Cristina Cordova

I’ve been asked “How can I hire more women at my startup?” a number of times and while I’ve always had concrete thoughts, I’ve generally wavered on the topic. Most people understand why it’s important to have more women in the workplace (and more diversity in general beyond gender). Yet, most don’t grasp that the fewer women you have early on, the harder it is to recruit them later. If you wait until you have a 20-person team to think about it, it’s already too late. With that, here are some thoughts on how to recruit more women at your startup:

1) Don’t look for ninjas.
Language such as “rockstar”, “ninja” or even “hacker” will result in fewer female applicants. In your recruiting materials, choose words women use to describe themselves. Don’t ask someone to send you “an example hack”, but instead “an example of quality software”. Don’t say “We only hire the top 1% of candidates”. I know many talented women who don’t have the confidence in their abilities to include themselves in that group, despite being very talented and deserving of it.   

2) Make your workplace one that women will enjoy being in.
Don’t be surprised when a woman visits your dirty hacker house and ends up turning down your job offer. This is not because she can’t cut it in at a small-stage startup, but because working in that environment can be indicative of so much more: 1) not caring about the details, 2) a lack of certainty about the future, 3) working with people who can barely take care of themselves.

3) Care about culture beyond free beer and chips.
I’ve been to numerous startup recruiting pages that talk about a company’s gigantic kegerator before other important aspects of culture. If you think a woman is going to join your company for free whiskey shots, you can stop reading here. Talk about values before freebies: transparency,  communication, autonomy, how people interact outside of work, how you decide what you work on and growth within the company.

4) Have women interview women.
It can be quite daunting for a woman to do six back-to-back interviews all with men. She doesn’t see anyone quite like her and it can be hard to identify with the company or see how she would fit in. I know several companies that require at least one woman to interview a prospective female candidate and I think it’s a good policy to have in place. If your startup is able, have every candidate, regardless of gender, interviewed by a woman on your team — it will help guard against bad hires. 

5) Hire well.
I’ve heard more than a few bad stories about women that interview at a startup full of men and end up running into your token startup douchebag. You know, the one that says his time is more valuable than others on the team. The one that asks your female engineering candidate if she’d be happier in more of a PM role because she isn’t really a hacker. “He’s just a little aspergersy”, you say. Just one of these guys can make it difficult to hire or retain women at your company.

6) Be conscious of gender differences.
I’ve found subtle differences in how men and women write and speak about their work. Men tend to write about the results of their accomplishments and women tend to speak about the process. A man talking about his work might say, “Initiated a new policy that resulted in $XXMM YoY cost savings” whereas a woman might say, “Researched, wrote and prepared new policy to bring more efficiency to supply chain”. Be conscious of how men and women may speak about their work and don’t pass up a resume just because the language used is less results-oriented.

7) Go find them.
So, you’re doing all of the above, but you still don’t have any women applying to work at your startup? Well go out and find them. As someone who was recruited or referred to each of their last four jobs, I know that most of the candidates you want aren’t out there looking. Take the situation into your own hands and search Github, LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever other networks you frequent. One day, in about two hours, I put together a list of about 50 prospective female candidates. If you can’t find potential female candidates, you’re just being lazy.

Answer by Cristina Cordova:

Depending on your specific use case for payments, there can be more differences to highlight, but here is some background to start. Prior to Stripe, when looking for payments service providers, you could basically go in one of two directions:

1. PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments.
Pros:
- They host payment pages for you, which makes the front-end integration easier, and helps limit PCI requirements.

- You can get started immediately, and don’t have to get your own merchant account.

- Simple pricing, by and large.
Cons:

- Limited control over the user experience — you have to redirect your users to another site, show various logos, etc.

- APIs that are not well-documented or very flexible.

- Often quick to freeze accounts when suspicious of fraudulent activity.

2. More traditional payment service providers (Authorize.net, ChasePaymentech). 
Pros:

- Complete control over the checkout experience.

Cons:

- You handle sensitive card data, which forces you to invest significant time and resources in PCI compliance programs.

- You have to get your own merchant account, which involves lots of paperwork and waiting days or weeks while the underwriting process happens.

- Indecipherable/unpredictable pricing.

- Legacy APIs.

Stripe gives you the best of both worlds with the kind of payments API that should always have existed:

- Complete control over the checkout experience.

- Stripe shoulders the PCI compliance burden by ensuring that you never need to handle sensitive card data.

- You can launch immediately — no need to get your own merchant account.

- Simple pricing.

With that for context, here are some reasons our users have chosen Stripe over PayPal:

Stripe has an an elegant, powerful API. Our API makes it quick and easy to integrate with Stripe. See what people are saying about our API here:  Search - stripe api. Based on what our users have told us, our API is much easier to integrate when compared to PayPal’s. To illustrate, here’s a blog post from one of Stripe’s users about why they switched from PayPal: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe. Because Stripe’s API and documentation are so much easier to work with, we save our users engineering time, both when initially launching and maintaining their integrations over time.

Build your ideal payment experience. With Stripe, you have the complete freedom to create the payment experience you want. Users can also use Stripe’s clean and elegant checkout experience, if they prefer to not build their own: Stripe: Button. With PayPal’s primary merchant services, you’ll redirect your customers to a PayPal branded webpage in order to pay. This can push customers into a completely different user experience that they’re unfamiliar with. (If you want to design and host your own payment experience with PayPal, you’ll need to use PayPal Payments Pro for an extra $30 per month, and contend with PayPal’s API, or you can also use PayPal entirely as an API/gateway via Payflow Pro, which has the same strengths and weaknesses as other traditional payments service providers listed above.)

Stripe has competitive, crystal-clear pricing. Stripe charges you one rate for each transaction—-that’s it. There are no additional charges for failed transactions, American Express cards, international cards, stored cards, currency conversions, refunds or recurring payments. See more about our pricing here: Stripe: Pricing

PayPal’s fees can make it very difficult to project what you’re going to make from sales and what the true cost of payments processing is. In addition to PayPal’s transaction fees, you might incur the following fees:

- $30 per month if you want to design and host your own checkout pages.

- 1% cross-border surcharge and/or a 2.5% currency conversion fee (see international fee calculator here: PayPal Fees for International Payments) if you want to accept payments from another country

- 3.5% transaction fee when your customers pay with American Express.

- A fixed fee portion of the original transaction fee when you issue a refund.

Stripe offers rapid help from real people. Our users can jump into our real-time community chat for immediate assistance from Stripe staff and our growing community of users, or email us for a fast, personal response. See an example from one of our customers here:

“I am not easily emotionally moved by git command lines, but this is clearly somebody who understands me and what I need in life.  In addition to exactly diagnosing the problem…he fixed it for everyone else. Sidenote: This is one of the very few times in my life where mailing support@ made me a better engineer.” - Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

Based on what our users have told us, PayPal’s customer support has left users wanting more:

- A PayPal user discusses how his account was erroneously shut down: Good riddance, PayPal

- “A combination of being unhappy with customer support and the disruption of our checkout process with redirects led to us searching for alternatives.” - Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

- A PayPal user describes an exchange with customer support: My recent experience with PayPal Customer Service.

Stripe prides itself on having fast and thorough support from our engineers to help when you need it.

A fast, powerful dashboard. Stripe’s interface is fast, exposes everything from bank transfers to HTTP request logs, provides instant type-ahead search over all your data, and generally makes managing your business simple and enjoyable. Once they get up and running, PayPal users often run into issues with the account management interface. It’s slow and it’s hard to perform functions like refunding transactions.

We hope you’ll find that Stripe makes it easy for you to build and scale a business on the internet, and we’d love to get your feedback on how we can do even better.

View Answer on Quora

In my last post, I aimed to draw attention to the fact that while consumers and the press like having a simple number they can understand, mobile metrics are not one size fits all. For some mobile companies, the internal focus may be on daily or even hourly active users. For others, monthly active users may make the most sense.

There are numerous tools available that help developers understand mobile retention and analytics, such as Flurry, MixPanel or Apsalar. Yet, understanding mobile retention is still difficult because of reasons far out of any developer’s control:

1. Mobile Developers Don’t Know Where Their Downloads Come From

Web developers have the luxury of being able to easily view traffic sources and understand how users get to their sites (search keywords, queries, direct, referrals etc.). With mobile, you’re flying blind, as the App Store and Google Play give you almost no information about how users learned of your product. If you’re not sure how you acquired that user, you certainly can’t optimize that acquisition process.

2. Mobile Developers Don’t Know When Their Apps Are Deleted

One data point I’ve longed for on mobile is knowing which users delete your application. There are several mobile apps that still send me email notifications or product updates, not knowing that I’ve already deleted their apps from my device. While I can imagine this metric isn’t given out because it may upset some developers (similar to getting an email every time a person removes you as a friend on Facebook, perhaps), I think it’s important to understand if you plan on building a sustainable app on another platform. 

3. Mobile Developers Don’t Know Why Users Drop Off 

When I unsubscribe from an email newsletter, downgrade a subscription service or delete an account on the web, I often get an email asking why I’m leaving. Because most users on mobile seem to just fade away (put an app on their 6th page or delete it without notification), the developer doesn’t know if or why their users drop off. 

These are issues the average mobile developer faces when attempting to combat mobile retention problems. Unfortunately, much of the data that would allow developers to make more informed decisions to improve retention is locked up by the mobile platforms. It’s not that running a sustainable audience or business on mobile is impossible, you’re just starting a few steps behind.

Answer by Cristina Cordova:

I’d argue that Facebook does a great job with acquisitions, but they have an entirely different approach than Google. Facebook buys companies for talent and not for technology, with the sole exception of Instagram.

A few of the key hires from Facebook acquisitions include:

Blake Ross (Parakey): Started the Mozilla Firefox project, now Facebook’s Director of Product

Joe Hewitt (Parakey): Worked on the Firefox web browser and related software development tools like Firebug. He created Facebook’s iPhone app, the most downloaded app of all time. 

Paul Buchheit (FriendFeed): The creator of Gmail. Zuckerberg once said  Paul was “leading the engineering culture at Facebook” 

Bret Taylor (FriendFeed): Co-Creator of Google Maps, later became Facebook’s CTO

Pitting Google and Facebook against each other in this context is probably the wrong approach, as they are different companies at entirely different stages. However, any acquisition in which you can select and retain this type of talent is impressive.

View Answer on Quora

When I read Fred Wilson’s post this morning about the tough times consumer companies are having raising money, his second point resonated with me most:

“distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. you need to master the “download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen” flow and that is a hard one to master.”

This made me think of how frequently we attribute success on mobile to downloads instead of monthly active users. From the beginning, Facebook focused on monthly active users instead of hits, pageviews, and numbers of posts and photos. On mobile, the story is far different. Companies and the press often talk about downloads, flips, check-ins or even activity among active users. They avoid discussing monthly active users. Why? By far, the biggest problem facing mobile companies today is retaining the users that download their applications. 

I returned to Fred’s post from July 2011 on user retention, noting that:

“I call this ratio 30/10/10 and so many services that we see exhibit it within a few percentage points here and there.

Here’s how it works: 30% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each month

10% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each day”

When I look at retention on mobile today, a 30% monthly active user rate is much higher than what publicly available data tells us:

Socialcam: In June, Socialcam had 83.6M monthly active users connected to Facebook. Today, it has 4.3M. This is a decrease of 95% in 5 months.

Viddy: In June, Viddy had 20.9M monthly active users connected to Facebook. Today, it has 660K. This a decrease of 97% in 5 months.

Draw Something: In April, Draw Something had 36.5M monthly active users connected to Facebook. Today, it has 9.1M. This is a decrease of 75% in 7 months. 

Path: In December, Path had 250K monthly active users connected to Facebook. Almost one year later, they have about 780K monthly active users. While the 2.0 version of their app led to much initial growth, it seems that growth hasn’t affected churn. 

Every company in mobile wishes they had the retention rate of Instagram - but very few even whisper the words “monthly active users” to the outside world.  An app is only a long-press away from being dismissed to the second, third or fourth page of apps on a user’s device. How mobile companies aim to defeat the retention problem in a world of fickle social users will be their true test.

Answer by Cristina Cordova:

I researched privacy on Facebook heavily from January 2009 through May 2010   for a senior thesis (85 pages of which you can read here if you have lots of free time: The End of Privacy as We Know It?: The Ethics of Privacy on Online Social Networks (scribd.com)). Facebook made many mistakes in regards to user privacy, the most prominent being:

Poor Notification of Privacy Policy Changes:
When Facebook proposed a new version of its privacy policy, it expected users to vote and comment on the changes, yet it made it difficult for users to even find out that there were any proposed changes at all. Users had to go to their messages and then to their updates to find out that anything was changing whatsoever. Users were not alerted with an interstitial or even a notification from their main newsfeed.

Contrast that with any Facebook product update, which receives a much more robust tutorial for users when they sign-in.

Complicated Profile Privacy User Experience:
In 2006, Zuckerberg said “This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings - to give you even more control over who you share information with”. Facebook’s robust privacy settings actually made it more difficult for users to execute this control. Take a look at the profile privacy settings from January 2010:

Not quite as simple and easy as uploading a photo, is it? At the time, if a user wanted to block friends from seeing his photos, he would have to change the following settings: “photos and videos of me”, “photo albums” and “posts of me”. If a user selected custom privacy settings, he had the option of sharing information with specific friends or groups of friends, making the process even more complicated as one would have to set up and maintain specific lists or groups of friends who could see particular information. Adding buttons, toggles and drop-down menus only complicated the experience and left users feeling like they had very little control at all. This resulted in users leaving the settings to the default public option, which was in the best interests of Facebook, not its users.

Application Privacy Issues:
At one point, Facebook gave Zynga access to some (normally private) information from friends of friends of the users that played their games - a clear privacy issue as those users never authorized Zynga to have their information. This led to many of the spammy practices Zynga was known for in its early days.

Beacon:
In 2007, Facebook launched Beacon, an advertising system that send data from external webpages to Facebook. When users would purchase from Overstock, for example, a pop-up like the one below would appear saying that Overstock was sending your purchase information to Facebook:

A user would have about ten seconds before the window would disappear. The information about the purchase would appear on a user’s Facebook wall. Facebook implemented this program as opt-out only. In 2008, a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook and the third party companies who participated in the program as personal information about users was released to these companies without a user’s permission.

When I think about whether I want to work with someone, I tend to contemplate the following questions:

1. Would I co-found a company with this person?

2. Would I come into the office knowing this person would be the only one there? 

3. Am I impressed by what this person has accomplished?

While it’s not always this simple, if a team can answer “yes” to all three of these questions, the person is typically a hire. 

In startups, employees expect a level of transparency that doesn’t exist at large companies. At Apple, only the people who need to know are in the know about new products and sensitive internal company information. Contrasting this with a startup, team members are taking both a financial and career risk in joining and transparency makes employees feel secure in their risky decision. This starts with employees knowing where the company stands and it ends with knowing where the company is going.

Paul Graham says:

When we haven’t heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that’s a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what’s up, and they don’t reply, that’s a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.

This applies to more than just popping up in the press every so often. If your employees and investors don’t know how things are going, it’s easy to lose that trust. Here are a few examples of company leaders investing in transparency: 

- Jonah Peretti, founder of Buzzfeed, emailed all company employees and investors summarizing the company’s strategy and progress. Chris Dixon posted the letter with Jonah’s permission here. Jonah shows employees the “why” behind the viral cat memes and how that factors in to Buzzfeed’s evolution. 

- Bart and Andrew, the founders at Tapulous, reported exactly where the company needed to go to hit its revenue targets at its monthly all-hands meetings. Engineers, interns and designers were all focused on revenue growth. 

- Pulse has a form in which any team member can ask anonymous questions and one of the founders will post a public response for the rest of the company to see.

- Keen.io made its salary and equity compensation completely transparent by having one of its early employees write about her negotiation experience on the company blog.

- Emails at Stripe are copied to lists that go to either the entire company or to a particular team for the sake of transparency.

Transparency should exist to protect from fear, unite everyone toward a common goal and keep each piece of the puzzle operating efficiently together. 

If your team members find out about a new product the day it’s released, they might as well be at Apple. If your engineers have to wait for a yearly review period to give feedback to their managers, they might as well be at Google. Transparency is one security blanket that startups have to give and big companies tend to lose. 

I think the interview process alone can usually assess fit for the majority of business development roles. However, I usually prefer that a candidate do a project before they come in for a full day of interviews. If the project relates directly to what a candidate will be doing if hired, this helps 1) assess whether the candidate is serious about the company enough to put in some work and 2) allows the candidate to assess whether the work is something that suits his interests. 

As for questions to focus on in the interview process, I generally touch on:

How Does a Candidate Assess Opportunities: As a BD person, you’re presented with numerous deals to go after and you need to ensure you hire someone who will go after the *right* deals for your company.

1. What companies should we target for partnerships and why?

2. Tell me about a deal you walked away from at your last company and why.

3. How would you assess what deals we should spend other company resources on, if any?

How Does a Candidate Form a Process: A BD person can have hundreds of deals in play at one time. You need to understand how they stay organized with heavy dealflow at various stages.

1. Tell me what you would do in your first 30 days at our company.

2. Once a deal is signed, what happens? What would you like to happen?

3. How do you ensure that existing partners stick with you as our company grows?

How Convincing is a Candidate: BD is all about relationships - from forming them at early stages to nurturing them as they grow. 

1. How have you convinced an unwilling partner to work with you in the past?

2. What tools do you think we should have to better enable partnerships?

3. Let’s say I’m (X big potential partner). You’re our latest BD hire. Convince me to work with you.

I originally posted this as an answer on Quora.

I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes for non-technical positions and am the first non-technical hire at Pulse. In looking for more non-technical people to join our team, I’ve found some common threads that hinder fantastic people in their job hunt. Before I begin, I’d caution that you should not want to work at just any startup, but one that suits your skills and interests. If you can’t be passionate about one or a few startups, it’s unlikely that you can make it for the long haul. Here are some tips on getting the job once you know what you’re looking for:

1. Explain what you’ve accomplished, not what you’ve managed: I often see that people emphasize “managing” rather than “doing” on their resumes and cover letters. I could care less that you managed a team of five marketing people. I’d rather see examples of the  marketing materials you worked on and what effects your work had on sign-ups and overall company growth. Most startups are not looking for early non-technical hires to manage people. Instead, they’re looking for fantastic individual contributors that can set a direction and execute (and maybe manage people when the time comes). 

2. Explain why you want to work at the startup you’re applying to: Surprisingly, many candidates often explain that they want to work at “a small startup” because they will have “impact and room for personal growth”. I could care less that you want to work for a startup. Why do you want to work for our startup? If all small startups look the same to you because you feel like a cog at {insert big company name here}, do your research and save yourself some time. All startups are not the same and you won’t get the opportunity to work at one if you treat them as such. 

3. Show a startup what you’ll do for them: It’s fairly easy to tell whether technical team members are performing ( i.e. are they committing clean code? ).  It takes much longer to tell whether you’ve hired a bad business development person or PR rep. At Pulse, we ask all non-technical hires to complete a project of some kind. For a community manager, this project could be creating a user survey on a recent product update. For a business development manager, it could be articulating a value proposition and finding target partners for the launch of a new product. To clear any doubts about whether you can actually accomplish what you say you will, take the lead on a project you would like to own at a startup you’re interested in. This will give you insight on whether you like the job you might land and show you can get stuff done.

4. Do your research: When interviewing at a startup, you should know about every  completed product and feature release. If you’re interviewing for a marketing role, you should know how a company marketed its last release and you should have ideas for improvement. Nothing kills an interview faster than being on a phone screen with a candidate who says “I downloaded your app for the first time yesterday” or “Oh, you guys have an integration with Nike already?”. No matter what space the company your interviewing with is in, you should learn as much as you can about the industry. While domain expertise isn’t always necessary, a startup should be able to tell if you have the skills to figure it out on your own without significant hand-holding. 

5. Above all else, be passionate: More than anything else, show passion in everything you do. Take time to compose a personalized thank you email after your interview. Request detailed referrals from friends or colleagues of team members at the startup you applied to. Show your excitement about a startup’s problems and how you can be part of the team that solves them. You can’t teach passion.

Business development is undefined by nature. Someone hired into business development will need to do whatever it takes to make the business succeed, whether that means customer development, selling a product or managing a marketing partnership.

When someone says “Business development is sales without a quota”, they’re often referring to the fact that business development roles can have intangible results. People in  BD are rarely held to partnership or revenue quotas like comparable sales positions are. However, I find this not to be a function of the role itself, but most often due to the fact that companies are unsure of what they need from someone in this role.

A company that doesn’t have product-market fit hasn’t figured out exactly how to sell their product so they don’t think they need a sales team. Investors and advisors may suggest that the company hire a business development person without knowing what that person will do. The person hired has non-existent or low expectations and the rest of the team wonders, “What does that business guy do, exactly?”. To prevent that, I’ve found it helps to:

Create Clear Expectations: While quotas may not be a good fit at the start, it should be clear what the company expects from a business development employee over time. It helps to define the role: will this person be working on e-commerce partnerships or user-growth partnerships? More often than not, if you tell someone to “Go out there and get us some partnerships!” you’ll have a business development person with a calendar full of meetings and no idea where to take things. 

Determine From the Outset What Partnerships Are Off the Table: Some companies are willing to take part in one-off partnerships that require engineering, product and marketing resources. Other companies only strike standard partnerships that are fairly cookie-cutter time after time. Determining what your company is and is not willing to do for a deal will save time and headaches. 

I’ve spoken to more than a few people that dislike the functions of business development, PR, sales, recruiting and host of other non-technical roles. It’s difficult to find the right people for these roles, but it makes it much harder when you don’t know what you’re looking for. 

18-Year-Old Morgan Jones Reporting on the Aurora Shooting via Buzzfeed

When I woke up Friday morning to the news of the shooting that took place in Aurora, all sources pointed to this comprehensive timeline of the incident on Reddit. The world was watching as an 18-year-old Denver resident, not a local or national newspaper or television station, chronicled the events. Patching together media reports, updates from a police scanner, tweets and other Reddit posts, Morgan Jones was able to give a more comprehensive account of a breaking news event than even the most seasoned journalists. Reporters began looking to the Reddit timeline in order to report the news across the web. 

This isn’t the first time this has happened and it certainly won’t be the last. While some journalists lament that any person can throw up a blog and call himself a reporter these days, I’ve found that this transformation has brought us closer to the truth. Rather than waiting for the news to go through filter after filter of eye witnesses, reporters, copywriters and editors, we’re hearing the news from the source at a faster speed than ever before. 

When I interned in a newsroom several years ago and saw that reporters were being laid off left and right and local papers were completely shutting down, journalists were concerned that the stories of locals may go untold. Today, stories like that of Caine, a 9-year-old kid in East LA who created an elaborate DIY arcade, or the story of Karen, the bullied bus monitor from Greece, New York, are found on Reddit first. 

Reddit is both a platform and a community. It allows anyone to tell his story or the story of someone who is unable or unwilling to tell it. Instead of reporters hanging out on street corners to tell stories, they hang out on the forums of Reddit and HackerNews waiting for the news to break. Ask a journalist what the favorite part of his job is. Often he’ll say “I get to tell other people’s stories”. Thanks to the Internet and sites like Reddit, we all get to do that now. 

When I was growing up, I asked my mother why she dropped out of high school at 16. She told me that when she was in 4th grade, she was accused by her teacher of submitting work that her “older brother or sister” had done. She was the oldest child in her family and did the work herself.

In high school, my mother had straight A’s and made the cut for her school’s honor society. Yet, because she didn’t attend study hall (she clearly didn’t have trouble studying), the teacher in charge refused to let her in.

In her words, “the classes were boring, the teachers were boring” and she wasn’t learning anything. She dropped out at 16 and the dean of her local community college allowed her to take classes even though she couldn’t take the GED Test until she was 17. She worked part-time, but had to drop out when her bike was stolen and she couldn’t commute to both work and school. She said, “What did I need a degree for? All the women I knew were secretaries and you didn’t need a degree for that.”

I didn’t think much about it again until I was a senior in high school. My longtime debate coach told me that the history teacher who just started teaching at my school brought him a paper I wrote and said “I don’t think Cristina wrote this. She must have plagiarized it.” My coach told the history teacher to run my paper through Turnitin. She did and found that the work was my own. I never knew this until I was about to graduate and my debate coach told me what happened.

The same thing happened to my mother (much earlier and repeatedly). Thankfully, 25 years later, it was happening to me and I had absolutely no idea. It’s been shown time and time again that girls are thought of as less capable than boys in the classroom. When I think about why there aren’t more examples of women in the highest positions of any industry, I think about how hard it must have been for them and how lucky I am to be a woman in today’s world.