed so she can understand enwhat her husband was doing, she wanted to become a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice g even though she didnt want to at that moment but she knew thats what she needed to say to get into law school and if you are able to do Something Like that and it leads to your being the powerful person that you are i think thats, you have to recognize the times. Its interesting to see the ways we can think about bias and how people interact on a daily basis, but theres these unwritten ways that i think that the things that saturate our lives. You point out in the book some examples of the beginning that Something Like wikipedia thonly has like 15 percent of its focus is on women or in the New York Times, obituaries. I think again it was Something Like 10 percent of them have ever been about women. So these are things that are in bedded in our culture as a 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 a bias that women arent important but thats what itdoes , doesnt it . Absolutely and the times to its credit wanted something a couple years ago called overlook which is a column of all the people who should have had obituaries in the times and didnt and they started with i think it was five women to launch this column and when you look at those women who were there, your son. It was charlotte brontc who wrote jane iron and sylvia plath, famous for the bell jar and Dorothy Elaine was a great photographer and you thought what were they thinking . How was it that charlotte brontc died with this fabulously successful book even at the time and nobody thought she dedeserved an obituary. It was simply because theres nothing else to say, shes a woman so she just wasnt see. They just wouldnt eventhink of it. And i guess there was also a story earlier 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 so you might have wanted to look her up and get more information but she didnt have a Wikipedia Page. Wasnt because somebody had submitted one for her but the gatekeepers at wikipedia who for various reasons tend to be mostly men just ignored her and thought this could possibly be rtimportant so she won the nobel prize and she got aWikipedia Page. At a high bar for a woman to get a Wikipedia Page when you win the nobel prize if you see elses on wikipedia. I think wikipedia is run by a woman. She wrote beautifully about the incident and explained and said i feel like this is not meant to be a criticism, i love wikipedia and he pointed out that wikipedia is not setting the rules, its just representing what the society thinks is important. Thats whats important is sometimes we want to say wikipedia is causing this problem when really y i think what she said is a reflection of whats in all of us that we have to, i think thats easy game we play. Lets put wikipedia out of business. Really thats not going to solve anything because everyone thinks the same even after its gone. Thats a good point, that these are reflections and time for wikipedia or whatever else is reflecting what we all expect or what we expect that time. And times you start to change and its Different Things. Lets talk about the brain. There have been people who said there is a difference. You talk in the book about people have written about the difference between women and men and some people have made a lot of money thinking they can describe this and i think its me elliot who studied this and what did she find about the difference to men and womens brains . Shes a neurologist, a neuroscientist in chicago and she told me she had started out wanting to do a book about the difference between men and women because thats always in the headlines. Theres always differences between men and women in the headlines but shes a researcher so she started looking at all the data and looking at the data samples and said to me she realized ive got nothing. Because basically, when you come down to the differences in male and female brains are minuscule. And you hear over and over again as i said to her, people always tell you that i treat my children exactly the same and the boys and girls just behave differently, this must be hardwired. And she sort of buried her head when i said that and she said the only thing that hardwired is the brainstem. Which is what controls our instincts. Everything else in a baby is born is just all mass of neurons that are connected. And the social messages that children get very early are what wire the brain. And it struck me after i spoke to her that why is it that we only use the phrase hardwired when were talking about gender issues so if i told you by the time children are 18 months some of them speak german and some of them speak spanish and some of them speak italian and so that must be proof that its hardwired, you would say janice, dont be ridiculous. Theyre picking it up from what their parents speak. If they met in spain, they speak spanish so why do we understand we dont understand that liking pink for liking the blue or liking barbie dolls or legos, why would we think that hardwired . Its a lot harder to pick up the social cues to learn how to speak spanish or french or italian is to pick up the social cues that tell you you look so darn cute in that little pink outfit. It was interesting because you use the example that we do see marketers trying to have the same things for boys and girls but still its the chemistry kit to create beauty. Like for a woman, its not just the chemistry kit, its lets make perfume. So thats still bias coming out. If you tried to get a toy thats not male or female, its hard to find and by the way, people talk about the progress were making and i think we aremaking huge progress. Thats the area were going usually backwards. Toys are becoming more and more and close are becoming more and more divided by gender. And thats not terribly helpful. Look at gender reveals parties. What is that about . Other than saying well, this is the most important thing about this child and it announces what my child is going to be. Guess what . Maybe youre going to have a boy who likes poetry and a girl who wants to play rugby so that gender revealed party is only saying heres how im going to stereotype my child frombirth. 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 plants for boys. A couple years ago again had a tshirt, a cobbler tshirt which was cute and it still not genius and each letter of genius was one of the boxes from the periodic table and it only came in blue and you could only find it under boys, toddlers boys clothes. I mean, they could have had the same tshirt and blue and you could have found it if you were searching under toddler girls that it was not there. Even though i know its not a book about profiles, there are some Amazing Stories of women that we should know abouts. But it was also something that turn physics on its head. It was a really important and it won the nobel prize. I think it won the nobel prize because it went to my lab partner who was a chemist. From what ive read, it was a very nice man and a very good chemist and maybe even deserve the nobel prize for Something Else but he sure didnt deserve it for Nuclear Fusion because he didnt really understand Nuclear Fusion. But a man and, of course, they were meant on the Nobel Committee just couldnt wrap her heads around the idea that it could have been a woman responsible for this enormous breakthrough. They fell back into what were talking that before, that confirmation bias that it must be the woman behind the men. Its always the man who does it and its the woman behind the bed so theyav gave the nobel pre to the men. Many years later the proceedings of the committee were released. A group of physicists looked at that and called it the most egregious and indefensible oversight ever. And believe me, for egregious and individual oversight theres a lot of competition. [laughing] but what kelley was referring to is that many physicists sensitized to make it up at this now an asteroid named for her. Our statues of her all over berlin where she did her work, and my favorite, the periodic table which i mentioned just before, there is now an element periodic table. But shell never know that. She was never know that. But itss important because e talked come later when you were talked about what helps women geniuses succeed, they need to have seen something that gives them sort of the confidence to keep pressing on and there were so few of those that even, even though they will never know in their lives theres something important about us actually seeing these women even today and call getet up, why would you keep talking about Catherine Johnson. Absolutely. If you dont see it you dont know you can be. The actress had been the star of blossom which is a teenager and recently was amy on the Big Bang Theory. In between those shows she got her phd in neuroscience. Funny storages ssi which went to do her addition for the Big Bang Theory should get a lot of active for long time, spent the last seven years getting her phd in neuroscience, and so should she turned in her head shots, has your fiction resident audit and she did know where to put the shows a phd in neuroscience so she put it under other, where d you say good at skateboarding and so the producers know that this was for Big Bang Theory this is this a joke . She said no, its actually true. They did make the character in neuroscientist so that she could correct any mistakes. What oskaloosa 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. She gets made on the show, okay, to another nerdy guy but its okay. It starts to give images of different kinds of liesrt that women can have and to say there are Different Things in Popular Culture that its okay to be. Its interesting when you bring up the issueul though abot marriage and family, because you noted as youd met a lot of thee women, very many of them have families, children that theydr e juggling partners and i recently was introducing someone at the, theres a fellowship in the name of the woman who was the first head of surgery anywhere in the country at ohio state. She had been completely ignored until recently. Some looked at the ball into a wiser picture it a picture of everyone else and not her . When us talking about the importance of us seeing her and was important of a fellowship in her name, someone in the back could work with her stood up and said she would have never wanted this. She never saw herself. She married a surgery. And i thought thats another one of those biases, that if you are a women geniuses succeed you must have given up everything else. All of the things that our body is made to do, you give that up to actually focus on different because you couldnt possibly do both. Do you think thats a bit of that make sensitivity on the other side that we can do both . And you have want to focus on the fact we managed to pull it off . I had gone out looking for women were married and had children, but it did turn out that almost all of these genius women, the modern genius when i spoke to, dataviz multidimensional lives. Many of them have toddler children, genius, summit grown children, and the the president barnyard college told me she thinks its a really important for women to have many selves. She did mean that as free faces of eve in any way. No one is suggesting schizophrenic but you make you jump many different roles. Shes a psychology researcher. She is a president of university. Shes a mom. E e shes a wife. Shes a collie, a friend. She said some days she thinks is a most important saccades to researcher making these rate breakthroughs and sunday she think shes the worst month and will because she forgot to pack her daughters lunch. Thats okay and is helpful we youre these many different roles as she said if you slip up in one, you can always fall back into theal other. Weve always assumed that men are going to have careers and families and lives, and i think women find a great richness to the lives went to recognize okay to have many cells in many parts to your life. One of her other favorites i think because of evenn the introduction, well think in fact, i tested today, i look at wikipedia and the photo of the genius next to the sort of click on this was Albert Einstein here it turns out and they started telling Albert Einstein. Sport in an adultlt right, malaysia merrick, we should hear her name. And not just think of her as einstein said first wife. 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. I did a lot of the searches and theres been a lot of discussion over the years as to how much she contributed to the theory of his greatestich is greatest discovery. Theres some suggestion that they were to partners in this and he for example, talks about when our discovery gets known and when we win the nobel prize for this. Various other suggestions that they really worked very closely together. I am unable to make a determination on exactly how much she contributed. I dont know whether they were actual college scope partners or whether they just discussed it in bed at night. This is not something i can determine, but what i found reallyin fascinating was how upt people get at the suggestion that mileva maric might participate in the discovery of relativity. There is like people who are keen einstein all the way, no, no, no, he, did this alone. Everybody knows that einstein was not actually a a great mathematician with certain things andma he turned to some wellknown mathematicians of the time to help with some of the things within of the great discoveries that he couldnt do. Thats what scientists do. Thats what academics do. The fact its a shocking and upset the people that might have been his wife, i find kind of funny actually. When i saw this research in his own writing and given sort of the cultural, the confirmation buys that exists, i did think as i was reading that it seems remarkable that it would be so open about our discovery, if she wasnt a little bit involved because the confirmation buys wasnt like give half your credit your wife, you know. That was at the natural thing. He did n give her half the money and they say it did become divorced and maybe he did give her half the nobel prize money. He did. He promisedid her that early onf he won the nobel prize he would give her half the money. Its not to be ignored i agree. We dont know as a former lawyer, its all circumstantial evidence. With it. To go [laughing] so the so many great examples and a new will have so much time tonight but i do think, i know a few will probably comeba up, we talked about joe dunkley and may become a little bit, i didnt get to mention her yet but what was the revelation you read about beating joe dunkley. Joe dunkley is a tenured professoroe of physics at princeton. She had been hired away from oxford when she was a tenured professor of physics at offered. I squint at early in my research to princeton to interview her and i studied both hard for this interview. He talked its greato physicist. She would also support, quite famous for some of things should including putting in a in a joy universe that it was wanted to be prepared. I really wanted to be prepared for this interview. I go down. Im all set. Ive read or research. I knock on her door and is very, very pretty woman in her late 30s opens the door. She has a big smile. Shes wearing a pretty floral dress, she says come in. May i get you some tea . We sat down and we talked about her two toddler daughters. They do what i said to you that i wasas going to interview a tenured professor of physics at princeton, thats exactly the image that you had. If so, youre a better person that i am, because no matter, i was working on the subject, this is was doing and get a realized as it opened the door the summer in the back of my head i did expect to see Albert Einstein. And to think thats important to the vulnerability of us. I shared some similar examples that you can think about these things all the time. Were thinking about our coworkers or the people we need that were just chatting with and all of a sudden they dont understand what we have to remember everything card we have done it, too. Toto you, the patriarchy lives n us, all of us, and that vulnerability can need help us break the ice. Thats right. But hard to stand up against the whole society, to stand up against the things you have been here since you are very young. I tell a story but being a little girl, i was nine years old and what my mom to our family doctor. He told them on the thought i was reading too much. She got a little worried and she said is a something wrong with her eyes . No, the eyes are fine but the girl could get too smart for her own good. Yes, you grow now. My mom seems to understand exactly what he meant and she sort of nodded. Those are the things that state in your mind for a very long time. I thinky were probably hopefuy wise enough we dont say things like thatab to girls directly anymore, but as one of the women i interviewed said, we live in a time of a thousand nudges. We are all nudging girls in a slightly different direction than where slightly nudging boys. Since we a few minutes left about, how do we help more women see their genius and, or even if youre thinking about your own genius, what can you do to bring out . You focus on the things that help. One of the things before i get to the points you should at the very end of the book, i did find one p thing, sorry if this is a spoiler alert for hambleton, but its been 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 [applause] here are some of the current bestselling nonfiction books according to the New York Times. Some of these authors have appeared on booktv and you can watch them online at booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] hey, guys. How are you . [applause] hi, how are you . Good morning