Female tech leaders offer career advice to girls in Women's Month video series: 'Never be the one saying no to yourself'

Beth Greenfield
·Senior Editor

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When I was 10 years old, and it was time for us to pick an instrument for school band, I told my friend I wanted to play the drums. “Girls can’t play the drums,” she said, laughing. “Think how silly you’d look standing up there in a skirt!” Oh, right, I thought, confused. Girls only had two choices back then — flute or clarinet. I settled for clarinet. And I instinctively understood many of the other gendered expectations — like how math and science and computers were for the boys.

Today, though I’m still bad a math, I have plenty of examples of how much the world has changed — my own empowered 10-year-old daughter, for one. And the incredible #BUILTBYGIRLS, for another. The mentorship and resource-providing organization (part of Verizon Media, along with Yahoo Lifestyle) has an inspired mission that I would’ve been so grateful for as a girl: to “prepare young women everywhere to claim their place in the careers, industries, and roles they want — starting with the tech industry.”

Now, in honor of International Women’s Day, #BUILTBYGIRLS is releasing a new video series — its first — called “This is a world #BUILTBYGIRLS,” featuring intimate and enlightening conversations between ambitious young women and the powerhouse women who have all succeeded in breaking into — and quickly dominating — an industry that was not ever meant for them.

The series of one-on-one discussions, covering issues from fighting against the wage gap to creating an inclusive workplace culture for trans and queer folk, features sage advice from the following professionals: Arlan Hamilton (Backstage Capital), Angelica Ross (Trans Tech), Claire Wasserman (Ladies Get Paid), Lauren Kassan (The Wing), Naomi Hirabayashi & Marah Lidey (Shine), Moj Madhara (BeautyCon) and Amani Al-Khatahtbeh (Muslim Girls).

Hamilton — a black queer entrepreneur who overcame racism and even homelessness to bust into Silicon Valley — sat down with Gefen Skolnick, a UCLA junior who runs hackathons, and wanted to talk about the challenge of diversity in tech fields. “If you can’t find a person of color or woman or LGBTQ person looking [for a tech job], you’re not looking,” notes Hamilton, who also shares how being part of an underrepresented group can actually work to a young woman’s advantage.

“What stands out to me is someone who can anticipate, and really study the situation, and take notes,” she explains, adding that often, when people have it “easier” because of gender or race or class, they may not “go through the mechanics of learning everything from the ground up. And a lot of times, “this is where people who are underrepresented can shine,” Hamilton explains.

Several of the intergenerational pairs spoke about how girls and women often struggle with “imposter syndrome,” and how to overcome it.

“You are meant to be there because you were invited into the room,” Angelica Ross, founder of Trans Tech, tells Isabel Abonitalla, a high school student who does coding and robotics and recently invented a UVC-LED water bottle that can kill harmful bacteria for people who do not live near healthy water sources. She tells Abonitalla that, in order to believe you’re deserving of your place in your career, one must “show up with everything that you’ve got and know that it is impossible to be an imposter of you. I know what it feels like when you’re trying to go into a job or into a position that feels like you’re reaching. But that’s what it takes to succeed — to kind of reach for something.”

Adds Madhara, “Imposter syndrome is like a terrible disease. Hopefully by the time you wind up in that room, where you’re hearing the voice of, like, ‘Why am I in this room?’ you should hopefully have another voice in your head: ‘I deserve it. I deserve to be in this room.’”

Al-Khatahtbeh spoke with Ofelia, a young woman and Mexican-American immigrant with an interest in STEM, about the trick of establishing yourself as a boss, rather than someone who is bossy. “A lot of times female ambition is off-putting,” she says. “But that should never be a reason to hold ourselves back. We can’t let the patriarchy win.”

Further, Al-Khatahtbeh stresses the importance of not holding yourself back. “Never be the one saying no to yourself, because there are going to be plenty of people out there in the world that are going to say no to you,” she says. “The first thing you owe yourself is to not be one of those people… especially women and young girls of color.”

Madhara, meanwhile, adds some unexpected advice for young women looking to sharpen their confidence. “Take a stand-up comedy class,” she tells her young charge in the video series. “Women are basically 2 percent of all venture capital funding, and women of color are .02 percent,” Madhara says. “I had to pitch about 105 investors before I got my first $200,000. It’s, like, nerve-wracking — you’re on the 57th floor of a building, it’s all these older white men in suits…it’s hard to not feel weird when you’re asking people for money. So my friend was like, ‘You should take a standup comedy class,’ and it’s transformed the way I ask for money… It became less personal about me [and] how people felt about me in that room.”

Finally, comes this sage advice from Wasserman of Ladies Get Paid about negotiating your first salary. “Well first of all, you can negotiate,” she stresses. “You think you have no experience when you graduate, but you do. Think about all the things that you even experienced as a student…and being able to say here’s what I did, here’s what I learned — and you always have to be able to say what the impact was… If you can quantify it, you are a strong negotiator.”

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