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WORK TITLE: Geek Girl Rising
WORK NOTES: with Samantha Walravens
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://heathercabot.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://geekgirlrising.com/about/ * https://journalism.columbia.edu/faculty/heather-cabot * https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-cabot-5aa5704/ * https://us.macmillan.com/author/heathercabot/ * http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/geek-girl-rising-heather-cabot-samantha-walravens-interview
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Neeraj Khemlani (president of Hearst Entertainment); children: two.
EDUCATION:Simmons College, B.A., 1992; Columbia School of Journalism, M.S., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, television journalist, broadcaster, news anchor, public speaker, investor, and educator. Yahoo!, web life editor, 2007-12; Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, adjunct professor, 2012-.
ABC News, former correspondent and anchor of World News Now/World News This Morning; former reporter and news anchor at television stations such as WCAX-TV, WFSB-TV, KUSA-TV, and WUSA-TV. Adviser to and investor in women-led business startups. Speaker on technology and female entrepreneurship. Frequent guest on television shows and news programs. Golden Seeds (an angel investing network), managing director. Columbia Journalism School, member of alumni board.
MEMBER:Golden Seeds.
AWARDS:Joan Shorenstein Congressional Fellowship, American Political Science Association.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career, and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, edited by Samantha Parent Walravens, Coffeetown Press (Seattle, WA), 2011.
Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Parents, Denver Post, Baltimore Sun, Psychology Today, SHE Network, Yahoo!, USA Today, and the Huffingtom Post.
Author of a blog at http://www.thewellmom.com.
Geek Girl Rising is being adapted to television by ABC Studios and the production company MILOJO.
SIDELIGHTS
Heather Cabot is a television journalist, public speaker, investor, and educator. She has been a correspondent and news anchor for World News Now and World News This Morning. She has also been a news anchor at a number of small television news stations around the country. Cabot also spent five years as the web life editor for Yahoo! In this job, she covered the consumer technology field and wrote stories about tech issues for television programs such as Rachael Ray, Today, and Martha Stewart. She is an adviser to women-led business startups and frequently invests in these businesses through Golden Seeds, an angel investing network. Cabot graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism and is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech, a collaboration between Cabot and Samantha Walravens, tells the stories of numerous women working in California’s Silicon Valley and in other technology hotspots around the country. The authors intend the book to be an antidote to the perceived, and too often real, bias against women in technology, in California and elsewhere. They do not doubt that many women in tech have experienced personally and professionally jolting instances of sexism, discrimination, and harassment. They present the stories in this book not only to show how women have been treated in the technology field but also to illustrate how determined individuals can resist and overcome the sexism to create a satisfying and lucrative career in an admittedly difficult field.
Walravens traces the origins of the book to a conversation she had with a friend of hers who worked in technology. She was a twenty-year veteran of the tech field and, at the time, was serving as head of sales for a Silicon Valley startup. “She had just had her performance review. Her sales team had hit their numbers out of the ballpark, but her manager, she told me, was more interested in sharing with her comments from her team and from her colleagues that she was too aggressive, her manner was too abrasive; and he asked her if she could tone it down a little bit because she was scaring people around her,” Walravens told interviewer Carrie Compton in a podcast transcribed on the website Princeton Alumni Weekly. To make matters even worse, the woman was told by her manager to tone down her outfits, her makeup, and her jewelry.
In response, Walravens began seeking out other women working in the tech industry to find out their stories of sexism and discrimination. She found these types of stories, certainly, but to her surprise she also found something else. Walravens told Compton, “What I saw was that while yes, many of these women had experienced some form of sexism at work, whether it was overt, or unconscious bias, death by a thousand cuts, they wanted to talk about their companies that they were building.” In the case of many of her interview subjects, “They were like, ‘Yeah, we’ve experienced this. Most women have. But let me tell you about the company I’m building.’ So they wanted to share how they have overcome these obstacles, not dwell on the negatives, right?,” she further remarked to Compton.
The authors make several suggestions for how technology concerns, in both business and academia, can restructure their environments to make them more inviting for women. One of their major arguments is that “environments where women support other women offer the most hope of success and that tech companies must reach a tipping point where women will be encouraging the growth of other women,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer. In the authors’ view, their book “counters the age-old stereotype of sharp elbowed women competing against each other. What we saw over and over was the exact opposite: women cheering each other on, passing along opportunities, helping each other get ahead. It’s incredibly important because women haven’t had the access and the contacts to succeed in the past and here they are creating their own network,” they told interviewer Swapna Krishna on the website Syfy Wire. Notably, “that network includes men who recognize that diversity and inclusion is good for everyone,” they commented.
In the interview with Krishna, Cabot and Walravens described their intentions in writing the book. “We wanted to crush stereotypes of who works in the tech world and what they are really like. We believe that one of the biggest hurdles to closing the gender gap in tech is the deeply gendered notions of who is an engineer, who is an entrepreneur, who is an investor, who is good at math and science,” they told Krishna. They “intentionally followed women whose efforts focus on debunking the myths,” they further said to Krishna.
With Geek Girl Rising, Walravens and Cabot clearly show that while women in tech are a “minority in this historically white, male industry, they are an inspirational force to be reckoned with,” commented Julia Smith in a Booklist review.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2017, Julia Smith, review of Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech, p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of Geek Girl Rising.
ONLINE
ABC News Website, http://abcnews.go.com/ (May 29, 2017), “Geek Girl Rising Author Heather Cabot Shares Her Top Pick for High-Tech Toys for Girls,” profile of Heather Cabot.
Columbia Journalism School Website, http://journalism.columbia.edu/ (February 9, 2018), biography of Heather Cabot.
Forbes Online, http://www.forbes.com/ (February 9, 2018), biography of Heather Cabot.
Geek Girl Rising Website, http://www.geekgirlrising.com (February 9, 2018), biography of Heather Cabot.
Heather Cabot Website, http://www.heathercabot.com (February 8, 2018).
Lioness, http://www.lionessmagazine.com/ (September 1, 2017), Tara McCollum, “Geek Girl Rising—The Book Turned Movement,” profile of Samantha Walravens and Heather Cabot.
Syfy Wire, http://www.syfy.com/ (May 26, 2017), Swapna Krishna, “Geek Girl Rising: Interview with Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens.”
Heather Cabot is an award-winning journalist, adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and contributor to Women@Forbes. She is a former ABC News correspondent and anchor of World News Now/World News This Morning. Cabot jumped into the digital revolution when she was hired to serve as Web Life Editor for Yahoo! in 2007. During her tenure through 2012, she reported on how the Internet was transforming our everyday lives for Today, GMA, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel and dozens of local TV and radio stations around the country. Cabot is an adviser to several women-led startups and is a member of Golden Seeds. She is married to her best friend, Neeraj Khemlani, President of Hearst Entertainment and her Columbia J '93 classmate. They reside in the NYC area and are parents to tween twins and a GoldenDoodle named Midnight.
Geek Girl Rising: Interview with Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens
Contributed by
Swapna Krishna
@skrishna
May 26, 2017
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The issues that women in tech careers, or women aspiring to these kind of Silicon Valley jobs, face are numerous, but there's real progress being made. There's a new culture of "geek girls" in the tech world, and that's the subject that writers Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens tackle in their new book Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech (St. Martin's Press, May 23).
The authors generously agreed to talk about the book, the status of women in tech and what we can do to further improve and help women succeed in these difficult careers.
Where did the idea for this book come from? What are your backgrounds?
Heather Cabot: Aside from our daughters who all love tech, the light bulb moment for me came during my years as an on-air digital lifestyle editor for Yahoo from 2007 to the end of 2012. My entire job was to study what was going on in consumer tech and to craft those findings into informative TV segments for shows like TODAY, Rachael Ray, Martha Stewart, etc. There were tons of amazing companies being started by women at the time and or that had leadership teams that included women which I featured in my stories. Companies like Rent The Runway, Gilt, Red Stamp, IndieGoGo, Kiwi Crate, and on and on.
The research took me inside the world of startups and when I left Yahoo, I started doing a bit of angel investing and stumbled into the world of investors focused on female-led companies. That's where I realized there was a larger story about the sisterhood of women in tech across the ecosystem—it wasn't just about founders. The movement encompassed investors, educators, advocates around the country and that felt like a really big story no one had told quite yet. And by 2015, when we were deep into writing the proposal for the book, the Ellen Pao trial and its revelations emerged as a rallying point for a lot of the anger and frustration over sexism in tech and it just felt like this force for change was growing at the grassroots level — there was another side to the story of women of forging their own paths in tech and that empowering narrative is what we decided to cover.
Sam Walravens: I'm a first-generation "Silicon Valley Girl." I started my career in technology in 1995 as a reporter for PC World magazine, covering the rise of the dot-com world and companies like Netscape, Yahoo, and eBay. Then I got the "Internet bug" and went to work for a startup called Tumbleweed Software, which went public in 1999, right before the dot-com bubble collapsed. We all saw our fortunes rise (on paper) and disappear within a matter of months! It was a crazy time. Many of my closest friends and mentors to this day are from those early Internet days. We went through a lot together.
In 2011, I published my first book about women and the work-life juggle, TORN: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, and was writing for several publications about women and work. Over lunch one day, a girlfriend and fellow dot-com survivor was telling me about how horrible it was to be a woman in Silicon Valley these days. She was the head of sales for a software company and had just had her performance review. Although her team had hit their sales numbers out of the ball park, her manager was more focused on complaints he had received from colleagues about her "aggressive" demeanor and asked if she could "tone it down a bit." He also told her she wore too much makeup and jewelry. She was horrified. Needless to say, she didn't stick around long at that company.
That conversation prompted me to explore the issue of sexism in Silicon Valley, which hadn't hit the mainstream media yet. In my conversations with women executives, entrepreneurs and engineers, I saw a pattern emerge: while a majority had experienced some form of sexism- either overt or subtle- they were more interested in telling me about their work—the companies they were leading and the cool technologies and products they were building. They wanted to share how they had overcome obstacles to find success, but not dwell on the negatives. I teamed up with Heather in 2013 when we learned we were both researching the topic of "women in tech." Four years and 300+ interviews later, Geek Girl Rising was born!
You tell the story of women in tech, and the way we are transforming the industry, through personal anecdotes and stories. It made me feel like I got to know these women. Was that the reason you structured it that way, to put a human face on the issue?
Heather & Sam: Our goal from the outset was to curate stories that would resonate with other women who perhaps never thought of themselves as having a stake in the digital revolution or who see tech as something that makes their lives easier by don't envision themselves as creating it. We wanted to crush stereotypes of who works in the tech world and what they are really like. We believe that one of the biggest hurdles to closing the gender gap in tech is the deeply gendered notions of who is an engineer, who is an entrepreneur, who is an investor, who is good at math and science. So the descriptions of women, including what they wear, what they like to eat, what they do with kids or during their time off was deliberate. And we intentionally followed women whose efforts focus on debunking the myths.
We also wanted to put a human face on the numbers. There's a lot of data out there that show how hard it is for women in tech today. 56% of women in technology drop out mid-career. The number of college women majoring in computer science has dropped from 37% to 18% over the past 30 years. Less than 3% of venture capital-funded companies have a woman CEO. Frankly, it's pretty depressing. What you don't hear about are all the success stories of women who are bucking the trend and starting companies, creating "sisterhoods" of support and rallying their younger sisters to join the tech revolution.
Geek Girl Rising focuses on awesome women in tech, but it also focuses just as much on how women can help one another succeed. Why do you think that's important?
Heather & Sam: It's essential because it counters the age-old stereotype of sharp elbowed women competing against each other. What we saw over and over was the exact opposite: women cheering each other on, passing along opportunities, helping each other get ahead. It's incredibly important because women haven't had the access and the contacts to succeed in the past and here they are creating their own network. And by the way, that network includes men who recognize that diversity and inclusion is good for everyone.
We saw this "sisterhood" in female-focused co-working spaces like HeraHub and The Wing, in accelerator programs that support and invest in female founders like the Women's Startup Lab and MergeLane, and on college campuses, where women in engineering and computer science were forming networks to address gender disparities and inspire the next generation of girls in tech. As Shelley Zalis, CEO and Founder of the Girls' Lounge, says, "A woman alone can be powerful. But collectively, we have an impact."
There are more and more young women interested in tech careers. Do you have any advice for them?
Heather & Sam: Find other women in similar situations, within your workplace or outside. Many companies today have women's groups that allow you to share your experiences, learn from each other and even learn from experts who are brought in to teach and give workshops. Because of the gender ratio in tech, you may find yourself the only woman in a meeting, or class or in your area of the office. The support that comes from finding others in similar situations can help that isolation.
Don't compare yourself to others. Tracy Chou, former software engineering lead at Pinterest, tells a story about how she felt intimidated by the guys in her computer science class at Stanford, who bragged about finishing their programming projects faster than her. She was one of the only girls in the class and was demoralized. When her professor asked her to be a TA for the class the following semester, she was able to see the actual code that her male classmates had written, and she realized her code was way better than theirs! It turned out she was cut out for the job. She kept it up and it led to a successful career in tech.
What surprised you the most about writing this book?
Heather & Sam: How similar writing a book is to launching a startup!
What do you want readers to know about Geek Girl Rising?
Heather & Sam: There are two things we want people to know about the book:
(1) We didn't have to look far to find incredible stories of women forging their own paths in the tech world. There were too many to fit in the confines of our book. So when you hear people say they can't find a woman to be on a panel or to be interviewed for a news story, they really are not looking in the right places. It's too easy to say "Well, there aren't very many out there." That's true, there could be many, many more women entering the field and staying on. But that shouldn't be an excuse to overlook the amazing women who are there persisting and succeeding.
(2) The stereotype of the nerdy "geek" guy coding away in a dark basement is fast becoming a relic, like the 1980s Revenge of the Nerds-type movies that created it. In all honesty, this image is completely false. Women have always been part of "geek" culture, from Ada Lovelace in the 19th century to Grace Hopper in the 20th to Marissa Mayer in the 21st. But like the movie Hidden Figures illustrates, women been largely kept out of the narrative. The good news is that, in the past several years, women have started making their voices heard about their "geeky" passions and love of technology. Geek Girl Rising is on a mission to elevate the voices of women in technology and encourage women and girls to join the digital revolution — and create the future!
What's next for you both, now that you've written this book?
Heather & Sam: Of course, we are eager and hopeful to see how the scripted TV series takes shape. We loved the reporting and process so much during this project. We'll definitely will continue to follow up with women in the book and profile amazing women in technology on our digital platform, www.geekgirlrising.com.
Heather: But I am also eager to tackle a different topic and subculture and hope to be digging into another juicy long form, nonfiction writing project soon. It was a gift to be able to spend so much time on this one.
Sam: I'll continue writing about women and work for Forbes and The Huffington Post. I'd also like to work with the "CS for All Initiative" to get coding built into the public school curriculum across the U.S.
'Geek Girl Rising' author Heather Cabot shares her top pick for high-tech toys for girls
By ABC NEWS
May 29, 2017, 9:02 AM ET
Heather Cabot, a journalist and co-author of the new book "Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech," appeared live on "Good Morning America" today to share some of the best new gadgets for girls to play that are also meant to keep their brains active all summer long.
In "Geek Girl Rising," Cabot interviews female leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who are shaking up the nation's tech scene and destabilizing the misconception that women don't belong in the science and technology field.
"I'm a mom to kids who love technology and my co-author and I were really concerned about the fact that a small number of women are really going into computer science and engineering and of course you can't avoid the headlines today about the sexism in Silicon Valley," Cabot said today on “Good Morning America.” "So what we decided to do is to actually find the stories of the women who are succeeding in tech -- to find out how they did it, and to get their advice for our daughters."
Cabot also examines how societal pressures, from even an extremely young age, can veer girls away from a career in science and technology fields. Here she shares her top picks for toys, many specifically aimed at girls, that encourage children to learn the basics of science and engineering while also having fun.
ILookLikeAnEngineer Hashtag Breaks Down Stereotypes, Highlights Diversity in Tech Industry
This Homeless Shelter Is Empowering Teen Girls by Teaching Them to Code
ABCNews.com
VIDEO: The smartest gadgets for girls this summer
Blink Blink Creative Circuit Kits
Cabot's first pick are the Blink Blink Creative Circuits kits, which lets girls combine creativity with technology to create wearable high-tech fashion that they make themselves. The kits are inspired by the light up dresses worn on the red carpet by stars such as Lupita Nyong'o.
"Think of it as 'Project Runway' meets electrical engineering," Cabot said.
The kits mesh LED lights, conductive tape and common materials such as paper or fabric. The fun and creative toys also teach girls basic circuit theory. Cabot said the kits are recommended for girls ages 8 and up.
RaceYa Cars and Parts
The RaceYa Cars and Parts, which are currently only available for pre-sale, are predicted to be some of the hottest new toys of the year, but also aim to teach children the basics of science, technology, engineering and math. The customize-able, radio-controlled, cars that children can build themselves aim to boost young girls' confidence in engineering and technology fields through hands-on activities.
Jewelbots
Jewelbots, described as modern friendship bracelets, changes colors to match with a friend when you two are together. Children can also pair up with a friend via Bluetooth and send secret messages through the bracelets.
"Imagine they're walking down the hall in middle school and they’re passing the lockers and as soon as they get close to each other, they light up," Cabot said.
Jewelbots offer a unique way to get children to experiment with programming and see firsthand how collaborative and creative it can be. They makers of the wearable technology also assure parents that the bracelets are safe for children, and do not contain a GPS or store any personal data.
Goldieblox
Goldieblox are a line of toys marketed for girls that include toys, books, apps, videos, and more which all challenge gender stereotypes and rely heavily on combining creativity with science, technology, engineering and math principles. One of the craft kits has girls build a miniature Ferris wheel. Girls not only build structures with the toys and tutorial videos, but they can also play with and relate to the characters, including the line's action figures Goldie and Ruby.
I am an award-winning journalist, adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a former ABC News anchor/correspondent. I am the co-author of the acclaimed non-fiction narrative, "Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech" (St. Martin’s May 2017) and speak frequently about tech and female entrepreneurship. My next book will take readers inside the high stakes world of the "Green Rush" and introduce them to the players betting big on the future of marijuana legalization.
Heather Cabot
Adjunct Faculty
Expertise: Broadcast
Heather Cabot is a former ABC News correspondent and anchor with more than twenty years of experience as an on-air reporter and freelance writer. Since 2007, she has served as a digital trends expert for Yahoo!, appearing regularly on TV including, "Today", CNN, MSNBC, "Rachael Ray," and "The Martha Stewart Show." While at ABC News, Cabot co-anchored "World News Now" and "World News This Morning" and reported for "Good Morning America" and "World News Tonight." After graduating from the J-School in 1993, Cabot launched her TV reporting career on the assignment desk at NY-1 News. She went on to report and anchor at award-winning stations around the U.S., including WCAX-TV, WFSB-TV, KUSA-TV and WUSA-TV. Cabot is a recipient of the Joan Shorenstein Congressional Fellowship by the American Political Science Association and was honored by the Denver chapter of Women in Communications for her in-depth, multi-media reporting on high stakes testing and education reform in Colorado.
Cabot's writing has appeared in Parents, The Denver Post, The Baltimore Sun, USA Today, Huffington Post, Yahoo! and the bestselling anthology Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood.
She blogs at thewellmom.com
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Heather Cabot is an angel investor, writer and adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a managing director of Golden Seeds angel investing network, a Pipeline Fellowship alumna, and an investor/advisor to numerous women-led ventures including Project Gravitas, Cisse Trading Co, DayOne Response, and the Harlem App Collective. She is also a member of The Li.st, a network that supports and advocates for women in technology. Cabot is a former ABC News anchor/correspondent and served as Yahoo! Web Life Editor from 2007-12 in which she reported on digital trends for TODAY, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and syndicated daytime talk shows. She’s written for The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, Parents, The SHE network, Women 2.0, USA Today and Yahoo!. Cabot first got interested in this topic as a researcher on the 1995 PBS documentary “Minerva’s Machine: Women and Computing,” which profiled female pioneers, including US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who programmed some of the very first computers, helped develop the high-level programming language COBOL and popularized the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches .
I’m a storyteller by nature and by trade. I’m a writer, former network TV journalist, investor in women-led startups and mom to happy, healthy twins. My latest project, Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech (St. Martin’s Press, May 2017), is a non-fiction narrative that uncovers the true stories of the women who haven’t asked for permission from Silicon Valley to build the future. The acclaimed book is being developed into a scripted TV series by ABC Studios and MILOJO, the production company owned by Kelly Ripa and her husband Mark Consuelos.
I spent the most of my career chasing stories as a TV reporter and anchor for local news stations from Burlington, VT to Denver, CO to Washington, DC and joined ABC News as a correspondent in 2002. My byline has appeared in a host of newspapers and magazines, including USA Today, The Baltimore Sun, The Denver Post and Parents. In 2007, I started covering tech trends for Yahoo and served as its national on-air tech expert which included regular segments on TODAY. In 2012, I became an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and recently joined the Columbia J-School Alumni Board.
As an investor and adviser to early stage ventures, I have had the privilege to collaborate with Pipeline Angels and Golden Seeds. My portfolio is focused on women-led startups including Project Gravitas, Cisse Trading Company and DayOne Response.
The love of my life is a former J-school classmate who is a former 60 Minutes producer turned entertainment and digital media executive. We spend most of our free time raising our tween twins who continually challenge, amaze and teach us new things every day. When I’m not researching the next big story, you can find me exploring the world on adventures with my family, walking our dog Midnight and “training for life” on my Peloton spin bike, in the pool or at the gym.
Geek Girl Rising – The Book Turned Movement
Posted on September 1, 2017 by Tara McCollum
“Sometimes you’ve got to take a leap of faith,” says Samantha Walravens, co-author of the book, “Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech,” a collection of stories about the women not just succeeding in tech, but the ones who are changing the game for women entrepreneurs everywhere.
Walravens, a Princeton alum and award-winning journalist with a lengthy history of her own within the inner workings and beginnings of Silicon Valley, decided to give up her career some time ago and focus on her family. But as a mother of four, over time, she began to feel, as she put it, “like a big loser.”
“I had always envisioned myself to be this hitter, professional woman and I was home, literally not sleeping, not dressing, raising four kids and [with] a husband who was gone [a lot]. I was depressed, I was just feeling really badly about myself and I started reaching out to some of my girlfriends from college who were super successful, they were bankers and lawyers — they were like so many people from Princeton that achieved such great professional success, and I reached out to them and I was like, ‘How are you guys doing it? You have two kids; you have three kids, you’re a CFO or Head General Counsel of Goldman Sachs — how the heck do you do it?’ And they all responded to me, ‘Sam, we’re not doing it all, we never wanted to do it all’,” remembered Walravens. “We make choices, we make compromises, you know a bunch who were working full time were like, ‘I don’t see my kids as much as I want to, I have a nanny, my kids are in daycare.’ And the ones who were working part time were like, ‘I’m doing a horrible job, I’m a horrible mom, I’m a horrible professional, I’m doing a half-assed job at both things, I’m not succeeding.’ And the ones who were stay at home were like, ‘I’ve totally given up my career and I’m raising kids and I’m a total failure’.”
“That’s why I wrote Torn,” said Walravens of her first book, “TORN: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood,” a New York Times acclaimed anthology. “I was like, oh my God, we’re all torn, I’m not alone in this and I want to share these stories because I feel so alone in my situation and I want to share with other women that they’re not alone, regardless of what choice you make with career and motherhood. There are people who are struggling and no one is doing it all.”
Walravens’ friend, a tall, attractive blonde, was given not a congratulatory review for her professional successes but rather a warning about how her lipstick was too bright, her style of interaction too aggressive and that she wore too many bracelets.
Through TORN, Walravens found herself resurfaced, impassioned and with a renewed purpose. Soon after publication, Walravens was back in the game, writing about women and their career and work-life issues, working for publications like Huffington Post, Forbes, Modern Mom and appearing on broadcasts like the Today Show. Having started her career as a technology reporter, covering the rise of tech (she actually worked as a coder, doing HTML 1.0 code in 1995, taking all the content for the magazine she wrote for from print to code), Walravens had seemingly now found her true niche until a lunch in 2013 that would culminate in the marriage of both worlds.
In a meeting with a friend who was head of sales for a tech company in Silicon Valley, Walravens learned about how despite her friend’s success at her job, in which she described her team as kicking their “numbers out of the ballpark,” her manager had some interesting comments on her performance review. Walravens’ friend, a tall, attractive blonde, was given not a congratulatory review for her professional successes but rather a warning about how her lipstick was too bright, her style of interaction too aggressive and that she wore too many bracelets.
“She quit that job because she just couldn’t do it,” explained Walravens, “She couldn’t take it anymore and she was in between jobs and she was ready to tell her story. She wanted to get out there and write it and I said well before I do anything, why don’t I just dig in a little bit of this topic of sexism in Silicon Valley and what’s going on.”
And dig she did. Soon it was all too easy to find the stories of sexism in Silicon Valley. Women were willingly and with fervor telling their stories; and there seemed to be no shortage of bad experiences. Walravens had her next book topic – and it was going to be about sexism in tech.
“So I put out a call for submissions, and like tell me your story, I’m interviewing women and one of the women I reached out to was Heather Cabot, who is my co-author, and she was working for Yahoo, and she goes, ‘Sam I’m researching something very similar but from a more positive perspective, of not just the sexism but how woman are succeeding’,” said Walravens who at that time decided to partner with Cabot and try to take control of the narrative for women in tech.
“When you read about women in tech it’s about how horrible it is, how sexist it is, how Silicon Valley is a terrible place for women, so why would you ever want to go into technology and entrepreneurship if it’s so horrible? The mainstream narrative about women in tech is this sort of negative story, so we wanted to flip the table and tell a more positive story,” explained Walravens, adding, “Some of the things women have to endure in the process of starting their companies and raising venture capital and all this kind of stuff, we definitely tell that part of the story too, but we wanted to show that you can get over that and here are some tools for getting over that and getting through that and succeeding.”
Over the next two years Walravens and Cabot conducted interviews with women entrepreneurs and technologists from all backgrounds, from Tracy Chao, the software engineer who wrote the essay “Where Are the Numbers?” in October 2013 that forced the tech industry to address their lack of female representation, to Debbie Sterling, founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, a first of its kind engineering toy for girls. Touching on the difficulties each woman faced due solely on their gender, and at times, their race as well, both Walravens and Cabot focused on all their abilities to overcome their difficulties rather than the obstacles themselves and by doing so really painted pictures of some super-hero like women.
“I have two daughters who are now nine and 13, Heather has a little girl who is 11 and we were looking for role models for our daughters. You can’t be what you can’t see, that’s a common phrase, and we were looking ahead at what our daughters could be and there were so few women in those positions of technologists, engineers and entrepreneurs and we’re like how can we tell them, okay this is who you can be if all they saw is Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Elon Musk and all these successful male entrepreneurs? There were no women entrepreneurs who would say this is who you want to be like, so – that’s why we wanted to collect stories of women entrepreneurs and technologists,” said Walravens.
Before the book even began to take shape, Walravens and Cabot started the Geek Girl Rising blog and website, knowing from the start they wouldn’t be able to include all their interviews in one book. In this way they hoped to keep Geek Girls going, knowing full well the stories, and the women, wouldn’t stop at the finish of a book.
“Every week we feature, we call it, Geek of the Week, and we feature a woman on our website and then on social media because there’s so many stories to tell so the digital platform was always part of our plan and we continue to do that on a weekly basis,” said Walravens, “We want to tell as many stories as we can and show as many images of women in tech as we can and just show that they’re not all alike and that they’re diverse and they come from different ethnic backgrounds and they’re creating different technology and they’re just a very diverse group of women. We just want to paint a picture. We want to get rid of the stereotypes and show real life examples of women and show that they’re just like you and me. They like to do yoga, they like to go on hikes, they have kids, they have families, they’re just normal human beings and yes they like to code or yes they’re starting a company or yes they’re investing.”
There’s so many obstacles in your way but if you have a dream, you have an idea, just go for it.
So while the book is now completed, published and out for consumption by the masses, the website goes on, with a lineup of profiles that continue to grow. ABC Studios and Kelly Ripa along with her husband Mark Consuelos, has even optioned the book for a possible TV show, while Walravens and Cabot are talking to Scholastic to make a young adult version of the book that would be available to middle school students, the age it is believed when girls start losing interest in math and science, and help introduce to young girls, and boys, the images of women in tech and entrepreneurial circumstances that seem everyday to them.
“My message is — actually I’m going to quote Reshma Saujani [founder of Girls Who Code] because she said it best, she says that as parents we teach our boys to be brave and fearless and we teach our girls to be polite and perfect. And my goal is to totally disrupt that, shake it up and teach the next generation of girls to take risks, get their hands dirty, to take their idea and make into a reality and not attempt to be polite and perfect and follow all the rules,” declared Walravens, “And that’s been my goal with this book. That’s a bigger vision but that’s kind of what I’m hoping to do – inspire the next generation of women to think big, act bold, take risks, follow your dreams, don’t let anything stop you [through] all the obstacles, because there’s going to be a ton, whether it’s sexism or lack of funding or motherhood, raising kids – there’s so many obstacles in your way but if you have a dream, you have an idea, just go for it. ”
What started out as simply an idea for a book has quickly turned into a movement and method of inspiration and change for Walravens and Cabot. To them, geek girls are not just rising, but thriving.
For more information on the women “shaking up” the tech industry, check out the Geek Girl Rising Blog as they continue to spread the word about the fearless women of Silicon Valley and beyond.
Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech
Julia Smith
113.15 (Apr. 1, 2017): p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech.
By Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens.
May 2017. 272p. St. Martin's, $26.99 (9781250112262). 602.
Despite increasing jobs in the tech industry, the number of women pursuing these careers is in decline. However, Cabot and Walravens admirably show that though women are a minority in this historically white, male industry, they are an inspirational force to be reckoned with. This book dismantles stereotypes surrounding women's capabilities, highlights obstacles impeding their entry into the tech "boys club," and encourages women of all ages to persevere and follow their passions. Cabot and Walravens accomplish this task by profiling a wonderfully diverse range of female entrepreneurs, financiers, company founders, and mentors--all of them intelligent, driven, and committed to creating a supportive community for women in (or trying to break into) tech. Included are such figures as Debbie Sterling, creator of GoldieBlox engineering dolls; Sheila Marcelo, founder of Care, com; and Michelle Phan, YouTube celebrity and Ipsy cosmetics company founder. This enlightening read reveals many problems embedded in start-up culture, but, more importantly, it is an invigorating call to action and testament to the wide-ranging successes of women in this field.--Julia Smith
YA: Any teen with an interest in coding or STEM careers will find inspiration here, but girls in particular will be drawn to the strong female role models filling its pages. JS.
YA RECOMMENDATIONS
* Young adult recommendations for adult, audio, and reference titles reviewed In this issue have been contributed by the Booklist staff and by reviewers Michael Cart, Laura Chanoux, John Charles, Carol Haggas, Kristine Huntley, Bethany Latham, Colleen Mondor, and Louisa Whitfield-Smith.
* Adult titles recommended for teens are marked with the following symbols: YA, for books of general YA interest; YA/C, for books with particular curriculum value; YA/S, for books that will appeal most to teens with a special interest in a specific subject; and YA/M, for books best suited to mature teens.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Julia. "Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 6. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491487806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3db9cace. Accessed 10 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491487806
GEEK GIRL RISING
Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech
by Samantha Walravens & Heather Cabot
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Concentrating on the years 2014 through 2016, journalists Cabot and Walravens (editor: Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, 2011) tell the stories of dozens of women who are working in or leading tech companies.
With considered optimism, the authors relate a few accounts of failed companies led by women and present statistics indicating how small a percentage of women are involved in tech jobs, but they keep most of their attention on those who have managed to break through and thrive in a tough business environment. Some of these leaders took off from relatively small internet niches and parlayed them into much larger presences, such as YouTube star Michelle Phan, creator of the e-commerce cosmetics company Ipsy. Others found areas that their male counterparts ignored: Sheila Lirio Marcelo, for example, was motivated to form a site for seekers and purveyors of domestic help by her own “struggles with balancing babies and aging parents.” In addition to tech leaders, the authors consider female “angel investors” like Joanne Wilson, who invests in female startups, or the group of Chattanooga female movers and shakers who invest their collective cash in businesses run by women. Cabot and Walravens make a point of seeking out minority women, whether women of color or lesbians, to include in their account. While a majority of the book covers high earners, one chapter follows women who have pieced together tech work at home following the births of their children and suggests that such work will be increasing in the future. Using evidence of colleges where computer science departments have managed to maintain female students, the authors argue that environments where women support other women offer the most hope of success and that tech companies must reach a tipping point where women will be encouraging the growth of other women.
A well-organized if sometimes-superficial survey of the successes and occasional failures of women working in what has traditionally been a male-dominated field.
Pub Date: May 23rd, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11226-2
Page count: 272pp
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 7th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15th, 2017