When we own our voices
A reflection of our WIP event at Vimeo’s NYC offices on March 15th, 2018
This past Thursday night, something special took place here in NYC. As the co-lead for the NYC WIP chapter, I’ve had the privilege of hosting a number of events for our community and meeting countless women, talking about advancing our skills, knowledge, and passion for product. Yet Thursday night, in many ways, felt like a long-awaited catharsis.
Our gracious hosts at Vimeo gave us the opportunity to put on an amazing event, Breaking Through: Amplifying Your Voice as a Woman in Technology. To shed some light, planning for these events is definitely a labor of love and requires immense support from our sponsors, which we found with the Vimeo team (shoutout to Yasi and Katrina!). It was immediately clear to us, even in the planning stages, that this was a topic not to be taken lightly. Our original version (like any good product, iterations are necessary) was centered around “Finding and Using your Voice.” But after deciding that topic, we questioned if that truly was the focus for our event. Did we, as women, really needed to be told how to find our voice? And if we use our voices daily, what about it isn’t working?
We had our own breakthrough when we realized that women already have agency — we don’t need to tell them they need to find a voice, they already have one. So we reframed the invite/event text to express more of that agency and underscore that women attending the event were already empowered. We focused the event on hearing from senior women in technology on how they’ve brought that empowerment to bear at work and learning strategies from each other on how to claim your space, every day.
As it turns out, our shift in mindset and approach resonated with our audience in ways well beyond our expectations.
We were also very fortunate to have powerhouse women such as Anjali Sud, Kathleen Barrett , Andrea Chesleigh, and Lisa Zhu share their inspiring journeys with us. The lightning talks and the breakout sessions fostered an inclusive, welcoming environment that makes me so proud to be a part of this community and is simply a testament to the empowered women amongst us.
There were some great highlights from the night. Here are a few:
1. Anjali’s candor when speaking about her early days as Vimeo’s CEO
Anjali Sud, the CEO of Vimeo, spoke candidly about her ascension to the CEO role and her experience over the past 8 months:
You’re going to find yourself in situations where you don’t have a lot of experience or you’re not the most knowledgeable person in the room, or you don’t really know what you’re doing…in my first couple months as CEO, probably every single day, several hours of the day, I’d walk into situations where I didn’t know what I was doing. But no one needs to know my self-doubts.
The candor with which Anjali spoke was incredibly refreshing and empowering, and her advice to fake it ‘til you make it (reinforced by a well-curated Beyoncé gif) was a great reminder to the audience that even when you’re in a new situation, you can own that experience. You can still have the opportunity to self-reflect on areas of growth or rely on others where you may not be the expert, but mentally, it’s important to project confidence as you lead and manage teams. The rest will follow.
2. Embrace your differences, even the weird ones
Kathleen Barrett, GM of Vimeo OTT, shared a poignant story about interviewing at Goldman Sachs as a pre-med student. While the interview room was chock full of people in the same black suits with the same black leather portfolios, she stood out with her gray suit and her purple folder. While this was a source of agitation in the moment, Kathleen realized that it was those exact differences that made her stand out as a candidate and as a powerful contributor to the Goldman Sachs team.
Being authentic can be hard, but trying to erase those unique differences that make you, you can be even harder to sustain in the long run. So just be you :)
3. When a breakout session suddenly becomes your tribe
The breakout sessions were my favorite part of this event, and a first for a NYC WIP event. While a logistical challenge (it really shouldn’t be hard to break up 80 women into 6 groups, but you’d be surprised), the breakout sessions allowed women to come together in smaller groups to discuss one of 3 topics:
- Pitching with confidence
- Dealing with microagressions
- Staying authentic and true to yourself
We broke out in smaller groups, brainstormed problems and solutions individually and as a group, and came back together to share our findings.
In hindsight, any of these subtopics could have been an event on its own, but I was inspired by the honesty and forthcoming nature of the women. Andrea Chesleigh, VP of Product and Engineering at One King’s Lane, encouraged us to find our tribe during her lightning talk, and as a participant in one of these sessions, I felt like we were quickly able to build a safe, inclusive environment for us to reflect and share stories. In my group in particular, we talked about feeling isolated at times, only to realize that as a group of isolated women, we really weren’t so alone anymore.
One thing that stood out to me during the group presentations, and one I’d like to explore further, is the high cost of the additional emotional labor women have to often put into their jobs to overcome some of these challenges we face. So while solutions like building consensus amongst the team first or back-channeling to ensure you have allies before you enter an important meeting are good short-term fixes, there is an untenable cost to this invisible, often unrecognized, labor.
We’re eager to continue to build longer term, more sustainable solutions and invite more male allies to join the conversation. Thursday night was an important step in that direction.
If you have any suggestions for future events here in NYC, please feel free to reach out or connect!
If you missed the event, you can catch the recorded stream here.
