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Women on the Move is JPMorgan Chase’s commitment to fuel female ambition and advance financial equality.
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Thursday Jul 20, 2023
Thursday Jul 20, 2023
As Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer at The Atlantic, Alice McKown is always on the lookout for new ways to work with clients and deliver the magazine’s brand. “What's unique about The Atlantic is that we are known for our influence on the cutting edge of conversation,” she says.
In this episode of Women on the Move, Alice sits down with host Sam Saperstein while at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The two discuss Alice’s two-plus decades in the magazine business, and how having a solid support system has helped her navigate change.
From coast to coast in the magazine world
At The Atlantic, Alice oversees all commercial revenue and partnerships related to the magazine, events, website, social media, mobile channels, and the branded content agency, as well as the brand’s new film and TV business. She tells Sam that it was her 20 years of magazine experience under the Conde Nast umbrella that prepared her for her current role.
“I got incredibly lucky,” she recalls. “I moved to San Francisco after college. It was the internet heyday. I had some friends who worked at Wired magazine, who had just gotten bought by Conde Nast, and I jumped into the magazine business. I jumped into a marketing role and really grew at Wired. It was at a time when there was tremendous growth with the internet exploding, and we were just an ideas machine and we launched some amazing things.”
She eventually made the move to New York, where she worked on other Conde Nast products such Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair. “And what was incredible is I was there for 20 years, but I had so many unique different opportunities and different bosses,” she tells Sam. “I jumped from marketing into digital operations into sales. And I think that was a big moment for me, was sort of moving from marketing into sales.”
She says she’d always thought of herself as a marketer, as someone creative, until a friend suggested she think about sales. “And I was like, I don't know clients, I don't know how to sell,” she recalls. “And they're like, you're creative, you've got big ideas, don't worry. That's what the clients want to hear. So I jumped into being an associate publisher and managed a very senior sales team and I was terrified. But then I realized as you started having these conversations around partnerships, it really was about solving people's problems, big ideas, what could you do together creatively?”
Leveraging teamwork and a support network
Alice says she realized early in her career that people work best when they work together and allow their skills to complement each other. Another key lesson? Letting her team members shine. The best salespeople, she says, are like “heat-seeking missiles.” When something works for them, they keep coming back to it. “And so that's how I found both my relationships with them, and [with] their clients,” she tells Sam. “It's like, Working with Alice is really working for me and my business. And so I didn't come at it as, I'm your boss. I came at it as, Let's figure out how you do you and I do me and one plus one is three.”
Coming to The Atlantic to head up a new team—many of whom had been working together for a long time—was a challenge that Alice says she was prepared for. “It's tricky and I think you want to kind of listen and hear, but you also want to remember what you know and what you know that works, right?” she says. “And so I think some of it is thinking about who are the people within the organization that I know will get on board with how I'm thinking, right? And really lean into those folks, have them help you kind of spread that change too.”
During her earlier career moves, Alice says she learned to make sure she had one or two people with her who knew her well. “Whether that was a boss or a colleague, but knowing that I could show up in a new place [and] I knew I had a person or two that knew me, knew what I was capable of,” she says.
As far as the future, Allice says she continues to be inspired by the work she does and is excited about managing and motivating a great team: “I am so excited about the year ahead and how we can work with our partners, how we can make The Atlantic brand stand out even more in new and surprising ways.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 20th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jul 13, 2023
Thursday Jul 13, 2023
Sabrina Horn believes that we’re all the director and lead actor in our own movie—and therefore we control our destiny. “You have one life to live and it's yours,” she says. “You have to push every day. You have to fight, and when you get shot down, you have to get up the next day and try it again.”
In this episode, the longtime CEO, C-suite advisor, professor and bestselling author sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein to discuss this philosophy and her own career journey. Sabrina founded a PR company in the tech industry in 1991 when she was just 29—and she ran it for 24 years before selling it. At that point, she made a decision: “I decided that rather than doing public relations for companies and putting companies on the map, I wanted to switch to really helping individuals like CEOs and founders, entrepreneurs, students as well, people who run teams in corporations, individuals who want to become leaders and help give them the tools to get over certain challenges that they have,” she tells Sam.
Starting out as a 29-year-old female CEO in 1991 was a bold move, and Sabrina says one of the reasons for her success was the fearlessness that people have in their 20s. “I would say 98 percent of the executives I worked with were almost twice my age, and they were all male,” she recalls. “I felt like as long as I've done my homework and I'm really intelligent about the advice I'm giving them, there's no reason to be worried about my gender, and if they don't want to work with me because I'm a woman, then there's plenty of other fish in the sea to work with.”
PR as strategy
Sabrina says a common misperception about public relations work is that it’s all about the message and the hype. “It was never just about putting out press releases,” she clarifies. “It was about helping them think through what those strategies might be, what move are you making today in anticipation of this move you're going to make tomorrow and the day after tomorrow so that it's strategic, it's a plan. It can't just be tactical.”
In terms of helping companies grow strategically, Sabrina says being authentic and not being intimidated or backing down is important for leadership: “This is where standing true to what you believe, if you really have done your homework and you really have done your research and you know in your heart that the direction that they're going in is not going to help them, I would always say, Look, you can do that. You can do whatever you want. But I'm here. You ask me to come here to give you my advice. So if you go down this path, here's what can happen and if you go down this other path, here's what can happen here.”
Why “Fake it ‘til you make it” is the worst business advice
On the surface, she says, there’s nothing wrong with this common adage. “If you are doing cognitive behavioral therapy to practice certain behaviors that you wish you could exude, like more confidence, and you practice that and you visualize what that might look like or you wear a certain color to a meeting because it makes you feel more confident or as Amy Cuddy did over a decade now ago in a TED talk about power posing where you stretch your arms out, that was how fake it till you make it got started and it's okay because you're just helping yourself,” she says. “It’s self-help.”
The problem with the phrase, she says, is that it’s mutated over the years to become an excuse to lie and exaggerate the truth at the expense of others for personal good. “It was like an excuse for bad leadership,” she tells Sam. “But the problem is that the truth always comes out. The investor will do her due diligence, the customer will use the product and it won't work as prescribed. Then you expose yourself, you set yourself back, you embarrass yourself and your team. You ruin your credibility.”
Rather than go down that dangerous route, Sabrina encourages people to be authentic at every turn. “It’s about looking at yourself in the mirror every day and saying, this is what I stand for,” she says. “These are my values. This is what my company stands for. This is what we don't stand for, and committing every day to that. And surrounding yourself with people who will call you on that when you don't stay true to that.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July13th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jul 06, 2023
Thursday Jul 06, 2023
Diana Markaki spent 22 years in a successful corporate career before founding the Boardroom, an organization dedicated to preparing women who aspire to be board members. Here she sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she built a rigorous approach for helping executive women get on boards.
Diana grew up with what she calls a strong sense of justice and a desire to address the big problems of the world. She left her native Greece for New York as a 21-year-old and began a career as an international lawyer. It was when she received her first public board appointment, at 36, that the idea for the Boardroom started simmering. “I was the only woman on the board, by far the youngest,” she tells Sam. “And obviously the last thing I wanted was for my older male peers to challenge my credentials. I wanted to be the best board member anyone had ever met. So immediately, I started looking at the different things that I had to do in order to be a successful board member, then I built a solution for myself.”
As an MBA student at Harvard Business School at the time, she got the opportunity to put that solution into an actual business case, and she quickly realized that many women had the same problem she had. She decided to share the solution with the world, and the Boardroom was born.
Four pillars
Diana formally founded the Boardroom in Switzerland in 2021, as the world’s first private club for women executives who aspire to be board members. It’s an in-person focused organization, with a villa in the center of Zurich which members go to daily. “We developed what we call the holistic approach to board readiness, in the sense that we identified everything that an executive needs for the next step in our career, then we brought everything together in a one-stop shop approach,” she tells Sam.
The Boardroom has four organizing pillars. The first pillar is executive education for aspiring board members, for which they developed a proprietary five-module curriculum based on extensive market research. The second pillar is called the inner circle program, which is a combination of leadership development and peer learning. The third pillar is strategic networking, and the fourth is what Diana calls “the inspiration, the role models, and the representation in the sense that you cannot be what you cannot see.”
Disrupting the “boys’ club” culture in the workplace
Although the Boardroom is for women, Diana stresses that she was very intentional about including men, since they dominate the corporate board space and lead many board appointments. “You go through these informal networks that are dominated by men. Someone is a guy that knows a guy that played golf together, were in the Army together, and that's how it goes. That's why we bring the male supporters.”
The men recruited by the Boardroom are senior level executives who support senior female talent retention and board diversity. Diana notes that they don’t do coaching or mentoring “because we believe that our women are just as good and qualified as the men.”
Instead, the men who are supporters commit to bringing more women on their executive committees and boards. “When they have an opening and they want to affiliate with an amazing executive, then immediately they tap into the community of the boardroom and then we make nominations and referrals to make sure that we place the right people in the right positions,” she explains.
Future growth
Since its birth in Zurich at the beginning of the pandemic, the Boardroom has expanded to Athens, London, Paris, and Brussels, with plans for six more European sites next year. And while for now, the organization is focused on enrolling women who are already senior level executives, in the future Diana says they plan to expand their membership. “Once we create the critical mass that's needed at the board level, these women together with the support of the boardroom structure are going to build the pipeline and then we go to the next generation of leaders that will be able to join boards,” she tells Sam. “But it is time critical to create that critical mass, and that's why we focus only to very senior women executives that are determined to put in the time and effort to become a successful board member.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 6th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jun 29, 2023
Thursday Jun 29, 2023
Continuing her conversations with global leaders at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein sits down with Sara Kehaulani Goo, Editor in Chief of Axios. They discuss the organization’s newsletter approach to expand into more local markets—and how Sarah is committed to Axios reporters understanding their community and building trust with readers across the political spectrum.
With a background in reporting, Sara says she moved her way across the country working at local newspapers, eventually landing at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post before moving to Axios a few years ago. “I loved being a reporter,” she tells Sam. “I loved breaking news, and over time I realized that there was an opportunity for me to shape the news in a bigger way at a time when our digital forces were changing how people consume news.”
News that is trusted, and locally responsive
Sara says that the premise at Axios is that while people increasingly don’t have time to read the news, they still want to be informed about the news. “So we came up with something called Smart Brevity,” she says. “It really distills the news to the most important essential elements of what you need to know, why it matters.” Axios uses a newsletter format to deliver brief summaries—written by experienced journalists—on major news topics. Readers can get what they need to know from the newsletter, and they can visit the website for deeper dives.
Earning readers’ trust is a key goal at Axios. “We know that people really need information, but we're operating at a time when people don't have a lot of trust,” Sara says. “They don't have trust in a lot of institutions, but in news it's become very polarized. So what we've tried to do is really be transparent with our audience and say [that] we are going to be clinical in our reporting and facts and delivery, and be not right or left. We don't have an opinion page. We want to attract an audience of all political stripes, of all backgrounds and interests, and give you the news that's essential for you to feel like you've got what you need.”
In addition to the trust gap, Sara says there is a growing gap in local news coverage—and filling that void is one of her top goals for the year. “There is an opportunity to rebuild trust,” she tells Sam. “So it's not just politics, but what's going on in my community, how do I understand the issues that I'm going to be voting on?”
To that end, Sara says Axios has expanded the newsletter approach and hired local journalists in 26 different cities to do targeted newsletters. “The goal there is to figure out both the business model and the journalism model to make sure that we become an essential trusted source of news,” she adds.
Representation matters
One key to earning readers’ trust is making sure that Axios staff are reflective of those readers. Sara says she’s committed to ensuring that women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and other historically underrepresented people have a spot at the table. “When I was first entering the news business, there weren't very many women at the top of the newspaper,” she recalls. “And why that matters is because that's who makes decision on what you cover.”
“I think it is making sure that we have journalists and editors who can cover the story with real authenticity and experience in relatability,” she says. “And the topics that they're covering matters. So immigration for example, or wage gap issues. And if they don't know, they have to be comfortable asking and getting out of their comfort zone. I mean, that's the essence of every reporter. So to me, I think about: it’s issues around race, it's issues around gender, LGBTQ, when you have issues come up around anti-trans hate or harassment going on, we have to have people on staff who can speak to that.”
Keeping with this year’s focus on the theme of ambition, Sara tells Sam that she feels like she’s always been ambitious, and for her, that’s gone hand-in-hand with a natural curiosity. “What's great about that is that it's really an unending curiosity,” she explains. “So how do you get the story? What's happening next? How do I get the interview? How can I tell the world first about what's happening, how I help them understand the story to then how do we run this newsroom in a different way? To me, those are all fun versions of the same curiosity. So I think I just love the challenge of it. It's not just a job. Journalism is essential to this country, to how we live to our lives, and I feel very responsible for that.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 29th , 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jun 22, 2023
Thursday Jun 22, 2023
Ash Beckham wants us all to have the hard conversations. The speaker, advocate, and author of Step Up: How to Live with Courage and Become an Everyday Leader sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she found her own voice as a speaker and a leader, and the qualities she believes everyone can tap into to grow their own leadership style.
Ash’s journey to advocacy started when her sister and friends began having children and Ash was thinking about how her LGBTQ identity might present challenges for them. “I knew I wanted to give those kids the tools and not bear the responsibility of having to advocate on my behalf,” she recalls. “So I did an Ignite talk which led to a TED talk and then all of a sudden the ball was rolling.” Her TED Talk, Coming out of the Closet, went viral. Her message was more than advice about coming out. She emphasized a universal truth that resonated with many: growth is possible when we commit to having those hard conversations.
She tells Sam that going on that journey of opening up via the TED Talk allowed her to have an understanding of finding the commonalities among people. “Empathy is so key in that our ability to connect is based on our ability to relate,” she says. “And I think we can get into the nitty gritty of the more difficult parts of the conversation if we start from a place of trust and really establish that from the beginning.”
Growing into the expert role
Once her talk went viral, Ash says her world started changing quickly. She experienced some imposter syndrome as media outlets started asking for her take on various issues. Coming to terms with the fact that she really could be an “expert” was a growth step. “Of course we are the expert in our own lives and I think a lot of us, especially when we step into leadership, we really downplay the impact of that,” she says.
“So I went through a phase where it was kind of like an aw shucks, who me?” she recalls. “And then all of a sudden there was this expectation of, okay, Where are you in the DEI space? What are your positions on intersectionality?” She soon learned to claim her expertise, and in doing that she says she made herself vulnerable, and, by extension, authentic—something she encourages everyone, and especially leaders, to do.
Continuing the conversation
In change-making, Ash emphasizes that winning someone over to your side is not the goal—the goal is to keep the conversation open so that people have room to grow and evolve. She uses a story to illustrate. A 15-year-old transgender teen was meeting with a state senator to talk about trans rights. The teen was nervous until a fellow advocate gave this advice: “You don't have to get him to change his mind, you just have to get him to question the certainty of his position slightly. That's all you have to do, and then all of a sudden you’re relationship building.”
As long as we’re continuing the conversation, she tells Sam, we’re making progress. And by being authentic and speaking our truth from a place of compassion or empathy, we’re leaving the door ajar for understanding and change. “Some things that people say, you can treat like they have broccoli in their teeth after a meeting,” she says. “You [can say], ‘I know what you really meant but this is kind of how it sounded. I thought you'd want to know. And if you want to talk about it, let me know.’” When you can broach difficult topics in a respectful way, you’re on the path to impacting real change.
Impacting leaders
In Ash’s book Step Up, she applies this concept to leadership: effective leaders, she says, need to have qualities such as empathy, courage, and grace. And they need to be flexible enough to be able to know when it’s time to employ which trait. “So to me it's kind of like a recipe or a tool belt,” she tells Sam. A good leader, she notes, needs to be able to quickly calculate when it’s time to lead with courage, or when it’s time to step back and lead with empathy.
“When we're stepping into that leadership role [we’re] creating a space where there is no fear of repercussion or judgment,” she says. “A place where people are not afraid. . . . You’re creating a space by being authentic and being vulnerable so that other people can do the same. And to me, that's the first step to leadership.”
Full Transcript here
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 15th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Thursday Jun 15, 2023
Thursday Jun 15, 2023
From the World Economic Forum in Davos, this episode of Women on the Move Podcast features Anita Bhatia, Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women. She shares the mission of UN Women with host Sam Saperstein, and they discuss the importance of public-private partnerships in the journey to gender equity. Anita also describes her personal commitment to educating women and how education influenced her own trajectory in life.
Small agency with a big mission
Founded just 11 years ago by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UN Women is the newest agency in the UN system. Anita recalls sitting next to the Secretary-General at dinner one evening as he shared his first perception upon getting to the UN and realizing there were agencies dealing with children, hunger, trade - but nothing that was focused on solving one of the greatest problems in the world: gender inequality. “So he set up UN Women,” Anita tells Sam.
“We're a small agency, but I like to think that we punch above our weight, and my role is really a partnerships role,” Anita says. “It's a resource mobilization role, but it's also partnering both within the UN system and outside the UN system.” Anita says her focus is on making sure her team is growing UN Women's impact on solving for gender inequality by partnering with others “because we're too small and this problem is too big for us to do it alone.”
Anita says the goals of UN Women include women's economic empowerment, ending violence toward women, and increasing leadership representation. One critical factor is driving more finance toward the mission. “Public finance and private finance because without proper resourcing, we're never going to be able to change the state of the world,” she notes.
Anita says she learned about the importance of the public-private partnership approach during her time with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector branch of the World Bank Group. “Working in IFC, you understand something very fundamentally, which is that it's possible to do financially well while doing social good,” she says. “The other thing you understand when you work at the World Bank Group is the important role of the private sector in business in solving for development problems because governments just don't have enough money or bandwidth to do this.”
Personal commitment to educating women
But Anita says she brings more than her professional background to her role at UN Women. “I think the thing that gets me going is the idea of a girl getting educated,” she says. “It's because education has been so fundamental in my own life. I really do believe the research that education is the single biggest lever for development. When I think about a girl going to school, that inspires me, and I also do think about women who are victims of violence and about the need for the world to just do a hell of a lot more on that issue.”
Anita grew up in Kolkata, India, with a mother who she describes as a very progressive teacher who believed firmly in education. Anita was just 18 when her mother died, but before that, her mother had asked Anita’s father to make sure their daughters were educated and not married early as many young women in India were. “So my dad was a very strong feminist actually,” she tells Sam. “He kept his promise. He made sure the girls were educated.” After college, Anita told her father she wanted to go to the United States for graduate school. And while many Indian fathers kept their daughters near to help take care of them, he urged Anita to accept her scholarship to Yale.
Today, Anita calls on men to follow in the footsteps of her own feminist father. That’s because another key part of UN Women’s mission is male allyship. “We work with women and girls, but what's becoming even more important in our work is working with men and boys because this is a problem that is not a woman's problem, it's a whole of society, whole of government problem,” she says.
“I don't want men to be bystanders,” she adds. “Men need to call out bad male behaviors and toxic masculinity when they see it. And so in Davos, I've made a call to action to men and said, ‘You need to acknowledge that you guys actually still hold the power. You need to challenge negative masculinities and you need to share space. When you are on an all-male panel, it shouldn't be the women who are saying, Hey, we're not there. It should be the men saying, Where are the women?’”
Full transcript here .
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 15th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Thursday Jun 08, 2023
Thursday Jun 08, 2023
Elizabeth Lieba is on a mission to help Black women feel supported and heard. Here, the writer, college professor, and advocate for Black businesswomen joins Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss her journey to understand the important historical context of race in America.
“Why are black women feeling this way?”
Elizabeth believes that the most important job for leaders is to develop their people, and she says really listening to Black women's needs is a critical part of that. She’s had a career as an educator and an advocate, and has recently released a book called I'm Not Yelling: A Black Woman's Guide to Navigating the Workplace, which provides strategies for savvy Black businesswomen navigating a predominantly white corporate America. She says one of her goals in writing the book was to empower Black women and to give them a sense of context about why they were feeling what they were feeling, and to validate those feelings.
“We've seen lately in the news that Black women are exiting corporate spaces in record numbers,” she tells Sam. “Black women are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, tired. There's a sense of a mental health crisis that has been happening. And I think it wasn't really brought to the surface until Covid 19, and a lot of Black women were obviously in the workplace and then working from home and having to juggle and balance all of those responsibilities. And I think there was a collective sense of What is happening? Why do I feel this way?”
Elizabeth says she’d already been vocal on LinkedIn about social justice and racial inequity, thinking and speaking about police brutality and racial profiling, so she felt it was the time to pivot into her identity as a Black woman and focus on issues like why all the Black women she knew had such a visceral reaction to seeing George Floyd murdered. Additionally, she said she heard over and over from Black women in every space that they did not feel like they belonged in the spaces that they were in.
“And that's literally why I started to write the book,” she says. “I wanted to advocate for Black women, and I knew that social justice and racial equity was important, but I felt like as a Black woman, I also had a responsibility to find out why I was feeling this way.”
Challenging the constructs
Another goal Elizabeth shares about writing her book was to emphasize to Black women that their authentic selves are already enough. “Because obviously if there's a problem, and Black women are exiting the workplace in record numbers, Black women are not waiting for these places to become more equitable,” she notes. “They're saying, you know what, I don't have time or space to wait for you to figure this out.”
She shares that across demographics, Black women have seen the biggest increase in leaving traditional employment and starting their own businesses—only to run into the challenge that very little venture capital funding is going to women or Black people. “They didn't really have the resources to start businesses, and they were even more stressed out because they're exiting these [traditional employment] spaces,” she says. “But then finding the same struggles with just trying to create a living outside of those spaces.”
In her book she provides the historical context for why Black women often feel like imposters in the workplace—or, even more commonly, feel that they are constantly code switching between their work and personal lives. “When you're going into a space and now you're second guessing yourself because somebody said you don't belong there, of course you're gonna have lack of confidence,” she says. “But you didn’t just hop off the bus and walk in. Someone had to invite you there. We have education, we have experience, someone has hired us, why are we being pathologized and why is someone saying, oh you have imposter syndrome.”
In the end, Elizabeth says, she won’t be happy until representation is equal for everyone. “When I fight for women's rights, when I fight for my rights as a Black woman, because we have intersectionality, everybody wins. We need to empower everyone. When Black women are empowered, everyone is empowered because our empathetic nature really creates that. And I want people to understand if you're sitting there, standing there, or in a space and you're not advocating for others, then that's a lack of empathy. That's apathy.”
Full transcript here
The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 8, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Thursday Jun 01, 2023
Thursday Jun 01, 2023
In today’s special feature, Women on The Move is highlighting J.P. Morgan’s newest podcast ZoneIn featuring special guest Michelle Meyer, founder of the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) Network. She shares about her experience as one of the first, full-time NIL administrators in the country, how she stayed true to her purpose, and how athlete's build relationships with brands.
Full transcript here
Thursday May 25, 2023
Thursday May 25, 2023
In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Jill Koziol, co-founder of Motherly, a well-being destination. Jill co-founded Motherly in 2015 with the goal of empowering mothers to thrive.
“We felt like there were so many misconceptions about what it meant to be a modern mother back in 2015, and we knew that there was this tsunami of parents that were millennials that were about to become parents that were digitally native, super educated and very diverse, and we wanted to truly redefine what it meant to be motherly,” she tells Sam. “The definition is to be nurturing and caring and it really connoted this like martyrism approach to motherhood, and our lived experience was that motherhood gave us new superpowers and that we could be caring and ambitious, we could be strong and nurturing, and we wanted to really give a much more holistic approach to that.”
Drivers of change
As a co-founder, Jill’s approach was to look not at trends but at what she calls drivers of change, and to leverage a design thinking approach that got her out from behind her own identity as a mom. She says she and her co-founder identified three such drivers. The first is that the millennial generation that were having children in 2015 were the first generation in history to be digital natives when they become parents—and legacy brands were not speaking to them in a way that resonated with them. The second driver was that this generation is also the first one in which women are more educated than men. And third was the knowledge, based on demographic trends, that this was going to be the generation that shifted demographics in the United States: this generation was giving birth to the most diverse generation in history.
Jill says this approach was informed by her background as a strategy consultant, as well as her lived experiences as a mother, military spouse, and a daughter of an entrepreneur. She had young children when her husband was stationed abroad in the military, and soon after he left the military and started business school, she started her first company where she and a partner invented, patented, and brought to market a baby goods product called the Swingy.
By the time she started Motherly in 2015, Jill had a clear idea of the company culture she wanted: a workplace where women could thrive without having to make a choice between family and work. From the beginning, Motherly’s offices were 100 percent remote, cutting out lengthy commutes, and she encouraged her staff to have difficult conversations with their partners about sharing childcare and other duties.
Expanding to empower
Jill also discusses the results from Motherly’s latest Motherhood survey. The annual survey, now in its sixth year, is the largest statistically significant study of its kind of U.S. mothers. “The number one kind of key finding from this year’s 2023 state of motherhood survey was that the lack of and costs of childcare are continuing to create financial stress and are holding moms back from the workforce,” she tells Sam. “We saw that was the top reason cited why mothers are choosing to stay home with their children. We saw that 18 percent of mothers in our sample size this year chose to either leave the workforce or change jobs. And the number one reason that they did that was to stay home with their children, about 28 percent.” She says that bringing these women back into the workforce is an “economic imperative because, as we've discussed, today's mothers are the most educated cohort in the peer group.”
Looking forward, Jill says Motherly will be offering additional free resources. “This is something I'm really passionate and excited about,” she tells Sam. “I always knew that education was a really important social determinant of health, and when we launched Motherly, we knew that we were targeting this super educated demographic and that that was how we were going to grow with this new brand and this new perspective and voice. But 50 percent of today's children are born on WIC and Medicaid, and we are not going to achieve our mission of empowering mothers to thrive if we are only offering resources like our classes to the mothers that can afford that have disposable income to do it.”
Full transcript here
Thursday May 18, 2023
Thursday May 18, 2023
As Global Head of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs for JPMorgan Chase, Vivian Young says her mission is to drive opportunity and progress for Asian and Pacific Islander communities globally through advancement and economic inclusion. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about that mission and to describe her own immigration story and how the immigrant experience has changed since then.
Seeking fuller representation
Vivian’s team is one of the most recently established of the seven Centers of Excellence in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at JPMorgan Chase. Her priority, she says, is to bring a cultural lens to the broad API community. “Here in the United States, the Asian and Pacific Islander community is almost 24 million people that comprise over 30 different ethnicities and speak over a hundred different languages,” she tells Sam. “So I think it's really important for us to bring in that cultural dimension because we are not a monolith and honestly the term Asian American as a roll-up brings us together as a group. But what that does is it makes us invisible in that there's no representation for each of us.”
As a leader in a global organization, Vivian notes, making sure to attract and address the needs of employees, clients, and communities globally is a business imperative. She adds that a critically important step is addressing the model minority myth that all Asian Americans are doing well. “Because we are not as an aggregate,” she emphasizes, “When we roll up all of the information, our numbers look fantastic. We have the highest household income of any racial group. But when you take apart the numbers, what you see is that Asian households are larger than normal. So if you have a household of four with a hundred thousand dollars, you'll look at the Asian community and sometimes it's eight people or 10 people in a household. So when you start peeling those layers of the onions, they're not doing as well as we think on the surface. Part of it is really illuminating that not everybody is doing well. In fact, the Asian-American community has the largest income inequality of any racial group where the top 10% earns almost 11 times more than the bottom 10.”
A full 360 immigrant experience
Vivian believes that it’s critically important to understand immigrants’ origin stories of how and why they came to the United States—because coming as refugees, through chain migrations, or through education or employment sponsorships are all vastly different experiences. Her own story was one of chain migration: “My uncle came here first. He joined the Navy and was an engineer and worked on a nuclear submarine. And then he sponsored my father who was an accountant and he came over and got a job and then a year or two later, he was able to sponsor my mother and myself to come to the country.”
Growing up, she said her parents wanted her to assimilate—and she wanted to also. She shares a memory of asking her mom not to make egg rolls when guests came over. Of her parents’ generation of Asian immigrants, she says that many had opened service businesses to be able to support their children, and then invested their entire life savings into educating their children so that they could enter a profession such as lawyer, doctor, or engineer.
But she says she’s seen a complete turn-around with her own children’s generation. For one thing, they are embracing their cultural heritage and food. “What we are seeing now with this generation is that they're embracing entrepreneurship and they're rejecting the corporate structure and saying, I want to go in and take a risk and create my own table and have my own business,” she says. “So you're seeing this 360 of immigrants coming here, building a business, having their children not pursue the business, but then their children are now going into an entrepreneurial role.”
Diamond in the room
Today, Vivian advises others in the API community to embrace their differences. “Because if you are the only [Asian-American] in the room, it means that you are rare and you should embrace that difference,” she tells Sam. “Diamonds are rare. Think of yourself as the diamond in the room and own that. People don't invite you into spaces where you don't belong. So I think that is so critically important that when you are the only one in the room, that you represent yourself and your culture and have that pride because you are a diamond.”
Full transcript here