Theme 56: Equality

Having a small business can be a really isolating experience so having a support system is important.

NO.

Your pay reflects your self-worth.

Working for free devalues the idea that creative work is work.

If you do work unpaid, be selective about it.

Clients get what they pay for but creatives get what we sign up for.

I'm doing my best to haul ass one thing instead of half ass a bunch of things

In a creative business, there's often this tricky period where you're going from hobby business to business business.

Women are not my competition but my cheerleaders as I am to them.

Building those creative networks with genuine excitement for others' achievement does nothing but help you and is the only way forward.

Every women's success is your success too.

It's this internalized misogyny that tells us that there is this finite amount of success and that someone else's accomplishment is ultimately your demise. Which is bullshit.

Ironically we are told from birth that all women are our competition and it's a very toxic environment.

Women have historically been discouraged from entering creative fields because it's inherently competitive.

I'm a twice uni dropout

That's what I do when I don't do what I do.

"I only took this leadership role, this is very classic in the political world and in the business world, because people asked me to and talked me into thinking I could do it not because I assumed I could ... And so they did. Three wise women sat me down and said 'you can do this'."

If we're talking about equity, the big question becomes are you ready to possibly leave the table and not just bring up another chair.

One promising trend that I'm seeing is that we're shifting from a conversation about equality to one about equity, because equality assumes equal access.

No game is worth it if you're not bringing everyone from the bottom up along with you... it's about the larger collective.

We try to be successful and balanced in our product and project design, and for us that means including the people that that product or project will benefit in the design of it.

Success is about the balance of your own voice, and other peoples' voices.

A successful meeting to me looks like a meeting where everybody has an equal chance to speak.

I try to set my ego aside as a leader, and in the position that I'm in, because it's about the bigger version. It's about equality, and that's something that all of us here can be part of. It's not just about me, it's not just my responsibility to make the world a better place for young women and girls.

It wasn't just about fighting for that organisation, it was about fighting for a space for young women that I feel quite strongly doesn't exist.

I learned that success, when it boils down to it, is about balance. If you break down success and equality, what you end up with is balance.

We want to provide equitable opportunities as opposed to equal opportunities because there's a big difference.

In the civic realm, what are our responsibilities to make sure that people are being represented well and that every single opportunity that comes their way is not a one-size-fits-all solution or representation?

Diversity doesn't just apply to women, it just does not apply to people of color, it also applies to people who have disabilities or abilities or are older.

Diversity is a tough word, I think we all have a general sense of what that word means, but in terms of how I approach it on a day to day basis is that's an end goal. That's what I want to get to. Inclusion is the way that I get there.

It's hard that even, in 2017, I still have to stomach such archaic bullshit in this industry, and that I have male counterparts that feel that my successes are mere folly of luck, and not what I've done.

I've managed never to have a job. So that's my first big achievement.

What do you wake up wanting to change? We so desperately need you. We need your ideas, we need your leadership out there to get us to a better world.

When I get a crusty email, I stop myself for a moment and I'm like, 'What's the most radically generous response?'

We don't reach our potential by being picked on all day. We reach our potential by being lifted up by others around us.

If you were surrounded by radically generous people, how would you act differently? How would you think differently?

We have a model that is for funding and supporting female entrepreneurs. Here's how it works: 500 women, contribute $1100 each—it's an act of radical generosity—that money is pooled together in a fund, and then it's loaned out to five female entrepreneurs at 0% interest. They pay that money back over five years and then it's loaned out again. We're building a billion dollar perpetual fund that we'll pass onto our daughters.

We made all of this up. And we can change it. Everything around you is made up. And we weren't so good at version 1.0; we need to get to the next one.

I look around and think everything is broken, but as an entrepreneur I realize... what a great time to be alive.

We found, as Americans, 17 trillion dollars in three weeks to bail out the banks. Just to give you sense, 17 trillion dollars is 600 years without poverty on the planet. We found that in three weeks. Everything is just crazy broken in this world. We're living in this narrative, in this stew of an economy, that's bad for us.

Right now in the world, five people have the same wealth as three and a half billion people.

I believe that artists and creatives are the key to our future.

The story of Freddie Gray did not begin in April of 2015, it began in 1864 in the state of Maryland with the struggle against slavery.

There is a giant boulder of inequality in front of us, and it's very easy to believe that we cannot push it. But when we understand how much it took for it to get even halfway up the mountain, we become more forgiving with ourselves and others in the mistakes we make along the way.

Twitter is an effective way of taking the temperature of a lot educators at the same time.

When I think about Twitter, I think about the way it has allowed academics to create community about things that are important to us.

We started to imagine a way in which the history of slavery could inform our goals as a university rather than sit within our archive as a university.

Is history the change over time or the continuity in light of our ideas of progress?

I'm not creative, but I have a vision for the world I want to help create.

We learn about ourselves by not only what we say 'yes' to, but what we say 'no' to.

I want us to think about paternity leave as well as maternity leave. I was us to make sure that the guy that's pushing the stroller to the playground does not feel alienated or stereotyped, as well as the woman who attends the boardroom meeting.

What I've been struck with in this work, is that for a movement that's about breaking down stereotypes, it seems like there are whole lot of stereotypes, assumptions and labels.

"Don't wait until you have something to be someone."

"Wherever you are in your journey, especially in your professional career, everything that you have been through has helped you become who you are and where you are today and is helping you get to where you want to be."

"Wherever you are in your journey, especially in your professional career, everything that you have been through has helped you become who you are and where you are today and is helping you get to where you want to be."

We must believe that we can all have an equal chance to make a difference if we want any real difference to be made.

Don't wait until you have something to be someone.

You can't let your individuality, your uniqueness go to waste, because there is no one like you and so you have to own who you are and know your worth.

Information that is applied is power and power brings confidence.

Confidence is a skill and skills can be taught!

All of you have the capability to make a huge difference, to accomplish what you want to accomplish in life, to make an impact.

Everything lead into something else. It made me who I am.

When we are fearful we complain, when we are confident we act.

The way you perceive your life, is a choice.

My desire to have economic security and independence probably played a bigger role than I even realized in starting my business.

Everything that you've been through has helped you become who you are and where you are today, and is helping you get to where you want to be.

Negotiation is a conversation, not a battle

We live in a society that deems the feminine as a negative—don't be a pussy, stop being a bitch, to be female is to be weak. I was told yesterday that I had balls because of the way that I run our company—a male attribute assigned to my strengths and successfully coding three businesses. Men in business, please understand that this practice is bullshit; it's hurtful, demeaning, and it's not me being a whiny bitch by saying it.

It was the best experience that ever could have happened to us because it was the worst experience that could have happened to us. We needed it to happen because we needed to be humbled.

We live with the repercussions of just existing with the melanin in our skin, so just speak the truth.

I realized there’s a difference between writing it and performing it. When you speak it into existence, when you speak your emotions and let yourself go and really be vulnerable, it unlocks a part of you that’s been lost for so long.

Everything around you should be used as a resource.

We have to work a lot harder at intentionally building relationships so we can get to know one another – so that we can destroy racial implicit biases we all have.

Be a mathematician of the spirit.

There is no program you can create to fix what policy and law has broken. We have got to do more and it is you who must decide that you don’t want to live in a city where some people, because of their zip code, can live longer; where some people because of their skin color can feel safer.

I don’t know if your life is valued, if you understand what it is for us to walk around in this skin, to work everyday, to pay taxes and, to be so afraid that if something happened to you or someone you loved, that no one would even mourn.

We have got to think of this privilege that we have in our country, in our neighborhoods, in our skin; we have to use it in a way that helps change the world.

We have the power in this room to use our voices to make a difference, to be better than those who came before us. You can change the world, but you have to want to. You have to understand that the world needs to be changed.

Where is the outrage from the people with so much privilege in our country? When do we push for real change? How many people have to die?!

Your zip code should not predict how long you live.