The Gen Z CEO

Hey Bridget, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. So I want to start off with where Diane left us off, which is this new Gen Z Ambition Gap study you have coming out. So one of the things that I thought was the most depressing that I read is that one young woman in your research said companies seem to be filling a quota rather than actually wanting a woman's perspective in the room. So start us off by saying, how does a company tell a young woman that, yes we want you in leadership in a way that she will actually believe them and what have you seen that works yes well first let's start off with with what's really interesting about Gen Z so Gen Z women's number one life goal is a fulfilling career that's their number one life goal and more than any generation before us we identify as feminists the most generation to identify as feminists but the problems start happening once women reach the corporate workforce and see things like their male counterparts getting promoted over them and stylized feedback, which women get, but almost no men get. And so what happens is Gen Z women only want to be senior leaders when they genuinely believe that companies want them in leadership. But only 43% of Gen Z women believe that because when they look up, they only see a majority of senior leaders. And so they doubt that companies genuinely want leadership. So what do companies to do. They need to prioritize women's advancement. Study after study has shown us that more diverse teams perform better. And right now, we're only getting the best out of half of our people because we're only prioritizing half of them. We need to give women equal opportunities for stretch assignments. Men are 50% more likely to be given a stretch assignment. And so how can you showcase that you deserve to be promoted if you're not getting those stretch assignment opportunities. And here's what's really interesting. For the Gen Z women who are on the fence about wanting to be senior leaders, there are two top things that would change their mind. The first is fair pay. Gen Z women just want to be paid for the work that they do and be paid equally to men. And right now that isn't happening because the pay gap is still 84 cents to the dollar per man and that has not improved in the last three years. The second thing that would change their mind is work that grows their skills. Gen Z women are smart, they are ambitious, they are hardworking, they just want it. Now I'm curious from your perspective as a young woman in a leadership position before Cheryl called and you know offered you this job did you believe that you know people wanted you in in leadership roles? A big reason why I am able to be here doing this is because I had people throughout my life that said to me like I see you leading and I believe in you and what I hear among my male friends or what we see in the data is that that's what often majority men hear is I see you as a future leader I believe in you you have the qualities that will make you successful but then when the women hear is mmm I don't know something about you you just you just rub people the wrong way and I'm just not really sure I've heard you're not a superstar yeah like that yeah critique women and scrutinize women in a way we don't to men and because I had people throughout my life many peers what we believe in Lean In it's peer mentorship with peer support who gave me the former of what often men hear that has allowed me to be in this. Well you bring up a good point because I think you know we've talked about this so many studies out there show that men get opportunities based on their potential women it's based on what they've already proven. So I'm curious too as someone early in your career like how are you looking at that how are you thinking about it? Yes that is a huge problem that women face and where this is manifesting is in this thing that we call it Lean In the broken rung so the broken rung is one of the most entrenched problems that women face and it's early in their career it's the first promotion from entry level to manager last year for every 100 entry-level men that were promoted to manager only 93 women were and in the scheme of gaps that we talk about between men and women that seems relatively small but this really matters because if women once you don't get that first promotion it's been really hard to catch up and we can't fix the problems for under representation of women at the top if we can't fix the broken rung at the bottom but here's the good news we know companies have an ability to fix this because in 2021 nine out of ten companies were making diversity a priority so then the next year the broken rung almost closed for black women in 2025 that went back down to only 60 black women promoted for every 100 men these numbers are going in the wrong direction yeah absolutely I struggle a lot and I'm sure many women in this room have struggled too I'm not a Gen Z I'm a millennial but I have I think a baby face and so many times I walk into rooms and people are like oh you brought your daughter so cute or like this so so I'm curious from your perspective too like as a Gen Z CEO has it been hard for you to gain the attention of your peers you're leading a team you're a CEO what have you faced I like to believe I'm quite fearless which I think has treated me well in this role um and in being young it really allows me to trust in my leadership team the lean and board and Cheryl for a lot of counsel and domain expertise I'm also challenged in this role doing things that I've never done before like sitting up here speaking with all of you but I believe that many of the most challenging things in life are often the most rewarding. Talking about being a young CEO, I'll finish with an interesting conversation that Cheryl and I had when I got this role, which was that when a young man gets a big job in our world, it's just not really that interesting because it happens often. And so people aren't really that interested in it. When a young woman gets a big job, which happened to me, it's a little more interesting because it's rare. And that is why I do this works that when women get big jobs it won't be something that's surprising it will just be a matter of fact in the same way it's a matter of fact for men and as we say at Lean In we hope that in the future there's not uh just women women leaders they're just leaders yeah well it's also age too I think plays a huge factor because yes obviously it's different for women but I think it's it's our age or how you look that makes people question you know are you are you fit for this role do you ever push back do you ever have to tell people about that i'm so grateful I have an incredible team that respects me and I work so well with. So that is wonderful. I think in the world, people are taken aback and I just smile and say, yes, that is my role. I am a CEO and I love doing it. Good for you. I want to talk about the Tradwife movement because this is something that you and Lean In has been really vocal about. Why is fighting the Tradwife and Manosphere movements a job for a workplace organization? What do you think that you and Lean In can bring to this conversation the attitudes from the manosphere are showing up at work and they're very harmful so of men who are served more manosphere content they are three times more likely to believe that men are just better suited for leadership and they're 3.5 times more likely to believe that women are too emotional for high pressure roles so this really matters and i mean through every period of progress we've seen some level of backtracking we had Lean In telling women that they could be unapologetically ambitious in our careers that we were able to lead we had me too that brought visibility to the sexual harassment that many women were facing at work and started to hold men accountable and then i remember when i was young the hashtag repeal the 19th was trending i remember that and then yes and then more recently your body my choice was becoming popularized and now we have the manosphere tradwife movement trying to tell women that we belong in the home and don't get me wrong women should be able to choose what path makes the most sense to them and being a stay-at-home parent is a hard full-time job but for the women who do want to work and for the majority of women who have to work and don't have another option they deserve the fair fair pay and equal opportunity to men and I'll finish with a final statistic that I find really really jarring in 2018 when teen boys were asked if they believe that women should be paid equally to men 72% said yes which is already too low. Yeah. In 2025, that went down to 57%. The manosphere is taking hold and then we need to make sure it's not going to take hold on women. Yeah. Now I'm going to turn to the room in just a second. But one follow up question on that, Bridget, that, you know, you had previous roles at Meta, you helped build Reels, you redesigned Instagram search, but these are the platforms where this content spreads. So what did you learn about how those algorithms work that kind of helps you fight against that today? Yes, I'll tell you a story of, that really pushed me into this role and the belief of the importance of women in leadership. I was a product manager on Instagram search, leading a product, a feature, to reroute celebrity searches to the search results page. And so if anyone uses Instagram, if you've noticed, you have to click twice now for large accounts. You can blame me for that. And we were days from launch, And I noticed that for a wide number of female celebrities, the top content we were ranking was explicit content. And me, as a woman leading this, I was livid. I pulled the full Instagram search team together and I said, we needed to fix this. I was not gonna launch this product unless we fixed it. And this was a team that was almost entirely men and I was the only woman in the leadership role. And I was surprised the majority of them actually knew this was happening, but they just didn't really think it was a big deal. But because I was a woman in that room, I was angered and I was able to make a solution and fight for change. And so fixing this became a priority for all of Instagram search and Instagram integrity teams. And we did fix it. But this is why we need women leaders and often not even the fault of men. They don't have the experience of being a woman to fight for what women need and to make sure that our all of our companies and countries and products are built not with just women. one demographic in mind we need women to lead turning to the room any questions you can raise your hand and we have some mic runners throughout okay well if you do we'll come back in a second is there anything that you think the trad wife movement is actually getting right that we should actually pay attention to or or is it just all noise i think that any movement like this doesn't come out of nothing it probably comes from some place that i'm not knowledgeable on so maybe we should dig into why this is happening more but what we're really focused on at Lean In is making sure that this these bad ideas do not take hold on women it would be very helpful and i see Sammy has a question down here, good to see you Bridget and uh thank you for all that you're doing i'm curious now that you've been in the role was about six seven months um how are you thinking about where LeanIn goes because when the book came out it was a massive change it it really encouraged women to join that table speak up and some of that worked and some of that didn't and as you take it from a new lens where do you want to see it go and what's your vision for taking it into the next i don't know decade thank you a couple things we're continuing to grow our core service which is circles these are small peer groups of women that meet regularly and help each other grow in their careers. Women who are in circles are two times more likely to get promotions, two times more likely to get raises, and five times more likely to have sponsors. We've had almost 180,000 of these started in almost every country in the world, and so I want us to continue to grow these, and that's a huge priority of mine, and I'm helping do that through product and technology. We also have circles in companies. They're in almost, they're in over 3,000 companies in the world and they can be really impactful for companies because they facilitate cross-functional collaboration as women from across the companies meet together and everything we do is entirely free and then another huge area that I'm focused on is AI. We're seeing large gender gaps between men and women in AI in terms of usage, bias in the LLMs and leadership roles and it's something we're going to continue to push at Lean In because we need women at the tables where decisions about AI are being made. And we need women to be upskilling themselves on AI in the same ways that men are, because more and more we will all be evaluated on how well we use AI. So it's critical that women are similarly upskilling themselves on it. Bridget, can you talk more about that? Because I think you're totally right. A lot of women feel overwhelmed, threatened, or just like they're cheating by using AI. Yes. How are you working with the next generation college-age women to combat that? Well, women are more likely to worry they'll be perceived as cheating for using AI, And they're not wrong to feel that way because they're criticized more when they do use it and men are being encouraged more and praised More to use AI and that has impacts last year or men are 22% more likely to use AI daily or constantly at work and last Year of the people who were using AI at least daily at work They were two times more likely to have received a promotion This really matters and so what at Lean In we're encouraging is peer support Through our circles to help each other use AI and give the praise and encouragement that women are often not getting from their managers and to not make them feel discouraged by this technology that men are excited about and using and women are getting discouraged by any other questions hi bridget you mentioned your work is global so as you look at the countries who's getting it right who used to get it right but they're slipping and who's getting it really wrong yeah um i mean it's it's bad everywhere the numbers are just not getting getting better for women and and we have but actually the best in the United States. There's the most equality in many ways here. And so we focus a lot on a global community because often those are the women who face the greatest amounts of bias and are often, we call it, the only women in the room. When you're the only one in the room, it's bad everywhere. And we focus on, yes, 183 countries to make sure that we can help women across the world. You want to go over here? Hi, I was really struck by your story of being at Instagram and the men in the room. And I'm curious if you, like, do you think those men are behaving differently after you pointed out kind of the bias in the search results? And then part two, do you feel like there's a complement to what you're trying to do for men to help them be allies or something you and your nonprofit could be doing to help more men become allies and notice these things in the workplace? totally agree we need more women in the room, but I think we also need to focus on some of that as well. Exactly. We, I want, and Lean In wants to live in a world where both men and women support women's leadership. So it's extremely important that we have male allies. When I pointed this out on Instagram search, I'm sure it taught the men around me something, but it's also not the responsibility of the women to have to bear the burden of educating men. This is something that they need to be focused on too and so that's why we'll be loud about the manosphere saying that these are bad ideas and refer what all of you are do and just being in the positions you're in to represent female leaders is extremely impactful to represent that women are strong are smart are hard working and when you have more women in leadership by companies younger women are more likely to want to work for those companies so even just being in the positions you're in don't bear the burden of having to educate the men around you, but it makes, it makes a big difference and a bigger difference than you probably likely realize. So thank you. Bridget, one last question for you. You mentioned all the numbers are trending in a negative direction. We're at a point where companies are scaling back all of their DEI programs. DEI is actually even a dirty word. Some people are afraid to say DEI on the stage. And I, as a journalist, have a hard time getting people to talk to me about it because they're fearful that something is going to happen to them or there'll be retribution. What is your advice to women leaders who are navigating this in their workplace? It might be a bit fearful. Yeah, I just saw the Grace Hopper march was canceled this morning because of all the issues you've explained, and it's very sad and very concerning. What women leaders need to do is, on an individual level, support the women around you. As I started with, it really matters for young women to hear, I believe in you, and you can do great things. So just on an individual level, you can do that. And then our Circles programs, which are entirely free, are open to all genders, so anyone can be a part of them. Thank you so much, Bridget. Thank you.