Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Tonight i have the pleasure of introducing samantha as they join us to discuss the new book by former news correspondent adjunct professor at Columbia University grad school of journalism and a woman at forbes contributor. And Disney Interactive so please join me in welcoming heather and samantha. [applause] thank you. We appreciate you coming out on a night like this this is an exciting moment for us because we are in the same city but this is the evening before it comes out to two kick things off i want to show you a little book trailer first. I think that women understand we are not going to get ahead unless we help each other to get ahead. I have a female manager and pushed me beyond my roles. So many women have been able to work the typical jobs given the opportunity to travel and Everything Else they want [inaudible] ive picked the groups up before and they dont necessarily get it. They see value in it and compassion i have focomepassiond immediately their offers are how can i help. [applause] the culmination of five years of reporting and research and more than 250 interviews with the when people start using the internet for consumer use, Microsoft Windows 95 came out so before that the internet was primarily now it is used by regular people for business and commerce etc. I saw the rise and fall of the. Com industry the stock shot up within six months it was down to two. So we were all rich and poor but it was fun. I made some lasting friendships during that time. In 2013, he was a. Com survivor and said ive been working in the valley for over 15 years and shes the head of sales and Software Company and my manager told me even though they hate the number he said to me ive been told by some people in the group and company you are abrasive. Would you mind toning it down a bit and by the way your lipstick is to provide and you wear too much jewelry. She was horrified and didnt stay in the company very long but said its unbelievable what the women are facing today. There is such unconscious bias and you need to write about it. I said i want to interview a couple more people to see what is going on so i went to other women i want to hear about the experience and the basic bias and discrimination is it really that bad. Ive been researching out of Silicon Valley here in new york on a similar topic for yahoo . I had amazin have amazing storim these female founders. We do face sexism in every industry. Its a lot more positive than negative when it comes to starting companies so that is the story that we decided to tell the worklife balance, so we came together in 2013 to tell the story. So abc news correspondent and longtime reporter i had the wonderful opportunity to go to yahoo for 2007 at the dawn of the iphone and the app store and my job fai there was to cover digital lifestyles essentially to look at how the internet was changing our daytoday lives and put together stories i would then present on the today show. It was a an eye opening experience because i kept meeting women who were starting companies. Why is nobody telling their story im featuring them in these segments and their products, but i thought it was so interesting they were so successful and fearless. I knew because i had worked on a documentary right out of grad school about the gender gap in the 90s. I knew that it was a problem. I thought this is interesting there is a landscape of women that are doing well for themselves in spite of the sexism and the fact that it is a maledominated industry. So what is it about them that has made them successful and enabled them to persist. What can we learn from them for our daughters, i had 11yearold twins, a girl and a boy. That certainly was an inspiration for the stories to figure out what is it from their backgrounds and childhoods and from all of their experiences to keep going. So during the time i started curating interviews with these women and sam said she was interested in doing the same, we realized we could cover so much more ground if we were working on the two and what we were able to do that is though cool at the time, there were so many outside of Silicon Valley that were starting to kind of bubble up and so it allowed us to go out there and spread ourselves as far and wide as possible to be able to track these women and get out of the coast and get into the middle of the country to find some of those stories. First of all, we are writing for the Good Morning America audience. We are writing for the mainstream to take them inside the subculture and what the book strives to do is connect the dot across the system to take the audience to the front line where the women are working at the Grassroots Level to close the gap and closed the diversity gap. So the book is broken down into seven chapters and we kind of survey the landscape. So we profile activists and entrepreneurs and investors. To understand the challenges that the women and the diverse backgrounds face we explain that to them and being part of the digital evolution. One of the Things Holding people back in the tech center is fear of failure. Has anybody here heard of the syndrome or ever experience it each and every day . It is i am not good enough or smart enough, what am i doing here. She feels it to this day so what i want to read from you is don donna, and she is currently a head engineer of microsoft and talks about fear and failure, but actually failing to Computer Science class at the university of michigan and went on to become the head engineer at microsoft. Wearing leopard and owning it if was midnight in downtown seattle she was hosting a 48 hour session to try to make the first half for the augmented reality device that enables the holograms to leak from computer screens into real life where it can be manipulated. At 36yearsold a hardware geek and a Fashion Designer in the Outreach Program confirming the status of the rising star in microsoft it is hard to believe she failed her first Computer Science class. The story of resilience is what she tells often inspiring young women to charge ahead in a long time developer for the windows operating system she likes to think of it as the invisible fairy godmother that makes things happen and was overseeing Microsoft Windows programs with millions of users getting feedback about the update. My biggest success microsoft is the legendary Software Company being a principal level is a huge achievement. When i was growing up in detroit if someone told me you are going to be making a really good salary working at microsoft i would have laughed. She didnt know any women like the one she would one day become. Her parents, immigrants from kathmandu worked in the Auto Industry and her grandmother a seamstress and a Fashion Designer. The computer lab at the high school consisted of teenage boys that left her out of the room when she approached about joining the Computer Club and shed been fascinated ever since she had laid eyes on her classroom. Her father who read the journal encouraged donna from a classical career move and thought it. He scraped together the money at a college while she was still in high school but it wasnt enough to prepare her for Computer Science 100, the programming class at the university of michigan but crammed them into one semester. She felt like her male classmates had taken ap Computer Science in high school and they were speaking a Foreign Language as they paired up for assignments. I listened to them all the time and they would say i cant believe how easy this is. Who doesnt know this. And im sitting there like i dont know any of this. I dont even know what this word means. They would say lets move on and yell it out. She failed the course because she was too embarrassed to ask questions and didnt want anyone to think she was an airhead. Immediately afterwards she thought about dropping altogether and then she started thinking about how she would ride her bike and asking her knees and cry a lot and now to never do this again only to get back on the saddle two days later. She took the class again and this time got a letter d. B. What are people talking about and a lot of people dont go for things unless they are guaranteed success. If you get 50 or 75 75 that is far Better Success than 0 of the way. One of the reasons we watched the digital platform is to highlight these stories because there is a visibility gap. The. There were all these different women from different backgrounds all over the country to see how creative and collaborative model me their jobs are about how they are in their lives. Its cold and not collaborative and these are some of the things you hear from younger girls when you ask them about it. But that is the complete opposite they were super creative and they were artsy and they care about fashion and family and they have these incredibly multifaceted lives and their jobs are very collaborative. There is a computer genius of the tech company, so the memo park on the accelerator called the Womens Startup Lab there were eight female founders who were Technology Founders living in the house and the interesting things i learned about researching this book is female entrepreneurs dont look like Richard Hendrix or act like the programmer type that you see on tv or hear about in the media. They are from all over the country, one in particular from santa fe new mexico with two little kids at home said this is the first time ive been able to breathe and not have my kids all over me, started a baby Equipment Rental company so when you go visit your parents across the country traveling with kids and have strollers and all these things you dont have to come you can go from one state to another. So the first time i could read and focus on my company with these entrepreneurs we spent the week work shopping and training and learning to go out and pitch to investors to scale the business, so i spent the week with her and other entrepreneurs and the interesting thing about the program is that it was building a network. These women were working together, they were mentors and adult competence and her husband looked at her and said who are you. She was so confident and met the cofounder of match. Com was one of the advisors at the startup lab. He said i want to partner with you and to scale it out and make this into a billiondollar company, so now this is her cofounder and ceo and its now spread into 40 different markets around the country and its booming. You have this network of the support and we devote a whole chapter of entrepreneurs and investors is the fact that women founders were trying to scale the company is back. We look at how female investors are starting to come into play. We were able to get inside of their world and meet them and get a sense of what its like to be one of the partners in a Silicon ValleyVenture Capital firm. The network is the key point because what these women are trying to do is not only start the company which is the hardest thing ever but trying to break into the boys club. We talk about these underground secret Handshake Society is bubbling up. Women are coming together saying melissa and if we are not going to get in the traditional way we will make our own way. That is why we wanted to focus on what was happening at the Grassroots Level because it was a story that hadnt been told yet and we felt like the focus in the Mainstream Media had been on sexism in the industry which does need to change that at the same time we felt like there was some hope in this drives a lot of women have made by creating their own network. Its pretty impressive and i think that it is really inspiring. One of my favorite stories is an entrepreneur who is actually in San Francisco and talks about the boys club and how she never felt what she was part of it and went to Carnegie Mellon undergrad and graduated she started her company while in grad school at Carnegie Mellon. It was a Gaming Platform that build tools to help build up their games so she lost the company that she sold and went to work for google venture. That was the first time she realized what the boys club was a. She realized there are fewer women coming to pick further investment. This is really bad. She went back to the company that is a super cool Virtual Reality environment where you can walk around a room and basically what you do is take for pictures of your living room from four corners of the room and they make a three d. Model of your room that looks like your room and they give you different design concepts. You can actually do this Walking Around as an avatar on your computer so that super, duper cool, and its raised i think 11 million now but she started this project and said there are so many interesting founders and investors along the way im going to invite everybody to park city utah to have a festival called the thin air innovation festival that takes place in april so she brought a lot of friends and other advisers and they skied and had fun and networked and one that ran the farm at one point said i feel guilty i should be home with the kids working on my company. She said this is what the guys do. They play golf and go on these ski trips. This is the golf club. And shes doing this every year now to build her network. All of this stuff happens so shes doing her own Grassroots Club so this is what we thought about the book and the journey so they are creating opportunities where even beyond networking but to establish authentic relationships with each other that ultimately could turn into business relationships. In the first chapter there is the girls lounge which is essentially a popup salon indias maledominated conferences around the world now, but it was most famous for the first one and basically what she does is create a comfortable place for women to come and hang out when they are at these business events where they are the only ones there and its an amazing place to see these women not only bonding but actually doing business as well and her belief is that women need more opportunity to be able to collaborate. She believes that women have to socialize to be competitive, and shes trying to really dispel that notion and the fact that i spent some time with her at one of her conferences in germany last fall she had an entire panel devoted to the theory if you surround yourself with women who are Successful Use your cell phone be successful as well like if you shine, i. E. Shine and that is the mantra that we saw throughout whether it was in chattanooga tennessee or pittsburgh or seattle or los angeles for all these different places there seemed to be this mandate for women to lift each other up. I remember specifically when we went to the conference, one of the places we went early on in the reporting when we sold the book proposal we went to houston and we spent a few days at the celebration of women and computing which is the largest gathering of technologists in the world so for all these women suddenly appeared there with 15,000 from all over the world together. Every program was about how to help each other. Helping people find internships it was amazing. We were interested in finding College Students because we knew we wanted to do a chapter on College Women and what was happening. This Research Compiled by the American Association and it was one of the first times that researchers have actually highlighted things that were working to retain women in the Computer Sciences so its not just that they expressed an interest in the Computer Science at the big issue is persisting and actually graduating so we went to grace harper because harvey not a college is one of the schools that actually pays for freshmen women to go to grace hopper. They do that, its a small school but they do that so that these women get connected to a network and so they can see there are other women like them and they get to meet professionals in the field so they can actually say okay they get role models that are related to them. Those are not necessarily believable role models when you are a sophomore and engineering student. They need the chance to meet real women. It is a fantastic example of that so that is ultimately why we were there. We have been easing the need for the when we went back. There is a group that is a play on the word c is a Computer Programming language. They were double majoring in english and Computer Science or Information Science sociology. More so if they had a program called the c Ambassador Program so what they were giving us paying it forward. So they go to different communities from around the United States and to find High School Girls that are interested in engineering and say i want you to start a program in your local community that encourages or inspire