Inside and suggestions and everyone will be very energized so please welcome, first of all and i think youre coming in from the side doctor jenny columbothank you all. We look forward to this. My thanks to the organizers of the forum this year for giving us an opportunity to talk about some things we dont talk about very much and we have an exemplary panel that brings a lot of experience from the public and private sector and looking forward to moderating the conversation. A little bit by way of background, over 50 of the pacs that have recently been awarded in biology have gone to women and yet, it goes without saying that in some respects you all are an exception to the rule of women rising to important positions of leadership. When we talk about it we recognize there are some key issues that have stunted our ability to assume important positions of leadership. Some of those are related to work and life balance and there are biases we need to acknowledge and overcome and i am looking forward to this conversation and what struck me is we are talking about the importance of diversity and making sure our leadership is as diverse as possible. First impressions i will ask everyone on the panel to responded to and i have some focus questions that reflect your unique contributions and i refer to the fact that our numbers and in some cases are onex variances tells us that we still lack leadership and wonder if you would draw on your own career or those of others that you have observed to see if you can identify some of the key issues for why these gaps may process . Good morning. One of the key reasons for the persisting is actually at the system level. You heard about over half of the life science going to women and the system has not changed to catch up with the changes in the workforce. Promotion and tenure pathways have not changed. There are cultural issues around welcoming women and familyfriendly policies that although they exist, women feel stigmatized and unwilling or hesitant to use that. There are pay differentials that we know about as an issue and we see that women publish less than men and in different journals and on different topics. That has a factor because we talk about promotion and tenure not changing and the advent of science and the importance of collaboration being critical to the science of today. Interdisciplinarythat requires a team and they havent caught up with recognizing those contributions as well as recognizing mentorship which is important and we know it is, but it is not rewarded. Those are some of the key factors that i see. I am a little less scholarly. Maybe i will take the personal side and for those of us that have moved into leadership this is a responsibility we have to be both role models and mentors and i was very fortunate i had a mother who was very successful and accomplished physician and she was a pioneer in many ways so i grew up thinking that, of course i could be a doctor some of the best doctors and leaders in medicine are women, but it was a shock for me when i entered medical school and my medical training and the work place that it wasnt as easy as my mother made it look and being able to assert myself and really sit full square at the table and being able to balance other pressures in life because it was important to me to have a family and commit time and effort to the family and especially when i was in medical school i move through the system how few other models there really were throughout my whole medical school tenure i only had one female attending physician. That was astounding when i was in my clinical rotation and in my Resident Program there were only actually three women out of 35 so that was surprising. One quick story, when i got to the sba and i was the second woman to be in that role, the first week it was about 7 00 at night i had two kids at home and a husband that was working in new york and commuting so i was a single mom during the week. I was leaving and a couple of guys standing in the hall part of the Leadership Team and i made a joke i guess im going home first and one of them looked at me and said you dont have to say youre going home you can say youre going to an event for work and i said why would i say i am doing that it is important to go home and important to be with your family and i knew that one of them had two young kids and i said you should be home already and from that moment on i really felt it was important to be a role model that you can be and an important powerful position and you could have credibility and impact that you could also show that balance was important and you could also admit that you werent superwoman. All of the things you to have said resonates with me and i will repeat those as factors, but i think the factors that influence whether women are in leadership positions or not in general are the same that i am familiar with which influence the fraction of women that are tenured faculty full professors which is as you heard although after pacs are given to women in the Life Sciences fewer than 25 of full professors are women and i think this is a consequence of many factors in noting the ones that have been mentioned by my fellow panelists and one i would add is i think we are coming to recognize the environment in which people work is very important part of how they feel about their job and there have been problems pointed out about work environments in particular there was a really terrific National ResearchCouncil Study on harassment in the workplace, gender harassment and i think it is quite clear from that study that this is really an issue that influences the retention of women in sciences and i think that is an additional factor. On a more personal note of how i got here, i think when i reflect on what enabled me to overcome barriers , i think for me the biggest influences were, first that i went to a Womens College as an undergraduate and it had an enormous influence on me. I left there feeling like i could do anything and i went to mit for phd in chemistry. There is a single female faculty member when i started. The feeling i got four years us that carried me through that entire time and really launch my career and i think for many years after leaving smith i fell back on the confidence and feeling i had that i could do whatever i wanted. That was a very powerful thing in addition to having great mentors that also was an important part of my success and many of those mentors were men, they were not women, but they played an Important Role in my career and supporting me and enabling me to get to the kind of position i am in now. I have two stories that i think would help illustrate. The value and im thinking about academia in particular of what is considered important to succeed needs to be changed and it will help all of us. It is not just change because it will help women. It will help everyone enjoy their work more, have a family life that is reasonable, have a personal life that allows you to be someone other than a scientist and, i think, that really needs to be done proactively. It cannot just be now we have more women it will happen. It really needs to be thought of as a process and what do we need to do to get there and the first story is one of my first days at Columbia University and i moved into my lab and i was very excited my first lab and the guy in the lot next door i came into his office to introduce myself and i noticed he had a picture of two children and i said are those your kids and the first thing he said are you one of those women who talks about their children all the time and i thought, you dont even know if i have a child. Until we realize that is a value for all of us, it will not change and the second part and the second story is i am fortunate in that i have a husband who is not a scientist who is in the Business World and he has been a mentor to me because he has heard me describe situations and said why didnt you do this and this and i said i would be too uncomfortable and that doesnt seem right and he said they will think you are weak, that you dont want it enough i think it is important that women dont become men. That we need to understand that some of the things we may do may appear that we are not as driven or as interactive or as aggressive or want it as badly and i think, i have this and i was recently at a conference and there were five men and two women who spoke. Every one of those men although i only knew one of them came up to me and introduced themselves and shook my hand for having them at the conference and the women never approached me. Never approached me and i dont i know what they are thinking she is busy and i dont want to bother her all the people around her. It was so stark to me and i said i know i have done that. We have to take responsibility as wanting it badly enough to say overcome those fears and actually self promote. I will start with a story as well and it hits in nicely with what she just shared maybe five or six years ago i was attending the National Council for behavioral Healthcare Annual conference and Hillary Clinton was being interviewed by a very strong woman leader of the organization and her closing question for her was tell us what have you observed is a woman leader over the 30 years of your career and she said, well, the take away for me has been every time i have promoted a woman she has said are you sure i am ready for it . Are you sure i can do this. Can i make the grade. Every time i have promoted a man he has said what took you so long. I cant say if thati thought it was exemplary of the attitude that i think many women have that i think whether or not it is accurate for are words i cant say for sure. I will also say about the National Health council i have some good news to share that we talk about the lack of women in leadership and certainly academia and the opportunity for copromotion, among organizations is a very different story. Of the voluntary Health Agency members thing on corporate consumer advocacy 59. 3 of those organizationsand 64 64. 7 have female cfo. I think the question is what do we learn from these organizations and kind of a survey across the room and i saw others who have been a mentor to me and many others in this room andso many of the women who are inspiring leaders in the patient and Research Community i think there are lessons we can learn and how do we extract those and get those thinking to our respective sectors . It is not easily following these women. It is difficult to add to what has been said. It all resonates for me. I come from an academic background and i would like to pick up on some of the nuances and that is that the decisions being made when we are not in the room that i a little bit into bios so as an example i am a career woman and i chose to have a family and that questions my commitment to my career and when i was in academia and the industry how these come up and they come up in ways that we are not there to defend ourselves or say i can be considered for that, i can travel, i can relocate. Those are questions that dont necessarily come to us so we are part of that decision making. There is another side to that and that we as women, i think you for getting this out there, we have to have this ownership and we talk a lot about Work Life Balance and we dont hear men talking about that, but they find it and they do it and they figured out and one of the things ive gotten a little more comfortable about is talking about choices i have made and i think of my own life as being one it is not career, personal, my Community Involvement is one life and all these pieces are words into me and the more we can get women to look at that in a more holistic and really think about how they find balance and not be talking about that balance issue that has suddenly become a gender issue or a women office issue and it isnt. We are all looking for balance is really one of those things that i still see even though we have moved the needle i still see it and i hear from my colleagues who are still there and i still see it in the industry. Anything that we can do as leaders we dont fall into that trap that we are not making decisions for women about what they can or cant do especially when we are considering them for leadership promotion. I have come to talk about that as worklife integration. It doesnt matter whether you are a man or a woman, it seems to be key. Several of you have tdot the second question, but as leaders in our own organization if you thought about one thing that we should do that would help prepare for the leadership positions and why dont we go in reverse order . I would say there are some things that when i reflect back some things i wish i had done better and and now when ice beeck men alike it is really about building a network and building it early and not thinking about building a network and it is done. You have to continue to search and build that network and i say this to my son every day. He just graduated from american university. The other piece is to find mentors and sponsors and they are not necessarily the same people. I have benefited tremendously from my sponsors and in particular in the industry. These are the people who when im not in the room are able to speak on my behalf and that they are the ones who have opened the doors for opportunity. I dont know that we think about sponsors. We talk about mentors. I will speak to it from two sides, one is my primary organization and i look at our daughter we dropped off for her freshman year in college and i will try. She has from day one really since eighth grade she has said im going to get a phd in biology and im going to study Wildlife Conservation and im going to figure this out and that is incredible and could i have said that at that age i think i wouldve been more to my earlier point can i do it in my worthy, can i get it and go and do all of these things and i think it is about, to your point the generation coming up now it doesnt necessarily differentiate i should think this way, i am a woman so we as those should really try to get ourselves out of that and if you fail at something because you tried and you took something out on the risk curve you have a far richer experience than if you had have just going for a little bit and gotten that success. I think about the number of times i have failed in my efforts to do something and having that double burden and will i get another chance and get over it because the only way you will really learn is to fail. It talks about i would like to expand on that because i was one of those girls who knew what i wanted to do the minute i took a biology class. I think we also can suffer and i dont think this is uniquely female from taking you can just put your head down, do the work, be good at it and people will reward you. You know if you had a nice family that has rewarded you you think that that will be continuing and i think we need to be proactive and i hope that young women dont believe that the problems are all solved just because the men may be more involved about that in the next generation. I dont think we need to be understood as wanting and wanting to do this work and finding those mentors and for me it was never comfortable to ask anybody for any help and i think i harmed myself in that career in doing that and i really encourage people to do that and be proactive about saying what you want and where you hope to go. All the things that have k