Bestselling author Janice Kaplan and her fascinating book the genius of women from overlooked to changing the world. She will be in conversation with the ceo of central ohio and this will be on eliminating evening. I want to thank our venue partner and our Wonderful Community partners, all these organizations that helped us get the word out. I will introduce janice in a moment but let me ask you to silence your phones or any other noisemakers you have with you tonight so that we can hear everything. I hope many of you have visited, we are right down the street a few blocks down and we invite any of you who have not been there before to browse. We have been open for three years and hosted 300 book related events. [applause] besides being an independent bookstore for central ohio our mission is to connect the community with talented authors. That is what we are doing tonight. You received the program, i want to give a shout out to three Upcoming Events can we produce eight events every month. Literary legend james mcbride, a modernday mark twain by the New York Times but his latest novel, his last novel won the National Book award for fiction and author of the 1995 classic the color of water, a black man as tribute to his wifes mother, one of the best memoirs of a generation, mcbride is back with a hilarious late 60s brooklyn featuring an eclectic group of individuals, on thursday, march 5th, tickets are through event bright and we feature a wonderful memoir on monday march 9th. And a look at the childhood and the unsung backbone of our country in conversation with united ways michael will go and will be held down the street at gramercy books. We are thrilled to feature Jerry Mitchell to hear about his great story bringing to justice, the crimes of the Civil Rights Era. The reporter reopens the Civil Rights Era and the historian, python jeffries, tickets are available. You will be hearing about women geniuses. Even in times of rethinking womens roles, we define genius almost exclusively through mail achievement. Most people mention Albert Einstein, Janice Kaplan decided to find out why. Why have you stored in her work of so many women been brushed aside. With her unique mix of memoir and inspiration janice made surprising discoveries about women geniuses now and throughout from music to robotics. The research is extensive, conducted interviews with neuroscientists, colleges and dozens of women geniuses at work in the world today. Insight will be at the stable program. Janice kaplan enjoyed wide success as a magazine editor, television producer, writer and journalist, former editorinchief of parade magazine, there she works with Major Political figures including barack obama and interviewed also stars like Barbra Streisand and matt damon. The executive producer of the Tv Guide Television group, and 30 Television Shows aired primetime. She began her career as an awardwinning producer on good morning america. And and Janice Kaplan is a woman genius. A woman genius as well. She is president and ceo of the womens fund of central ohio, fiercely committed to igniting social change. Deeply committed to this work having been involved with the womens fund as volunteer for many years while she works as a partner with jones and chief operating officer. And i will ask janice questions, and lining up to my right, to your left and bring the microphone and line up in missile to answer questions afterwords. And purchase one then, give a warm welcome to Janice Kaplan. [applause]. Do we need this one or that one. And and with gender norms as much as i do. You can imagine what a woman i am for having spent the time and vulnerability to write this book. And janice is coming up here. Today marks the passing of Katherine Johnson. 101 years old. For those who that name doesnt ring about, i hope it will from this day forward. She is the hidden figure at the center of the movie hidden figures. Help their own john glenn go into space. My hashtag for todays no more hidden figures. I think janice shares and that. Thank you for what she did to pay for all of us. When inspired you to put on the the topic of the fifteenth book. The particular impetus for this, a survey done by my friend who is a wellknown strategist who did a survey that 90 of americans think geniuses tend to be male. You dont get 90 of americans who say they like chocolate ice cream. Mike presented his findings to me. What do you think is going on . I have no idea. Mike paid for lunch and i spent the next two years trying to come up with it. They asked people if they could be a genius. 15 of men said probably. I might be a genius was how many said so . 0. There was not a single woman in the survey who said she might be a genius. 50 of men said they are geniuses are possibly delusional. That is okay because you have to think you can do something before you can do it. It is much better and i would like to see more women say maybe i am. 0 did, it is stunning. Im going to play a little game. I want somebody to be brave, name a woman genius right now. Madame curie. That is the number one answer. In the same survey, mike says when asked to name a female genius, the anyone could name is madame curie and there were a couple roslyn franklins thrown in there. Why not now these names . Why have we never heard of Katherine Johnson until somebody did a movie about her. Part of the excitement in doing this book was uncovering some of these people in the past, looking at people from the present. It is not profiled by any means, it is a narrative of women in womens issues but to discover these people and weave their stories through is very exciting. That is a great point. What i love about the book was i did expect i was going to read these wonderful stories and learn from them. Instead, you opened up the thought process over the various chapters about what is a genius. How the definite genius has been state here is the definition of genius. With creative power, natural ability, what do you think of that . I tried to change the definition of jesus genius and rethink genius. I started my research in london and spoke to a professor at cambridge named charles jones, you give a lot of good luncheons, and what that meant, took a couple steps of his chardonnay and an english accent, genius, that would be where extraordinary talents meet celebrity. This is a cambridge professor, has never seen reality tv. What he meant was getting your work noticed with you in a corporation or academia, a lot of people do great work. If it is not recognized, dont have an impact on the current generation of future generation and for too much of history up until this moment, women have had the extraordinary talents but havent had the notice, the recognition. 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. Geniuses asthink of a natural state, either yous ae or are not. As i did this research i realized this is just not true. Being a genius isnt like being elected as president with your name appears in your book forever. Who we consider a genius changes over time, and genius needs to be nurtured. Genius doesnt appear fullblown. I tell the story in the book of mozart and his sister. Of mozart as a great genius. He was a great genius. This is not a zerosum game. Yes what. His sister was a great genius also. In fact, 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 he was. When she had her early teens her father told her it was time to go home. It would be scandals or 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. S. Mozart got to go on. His talent was nurtured. He met composers, of the conductors. Yet people who helped him, the put them in great positions. If mozart got sent home what we considered him a genius . If beethoven never got to compose because it was scandalous for a mans work to be placed in public, we wouldnt consider him a genius either. Genius needs to be, the true point art that is not natural but it needs to be nurtured and recognized. We will be calling the Dictionary Company as well to chat with them. Quite a bit. You just said it. Its not a zerosum game. I think whatever we get into the organization where i work we spent a lot of time talking about implicit bias and gender norms and what does that mean. N 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 what we all expect or what we expect at the time. Times start to change and we expect some things. Lets talk about the brain. There have been people who said there is a difference you talk a lot in the book about people have written about the difference between women and men and some people made a lot of money thinking they can describe this and i think its lee elliott and she study this and what did she find about the difference between men and womens brains . She started out wanting to do the book about the difference between men and women because its always in the headlines. You hear over and over again, as i said to her, people always tend to you i treat my children exactly the same and the boys and girls clubs behave differently this must be hardwired. She buried her head when i said this. She said the only thing thats hardwired is the brainstem. Which is what controls our instincts. Everything else when the baby is born it struck me after i spoke to her that why is it we only use the phrase hardwired when we are talking about gender issues. If i told you by the time children are 18 months some of them speak german and some of them speak spanish and some speak italian so that must be proof its hardwired you would say janice, dont be ridiculous, theyre picking up from what their parents speak. So why do we understand that . We dont understand that liking pink or liking blue or liking barbie dolls versus liking legos why would we think thats hardwired. Its a lot harder to pick up the social cues to learn how to speak spanish or french or italian then it is to pick up social cues that tell you you lo