Mo News Interview: Why Women Leaders Help Companies Excel

** Check out the Mo News Daily Podcast for a breakdown of all the key headlines. Your listens, show follows and reviews have launched us up the charts and into the Top 10 News Podcasts on Apple & Spotify! Apple | Spotify | More Platforms **

Hi everyone,

Time and time again, research has proven that firms with women CEOs are more profitable, more socially responsible, and offer a more positive work culture... so why do we see so few of them?

We spoke to Julia Boorstin, CNBC Senior Media & Tech Correspondent, who has spent two decades as a journalist covering tech, media, and business. She is also the author of the new book, When Women Lead, where she tries to answer all of our questions.

In today's conversation she explains how women leaders differ from male counterparts and why traditionally female attributes (including vulnerability, empathy and gratitude) benefit a company’s culture and bottom line. Boorstin interviewed more than 120 women and men for the book and brings an incredible amount of research data to the conversation. She also dives into why women are still not making it into the C-suite despite now being the majority of college graduates.

We end with the mistakes women and men make in the workplace as well as lessons for improving things moving forward.

Highlights from our conversation are in today's newsletter and the full audio interview will go up on the Mo News podcast later today.

☕️ But first, a few headlines this AM before our interview...

• TikTok Ban: FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wants the US to ban TikTok. He's concerned about US user data going back to China, and that China could use it to influence our elections. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.Stop me if you've heard this before: The Trump Administration tried banning TikTok back in 2020, or forcing ByteDance to sell the US operation to a US company. Federal courts eventually ruled that Trump’s order blocking TikTok was illegal, along with another blocking the Chinese-owned app WeChat.

• Pay Transparency: Starting yesterday, New York City employers had to start disclosing salary information in job ads, thanks to a new pay transparency law. It's part of a national push to shrink gender and racial pay gaps. Colorado already has one and California and Washington are set to roll similar laws out in 2023.Companies now have to post salary ranges for open roles - but many didn't have any established pay bands at all. Already, firms like American Express, JPMorgan Chase and Macy's have added pay bands to their help-wanted ads.

• Democrat Second-Guessing: Top Democratic leaders, lawmakers and strategists are openly concerned about their party’s campaign pitch and tactics a week before midterm elections. It reflects a growing sense that Democrats have failed to gather around an effective message in time to avoid major losses in the House and Senate next week. It comes as Republicans hammer away with attacks over the economy and public safety.

• UFO Explanation? Government officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne garbage explain most recent UFO incidents as well as episodes in past years. The sightings have fueled theories about visiting space aliens and spying by a hostile nation using advanced technology. But government officials say many of the incidents have far more ordinary explanations.

Now, to our interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. She tells me about the one attribute all successful female leaders bring to the C-Suite - plus the lessons she learned from more than 100 interviews. In her new book, When Women Lead, she looks at how we can dismantle double standards that traditionally exist for women in the workplace, and what both men and women can do differently to help change things.

Key quote on challenging the status quo: “…diversity in problem solving not only brings in the outside perspectives, that seems obvious, but having diversity actually makes everyone in the group raise their game and level up the way they're reconsidering their assumptions. Why are they making the decisions they are? If somebody else is here who might be challenging them, they better be really sure about what they're about to say.”

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The full conversation will be available later today on the Mo News Podcast. Apple | Spotify | More Platforms

MOSH: You've been reporting at CNBC for 16 years, and you've covered all things tech, media, Hollywood. You've watched this evolution... as you've been covering these companies, you're not taking on the lens of your book, ‘When Women Lead.’ Take me through boardrooms, the C-suite over the course of the past decade and a half. I was actually surprised by how low the numbers still are.

Boorstin: Back in 2006 when I started, very few companies that I intersected with were run by women. You maybe would see women in the C-suite in CFO or COO roles, but many fewer as CEOs. Right now, as of May, when the last Fortune 500 list came out, 8.5% of Fortune 500 companies had female CEOs. That is an all time high. But the problem is, you get higher in the funnel, the fewer women there are, the fewer women of color. There was actually a McKinsey LeanIn study that came out this week that showed the decline of women and women of color the more senior you get in an organization, and specifically showed that at each promotion, the number of women drop off.

So this is a systemic issue. It's not like tons of women are making it to the C-suite and they just don't get to be CEO. It’s that women often never make it anywhere close, because they're falling behind in those first two promotions. The numbers are crazy. And then if you look at the VC (venture capital) space, last year, female founders got 2% of all venture capital funding. 2% in 2021! Co-Ed founding teams got about 15.5%. Male-only founding teams drew 82% of all VC dollars in 2021. The percent going to female-only teams actually declined from an average of 3% over the prior decade, to 2% last year. It went down during the pandemic. I was really struck by these numbers. I thought, we're in a culture that celebrates outliers, we're fascinated by what has enabled the success of outliers. The reality is, is the people who may have faced the highest hurdles, and the most obstacles against them, are probably women in that tech space.

And I had been interviewing these women through the Disruptor 50 list, they were remarkable. And not only were they in the tiny minority, but I was so inspired by them and found them leading and doing things in slightly different ways. They did feel different. So I thought, if I'm inspired by these women, I want to tell their stories. And I want to help change the archetypes of what's out there, of what a successful leader looks like. We see it on CNBC all the time. We see it on the cover of the Fortune 500. The dominant image of what a leader looks like is men in suits from New York City, or guys in hoodies from Silicon Valley. And that defines the image of leadership in our society. But I was seeing in my experience, that that's not at all what successful leaders look like, particularly those leaders who defied the highest odds. So I use this lens of the highest hit, the highest odds against them, of women who had managed to succeed in the tech and the tech landscape backed by VC. And I dug into this, the stories, interviewed about 120 people, and from there found these commonalities.

And then I started to dig into the research and I read probably 300 academic studies. The studies reveal that the traits these women are leading with, and the strategies that they're deploying, are actually things that yes, women are more likely to do, but are in fact incredibly valuable for everyone, male and female. That was my big takeaway. Women have been leading differently their whole lives. And in success, they show us what phenomenal leaders of this next generation should look like. They're not all white men. And they're leading in ways I hope everyone will lead – with empathy and vulnerability and these characteristics that for many years have been seen as flaws. But I have seen in my reporting, they can actually be leadership superpowers.

MOSH: You talk about the numbers of CEOs, the percentage, and it's interesting because at the same time, if you look at the numbers of college grads in this country, women are the majority.

Boorstin: Every type of grad school, with the exception of Business School, and Business School is coming closer to parity these days.

MOSH: There's some universities that are actually concerned by the low percentage of males. So the majority of grads outside of Business School are women. They're all starting out these companies. So what is happening along the way? How are they not getting to the top of the ladder?

Boorstin: Well, it's a complex question with a complex answer. Again, back to another McKinsey LeanIn study, they found something called the broken rung – this idea that if you miss a promotion halfway through your career, a couple decades into your career, you're never going to make it to the top. The women hit this broken rung in the ladder, maybe because they have kids, maybe because they take time off work, maybe because they're in a less intense work mindset because they're managing kids at home. But if they just miss a little bit of that acceleration that happens mid-career, then they never get a chance to make it to the top.

There's another piece of the study that came out this week from McKinsey, that found that senior women are quitting at record numbers, and that is because of their personal frustration with the lack of recognition they get, the fact that other people are taking credit for their work, and because they have younger people questioning them or undermining them, or younger men basically not respecting their authority. So there are practical reasons of women saying, 'forget this, I've had enough, I'm going to quit and maybe start my own company, or maybe do my own thing.' And by the way, if you lose those senior women, it's really damaging to think about the mentorship and the role models that are lost. But then the structural challenges of the broken rung and the lack of promotion every step of the way.

MOSH: For the same job, white women are making 82 cents for every dollar that a man makes. And then women of color are making much less than that.

Boorstin: The pay gap is massive. But I wanted to see how companies were closing it. It’s not impossible to close the pay gap, you just have to commit to doing it. But what was most interesting – until Salesforce, for example, dug into their pay gap, they found they actually do not technically have a pay gap. Because men and women at the same level were getting paid the same amount. What they realized in doing the research, though, is that men were getting promoted so much faster, so then they ended up getting paid more. So women were staying in the same position for longer and getting paid reasonably for that position. But men's promotion rate was so far accelerated, that they ended up making far more money over their careers and getting to the higher levels. They realized that was in part because men were asking for promotions faster. And the bosses, the managers, were promoting men faster. Even the female managers are more likely to promote men faster! So they use the data to break out that bias and move away from it.

PayPal had a similar situation where they created a very complex system of measuring performance to make sure that managers were rewarding people not on whether they liked someone, or because someone reminded them of themselves when they were younger, but actually based on tangible performance metrics. And with that, they were able to weed out not only pay bias, but also promotion bias. So this is possible to do. It just takes an investment. And ultimately, what both PayPal and Salesforce have found is that investing to close pay gaps and promotion gaps is not just the right thing to do, but it actually really helps for retention of employees at a time when obviously that's very important.

MOSH: What you just brought up there gets to the idea of characteristics, the qualities of men and women leadership, men and women at work, the types of things they ask for, the way they act. Take me through the kind of traditional characteristics that you ascribe to both men and women in the workplace.

Boorstin: Male leaders are oriented towards action, rather than taking a moment to consider options or data. They're more likely to lead in a top down way, rather than in a communal way. What I found is that female leaders are more likely to be empathetic. That is a trait that really helps leaders, and particularly we've seen female leaders use it to their advantage. Obviously, empathy is valuable as a skill for connecting with employees, connecting with customers relating to investors or partners, etc. Women are more likely to lead with vulnerability, traditionally seen as a weakness, but admitting what you're not good at, what you need help with, is really valuable to invite collaboration. And I've found in a number of examples it has helped women hire very senior executives away from other companies, because the women say, ‘this is not my thing, you're going to get to take the lead in this,’ and that really invites other people to step up.

Women are also more likely to lead in a communal way, so the opposite of that top down approach, pulling from perspectives from across the organization. And while male leaders are more likely to have convergent thinking – like, we got to solve a problem, let's just focus on getting this problem solved right now – women are more likely to have divergent thinking. So that means pulling on related tangents, talking about the situation around a problem, more sort of looking at the forest in order to understand the tree better, rather than just rushing to help fix the tree right now. And women also have been found to have a higher what they call ‘adaptability quotient.’ And I actually think that convergent thinking helps with that. Because if you've already explored the situation around a problem, when the situation changes, you already have a better sense of the context. So you may be better equipped to look at the new the new challenge.

MOSH: One other trait that you bring up in the book is gratitude.

Boorstin: Yes, this is the surprise one to me. I had no idea that gratitude had anything to do with business. I think of gratitude like a personal characteristic.

But what I found is that female leaders feel more comfortable practicing gratitude. There are various studies showing that women love the feeling of gratitude. It makes them feel great. Men oftentimes feel uncomfortable with gratitude. 'Does this mean that I owe someone something? Does this mean that I have to do something for someone else, because I'm grateful for them?' And so men are less likely to practice gratitude. But they should practice more gratitude, because gratitude is found to correlate with long term planning.

There's a study I cite in the book that I think is so interesting – they ask people to either do nothing or to write about something that makes them happy. And then they offer them whether they want $50 now, or $86 in the future. People who practice 'happiness or nothing,' they always opt for the money up front. They'd rather get the quick payout. Then, they have a different group of people come in and they say 'write about something that you feel grateful for. Do a gratitude practice.' The people who did the gratitude practice: they pick the long-term payout. They're more likely to go say, ‘I'm fine right now. I feel grateful, I feel good. I'm not going to go for the near-term fix, I'm going to go for the long term, getting paid far more in the future.’

So I've seen this time after time after time, with the women I've interviewed, the CEOs who say, 'It's okay that I'm not going to hit these quarterly numbers, because it's much more important that I have the big payout down the line.' I'm so grateful I get to solve this problem. I can handle a little bit more pain now because I know that, long term, the upshot is so much bigger. So I've seen it in action. And it came up in so many interviews. And when I went through the transcripts, it was amazing how much the words ‘gratitude,’ ‘blessed,’ ‘lucky’ came up time after time. So this idea that gratitude correlates not just with longer term thinking, but bigger picture problem solving, means we should all be practicing gratitude every day.

MOSH: Ultimately most business are a team sport. You multiple leaders running various divisions, and ideally, in this day and age, you have a mix of men and women. How do those various characteristics play amongst leaders at an equal level?

Boorstin: So I have a whole chapter in the book about management and the idea of bringing the most out of diverse teams. And the idea that having diverse teams is not about this Kumbaya, everyone's ideas are welcome, but bringing together perspectives to clash, and people to disagree and get the best out of that. Female leaders are more likely to have diverse teams that report to them. So female leaders are more likely to have gender and racial diversity in their employee base, which is obviously incredibly important for financial outcomes. They're also more likely to invest in mentorship.

But my interest in having diversity in teams is that female leaders are actually more likely to have women in groups are more likely to do conversational turn taking, which means if you get a group of people together, women, we'll make sure everyone gets a chance to speak when they go around the room. Whereas if you have a male-dominated environment, it's not unusual to have one man or two men just sort of steamrolled the conversation. Everyone else sits there silently. That's not productive.

There's some really interesting data and some examples in the book about how having diversity in problem solving not only brings in the outside perspectives, that seems obvious, but having diversity actually makes everyone in the group raise their game and level up the way they're reconsidering their assumptions. Why are they making the decisions they are? If somebody else is here who might be challenging them, they better be really sure about what they're about to say.

MOSH: The case you're making is not just an ethical case for more women in leadership. It's a business case. Businesses are worried about the bottom line, profits and revenues, and shareholders. Explain the impact of diversity on the actual bottom line here – why it makes sense financially for these companies?

Boorstin: Yeah I’m not making an ethical case for diversity. What I'm talking about is the fact that I lay out these numbers – study after study, whether you're looking at diversity in boardrooms, diversity among CEOs, diversity in the C-suite, diversity among investors at VC funds, etc. If you add more diversity, the firms perform better. Startups that have female founders perform better. So each one of these studies showed that having more diversity leads to better financial outcomes. The boards with more diversity are less likely to take unnecessary risks, so they perform better.

I love this study of regional banks during the financial crisis, because it's actually pretty easy to compare regional banks. And obviously, the financial crisis was a huge disaster for many of them. The regional banks that were led by women outperform – they were more likely to survive and to do far better during the financial crisis. So these researchers went back and said, Why? Was it something these women did once the financial crisis hit? And they said, No, it turns out that those female CEOs were less likely to take on risk. They didn't take on as much risk in that lead up to the financial crisis.

And then if you look at startups, the numbers are so dramatic. It's shocking to me that female founders get so little access to capital. There's a study out of Boston, and they looked at 350 startups, and they compare the male and female led startups. The female-led startups raised half as much money as the male-led startups. And then they yielded about twice as high the return on investment, a number of years later, so half as much upfront twice the ROI. It just doesn't make sense that women are getting such little access to capital.

MOSH: There was a time period when female politicians felt like they had to fit into male stereotypes, even dress wise, and only recently, they've been able to kind of embrace female characteristics to a certain extent. How are you seeing that play out in the business world?

Boorstin: Very similar thing. It's a double bind. There is the baseline assumption that women are going to be warm and nurturing. But there's also this expectation that you have to be serious and aggressive to compete in a male-driven world. But in a chapter in my book, I lay out all the different ways women face double standards. And it's mind boggling that women are judged more harshly if they succeed in a male dominated environment. Women are judged more harshly if they if they fail in a female dominated world. They're judged more harshly if they don't demonstrate warmth and if they demonstrate too much warmth. I mean, it's a ridiculous laundry list of things that you can't possibly meet all these expectations.

MOSH: That’s your chapter on gender incongruence. You also talk about how women are judged more poorly for using humor and men are given credit for it!

Boorstin: They're judged more harshly for showing any emotion. Even making jokes at the office is considered bad for women and positive for men. Doesn't make any sense.

MOSH: To what extent, though, do women feel like they can now embrace their characteristics? They don't have to role play men.

Boorstin: I think there's been a gradual shift, say over the past 5 or 10 years. I actually think the shift for women to understand the particular strengths of their unique characteristics came during the pandemic. It put a spotlight on the importance of things like empathy and vulnerability. And there are a lot of studies in the book that talked about how, in times of crisis, employees would rather have a female boss. And I would argue that now is a time of like, this is a permanent state of crisis, whether it's financial anxiety and record inflation, war in Ukraine, etc. I mean, there are just so many different elements contributing to uncertainty right now.

And so, if all the research shows that employees would rather have a female boss at a time of crisis, that speaks to the incredible power of those female traits, such as around a communal management style, or vulnerability, or empathy. And, I'm actually hearing from more male CEOs, that they understand they need to get their head around these traits and these characters and these strategies. I was talking to a man who is an executive coach, and he works with top CEOs and big companies, mostly in New York. And he said that recently, post-pandemic, as employees do quiet quitting and great resignation and it’s just harder to connect with employees, he's finding his CEO clients are saying, ‘Can you help me out this empathy thing, like, teach me how to be empathetic, I got to figure this out.’

As ridiculous as that sounds, it is incredibly reassuring to us to see that these traits are now at the forefront. And I do feel like these days, you've got to figure out how to connect with employees and think big picture and do long-term planning and have that divergent thinking and figuring out the context. All of these characteristics are ones where women have traditionally had a huge advantages. I do think people are starting to understand that. And I also think that the weirdness of the pandemic, and people being at home and being open about their lives, and maybe you have kids running in the background, I think a lot of women have said like, ‘This is who I am, this is how I lead, and I'm not gonna apologize for it anymore.’

MOSH: How much of a step back was the pandemic was for women, though? Especially in the in the workforce, the number hasn't recovered.

Boorstin: Horrible. We saw women leaving the workforce in record numbers. So I think that speaks to the fact that people are frustrated. But I hope that some of those women will go out and start their own businesses. And we see such a high level of entrepreneurship, women are more likely to found businesses than men are right now. And that fact means that, hopefully, women are taking their careers more into their own hands. I mean, obviously founding a business is hard, access to capital seems impossible. But I hope that while the pandemic has been such a massive setback for women in the workplace, it did at least raise attention to the value of women's leadership strategies and skills.

There's still remarkable growth in the in the entrepreneurship space coming from women. The question is just how many of them are bootstrapping, and maybe without venture capital are not gonna be able to scale their businesses as quickly. And how many of them are able to grow more quickly, because they've had either access to Angel investing, or maybe a slice, a tiny piece of that slice of VC capital?

MOSH: What is your advice to men in the workforce, who are either at the CEO level, in the C-suite, or junior and reporting into women leaders or other male leaders? How can we all help to improve the situation?

Boorstin: First of all, everyone should read my book, ‘When Women Lead.’ It is a great primer on all the numbers that you didn't realize were there. The stats are horrifying, mind boggling, and very surprising. They are so surprising that at various points, a copy editor of my book was sure that these were typos! They thought that I messed up the where the decimal was. So read the book. You can see that these are not typos.

MOSH: One of them I read twice – of the 2,000 companies that went public between 2013 and 2022, there were 18 female CEOs, or 0.9%.

Boorstin: That is not a typo. I would say read the book to educate yourself on the numbers. I can't tell you how many men said I don't believe that. People don't believe it, but they're real. And I think you will be surprised by the stats in this book. Second, I think the power of pattern matching is really is massive, and can also be pernicious. I was talking to a female CEO of a public company recently, and she said she was surprised to find, as they were doing their own pay equity evaluation, that even her female managers were paying the male employees more! She thought that female managers would be good about pay equity, that they would know to pay men and women equally. But she found a pattern matching this assumption, that men are ready for the promotion, or this assumption that this is what leaders look like, they look like men. So it can even influence women in the workplace.

So I think it's really important to be aware of that, and to be so reliant on the data rather than instinct, that data can overwhelm any instinct towards bias. And even to acknowledge that women have their own bias. By the way, plenty of women in the book didn't see themselves as CEOs. They had not seen CEOs who looked like them. So of course, they didn't see themselves as a CEO. And that's what I'm hoping to change with the stories in the book. But I think even an awareness, that no matter how good your intentions are, your bias is so deeply baked, and so sort of societally ingrained, that it may influence your decision making. So the more you can use data and numbers and performance metrics to make decisions, the more you'll be making decisions fairly and accurately, and not based on long standing stereotypes and patterns.

MOSH: And I want to reverse the question and ask what women can do better support other women, or support themselves?

Boorstin: There’s a great chapter in the book on the importance of communities. And there's so many organizations, nonprofits, and also for profit companies that are focused on helping women help each other. I have seen in the past 20 years and entire massive sea change in terms of women going from being concerned that there was only room for one of them in a room to understanding that they will all succeed if they can help each other out. And I think there's really a movement right now for women to help each other. So I think for women, there are all these organizations, you can join Chief, which is for women at the VP level and above. There's an organization called The Crew, which helps women learn how to coach each other for their career success.

So I think relying on networks of other women, offering help, and asking for what you need, needs to be destigmatized. Women feel uncomfortable asking friends for professional help. Men do not feel uncomfortable with that. So understanding that it's okay to build a business network and rely on that network for professional advancement. That's what people are supposed to do. Women feel a stigma around that, and they need to get over that. I also think a lot of women suffer from imposter syndrome.

Many women I interviewed who are currently CEOs of successful companies suffered from massive impostor syndrome that almost held them back. Gwyneth Paltrow suffered from imposter syndrome. If she suffers from imposter syndrome, then all of us probably do! So I think this idea of recognizing that and trying to decipher the difference between, ‘Wait a second, am I just having a moment of imposter syndrome? Maybe I could do more than I am. Maybe I'm capable of more than I think in this moment.’ So I think trying to peel away the layers of societally-imposed impostor syndrome that can hold us back is a really valuable thing as well.

MOSH: In your conversation with Gwyneth, she was bringing up examples of being asked by various folks, ‘so who's the guy behind the scenes? Who is actually running things?’

Boorstin: Many CEOs in my book were asked that. ‘Where’s your white male co-founder?’ A number of women of color were asked, ‘You can't do this without a white male co founder.’

MOSH: So looking beyond the U.S., Julia, some countries have gone to quota systems for all boards of major companies – you need to be 50/50, etc.

Boorstin: California was trying to do that. It's currently being challenged in the courts.

MOSH: What do you make of that as a strategy?

Boorstin: I think it depends on the culture of the society. I think sometimes those guidelines force companies to realize how far from equity they actually are. So I actually think having that law proposed in California, even though it's being challenged in the courts is a valuable exercise for companies to say, 'hey, wait a second. Why do we only have one woman on our board? Or why do we have an all male board?' Which was the case for a number of companies. So I think it's a shame that quota systems could be necessary. I think that if companies were more cognizant of the statistical value of having diversity on their boards, they might be more likely to embrace that and not be forced by a quota system.

I think what's interesting is that as a journalist, I don't want to be known as a female journalist. I'm just a journalist. I would like to be known as a good journalist, not a good, female journalist. And I really struggled with this in writing the book about how to make sure that I was not “othering” women by calling them female CEOs. And I think ultimately, where I landed at, is the idea that women are so far from equity in the business space, that until we get to a place where having female CEOs is more common, or more normalized, we need to be elevating positive stories of success among female CEOs.

And I hope that this book can help the female CEO from being almost a derogatory negative thing, at least based on the way women are often portrayed in the media, to making female CEO a positive thing – you want to be like a female CEO, and moving the conversation past this “girl boss era” where it was kind of a joke. This is not a joke. These are not girls, they are women. And they're leading with traits that everyone – male and female – should understand and emulate

MOSH: What did you learn through this process? As a journalist, day to day you’re telling stories, but here you've had an opportunity to really dive deep into something.

Boorstin: My daily job is really exciting. It's fast paced, nonstop, super high energy. And there's always a real urgency to it. So writing a book was very different. You're living with these characters. There are dozens of women in the book. And I feel like they're like roommates. They live with you in your head for two years. And you really get to know their stories and their motivations. And these are women who, for the most part, I interviewed via zoom, because I did the interviews during the pandemic. And so it's been interesting to reflect on their stories, and then also to meet them in person as I've been on book tour.

What I've seen in these women is if you have a very distinct purpose, I really think you're going to be more successful. And I'm not just talking about like helping the world or, you know, helping improve health care, or improve the environment – but just really understand what you're doing. And the women who I've profiled, they are not just driven and passionate, they're not just about making money, but they really have this vision for, ‘I'm going to succeed, and I'm going to show everyone else that women can succeed.’ The women are just remarkable. I'm personally very inspired by these women. And I also have found that my knowledge of the data in the research, totally empowering to be more successful in my day to day. I'm no longer intimidated, or put off by comments that are laced with bias. And it's been really, really helpful for me as I as I negotiate and navigate being a business journalist.

MOSH: What is the biggest mistake women make as they go up the ladder, as they seek to lead? What would you say is the most important attribute, the thing that most ensures success?

Boorstin: I would say there are two mistakes. One is not thinking that they're capable of it, or have the potential to do it, to really lead. And number two is trying to lead in a certain way, or fit themselves into a box that isn't authentic to them. Women should not try to fit themselves into that male stereotype. And I would actually say that Elizabeth Holmes failed, in part, because she was modeling herself on these genius, male leaders like Steve Jobs, and she wasn't actually being true. She wasn't being honest. But she also wasn't being true to who she was, at least at the beginning of her story. So I think it's sort of like authenticity and confidence beyond what maybe women are socialized to have in themselves.

And, by the way, no one is born a leader. No one is born with what it takes to be successful. Nothing comes easy, and it shouldn't come easy. People succeed because they have that combination of self-knowledge of who they are, what they're good at, and also a real focus in terms of how they push themselves to improve. I talk in the book about after-event reviews....this idea that you will succeed if you get comfortable with failure. Once you're comfortable with failure, you can take greater risks and every experience you have, success or failure, evaluate your performance and what you could do better. It's not about pitting yourself against other people or competing directly with other people. That's not what progress is about. It's about understanding your own goalposts, your own benchmarks, and pushing yourself to get there regardless of whatever else is happening in the world.

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