Evening ill say that right now. I want to thank our venue fantastic friends and their wonderful Committee Partners and all these organizations for helping us get the word out. I want to introduce janice and kelly and just minute that i want to ask you to silence your phones or any other noisemakers he might have with you tonight so we can just share everything. I hope many of you have visited gramercy books. We are right down the street. We invite any of you who have not been there before to come in we have been open for just over three years and we have hosted 300 events during that period. [applause] besides being a fullservice independent bookstore we intend to connect the community with authors launching important books and thats exactly what we are doing tonight. You receive a program when he came in and i want to quickly give a shoutout to three other events that are listed there. We have eight events every month per first two legend james ride. His latest novel won the National Book award for fiction. Hes also the author of the 1995 classic the color of water one of the best memoirs in a generation. Its a hilarious tapestry featuring an eclectic group of individuals that bear witness to the shooting. Thursday march 5 at 7 00 p. M. And tickets are through the event. We feature them memoirs by italys goldberg. Mm wired stealing grit. The people that she sees as the unsung bat ground backbone of our country. It will be held down the street at gramercy books. Finally i want to do a shoutout for march 30. The will feature Jerry Mitchell to hear his courageous story bringing to justice the klansmen responsible for the notorious crimes of the civil rights area priest going to share his memoir race against time the unsolved murder cases of the Civil Rights Era and helping conversation with Ohio State University historian. Onto tonight. Youll be hearing about women geniuses. Even in the time of rethinking womens roles we defined genius almost exclusively through male achievement. Most people mention Albert Einstein. Janice kaplan decided to find out why, why have the extraordinary works of some women are brushed aside. Her results as they were workable book the genius of women to return mix of memoirs and inspiration janice makes surprising discoveries about women geniuses now and throughout history from music to robotics. Her research is expensive shes done interviews with neuroscientist psychologists and dozens of women geniuses throughout the world today. Her insights will be at the center of tonights program. Janice kaplan has enjoyed wide successes of Magazine Editor and journalist. She works with Major Political figures including president raqqa obama she interviewed Barbara Streisand and max didnt shoot the Deputy Editor of Tv Guide Magazine and executive producer of Tv Guide Television group where she created more than 30 Television Shows that aired primetime on net maker networks which began her career as an awardwinning producer. She has authored or coauthored 14 books including New York Times bestseller. Janice kaplan is clearly able genius. Joining janice in conversation is Kelly Friedman herself a women geniuses while bushs presidency of the womens fund of central ohio Public Foundation is seriously committed to igniting social change toward gender equity. Kelly is deeply committed to this work and is volunteered for many years while she worked as a partner with chief operating operator is peloton nia. After the conversation to be able to ask jenna some questions and you can do so by lining up right here to my right in your left and we will bring the microphone up this ill so we could have questions afterward. After the question and answer you can purchase a book and get a signed copy. Please give a warm welcome to Janice Kaplan and kara burisma. [applause] do we need this one or this one cracks do we need this one at all . Here we go. Welcome janice. Thank you. Its nice to be here. [applause] is hard to imagine someone who thinks about the bias and gender norms as much as i do so you can imagine what a fan woman i am of this author for having spent the time and the vulnerability to write this book thank you again for being here tonight and i want to do justice to the one thing i think we all have to realize sitting here today i said to genesis we were coming up here, today marks the passing of Katharine Johnson at 101 years old. For those of you who that name doesnt ring a bell i hope it will from this day forward. She is the hidden figure that was at the center of the movie Hidden Figures and helped our own john glenn go into space. My for today has been no more hidden fingers and i think janice shares a map. So thank you kathryn for everything she did to pave the way for all of us. So Janice Hughes spent a lot of time thinking about people like kathryn johnson. What inspired you to take on the genius of women as a topic of this 15th book . Ive been thinking about womens issues for a long time in my career but the particular for this was a survey done by a friend of mine. He was a strategist and he did a survey where he found 90 of americans think geniuses tend to be men. You dont get 90 of americans say they like so we went out to lunch and mike presented his findings to me and he said what do you think is going on . I really had no idea. Mike paid for lunch and i spent the next two years trying to come up with an answer. There was another part of your but the said they asked people what it took to be a genius and 15 of men said i might be a genius. How many women said so . Zero. There was not a single woman in the survey who said she might be a genius. Lets admit 15 of men who said they were geniuses are possibly delusional. But thats okay because you have to think you can do something before you can actually do it. I actually think its much better and i would like to hear a lot more women say well, yeah abim. And its stunning. Im just going to play little game. I want someone to be very brave quickly. Name a woman genius right now. Madam curie. Isnt that the number one answer . In that same survey mike found when asked to name a female genius the only one anybody could name was madam curie and there were a couple of others thrown in there. Why is that . Why do we not know these names and why have we never heard of Katharine Johnson until somebody did a movie about her . Part of the excitement for me in doing this book was uncovering some of these people from the past and looking at the people from the president. Different geniuses and learn from them. Instead you opened up this thought process for me over the course of the various chapters about what is a genius . How has the definition of genius been shaped by society so share with us a little bit about, i said that the definition of genius is exceptional, intellectual, or Creative Power or other natural ability, would you think about that . I tried to change the definition of genius and rethink what we think of genius. I started my research in london and i spoke to a professor of cambridge and we also went out to lunch. He gave a lot of good lunches when your writer. I told him i was thinking about genius and what that meant. Heat took a couple sips of his chardonnay and a very pluming english accent, which i wont try to imitate, he said, genius, that would be where extraordinary talent meets celebrity. I was really taken aback by that. Meets celebrity . This is a cambridge professor this guy is whitehaired academic he did not mean celebrity in the kardashian sort of way. He has never seen reality tv, believe me, but as i thought about it i realized what he meant was getting your work noticed. Getting your work recognized. Whether you are in corporation academia science and the arts there are a lot of people who do great works but if its not noticed if its not recognized if nobody is paying attention to it, it cant have an impact on the current generation or future generations. I think for too much of history and even probably up until this very moment women have had half of the equation. Theyve had the extraordinary talent and they havent had the notice. The celebrity the recognition. We will talk about why people dont notice that in a minute. I know that there has been a little bit of that equation that has to do with the nurturer side of things, the encouragement. Talk a little bit about how i guess genius is born. We tend to think of genius as a natural state, either you are or you arent. As i did this research i realize its not true. Being genius is not like being class president murray name appears in the yearbook forever. Who we consider genius changes over time. Genius needs to be nurtured. Genius doesnt appear fullblown. I tell about the story in the book of mozart and mozart sister his sister was great genius also. When they were young she was equally a child prodigy and when they were young they toured together and some people said she was a better musician than she was. Once she hit her early teens her father told her it was time to go home it would be scandalous for her to continue being a musician in public and she had to go home and be married, which was the only proper thing for an early teenager of the time in the 1600s. Mozart got to go on his talent was nurtured he most met composers and conductors of people who helped him put them into great positions. If mozart had been sent home and only got to play his music in his living room would we consider him a genius . If you never got to compose because it was scandalous for a mans work to be played in public we wouldnt consider him a genius either. Genius needs to be the two points of genius are not that its natural but that it needs to be nurtured and it needs to be recognized. What we call in the Dictionary Company as well. [laughter] please. You just said it, its not a zerosum game. I think whenever we get into the organization i work we spent a lot of time talking about gender norms a lot of times the first thing people want to say to us is, i hate men, i hate men. People, why are there not more men in this room because its intimidating we are going to be upset with them . I think what we all realize is that this biased, this is a generations old problem. This started with the beginning of time you cited to an early socrates time that was just as talented as everyone else. So lets talk a little bit about implicit bias which we know i think we all have to be vulnerable in the beginning to say we all have about certain things but there is something a way about the way that biases have affected a womans ability to be a genius. As he looked at that when did you become aware of the bias issue . Was it something you are already thinking about before you wrote the book or something you thought even more deeply about what you got into it . First to say what you are saying about the angry man, its not an angry book. My husband assures you, men come you can read this book you will not get upset by it. I think a lot of women who know about womens issues are surprised when they read the book because it brings out a lot of things they hadnt expected before. Implicit bias is really important. Another way i started to think of it is as confirmation bias. Psychologists refer to confirmation bias to say that when you have an idea about something when you have a belief when there is something you already think, its really hard to change that idea. I wont give a political example, i will give an example about cars. If you just bought a new car because you think its the very best car out there, once you get it you start looking for all the articles and advertisements and the friends who bought the same car to tell you its the best car. If somebody tells you its not a good car, you are pretty sure they are wrong and you dont pay too much attention to them. We do the same thing with men and women. We have our ideas about what they are so the new stereotype, which i think is as damaging as the old one, is that women are collegial and cooperative, and men are leaders. Is that true . Of course its not true. We all know women who are leaders and women who are collegial and women who are loners and men who are exactly the same. Because that becomes a belief when you see a woman whos collegial or you see a man who is a leader even when you see it in yourself you immediately start to notice that when you discard all the others. It becomes a selffulfilling prophecy what we expect to see becomes what we do become in many ways. I noted when you said that in the book that women do have learned behaviors to succeed in many ways i dont know many of us a better choice but to be legal. When we are not thats really a problem. Of course its a learned behavior. Shirley tolman, the former president of princeton, a microbiologist, told me that when she was younger and a scientist, she used to close her eyes and tried to imagine a scientist and when she was able to picture a man as often as she could picture a woman she knew she was okay. I told that story to another woman scientist who was interviewing later and she said thats amazing because when i close my eyes i cant even picture myself. I think thats what happens i think the external messages become very deeply embedded in terms of your question also about women being collegial, i think women have always had to do the great work around, if youre not in power and somebody else is in power and control your life, you got to figure out how to make it work. Sometimes that does mean by playing by somebody elses rules and i dont think thats a bad thing. I think women throughout history have done it, they figured out ways around obstacles and you got to do that. I dont have a problem with that. To speak about another genius you cover in your book that many of us are so culturally now a piece of our lives, ruth Bader Ginsburg, rgb, a lot of people, i think you use her as an example in the book as someone who has allowed herself in some ways to become, you said the carly goat because abthe qaeda league guilt because she knows in a way that she is getting what she needs by becoming endearing to people and her story becoming what it is about a man who wanted to tend to his mother the idea of caretaking the first case had to do with men not women. Can you talk a little bit about her and how she participates . Ruth Bader Ginsburg did have to do the great work around also. While she was at harvard law school, one of the very few women in the class her husband was also there. She was applying and she was asked why she wanted to go to law school. Im sure she wanted to throw up when she said that because of course its not why she wanted to go to law school so she could understand what her husband was doing she wanted to be a lawyer. And she wanted to become Supreme Court justice. She knew thats what she needed to say. She knew thats what she needed to say to get into law school. If youre able to do Something Like that and it leads to your being the powerful person you are, i think you have to recognize the times. Its interesting to see i think the ways we can think about biased and how people interact on a daily basis but theres the unwritten ways i think things that saturate our lives. You point out at one point in the book some examples, i think at the very beginning, that Something Like wikipedia only has like 15 percent of it focuses on women or in the New York Times obituaries i think it was Something Like 10 of them have ever been about women. These are things that are embedded in our culture as the marker by which we judge whats important and i dont think anyone thinks that none of us are realizing that by reading New York Times obituaries we are reinforcing the bias that women are an important but thats exactly what it does, doesnt it . Absolutely. The times to the credit the New York Times started something a couple years ago called overlooked. Which is a column of all the people who should have had obituaries in the times and didnt. They started with i think five women to launch this column and when you look at those women who were there you are stunned. It was charlotte brontc who wrote jane eyre and sylvia plass, famous for the bell jar. Dorothy elaine who was a great photographer. You go, what were they thinking . How was it that charlotte brontc died with this fabulously successful book even at the time nobody thought she deserved an obituary at the times. It was simply because theres nothing else to say shes a woman and so she just wasnt seen. They wouldnt even think of it. There was also a story early in the book about a woman who won the nobel prize a couple years ago in chemistry and thats kind of a big deal when you win the nobel prize. You might have wanted to look her up and get more information on her but she didnt have a Wikipedia Page. It wasnt because she had somebody had submitted one for her but the gatekeepers at wikipedia who for various reasons tend to be mostly men just ignored her and headed thought this could possibly be important. She won the nobel prize and got a Wikipedia Page. That is a very high bar for a woman. To get a Wikipedia Page when you win the nobel prize. If you think who else is on wikipedia. Its run by a woman. It is. She wrote beautifully about the incident and explained and she said, this is not meant to be a criticism of wikipedia, i love wikipedia. She pointed out that wikipedia is not setting the rules its representing what society thinks is important. Sometimes we want to say wikipedia is causing this problem when really i think what she said is its a reflection of whats in all of us. I think thats the easy game we play. Lets put wikipedia out of business. Really thats not gonna solve everything because everyone thinks the same after its gone. Its absolutely good point these are reflections. In the times or wikipedia or whatever else is reflecting what we all think and