How do you overcome hesitation to provide a colleague with feedback when it's more constructive in nature, and you do not have the strongest lines of communication with them?

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares to give constructive feedback without stepping toes, in today’s Mentor Moment.

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Dee Poku founded the WIE Suite to bring together ambitious women leaders and creators who work to drive action for themselves and for each other. In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, she sits down to discuss community building and why she encourages women to be more transactional.

The WIE Suite

Dee first recognized the need for an organization like the WIE Suite many years ago. “There are so many wonderful women's conferences, but as someone who cares so deeply about women's advancement, what I felt was missing was that sort of true deal making that would really sort of catapult us to success” she says. “When I look at someone like my husband, within five minutes of meeting someone, they've exchanged business cards and they found a deal to do. And I think that to broadly generalize with women, we’re relationship builders, it takes us a little bit longer.”

She realized that instead of large, anonymous conferences, women would benefit from more intimate, curated spaces. She started the WIE Suite as a sort of “informational exchange.” When members join, they fill out a form about their goals, and they get placed in a cohort that meets every four to five weeks. “We're very thoughtful about how we put women together,” she says. “There are these sort of invisible lines in the sand that we [women] draw around conversations about business and money. And I just wanted to get rid of all of that and create a space where women have permission to ask.”

She describes the ethos of the WIE Suite as providing a space where women can be more actionable and transactional in their relationships. “It's a lot of referrals, introductions, check writing,” she notes. “It's very, very transactional in that way. And I feel like people just get truly tangible results. It's basically like having your own personal advisory board.”

Lessons from the entertainment industry

Dee didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur or to create spaces for women to grow. As a math major in college, she was on the hunt for a way to express her artistic side. She began her career in marketing and soon worked her way up in the entertainment business, becoming Director of International Marketing for a large film company.

In that intense landscape, Dee says she learned about intentionality and community building. Today, whenever she has an idea, she thinks first about the people she can reach out to for help bringing her idea to fruition. “And so when we hosted those early conferences, we were very successful at getting some really huge names,” she tells Sam. “And it was very much the same strategy of thinking about who comes first and then who follows.”

Dee describes herself as a big believer in intentional community, by which she means being thoughtful and intentional about who's in her life. “I think that so many people just kind of stumble around, and it's really about who just happens to be [there],” she says. “I think that the most successful people are really intentional about how they build their careers and who can sort of support that.”

Community building practice and advice

One way that Dee has put her intentions into action was creating an initiative called 2 Million Mentor Minutes during the pandemic, which lets women (WIE members and nonmembers alike) donate time to mentor other women, especially those forced to leave the workforce during the pandemic. She notes the pandemic impacted everybody but especially women—and specifically Black and Brown women. “Everybody wanted to do something,” she recalls. “We all felt so helpless. Just being able to just post to your platform or send a note to your network to say, Hey, I have 60 minutes to give or 120 minutes to give, take advantage. I think was just a simple, effective idea.”

Dee advises women just starting out in their careers to be intentional from the beginning about building their community. “I think it starts early. So often when we are thinking about building relationships, we're looking sort of ahead, like who is important or like who can bring value,” she says. “It's really about building that community around you, being thoughtful and intentional about having good people around you, people who build you up and make you the best version of you, people who you share ideas and who inspire you.”

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More than 30 years after she became a national figure during the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings, Anita Hill is now one the nation’s fiercest activists for the eradication of gender-based violence. In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, Anita talks with Natalie Williams, General Counsel for card services at JPMorgan Chase & Co., for a special Women’s History Month event. The two discuss Anita’s activism journey and her new book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.

Answering a call

Anita tells Natalie that folding activism into her ongoing work as a lawyer, professor, and author was a natural choice. She describes it as a decision to not ignore the reality she was faced with. After the hearings ended and Thomas was confirmed despite Anita’s accusations of sexual harassment, she received many thousands of letters of support. She says she felt a sense of responsibility to not let those supporters down.

Growing up black in the 1950s and 1960s with 10 older siblings who attended segregated schools, Anita says she also keenly appreciated that she benefitted from the civil rights movement and had the opportunity to go to law school. “It was my responsibility, but also it was something that I had the opportunity [and] the chance to do, to make a difference in the world that people had already changed for me,” she tells Natalie. 

Addressing the structural institution of gender violence

Once she made the decision to lean into her role as a voice against gender-based violence, Anita says she found support from her friends, her family, her students, and complete strangers. Her work often focuses on what she calls “mini manifestations of gender violence”, and the many ways that our institutions, including schools and workplaces, enable that violence. She describes how, from a young age, girls and women are told that small acts of harassment or violence are not important, and that they should be able to brush them off.

“We've been given stories that tell us that either the problem isn't as big as people think it is, or they tell us that, oh, it's the victim's fault, or they tell us that, you know, it's not so bad,” she says.  “And those have been part of our thinking for all of our lives.” Anita says this type of minimizing, or saying the problem isn’t as big as some people make it out to be, was part of the resistance to her testimony in 1991.

And although resistance and minimizing starts as early as grade school, it continues into universities and workplaces. One of the reasons that sexual harassment continues to be widespread despite more media attention in recent years is because of the way institutions and workplaces operate, she says. They tend to develop policies and procedures focused on compliance rather than culture, and until the culture of minimizing harassment is changed, gender violence will continue to grow. Anita calls it institutional denial that begins with leadership. “And what I say in the book is that if it's going to change, the leadership attitude has to be changed and it has to be intentional and vocal,” she tells Natalie.

Support and hope for the future

In recent years, Anita has focused on combating gender violence in the entertainment industry, leading the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace. She describes how that experience has changed some of her thinking on how to best combat gender violence. Where she had once been focused on the structural impediments of protecting people, she came to see that in Hollywood and the largely unregulated entertainment industry, it’s the informal structures that perpetuate violence. 

“In Hollywood, you're not just talking about one individual in one workplace, you're usually talking about multiple workplaces,” she says. “And when it comes to serial abuse, you have people moving around from location to location and doing the same bad deeds, and you don’t have any way of tracking it. And we’re developing a platform to identify who those people are, by allowing people to come in and be empowered to file complaints.”

Anita and Natalie discuss other recent events that Anita says give her hope for the future, including the Supreme court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson and President Biden’s support for strengthening the Violence Against Women Act. In terms of looking forward, Anita says she draws big inspiration from her students: “It is a blessing to be a teacher because every day I get to look at the possibility for the future. And so I don’t lose hope because I’m seeing my students and what they can do and what they want to do and how they see the world.”

To hear more from Anita Hill, please listen to her podcast, Getting Even with Anita Hill, found wherever you get your podcasts.

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What traits, professional qualities, et cetera, should I develop to be ready for the new market realities in ever-changing landscape?

In this Mentor Moment, Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares how being a lifelong learner can help you to excel in an ever-evolving workforce.

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As head of specialized industries at middle market banking at J.P. Morgan, Melissa Smith is focused on helping female and diverse founders grow and scale over time. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss the innovation economy, her passion for supporting women in business, and how her early life as a ballerina prepared her for a banking career.

From ballerina to banker

Melissa says she developed early skills in discipline, commitment, and focus from her classical ballet training. She began studying ballet at age 4, and by the seventh grade, her mother was driving her 120 miles a day to train in Washington D.C. Between her determination, her family’s support, and the willingness of teachers to re-arrange her high school schedule so she could finish classes by noon, Melissa ended up graduating high school a year early and starting a professional ballet career. 

By her early 20s, Melissa made the decision to give up dancing in order to go to college full time, eventually earning her master’s in public policy from the University of Chicago. Straight out of that program, she joined JPMorgan Chase in public finance. “For me, the public finance role was a great way to leverage the quantitative skills I had acquired at school with my interest in the public sector,” she tells Sam.

From the associate program, Melissa moved to the debt capital markets team, where she got to experience the fast-paced trading floor. “I just loved the pace and the energy level and the phones ringing all the time and the noise,” she recalls. She also loved the opportunity to be up close with senior leaders on the trading floor, learning by observing everything from how to lead effectively to how to manage complicated client needs.

Focus on the innovation economy

After 16 years on the Investment Banking side of the firm, Melissa switched to the Commercial Banking side where she now leads the industry coverage teams within the Middle Market Banking business. Today, she’s focused on building an ecosystem around the innovation economy.

Melissa describes the innovation economy as high growth, disruptive companies across a variety of industries—primarily technology, consumer retail, and healthcare payments. She shares examples of how innovative companies have changed how we live and work in recent years: online fitness, food delivery, and streaming services.

Of particular interest to Melissa is supporting the gender and racial diversity of those founders, their employees, and their boards. She notes that while progress has been made, female and diverse founders continue to receive a much smaller percentage of venture dollars than companies founded by men. One reason for that, she says, is that female founders often don’t have access to the same networks for seeking funding that their male counterparts do. Another is that often their companies have products targeted to diverse markets, making it harder to capture the attention of mainstream funders. Both of these are issues that Melissa’s team aims to help female founders navigate.

Another area of focus for Melissa and her team is increasing female representation on boards. “Internal appointments on VC backed boards are actually part of the reason boards have become more diverse,” she notes.

Empowering other women: coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring

Melissa tells Sam that some of the most inspiring work she’s done is coaching women and their businesses. She also discusses her own experiences and what she’s gained from mentors and sponsors. She says she’s gained the most from mentors who are honest with their feedback and help women process the constructive feedback they get from other sources, such as performance reviews.

Melissa believes that sponsorships are invaluable to women. She defines a sponsor as someone “helping to make sure you have the visibility and network internally that you need to get a promotion [etc.].” She says that she was helped the most by a sponsor who was more prescriptive and helped her develop a list of people to meet with each month.

Today, she continues to devote energy to helping other women. “The thing that I very much learned in watching these more senior women who were mentors or sponsors was what a difference it made, and the passion that they had around it,” she tells Sam. “And I consider that so much a part of my day job. And it's really one of the most rewarding things that any of us can do – to help somebody else, give back and help them advance their career.”

How do you develop more relationships with sponsors? I want to prepare for a promotion in the next two years and would love any guidance.

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, discusses what it takes to develop sponsorships to help boost your career, in today’s Mentorship Moment.

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* You can access Sam’s recent article on sponsorship here

Can artificial intelligence and deep learning improve both cosmetic and medical skincare? Absolutely, say two women immersed in the effort. Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein learns more as she sits down with Eleanor Jones, CEO and Founder of Skintelligent, and Dr. Meenal Kheterpal, dermatologist and scientific advisor for the company. Sam, Eleanor, and Dr. Kheterpal discuss their background and motivations, how they believe AI will drive innovation in skincare, and how new technology must address equitable health outcomes for all.

Uniting an interest in skincare, a business background, and medical expertise

Skintelligent, the skincare company that Eleanor founded in 2019, aims to be the global leader in developing intelligent AI skin health solutions. Meeting that goal requires expertise in business, dermatology, and deep learning. As a veteran of the corporate world (she spent 10 years with the Coca-Cola Corporation), Eleanor brough plenty of business smarts to her company. She also brought a deep interest in skincare dating from her struggles with teenage acne.

As a dermatologist, Dr. Kheterpal had long been fascinated with deep learning and AI, and its implications for skin cancer diagnosis and other medical uses. Eleanor describes “chasing” Dr. Kheterpal when she was starting Skintelligent. And Dr. Kheterpal recalls feeling that the pair were a match made in heaven. “She just had this clear vision, and I felt we agreed on so many different levels as far as the potential for AI, and some of the work that she had already done was just so impressive,” she says of Eleanor. “I was so impressed with Eleanor's passion, direction, and purpose.”

Innovations in both cosmetic and medical skincare

Eleanor and Dr. Kheterpal agree that AI has the capacity to impact skincare in both the retail world and the healthcare world. Eleanor explains that the retail world of beauty and skincare is easier because, unlike healthcare, it’s an unregulated market. Machine learning and AI can be used to give consumers information about their skin and offer interactive product recommendations. “I think within a retail space in five years [we] will be walking down the aisles of Target, Walmart, and there’ll be a kiosk with a camera that allows you to take your skin and then port you over to the most suited product recommendations within that space,” she predicts.

As for medical skincare, the potential is great, but so are the hurdles. Eleanor and Dr. Kheterpal agree that AI can play a huge role in assisting dermatologists by automating some of the more routine tasks they now perform. One big potential is in telehealth, giving patients the ability to get diagnosed for skin conditions remotely. “I think we see ourselves as a part of an omnichannel healthcare plan, where we could potentially play triage,” Eleanor explains.

Technology as equalizer

An aspect that Eleanor and Dr. Kheterpal are particularly passionate about is the potential for reducing inequities in healthcare. One application of that is in the ability for rural and other underserved communities to access dermatology care. “There are healthcare deserts and flyover regions that are very, very underserved medically,” Eleanor says. “So you can think about a teenager in rural Tennessee, where there's no dermatologists, dealing with severe acne. The idea of having either a telehealth solution or potentially AI offers an access point in a service that was not previously available to them.”

Another area of great potential is in the area of racial equality. Currently, much dermatology research is based on European skin tone. “So a lot of our data that we use to train [AI] models is largely not equal,” Dr. Kheterpal explains. “There is a dearth of images with patients of skin of color, or various ethnicities. And this is where I have to give Eleanor a lot of the credit. She has been able to source an incredible amount of data where we are able to source images that we use to train a lot of the models in-house.”

Both women agree that the future of Skintelligent, and of AI in skincare, is bright. AI is already changing the way women buy beauty and skincare products. And with legislative changes underway in terms of healthcare regulation—especially regarding state line issues—they believe AI will only come to play a bigger role in healthcare. “My dream in the next five years is if you are a North Carolina resident, and you have a lesion of concern, you should be able to get a diagnosis from any remote corner of North Carolina, with the help of virtual care and the models that we are focusing on building,” Dr. Kheterpal says.

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**Disclaimer: This podcast may contain general information about medical tests and treatments. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. JPMorgan Chase is not responsible for views expressed other than our own.

"I found a new role that I'm very interested in, but I'm nervous to tell my manager I'm interested in mobility. How should I handle tough conversations with my manager?

In today’s mentorship moment, host Sam Saperstein gives advice on how to talk with your manager about your career roadmap.

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Sherrell Dorsey has long been fascinated by the tech innovations coming out of Black and Brown communities across the United States. In this episode of Women on the Move, the founder and CEO of The Plug—a subscription-based digital news platform covering the Black innovation economy—sits down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss her background in marketing and technology, her journey with The Plug, and her new book.

Early tech immersion

Sherrell tells Sam that it was her technophile grandfather who first nurtured her love for technology by insisting that she and her sister spend an hour a day on Mavis Beacon typing courses. That early foray into tech, she says, paved the way for her to take part in a program called the Technology Access Foundation, which taught kids of color in the inner city about technology, computers, and programming languages—and helped prepare Sherrell for high-school internships at Microsoft.

Sherrell says she loved her experiences at Microsoft, learning about building tech products and also realizing she could have a place at the tech table. But after high school, with her family expecting she’d go to college for computer science, she tacked in a different direction and studied fashion merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “I got to study the business of marketing within the fashion world, a multi-billion-dollar industry, and [one that] really encompasses so much technology from textile selection and forecasting to the building of an e-commerce business and brand.”

Taking those marketing skills with her, Sherrell worked at both Uber and Google Fiber. But while she loved her day jobs, she found herself more and more drawn to understanding the tech world from the vantage point of Black and Brown communities. “I would keep up on industry literature and read about these great profiles of, you know, the Gates’ and the Musks and the Zuckerbergs,” she tells Sam. “But I did not see the folks that I was interacting with and engaging with on a daily basis profiled or quoted. And the journalism to me just felt very one-sided. It did not identify genius as looking like, sounding like, feeling like, or coming from communities that looked like mine, but those were the people that I was inspired by.”

Transition to journalist and author

Sherrell remembers getting up early before heading to her job at Uber or Google Fiber and curating articles about “folks who I find really fascinating.” She was soon writing about Black and Brown tech innovations and submitting stories to publications like Fast Company. “And just trying to show the robustness of communities of innovation coming up with really cool ideas to solve specific challenges that they were facing that were being left out of this mainstream sort of noise,” she says. “Like sure robots are space. [But] here's a guy who's creating an app to exchange vegetables and fruits with neighbors on a more human level.”

Soon The Plug was born—with a $10 domain registration and a free MailChimp account. Sherrell built up subscribers one at a time based on her solid reputation as the tech journalist who covered Black and Brown start-ups. “It's just about being consistent,” she tells Sam. “It's about serving my audience well, and beyond that, it was every subscriber truly earned through this sense of trust and through this sense of representative storytelling, and care and adoration, and sometimes, you know, harsh honesty.” Sometimes, she shares, she had to be the one to say, “Hey, maybe this company isn't as exciting as I thought it was gonna be.” That kind of honestly, she says, helped solidify her reputation and that of The Plug.

Sherrell’s most recent venture is her new book, Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us, just published in January 2022. She describes it as a love letter to her grandfather. Drawing on his experience of moving from Birmingham, Alabama, to Detroit and finally to Seattle where “there weren’t a lot of folks who looked like him,” Sherrell wanted to illustrate her own experience along with Seattle’s changes, and how that was replicated across the country in a way that left many communities behind.

As far as the future, Sherrell says she’s excited to have The Plug become “the intelligent source for an inclusive business future.”

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Rise Above the Story founder and author Karena Kilcoyne experienced more tumultuousness in her childhood and early adulthood than most experience in a lifetime. But rather than get trapped by her story, she forged a path to rise above it. Here she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss the progression of her career from criminal defense lawyer to author and how she's using her own experiences to help others reframe their personal narratives.

A tumultuous beginning

Karena describes the challenges of her early years with clarity: a childhood spent finding solace in books, her father convicted of mail fraud and sent to a federal penitentiary when she was 12, and teen years spent taking care of younger siblings as her mother struggled with debilitating depression and anxiety. “I put myself through school with scholarships and working,” she says, “and I put myself through college and law school. I ended up practicing law for many years, and these days I say that I am a recovering lawyer because I have stopped practicing law and I am focused back on my childhood dream, which was writing books.”

Karena tells Sam that she originally chose to go into law partly because she was so familiar with the world of criminal law from her father’s experience, and partly because she needed a stable career at age 24 when her mother died and she adopted her nine-year-old brother. “And there was also this call in me that I wanted to help other families that were going through what I went through,” she explains. She started as a criminal defense lawyer and later switched gears to take on the challenging role of in-house council for a $6 billion publicly traded company.

Changing her narrative

Although she found success as a lawyer, Karena tells Sam that she found herself searching for fulfilment. She was successful—but she still had that childhood dream of being a writer, or a storyteller of some sort.

Making the shift form lawyer to writer was scary, Karena recalls, but she took the plunge. To ease into it and begin her learning curve, she started a lifestyle blog. “I figured just some way to get me writing multiple times a week and to make me feel more comfortable with it,” she tells Sam. The blog, Carousing.com, was flirty and fun, and, she says, definitely ignited her passions.

“But what was really interesting was that when I would write deeper, when I would get vulnerable and I would share some of these life stories, I would get such a great response from that,” she recalls. “My whole life, I had kind of shunned where I came from and shunned who I was, and I was ashamed of that. I started to really excavate who I was and what I was willing to show people, and it got really interesting as I started to write more of that.”

Just as she was exploring this new passion, Karena says, her beloved dog was diagnosed with cancer, and she spent two months nursing him before his death—coincidentally, the same two calendar months she had spent 20 years earlier caring for her mother as she died of cancer. After a “watershed of grief” caused her to reprocess much of her earlier trauma, she ended up writing a memoir.

It was an empowering experience. “I suddenly started to realize that if I could do what I did and rise above that story, there are so many people out there that could benefit from that,” she explains. It was the beginning of her journey with Rise Above the Story.

Rising above the story

“Rising above the story is understanding and acknowledging your story and then figuring out how you're going to change that story, rewrite that story so that you can rise above it and get out of those limitations,” Karena says. Today she spreads the word via her website, writings, podcasts, videos, and a special Rise Above The Story Acknowledgment Guide.

Karena tells Sam that she has big plans for 2022. “The biggest thing, my biggest dream of all is that I have this Rise Above the Story book written, Making My Dream a Reality, and I'm really, really proud of the book, the brand, the site,” she shares. She’s also focused on continuing to spread her message of empowerment through her social platforms, her website, and her newsletters.

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I've worked very hard to advance in my career over the last several years, but now it's time to advance in my personal life by starting a family. What advice can you give to new or aspiring parents on how to confidently transition to this phase of life while maintaining their careers?

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares advice on how to navigate your career and start a family, in today’s Mentorship Moment.

Transcript here.

In this final episode of the Women On The Move Podcast for 2021, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Megan Cunningham, CEO of Magnet Media, the podcast’s production partner. They talk about Megan's journey as a female founder, the impact of COVID-19 on the business, and the power of mentorship, all while discussing some of the wonderful lessons that WOTM guests have shared all year.

Telling stories that matter

Megan took an unconventional path to becoming a female founder and CEO: She started out producing “guerilla activist films” in college, later worked in a corporate environment making films that were broadcast on PBS and HBO. From the beginning, she says, she realized that she wanted to focus her career on telling stories that matter, but she quickly found that the corporate environment wasn’t a fit for her or her personality.

It was a lunch with a respected mentor that helped her see what was unique about herself. She recalls him saying, "Megan, you're really smart, and hardworking, and creative. However, you're in an environment where everyone is those things. Everyone is smart, everyone is hard working, everyone is creative, and the thing that really makes you unique is that you're good at computers." As a liberal arts major with a desire for storytelling, Megan was taken aback at first.

“But I took a cue from that conversation and left the production world temporarily to join [a start-up] as employee number two,” she recalls. After positioning that start-up for success, Megan applied that experience to founding Magnet Media, a company dedicated to using storytelling and data together to drive business results. As she tells Sam, “I think Magnet's aspiration is to really look at the storytelling qualities, the craftsmanship that is put into that type of storytelling, and apply that to brand storytelling because in my view, that's where everything's headed.”

Pandemic impacts

Sam and Megan also discuss the challenges brought about by the pandemic. As a business leader, Megan indicated that navigating the pandemic was easily one of the hardest challenges of her career. “And that's saying a lot, right?” she notes. “I've been in a scenario where we had to evacuate our offices at 9/11. I've been in a scenario where people were freezing their payments to us during the mortgage crisis. However, this was by far and away the most difficult part because it affected everyone personally, and it affected everyone's family and their friends, their loved ones.”

Early on in the pandemic, Megan says she focused on figuring out how Magnet could leverage their best work in this new environment. “And most importantly, starting with our people, how do we take care of our people and set them up for success?” she recalls.

At the same time, Megan tells Sam, she was cognizant that some of the worst impacts of the pandemic were being felt by women. Sam and Megan discuss many of these themes that were highlighted by other 2021 Women on the Move guests such as Katica Roy, Fatima Goss Graves, and Rebecca Minkoff. “A lot's been written on the she-cession, so to speak, of 2020, and how deeply disturbing it is that women have been inordinately affected and impacted by this period, by the pandemic, and continue to be,” Megan says. “And I think as leaders, it's upon all of us to look in the mirror and see what we can be doing to better support the women on our team, to recruit more women, to create policies that are favorable to attracting female candidates, and to really support them as the company grows.”

The power of mentorship

One consistent theme throughout Megan’s career has been mentoring other women. As someone who benefitted from amazing mentors in her own career, Megan’s been deliberate about giving back and supporting other women. She mentions three broad groups she focuses on helping: female filmmakers, female founders, and women at all levels within Magnet.

Megan describes her belief in the need for improving gender balance throughout media and other industries. At Magnet, she says they’ve only gotten sharper about metrics and measurement over the years, doubling down on tracking how many female crew members, how many people of color, how many people with diverse abilities are represented on the team.

Megan says she recognized that the pandemic had impeded her and others’ ability to be good mentors. “So that's something that I'm taking note of as we start to reopen and do more in terms of face-to-face meetups [and virtually],” she says. “As we think through the future, really committing to intentionally mentoring and making time for women on my team is something that is my 2022 commitment.”

Personal frustrations with the healthcare system led a Harvard Business School grad to found an at-home diagnostic firm nearly seven years ago. Then along came COVID, highlighting the need for improved access to low-cost home testing, and Julia Cheek, founder and CEO of Everly Health, rose to the challenge. Julia sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about the origins of Everly Health, its remarkable role in the pandemic response, and Julia’s hopes for the future of women’s health.

Finding the fit she could be passionate about

Julia was in her late 20s and working a corporate job when the idea for Everly Health crystallized. After a series of unexplained health symptoms led her through an array of medical tests and doctor visits, not to mention the copays and deductibles that come with them, she was left frustrated and discouraged by the overall experience. “I ended up paying, I think, over a couple thousand dollars out of pocket for this assortment of tests, none of which were really brought together to tell a story about my health,” she says.

It was an a-ha moment for a would-be founder in search of a great idea. “I knew that there were many, many women who face similar challenges in the healthcare system like me,” she tells Sam. “I knew there were ways we could innovate on it using existing proven methods and science.”

Julia also knew she wanted to found a company. “I had really been working on different business plans, brainstorming with friends on co-founding different companies, advising companies for free in my weekend time for the four or five years prior,” she recalls. She also tells Sam that she knew that this company would most likely fail and that it would be years, if not decades, of work. That meant it had to be something that she was driven and compelled enough by to be passionate about. “Making a difference in the world would make that likely failure worth it,” she says.

Riding the pandemic wave

When Julia, with a few early backers and advisors, launched Everly Health (then Everlywell) in 2014, she aimed to address the lack of access to easy, affordable, results-oriented lab testing in America. “I think it's important to recognize how radical this concept was just even five years prior to COVID-19,” she notes. Along with providing the convenience of at-home testing, Everly well was also committed to providing transparency in pricing, with a goal that most tests would be priced at less than a typical co-pay.

The idea was transformative to many early clients. “You could have physicians involved throughout the process, but you didn't actually have to go physically see them,” Julia tells Sam. “They could review your data, your health history, and your lab records and determine if you should get that test and then what your results would mean from that. And you could do this on your own time and at a price point that was transparent with you.”

Everlywell took off in its first few years. A November 2017 appearance by Julia on Shark Tank only served to expedite that growth. And when COVID hit, the company was poised to take on the challenge of helping the U.S. healthcare system ramp up at-home testing capacity. “I think it's such an important lesson that small, nimble companies can play such an important role in moments of crisis, because we were actually able to move so quickly,” she says.

In fact, Everly Health was the first company authorized by the FDA for an umbrella COVID-19 self-collection test. That meant that any lab in the country could use their data to become authorized, or to run testing using a kit from Everly Health. That huge success only led to more growth for the company. “In the early days (of COVID), we really shepherded all our resources towards scaling COVID, but very quickly, behavior shifted more broadly around home testing,” she tells Julia.  “And so we began experiencing a significant growth in all areas of our business, which then meant we had to be able to also scale at that capacity across all facets.”

Julia also shares her enthusiasm and optimism for continuing to innovate and provide more convenient, more targeted, and more transparent healthcare to the public—especially, she says, to women, who have long been sidelined in healthcare. “We envision that people will be able to do hundreds of tests from the home over the next several years,” she says. “And we want to be a big part in helping to commercialize that for Americans.”

Disclaimer: This podcast may contain general information about medical tests and treatments. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. JPMorgan Chase is not responsible for views expressed other than our own.

In the very best mentoring partnerships, both mentee and mentor learn and grow from each other—and that’s exactly what happened when Olivia McGuire, a J.P. Morgan portfolio manager, was matched up with Louise Winter, a funeral service founder, through the firm’s Founders Forward mentoring program. Here, Olivia and Louise sit down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss their careers and what they each gained from one another.

Forging a career in finance

Olivia has spent her entire career of twenty-plus years at JPMorgan Chase, starting in the firm’s technology graduate recruitment program after earning her master’s degree. Five years later, she moved to a role in asset management as a portfolio manager. Having applied for a similar role and not been the first choice a few months earlier, she got the call when a new one opened up on the same team. “And I'm still in the same team today working as a money market fund portfolio manager,” she says. She shares that she wasn’t sure she had the requirements for the first job, but she applied anyway since the position description said no experience required. The moral of her story? Take the chance and apply for the roles you want.

Olivia says she’s been excited and motivated by her career—and that she was lucky enough to have strong female role models early on. “But I think that as someone who has a couple of decades in their career, I think it's really important to give back and be a role model to those who come behind,” she explains. “It's trying to combat that imposter syndrome and the perhaps perceived barriers that you've put in front of you from going after what you want. And having someone as a mentor is really important in helping people to achieve the things that they want to do but may be too reluctant or scared to grasp and go after.”

Olivia knew the Founders Forward program would be a good place for her to give back and help other women—and yet she was also intimidated. “I have never run my own business,” she recalls. “What could I possibly tell a very brave and successful entrepreneur who started up their own company? And some of the companies that were described, I thought, wow, that's so impressive. They don't really need me as their mentor. So it took me a little time before I was brave enough to say, I'm going to do this. And I've done it twice now. Louise and I, that was my second pairing.”

Finding purpose in helping families plan funerals

Louise Winter was a 26-year-old creative strategist when her beloved granddad died. She describes his funeral as a “typically British cremation service in a really grim crematorium.” She says she had an epiphany moment of realizing there had to be a better way for people to both grieve and celebrate their loved ones. “I found the thing that I knew I was going to concentrate on for the rest of my life,” she says. She soon founded Poetic Endings, which she describes as a progressive funeral service company.

“I think the main difference between progressive funeral directors and more conventional funeral directors is taking a more emotional approach, not being so closed off and telling people what it is they can have, but asking people what they need, giving them space to explore what might work for them and providing them choices,” she tells Sam. She’s since become a leader in the field of progressive end-of-life care and collaborated with end-of-life doula Anna Lyons on a book, We all know how this ends: Lessons about life and living from working with death and dying, which was published last spring.

Like Olivia, Louise talks about being hesitant to join Founders Forward. She had already gained confidence in another woman’s entrepreneurship program, but knew she wanted to learn more about running her business—especially the finance side. “At first I was really intimidated because I wondered how anyone who works at J.P. Morgan and has a big career in finance, why they would want to hear about me saying how I don’t understand what my accountants are talking about,” she recalls.

Taking on the role of editor in chief during the pandemic, Sally Holmes navigated change and growth under extraordinary circumstances. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about her career, the women who make up Marie Claire’s readership, and the importance of work-life balance.

As the daughter of television journalists, Sally caught the news bug at a young age. While she initially wanted to be a doctor, by the time Sally graduated college, she had decided to follow in her parents' footsteps and pursue a career in journalism. She went on to intern and work at a host of high-profile companies including Scholastic, The Cut, and Elle magazine. Nearly four years ago, she was hired at Marie Claire as digital director, and 18 months ago—just as the pandemic was shutting down offices—she was promoted to Editor in Chief.

Leading during a pandemic

Sally is currently leading Marie Claire through a “digital first” transition—with more focus on the website rather than a monthly print magazine. She says that her ability to transition into her leadership role as Editor in Chief during the pandemic was made possible by the support of her incredible team. “It’s pretty amazing to think about what we've accomplished and what we used to do in the office,” she tells Sam.  “Literally, you know, a paper would arrive on my desk and I would mark it up and write notes on it, and then send it to the next person. And that was all something that we had to pivot and figure out how to do that virtually or digitally.”

Appreciating the support of others is a theme of Sally’s—she discusses role models in her life including her mother, and two of her former bosses. It’s that appreciation of the team aspect of work that leads her to see both positives and negatives in the virtual work model. On the one hand, she says, she’s thrilled to be able to give credit to staff members and empower them to make decisions about their own schedules. But she misses both the creativity and the organic chemistry that happens in the office setting. “It’s not the same as in real life interaction, which I think at the end of the day, unfortunately, is the glue that really holds the team together,” she notes.

Sally and Sam also discuss a recent survey of working women by  Marie Claire and LinkedIn. The survey found that half of women who participated are considering a career change to pursue more money and flexibility. Sally notes that those results highlight that stress or fear of burnout is forefront for many working women right now. And, she believes, there’s inevitably going to be an evolution away from pre-pandemic work attitudes. “I think that our survey was both a way to empower women to say, you're not alone,” she says “You're not the only one who wants flexibility. You're not the only one who thinks I can't go back to the office five days a week, or my priorities have changed or I don't feel safe. And then also to inform workplaces that we do need to rethink what employment looks like, what the state of our offices look like.”

Reaching a diverse readership

Asked about the typical Marie Claire reader, Sally says she is a multi-faceted woman of diverse interests. She defines the Marie Claire reader as a woman of power, purpose, and style. “I always think about basically myself and the 30- or 40-something woman who is either at the top of her game or wants to be at the top of her game,” she says. “She is career oriented, she's passionate. She is also totally multi-faceted. So I think it's totally fine and normal and good to love The Bachelor, but also be highly invested in the abortion bills being passed in Texas.”

Sally believes that one key to meeting those diverse reader needs is to have a diverse staff. “I think it's really important to make sure we have a diverse roster of writers who are able to share different perspectives,” she tells Sam. “Because I look a certain way. My staff looks a certain way. The world looks a certain way. We want to make sure that the stories that are represented really are told through multiple lenses so that we're able to offer different perspectives.”

Command Sergeant Major Cynthia Pritchett is a pioneering leader in the U.S. military. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move podcast host Sam Saperstein to discuss her time in the military, the impact she made on military education and training, and her firsthand experience of gender integration in the army. She also shares leadership advice and reflects on her involvement with the JPMorgan Chase Military and Veterans Affairs Advisory Council.

Living through gender integration

The daughter of military parents, Cynthia joined the Women’s Army Corps shortly after graduating from high school. She tells Sam that the Women’s Army Corps was a holdover from the World War II era when women were heavily recruited. “We were actually kind of outside the service,” she explains. “So we trained separately. We were mostly in the medical field, the administrative fields, not what women are doing today.”

Norms were beginning to change when Cynthia joined the Women’s Army Corps in 1973, at the tail end of the Vietnam War era. By the mid-1970s, the Women’s Corps was being phased out and women were being integrated into the training and personnel systems of the service branches. It was during this time that male service members began to take their female colleagues more seriously.

“Women in the military didn't want any special treatment, any special advantage,” Cynthia notes. “All they wanted to be was provided the same training so that when they deployed or went into these situations, they were just as prepared as their male counterpart. And I think when we had the segregated training, there was a lot of distrust [where] male counterparts were like, well, I don't know what they're getting over there ’cause I don't see it.”

Transforming education and training

Cynthia has always placed high value on the importance of military training. As an educator, Cynthia was a transformational leader who incorporated critical thinking and analysis into her programs.

She tells Sam that the military has always valued structure,  with a focus on rote knowledge and repetitive training. “When you're under stress and crisis, you want your training to kick in, but as you become more senior in the military, things go from this rote training and reaction to, you have to [have more context],” she says. “And when we're trying to deal with some elders in the village, that's not about training; that's about education and understanding the culture and the environment you're in. So how do you educate leaders to deal in these very complex environments and not just rely on reacting to the situation on the ground?”

Help veterans transition

As an instructor, Cynthia developed partnerships with universities to get military training courses accredited so they can count toward a degree once a service member transitions to civilian life. 

Since retiring from the military in 2021 after more than 36 years of service, Cynthia has served on the boards of a number of different organizations. One of the most rewarding, she says, has been her time as a member on the JPMorgan Chase Military and Veterans Affairs Advisory Council. The Council’s overarching goals are to help veterans and their families succeed. Much of the work draws on her experiences translating military credentials to civilian ones.

“Veterans do have a hard time translating back into civil society and especially into the job market,” she says. “How do you take the skills of an infantryman and translate them into something that corporate America can understand?” She’s passionate about helping veterans with housing challenges, financial literacy, and employment and entrepreneurship goals.

Cynthia explains that one of the biggest challenges has been helping veterans who have transitioned into the workforce navigate the culture differences between the military and corporate America. In the military, she says, service members learn to be part of a team and to talk about their team contributions, but not so much to talk about the individual accomplishments that they might need to highlight in their civilian careers. “It’s the whole package of trying to help veterans understand the corporate world,” she explains. “But also to help the corporate world understand the veterans, that we are not these foreign entities.”

What’s the key to successful leadership in times of fast-paced change? To Jenn Piepszak and Marianne Lake, co-CEOs of Chase Consumer & Community Banking, it includes focusing on the customer and building and maintaining strong company culture. This episode features a segment from the sixth annual Women on the Move Leadership Day, as Jenn and Marianne sit down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss company culture, the pandemic and accelerating the pace of change.

As co-leaders, Marianne and Jenn have split up the umbrella of Consumer & Community Banking: Marianne runs consumer lending and connected commerce, and Jenn heads up banking businesses and wealth management. Jenn tells Sam that their successful partnership is built on a lengthy experience of mutual trust, respect, and friendship. And while they’ve split up the responsibilities, they spend a lot of time collaborating on issues that make all experiences easier for customers.

“Be the CEO of whatever you’re running”

Marianne shares that she looks for a few key traits in managers and leaders, including putting the customer first and communicating clearly with the team every step of the way. She says that being the CEO of whatever you’re working on includes understanding and focusing obsessively on customer needs and putting the customer—internal or external—at the center of all decision-making. “Oftentimes the best way you can obsess about the competition is obsessing about the customer,” she says.

Once a leader has clarified their focus, Marianne says communication is key. “Whatever you have defined as success for your business or endeavor, you need to communicate it clearly, consistently, and often, because people in the team can get behind what they understand,” she tells Sam. 

Finally, she says, a keen attention to the data analytics is necessary: She recommends being disciplined about showing data-driven decisions that people can understand. “Jamie [Dimon, JPMorgan Chase CEO] has said often, and I agree with him,: data analyze, rinse, repeat,” she says. “It takes the emotion out of decisions.”

Building and maintaining culture

Jenn and Marianne discussed one of the largest changes they’ve managed over the past 18 months—the sudden move to remote and then hybrid work. While the firm continues to pilot and test their return to office protocols, Jenn notes that there is a difference between the initial fast-paced move to remote work versus what flexibility will ultimately look like going forward. She highlights that the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on women and that the flexibility coming out of it will likely have a disproportionately positive impact on women as well.

“I think it was extraordinary what we were able to do in a weekend really, turn our entire workforce into a remote workforce,” she says. “I do think that we have proven that you can maintain culture in a remote environment. We have yet to prove that you can build culture in a remote environment. And so I think having an office-based culture is incredibly important to this company for a very, very good reason.”

Jenn and Marianne both agree that while remote work offers valuable flexibility, the in-person experience is critical to establishing team relationships and ultimately building culture and trust. “And I think that is a huge motivating factor for anyone,” Jenn says. “In person, you have that opportunity to build that culture. And yes, you also have that opportunity to take a little bit more time to work through an issue or solve a problem, or run next door to Marianne's office and say, what do you think about this?”

An accelerating pace of change

Marianne wraps up this episode by offering her thoughts on how to meet the challenges of the future. In some ways, she says, the pandemic sped up some changes that were already coming down the pike in terms of digitalization. Successfully meeting and leveraging that accelerating change is the next big challenge for Consumer & Community Banking.

“The competition is everywhere,” she notes. “It’s how every customer experiences every digital ecosystem. It’s how they order a pizza. It's how they order a car. It’s all those things that inform what customers think extraordinary experience looks like. We’re very focused on moving with all due haste, and that’s everything from our technology to how we operate as teams and how we do budgeting and planning, and all those things need to keep pace.”

In particular, Marianne says that they don’t want to be complacent about inclusivity. “We want to be the bank for all Americans,” she says.

Tiffany Yu, founder of the social enterprise Diversability, aims rebrand the way we envision disability. Throughout her career, Tiffany has used her platform to advocate for disability inclusion in many settings including the Word Economic Forum and multiple TEDx Talks. Recently, Tiffany was featured as a keynote speaker at the sixth annual Women on the Move Leadership Day. In this episode, she sits down with Sam Saperstein to speak about inclusion, exclusion and the importance of community building.

Tiffany discusses the visible and invisible disabilities that were brought on by a car crash when she was nine years old. Her father died in the traumatic accident and she suffered many injuries, including permanent paralysis in her arm and PTSD. Tiffany refers to the memory of this event as her first “disability origin story,” and noted that for the rest of her childhood and teenage years, she struggled with feeling shame about the accident. “I actually didn't tell anyone about it for 12 years,” she shares, “because not only was it a traumatic car accident that happened, but I lost a parent and in certain Asian cultures, having someone die in your family was seen as ill fate on the entire family.”

She describes her second disability origin story as the time when she began to take pride and ownership of her disability identity. Tiffany reflects on this moment in her life as a 21 year old intern at Goldman Sachs. After a meeting, she recalls her recruiter telling her, “Tiffany, I want you to know that you deserved your place here. You don't need to have a chip on your shoulder.” Tiffany describes that moment as giving her a “permission slip” to view herself based on her potential—as the recruiter did—and not on her disability—as she had done for so long.

Micro inclusions

Tiffany identifies that memory with the recruiter as a micro moment that had an outsized positive impact in her life. Just as we often discuss micro aggressions in society, she believes there are also micro inclusions. “Sometimes that passing conversation, that little micro moment to you can make such a deep impact, such a powerful impact on someone else,” she says.

Another powerful micro inclusion in Tiffany’s life came when she attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. “A large part of the event was these networking dinners,” she recalls. “And as someone who has a paralyzed arm, attending these dinners was probably my biggest fear because at the dinners you've got some fancy meat dish coming out, and in my mind, all I'm thinking about is how am I going to cut this? How am I going to enjoy this meal?”

Tiffany’s fears about how she would handle eating her food made it hard to focus on the dinner conversation. But, she says, she had the luck of being seated next to the rapper will.i.am, who was facilitating the conversation at her table. “He pulls my plate closer to him, continuing to facilitate the conversation, cuts my meat, pushes the playback and Voila—I can now enjoy the chicken dish and participate in the conversation,” she says.

The power of exclusion

While Tiffany believes in the impact of micro inclusions, she also believes in the power of exclusion—both at the micro and macro levels. She describes a personal history with micro exclusions, such as when she had to take a physical fitness class every year of school after her arm was paralyzed. “And for me, exclusion is the reason why I do the work that I do,” she says. “Part of the reason why I created Diversability is I wanted disability to be the reason to belong, not a reason to exclude.”

Part of the power of exclusion is that it keeps the excluded from feeling like a part of a community. Tiffany’s solution to that was to aim to build community through Diversability. She refers to a Japanese proverb that roughly translates to, The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down. Her childhood experience of not wanting to stick out led to her trying to hide her disability. “It's only in recent years, have I realized that I am going to be that nail that sticks out,” she shares. “It’s our duty to be that nail.”

“I’m a nail that sticks out and there are these other nails that are sticking out and I'm literally pulling, maybe that's what my hammer is doing—pulling all of the other nails out because that's who we are,” she adds. “That's how we make this world more colorful.”

Taking a risk—whether you end up succeeding or failing—is always the right thing to do, according to Rebecca Minkoff. Rebecca is co-founder and creative director of the global fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff, and co-founder of the Female Founder Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to enabling and empowering female-owned and led companies. In this episode, which draws from the JPMorgan Chase’s sixth annual Women on the Move Leadership Day, she discusses risk-taking, encouraging female entrepreneurship, and her new book, Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success.

Getting comfortable with discomfort

Rebecca describes risk-taking as a no-loss scenario: Either you succeed and achieve something you didn’t think you could do, or you fail and learn something along the way. “I choose to look at taking risks as always positive,” she says. “I think that sometimes we wait for something to happen to us. And I like to tell women, the cavalry is not coming for us. We have to stick our own necks out to get what we want.”

In her book, Rebecca explains that women need to get comfortable with discomfort. “Because if you look at our history as women, and what we've had to do just to vote, to get a credit card, to sign our own mortgages—people had to stick their neck outs and be placed in uncomfortable scenarios,” she notes. “So we can get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

Recognizing that the idea of sticking one’s neck out is scary, Rebecca urges women to practice risk-taking in small steps. “If you are like, I don't even know if I can do that, then practice with your friend, with someone who you trust, who you feel safe with,” she says. “Practice asking [your] boss for a raise or, ‘Here's how I'm going to ask to take on a project that no one thought I should take on.’” She likens this kind of practice to working out at the gym: Ultimately, you’ll build the muscle need to take risks in real-life situations.

Encouraging female entrepreneurship

After more than a decade growing her own successful business, Rebecca co-founded the Female Founder Collective in 2018 to support, develop, and elevate the founders of other female owned and led businesses. In just three years, the Collective has grown to a network on 9,000-plus female entrepreneurs and has helped women raise over $15 million in seed funding.

Rebecca says that she and her co-founder were committed to helping women access the resources and referrals needed to make their ventures successful. “Education was the biggest [missing] piece,” she explains. “As working women who've started their companies with a passion, they're not going to go back to Wharton or Harvard and get their master's degree.”

The Collective aims to fill that gap by bringing in experts for weekly or monthly informational programming as well as large networking events. A relationship with Women on the Move includes free one-on-one curated coaching for all Collective members. Rebecca says that that collaboration has been far and away the most requested and most attended of the Collective’s programming.

Looking to the future 

Rebecca says the pandemic has been both a time of great challenge and great growth for her brand, Rebecca Minkoff. When stores shut down in March 2020, they watched 70 percent of their demand evaporate overnight. And yet, she said, it led to their company revamping its product line from more than 300 styles to a fraction of that. “So some of the silver linings from the pandemic is we've gotten more focused,” she notes. As for the future, she says it’s looking bright: They’ve recently launched a luggage line, a second fragrance comes out soon, and a home and lounge line will debut in January.

She’s equally excited for what she sees as the future of solo female entrepreneurship. As the pandemic has led to higher unemployment and a shifting of priorities for women, Rebecca notes the potential for opportunity that this environment has created. “My sincere hope is that they all start businesses and they all join the female founder collective and or take advantage of coaching services [from Women on the Move],” she says. “Because if they can all start businesses, we're just at the beginning of the cycle of solo entrepreneurs.”  

“I think you're going to see a boom of people saying corporate America might not work for me,” she adds. “And so if you can start a business, I think it's a great idea and you're going to need resources and support.”

Economic research has shown that among Americans, Latinos spend the most, but save and invest the least as demographic. Beatriz Acevedo has set out to change that. During the pandemic, she co-founded SUMA Wealth with the mission of helping close the Latino wealth gap via youth-focused, pop culture–inspired financial content and fintech tools. In this episode, Beatriz sits down with her friend, Alice Rodriguez, head of community impact at JPMorgan Chase & Co., to discuss the venture, her motivation, and her goals.

Motivation from her border roots

Beatriz describes herself as “a very proud border girl, an immigrant entrepreneur.” Born to parents who lived in San Diego but purposefully moved across the border for their daughter to be born a Mexican citizen, Beatriz describes her father as “the classic Latino man who came from absolutely nothing.” A proponent of hard work and education, he became an attorney and started a philanthropic foundation 30 years ago. “Every cent he made in his career, he put it back into the foundation for educational opportunities for our community,” she notes.

Beatriz shared that her parents’ work and philanthropic focus profoundly shaped her motivations. “I've always felt like I am one of those Latina outliers that was able to have opportunities from a young age,” she tells Alice. “It doesn't mean I didn’t work hard for them, but we know in our community, there are so many deserving Latinos and Latinas that worked so hard and are still not given the opportunities, whether it’s capital, whether it’s boards, whether it’s advancement on a job. So I want to spend as much time as I possibly can every day opening as many doors as I possibly can for my community.”

Ethos of a brand

Alice describes how the demographic discrepancies in the economic impact of the pandemic inspired her to move forward with SUMA Wealth. Alice was an established philanthropist and a leader in digital media and brings a focus on the Latino point of view to multiple mainstream entertainment platforms, but she recognized that Latinos were being hit the hardest by both health and economic measures during the pandemic. “We had the least amount of emergency savings [and] were not equipped for something like this to happen in our families,” she says. Beatriz knew she could help reverse that trend. Despite the fact that her background was in media, entertainment and marketing—not finance—she co-founded SUMA Wealth at the height of the pandemic.

Knowing that younger Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic spurred Beatriz to focus SUMA on them. “These are U.S.-born kids who are English dominant, consume the content in English, but they’re still untrustworthy of certain financial institutions because they just don’t know, they want to learn more, and they want to have that trust,” she explains. “And I thought, now’s a really incredible opportunity to build a brand and a community that really speaks to them in culture, more than in language.”

Beatriz explains that with SUMA, her goal is to empower the Latino community by building trust around tools and services that are already available to them. Adding the in-culture media context ensured its success: In its first ten months, SUMA surpassed all of its growth metrics.

Looking ahead

One key message that Beatriz strives to share with the Latino community is that when it comes to improving your finances or financial literacy, it’s never too early and it’s never too late. “A big goal that we have at SUMA is to really empower our community with so many tools and services that are already available to them, but to have the trust,” she says. “And I think doing it through the youth, through the millennials, through the gen Z's and the families and the communities, is a really smart way to do it because they are the big influencers and an ROI through one of them is never one-to-one, it's always one-to-many. So I think that’s how we need to think about really scaling this information into our community.”

This month SUMA is launching a free financial check-up tool where people can track how they are doing on saving, paying off debt, investing, and other financial indicators. “I would love to see that growth in our community of feeling comfortable, not just being the biggest spenders,” she tells Alice. “I would love to change that data from the biggest spenders to the biggest savers and investors. I would feel incredibly satisfied with that as part of my legacy.”

Mary Barra is a pioneer in the male-dominated auto industry and one of the world’s most respected and influential CEOs in the world. As Chair and Chief Executive Officer at General Motors, Mary became the first female leader of a “Big Three” automaker in 2014. In this episode, she sits down to discuss leadership with Mary Erdoes, Head of Asset & Wealth Management at J.P. Morgan and share some insightful advice for aspiring leaders.

Focus on the job you’re doing

As someone who worked her way up at GM from an hourly job that helped her pay college tuition, Mary offers one piece of career advice to talented and ambitious employees: Focus on doing the job you have well. “Do the job you’re doing today like you’re going to do it for the rest of your life, because that means you’re going to invest in it, you’re going to make it better, and you’re going to drive efficiencies,” she says. “If you’re doing your job today and you’re more focused on your next job, it’s not going to work out well.”

In Mary’s experience, when you’re invested in your job, your leaders notice your commitment, and that’s what leads to new opportunities. For Mary, new opportunities at GM included being named vice president of Global Manufacturing Engineering in 2008, before being tapped a year later to be vice president of Global Human Resources.

Trusting and empowering the most vital resource

One of Mary’s first big moves as head of HR was to abolish the firm’s multi-page dress code and introduce a “dress appropriately” policy. Explaining that her real motivation was to recognize and empower employee’s own instincts. Mary says, “When you think about it, you’re trusting these people to do a great job every day to design a vehicle, or to service a customer,” she notes. “And you can’t trust them to know what they should wear?” 

She recalls one incident where a manager came to her asking her to re-implement the old dress code because his employees were now wearing jeans to work and he didn’t think that was appropriate since they sometimes had to meet with clients. Mary suggested he talk to his team about the issue rather than establishing a mandate. “He called me back two weeks later and he said, it was great. We all decided that we can wear jeans, but we’ll have a pair of khakis or dress pants available. So if there’s that rare time where we have to meet with someone, we will look appropriate for the meeting.”

Recognizing what women bring to the table

Mary also shares tips for aspiring female leaders, drawn from her experiences. First she highlights the importance of women understanding that they bring a lot to the table. “I know we’re all different, but in general, I think we approach things more collaboratively, we recognize people, we include,” she notes. And those traits are invaluable in terms of being able to engage other people and get the best outcomes—especially in cross-functional teams and situations.

Mary also has words of wisdom about the perennial work-life balancing act, stressing that when women take ownership of their own balance and identify what’s most important to them, they have the best results. “Your manager or your leader can’t work life balance for you, because they don’t know what’s important to you,” she says.

Once they’ve identified what’s important to their own work-life balance, she advises women to give themselves permission to state their needs. She recalls a time when she watched the clock keep rolling after a meeting was supposed to end at 5:15 pm. She had to be home to relieve her childcare-giver so they could make it to an evening class. “Finally, I think I let another five minutes go and I just said to my boss, ‘I really need to leave.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, go,’” she recalls. “From that point on, if it was toward that end of the day, he’d be like, ‘Do you need to leave?’ And he didn’t say, ‘You can leave. We’re going to keep going.’ He ended the meeting.” 

Mary says one thing she learned is that most managers will do that—once they understand what you need to be effective at work, they want to make it happen. “No one gets it perfectly,” she says of work-life balance. But the important thing is advocating for yourself at work so you can meet the needs of your family. In the end, Mary wants her family to know she did what was necessary to meet her obligations to them: “I was dedicated and I cared and it was important.” 

Curious about innovative banking technologies such as blockchain, crypto, and liquidity? In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with two great leaders Christine Moy, who leads J.P. Morgan’s blockchain team, and Lori Schwartz, the bank’s global head of liquidity solutions.

Lori has been in banking her whole career and has become a subject matter expert in liquidity solutions. She describes her current role as a Jack-of-all-trades: using product management to tie together sales, compliance, legal, regulatory, technology, and operations. What she loves most about her work is its relevance,  both to clients—helping them leverage solutions to better manage their business—and to the firm itself—as a deposit generator, liquidity solutions help to “fund the firm.”

Christine has been in banking at J.P. Morgan for nearly two decades. Five years ago, she got to focus on her love for technology and building products when she became the first hire to J.P. Morgan's blockchain and crypto team. While those terms may sound futuristic and complex, throughout the episode, Christine uses practical examples to break them down for listeners and explains the firm’s plans for the future. (Spoiler: It involves outer space!)

De-mystifying “blockchain” and “crypto”

Sam asks Christine to describe blockchain to listeners who might be unfamiliar with the concept, and Christine has a great analogy to help break it down. “I like to have people imagine a shared spreadsheet because the best way to think about blockchain is that it's a ledger that is shared by multiple participants and it's updated in real time,” she notes. She explains that these “shared ledgers” use cryptography and consensus mechanisms to ensure that everyone connected to a ledger is seeing the same view in real time—all while the ledger is tracking the historical progress of its subject.

Christine extends her analogy to explain how cryptocurrencies relate to blockchain. Cryptocurrencies, or crypto assets, are the asset types that you would track on the digital ledger, she says. Christine also describes the critical difference between public blockchains and permission blockchains. Cryptocurrencies usually live on the public blockchain side, she says, and anyone with a computer and an internet connection can have access to cryptocurrencies and crypto assets and public blockchains. “So the easy way to think about it is the Bitcoin blockchain is basically the digital ledger of all the Bitcoin transactions that have happened in the history of the world,” Christine explains. “And so basically what you get from the shared ledger is that you're able to have unique digital assets that have a transaction history.”

Understanding liquidity management

While the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains may seem removed from the day-to-day focus of a bank, Lori explains how related it really is to her more grounded world of liquidity management. “I think the major connect point between some of the areas that we're exploring and innovating is the keyword or value,” she notes. “And then what we really do every single day to help our clients manage their business. So whether the internet of value or, you know, the value of payments, we're helping companies move money across the globe.”

Lori also shares a practical analogy to help listeners think about liquidity management. “I start thinking about your own personal life,” she says. “You have a bank account, maybe you have one or two, probably have an investment account somewhere, but you have within your own personal life, pretty good understanding of what money is coming in and what money is going to go out.” If you take that simple, personal perspective, she says, and blow it up to global multinationals, financial institutions, and broker dealers, that’s the focus of liquidity management. “It’s managing with the view to understand how much cash you have, where it is, how you get access to it, and to ultimately optimize it,” she says. 

Innovating for the future

Christine describes how her role has recently expanded to include overseeing the Liink network, a  network of cross-border payments and banks connected together with blockchain technology to exchange information. The goal, she says, is to address pain points in the cross border payment space to make payments faster and cheaper and more efficient. The implications for the future, she says, are practically limitless. “Like I have to let you guys know that  J.P. Morgan is actually the first bank in space because we launched a couple satellites in space and we ran an Ethereum blockchain and actually tested tokenized payments to research, maybe an intergalactic coin that we might issue one day,” she shares.

Three weeks away from her retirement, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Alice Rodriguez accepted the opportunity to lead the organization’s new community impact department. In her new role, she is helping manage the firm’s 5 year, $30 billion investment into racial equity. In this episode of the WOTM Podcast, Alice speaks with host Sam Saperstein about some of the early wins that the department has seen, her work as chairwoman for the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the importance of recognizing Hispanic Heritage Month. Alice also discusses the important role that mentors like her mother have played in her life and how her new role at the firm has allowed her to make a positive impact in her own community and beyond.

Focusing on the wealth divide

The community impact department was created as a part of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s continued effort to reduce wealth gaps and systemic racism in society. As Alice discusses, the median net worth for a white household was $188,000 in 2019, compared to $36,005 and $24,000 for Latino and Black households respectively. Given this alarming discrepancy, Alice discusses the work that her team is driving to bridge these gaps.

Throughout her conversation with Sam, Alice outlines some of her team’s key focuses like home ownership, entrepreneurship and access to credit that will help them to achieve their goal of  increasing opportunities for minorities to build wealth. Key to this initiative is how the bank has aligned and engrained this effort as an integral part of their business strategies in order to ensure sustainability. As Alice states, “The only way to successfully do that is to have the businesses think about (diverse communities) in their strategic work.”

Reaching entrepreneurs

While female minority entrepreneurs are starting businesses at increased rates, Alice notes that many don’t have access to mentors to guide them through essential business practices, from business planning to technical details and challenges. To help with this issue, J.P. Morgan has sponsored a business owners forum in Chicago for Black women, and has helped fund the upcoming Los Angeles Latina Fest in October. Through these events and others, J.P. Morgan is focusing on reaching women of color in an intentional and purposeful way.

from the Chamber

At a moment in history when many Americans are having more conversations about racial equity, Alice mentions that she wants to see Latino communities become a larger part of those discussions. “I've been very vocal as the chairwoman of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that we're not paying enough attention to this,” she says.

Through her role as a member of the Dallas and U.S. Hispanic Chambers Alice has learned valuable insights about how to meet communities where they are, explaining that trust is a critical component of reaching Hispanic and Latinx communities. “People that come from other Latin American countries, the bank doesn't really have the same reputation that a bank here in the U.S. would have. There's just a lot of horror stories that have happened in their countries, that the bank is actually the last place they're going to come for help on what they need for their business.”

Alice highlights that in order to build trust, the bank can leverage its relationships with organizations in the community, utilize accessible language and be more intentional about recognizing Hispanic culture.

Passing down lessons

During the episode, Alice discusses the pride that she feels in celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, which takes place from September 15 to October 15. “I just know the sacrifices that my mom in particular made for our family,” she says. “There's just so much beauty in the family and culture and the faith and the traditions.”

Alice takes pride in passing down traditions from her mother to her own daughters—everything from making tamales to having a strong work ethic. “One of the most important values that my sister and I always talk about that we got from our mom was we can be scrappy. We do not have to have perfection. You know, we know how to be scrappy. And I think that has served me well over the last 35 years.”

A world-renowned expert in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), Dr. Manuela Veloso was a professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University and she took a leave of absence three years ago to be head of artificial intelligence research at JPMorgan Chase. In this role, she has applied AI to problems in economics, data management, and gender equity. She sits down with WOTM’s Sam Saperstein to talk about her journey, what she loves about her job, and the future of AI and robotics.

Working as a team

Manuela Veloso earned her Master of Science in electrical engineering in Lisbon, Portugal, before coming to the United States in 1984 to begin work on a PhD. She made the switch to computer science after she came to see how computers can solve problems for people, a purpose that still resonates for her today. She became interested in robotics because while computers and AI could create plans, it took robots to execute them. She tells Sam that she never had interest in science fiction or robots before that. “I began addressing the robotics only because of my interest in seeing these plans that we’d created theoretically eventually, through a generation of actions, being executed,” she says.

In 1996, Manuela cofounded a robotics soccer competition known as RoboCup, bringing together people’s love of games, and soccer in particular, as a way of promoting robotics and AI research. The RoboCup is still held every year and has advanced from the days of single robots on wheels acting independently to today, where humanoid robots work as a team.

A collaborative future

Manuela sees a future in which humans and intelligence systems are inseparable. She relates this vision to a breakthrough she had at Carnegie Mellon about ten years ago when she was developing robots that would not be able to solve certain novel problems. “These robots would move down these corridors and then they would face a closed door, or they would have to press an elevator button or someone talked with them and they didn't understand what people were saying.” The robots would never be autonomous if they kept being stymied by these problems. “And then one day I decided that we wouldn't be able to solve this problem with more arms for the robots or better language technology. There will always be these limitations, intrinsic limitations in the robots.” 

Her solution was “cohort robots,” or robots that work together with humans to solve problems. Manuela explains: “Basically if there was an obstacle in front of them, they would say, please, can you help me please? Excuse me, get out of my way, open the door, press the elevator button. They became autonomous, but asking for help.” She calls it “symbiotic autonomy.” She also calls it “the secret of the future.”

“One day I believe that we will be always asking for assistance from AI,” she says. Because of the huge amount of data we’ve accumulated and continue to accumulate, the scale of our problems—whether it’s at work, getting advice from a financial advisory, or just sorting the photos on our iPhones—is only getting bigger. Manuela says that humans who leverage AI to make decisions will be more trustworthy.

Advice and Legacy

Manuela hopes her legacy will be the simple notion that “problems can be solved.” But not even AI can solve them easily or right away. We have to put in the work, but we can celebrate progress. “And this is true for women in the job,” she adds. “This is the advice I always give: Break the difficult problems into pieces. Try to reward yourself, be happy when little pieces are accomplished. It's perfectly fine that the big piece is not there yet.” Take satisfaction in the steps along the way.

Lenore Estrada co-founded Three Babes Bakeshop just in time to have business upended by the pandemic. But rather than shrink from the challenge, she went on to co-found the SF New Deal, a community support and food relief organization dedicated to helping other small businesses—and individuals in need of food—make it through the pandemic. Here she sits down with WOTM host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she created her business, what she’s learned, and what she thinks about the future.

Launching a start-up

By her early 20s, Lenore had experienced a lifetime of challenges—including growing up around poverty, the sudden death of her college boyfriend, and cancer diagnoses for both her and her mom. Something told her it was time to take stock of her life, starting with her career. She made a list of the day-to-day job experiences she actually liked. Her list included talking to people, and community work. “So then I made a list of jobs where I could use these skills every day, and one of them was entrepreneurship,” she tells Sam. “So I decided to start a business.”

First up was determining the where and the what. She landed on northern California for the where—to be closer to mom. For the “what” she picked baking. She had a lifelong friend who already worked in the food industry, and she realized a bakery business had a low “barrier to entry,” which suited her since she had little money to invest. She and two friends launched a Kickstarter campaign, and soon raised $10k. Three Babes Bakeshop was born.

“When I started my company, I really was coming from a kind of a place of no other options,” she recalls. “And I started it, and immediately the feeling was so different [from] working for someone else.” She was hooked on the entrepreneurial life, but faced many curveballs from the beginning. After an early focus on fruit pies, she and her partner realized the product was too seasonal to offer the stability they needed to grow the business. They soon found that stability in contracts to provide a variety of baked goods to corporate offices. 

Start-up ups and downs

Selling baked goods for corporations offered Three Babes the stability to plan in advance and invest in the future. But less than a year later, Three Babes Bakeshop faced a big challenge: The pandemic crashed into their space like a natural disaster. In early 2020, Lenore was warily watching news of the coronavirus. But it was Pi Day (March 14th) that really drove home the impending catastrophe. Clients weren’t ordering their usual large Pi Day orders. “That sort of told me that people were feeling uncertain,” she tells Sam. It wasn’t long before Three Babes scaled down to nearly no business.

Helping the community

It was still the very early days of the pandemic shutdown when an old friend called Lenore and said he was concerned and upset about what was happening to small businesses in San Francisco. “And he offered to donate a million dollars if I was willing to sort of be the leader and form a non-profit to get that money out to the community,” she tells Sam. “So we started this organization and basically we started just buying meals from small restaurants and delivering them to hungry people.”

That’s how SF New Deal was born in March of 2020. Before long, they were helping small businesses band together to apply for federal grants. Businesses were getting the revenue they needed, and food insecure individuals were getting tastier and fresher food than they would get at a food pantry.

Today, Lenore is still the executive director of SF New Deal and running Three Babes. As far as what else the future might hold for her, she tells Sam that she’s always wanted to run for office.

Diversifying a board of directors is easier said than done, but Rebecca Thornton, head of Director Advisory Services at JPMorgan Chase & Co., has some great advice about creating a well-rounded board. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how her team identifies diverse board candidates—and her advice for women aspiring to sever on a board.

The art and science of matching candidates to board positions

Rebecca describes how JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Director Advisory Services was formed in 2016 by Jamie Dimon. It was a time when senior bankers at the firm were increasingly being contacted as sources for board searches. “And Jamie knew who he knew and the banker down the hall knew who she knew, but there was no real central clearing house for all the great talent our bankers knew to be board interested,” she explains. “And on the other side, we had clients coming to us saying, We need an audit chair. Do you know anybody with emerging markets experience? It'd be great if they were also diverse.”

Rebecca’s team now acts as that central clearinghouse with a mission of creating a more robust list of candidates. They now have a network of 4,000 people, and about 60 percent of their “actively looking network” are women or other underrepresented individuals.

Creating the list is when art and science meet, according to Rebecca. “The science is where they match the criteria,” she says. “So you're looking for a qualified financial expert who can step into an audit chair role who has emerging markets experience [and the client would love it] if they've also had operations experience out of a consumer-facing business, and this has to be a female or underrepresented person.” Rebecca’s team goes through their network and identifies people who meet the science. “The art is where the special sauce is because you have to make sure that beyond the paper that the person is going to fit,” she describes. “And that's where you really do need to understand a little bit of the culture of the organization.”

Advice for aspiring board members

Rebecca acknowledges that there’s a catch-22 for people seeking their first board positions: boards want individuals with board experience, so how do you get the experience? Her advice: be really good at what you do, and make sure that people are aware of your skills. With about 70 percent of board vacancies filled through relationships, Rebecca maintains that building your brand and networking are key to getting your name out there as a potential board candidate. As a resource for aspiring board members, she recommends checking out the local chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD).

And while she believes that the time is right for women taking more and more prominent roles on boards—most firms are fully on board with wanting to recruit women and other diverse members—there are still practical roadblocks to achieving full parity. One of them is the simple fact that board vacancies can be infrequent. She says that age remains the predominant reason for board turnover, and members typically serve until 72 or 75 years of age. “I just think there are some practical reasons why it continues to sort of lag or take time or plateau, but the good news is that I don't think there’ll ever be a board search done again where there’s an entire slate of white men,” she adds.

Rebecca and Sam also discuss the topic of quotas on boards. And while Rebecca says that in general she doesn't like quotas for quota’s sake, she  does feel like we’re in a place where the talent and depth is there, and quotas can help move institutions toward parity. “And if a company's doing it to satisfy a quota, I have a lot of confidence in my sisters that they show up, they do their work, and they’re going to have impact,” she emphasizes. “So if that voice convinces everybody else in the room that, Hey, this wasn’t so bad, she was actually pretty great. Then they get a second voice and a third voice and a fourth voice and parity at some point down the road . . . you have to start somewhere.”

Like many talented and ambitious professionals Lisa McCarthy once believed that professional success required personal sacrifice. But when she found herself at a career crossroads in her mid-40s, she took a leap of faith and left the corporate world to start a business aimed at proving that old assumption wrong. Today, she’s the CEO and co-founder of Fast Forward, a training and coaching company whose mission is to help organizations create a culture where professional and personal success go hand in hand.

In this episode, Lisa sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein—who has been through Fast Forward coaching herself—todiscuss her company’s approach to helping individuals think big, focus on what matters, and achieve success in their whole lives.

Dreaming big

Lisa and her co-founder, Wendy Leshgold,started brainstorming about the company when they were in their 30s and shared the epiphany that it is possible to have both professional success and personal fulfillment.But it wasn’t until nine years ago, when she was in her mid-40s and encountered an unexpected twist in her successful career as a sales executive, that Lisa made her dream a reality.

“When we launched the company, I literally moved from a corporate setting with a big team and a lot of infrastructure,” she recalls to Sam. “And all of a sudden I was in my home office on video with Wendy on the west coast. And so I knew that I was choosing to be uncomfortable, but similar to what we do in the program, we created a bold vision: At the time we went two years out and we really imagined What would extraordinary success look like for our company? What are we known for? What type of leaders are we working with? What impact are we having on their culture, on their talent, on their business?”

Lisa shares that the biggest critical success factor in starting Fast Forward was putting that bold vision down on paper. Sam wholeheartedly agrees, as she recounts her own experience as a Fast Forward participant through a JPMorgan Chase program. “It really did change my life and my career,” Sam says. “I wrote this vision down and I shared it with my Fast Forward buddy, who was a senior executive here at JPMorgan Chase. And when she heard it, she said to me, you know what, there’s a job that’s going to be created to run our new Women on the Move group, and it might be something of interest to you. I was amazed that I’d written something down, I shared it with someone else, and lo and behold, she had another idea for me, and look at what’s happened. Four years later, I’m in this job which is really a dream come true.”

Plan the work and work the plan

Lisa explains that Fast Forward is based on a simple, science-backed framework aimed at helping people identify and achieve their goals. Their clients are organizations that recognize the commercial benefit to having employees thrive in all areas of their lives, but the program participants are the ones who do the work of visioning and achieving. “We talk about getting clear on how you personally would define success and fulfillment because it’s different for all people. What is truly important to you?”

Fast Forward participants are matched with coaches who help them stay track and develop actionable steps to achieve your goals. “Then you’re chunking it out into bite size things that move it from daunting to doable and getting somebody else’s input, because sometimes you don’t know how to do it,” she explains. “And your buddy or a colleague may see a lot. So the first step is declaring a bold vision and sharing it. And then we plan the work and work the plan.”

Scaling up

In response to a request from JPMorgan Chase, Fast Forward has intensely scaled up their programs. As Sam explained, leadership wanted the Fast Forward program to reach employees broadly across the company, to move it from serving 30 to 40 people at a time in a room to reaching thousands of employees. Fast Forward met the challenge by developing more digital assets and using online meet rooms. “The punchline is 6,000 people have gone through this program entirely during COVID, which is really remarkable,” Lisa shares.

Pre-COVID, 80 percent of Fast Forward’s trainings were in person. Rather than letting the pandemic impact the company, Lisa and Wendy re-envisioned what success could look like for the company. Today they offer organizations virtual options and online resources for individuals who aren’t part of a formal Fast Forward program. Anyone can download the bold vision exercise and two samples to help them get started at FastForwardGroup.net.

Trinny Woodall wants all women to experience the joy of showing your best self. As CEO and founder of global beauty brand Trinny London, Woodall creates makeup personally tailored to women’s unique skin, hair, and eyes. “I love that feeling somebody gets when I make them feel better, it’s just such a secret sauce, such a magical thing to be able to do,” she says.

In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Trinny to discuss her passions, her path to success, and lessons she’s learned along the way as a renowned makeover expert, best-selling author, mother, and TV personality. Listen in as they discuss Trinny London’s unique approach to personalization and its mission to give customers the confidence to be their best.

A passion for the power of makeup

Trinny started her career in finance, before getting her break as a fashion columnist for the Daily Telegraph in the 1980s. She and her columnist partner soon enjoyed success as fashion makeover experts. From there, she tells Sam, the transition to the makeup industry was a natural step for her. “I think that founders come either from a passion of understanding a hole in the market or that coupled with what they really would want for themselves,” she says. For her, it was both: Her years working with fashion had taught her how much women value the concept of an individually tailored makeover, and her personal experience with makeup gave her a passion for it.

Growing up with acne, she explains, made her fall in love with what she calls the power of makeup at a young age. At 15, she recalls, her godmother took her to a makeup counter in New York City. “And going into an American beauty counter at that stage when England was so boring and behind . . . there was that feeling of, I can be transformed by this,” she recalls. “For me, it's like, how can I be the best me, but still be me? And that was always what I felt as a woman. I didn't want to become somebody else. I wanted to just be able to look in the mirror and feel happy with what I saw.”

It was the idea to personalize makeup that helped her stand out in the market. She says that once she had identified the need, she wanted to invent trends, not follow them. “And so I thought, okay, don't put red on every single person, because this woman has brown skin, a blonde hair, a greener eye,” she explains. “This woman has a peaches and cream skin and a blue eye and a brown hair. So why would you do the same thing? And I just thought back in my head, I’d love it. And that was that beginning of all, match-to-me technology.”

She began making the formulations in her bathroom and sending them off to the lab. Early clients would come to her bathroom, and she would track their products on a large physical chart on the wall. From that early data, she developed an algorithm and “things evolved from there.” Today, clients log onto the Trinny London website, put in their skin profile, and get customized examples and suggestions of what to pick.

Lessons learned

Trinny says she was confident early on that personalized makeup would work. “I knew from the 5,000 women I've made over in that 10 years, I knew there was a need,” she says. “I knew women would love it.” Developing Trinny London into what it is today, however, was facilitated by the help and advice of others. One mentor “was fantastic,” she recalled. “She said, you need suppliers. You need somebody who can help you manufacture what you're making in your bathroom. So, she put me in touch with people. I developed relationships.”

She credits much of Trinny London’s success to her staff and her hiring philosophies. “At Trinny London, we look for raw talent,” she explains. “I literally glide over somebody's university degree. When I look at the CV, I glide over nearly everything. I just want to kind of understand What's their passion? What's their motivation? What motivation have they inherited from their family life?”

Multiple sclerosis is a focus of interest for many medical researchers, and a critical issue for women as more are impacted than men. As a disease that also affects working-aged women more than retirement-aged, it’s also the focus of many workplace diversity and inclusion experts. In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with a noted neurologist, physician, and MS specialist, as well as a diversity and inclusion leader at JPMorgan Chase who was diagnosed with MS nearly a decade ago.

Dr. Jai Perumal is the attending Neurologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medicine, where she specializes in MS and other neuroinflammatory diseases. And Sheree Carara is Vice President and Product Manager for Digital Channels at JPMorgan Chase—where, as an employee with MS, she’s also become a leader in the inclusion arena. In this conversation you’ll hear their insights on MS as well as learn about their efforts to increase awareness of and treatment for all disabilities.

MS and the workplace

Sheree was diagnosed with MS in July 2013, and at the time she took the diagnosis as a death sentence for her career ambitions. As an autoimmune disease that can disrupt the functioning of the optic nerve or spinal cord, MS can cause symptoms ranging from vision problems, to numbness, balance issue, or cognition problems.

Not all MS patients experience all or even any of those symptoms, but they often share one common thread: emotional distress and fear after diagnosis. Sheree recalls that she immediately assumed she could never succeed in corporate America. “I realized that I couldn’t do what I used to do,” she tells Sam and Jai. “I didn’t think there was any other option. I saw myself in a wheelchair. That’s what I thought.” 

Instead, Sheree flourished at JPMorgan Chase—due to both her own tenacity and the support of colleagues. In fact, CAREERS and the disABLED magazine recently celebrated her as an employee of the year for her efforts on behalf of people with disabilities in the workplace. She says the JPMorgan’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion offers great resources, including videos illustrating how to tell your manager about a disability as well as how managers can supportively respond to hearing the news. She says the more tools and information that is available, the better. “I now have a different ability,” she says. “It’s not the same abilities as before, but I can say I need help. It’s okay. I just need support and help.”

Treatment and the future

With many MS patients being diagnosed in their twenties, Jai says that one of her motivations for getting involved with MS research and treatment was the opportunity to develop long-term relationships with patients. “You start seeing patients in their twenties and they grow with you,” she says. “You see patients over time and you become friends.”

Jai describes the care she takes when a patient is newly diagnosed, and how the first visit can be overwhelming. “Because you’re talking about the disease,” she notes. “We have to talk about the next step too, which is treatment. The most important thing is understanding what it is committing to treatment. We have so many treatments now. So a patient diagnosed now can expect to have a treatment that controls their disease very well.”

In terms of workplace policies around inclusion, Jai offers straightforward advice to employers: don’t try to fit all people with disabilities into one mold. For instance, with MS, some patients have visible disabilities, and it can be easy for employers to make accommodations. But others have invisible disabilities such as fatigue or cognition issues. When employers and colleagues both recognize and communicate about these invisible disabilities, accommodations can go much smoother. Because, she notes, “sometimes you just need to make some adjustments and patients can continue their jobs.”

Jai offers one other piece of advice for individuals with unexplained symptoms: Don’t ignore those symptoms, seek answers by visiting a doctor. And look for a good fit with a medical provider. She notes that many patients find a good fit with the first provider they see. “But if they don’t resonate with you, if you don’t have a connection [seek another opinion] because this is a long-term relationship, you need to be perfectly in sync with your provider.”

Co-founder and managing partner of the first female-led millennial venture capital firm, SoGal Ventures, Elizabeth Galbut sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she's going beyond investing in women to creating a global ecosystem of both women and men who are investing in women.

The Accidental Venture Capitalist

As the only child of two doctors, Elizabeth “grew up in the healthcare system.” “And very early on, I was seeing that there were a lot of problems in healthcare from a business perspective, as well as, how do you improve patient care for all of us in the U.S.?”

Initially, Elizabeth’s goal was to enter the healthcare industry to solve some of these broad issues. In the end, she says, she’s doing something very similar as a venture capitalist, by investing directly into innovative companies that are currently changing the landscape of healthcare. “So I call myself a bit of an accidental venture capitalist,” she tells Sam. “It definitely wasn't what I went into graduate school thinking I was going to do, but looking back, it really makes sense.”

During graduate school at Johns Hopkins she recognized the need for venture capitalists to invest in healthcare ideas. At Hopkins, she saw so many entrepreneurs with amazing backgrounds who weren't able to find capital to finance their businesses. “I thought,there's really this arbitrage investment opportunity of backing these founders.”

Through early, small investments she learned the value of even very small investments in talented people with great ideas. “It's not always about the dollar amount, but it's really about being that supporter and,helping somebody understand that what you're doing is actually valuable and you should keep going.”

Building an ecosystem

Elizabeth was just 23 when she and her 25-year-old partner decided to launch a venture capital firm. Going to career fairs and conferences as an MBA student had opened her eyes to the gender issues in the VC field. “Sometimes the men venture capitalists would say we don't hire women,” she recalls. Rather than join a male-dominated firm she and her partner founded SoGal, with an investment focus on exceptional, diverse founding teams that have plans for global expansion focused on tackling major consumer or healthcare problems in the U.S. and Asia.

Elizabeth and her partner identified early on that they were interested in supporting not just women entrepreneurs, but also other women investors. She describes those efforts as creating an ecosystem for investors, empowering founders and investors, and creating a support system and community. “There are trillions of dollars to be unlocked by empowering women. So of course I want to empower women from a social perspective, but it's also a deep business opportunity that we should all be paying attention to.”

Gayle Jennings-O'Byrne learned about the power of sisterhood and of women in technology from her mother, Thelma Bataille, who was a tech trailblazer in the 1960s and 70s. After a career at JP Morgan Chase leading philanthropy, Gayle went on to found the WOCstar Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in women of color (“WOC”) and diverse inclusive teams in the tech sector. In this episode, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein sits down with both mother and daughter to discuss their pioneering contributions in nurturing and mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs.

The can-do mindset

Seeing her mother succeed in computer programming and impact the nation was inspiring, “but the biggest thing that she did was she just believed in you,” Gayle recalls. Gayle’s biggest advise to other entrepreneurs is to “believe in yourself, believe you can do it. Because if you believe in yourself, you have a radius about you. That is a magnet, it will attract others.”

Gayle received her M.B.A. from the University of Michigan and spent 20 years in corporate America. “I had this amazing, great experience of seeing the capital markets from corporate finance and investment banking,” she tells Sam. “And then I also saw how capital was being deployed in a philanthropic impact investing way. And yet I realized we were still missing a huge segment of the population women and in particular women of color.” She went on to found her first firm, focused on investing in startups led by Black and Latinx women. In 2018, she founded WOCstar.

Builder capitalists

Gayle describes herself and her partners as “builder capitalists” versus venture capitalists. The builder capitalist is also focused on returns and on the most efficient and productive deployment and usage of capital. “But the difference is that we want to be there to help those founders build to success,” she says. “It's not enough for us if we're simply investing in them and hoping that they're going to be that unicorn.” This idea encompasses her belief that the way women succeed is by building together.

Part of Gayle’s investing thesis is customer engagement to validate customer product fit.  Companies must have a  product in the marketplace, ensuring there is an active and open dialogue with customers Pushing for progress

Reflecting on their careers and similar barriers faced despite being different generations, Thelma is disheartened but not ready to concede. Gayle says that’s why she’s continued to devote her energies to building women’s inner confidence and empowering them. She says that women, and particularly women of color, are very diverse and inclusive in how they build teams and how they collaborate. “So if you get a woman of color involved, she’s going to bring the rest of the village.” Thinking about the WOCstars they invest in and advise, both mother-daughter believe change and progress is on the horizon.

Helping women and People of Color achieve their entrepreneurial goals has been Melissa Bradley’s driving force throughout her career. Along the way she founded 1863 Ventures, a nonprofit that helps underserved entrepreneurs move from high potential to high growth, and she co-founded a separate platform that provides support for small- to medium-sized businesses. On this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein to discuss these two ventures, the lessons she's learned, and her progress towards creating $100 billion in new wealth for the new majority by 2030.

Empowering women, black and brown entrepreneurs

Melissa first realized that entrepreneurship was a pathway to financial success when she was bartending as a student at Georgetown University. When she returned to Georgetown as a professor, a student project to organize an entrepreneurial summit in Anacostia quickly grew, eventually becoming 1863 Ventures. The organization is dedicated to accelerating black and brown entrepreneurs from high potential to high growth, through rigorous leadership training and strategic market access. A key differentiator is their focus on ongoing operations for established companies, rather than startups. Their methodology was proven out by the high survival rate of their companies during the pandemic.

Following the success of 1863 Ventures, Melissa co-founded Ureeka in 2018. Ureeka offers “always-on coaching” to minority entrepreneurs, with 24-7 access to peers and colleagues via an app or website. “We essentially partner with accelerators and incubators all over the country and now corporations and others who want to help women and entrepreneurs of color and provide a scalable platform,” Melissa tells Sam.

1863 was Ureeka’s first customer. After businesses “graduate” from 1863, they receive ongoing support through Ureeka. At Ureeka, Melissa and her team  “made a commitment that every conversation, we would solve a single problem,” rather than offering theoretical advice

Qualities of a successful entrepreneur

The environment for entrepreneurs has changed in just the past decade. Ten years ago, Melissa notes, there was a stigma attached to entrepreneurship—that people starting businesses were either crazy or had graduated from Harvard. Today, “there's diversity in who shows up,” she says. “I think people are much more open to asking for help because they don't worry that people are going to make fun of them.”

In addition to the three most common mistakes entrepreneurs make, Melissa shares the three key qualities entrepreneurs must have to be successful. The first is blind optimism, “if you believe and see it for yourself, then go for it.”  The second is a dose of tenacity and resilience, she says, noting that many people are going to tell you no along the way.  The third quality is self-awareness and the ability to recognize “when you're not the right person to do certain things” and then move on to the next big problem that needs solving.

Anne-Marie Slaughter talks Care Feminism and Portfolio Careers

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” published in the Atlantic Magazine in 2012, ignited a national conversation about women and the workplace. The former director of planning at the U.S. State Department and current CEO of New America sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss why this article continues to resonate with women, her career, and a new type of feminism.

The article heard around the world

Anne-Marie had just left her glass ceiling–busting job in Clinton’s State Department when she wrote her Atlantic Magazine article. She recalls how the article “catapulted me into this different world, this domestic world, mostly talking about gender equality.” It was her time at the State Department, she says, that prompted the realization that “having it all” wasn’t the solution or the end game. As she wrote in the article, “I finally allowed myself to accept what was really most important to me. And that decision led to a reassessment of the feminist narrative that I grew up with and have always championed.”

“Real equality doesn't mean remaking myself as a man,” Anne-Marie tells Sam. “It means having the same opportunities that men have had, but also being able to be who I am.” She says that while working in D.C. during the week and commuting home to her family with two teenage sons on the weekend, she realized that while she took pride in her work, she didn’t want to look back later and feel she missed out on critical time with her family. Recognizing how hard it was to make space in her life for both her career and her family prompted her to re-think the ideas of feminism she had grown up with. Now that she was a leader in the system, her next goal was to “reshape the system to adapt to me, not to shape myself to the system.”

Care feminism

Anne-Marie tells Sam that her ideas of feminism evolved over her time as a professional leader and family caretaker. “When I wrote my Atlantic article, I was focused on the ways in which workplaces and norms needed to adapt, to allow women to have the same careers as men,” she says. “So I was solidly a career feminist and just saying, it's just much harder than I recognized, and I've been wrong not to see it from the perspective of women.” 

She soon began focusing on what she calls deeper forces of care and career. “And I'd concluded that you couldn't value men's traditional work and expect women to do it without equally valuing women's traditional work and expecting men to do it—just mathematically, it won't work,” she says.

Care feminism is infused into New America, particularly in the organization’s initiative, Better Life Lab. The Lab, sponsored in part by JP Morgan Chase, focuses on original research and reporting aimed at reimagining work, gender equity, and work-family justice for families of all types.

Portfolio careers

The lifelong arc of women’s—and men’s—careers is another piece of the work-life balance that Anne-Marie is reimagining. “I think about this increasingly in terms of what I call a portfolio career, that most of us need a job, and we do other things on top of it, but there's a kind of central job,” she tells Sam. Throughout people’s careers, she says, there may be times when they want or need to step back or slow down—but that doesn’t mean they have to take a break from their career. Anne-Marie believes rather than balancing everything at once, “it’s really possible to think about all the different things you want to do and construct a portfolio of activity that is your life.”

National Women’s Law Center CEO talks advancing gender equity

For 50 years, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has been working to improve the lives of girls and women in the United States. In this episode, the Center’s president and CEO Fatima Gross Graves sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about the NWLC’s work, the gender pay gap, and how COVID-19 has exacerbated gender inequalities—plus, what she’s hopeful about for the future.

Gender pay gap and COVID’s impact

Fatima and Sam discuss the longstanding gender pay gap, with data showing that even before the pandemic women overall were making 82 cents for every dollar that men made (and for Black women the figures were much worse, with Black women making just 62 cents to the dollar). And, Fatima explains, things only got worse with the pandemic. “The COVID-19 pandemic has upended all of our lives,” she notes. “But that has been very, very true for women in this country.”

Women experienced greater unemployment than men during the pandemic, she says. That’s partly because women’s jobs are more concentrated in the sectors that were hardest hit in this pandemic, and partly because women had to leave their jobs to take care of their children as schools and childcare options shut down. Fatima calls the pandemic’s impact a “complete crumbling” of the nation’s care infrastructure.

The “impossible math problem of caregiving”

Fatima tells Sam that the issue of caregiving in the United States is both a jobs problem and a quality-of-care problem. And in both cases, it rests on the shoulders of women: because women tend to work more often in caregiving jobs, and because they tend to take on more responsibility for caretaking within families. “And part of the reason our care system is so fragile, [is because] it was kind of built out of the idea that it is okay to pay basically poverty level wages to mostly women who are caring for the most important things to us,” she says.

It’s not only women who work in healthcare or childcare sectors whose employment is impacted by the issue of caregiving in this country, Fatima notes. Women who work in sectors like retail, with both low pay and unpredictable scheduling, can find it nearly impossible to schedule or afford childcare. .  For most families, childcare is more expensive than rent or mortgage payments or even college. This is just one of the issues the National Women’s Law Center targets.

National Women’s Law Center progress

As the organization approaches its 50th anniversary, Fatima describes the work of the National Women’s Law Center as both broad and deep. “We have litigators, we have public policy advocates, we have researchers, we have storytellers, we have culture makers,” she notes. “And all of that is to ground us in this idea that we believe we can build a better world in this country.”

As the pandemic is controlled, the Center focuses on making sustainable change by advocating for policy initiatives during the recovery. “I'm really, really proud of the relief we were able to get in the American Rescue Plan,” she tells Sam. “We have the largest increase in childcare spending since World War II. There was a child tax credit in that plan that, once implemented this summer, stands to move millions of families out of deep poverty. And the idea that that is a possible thing to do, that this country can do big and important things in this way, it was exciting and inspiring for all of us.”

Looking forward, Fatima is excited about the Center’s continuing work on building “a care infrastructure” that works for both families and employers. She notes that it will likely require third-party inputs to achieve fair wages for caregivers at prices that families can still afford. “In some ways the concept is pretty simple, if we want a stronger care infrastructure, then we're going to have to pay workers for that, and paying workers more actually helps the mostly Black and Brown women who have been doing those jobs,” she notes.

The future of mental health and women’s health with two healthcare CEOs

Innovation in healthcare is one of the biggest stories of the last few years, and in this episode, host Sam Saperstein, talks with two CEOs who’ve been at the forefront of that acceleration. Kate Ryder is the founder and CEO of Maven Clinic, the largest telemedicine health provider for family health and women's health. And April Koh is founder and CEO of Spring Health, a digital wellness platform aimed at making mental wellbeing easy to navigate for businesses and employees. In this conversation, Kate and April discuss how they each drew from personal experience as they built their companies, how COVID-19 impacted telemedicine, and how sometimes knowing when to pivot is the key to continued success.

Leveraging personal experience into start-up success

Both Kate and April drew on their own experiences as healthcare consumers when they started their companies. For Kate, it was her interactions with the complex maternal healthcare systems that led her to believe there must be a simpler way for women to access the range of care they deserve. She recalls thinking in 2014, when she started Maven Clinics, that “there was a lot around the telemedicine space that was really exciting, but nothing was really geared toward women and families.” She also knew that it could be hard for women to access the range of specialty providers they needed as they navigated fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond. So, she founded Maven with the goal of providing women with a multidisciplinary care team to help them fill in the gaps that often exist in women’s healthcare. Digital health or telemedicine is a key component of that, though Maven also offers in-person options for those who prefer that experience.

For April, it was her decade-long struggle with mental health that inspired her to start Spring Health. “I went through a really lonely and a really long process of trial and error to figure out something that would work for me,” she recalls. “And I found kind of randomly what worked for me, but I know so many people are struggling in that way today.” While so many other aspects of life were becoming data-driven and personalized, she felt that mental healthcare “felt like a total guessing game, it felt like it was stuck in the dark ages.” When she learned of groundbreaking research showing that machine learning could be used to personalize mental healthcare, she reached out to the researcher, Dr. Adam Chekroud. Together they launched Spring Health with the mission of making mental healthcare more accessible and personalized for everyone.

Navigating change and knowing when to pivot

As healthcare CEOs at a time when telemedicine was just taking off, both Kate and April learned to adapt and move fast. Recalling a time when she had found a great mental health care provider a few blocks from home, but could not make herself leave her bed to get to an in-person appointment, April says, she always knew that “the future of mental health care is virtual.” The pandemic accelerated trends toward telemedicine that had already started. Spring Health was off to a fast start, leveraging AI to provide personalized care, and benefiting from the overall trends toward telemedicine. But they faced a hiccup when their original model of selling into provider systems was being hampered by those system’s entrenched workflow issues. April’s response was to pivot quickly to owning their own provider network and eliminating the workflow bottlenecks. “It’s helped us move forward in our vision to deliver care,” she says. “And it’s one of the things I'm most proud over the past five years. I recommended a hard pivot.”

At Maven, Kate recalls a different type of pivot: shutting down a failing product. The product was birth-control subscriptions for college students, which Kate says they launched after hearing from enough parents that they would buy such a subscription for their college students. “And we realized later on, they were just being polite,” she says.  “Actually, they didn't want to think about their daughters having sex in college.” Eight months after launching the product, Maven shut it down. Luckily, they were already achieving success on other fronts and the quick pivot to shutting down the failed product spared them from big losses.

Entrepreneur’s passion for healthy baby products comes from a personal place

The healthy baby product industry has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and Shazi Visram has been a key player in that surge. From founding an organic baby food company just out of graduate school through raising an autistic son and then launching her baby-product company, Healthynest, during the pandemic, Shazi has immersed herself in the mission of protecting children’s environments. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about motherhood, her journey creating two successful mission-driven companies, and her roles as an investor and advisor.

A passion for entrepreneurship—and safe and organic children’s products

Shazi describes her journey as an entrepreneur as anything but pre-ordained. As the daughter of immigrants who ran their own businesses, she observed her parents’ entrepreneurial struggles and realized she wanted nothing to do with that—she’d be an artist and paint pictures instead. But by her early 20s, she realized that working for yourself is empowering. “When you work for yourself, the values that you bring into your work are your very own and you're directing the ethics of your life,” she says. “And so I realized that despite everything that I always said, I was going to… start a business.”

Shazi started the organic baby food company Healthy Baby in 2003, with the mission of impacting children's health through food. “I really saw this opportunity to kind of change children's outcomes by starting them off on the right foot with clean, healthy nutrition,” she tells Sam. She built Healthy Baby into a successful food company, but, she says, after her son was born and then later diagnosed with autism, she realized she needed to shift her focus to supporting her family. She sold Healthy Baby and plunged herself into researching the factors correlated with autism. Along the way, she developed a deep appreciation for all that impacts children’s development.

The difference a diaper can make

Shazi tells Sam that her research around children’s health and their environment was eye-opening. She realized there were many factors in addition to what they eat that have huge impacts on babies’ health. “One thing that's so exciting about the baby space is that when you can build products that live in a new parent’s home, you affect them on a day-to-day basis,” she says. 

Her focus landed on diapers—those everyday products that babies often spend their first three years in, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “This is an industry that had yet to be ever regulated,” she tells Sam. “And babies literally absorb everything that you put on their skin, through their skin, and it goes into the bloodstream right away. And we think about organic food because obviously what you eat, you want it to be clean, but there you have the benefit of your digestive system. And yet the skin is actually this huge organ that doesn't have the benefit of a digestive system to detox.”

Healthy diapers became a cornerstone of Shazi’s new company, Healthynest. The B Corp company’s mission is to fulfill each child's highest potential by supporting parents in their developmental health and outcomes. “And we do that by creating really elevated routines throughout the day, using products that ideally support their biological health so that we can focus on their developmental health,” she says.

Continuing her mission

Shazi shares that her first goal when launching Healthynest was to protect and enrich. “You protect by creating the safest biological environment for baby’s brain to develop in,” she says. “And then you enrich by creating activities and games and all kinds of basically therapeutic little fun things to do with baby that are actually building deeper neural pathways, but for a mom or dad, it's just a fun game.”

Shazi also discusses her philanthropic and investor efforts to encourage likeminded entrepreneurs. She says she truly loves backing founders who have “passion and vision and the ability to execute.” For instance, she was an early investor in EpiBone, a collaboration of the scientist Nina Tandon with Columbia University’s schools of business and medicine to develop the science to build human bones from stem cells.

New to the job at a time of global crisis, JPMorgan Chase diversity leader talks Diversity initiatives

Brian Lamb was named Global Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at JPMorgan Chase in April 2020—just a few weeks after the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. He got rolling in his new position just as the country erupted in response to the George Floyd murder, he still hasn’t met many of his colleagues in person, and yet he calls his new role the best career decision he’s  ever made. He sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about the firm’s DEI initiatives, what inspires him, and what he hopes to inspire in others.

Starting a new role during global upheaval

Brian tells Sam that the murder of George Floyd and subsequent ramifications offered an opportunity for reflection, both personally and professionally. “There's parts of this that you can never really prepare for, no matter how much professional experience you have, or even being a Black man in today's environment, which in many ways can be scary and uncertain—there’s really nothing that prepares you for what I think many of us felt or experienced,” he says. “So I think one of the first things I did is try to really kind of bring the humanity back to what we were all experiencing, pause and slow down and take the opportunity to understand that in so many ways, our  colleagues,  friends, neighbors, and the communities that we work with have so much more in common that we can rally around.”

Brian notes that many people have drawn on  natural human resilience to bounce back during times of crisis of the past year. For him, he says, the urgency of the moment translated into professional urgency. “It felt like I had a responsibility, both for my family and for the firm, to spring into action,” he says. “Not ignore long-term strategy, but frankly saying we didn't have the time to wait.”

Diversity initiatives at JPMorgan Chase

As the firm’s global head of DEI, Brian is responsible for executing a strategy that builds on the firm’s existing work and incorporates a diversity lens into how the firm develops products and services, serves clients, helps communities and supports employees. He says this work relies on the firm’s intentionality around an organizational strategy of having DEI ladder up into all aspects of the firm. “There was a commitment both verbally and structurally that we would weave diversity and inclusion into everything that we do,” he says.

Brian notes that accountability is an equally important factor. “The structure was intended to kind of be an enabler [but] we also want to make sure there's the right level of accountability,” he tells Sam. “As we think about sustainable change, we’re really pointing to the key elements of a business around having objectives, with priorities, initiatives, and programs that ladder into those priorities and ultimately have metrics that are transparent, that we can hold our most senior level leaders accountable to.”

That type of accountability, and viewing DEI initiatives as business priorities, are already showing success, Brian says. The firm currently has six verticals, including  Women on the Move , aimed at improving diversity throughout the firm. “We're seeing improvements in our representation results, generally across the board,” he notes.

Measuring success

Making change is not easy, Brian acknowledges. “We still have work to do to make sure that we create that right upward mobility, the experience for employees, regardless of their ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation or identity, so that they feel like this is a place that they belong and that they can thrive and grow,” he says. And at the end of the day, he says, success won't be measured by strategy or an action plan, or even public perception. The real measurement is whether JPMorgan Chase employees are getting the experience the DEI team has committed to providing.

“It’s a dynamic issue,” he tells Sam. “I don't think and have not seen any evidence to suggest there's really one solution or even a handful of solutions that are going to address the hundreds of years that have gotten in the way of equitable prosperity. The comprehensive nature of this, and the business-led nature of [our initiatives], we believe is going to be a difference maker and is a unique approach that we haven't really seen as many do.”

Brad Baumoel, the newly appointed global head of the LGBT+ affairs at JPMorgan Chase brings more than 30 years of experience advocating for the LGBT+ community. He joined Women on the Move Podcast host Sam Saperstein to talk about his passion for LGBT+ rights and how it transformed into this new full-time role.

In this new role, Brad has made it his mission to make JPMorgan Chase the best in class financial institution for LGBT+ for employees, customers, business partners and communities.  He will do this by building a global multi-year strategy, which includes making sure the LGBT+ talent at the bank has the right opportunities to match their skills. With inside awareness, education and training the firm aims to create better opportunities and put increased focus on the transgender community.

Brad has created true meaning behind the “why” of his job and the lasting impact he hopes to achieve. 

Honesty, humility and compassion: healthy advice for professional women from author Jennifer Nadel

How can professional women maintain a healthy balance in their lives? That’s the question that Jennifer Nadel explores in her book We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere. In this conversation with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein, Jennifer discusses the burnout she experienced in her award-winning journalism career, her path to healing, and her advice to help other women stay healthy as they pursue professional success.

Jennifer describes how satisfied she was in her career in the 1990s as a journalist at ITV. She brought important stories to light—stories that made real change, such as her report on the use of rape as a war crime against women in the Bosnian war. “Privileged is the only word I can think of,” she tells Sam, “I woke up every day feeling so motivated, feeling so driven because I was lucky enough to be in a position where I had a camera and a microphone and access to a nightly audience of up to 10 million viewers.

Success, burnout, and healing

But at the height of her success, Jennifer suddenly experienced crippling burnout. “I was so passionate about my work and I loved it so much that really everything else fell away,” she recalls. “I didn't think there was a problem with that because it held so much meaning for me and so much purpose. But in fact, I had driven myself far beyond the point at which humans can function. And, one day I just woke up and couldn't go on. And it came from nowhere. I can remember the weekend before thinking, I'm the luckiest woman in the world. I have two kids, I have this amazing job. And then one morning I just woke up and thought, I can't go on. I rang the office. And I said, I'm really sorry. I can't come in today. And in fact, I never went back.”

What followed was ten years “in the wilderness,” that she spent searching for health and a renewed sense of purpose. She describes those years as examining every conceivable religion, teacher tradition, and self-help practice in hopes of finding the one perfect solution. “What I really longed for was that I would find one path and that would be the answer,” she tells Sam. “And that wasn't my experience. What I did was I just took the best from every different teacher that I was fortunate enough to encounter.”

Manifesto for Women

That experience of burnout and healing inspired Jennifer to co-write WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere with her longtime friend and actress, Gillian Anderson. The book aims to help other women find holistic fulfillment—in a much less circuitous route than Jennifer took. Jennifer says she wanted to help women in high-pressure industries—women who are excited and enthusiastic and driven—enjoy success without risking their health. 

The book describes nine principles that women can embrace: honesty, acceptance, courage, trust, humility, peace, love, joy, and kindness. Jennifer describes honesty as one of the most foundational of the nine principles. “Truth matters to all of us,” she says. “And yet there is one person that we are often deceiving, continually, and that's ourselves. We tell ourselves that things are okay when they're not okay. We say yes, when we mean, no. We say, I'm fine. When actually we feel like weeping. And until we come into right relationship with ourselves and have an honest and authentic relationship with ourselves, it just means that we need to know what we really think about situations, what we feel about situations.”

How and why you should negotiate like a woman

Kathryn Valentine, the founder of Worthmore Negotiations, offers insights—and more importantly, concrete solutions— for women to negotiate successfully for the life and career they deserve. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein in a conversation described as “a masterclass, both for employees looking for a more rewarding career and employers who want to retain their top talent.”

The (male) art of negotiation

Kathryn tells Sam that she first became interested in the topic of women and negotiation when she was in business school. “I was blown away by the fact that my male peers were negotiating all kinds of amazing things,” she recalls. “These guys were doing it every day, to get business school paid for, to have their relocation to business school paid for (which I had never heard of), to do a one-year rotation with a really cool company that was a client of their main company, just all kinds of amazing things.”

She soon tried negotiating her own MBA internship, and she calls the result a disaster, “probably one of the worst negotiations anybody’s ever had.” So she spent a year researching the art of negotiating, and she learned that while negotiation is typically taught as if it's a gender-neutral skill, it's actually a highly gendered skill.

She emerged from her research with two major insights. One was that many women were leaving jobs for reasons that were actually negotiable, but the women just didn’t realize that they were. The second was that “negotiation is this incredibly powerful professional tool that a lot of women aren't able to fully leverage because the way that it's talked about and the way that it's portrayed as a way that feels really inauthentic to us.”

Reframing negotiation as collaboration

Kathryn identifies a focus on salary as one male-centric quality of most negotiations. “I think our minds automatically go to money and that’s important,” she says. “I don't want to downplay that there is a gender wage gap that needs to be paid attention to.” But often, she notes, women can negotiate something else—such as a more flexible schedule, or more autonomy or recognition—that will be “worth” more to them than salary.

She describes the importance of reframing negotiation as less of a competitive strategy and more of a collaboration. “The best negotiation ends with both parties walking away, feeling like they got something great,” she notes. “This can happen a majority of the time if we change how we think about it. The competitive strategy has seized our cultural mindset, so that's what we think of. However, the collaborative approach works significantly better for women—it eliminates the risk of backlash and enables both parties to walk away more satisfied.”

Practicing the micro to prepare for the macro

Kathryn also tells Sam that many women can be intimidated by the very idea of negotiating—but, like everything else, practicing the skill will help them improve. She suggests that women can practice negotiating on small, everyday facets of their work life (what she calls micro areas such as deadlines, meeting attendance, etc.) in order to be prepared for the macro negotiations that come with promotions, employment offers, and other milestones.

“I think of micro and macro in sort of two different ways. So for micro negotiations, the steps that I recommend are collect your data, craft your ask, and then get feedback because you do them so often that you can actually really improve quickly,” she says. “And then there are macro negotiations, which is a more complex process.”

For the macro negotiations, Kathryn suggests that women don’t negotiate just one thing, but negotiate three or five things at the same time. Her company offers guidelines that encourage women to focus on three areas: opportunities to increase their impact in the workplace, the support they need to be successful, and flexibility, which she notes is really “support by a different name.” She also notes that the recent pandemic offers opportunities. “You have a lot of really good tailwinds right now. COVID has proven that remote work is not the scary monster we thought it was two years ago. Now is the time to negotiate flexibility.”

To learn more about Kathryn’s work, go to worthmorenegotiations.com.

Gender equity leader: Gender parity is not merely a social issue, it’s an economic issue

Did you know research shows that when firms increase gender equity, they see increased profits? That’s what Katica Roy, CEO of Pipeline Equity, found in a study across 4,000 companies in 29 countries: for every 10 percent increase in gender equity measures, firms saw a 2 percent increase in revenue. In this conversation with Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein, Katica discusses why gender equity is more than just equal pay, and why she’s optimistic about expanding opportunity for women in the workplace.

Gender equity as an economic issue

As the daughter of an immigrant and a refugee, Katica had long been interested in improving access and opportunity for others. She describes her motivation as “the return of the opportunity that had been provided to my family.” As a young professional with two master’s degrees and experience in data science and human capital, she realized that she had “the opportunity to both change the narrative, but also use my skills to make gender equity a reality in my lifetime—…and make sure that somebody else had that opportunity.

Before starting Pipeline Equity, Katica researched the ROI of firms’ investments in gender equity. In addition to the findings about revenue increases, she learned that while 96 percent of CEOs reported being committed to equity, only 22 percent of employees reported that they regularly saw that shared and measured. “So you had this 74 point gap and how do we actually fill that gap?” she says. “The need that we were really looking to solve in the market was about changing the narrative from a social issue to an economic opportunity, but also enabling companies to essentially live their pledge or live their commitments on equity.”

Katica launched Pipeline Equity with the mission of helping firms increase financial performance through closing the gender equity gap. “We have historically treated [gender equity] as a social issue or the right thing to do rather than a business imperative,” she notes. “But if you can improve your revenue by one to two points for every 10% increase in equity, that's a significant lever to maximize shareholder value.” 

Measuring the pillars of performance

Pipeline uses analytics to guide firms’ decision-making across several pillars of performance. “One of the things that we found is that you can't close the gender pay gap by starting with pay,” she tells Sam. “We found that pay is actually the symptom. It's not the disease. So in other words, pay is this quantitative value that you place on your talent. But the actual value happens before that in performance and potential.”

Katica identifies three key decisions that companies make across their talent each year as performance, potential and pay. At Pipeline, she says, they often start by addressing performance and de-biasing performance reviews. “In performance reviews, there are two types of recommendations we provide,” she says. “One is the actual language itself. That's in the performance review. We call out bias phrases. And then the second is actually calibrating those ratings to ensure that they are applied equitably, equitable performance, equitable rating.” She notes that Pipeline has found that about a third of all performance reviews within companies contained bias and four percent of the time that bias leads to lower performance ratings for women.

Encouraging internal hiring is another approach Pipestone employs. Katica notes that in 86 percent of all job requisitions that Pipestone’s customers post, they find five or more qualified internal candidates. And internal hiring has been shown to benefit women. “There's a fair amount of mobility and opportunity that actually exists for existing employees,” she says. “And employees don't have to apply for that position. We're actually proactively giving that [list of qualified internal candidates] to the talent acquisition team. And then they contact the employees to interview for those positions.”

Remote work and gender equity

Katica also discusses the current trend toward virtual work in her conversation with Sam. She notes that many people assume that the increase in remote work is good for women. And while that might be true for some, she notes that for many, it’s led instead to an increase in non-paid household labor competing for their time, as well as more subtle impacts. “There are really three key issues with remote work and equity,” she says. “One is that women become more invisible. And if they’re invisible, they are less likely to be promoted. The second is managers tend to undervalue employees that work remotely. And then the third is you have to now speak up over Zoom.” She notes that it’s already harder for women to speak up in person, and remote meetings increase that disparity.

Career paths and fostering community engagement with a JPMorgan Chase Leader

With a deep history in both the public and private sectors, Melinda Yee Franklin stepped into the role of community engagement and corporate responsibility executive for the west region at JPMorgan Chase in late 2020. In this conversation with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein, she talks about her career path and why she thinks the time is right for bold corporate community engagement. A longtime advocate for Asian Americans, Melinda also reminds us why we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage month in May. 

Path from public to private sector

Malinda’s interest in government and public policy started when she landed a college internship in D.C. with her hometown congressman from California. She began her career at a telecommunications consulting firm, and in less than five years found herself working at the White House—with stops along the way in civil rights advocacy, at the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Democratic National Committee, and on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.

She soon took on a senior role at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where she stayed for several years. “At that point I had been in D.C. for about 10 years, and I thought, wow, it's been a ride,” she tells Sam. “And to me, it was time to come home back to California. And that's what I did.” Her next stop was in San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s office, where she stayed for four years. At that point, she says, she decided she wanted to explore the private sector.

Melinda began that part of her career at a startup called Meet China that became Meet World Trade, doing international B2B work. “And then I took time off because I had a child, and still continued consulting with clients that were both public and private sector,” she recalls. “There was an opportunity to be able to work with United Airlines as the head of corporate and government affairs for the west region. And I felt like, yeah, that's a good job for me because that combines the skillsets I've learned in the public sector. It was a really good fit for me at the time, and I stayed at United for 14 years.”

She hopes her career journey is inspiring for women looking to make a big career change. Her advice is to think about all the skills you’ve acquired from different roles. “I think when you package yourself, for lack of a better term, or create the narrative of your journey, just think about how that translates into other things that are related, but not necessarily the same,” she says.

Fostering community engagement at JPMorgan Chase

Melinda came to JPMorgan Chase in January to help launch the firm’s office of community engagement, which combines three vital functions within the corporate responsibility team: community re-investment, community partnerships, and the office of nonprofit engagement. She says the goal is to localize much of the office’s work of going into the communities and working with nonprofit leaders. “We’re really developing a narrative around what we're doing, how we're showing up into the community and working really closely with our philanthropy colleagues, as well as our government affairs colleagues, to really shine a light on the good work that JPMorgan Chase is doing,” she adds.

Post-pandemic, she says, she’s looking forward to helping rebuild small-business communities in cities such as San Francisco, where 50 to 60 percent of small businesses have disappeared since the start of the pandemic. “So how can we help to rebuild… these small businesses of color, women-owned businesses,” she says. “How can we really help them rise again?”

Pandemic aftermath: hybrid schedules and work-life satisfaction

As the president and co-founder of the digital career community Fairygodboss, Romy Newman has a front-row view of emerging trends in the workplace. In this conversation with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein, Romy discusses the impact of the pandemic on the workplace, how women can negotiate for flexibility, and her hopes for the hybrid office of the future.

The origins of Fairygodboss

Romy Newman already had a successful finance and marketing career including a stint as the only female vice president at the Wall Street Journal when a friend approached her about a start-up idea in 2015. The friend, who was pregnant and job searching at the time, was realizing how hard it was for women to find information about workplace policies supporting women. She was finding that her ability to collect information was only as good as the people she knew,” Romy recalls. “So if she didn't know somebody who worked at J.P. Morgan, she wasn't going to be able to find out what the maternity leave policy was . . . or whether the company had paid leave or infertility benefits or anything like that.”

With two young children at the time, Romy said she was looking for a change herself, so she jumped in to co-found Fairygodboss. At first Romy and her partner focused their new digital community on employee reviews, having women anonymously report their experience at different companies, but they soon changed the focus to be a forum where women can ask and answer specific questions. “What we've found is that women feel isolated as they rise up in the workplace and they have questions.” She says, “They don't know who to go to for answers. So was it okay that my boss said this, or I'm asking for a raise and I don't know the best way to approach it, or is now the time to apply for a lateral move or is now an appropriate time to ask for a promotion.”

Once the pandemic upended the workplace in 2020, the concerns being voiced on Fairygodboss centered more and more on the anxiety, burnout, and exhaustion of maintaining work-life balance while working from home, often with kids at home. “We have definitely seen it kind of rattle through our community,” she says. “Starting with kind of the shock of how am I even supposed to help my kids with homeschool at the same time that I'm doing a full-time job to the anxiety of I'm worried that if I am not available all the time, I'm going to lose my job to just like pure burnout and exhaustion.”

Negotiating for flexibility, and success in the hybrid office of the future

One positive to come out of the pandemic, Romy says, is a new appreciation for working from home. “I think this has been a wonderful experiment in how flexible schedules don’t impede productivity,” she says. And though she recognizes that there is value in the personal connections made in an office, she hopes the future will include more hybrid arrangements where women can set their own schedules according to their own strengths and needs.

For instance, she notes her own preferred work schedule: work early in the morning, then drop her kids at school, then work out, then get back to work mid-morning. “Instead of feeling like behind the ball, I feel ahead of things and I feel invigorated and happier,” she shares. “I think just being able to design my work around a schedule that works for me is so much better.

Her advice to women who want to negotiate more flexible schedules with their own bosses is simple: express it in a way that highlights the value it would bring to the company. “What is it going to do for them?” she asks. “If they help you have the flexibility that you want, I think helping them see that it's going to help you do better work, that you're going to be available to them, that you're going to get them everything they need is really important.”

For women currently searching for jobs, Romy advises focusing on areas where flexibility and hybrid schedules might be more available. Right now, she says, job postings are more than double what they were a year ago. “I know people don't want to hear this, but it's all digital, it's all technology,” she notes. “So I think for women who don't have those skills, the great news is they are so easy to acquire.”

Doing it All: Dr. Ronak Mehta Discusses Mixing Entrepreneurship and a Medical Career

Dr. Ronak Mehta found life as a practicing family physician and a clinical assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin both rewarding and challenging. Then a few years ago, she decided to pursue another longtime goal: founding a toy company to help educate and inspire people to learn more about their health. The physician and CEO sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she launched her company, navigating work-life balance, and what she sees in her future

Creating a toy company from scratch

Nerdbugs is a line of plush toys in the shape of human organs, which are intended to inform and educate children in science and healthy lifestyles. Ronak founded the company in 2018—but the idea had been germinating in her for about 10 years by then. She was in medical school when the concept first came to her. “One of the things that I noticed was how neat would it be if we had these plush toys that could not only be used to educate people about ‘Hey, you have asthma, this is what your lungs actually look like, and this is how asthma works,’” she says. “And the second thing was, it would be a really neat get well gift for someone that was hospitalized post-surgery or was undergoing dialysis or chemotherapy or something like that.”

Early in her medical career, Ronak also published a children’s book about health. While the book didn’t take off, it provided the inspiration for her idea about plush toys. It still took nearly 10 years to get up the nerve to actually pursue launching the toy company. Part of the reason for her resistance, she says, was self-doubt. “I sort of told myself, I have this formal career in health sciences and in medicine and I have no formal education in business, and I have no idea where to start and who am I to try to figure this out?” she says.

Adopting a “Why Not” Mentality

Once she finally took the first step of interviewing toy manufacturers to make prototypes of her design, Ronak says, she didn’t look back. When she first launched Nerdbugs, she was doing nearly everything herself. But once she realized the inefficiency in that model, she began hiring freelancers to cover areas like web development, social media, customer service, and photography. And she learned that taking the time to select the right partners as freelancers, and to nurture and support them, helped the company grow. “I wanted to help build these relationships within Nerdbugs, where it wasn't just a short-term person that I was looking for, but someone that really believed in the mission and wanted to grow as we grew,” she says.

Along the way, Ronak recalls, she adopted a “Why not?” mentality around Nerdbugs and taking chances on business contests. As she explains: “So I would apply for these things that I felt like maybe I'm not qualified for, but why not me? Why wouldn't they pick me?”

Work-life balance and what’s next

As she’s successfully juggled her medical career with her business venture, Ronak says she’s continuing to refine her work-life balance. “When I first started, you know, you have this fire inside you where you're like, okay, I'm just going to make it happen,” she says. “So you wake up at ungodly hours, go to work, come home and work.” Now, she says, she’s setting more boundaries, like not working after 6 p.m., or taking the whole weekend off.

As far as the future, Ronak has big plans. She’s in the process of revising her children’s book that originally inspired Nerdbugs. She wants to include more Nerdbugs as characters in the book. And she’s exploring video and creating animated shorts based on the characters.

Cleo Capital’s Leader Hopes More Women Follow Her into VC

Women are severely underrepresented in the world of venture capitalism. That’s something that Sarah Kunst, managing director of Cleo Capital, would like to see change. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss her career path, why she loves VC work, and the ongoing challenges of racism and sexism.

A unique career path

Unlike many leaders in the VC world, Sarah studied advertising in college and began her career in marketing, working for brands like Apple, Red Bull, and Chanel. She says understanding the importance of branding helps her spot companies that will be successful. “What working for those places really taught me is that if you are a consumer-focused brand, if you are something that no one needs in their life, then you better have an amazing, amazing brand so that people want you in their life,” she tells Sam.

Sarah describes how her move to the world of VC funding was almost accidental. She was working for a firm that ran into financial issues, and she asked an investor friend for some advice. “I had free time,” she recalls. “So I would do some research and I would send her back these long emails about, you know, this company is interesting because X, Y, Z, and this is what the market looks like. And I just was being helpful because she was helping me and giving me advice and I wanted to return the favor.“ Sarah’s friend recognized her talent—and encouraged her to come work in VC. That type of mutual support is, according to Sarah, the key to career advancement.

The ongoing challenges of racism and sexism and the future of VC

One path to VC success is to start out as an angel investor, Sarah notes. Once you have a successful track record as an independent investor, a VC firm is more likely to want to invite you in. For people who don’t have the money for angel investing, scout programs such as the one at Cleo can be invaluable. A scout program, she says, is basically angel investing with someone else’s money. Many firms offer scout programs, which can be an ideal pathway for start-up executives and others with deep industry knowledge but without the capital to invest, to get into VC.

For those working in VC, Sarah describes the day-to-day job as less strategic and more like being a babysitter. She says her work falls into four buckets: finding the prospect, securing the investment, helping the company do well, and finally, exiting and making the money. The bulk of her time is spent helping the company do well, and that’s why it feels most like babysitting: she finds herself performing multifaceted tasks in the name of freeing up the company founder’s energy to be successful. Recently, for example, she drove to the Apple Store to retrieve a founder’s laptop.

The barriers keeping women and people of color from success in the VC world, Sarah says, “are always the same thing: its racism and sexism.” The solution, she says, is just as simple: hire more women and give them a seat at the investing table. She’s hopeful, given all the research that diverse teams perform better whatever the industry, that more VC firms will embrace diversity. “To all the crazy people out there who say they care about making money and who aren't surrounding themselves with diverse teams, I feel bad for you because you know, you're missing out on money that I'm going to make!” she says.

Sustainable Farming Entrepreneur Talks Career Path and Autism Awareness

Zephrine Hanson’s journey from Air Force photojournalist to small-scale farming entrepreneur in Colorado has been shaped by time her career in the service and her role as a mother to three children on the autism spectrum. During Autism Awareness Month, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein talks with Zephrine about those experiences and her mission to make small-scale farming profitable.

Military experience paves the way

Wanting both a path to college and a chance to see the world, Zephrine joined the Air Force soon after graduating from high school in southern California. She spent eight years as a photojournalist and although she ultimately left the military, she says she learned invaluable skills including the ability to both plan and be able to think on the fly, as well as how to compromise with others. “Sometimes I'd have to photograph someone who didn't really want to be on camera, but we both had been voluntold to do this,” she explains. “And so [I learner] a little bit of the art of negotiation.”

But it was after leaving the military that Zephrine experienced some of the biggest benefits of her service: veterans organizations. She’s participated in more than four programs, which helped connect her to entrepreneurial support. “Every veteran program I went to has allowed me to just even be here to speak with you,” she tells Sam. “I learned from them how to have my transition, have this second opportunity at life.”

Transition to sustainable farming

As a veteran facing health issues, Zephrine found herself immersed in wellness. She explored “every kind of spiritual religion," yoga, healthy eating, and other wellness practices. Feeling healthier, she and her husband embarked on parenthood: first a son and then, 15 months later, twin daughters. “I wasn’t ready” she tells Sam. “There was no part of me that was ready for that.” She and her husband dealt with the stress by moving to Denver—a place where they knew nobody but figured they could build their future.

In Denver, Zephrine connected with a veteran organization that had a relationship with the Denver Botanic Gardens. The program connected her lifelong interests in farming and entrepreneurship with the community connectedness she had discovered as a Black woman in veteran programs.

Soon she founded Hampden Farms, a suburban farming project offering sustainable farming solutions and small-batch artisanal products made from organic ingredients. “The mission of Hampden farms is to make small scale farming profitable,” she says. “I get to be a farm business owner and work with other growers and farmers who are creating these systems to really change the farm system.” Along with several other farmers, she created the East Denver Food Hub, who collaborate on marketing and distribution. Their goals is to make local food accessible to everyone. That includes people who have traditional barriers to fresh food, including families with special needs kids.

A family affair

Zephrine’s family has been central to her journey as a businesswoman and advocate. Her three children had received diagnoses of autism, and when she and her husband took the opportunity to move to Denver, they decided to homeschool their children, and soon discovered an organization called Teaching the Autism Community Trades. Knowing that statistics show 90 percent of people with an autism diagnosis will never be hired, Zephrine and her husband embraced teaching skills to their children. Farming, and the development of Hampden Farms, fit that bill perfectly.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Zephrine took the opportunity to launch Farm in a Box, a virtual interactive experience where customers can curate a box of local produce. The idea was partly inspired by her husband, faced with the reality of the family being stuck at home due to the pandemic. He built a backyard farm where their children could participate in skilled farm work. Meanwhile Zephrine, inspired by activity boxes her children received during the pandemic, hatched the idea of Farm in a Box. She applied for and received grant funding from a Denver organization. She’s working with the food hub, whose farmers make money by delivering the boxes clients create. That circles back to her original mission for Hampden Farms: making small-scale farming profitable.

Disability Inclusion at JPMorgan Chase: Two Perspectives

In celebration of Autism Awareness Month, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein sat down to look at disability inclusion at JPMorgan Chase through two different lenses. First, she speaks with Jim Sinocchi, head of JPMorgan Chase’s Office of Disability Inclusion, to hear about the organization’s goals, priorities, and the innovative Autism at Work program. She also talks with Kym Francis, an operations project manager who was diagnosed with autism shortly after beginning her career at JPMorgan Chase.

Normalizing differences

Jim Sinocchi was just settling into retirement when he was invited to run the Office of Disability Inclusion at JPMorgan Chase & Co. And although he’d been looking forward to time with his family after nearly four decades with IBM, he found the opportunity too enticing to turn down. “[They told me] ‘we do a pretty good job with diversity, with all the other groups,’” he recalls. “’We just don’t know how to do it for disability inclusion.’” Jim—who has been in a wheelchair since being paralyzed in a body surfing accident at age 25—was impressed with leadership’s honesty and enthusiasm, and accepted the challenge.

Jim sat down for interviews with 16 of the company’s leaders when he first joined in order to hear their perspectives. He says those discussions were invaluable because they were private and allowed for honest conversations around disability inclusion. He tells Sam that his team’s overall priority is to make able-bodied people in the organization comfortable with people with disabilities. “Our society makes disability too complicated,” he says. “They go into, are you blind? Are you deaf? Do you have a mental illness? And the idea is that that is really not a way to engage a population where we're trying to normalize people with disabilities.”

Overall, Jim says JPMorgan Chase continues to make progress in the area of disability inclusion—although recruiting remains a challenge. He shared that many job candidates with disabilities are careful not to disclose their disability until they are deep into the hiring process. One of his priorities, he says, is to help hiring managers understand the value of recruiting people with disabilities.

Autism inclusion is an area where JPMorgan Chase is a worldwide leader. The firm’s Autism at Work program started as a pilot with a handful of employees in 2015. Today the firm has more than 200 employees on the autism spectrum across nine countries. Jim notes that the program excels at figuring out where in the organization to place people with autism, and then ensuring their success. “And I'm not surprised in terms of the success of the program because of the skillset that we've been able to uncover with people on the autism spectrum,” he shares. “The autism area is the rock star of disability inclusion because of the findings that we have learned about their brilliance in terms of certain jobs.”

Autism at Work from an employee perspective

For a different perspective on the Autism at Work program, Sam also speaks with project manager Kym Francis. Kym joined JPMorgan Chase as an analyst in 2016. Soon after she started in that role, Kym received her autism diagnosis —at age 24. She described how helpful the diagnosis was “because I was able to use it as a tool to understand myself, to understand why I had struggled in certain areas and to stop beating myself up internally about things I had not done so well previously.” Still, she says she was terrified to tell her manager about her diagnosis. But rather than viewing it as a negative, her manager stepped in to advocate for her. “He said to me ‘I don’t know what to do here, I don’t know what the protocol is,” she recalls, “’But I’m willing to go and do research and find out what’s out there, what we can do for you.’”

Since then, Kym said, she has come to realize that the organization puts a huge amount of resources into disability inclusion, including the Autism at Work program. “The biggest game changer for me, that's made J.P. Morgan somewhere I could excel as opposed to anywhere else, is having supportive managers and having managers that have not been put off by some of the things I have struggled with as a result of autism, and are willing to have open conversations about those things and offer me some guidance,” she says. “And sometimes it's not as a physical, reasonable adjustment or change in the environment. Sometimes it's just about having someone you can talk to. I've always had encouragement to write, what's next? Where do you want to grow? Where do you want to develop?”

COVID-19 Widens the Gender Gap: Joyce Chang Discusses new Findings

How is the pandemic affecting gender balance in the global workforce, in corporate leadership, and in the public sector—and what policies can help women thrive moving forward? That’s exactly what Joyce Chang, the chair of global research for JPMorgan Chase's Corporate and Investment Bank, sat down to talk about with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein. Joyce discussed the 2021 findings of her team’s annual Global Balance Report.

How did women fare globally during the pandemic?

Joyce described her team’s top-level findings in her conversation with Sam. First, she noted, this year’s report reveals that female participation in the labor force is suffering a historic setback as a result of COVID-19. “We're actually at a 33-year low in the United States,” she said. “The lowest since 1988, as women have lost jobs that are concentrated in the services sector, and they've also born greater responsibility for childcare.” During the pandemic, she noted, 2.3 million women have lost jobs, as compared to 1.8 million men. That discrepancy can be traced back to childcare, home responsibilities, and virtual learning patterns. For instance, when school started in September 2020, four times as many women left their jobs as men that month.

A second major theme in the report was that the gender pay gap is at best stagnating, and potentially widening. In the U.S. that rate has hovered around 17.5 percent, while in the EU it’s a bit better at 15 percent. But Joyce noted that researchers are currently worried about long-term impacts because as the economy recovers, service jobs—which are female-dominated—are the hardest to recover.

Third, Joyce’s team found that racial inequality in the labor market is also on the rise. In the U.S., for instance, Black female participation dropped by nearly 6.5 percentage points from February to September, 2020. “Black women who had benefited from some of the largest employment gains from 2015 to 2019, because you had such a strong labor market that pulled the new workers, have experienced the most significant setbacks,” she added.

Another area of progress over the past decade—female representation on boards—also showed signs of slowing over pandemic. However, Joyce noted, one silver lining seems to be a heightened global awareness of the issue. “There is a focus on getting women in public leadership positions in the developed markets,” she noted.

What policies can help women moving forward?

While many of the findings from the report showed backward movement for women in the U.S. and around the world, Joyce noted that there is reason for optimism as pro-women policies gain traction. JPMorgan Chase’s paid parental leave policy is an example of employers moving in the right direction. Along with paid parental leave policies, support for early childhood education is critical to solidifying women’s ability to remain and flourish in the workforce.

Another policy that can help achieve more gender parity is an emphasis on “reskilling” or re-training women to succeed in in-demand, higher-pay jobs. Unfortunately, Joyce noted, that’s most feasible in developed countries, and women in the world’s emerging markets are still likely to be left behind.

What does the future look like?

Joyce predicts that, where possible, the future of women in the workplace will be a hybrid model of in-person and remote work. “[During the pandemic] it's been very possible to keep that global connectivity because of technology,” she noted. “But I'm finding that what everybody does miss is that in-person contact and connectivity. So you want to get the right balance. And I think that's where the focus is going to be. It's not going to be back to what it was before.”

Joyce cited her involvement with Girls Inc. as an example of a reason for optimism. JPMorgan Chase has a sponsorship with the nonprofit serving low-income girls, and Joyce currently sits on the board. The progress that she sees Girls Inc. making in terms of preparing girls for a strong financial foundation and successful career has inspired confidence in the future.

Embracing a more fearless approach, even in a pandemic

When Jean Case published her book, Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose five years ago, she had no idea that we were about to experience a life-altering global pandemic—and she certainly didn’t anticipate that the book’s principles would remain relevant during such a crisis. But, as she discussed with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein, that’s exactly what happened.

Case’s book centers on five principles of a fearless approach to change and growth: making big bets; being bold in taking risks; making failure matter; reaching beyond your bubble; and letting urgency conquer fear. And as Case, who’s also CEO of the Case Impact Network, the Case Foundation and chairman of National Geographic Society, told Saperstein, she was a little uncomfortable in the beginning of COVID-19 to have a book about being fearless at a time when we all needed to take safety measures. “But obviously the kind of fearlessness that I talk about in the book is the fearlessness that looks past what's right in front of you and sees a different future, and clearly that's what we've needed in this last year,” she said.

Big risks, big bets

At the core of Case’s advice to innovators is the idea of starting where you are. “What is not well understood about entrepreneurs, for instance, is that in most cases they’re really solving a problem when they start a new company,” she says. “And in most instances it’s a problem that they’ve either dealt with, or been up close to. And it turns out that’s universal for change makers around the world.” Once you’ve envisioned a solution to a need that’s before you, you often need to take a big risk and make a big bet to put that vision into practice.

In Case’s own life, her big risk and her big bet came in the early days of the internet, when she had a dream job shepherding the new “online services” vision at corporate giant GE. But when a tiny start-up came calling, she was interested in joining an organization with risk-taking in its DNA. Against the advice of horrified friends, she joined the start-up, which later became AOL.

Silver linings of the COVID era

The current pandemic has impacted several areas of life over the past year—not the least of which is people’s willingness and ability to take big risks and make big bets. But Case says the pandemic has led to great innovation as well: she tells the story of an emergency-room doctor struggling with a lack of PPE who devised a process so that 80,000 masks a day could be sanitized and reused.

And pandemic life has provided fertile ground for another of Case’s priorities: advancing equity and inclusion, especially amongst women. Amidst research showing that organizations with diverse teams outperform those without, today’s virtual meetings are more diverse than when people had to physically meet in an office. She noted a very specific reason why female entrepreneurs are benefiting from the propensity to virtual meetings: “There's a very sad narrative through the years as entrepreneurs sit in front of investors, they get hit on, they have to put up with a lot . . Well, it's a little harder to do that over Zoom.”

Looking forward

Case continues to advocate for diversity and inclusion in her roles at both the Case Foundation and the National Geographic Society. When she became chair at National Geographic, the organization’s explorer class was more than 80 percent male; today it’s 51 percent female. At the Case Foundation she continues to both invest in and champion organizations that strive to give women opportunities. 

She’s currently putting her passion to work as co-chair of the American Women's History Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution. “This initiative sets out with one goal in mind, and that is to make sure we are adequately capturing the unbelievable contributions and achievements of women through time in America,” she said. “It is a very intentional effort to open up the archives and look across fields and say, where were the contributions of women left on the cutting room floor?” To Case, it’s an extension of her life’s work: recognizing when women have been fearless in the past is a step toward encouraging women to be fearless today.

JPMorgan Chase Foundation President Talks Transformative Giving in Times of Crisis

At the helm of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation is president Janis Bowdler, a visionary leader who’s transforming how the organization distributes $350 million annually in charitable giving. In fact, it was under her leadership that JPMorgan Chase & Co announced it would make a $30 billion incremental investment in Black and Hispanic communities across a variety of different areas and sectors over a five-year period. In this conversation with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein, Janis talks about how the foundation reached that colossal decision and how she’s adjusted her leadership style in the time of COVID-19.

Crisis shines a light on need

With a mission to help vulnerable communities around the world, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation has spent decades helping low-income communities share in the prosperity of a growing global economy. Janis explains that, for the past seven years she’s been with the firm, her work has been all about inclusive economic growth.

Then 2020 came, and things changed almost overnight.

“Suddenly we're hit with a double crisis of a global pandemic and an economic recession,” she says. “So we shifted quickly from a growth mindset to a recovery mindset. The needs of our communities and our nonprofit partners shifted significantly.”

Long-term infrastructure projects were set aside, and Janis put the foundation’s energies toward core support. She worked to get dollars to nonprofits on the front lines, funding organizations that handled everything from feeding families, to making sure that they could cover household expenses until their stimulus checks arrived. Since many of the foundation’s existing partners were already deeply embedded in vulnerable communities, Janis and her teams were able to get firsthand intelligence on what was actually going on. From there, she could determine the needs of those communities and pivot to respond.

How giving is changing in a post-COVID world

Although Janis makes loads of decisions about how the foundation’s resources should be allotted, she speaks frankly about the importance of centering decisions on community needs. This has been a trend in philanthropy for some time, but the events of 2020 and the COVID crisis have given it even more weight.

“Philanthropy can exist in a bubble. We have dollars, we have prestige, and frankly, we have power compared to vulnerable communities,” she explains. “And so it's easy to sit in our rooms and say, here's what we think the problem is. And here's what we think the solution ought to be. The shift is to do deep listening and say to community members, ‘You know better than we do. What are you seeing? What are the solutions that you really want to put forward?’”

Janis also describes how economic, political, and social shifts in 2020 forced her to make certain that funding from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation truly supported and was built around the most vulnerable people. In most cases, that meant Black and Hispanic community members, since they are both more likely to be in frontline jobs and more likely to experience unemployment.

“The pandemic has laid bare what we already knew; the deep inequality facing Black and Brown communities around the United States and around the globe,” she says.

Keeping up the good work

Despite the challenges of 2020, Janis remains hopeful about what the foundation can achieve. She explains how the organization advocates for policies that make real change for communities, puts dollars into non-profits, and sends in teams to support existing organizations with everything from building out back office technology to developing marketing plans. She is excited to steer the JPMorgan Chase Foundation into a bright future.

What Really Matters When You’re Picking a Financial Advisor?

If you don’t know exactly what a financial advisor does all day, you’re not alone. Many of us have the nagging feeling we should engage with one … but aren’t quite sure what they’d do for us. That’s why Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein sat down with Annemarie von der Goltz, a Wealth Advisor with J.P. Morgan. In this conversation, Annemarie gives us a peek behind the curtain to see how she connects with her clients and why she loves her job.

As it turns out, financial advisors like Annemarie may juggle everything from lending, estate planning, retirement planning, and investment strategies to talking about monthly expenses and cash flow. She’s there for her clients, no matter how big or small their money-related questions may be. Interestingly, a financial advisor’s job used to be narrower in scope. Annemarie points out that the role of the financial advisor has evolved over time, and now she needs to think 10 steps ahead of her clients.

“We have to be thinking about the ripple effect of anything we do,” she explains. “[We need to make] sure that we are using the knowledge we have from servicing other clients to set up each new client.”

Why rapport matters in financial advising

The investment world has a reputation for being cold and impersonal, and yet money itself is an incredibly emotional concept for most of us. For this reason, Annemarie urges women seeking financial advisors to focus on rapport and chemistry. The relationship will be an intimate one by its very nature, so you should pick someone who “gets” you! To work effectively with her, Annemarie insists that her clients share their wants, needs, and fears so she can create custom-fit investment strategies for them. Her years of experience have taught her that if a client doesn’t trust her, she’s sunk.

“A financial advisor, from my perspective, is a coach, an educator, and a psychologist,” she says. “If you don't feel comfortable opening up, it's probably not going to be a great relationship. Your advisor is only as good as the information you share with them.”

To close out the conversation, Sam asks if a career in financial advising and planning is welcoming to women. Annemarie says it’s a perfect fit for women with high emotional IQs and entrepreneurial spirits and encourages more women to follow in her footsteps.

DISCLOSURES

The statements, views and opinions expressed are those of the presenters and are not necessarily endorsed by, or reflect the views or positions of, JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA or any of its affiliates.  The presentation is for informational purposes and is not a recommendation or solicitation of any particular actions.  JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA and its affiliates are not liable for decisions made or actions taken in reliance on any of the information covered during the event.

Investing involves market risk, including possible loss of principal, and there is no guarantee that investment objectives will be achieved.

This material is intended as a general commentary , and not intended to be a forecast of future events, or guarantee of future results or investment advice. The opinions expressed are those of Annemarie von der Goltz and may differ from those of other J.P. Morgan employees and affiliates.  This material should not be regarded as research or as a J.P. Morgan Research Report. Nothing in this material shall be considered a solicitation to buy or an offer to sell securities, other investments or services to any person in any jurisdiction where such an offer, solicitation, purchase or sale would be unlawful under the laws of such jurisdiction.  Any mention of an individual security, investment or strategy is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation. Outlooks and past performance are not guarantees of future results.

The use of any third-party trademarks or brand names is for informational purposes only and does not imply an endorsement or that such trademark owner has authorized JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., to promote its products or services.

J.P. Morgan Wealth Management is a business of JPMorgan Chase & Co., which offers investment products and services through J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (JPMS), a registered broker-dealer and investment advisor, member FINRA and SIPC. Annuities are made available through Chase Insurance Agency, Inc. (CIA), a licensed insurance agency, doing business as Chase Insurance Agency Services, Inc. in Florida. Certain custody and other services are provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (JPMCB). JPMS, CIA and JPMCB are affiliated companies under the common control of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Products not available in all states.

Investment and insurance products are not F-D-I-C insured, not insured by any government agency, not a deposit or other obligation of, or guaranteed by JPMorgan Chase Bank N-A or any of its affiliates. Subject to investment risks, including possible loss of the principal amount invested.

Teaching Girls to Be Strong, Smart, and Bold

Stephanie Hull knows that making our society more equitable for women is a long game. (And just like Whitney Houston, she definitely believes “the children are our future.”)

So she’s working with young girls, aged 5 to 18, to teach them the skills and confidence they need to grow into powerful leaders. Stephanie discusses her transformative program, Girls Inc., with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein, including how her programming covers topics from racial justice to money management.

Shifting paradigms through mentors and role models

Girls Inc. is a big organization tackling big issues. Through a combination of direct service and advocacy, the program helps budding leaders grow up healthy, educated, and independent through in-school and after-school workshops. And with 78 local organizations in 1600 different sites—both urban and rural—Girls Inc. has some serious reach!

Participants might tackle anything from building a robot in STEM programming to developing a yoga practice in mind/body classes. Stephanie is especially proud of the mentorship component of Girls Inc. She’s witnessed firsthand the power that role models have on the hearts and minds of young girls.

“A mentor can make a huge difference in their ability to be resilient, to stay on track in school, to graduate from college,” she says. “When you have a role model who is a woman, who models healthy choices and also cares about you, that goes a long way. Mentors help to build a sense of possibility.”

She points out that this is especially true when it comes to money matters; if your role model is a dedicated saver or an enthusiastic investor, that can have a huge impact on your own habits. This is why Girls Inc. has a strong financial literacy component.

Making money less mysterious

Since our schools don’t teach kids how to make budgets or apply for loans, most young adults emerge with no real knowledge of how to manage their finances. Stephanie sees this as a huge roadblock for upcoming generations, one that prevents them from leading financially independent lives. The Girls Inc. financial literacy curriculum is designed to be age-appropriate, teaching the youngest girls about simple concepts like counting money and basic banking; the middle grades about investing, entrepreneurship, and budgeting; and the oldest girls about loans, labor laws, and economic equity for women. Parents even get involved in this aspect of Girls Inc., and everyone graduates with a solid sense of how to manage their money.

JPMorgan Chase is thrilled to partner with Girls Inc. on their economic literacy program, and couldn’t be more proud of the progress Stephanie has made with this groundbreaking set of classes. She has such a clear vision for what her girls need to build confidence and grow into strong, capable women.

“They are the leaders that our future needs,” she insists. “And what we're trying to do is provide them with the tools and opportunities that they need to succeed, to change their own circumstances and ultimately to change the world.”

Byna Elliot is paving roads for change

For over two decades, Byna Elliot has created opportunities for growth and development within low- and moderate-income communities, and now she’s bringing her expertise to JPMorgan Chase, leading the Advancing Black Pathways program at a pivotal moment in American history. In this episode, Byna joins Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein to discuss what it’s been like to helm the Advancing Black Pathways program during COVID-19, how changes must be made with intention, and advocating for yourself in the workplace.

Forging Pathways

As the Head of Advancing Black Pathways, Byna oversees the bank’s $30 billion commitment to closing the wealth gap for Black and Latinx communities. From transitioning HBCU graduates into the workforce, to fostering entrepreneurship by increasing access to capital for Black and LatinX business owners, Byna works tirelessly to strengthen the next generation of leaders.

Arriving at JPMorgan Chase just months before COVID-19, Byna quickly pivoted the entire operation to meet the unexpected challenges brought on by the pandemic. With some students lacking access to the technology they needed for online learning or struggling to stay focused, it was no longer reasonable to expect the same level of academic output that was once possible. To meet students where they were at, Byna and the Advancing Black Pathways team worked with Thurgood Marshall and the United Negro College Fund to create a million dollar hardship fund and to modify the admissions qualifications in order to boost students’ chances for success, such as lowering the GPA requirements. “We wanted to make sure that we made some changes that allow these great students that we’ve supported over the years to have an opportunity to continue on with their education,” says Byna. “We want to make sure that we were part of the solution so that those students didn’t have debt without the prize of having a degree.”

Choosing a Focal Point

This isn’t the first time Byna has led an initiative designed to reverse economic inequality, but the culmination of the protests following the murder of George Floyd and the blatant disparities highlighted by COVID-19’s destruction, she found herself reexamining her approach. “While I was extremely proud of the work I had [previously] done, it wasn’t focused on race,” she says. “When I pulled the data, I didn’t see the outcomes on race that I thought I should have seen given my focus on low and moderate income communities. It reminded me how important it is to really hone in on the communities and cultures or races that you want to affect. And so the opportunity to come to an organization that has been so bold and courageous was really important.”

Being Your Greatest Spokesperson

We’ve all heard about backlash women might face after sticking up for themselves in the workplace, but if we don’t advocate for ourselves, no one else will. Halfway through her career, when Byna was the only woman on her company’s senior leadership team, she had to make a choice: she could either continue bending over backwards to accommodate her male coworkers while juggling her responsibilities as a wife and a mother, or she could speak up.

So she spoke up.

“They wanted to start a meeting at six o’clock,” she explains, noting that the early start time meant having to drop her kids off at her mother’s house two hours prior so she could get them ready for school. Believing that her co-workers should never see her sweat, she agreed to the proposed schedule despite its obstacles. “So I get to the office before six I’m there, smiling, ready, looking calm, and collected, the gentlemen saunter in and they laugh, they joke, they’re talking football, they’re talking sports. And I am sitting there steaming and thinking they have no idea what it took for me and my family to get into this office.”

When the meeting wrapped and her boss asked whether they could meet again at the same time the next day, she put her foot down. “I said ‘the same things that you expect for your

wife to enable you getting into the office is the same thing my husband expects for me. It takes a lot for me to get in here at six o’clock in the morning and it doesn’t work for me.’”

The following morning, the meeting started at 8 a.m.

All because Byna voiced her needs and her boss listened.

How Barnard’s President Sets Female Students on the Path to Success

Sian Beilock is president of Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women in New York City. The mission of the school is to develop its students to become agile, resilient, responsible, and creative in order to lead and serve their society, and Sian eagerly describes some of the school’s groundbreaking programs that fulfill that mission.

“We started a new program this year that I'm really excited about called Access Barnard,” she tells Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein. “It’s a home, both physical and virtual, for first-generation, low-income, and international students. So populations that may not have experience navigating American higher ed.”

Access Barnard offers these students help with everything from finding a mentor to budgeting for living expenses to asking professors for help. Sian says this program is particularly important because the school’s acceptance policy is need-blind: Barnard doesn’t consider financial need when reviewing applications.

Since Barnard is very focused on preparing women to lead, the school has created multi-level resources to help alums succeed once they’ve graduated. One such resource is Beyond Barnard, a one-stop shop that students utilize from day one to learn about different career paths and connect with professionals in the school’s broader network. Sian explains that connecting her students to female role models across industries is a huge priority.

“At Barnard, 60% of our faculty are women, including faculty in the sciences,” she says. “And when you see women who are excelling in fields where they're not traditionally represented, when you see women leaders, it lets you know that ‘people like me’ can do this.”

Self-care as leadership prep

Sian emphasizes that her school is dedicated to instilling its graduates with the skills and knowledge they need to achieve long-term independence. The school’s new Francine LeFrak Center gives all Barnard students access to comprehensive physical and mental health, holistic wellness, and financial literacy support services, and underlines Barnard’s commitment.

“We know that women often stay in relationships for financial reasons and that women even who are successful in their own careers, aren't overseeing their own finances,” Sian explains. “These are part of the financial literacy conversations that will take place at our new wellbeing center.”

Watching Barnard students gain confidence, expertise, and wisdom makes her job incredibly rewarding, Sian tells Sam.

“Our students are going to go out and change the world,” she emphasizes. “I know young people are not going to stand by and go back to the old normal or accept systemic inequality issues around healthcare, race, and education. I have so much confidence and pride in these young women, and I can't wait to see what they produce next.”

Real Talk About Homeownership

Did you know that nearly 20 percent of new homeowners are single women? Even in the face of pay gaps and other gender-centric challenges, women are finding ways to invest in houses, condos, and apartments of their own. To discuss this trend, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein calls on Keosha Burns, Vice President of Public Relations at Chase Home Lending. Keosha is a homeowner herself, and speaks candidly about her challenges and triumphs. 

“Once I came around to wanting to buy a home, I had about $10,000 in credit card debt that I needed to tackle,” she admits. “I also had student loans, but my student loan debt was not outrageous. I was making that payment just fine. So I decided to tackle the credit card debt first.”

She says she sat down with her grandfather who took out a piece of graph paper and created a plan to aggressively pay down her debt. With his guidance, she had it paid off in about six months and was able to save another few thousand dollars on top of that! Keosha acknowledges that each woman will need to create a financial plan that works for her unique situation, but says that anyone who has been bitten by the homeownership bug should start by taking a long, hard look at her financial profile. Without a thorough analysis of income, spending habits, and debt, tackling a giant investment like a mortgage is bound to backfire.

“This is a huge transaction,” she says. “The biggest purchase most people will ever make in their life. And you need to make sure you're not just relying on someone else to tell you what you can afford to buy.”

Single women homeowners making waves

Why are more and more single women buying homes? It used to be that purchasing a home was something that went hand-in-hand with settling down, getting married, and starting a family … but recent studies show that women aren’t interested in waiting. Many are eager to create a stable foundation for their financial futures, but Keosha points out that the single women driving this home-buying trend have a variety of backgrounds and motivations.

“I see a couple of groups. There’s this older cohort of women, often dealing with a divorce or separation of some kind, who are trying to maintain their lifestyle for their family,” she says. “I think that's a big portion of the single women home buyers. And then you also have this younger Millennial cohort that is focused on their careers. They're determined to build wealth and home ownership is a big part of that.”

In a previous role, Keosha launched a campaign to attract Millennials to homeownership through education and open communication, so she’s especially attuned to this group’s needs. She insists that if companies want to connect with female home-buyers in this demographic, they can’t just hit them with the same old messaging. They need to understand what women are looking for, how they're living their lives today, and how their dreams are shaping their homeownership goals.

“Telling these women, ‘You need to be part of a family to afford to make a purchase,’ or even just showing images of big suburban homes, it won’t work,” she says. “There are all different types of houses and people who buy them. We need to make sure that people know our industry embraces that diversity, and that we’re there for them.”

She rounds out the conversation by urging women interested in homeownership to be bold, ask questions, and give themselves permission to dream big!

Forget Rainy Days. Are You Saving for Your Future?

Most of us have heard the statistics about women doing the lion’s share of caregiving. Far fewer of us recognize the ripples of impact that caregiving can have on our lives, careers, and financial futures. Laurinda Rainey, Managing Director of Travel and Affinity Credit Cards at Chase, talks with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein about the often-unseen consequences of raising kids, taking leave, and being a caregiver.

“If women are caregivers to older parents or an older sibling, the time that they're out of the workforce compounds the wage gap that already exists in our country and in our world,” she explains. “Since women tend to also live longer, it's really, really important that they think ahead to their 70-, 80-, or 90-year-old selves. They must make sure that they have enough money for the life that they want to live, because they spend so much of their life constantly giving to others.”

Laurinda also dives into the importance of having long-term savings goals as a woman regardless of caregiver status, pointing out that saving for retirement and emergencies—as well as fun things like travel or homebuying—helps us be flexible and confident in the face of unexpected changes. A true advocate for preparedness, she encourages women to explore and invest in insurance, especially if they have known health risks. It may feel uncomfortable to insure yourself for worst-case scenarios, but Laurinda insists doing so often helps women through incredibly difficult times. Some of which she’s been forced to face on her own.

“I'm from a very large family, and that made me want to enroll in catastrophic medical care plans. I also have a cancer insurance policy, since I've lost both of my parents to cancer,” she says. “Some might have said that I was wasting money on these insurance plans, but with each of these instances, as they have occurred, I had a plan in place that gave me resources to help me navigate.”

Avalanche vs. snowball

Of course, preparing for the future also means balancing out your debts. Laurinda tells Sam about two mindsets that helped her understand the best way to tackle paying down her own debts. The first is the “avalanche method,” which involves rank-ordering all of your debts, paying off whatever has the highest interest rate first, and once that debt is cancelled out, applying the money you’d once put toward it to the next debt in line.

“What worked for me, though, was the snowball method,” Laurinda says. “Building the snowball is rank-ordering by the smallest amount of debt that you have to pay. When I paid off one debt, I could then apply the minimum payment I was making on it to the next debt that I had. That worked because I liked the adrenaline rush of quick wins.”

How Can You Teach Your Kids to Earn, Spend, & Save?

At school, kids may learn about money in the abstract … but talking about bank balances and interest rates isn’t the same as experiencing them with your own dollars. Not only that, most parents never had “the money talk” with their own parents, and aren’t sure how to broach financial topics with their kids.

Kavita Kamdar is both a new mom and General Manager of Community and Business Development at JPMorgan Chase, so she knows instilling financial lessons in kids can be challenging. She’s passionate about creating tools that help young people learn and practice how to earn, spend, and save so they gain money skills long before they enter the workforce.. In this conversation with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein, she offers advice on how parents can talk about budgeting and expenses, navigating the world of “allowances,” and responsible spending. Kavita also introduces listeners to Chase First Banking, an account that can help make financial education easy, fun, and immersive.

“First Banking is a free digital product that helps kids learn about finances,” she says. “It's a checking account that's for your child and they get a debit card with it, but it's controlled by you as the parent. So you can go into the Chase mobile app and set allowances, assign chores, decide if you want them to spend $10 on Fortnite or not. It goes back to this idea of budgeting and instilling that lesson at a young age.”

Kavita points out that when most kids interact with money, it either is given for the purposes of being spent immediately (eg. “Here’s $10 to spend at the amusement park”) or given so it can be saved (eg. “Here’s $50for your savings account.”) With First Banking, kids get to experience spending and saving a and learn to understand the tradeoffs of each.

First Banking in action

Sam also chats with Sara Treece whose son, Gideon, took part in the pilot program for the First Banking product that was offered to Chase employees. Sara describes Gideon as, “a funny 11-year-old boy who loves Michael Jackson and weird Al Yankovic. And he happens to have cerebral palsy, but he doesn't let that stop him from rock climbing and he loves to play wheelchair soccer.”

Like many parents, Sara had been trying to teach her son the basics of spending and saving for a while, but the concepts didn’t quite stick. Since Gideon has some learning disabilities and some developmental delays, just explaining things like “the value of a dollar” in abstract terms wasn’t helpful.

With First Banking, Gideon could see the balance of his account increasing and decreasing, and that helped solidify the concept of spending and saving.

“That really helped us kind of explain things like, ‘This is how much you have to save and this is how much you have to spend.’ We were finally able to teach this lesson to him about finances and how to earn, save, and spend money wisely.”

Sara says she’s also loved teaching her son to equate doing his chores with earning money that he can choose to spend or save, and to check his own bank balance before deciding to purchase something. She admits, too, that having some control over how and where he spends is a huge relief. (Gideon’s account splits his “earnings” into 60% for spending and 40% for saving.)

Kavita is proud to have championed a banking product that helps kids gain money management skills, and Sara is overjoyed to have access to a tool that helps her amazing son understand the basics of finance!

To say that Jean Chatzky is passionate about helping women build financial independence would be an understatement. She’s spent three decades reporting on personal finance, won countless awards for her writing and co-founded HerMoney Media to carve out room for discussions specific to women and money.

“When I set out to create her money, I wanted to create a safe space,” she tells Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein. “I wanted to create an environment where women feel like we can ask all of our questions because nobody's going to judge us, and we can put forward the things that we feel that we're doing wrong, as well as the things that we feel that we're doing right. A place where we can really dig in and help each other.”

Jean has built HerMoney Media into a wildly successful endeavor that supports many projects including the HerMoney podcast and Jean’s own writings. In her most recent book, Women With Money, she shares an accessible and simple five-step money philosophy that she designed to help women build sustainable wealth and financial security. Speaking with Sam, she describes the basics of each step—including building a sizable cash emergency fund and embracing your inner investor—emphasizing that her model only works if it’s followed consistently and over the long term. (Tough love, but so true!)

To research the book, Jean hosted dozens of HerMoney Happy Hours during which she invited women to gather and discuss their money worries and insights. She did this knowing that most women are deeply uncomfortable chatting about their finances, and that they were more likely to open up in a friendly group discussion.

“I created a deck of cards that have leading questions about money,” she explains. “We have since created a HerMoney Happy Hour kit that works pretty well on Zoom, and I know a lot of financial advisors who have adopted this format and do it with their clients!”

In this frank and revealing conversation, Jean dives into the fiscal issues facing women during the COVID-19 crisis, including feeling pressure to drop out of the workforce to support their families at home. She points out that when families have to hunker down and recalibrate, many revert to outdated gender roles where women are caretakers, cooks, cleaners, and homemakers. This works for many women, but others worry about how putting their careers on pause will impact their long-term goals. Jean agrees that COVID-19 related work sabbaticals may have real risks for women.

“When you leave a job, you are leaving the opportunity to earn additional seniority,” she says. “You're leaving the opportunity to earn additional social security credits. And when you go back in, you're often doing it at a level that is asking you to take a step back.”

That said, she’s still hopeful for working women everywhere. She urges us all to practice asking for the salaries we deserve, set solid fiscal goals, and never be afraid to ask for help with our money concerns. After all, if we don’t ask, how can we learn?

DISCLOSURES

The statements, views and opinions expressed are those of the presenters and are not necessarily endorsed by, or reflect the views or positions of, JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA or any of its affiliates.  The presentation is for informational purposes and is not a recommendation or solicitation of any particular actions.  JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA and its affiliates are not liable for decisions made or actions taken in reliance on any of the information covered during the event.

Investing involves market risk, including possible loss of principal, and there is no guarantee that investment objectives will be achieved.

This material is intended as a general commentary, and not intended to be a forecast of future events, or guarantee of future results or investment advice. The opinions expressed are those of Jean Chatzky and may differ from those of other J.P. Morgan employees and affiliates.  This material should not be regarded as research or as a J.P. Morgan Research Report. Nothing in this material shall be considered a solicitation to buy or an offer to sell securities, other investments or services to any person in any jurisdiction where such an offer, solicitation, purchase or sale would be unlawful under the laws of such jurisdiction.  Any mention of an individual security, investment or strategy is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation. Outlooks and past performance are not guarantees of future results.

The use of any third-party trademarks or brand names is for informational purposes only and does not imply an endorsement or that such trademark owner has authorized JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., to promote its products or services.

J.P. Morgan Wealth Management is a business of JPMorgan Chase & Co., which offers investment products and services through J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (JPMS), a registered broker-dealer and investment advisor, member FINRA and SIPC. Annuities are made available through Chase Insurance Agency, Inc. (CIA), a licensed insurance agency, doing business as Chase Insurance Agency Services, Inc. in Florida. Certain custody and other services are provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (JPMCB). JPMS, CIA and JPMCB are affiliated companies under the common control of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Products not available in all states.

Investment and insurance products are not F-D-I-C insured, not insured by any government agency, not a deposit or other obligation of, or guaranteed by JPMorgan Chase Bank N-A or any of its affiliates. Subject to investment risks, including possible loss of the principal amount invested.

Welcome to Season 5 of the Women on The Move podcast; I’m your host Sam Saperstein. In this season we’re giving our financial health a checkup, with some phenomenal women giving us the prescription for financial wellness. From experts on how to speak to your children about money and starting them on their journey to financial responsibility, to how to save for homeownership, this season a masterclass on understanding and managing your money.

Listen in as three powerhouse women—Janet Alvarez, Laurie Santos, and Allyson Felix—offer their advice on how to be happy, how to secure yourself financially, and how to make history.

Hear from Adrienne Stewart-Gordon, co-founder & co-owner of Pound Cake Society; Kelsey Bunker, co-founder & owner of The Jupiter Hotel and Jupiter NEXT; and Blanca Cabrera, owner of Sergio’s Family Restaurant on coping with COVID as a business owner.

In this timely conversation, JPMorgan Chase’s head of human resources Robin Leopold speaks about systemic racism with co-CEO of Ariel Investments, Mellody Hobson; best-selling author and activist Mikki Kendell; and president of One Fair Wage, Co-Founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and Director of the Food Labor Research Center Saru Jayaraman. All three women speak on racial inequality and how we can all do our part to fight it.

In 2019 NASA astronaut Jessica Meir participated in the first all-female spacewalk, an historic honor she’s still processing now that she’s back on earth. Jessica always wanted to be an astronaut and recalls a time in first grade when she drew a picture of an astronaut on the surface of the moon to signify what she wanted to be when she grew up! In this conversation with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein, Jessica explains what it was like to be up in space when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and why spacewalks are so challenging, both physically and mentally.

In this episode of Women on the Move, three high-ranking executives weigh in on how they’ve grown their careers and helped their companies navigate the challenges of COVID-19.

In this episode of JPMorgan Chase's Women on the Move, entrepreneur and fitness guru Ally Love celebrates wearing many hats. As the founder and CEO of Love Squad, Peloton instructor, and host of the Brooklyn nets, she uses her influence to embolden women everywhere.

Welcome back to the fourth season of the Women n the Move podcast. This season we'll take you inside JPMorgan Chase's annual Women's Leadership conference. This year, the event addressed critical issues affecting women, and tackled topics such as the health and economic crisis caused by the global pandemic racial injustice and prioritizing self-care.

Jessica Matthews, Founder & CEO of Uncharted Power, is leading the way in developing sustainable infrastructure for everyone around the world. At just 19 years of age, Jessica invented a soccer ball that produced renewable energy through play. She always knew there was a problem with outdated and inefficient power infrastructure, but because she was a young Black woman, she thought there would be a someone else to solve the problem. But as she continued to work in this space, she realized that power infrastructure was a global issue and she could provide an innovative approach to solving the issue.  

Tune in to this episode of Women on the Move and hear how Jessica is leading the world in developing sustainable power infrastructures and nurturing future leaders

Jamie Erickson, owner of Poppy’s Catering and cafe, saw that New York City had a need for “simple beautifully done food,” and she knew that she had the passion to bring a fresh new take to the catering industry. When the COVID-19 pandemic halted her catering and cafe business, she pivoted to find a way to serve her community safely and maintain her employees. She shares her struggle and her journey of recovering during this surreal time. In the face of crisis, Jamie stands strong in her original mission to share her passion for beautiful, approachable, and high quality food.

Our second guest, Jacintha Tucker, Chase business banker, has been working with Jamie through this crisis and with many other small business owners. Jacintha demonstrates how women supporting women can create the biggest difference especially during an uncharted time like this pandemic.   

Tune in to this episode of Women on the Move and learn about how a small business was able to navigate a crisis by using local resources while keeping their family and the families of their employees afloat.

The statements, views, and opinions that will be expressed during the event are those of the presenters and are not endorsed by, nor do they reflect the views or positions of, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. or any of its affiliates. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. or any of its affiliates are not liable for decisions made or actions taken in reliance on any of the information covered during the event. Please consult with your personal tax advisor on all tax-related matters. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity Lender. ©2020 JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Tracy Jaffe is the Chief Operating Officer of The Acceleration Project or TAP, a nonprofit dedicated to providing small business owners and entrepreneurs with the mentorship and resources they need to succeed. Tracy has played a key role in TAP’s growth from a small local nonprofit to an organization with major national impact. Most recently TAP collaborated with WOTM on Navigating Your Cash  a series of interactive tools, resources and content designed to teach small business owners how to better manage their finances.

Our second guest, Ellen Sledge, founder and CEO of Penny Lick Ice Cream, and a TAP mentee, shares her own experiences with the cash flow management tools and the story of how she expanded her business from a mobile cart to multiple retail stores.

Tune into this episode of Women on the Move and learn more on navigating cash flow for your small business, the available resources you may not know about, and how even during a pandemic, you can come out on top.

For more information on the Navigating your Cashflow content, go to chashflow.chase.com.

The statements, views, and opinions that will be expressed during the event are those of the presenters and are not endorsed by, nor do they reflect the views or positions of, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. or any of its affiliates. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. or any of its affiliates are not liable for decisions made or actions taken in reliance on any of the information covered during the event. Please consult with your personal tax advisor on all tax-related matters. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity Lender. ©2020 JPMorgan Chase & Co.”

Casey Halliley, founder of Wealthology, is on a mission to provide outstanding financial literacy training to students and young professionals. For Casey, the most powerful lesson on how to accumulate wealth is simple, start saving and investing early.

One of the keys to Casey’s success is her ability to seek out and work with mentors. Our second guest, Elizabeth Ellsworth, head of marketing for J.P. Morgan’s innovation economy sector, was Casey’s mentor through the Vinetta Project. Casey and Elizabeth discuss how a mentoring relationship can support both personal and professional growth.

Tune in to this episode of Women on the Move and hear about mentorship and supporting female founders and learn how financial literacy education in this country is still a major work in progress.

LaChena Clark’s story of starting a business during the 2008 recession is a lesson we can all learn from in the current COVID-19 pandemic. LaChena, owner of Sudsy Water Laundry & Dry Cleaners and Mia’s Bathhouse for Pets, shares advice on how to get through a crisis, as well as how to lean onto other local business owners for support during these uncertain times. Despite facing a loss in her business, LaChena was determined to give support to the community by providing laundry services to the homeless and the elderly. 

Tune in to this episode of Women on the Move and learn about how a small business was able to navigate a crisis by using local resources while giving back to the community.

Like many people in the food service industry, Nicole Jordan, owner of Nicole Jordan Catering in Chicago, faced a sudden drop in demand for her catering company during the COVID-19 pandemic. Determined to adapt her business and take care of her staff, Nicole turned to non-traditional funding sources to change her company’s focus and pivot to prepared meals. Opening up about her path to entrepreneurship and how she quickly restructured her business during the pandemic, Nicole shared advice for female entrepreneurs about funding sources, the importance of setting your business up for success, and the importance of mentorship and taking advantage of all available resources.

Tune in to this episode of Women on the Move and learn how a small business quickly navigated change during the pandemic.

The global pandemic hit small business owners hard, most facing tough decisions on whether they would be able to stay open and, also, how to best help their local communities. Our guest today, Dr. Sonat Birnecker Hart, co-founder of Koval Distillery in Chicago, was able to pivot her business to remain open and also provide essential hand sanitizer to her community and the health care professionals who needed it most. 

Changing her business to produce hand sanitizer was an uphill battle, and Sonat had to deal with regulatory challenges and slumping sales as countries locked down and bars closed across the world.  Luckily this is not the first challenge that Sonat had to overcome: from starting a distillery midway through her career, being a working mother, and being one of the few women in her industry, these hurdles prepared her for the COVID crisis

Tune in to this episode of Women on the Move and hear how a small business was able to make a big impact in the community. 

Welcome to Season 3 of Women on The Move podcast. In the first two seasons, host Sam Saperstein spoke with incredible business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and, the talented executives at JPMorgan Chase.

In season 3, we're focused on fearless female business owners and how they are meeting the needs of their customers and community while facing a global pandemic with grit and resilience. 

Make sure you rate, review and subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any episodes.

Knowing when to pivot

While reflecting on their individual career journeys, Racquel and Toye offer examples of the conscious choices they made and why.

Racquel, who leads the Northeast region for Consumer and Wealth at JPMorgan Chase discusses the importance of being 110% prepared. She shares a story of when preparedness unexpectedly catalyzed the trajectory of her career.

Toye delivers marketing and public relations strategy for the firm’s Advancing Black Pathways initiative and makes the case for making strategic career moves even when the role offered may appear to be less than a perfect fit.

Mentors, sponsors and the importance of authenticity

In this episode, we explore why mentors and sponsors are critical to career success and what to expect from these critical relationships. We also learn how Toye previously struggled with authenticity and what ultimately helped her get comfortable bringing her whole self to work.   

Racquel shares a pet peeve with year-end performance reviews and explains why reviews done ineffectively could be the key to what is holding you back.

Talking about empowerment

Empowerment is a recurring theme in this episode and Racquel and Toye share advice on how to empower others as well as yourself.

For Toye, advocating on behalf of the black community is both her personal and professional passion. She points out that a majority of black women are the CFOs of their households and would benefit from financial education around planning, spending, saving and investing. She works to provide this information through the bank’s Advancing Black Pathways initiative.

When in need of moral support or a boost of confidence, remember your networks. Racquel touts the importance of tapping into the encouragement and guidance your colleagues, friends and family can provide.

Soul-searching and finding purpose

Rebecca’s childhood fascination with nature led her down the path to garden design, large-scale plant installations and entrepreneurship. Rebecca walks us through her very relatable experience and the twists and turns of her career path. 

While climbing the ladder as an audio book publisher in New York, Rebecca found herself unfulfilled. As the outward trappings of success grew, an internal voice grew louder pointing her back to her roots.

Taking a leap of faith

After a period of soul-searching, Rebecca left her corporate job and eventually landed a role as website editor for the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Despite a significant pay cut, Rebecca began to thrive again while working with world-class master gardeners of horticulture and garden design. 

Slowly, Rebecca found a way to pivot her work directly into the gardens themselves and acquired a small following of visitors, board members and wealthy individuals seeking her guidance.  It wasn’t long before word spread and demand for her work grew.  

The power of access

This new-found success led her to start Greenery NYC, however not without the typical challenges small business owners face including scaling business and accessing capital. She recalls a key turning point when she began reaching out for help which in turn led her to much needed resources, mentors and the confidence to invest in herself and her company.    

Rebecca offers savvy advice to women entrepreneurs needing to overcome self-doubt when approaching professional resources for help. She advocates moving past the need to wait until you have all the answers or ‘enough experience’ before reaching out and accessing your potential

A unique client approach

As a financial advisor who specializes in the needs of the ultra-high-net-worth client, Elaine has assembled a diverse team of experts who have one thing in common; passion.  For Elaine, this is the key differentiator for her business.  Her clients are focused innovators and require a partner who understands how to address their complex and rapidly changing needs.  

After more than 20 years running a multi-family style business, meeting face to face with her clients continues to be the most rewarding part of her job.  Elaine finds that she learns from her clients as much as they learn from her.

A good career choice for women

Women have a natural ability to multi-task and outsource and as a mother of four, Elaine uses these qualities to manage both her family and business. The flexible nature of being a financial advisor allows her to divide her time efficiently between both worlds.

Having the freedom to switch ‘hats’ and pivot between work and family as needed gives her peace of mind and allows her to be the best mother and advisor she can be. 

Finding the right advisor

When looking for a financial advisor, Elaine suggests you take your time and interview multiple advisors until you find someone you can easily relate to and communicate with. You should also look for an expert in the area of your specific situation. 

Lastly, make sure you find an advisor who can listen effectively, which has been key in Elaine’s personal success.

Kaguya Komatsu

Finding purpose in your work

Kaguya has found deep connections on both a professional and personal level. 

As head of Japan’s Institutional Client Sales and Marketing, Kaguya sees her leadership role as one of service.  She views her work as providing value not only to her client base but also benefiting the next generation of clients.     

Working mothers in Japan face similar work-life balance issues to those held around the world.  Kaguya shares her views on where progress has been made for mothers in the workplace and where more work is needed.

The power of honest feedback

Fortunately, Kaguya has benefited from managers who have taken a strong interest in nurturing her career path.

Kaguya describes a particularly tough manager who recognized and rewarded her strong work ethic and who was responsible for starting her on the career trajectory she now enjoys.  She also shares a story about a watershed moment she had with her current manager where they discussed a potential promotion and ultimately both came away with a key life lesson.

Paying it forward

Women in Japan have traditionally been raised to be quiet, modest and receptive.  In this context, Kaguya explains why she invests her time teaching female colleagues to understand these learned behaviors and equip them with tools to find their voices and be more confident and productive.  She also helps women understand that it’s okay when you don’t have all the answers and to view those moments as opportunities. 

Camila Penna

‘Having it all’ is different for everyone

Camila Penna wants to see more women occupying senior management positions in sales and trading. 

As the head of equity sales across eight regions, she has seen some progress in this area, but recognizes there is more work to be done.  In her view, reframing the conversation around ‘having it all’ or work-life balance is key to demystifying this common misnomer. Camila suggests a simple shift in the definition could make all the difference.  Using herself as the example, she admits that having it all can evolve over the years, but being satisfied with what you have at the time can help create a sense of balance and control.

Career Management

No one has total control of their career trajectory and yet Camila has relied on a few ‘rules of the road’ that have served her well.  For one, she always arms herself with as much information she can prior to making key decisions.  She recommends being goal-oriented and maintaining regularly scheduled conversations with your manager to stay on track. 

Through the years, Camila has come to truly value and understand the importance of diversity.  She can attest that by pursuing diverse views and skillsets, managers and their organizations will reap better outcomes.

Giving yourself permission

Camila wears many hats as the manager of a global workforce, and the mother to a young child. Keeping it all together requires carefully coordinated planning with her teams and family.  And she acknowledges that with her heavy travel schedule, there are times she allows herself to reassess priorities and even consider taking a pause. 

On the home front, she has a husband who believes in sharing the household and family responsibilities, down the middle. They both enjoy entertaining, staying physically active and spending optimal time with their son, Noah. 

Same goal, different approaches

Sarah Heffron and Joanna Martin are members of the J.P. Morgan Electronic Client Solutions team in London.  Sarah runs European Equities Execution for traders and Joanna leads the Global Liquidity Solutions group focused on institutional client product needs. 

Over the years, Sarah and Joanna have come to develop a strong collaborative working relationship while driving institutional client business and building their teams. 

Although their roles are distinctly different they have found in certain situations that the unique blend of their skillsets enable them to find alternative solutions and unexpected approaches.  While one brings an analytic and problem-solving nature to the table the other brings the ability to connect dots and motivate people. 

What it takes

As leaders of large working groups, Sarah and Joanna are responsible for managing and building effective teams. Their personnel management approach includes understanding an individual employees’ career trajectory and continuously projecting out what the organizations’ future talent needs will likely be.  

For early-stage employees, Sarah and Joanna tend to look for key skillsets they believe will add value to the business and grow the candidates’ career.  At the top of the list is the ability to harness the power of data, understand processes and deliver analytics.  They will be looking for talent who can build dashboards for traders, sales, and product to drive real time decision-making.

Joanna also watches out for ‘self-starters’ who are curious and can collaborate, a skillset that together can set the stage for career mobility and new opportunities.

Career mobility survival tips

When facing a steep learning curve such as starting a new role, Sarah advises that you need to get comfortable with not fully understanding certain dimensions of the job and the business for a while.  Joanna adds that asking questions to understand complex concepts demonstrates a willingness to learn and go the ‘extra mile’.  Both recommend developing strong communication skills and learning how and when to have a productive discussion with your manager about your new role.

 Attract, retain, promote

Currently, women represent about a quarter of the computer science workforce. Beer understands why and as Chief Information Officer for JPMorgan Chase, she has led the strategy to put an end-to-end solution in place for young women. 

Elinda Welsh, one of the strategy’s benefactors, is a software engineer who is on the fast track for new, exciting and challenging opportunities.  Elinda’s opportunities started with an internship back in Glasgow, and following that was tapped to participate in a variety of highly coordinated and focused skills-based programs.  Along the way she received critical support provided by mentors, technology leaders and business managers.

In this episode, two successful women in technology share their experiences and perspectives from uniquely different ends of the career spectrum. 

Technology: From a bank’s perspective

From a cross-enterprise point of view, Lori’s global organization of industry experts are tasked with ensuring the integrity of the organization’s data.  This translates into three overarching priorities for Lori and her team; protecting customers, clients and the firm. They spend the majority of their energies focusing on data use, data rights, A.I. and cyber security. 

In the consumer space, Lori touches on the work they are doing to improve client experiences by providing more virtual assistance capabilities and intuitive credit cards.  For the latter, their goal is to lower potential fraudulent activity by making credit cards innately and preemptively ‘smarter’.  

Brightest and smartest

With the growing need to attract top talent, it doesn’t hurt to have an annual working budget of $11 billion and over 50k technologists globally.  Lori’s organization is constantly scouting for bright minds and high achievers and believes JPMorgan Chase’s industry leading position in technology creates a competitive advantage.  This advantage gives her team the ability to gather extensive thought leadership and diverse perspectives

For Lori, the competitive differentiators boil down to having the capacity to engage top talent, deliver seamless execution and provide a collaborative environment.

Diversity and Inclusion: A career-long focus

Gordon is a leading champion for JPMorgan Chase's diversity, inclusion and talent development efforts. 

It was years ago while working with a female mentee, when Gordon became keenly aware of the need for diversity and inclusion. While expressing her concerns about organizations lacking diversity, she told him companies are sending the message that they are not the place for diverse talent.  From that point on, Gordon has maintained a keen focus on management accountability and instituting real business metrics designed to help managers maintain and grow the firm in this area. 

Gordon believes driving the organization to better reflect diversity  will positively impact JPMorgan Chase’s overall culture and better serve customers and the communities they live in.

Simplification is Innovation

You could say that Gordon is fixated on the customer experience and looks for meaningful ways to take complexity out of business.  Gordon understands that by simplifying products and making them easier to understand, customers can continue building their businesses and focusing on growth.

Advancing Gender Equality

On male allies and advancing gender equality… Gordon discusses the importance of having senior male leaders leaning-in to provide mentorship, deliver talent reviews and give constructive developmental feedback. 

Building a diverse workforce takes a thoughtful, organizational approach.  It starts with the role of the recruiter who understands their role in building the talent of the future and carries through to managers who remain focused on diversity as they grow their teams.  Promotions and stretch opportunities need to be reinforced with a support system designed to encourage, fill knowledge gaps and ensure success for employees and the company.

Thank you for listening to the first season of the Women on the Move podcast, where we spoke to some incredible business leaders at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.

In season two of the Women on the Move podcast, host Sam Saperstein will introduce you to the x-factor at JPMorgan Chase, the talented executives who lead the company and foster an inclusive culture. You’ll hear career lessons, advice and stories from leaders representing all of JPMorgan Chase's businesses and geographies. 

Make sure you rate, review and subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any episodes.

Philanthropy is better together.

The Getty family is known for their philanthropy and Ariadne Getty is no different, making a name for herself supporting LGBTQ rights in part because both of her children are gay. She has been named Variety’s 2019 Philanthropist of the Year and working with organizations like GLAAD and the LGBTQ center in Los Angeles. YouTube star, influencer and trans activist, Gigi Gorgeous has joined her in the cause.

Ari has been told that she’s very hands-on and says that it helps her get closer to the causes that need help. “I've been told that I do things differently. I haven't sort of been keeping tabs on it, but what I have been told is that I'm very hands-on. So, when I go on my United Nations Foundation trips, I go to the refugee camps. I don't write a check and expect results. I work very closely with GLAAD with the center in LA weekly schlepped bags of clothing to the center,” says Ari.

Funding the future of service

In addition to her hands-on approach, Ari puts her money where her purpose is—donating $15 million to the GLAAD Media Institute, which trains young activist ambassadors to take their message further.

Gigi Gorgeous has used her platform of nearly 3 million subscribers to influence and help young people struggling with mental health and LGBTQ issues.

“This is our third year together that she's (Ari) brought me to Davos with her and GLAAD and it’s the power and the presence that she has is so inspiring and it's only gotten bigger,” says Gigi. Seeing Ariadne’s work has inspired and influenced her to go further with her own activism.

Doing good feels good

Behind the acts of service is a greater message and Gigi speaks on using her platform to reach younger people who may be struggling or dealing with bullying. Her collaboration of genderless makeup is ushering in a new era of social change and helping young people feel and be included.

In this episode of Women on the Move, businesswoman and philanthropist Ariadne Getty and YouTube star and trans-activist Gigi Gorgeous speak on the beauty of giving back and what it means to support causes that are close to your heart.

The text that started it all.

“Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)” is book Eve Rodsky feels she was born to write. A Harvard-trained lawyer and former foundational manager at JPMorgan Chase, Eve found herself in a marriage and partnership that was more than just a little uneven. 

After she and her friends, accomplished women and mothers, compiled a list of over 1000 things they do, invisible work, that gets no recognition, she knew that she was on to something larger than just a text about buying blueberries.  

The myth of 50/50

In thinking on her marriage and life partnership, Eve realized that 50/50 is a myth and she speaks on how unions should act more like business partnerships to get the work and parenting done in an equitable fashion. She devised the Fair Play card game to help partners work through their values and their roles.

“Fair Play became my love letter to men and women on the move. All over the country, men were saying to me, ‘I would do more in the home, but I just can’t get anything right,’” says Eve. To Eve, proper partnership goes beyond splitting things down the middle and trusting each other to do them with care.  

Great partnerships benefit everyone

For women, sharing household responsibilities creates a space that Eve calls Unicorn Time. When women have space to be themselves and be creative the results are astounding.

In this episode of Women on the Move, Eve praises the courage of women to fight back on societal norms, to reclaim their space and time from invisible work, and how both men, women and children benefit from the fair play of great partnerships.

Modernizing a historic LGBTQ organization.

When Sarah Kate Ellis took a key leadership position as President and CEO of GLAAD, her initial priority was to modernize the historical organization and increase funding. Through strategic sponsorships and the GLAAD Media awards, she has been able to help companies and brands improve their allyship and support of LGBTQ causes. She has helped pivot GLAAD into the digital space and modernize the historic not-for-profit.

“I am a change agent without sharp elbows. I think when you’re trying to move an organization, especially a not-for-profit, you can pivot and move forward in a softer, more manageable way,” says Sarah.  

Making the biggest impact

In addition to bringing GLAAD into the present, Sarah Kate is passionate about keeping the organization growing and evolving. Looking at impact, she and her team are assessing what work is making the most significant impact in the LGBTQ community. Much of this work is already being done, to which she credits the Hollywood media representation for providing a model to roll out across other forms of media, including social. But instead of representation, Sarah Kate is interested in safety on social media and measuring the spaces in terms of how safe they are for the LGBTQ community. That’s where she sees the impact. 

Representation starts small

In her mission to increase representation and shift perspectives of the LGBTQ community, Sarah Kate wants to go from macro to micro. Going local means tapping into smaller cities and towns and reaching people through their local TV, newspapers, and social media. Shifting the negative perception and hate toward members of the LGBTQ community starts with people stepping up. 

In this episode of Women on the Move, Sarah Kate talks about the importance of increasing representation of the LGBTQ community, how GLAAD is working to shift negative perceptions and how corporations are the funding key for not-for-profit initiatives.

The power of a global community.

For Claudia Romo Edelman, service is a global affair. Starting as a diplomat in her home country of Mexico, Claudia has served as a first correspondent and worked for the World Economic Forum for 10 years. She is currently Special Adviser to the United Nations, working with Ariana Huffington on Thrive Hispanic, and spoke with Women on the Move about changing the narrative for Hispanic communities, bringing Hispanics together to leverage their power in her foundation We Are All Human.

“We’re forgetting that we all belong to the same human family. It’s all about having this conversation through content, through community of precisely that. That we are all human,” says Claudia. 

Uniting the Hispanic community

In America, there’s a label of Hispanic or Latino/Latina, but it’s something Claudia believes Hispanics have not used to their advantage.

Claudia’s passion and dedication to her community have led her to create her foundation We Are All Human.

In her work with the World Economic Forum and the Hispanic Star Alliance, Claudia sees the future as one where Hispanics and Hispanic leaders are unified. “We’re going to launch a symbol for Hispanics to unify and in a year, we will see this symbol in the windows of corporate America during Hispanic Heritage Month.”

Her plans include working with the 150 companies that have signed the Hispanic Promise and launching the podcast Global Goalscast to celebrate the positivity and progress of the Hispanic community.  

Global action starts with you

After experiencing a massive earthquake as a teenager in Mexico City and rescuing a young girl during the relief aid, Claudia learned to accept what her family called “her loudness” and use her voice in the service of others.

In this episode, Claudia talks about the importance of coming together as a global community, learning from others through open dialogue, and promoting the power of the Hispanic community. Listen to the full episode and learn how fierce global advocate is changing perceptions one conversation at a time.  

The business of gender equality.

For Katja Iversen, gender equality is everyone’s business, and it’s not business as usual. As the president and CEO of Women Deliver, an organization that actively delivers for women around the world in the fight against gender inequality, Katja has watched as powerful people – often men – have developed gender equality fatigue.

“Some people say they are getting fatigued with the discussion about gender equality. You can be fatigued if you worked for 20 years nonstop on changing something, but you cannot be fatigued if you just had to listen to something for a couple years.” says Katja.

Reframing the gender equality conversation

Katja is passionate about focusing on the economic argument of gender equality, rather than just the moral one. With the power of data, research and evidence to show how gender equality contributes to the bottom line, she is hoping to reframe the gender equality conversation.

Women are good for business

With a focus on how gender equality benefits business, economy, community and country rather than just the individual, Katja aims to show that solving the gender pay gap and providing equal opportunity is not just morally correct, it makes sense financially.

In this episode of Women on the Move, Katja stresses how important it is to reframe gender equality as part of core business, and she has the data to back it up. Listen to the full episode to find out more about how this passionate female advocate is planning to make a real difference.

Stories from Self-starters

In this episode we're going global and meeting Shalini Misra and Aysha Al Khamous, two innovators who’ve created women-powered businesses from scratch. We also speak with Shaima Hamidaddin, the executive manager of the Saudi Arabia-based Misk Global Forum.

Listen in to this conversation where we learn about how these women continue to drive successful careers across interior design, food service and youth empowerment.

Leadership Insights and the Future of Work

Rima Qureshi is the Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Partnerships and New Business Development at Verizon. She is responsible for the development and implementation of the company’s overall corporate strategy, business development, partnerships, and strategic investments and acquisitions. In this episode, Rima explains how the future of ‘5G’ will bring communities closer together and how technology can help create new jobs and opportunities.

A Life Devoted to Advocating for Global Human Rights Kerry Kennedy is an accomplished author, philanthropist, and human rights advocate. She is President of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and has sat on the board of directors for SDG USA, Human Rights First, Inter Press Service, Health eVillages, United States Institute of Peace, among others. In 2018, she published her most personal book: Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope. In this episode, Kerry shares select human rights battles and why she is hopeful about the future.

Morag Watson is the Chief Digital Innovation Office at BP and has been with the company since 1989. She currently leads a team that looks for technological innovations that help further BP’s business objectives, including drones and 3D printing.

Morag discusses emerging digital technologies, career planning and the power of collaboration. In this episode, we learn what a Chief Innovation Officer does day-to-day and how the role has become a business imperative.

Jeremi Gorman is Chief Business Officer at Snap, Inc. Since joining Snap in 2018, she’s turned the communication app into the go-to platform for Generation Z, using her expertise in sales and advertising to redefine Snapchat’s purpose and push its limits without sacrificing the privacy of its users. In this episode, we learn about surviving massive ‘change-management’ events, understanding GenZ’s relationship to brands and their influencing power in the future.

Julianne Hough is an Emmy-winning choreographer, actress, and singer. She is also the founder of KINRGY, an energy-based workout she describes as the Soul Cycle of dance. In this episode, we learn what drives her and how she created KINRGY.

Kelly Kramer is the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Cisco. Throughout her eight years with the company, she’s implemented hiring practices to promote diversity, facilitated mentorship programs, and pushed for gender pay parity and salary transparency. In this  episode, we learn about the importance of career mobility, effective leadership and mentoring.

Hi, I’m Samantha Saperstein of JPMC and I am really excited to announce the launch of our Women on the Move podcast. Women on the Move is an initiative inside of JPMC dedicated to advancing careers and providing leadership to the women in the firm. As the initiative has evolved, we’ve expanded our thinking globally and sat down with some of the world’s most respected business leaders.

As part of this podcast you’ll hear from an exciting range of personalities like Meredith Kopit Levein of The New York Times and  Fair Play author, Eve Rodsky. You’ll also learn how these individuals advocate for success in on our 3 key pillars: Expanding Women-Run Business, Improving Women’s Financial Health, and Empowering Women’s Career Growth. 

I hope you follow us on this journey as we debut our first three episodes next week, on March 5th! Please make sure to like, subscribe and follow us so you don’t miss out!