SPECIAL EDITION: GETTING TO EQUAL: Abby Wambach on Women in Leadership

been more crucial. We have two amazing leaders who are guest hosting these six episodes, Carol and Tastad, Group President North America and Deiana Bass, Vice President Global Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, both from PNG, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world. Together, Caroline and Diana have created an impressive gender equality strategy for PNG, and it's a strategy that's really breaking new ground on these issues

in the private sector. And they'll be joined by incredible guests from all walks of life. In this kickoff episode, Caroline Indianna talk with soccer legend, Olympic gold medalist, author and speaker Abby Wambach. They discussed why women's leadership is so important right now and why we need to, as they say, tear up the old definition of what it means to be a leader and see it in a whole new way. Caroline, Indiana, thanks so much for joining us and for guest hosting this series. It's so nice

to be here. It's great to be here. We at Seneca. I have had the great pleasure of working with you for several years now on your gender equality initiative. So, Dianna, let me start with you. Why is this work so important to you personally and what are you trying to accomplish? Well, first, Kim, let me say how great it is to be here guest hosting with you on these conversations on power and purpose.

We really appreciate being invited. Caroline and I have been working for the last several years with a lot of really great leaders inside and outside of our company too. We call it debunk a series of myths and narratives that continue to hold women back in the workplace and frankly, in the world. Our goal has been to create a new narrative, a new story about women in the workplace that gets to a better, more equal world where women and men can contribute to their fullest potential. That's really

what our work is about. Interesting, So what do you mean by a new narrative and what's the old narrative. Well, first, let me say a narrative is basically a story that gets told so often that we all begin to assume that it's true, um, you know, and that's where we come up with it with with what a myth is.

So these stories get told everywhere. They get told in books that people write, they get told in op eds, they get reflected and how women are seen in the media, in movies, in advertising, and so that it's really ubiquitous, which is why it's important that you learn to recognize a myth or a false narrative and then figure out what's your part in correcting that narrative. So these false narrative tells, they tell us things like women lack confidence,

women fear failure, women fear risk taking. They tell us things like women's time is not as valuable as men's time, or that sexual harassment is only a woman's issue. Now, the reality is that none of that is true. I mean, the reality is that communities and companies and countries thrive when women are fully represented in all forms of leadership and at every level, and that includes at the very top levels of the public, private, and not for profit sectors.

So we've been working really intentionally to reframe these stories or narratives UM, and that's why we're really happy to be hosting this series on Conversations on Power and Purpose where we can we can have the opportunity to unpack those those myths with really great leader as an artists and activists UM as part of the conversation. Well, we are so excited about this. Carolyne. You lead the North American business for PNG, representing almost half of the company's revenues,

and you're the executive sponsor of gender equality. Why is gender equality so important to P ANDNG and why should it be important to all companies? Look, and for us at PNG, it just makes sense. You know, many of our products are made specifically for women always Tampex, Olay, Secret, Pantine, just to name a few. And we know that women influence the majority of purchase decisions in most households. Right

of purchasing decisions or something are influenced by women. Yeah, that's absolutely right, and so it's just the right thing to do for our business. It's the right thing to do for our people, and we know that when we have diverse teams, diverse voices working together with the broadest range of skills, experiences, and styles, we get better results. There are so many studies that show this. These studies show that good things happen when you build a diverse team.

There's a study done by Boston Consulting in that showed that companies with diverse management teams had nineteen percent higher revenues from innovation. And I just read the other week that an organization in the UK called the Pipeline looked at companies on Britain's Footsie Index and found that firms that had more than thirty three women on their executive teams had a net profit margin that was more than ten times that of companies with no women on their

executive teams. Ten times. That's an incredible statistic. Imagine what they could do when they hit fifty of women on their executive team exactly Exactly At p and we are operating with the most diverse leadership in our company's history. Forty percent of all managers are women. Of C suite executives, the top thirty executives in our company are women men, and of our independent directors on our board are women. And we're delivering our best results in more than a decade.

These things are connected. That's amazing. So clearly women's leadership matters. Now we're living through a pretty unique moment in history. What have we learned about women's leadership in the past months and why is it so important right now to get more women into leadership. Well, as you said, we

know that women make strong leaders. We're seeing those examples every day, and during this time of the pandemic and social unrest around the world, we're seeing examples of countries led by women doing an excellent job of containing the pandemic with very decisive actions and amazing leadership. Prime Minister Jacinda our Dern in New Zealand, Angela Merkel in Germany. We've seen this in the US as well, with Governor

Michelle Leuhan Grisham of New Mexico. Now, as it relates to social justice, women have again proven to be strong leaders. Atlanta's Mayor Kesha Lance Bottoms was widely praised for how she handled the protests in her city, speaking not only as a mayor, but appealing to our citizens as a mom in an emotional, personal, and highly effective way. So women's leadership and women's authentic voices are needed today more than ever, and we're seeing the profound impact that they have. Well,

that's why we had Seneca. Are so delighted that you're going to be guest hosting these next six episodes, Deanna. Today, you're kicking it off with an exciting conversation with soccer legend Abby Wambach, which I can't wait to hear. We'll

be back after this break. Abby Wambach is a soccer legend, a two time Olympic gold medalist, a FIFA World Cup champion, and she's the author of two New York Times bestseller books, Forward, a memoir, and the number one best seller wolf Pack, How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power and Change the Game. It's based on her inspiring two thousand eighteen commencement speech to Barnard College graduates that went viral. Abby's message to all women, if we keep playing by the old rules,

we will never change the game. Abby. I am so excited to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh man, thank you so much. That was such a nice intro. So glad you're here. Abby. We're so happy to have you here because you always bring so much great perspective and energy to the conversation. So you have captained the women's soccer team to more

victories than any other individual. As Diana said, you're the two time best selling author, including this book on leadership, a very sought after speaker, and a great friend of ours. So let me open it up by asking you how you lead. I would say one of the most important things that I ever saw and witnessed with my own eyes, and I think that that's really important, that this idea of representation is seeing another woman stepping into her full

humanity as a woman in a leadership position. And this happened to me when a coach from Sweden came to coach the United States, our US national team, Pia Sundhaga. She showed up in the first day. She showed up with this guitar and she starts playing the guitar of our first meeting. And at first I was like, this

lady is crazy, this lady, what is she doing? And then as the song progressed, we kind of in our seats were inching forward because we had never seen a woman step into her own self like that, and Pio was that way. Every space she walked into in every room. She was the exact same. She never changed her personality for anybody. She was the boss. She was the big boss, and it gave us that confidence to do that in our own ways, whether it be on the field or

in meeting rooms. And so she gave me the confidence as a person, like not just as an athlete or a leader, but as a person to be who I really was. And around this time is when I really, you know, so concerned with endorsements and not being the gay atypical gay person. I didn't want the whole team to know. I didn't want the world to type cast our women's national team as the gay team. So I

kind of kept it to myself. But when PA showed me this form of leadership, I realized authenticity was one of the most important key elements to having people follow you. I'm talking about getting a group of people from where they are to where they ought to be, and to be able to do that, you have to have people follow you. And the only way people will trust and believe you is if you are truly yourself in every

room you walk in. So that is the story that is That is kind of the way that I try to lead in my life and sometimes you know, I am too much of myself. My wife would say, well, I think this notion of authenticity is so important, and I think it's exactly what you said. Authenticity builds trust, and when you have that trust, I think it is

easier to lead. So your New York Times bestseller, wolf Pack, is about women and leadership, and you've got this amazing way of describing the rules that you think are important for people to truly lead authentically, as we've talked about, and uh, you know, by the way, for our listeners, Abby's also got a second book coming out this fall, which is wolf Pack, targeting a younger audience. So Abby,

tell us about wolf Pack and where it all began. Okay, so where it began a few months after I retired, ESPN called me and they wanted to award me with what they called the sp Icon Award. Now for the listeners who don't know what the sps are, it's essentially the Oscars for sports. And I found myself on stage

standing next to Peyton Manning and Kobe Bryant. May he rest in peace, and I just remember this poignant moment where the lights were on in the camera was on, and I was just feeling like this immense amount of gratitude, like we women here, we are, we have finally made it. They see us like they see Peyton and they see Kobe. And then the lights turned off and the three of

us turned to walk off stage, and something totally different happened. Um, what you might have thought would have been the best celebratory night of my life turned into what I kind of called the Jerry McGuire moment, where I spent sweating and like pacing in my hotel room trying to figure

out why was so piste off. And I think what I realized that night is that I spent my whole career fitting in and staying inside the lines and and not pushing the envelope as much as I needed to, as much as maybe the world even thought I was. Because the three of us were walking into very very different retirements. You know, Kobe and Peyton, they earned a ton of money, and their biggest concern and retirement was where they were going to invest. They're hundreds of millions

of dollars rightfully, so they rightfully earned those dollars. But my biggest concern was where I was going to do and how I was going to recreate myself in a career on being able to pay my mortgage. You know, I played for the national team. I won gold medals and World Cup and and and players of the world. How can it be that I have literally basically nothing to show for it. Um, and especially by comparison to my male counterparts, that we were all getting the same award.

So I promised myself two things at night. One, Hey, Abby, is it fair for me to say so? Everybody's clear you didn't squander your money away, you didn't get paid exactly. This is not the This is not the broke story where I spent all of my money. Um, this is the this is the whole idea that women are paid far less. And I felt like that night, if I realized that this was happening to me, this is happening to every woman in every space, right, I fancied myself,

but it was a very sobering nights. So I promised myself that I would do every that everything that I can for the rest of my life in service of not just the players that are still playing that I didn't want them to have this experience, but other women in every industry. Um. And I want to fight for the voiceless. I want to fight for the people who don't even know that they that they are under the spell also, so that's kind of what I've been doing.

And you know, the books UM, They've been kind of one of the things that have just kind of come out of me since retiring UM and so, yeah, the books have been like such a an avenue for me to figure out what it was that I knew about leadership and how I learned some of the methods and and and the tactics of leadership like making failure of

fuel UM and demanding the ball. You know, I am so grateful for the time that I spent on the national team, because had it not been for that experience, I wouldn't have learned the very lessons of life of leadership that would allow me access to this conversation with some of the biggest and brightest women in the space of corporations of the corporate landscape UM fighting the good fight as well. Well. One of the things we're certainly

really proud of is to be working with you. Our secret brand has worked with you and Women's soccer to really become an advocate for pay equality and equal pay for women in sports, and you have made such a huge impact in that space and it's so very important. Tell us a little bit more about some of these rules. Make failure your fuel. Old rule failure means you're out of the game. New rule failure means you're finally in the game. And essentially what this means is when you fail,

you need to in your mind. It's a mindset shift. It's not easy, but when you fail, you need to look at it as an opportunity, not a thing to take your ball and go home. It's the moment that can change your life. You can do it. Fail year is your fuel. I'll just tell you this story. It's great because it's an old one. It's the first time that I got invited to play as a youth national team player. This is like back in ninety six. So we got to tour the U S women's national team,

the full senior team's locker room. So there I was, We're sixteen years old, and here we were. We found ourselves at the foot of Mia Hamm's locker. There was this picture that was taped up right next to the door. As I you would assume every player could see and look at right before they were going to go step on onto the field for training each day. And you might think this was a picture of them, I don't know, celebrating a goal or their last win, but it wasn't.

It was of the Norwegian women's national team, in fact, celebrating obnoxiously, in my opinion, the previous year's win over the United States in the Women's World Cup, knocking the US out of the World Cup in and as a sixteen year old, I just was like, what is this about? And we talked about it for the rest of that week. Is a team because a lot of us were stunned

and surprised. And then when you kind of break into it and get down to the basics of it, you know, the fear of failure is also the fear of success when you get straight down to it. And I think that that's one thing that I have grabbed onto, held onto and continue to enforce in my data that even after soccer, you know and and and it's a muscle, right that you have to train. I wasn't born being

completely fine with failure, right. I had to learn that the failures of my life we're going to be the arrows that were pointing me in the directions that I needed to go or that I needed to steer to steer clear of. And I wasn't going to not try something because I was going to be afraid of what the outcome was. So I don't know. I think that that's one of my favorite lessons of the wolf Pack book and um and I think it's one of those lessons that I keep having to relearn every single time

that I fail. I have to remind myself, no, this is actually the beginning, this is not the end. That's amazing. It's it's such an important lesson for young girls and for women to not fear failure. But like, I love that you turn it into failure is fuel, right, It's

such an amazing reframing of how to think about failure. Yeah, I just think it's important, especially women, when you find yourself in if you're in the corporate world, or you find yourself in male dominated spaces, there's this mindset that we have to be perfect in order to get any success, to find any worthiness, right, And I think that this

concept really will help you move forward. You know, men are allowed to fail up, Why the heck can't we Why can't we fail and also grow, rather than fail and get demoted, or fail and lose all of our confidence and take our balls and go home, like we have to be strong enough and courageous enough to come back and continue to fight, because it's going to take all of us continuing to come back failure after failure to make sure that we have more representation not just

in corporate worlds, but in governments and in every institution. I think your point that failure becomes the way to learn. Right, If you don't learn, if you don't push the boundaries and push yourself, how do you expand your impact? How do you expand your influence? How do you expand your knowledge base? So the notion of learning is so important in that you have one more rule that I want

you to share. You have a lot of rules here, but we're going to make people go get your book to find the other rules because it's just extraordinary way that you frame leadership. So what's your last one that you want to share with us? Demand the ball old rule, play it safe past the ball, new rule. Believe in yourself, demand and the ball. We women have been conditioned to believe that we need to stay silent. That I mean,

we need to be quiet. And I'm here to tell you that if you want what you want in your life, whatever it may be, you have to demand it. The call to the wolf pack. Believe in yourselves, stand up and say, give me the effing ball, give me the effing job, Give me the same pay that the guy next to me gets. Give me the promotion, give me the microphone, give me the Oval office, give me the respect I deserve, and give it to my wolf pack. Two. I found myself. It was a couple of years after

the other story. At sixteen, I was about eighteen years old as a the Olympic training facility and we were there with the U eighteen women's national youth national team and one of my idols, her name is Michelle Acre. She at the time was thirty five, at the end of her career for the senior team, and she was walking towards our training session and I was like, why

is she walking towards our practice? Well, she sits down next to me and she starts putting her own cleats on, and so now I'm starting to like actually have panic attack. I'm like, is she actually going to be playing soccer with us today? So she had to elect to come and play with eighteen year olds, right, that was that

was her choice. And so for the first like a couple of quarters of the game, you know, I noticed Michelle and she's kind of staying back and letting the players kind of do their thing and and and motivating them and also like cheering them on and telling them like, great job. Well, the last quarter comes around and it was like something totally switched on or off, I'm not sure which, and Michelle ran right back to the goalkeeper, got in her face and goes give me the ff

thing ball. Michelle takes the ball and dribble dribbles it through our team, leaving all of us basically on the floor literally, and she scores and it was winners keepers so which that which means her goalkeeper again got the ball, and you can guess what's going to happen. So Michelle runs back to the goalkeeper again, give me the ball. And she does this time and time and time again

until her team wins five before which sucked for me. Yes, and here's the thing, right, I thought a lot about this story because though I was you know, I'm a competitor, I'm one of the most fiercest competitors you'll ever meet here. This moment was in my life that I have and and and maybe not even since then, I've never seen somebody step into her power, let alone a woman right step into their power quite like she did that day. And what that did is it gave me the ability

to do the same. Like she demanded the ball, she demanded what she knew she needed to help the team. Right. The caveat to this is that she delivered. Right. You can't go around in the world, then give me this, give me this, give me that, give me that without actually following through on what it is that you're trying to become responsible for. And I think what Michelle taught me was that we all have power, we all have something to demand. So that's kind of the story. I

think it's a good one. It's a good one. It is a really good one. You know. Um, Caroline and I talk a lot about UM. We talk about changing this narrative that has been in the world for a while, and it got really loud several years ago. UM, And

it is this. And what I love about your story and what I love about you is that you're one of the women that's out there correcting the narrative with us, right, and so the narrative is, you know, it basically says that women, women lack confidence, women fear failure, women fear

risk taking. It's this whole lack narrative about women. And what's frustrating about that narrative, um, is that we've taken the very essence of what leadership is, courage, confidence, risk taking, failure, those things that are core to extraordinary leadership, and we've labeled them as lacking in our gender. Right, women lack confidence,

women lack you know, fear failure. And so we're really part of part of our desire and bringing people like you and to have this conversation with us is that when you say demand the ball, when you say failure is fuel, it's a way that starts to course correct that narrative that really is one of the things that holds women back, whether it's in the workplace, in the

world and their communities. And the problem with the narrative is that people start to believe it if you hear it enough, Um, People who are making hiring decisions, pay decisions, promotion decisions, they start to hear that narrative and they've heard that narrative and it becomes what they act off of. And so, um, I what I love about your story is that it is the opposite of that, that narrative of lack. Really, it's it really starts to reframe the

narrative of lack. Uh. Carol, and you'd like talk a lot about the Hewlett Packard study which started that that, which is really kind of the basis of that. Yeah, it was one of the when we looked at it, you know, Dana and I spent a little bit of time going back and saying, where did this come from? You know, this notion of women lack confidence and the the crazy adoption of that within companies, workplaces, communities, including

by women. You know, Um, Diana and I would have conversations with women inside PNG and people would say, well, I've got a confidence issue. And I was like, you made it through a crazy recruiting and vetting process, you graduated top of your class. Where did that come from? And while we know all of us as individuals can have moments of self doubt, for it to get labeled and gendered as such was was something that we wanted to really understand. But HP did h V of the study.

This is the other thing that kind of made us crazy when we looked at it, because they looked at job applications of men and women, and what they found is that men applied to the jobs when they had six of the qualifications. Women applied when they had a percent of the qualifications. The man says, I got six out of ten, I'll figure out the rest. The woman takes the briefing at face value and says, oh, they asked for these qualifications. I'm going to go for these qualifications.

As a result of that case study we created, this is where the narrative came up. They were like, well, women must struggle with confidence. We could just have well have said women read instructions, but we didn't say that, you know. And so as Deanna said, then the other part that makes me a little bit crazy is no one spent any time on the that prototypical male behavior. We could have called that overconfident, we could have called that reckless. As I say all the time, I'm still

waiting to read that book. I haven't seen it. But we've got hundreds of books on women's confidence. So um, again we misinterpret and it's the adoption of that false narrative that gets in the way. And here's the thing. Women and men are different, but there is a inherent superpower, right, So that's what these these these philosophies and ideas and these rules that I write about and and wolf back

are there to remember and remind women out there. Sometimes this conditioning of lack of confidence, of quietness, of um staying on the stay on the path, otherwise you're gonna get eaten by the big bad wolf. Like those are Those are systemic and institutional things that are keeping women down. And and what we need to remember is that what is coined feminine in some women, right, being emotional, um,

being pragmatic, some of these things. When it's when it's compared against the masculine that we oftentimes see in more males, um, it looks like it's it's not as good, right, But there is. I mean, if there is a place, and I know we're gonna keep talking about this, but if there is a time in history that feminine leadership is

more required right now, is it? I Mean there's just like all of the studies, when these institutions have been built, they've been built by men, and they've been built for men. So of course we're standardizing ourselves against men and we're not them. It makes perfect sense why it feels weird

in an uncomfortable world. But like my goodness, thank goodness for Cheryl Sandberg writing the Leaning Book, though it feels like so archaic thinking about how how far we've come since that book was released, her time and her writing that was important because it gave women permission to be inside of those spaces. You know, I think the notion

of lean in gave women permission. But we still see this default to male behavior as the standard that we look for, you know, I saw it in the last year and there was this remarkable story that a CEO told of hiring a CFO for his company, and he was working so hard to ensure that he had an equal slate of candidates male and male and female. And he got down to his two final candidates, one man,

one woman. He went through the whole interviews. At the very end of the interview for each of them, he said, I want to know if you can cut my corporate tax right now, you're you're interviewing somebody who's not been with the company, doesn't unders. I mean, that's a complex, very complex question. Right. The man responded immediately and said, yes, I can. The woman paused, hesitated, and said, I don't have enough information to answer that question. I would need

to know more. So smart it is smart. The CEO, in telling the story, which I think was very cool, said, my initial instinct, my gut reaction, was I'm hiring the man. He gave me the answer that I wanted. But luckily this CEO had surrounded himself with counselors and advisors and people on his team who said, hang on a minute, hang on, she gave you the better answer. And so to your point, this notion of systemic fixes, that's what I like about this story. The CEO had put in

place a system people who could balance his perspective. He had men and women in his inner circle, and then he listened, and as a result, he hired the woman. He said, it was a great decision. But this whole notion that we have to restructure systems and we have to ensure that we're designing systems that work for everyone is the point of this story. As you said earlier,

women and men are different. Thank goodness, right, it makes the world a wonderful place for all of us, and so the notion that we've got all of these unique individuals and unique personalities is what makes this world an amazing place. So we've got to find a way to broaden that in how we build the systems. And we've got to stop focusing on fixing the women, and we've got to fix the systemic bias and systems that are in place. Now you're doing that with Angel City. So

let's talk Angel City. So the end of your cell is the National Women's Soccer League, and you know PNG. You all know them very well because you've been a sponsor of the league. And thank you for being one of those companies that puts their money into places where not only it's needed, but you know, to get some sense of respect, to see a secret to see PNG on the boards of the sidelines like that actually does

something to somebody's psyche, right. Angel City is is a team that is going to be starting in two founded by these four folks. Natalie Portman, I think you all

know who she is. She called me a few days before they were going to release the statements that they were coming into the league, and they decided that they were going to structure this team very differently than what most professional sports teams and how they're structured, and they wanted to do this differently to give access to professional sports ownership to the people, to the very people who

helped build the mid soccer. So they found a bunch of women who played for the United States wimens national team at certain points throughout the history of our national team that lived in southern California, and they reached out to them that and asked if we wanted to be

a part of the founding investor group. And you know, I felt like I was in a dream a I was talking in Natalie Portman right right, and it was this idea of building her own system, her own institution that is going to be built for women, and so she wanted to be built by women. UM and you know, our women's national team. The only reason why you know who the women's national team is isn't just because we win,

though that's great. It's because we had immense unity. And by the way, that doesn't mean that every player always agreed on every UM contract negotiation topic, uh specific bullet point that we were trying to get from US Soccer Federation. It just means that in the end, we agreed and we had a democratic systems set in place to support

each other. And so what this this situation and hold the whole point of the wolf Pack book is to find your pack, is to find your people, right and and that is why I know our women's national team has found not just success in getting decent contracts over the years and especially now since I've retired, but they won medals, they've won championships, and then they won and they won the hearts of our country, right and and it is no surprise to me because when you get

a bunch of badass women together, excuse the language, but it's important for that sentence. When you get a bunch of badass women together, good things happen. Right. And then of course, like I don't know, it's just so it's so freaking exciting, and it's and it's restructuring and reorganizing and reimagining what is possible. Right. We can't keep banging their heads against the ceiling of a house that was built for a man. We have to do what Ava du Vernese has said. We have to start building our

own homes. It's so funny because you keep reminding me of these we you know, myths or false narratives that, um that just your storytelling helps debunk them along the way what Angel City makes me think about Caroline and I talk a lot about. And again, this is in a corporate setting, right. So there's another one of these false narratives that kind of plagues women in the workplace. And the narrative is that there are just simply not

enough qualified women in the workplace to take on top jobs. Right. And what's so frustrating about that narrative is that you've literally take in quantity and quality and stuck it in the same sentence. They're not enough of them and the ones that are there aren't quite good enough. Um. And if you listen in the workplace, you will hear this quantity and quality narrative kind of played over and over and over again one of the ways that we like

to talk about it. And you just debunked the myth in in what Natalie A. Portman and you and all the women who are really fixing the systems are doing. But we talked about um. So here's how this narrative plays out. Um. There's a lot of discussion in the corporate world about getting to fifty fifty representation of women in fortune five hundred CEO roles. Right, so there are

I know, it's amazing. There are thirty eight women there today, so half would be two and fifty or about two eighteen two twelve more women, right, And the narrative is simply that there just aren't enough qualified women to take on those additional two hundred and twelve jobs. And so my pushes, wait a second, We're looking for two hundred and twelve women on a base of a hundred and thirty six million women in the United States, right, it's crazy,

it's a crazy number. And people will go, yeah, yeah, Danda, that doesn't matter because all those women aren't you know, they aren't even in the workplace yet, right, some of those are newborns. I'm like, okay, that's very fair. Point cut a hundred million off the top of that number.

Just cut a hundred million off. And so we're dealing with thirty six million women now and still holding the narrative that there aren't two hundred and twelve that have the risk, risk taking profile and the courage and the you know, um, the mentorship and the sponsorship to take on those jobs. And if people still don't like that number,

cut that number in half. You know, take that thirty six million, cut it in half, and I just keep cut cutting it in half and cutting in half, and it's like, how low does that denominator have to get before we get rid of that narrative that there aren't enough quality, our quantity of women to take on some of these top jobs. It's really amazing what you just said, because what what you're all doing is you're breaking that narrative of quantity and quality and refrain redoing doing it

your own way through Angel City. I think all of what you just said is so important to umber who is creating the narrative exactly. I think it's it's how do how does it? You know, come from the ground up. But there's also there are enough women that are so close to hitting that CEO role because I also think that's still part of the solution there in the in the corporate lane, most of these problems, the number of women in CEO roles is completely within the remit of

a board of directors. That is a solvable problem today. It just requires that you have people that you know, that aren't afraid of losing their power, that are courageous enough to make the decisions to shift, you know, shift the dynamic. There's a lot of work that's being done about paying attention to how many women, how many people men and women of color are you know, sitting on boards of directors of these big companies, because when the when that mix changes, right, then you start to see

changes in the system where they have. Most of the stuff is solvable. Pay equality is solvable by a leader who decides I'm going to do it differently. See, you know, CEOs are changed because a board of directors is courageous enough to say we're going to do it differently. This kind of thing is not just from the top down, but also from the bottom up. This is no longer like, well, we feel bad for those who are on the margins, so we just want to like make some room for them.

And you know, it's going to make our company look good.

It's gonna make your company more freaking money, right, and so it's like for me, I think the long term need, the long term viability of any company is to get way more diversity and inclusion on every leadership board, in every leadership boardroom, at every leadership table that you possibly can, because then all of the campaigns you run all the marketing ideas, all the products that are going out into the world will not have biased because somebody in that margin,

on that margin wall have had had a voice, had an opinion that had something to do with that actual product going out to somebody that might look like them, might like talk like them. I don't know. I get so fired up about this. I do because I think it's so important, and it's so important, not just in the corporate world, but it's important in government, it's important in schools, it's important in our like small communities and our pta meetings. Everybody needs a voice and we will

all be better. It'll make it the world gets better, and not just for the marginalized. The world gets better for the majority. The world gets better for across the board. We we just fundamentally believe that, and we've seen it time and time again. It's so important. And uh, I was saying this to Diana after we talked the other day. I said, every time we talk, every time, I am

just so struck by your generosity. And I really, I mean, that's so sincerely because it's your generosity with us, it's your generosity, your spirit out in the work that you're doing. We appreciate it very much. I mean, that's so sweet of you. My my wife says it's my superpower. But yeah, it's like, Look, I grew up in a huge family. I've been on teams my whole life. Um, I know what it's like to have an ego and operate through that and and want to be the one, the chosen one,

the best one. I know all of the feelings and the reason why I can be generous is because I've gone through all of that and I've come out the other end. And what I have found is that you win more when you open yourself up and you bring people along with you. You get to to more places, you win more championships, You find more success when more people around you that not just are supporting you, but actually helping you and pushing you. People that you can

also follow, people that you can learn from. One of my favorite books is Like Happiness. One of the quotes is happiness is meant to be shared. And I think that that also has to do with success. Agree, Abby, that's so incredible. Thank you so much. So before you go, is there one last thought you'd like to leave us with? So I think what I'm trying to teach my daughters and son right now is they're young twelve, fourteen, and seventeen.

UM this idea because I think about this a lot, like how the heck did I get to be one of the best of the best. And I always knew, no matter what situation I was in or what team I was on, I always knew that I wanted to continually level up. I don't know if it's the youngest child in me, UM, but I wasn't afraid at a young age. I wasn't afraid of being mediocre in a field of better players. I knew that that was the

way I was going to get better. And then over time and and and through team after team after team, UM, finding myself in college leveling up. I'm like, looking around, these players are faster, they're stronger, they're four years older than me, and it's seventeen years old. That's a huge difference. And then I find myself getting to call up to the national team, UM, the best of the best of the best. Uh and and it's the play is too fast for me. I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

I'm like, they're running circles around me. But I'm like this uncomfort is part of what allowed me access to success later down the road, and I think people don't understand that enough that there is going to be on comfort. And then the other component to this is I had this crazy audacity about me that I believed that I deserved to be in every leveled up position that I found myself. I knew that I was not yet the

best player on that team. I knew that I was even like maybe middle of the road, but I had this sense of confidence that if I just gave myself time to adapt to level up, then I would in fact one day be worthy. Right. But it takes this courage inside of us as people two believe that we belong wherever we stand. We belong in some spaces and guess what it's going to be uncomfortable, and guess what it's going to hurt, and guess what there will be tears, and guess what it's not all going to go well.

But you can never stop believing in yourself, otherwise you're never gonna get anywhere. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Abby for being here. It's just such a joy to spend the afternoon with you. My pleasure. That was an incredible conversation with Abby Caroline Indiana. To learn more about Abbey's work, go to Abby Wombach dot com. Here are three takeaways that I got out of the conversation. First, as Caroline and Diana remind us, we need to stop trying to

fix the women and instead fix the system. This includes debunking the myths and rejecting the false narratives that hold women back in the workplace and in the world. Instead, we need to create new narratives as well as address head on systems across industries that lead to inequality. These include how women get paid and how women get promoted, and, as they remind us, if we want to get to equal, we need to make sure that women leaders are equally

represented in top leadership roles across industries. Second, we need to broaden how we define leadership. The legacy model of leadership that is often described as quote mail may not be working for anyone, men or women. Instead, we need to recognize that women's leadership matters and it drives results. In these past several months, we've seen women leaders step up and model incredible styles of leadership and strategies that

are working. Both women and men should look to these models of leadership as a source of guidance and inspiration. And finally, we should all become a student of Abby's wolf Pack and remember the rules, including demand the ball

and remember that failure is fuel. I hope you've learned as much as I did from this conversation and join us next week when Caroline and Diana speak with actor, producer and entrepreneur Justin Valdoni on the role that men play in advancing gender equality and getting us all to equal.

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