Magazine conference draws high-powered women.
“I love obstacles. I love the word ‘no.’ I love when people doubt me — it adds fuel to the fire.”
With those words, actor Taraji P. Henson set the tone for the Power Trip, Marie Claire magazine’s whirlwind, bicoastal, 36-hour women’s conference Oct. 16-17.
Change was in the air — in what was new (the current administration) and what, it became clear, was not (Harvey Weinstein). It had clearly been a “huge” 18 months since the aptly named event’s first year, said editor-in-chief Anne Fulenwider while taking a moment to sit during a cocktail party at Ken Fulk’s Magic Factory, one of a handful of surprise stops that included AT&T Park and the Museum of Ice Cream.
This year’s tenor felt a bit more urgent, said Fulenwider, who kicked off the invitation-only event by announcing that Kate Lanphear would be taking over Nina Garcia’s vacant spot as Marie Claire’s creative director and who concluded it by asking actor Priyanka Chopra about the power dynamics of movie producers.
The day (National Boss Day, naturally) had started in New York. One hundred C-level executives boarded an all-female Jet Blue flight to San Francisco to join 100 or more Hollywood and tech leaders at the W San Francisco for the “pop-up” conference. Speakers ranged from actors Mila Kunis and Henson to Uber chief brand officer Boz Saint John, Cowboy
Ventures founder Aileen Lee and Kapor Capital investment partner Ellen Pao.
Henson, who earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for her portrayal of Katherine Johnson in “Hidden Figures,” said that power in Hollywood meant the ability for her to say “no.” “That’s when you know your worth,” she said.
She compared Silicon Valley’s wage-parity problems with the film industry’s, revealing that for her
Academy Award-nominated role in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” she’d received one-third of the compensation she requested. She said she always fights for more pay because it will help other women.
Pao, no doubt, can relate. After losing a 2012 gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, the former Reddit CEO is now the chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact and
co-founder of diversity consulting nonprofit Project Include. She said that rather than focus purely on gender inclusion, companies should aim for inclusion of everyone.
“If it’s unfair for gender, it’s probably unfair in other ways,” she said. Pao also advocated for speaking up — for both oneself and others — to create a ripple effect. A poignant example: the #metoo social media campaign that has made waves.
Saint John, who raised eyebrows when she decamped for Uber from Apple, said that her decision was motivated in part because “we need to change the way our environments look, feel and behave” from within. “And who is going to do this but us?” she asked. She’d felt the pressure to succeed as the first black woman to take the stage at an Apple conference, feeling, much like Henson, that she was holding the door open for others on a similar path. (She reminded the audience that when she worked on Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance in 2013, it had been almost 10 years since a black woman — Janet Jackson and the controversial “wardrobe malfunction” — had taken that stage.
Lee, a prominent venture capitalist whose investments include True & Co. and Product Hunt, had thought that by the time she was “grown up,” these problems would have been fixed, suggesting that the payout of gender and wage parity was vastly in arrears. She encouraged the recent habit of naming names when someone commits bad behavior. This is something that John Legend manager Ty Stiklorius, who name-checked concert promoter Ron Delsener, was eager to do.
Thus, it was clear that while the specifics of each industry might be different, the challenges, particularly for women, aren’t.
This merger of the minds among the Bay Area, New
York and Los Angeles was a major goal, said Marie Claire Publisher Nancy Berger, who had envisioned something that would be easy for busy women to say yes to. She added that one’s network tends to be more powerful than one’s net worth.
Although Silicon Valley might be a far cry — literally and figuratively — from those other capitals, its relevancy is only expanding. Or, as Kunis put it, “Silicon Valley is the sexiest topic ever now.” Kunis had spent the morning meeting mothers at Google, Pinterest and Twitter at the suggestion of husband Ashton Kutcher; his advice to her, in classic regional fashion, was not to buy a product she likes, but to buy the company that makes it.
But the entertainment world isn’t relegating tech tools to business opportunities; Instagram COO Marne Levine, in conversation with actor and model Emily Ratajkowski, discussed how Instagram “has helped demonstrate that there is no one beauty standard, and beauty is no longer what defines women,” adding that Instagram’s visual nature has helped decrease objectification of women by representing diversity and authenticity — a key element to Ratajkowski’s Instagram popularity.
Ultimately, Fulenwider said, the point of the whirlwind trip was, simply, to have fun. When being a female leader can be isolating, she wanted to offer a place without the pressure of (totally) solving the world’s problems.
Call it, perhaps, facilitating a level playing field, literally: Dinner was in the middle of the San Francisco Giants baseball field, where a bunch of (flats-clad) Power-Trippers were relieved to sit back, eat chicken and talk shop.