Author Julia Boorstin Talks About "When Women Lead"

Julia Boorstin is CNBC's senior media and tech correspondent and the author of When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them.

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Deidre Woollard caught up with Boorstin to discuss topics including: 

• Closing the funding gap for female-led companies.
• Shifting power dynamics in healthcare.
• What sports can teach kids about business.
• Why female leadership strategies are valuable for any business.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, visit our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Nov. 13, 2022.

Julia Boorstin: We see more women now who are at the senior levels leaving the workforce than ever before. Women at the VP level and above, they are leaving their companies. That is an incredibly negative thing, not just for them but for corporate America. Not only are those companies missing out to have the expertise of those senior women, but think about all the younger women who are losing role models and losing mentors.

Chris Hill: I'm Chris Hill, and that's Julia Boorstin, Senior Media and Tech Correspondent for CNBC. She's also written a new book, When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them. Deidre Woollard caught up with Boorstin to talk about the problems that female-led businesses are solving and how sports can teach kids to fail better.

Deidre Woollard: I love this book. I found myself cheering while I read it. One of the most important things I took from your book was the idea that women are more likely to start a business with a societal impact, and that women tend to prioritize impact over financial gain. How do we get more of that superpower out in the world?

Julia Boorstin: What I actually think what's really important is not prioritizing impact over financial gain, but figuring out business models that align impact and financial gain. In success, these companies are not only making money, but the more money they make, the more of a positive impact they are having either on society or on the environment, and I profile a lot of these companies and these founders in the book, and I think that's what's so important, figuring out a way to align those. I, for instance, write about a company called Full Harvest. They take food that is not considered pretty enough to show up in a grocery store.

These are the exterior romaine leaves that before were just rotting on the ground in the fields when all the rest of the romaine hearts were being harvested. This entrepreneur Christine Moseley said, hey, we can take those romaine leaves and sell them to companies that make green juice. The farmer benefits. We can help the companies that are making the pricey green juices lower the prices of green juice and by the way, you're saving billions of dollars of food that otherwise would be rotting and bad for the environment. Financial gain and positive environmental impact, I think increasingly we need to see companies that are doing both at the same time. It's not like a side thing, we're going to make money and donate some of it to a good cause. We're going to create businesses that have both the financial and a social or environmental win.

Deidre Woollard: Well, I think what's interesting about that example is that women sometimes ask questions about things that maybe other people don't. Think about the healthcare example, in the book you had a bunch of female lead healthcare start-ups. I was really struck by the story of Toyin Ajayi and how her experience as a doctor let her to think about healthcare in this different way, and really reimagine it. Why do you think healthcare is an area that we see this happen with too?

Julia Boorstin: Well look, healthcare is an area that a lot of people have had their own frustrations with there. There are a lot of challenges to the healthcare business in the United States and I would say it is a business. One of the challenges is that a lot of companies get paid on the volume of care, not on the actual health outcomes of individuals. That Toyin Ajayi story is an amazing one. Her company is called Cityblock Health, but what I found so interesting is she really deployed a lot of the traits that female leaders are more likely to have strategies that female leaders are more likely to use and she did that to take an entirely different view of how to fix the healthcare business. For instance, she was a young resident at Boston Medical, which is an incredibly wealthy state when it comes to healthcare, but what she noticed is that when it came to low-income patients, they were going in and out of the emergency room.

She would see the same people come in month after month and they were getting treatment for the immediate issue but oftentimes they were getting discharged into the street. Some of them were homeless, and were literally getting sent back out into the street. She thought, of course, these people are going to be coming back in because they're not actually getting the help they need to really get healthier. She also saw some distrust of the system and one patient she found hadn't been to a doctor in 30 years and she had to pull out of her what she was really in for, not the cough she had technically come in for but the fact that she was worried she might have breast cancer, which it did turn out she had and she had waited way too long to get treatment so of course, Dr. Ajayi helped her get treatment but Dr. Toyin Ajayi, saw all of these challenges, saw that the system itself wasn't actually working for patients.

She built Cityblock Health to take a really comprehensive view to help those patients especially at the lower income levels. For instance, they shift the power dynamic to try to build that trust. Oftentimes they've doctors visit patients in their homes to address the whole health of the patient, to make sure people are actually getting healthier they often have social services. They have people who are effectively social workers help their patients secure housing, get additional benefits, and ultimately this is a company Cityblock Health gets paid on the long-term health outcomes. They don't get paid more if people get a lot of tests run on them when they go into the emergency room, those high emergency room bills are not a win for them. They're trying to structurally fix the problem, not just put a band-aid on it.

Deidre Woollard: I think there's something interesting there about the value of the female perspective. It's something you talk a lot about that in the book. How would you define that and what do you think is the specific value that brings to business?

Julia Boorstin: Well look, I think that I have to say every leader leads in a very different way. I've interviewed literally thousands of leaders and CEOs in my 20-plus years as a business journalist. First at Fortune Magazine, now at CNBC but to me what is so notable is there are these strategies that women are far more likely to deploy. For decades they have not been associated and probably forever they have not been associated with strong leadership, but all the research shows, and I read through about 300 academic studies, all the research shows that these more female leadership strategies are in fact incredibly valuable for everyone. For instance, empathy, what Toyin Ajayi did is she was empathizing with those patients who didn't trust the system.

She saw an opportunity because she could really empathize with the people who would ultimately be her customers. Empathy is hugely valuable not just to relate to your customers and what they want, but also your employees. It's harder now than ever to motivate and connect with employees, empathy is essential. Another characteristic that women are more likely to have, vulnerability. Women feel a lot more comfortable leading with vulnerability and there's so much evidence that vulnerability invites problem-solving, invites collaboration into problem-solving. Humility is a key part of that as well. As one of the CEOs I interviewed said nobody wants to work for no at all. That's a really essential thing.

Then you mentioned the fact that female founders are more likely to launch purpose-driven companies. There's a lot of evidence that that leads to greater outcomes, greater success. It's easier to motivate and hire employees. If people know that they're doing more than just making money for their boss, they're also going to have a positive impact on the world, and then I think this big picture approach, that Toyin Ajayi demonstrated this idea of contextual thinking. There's a lot of data that women are more likely to have divergent approaches to problem-solving. To pull out threads and try to ask questions around a problem to bigger build a stronger picture of the whole forest around a tree whereas men are more likely to converge on the problem.

Say, let's rush to a solution. Let's focus only on the solution right now. Though there are advantages to that, it's also really valuable to take that divergent approach, explore everything around the problem, and what I've seen in my research is the more you understand the context of a problem not only will you be able to create a more systematic approach to fixing that tree if we want to talk about forest and trees, but also when the situation changes, you might be better equipped to adapt because you've already gone down those roads, pulled all those threads, and explored all of those tangential things. You have a better understanding of the full situation. The situation changes, you'll be like, "Oh, we've already talked about this. Now we can pivot and address that challenge."

Deidre Woollard: Obviously we want more female leaders. Getting funding is a core problem. In your research, did you find that women are more likely to get funding for things that speak to women's issues and if so, how do we get women into all leadership positions and all companies?

Julia Boorstin: The funding gap is massive. Last year two percent of all venture capital dollars went to female-founded companies. About 15.5 percent went to companies with coed founding teams. That number has actually been growing, the coed teams but the percentage of funding that went to all male founding teams last year, 2021, 82 percent. That is a massive gap. If you think that those are founders that don't have women involved in the earliest stages. The funding gap is huge. One way women have seen a closure of that gap is when they found companies with a purpose. There's research showing that when investors are looking at companies without a purpose, or companies that also have a purpose baked in, that having a purpose baked in eliminates the bias against female investors. I have a really interesting study again about that in my book.

That ties into this expectation that women are supposed to be warm and nurturing, which is a stereotype of women that has also been a challenge for a lot of female leaders in part of the double standards that women have to reckon with. We are seeing a surge of entrepreneurship and funding of female founders in the health-tech space. Health-tech is an area that is overlooked services for women for a very long time and now we're seeing a surge of these companies, whether it's around fertility or menopause or even just general women's health, and so that's an area where we're seeing women draw more funding. Then also in retail, there have been three big notable IPOs, and female-founded companies that have really changed the way people consume products.

The RealReal, Rent the Runway and Stitch Fix, from the circular clothing economy to the rental economy, to this idea that everyone has access to a personal stylist. I do think that once there's a critical mass in certain categories and things start to change more quickly. In any field, once you have 20 or 30 percent of the executives in that field, the women, or 20 or 30 percent that idea of critical mass is once you hit a 20 or 30 percent of a minority group, then the change becomes much more rapid. I think that's something to watch and another reason why it's important to get more and more women into each of these industries but I also do feature some women in my book When Women Lead that are in the enterprise software space and it's important to understand they're women in companies across various fields.

Deidre Woollard: Thinking about the post-pandemic, we just talked a little bit about what some of those companies are going through, how did your understanding of female leadership evolve as you watched so many women leaders that navigate the challenges that we all face during the pandemic?

Julia Boorstin: Well, on one hand, I was incredibly inspired. I was watching these women navigate the biggest challenges that any companies have seen in the United States, probably since World War II, and I was really impressed by their ability to balance long-term planning and short-term adaptation, and I really saw this idea that women are more likely to have a high adaptability quotient. I saw that in action. I was inspired. I was incredibly hopeful, especially because so many of these companies are really trying to change the world, and so that was very inspiring.

On the other hand, I did see women facing more double standards, more challenges, and more public scrutiny simply because there are fewer of them. I really wanted to understand why women leaders are so much more likely to be under the microscope and I think it comes down to this idea of token theory. Whenever someone is in a small minority, they are more likely to draw increased scrutiny, criticism, and attention, and I think that's definitely been true of the female leaders and CEOs. I hope you get to a place where there are so many female leaders that they are no longer so notable for being in the minority and no longer draw that heightened scrutiny.

Deidre Woollard: Well, and also during the pandemic, we saw the challenges of having kids at home, things like that really impacting women in general, not just women leaders, but women all throughout the workforce. What do you think needs to change the way that we think about children and the responsibilities in the home to enable more female leadership?

Julia Boorstin: There are some amazing books that are written about this very issue. One is called Fair Play by my friend and inspiration Eve Rodsky. She talks about how men and women are partners need to equitably divide up labor at home, including the invisible labor, the stuff that we don't talk about, or that people just assume that the moms are going to do. I think that's a key part of it. There's also been a lot of attention coming out of the pandemic about how many women left the workforce.

How the pandemic really set women back, not just by years but by decades, and we need to have better systems in place around child care to support women so they can continue to work and so corporate America doesn't lose a whole generation of phenomenal female executives and leaders. I think there has been a big push to really try to address that from a regulatory standpoint and Reshma Saujani has introduced this thing called the Marshall Plan for Moms, which I think is a really important thing to look at. This idea of how our government needs to be working to help support women, which is what it needs to do to help support businesses.

Deidre Woollard: Well, I find that fascinating because I think that it's true that child care is seen as a women issue when it is absolutely a future of the economy, future of the world issue, and yet it seems to be bucketed under female problems in some way.

Julia Boorstin: Yeah. It's interesting because, LeanIn and McKinsey just came out with their women in the workplace report, which is now an annual report and this report focused on the fact that we see more women now who are the senior levels leaving the workforce than ever before. Women at the VP level and above, they are leaving their companies. That is an incredibly negative thing, not just for them, but for corporate America. Not only are those companies missing out to have the expertise of those senior women, but think about all the younger women who are losing role models and losing mentors. I think it's really important to look at that data and understand that we need those women to stay in workforce.

If you look at this study, which I highly recommend, it talks about why women are leaving. Many of them are frustrated. Many of them feel like they're not getting credit for what they're doing. They're getting undermined at work, and they've simply had enough. We've talked about the great resignation which was a phase a couple months ago or maybe even a year ago and now I think senior women are trying to figure out where they fit in in the corporate landscape. I hope that some of those women found their own companies or go work at companies that believe in them and value them as much as they should. But I think that we really need those women to be working and to be inspiring and educating and enforcing change because that's what we need right now. I just think that this is not just a women's issue, like male run corporate America will benefit if more women stay in their companies and don't leave.

Deidre Woollard: We've talked a little bit about senior leadership. Let's talk about the future of the next-generation. You made this interesting connection in the book between sports and leadership for women. What did you discover and how does that make you think about the role of sports in young girls lives?

Julia Boorstin: Well, I actually think the thing about sports is valuable for men as well. There's a lot of research showing that not only are female athletes in high school and college more likely to be successful in business, but athletes in general, if you do sports seriously in high school or college, you're more likely to be successful in business. This is true for both men and women, but interestingly it also helps close those gender gaps between men and women. I was really interested in this research and I thought maybe it's because young women who are doing sports are trained to be really competitive with each other and to go out and compete against other teams. I thought maybe it was something about teamwork, I did not do sports very seriously myself so I was really curious about this research.

Also I have two kids and I take them to basketball practice all the time. I want to understand like what they were really getting out of this. I dug deep into the research and what was so interesting is that the value of sports does not come from competing against other teams, the value is frequent failures because you're not going to win every game. You'll probably lose about half of the games on average, frequent failures and getting used to the idea that you're going to constantly be evaluating your performance, figuring out what you could do better and pushing yourself to do better next time. Psychologists or social scientists call this after-event reviews. In sports, you call it reviewing the tape. You don't have a game and then don't talk about what happened and then move on to the next one or say, well, that was a bummer and move on to the next.

When you say, wow, we bombed that game, why? What can we do differently? What could we not control? Because the team has certain advantages or the sun was in our eyes or whatever it is. I think that this idea that athletes are trained to get used to failing and understand that each failure is an opportunity to learn and improve. To break that down, these after event reviews include figuring out what you did well that you can be proud of, but also continue to grow into figuring out what you did badly and how you need to do better next time. Also isolating the factors that were really outside of your control so you can understand how you interacted with these factors that were outside of your control and maybe even how you can prepare for those types of things better next time. I think that's a practice that everyone can adopt. I did not play basketball in high school, but I can adopt that practice in my everyday life, every TV segment if I feel like I could've done that better, instead of just being annoyed, I can go back and watch it and think let me do my after event review and be better next time.

Deidre Woollard: I love that. Yeah. Not always so easy to do but I love what you said there about frequent failures because I think that's really important especially when we talk about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, most businesses, the success rate is not so high. Getting funding, which we talked about earlier, is even more important. One of the things that you talk about that I think is really interesting and it gets me excited is there more female venture capitalist, women raising money to support women, how can all women benefit from understanding the ways that money is raised and changing that power dynamic a little bit?

Julia Boorstin: I truly believe that knowledge is power. I have become in this researching process increasingly obsessed with data, I think if you understand what you're up against, you're going to be more successful in battling it. You can't climb a mountain if you don't know how high it is, you can't blast through the boulder that is bias if you're not totally where or what exactly that boulder is. I really lay out in the book a ton of research about double standards and about challenges and about the percentages of funding that go to women or why women get asked different questions and pitch meetings because I think all that information is not meant to bump people out and to frustrate them, but to empower them.

If they come up against bias or if they're frustrated by how a situation is going, they could say, wait a second, which part of this negative feedback that I got is actually valuable to me and is useful and I could use it to get better next time? Which part of this is simply bias and stereotype being deployed against me? Being able to separate out the valuable stuff from the bias is hugely empowering and useful and I think that people need to know all the numbers so they can figure out how to exist in this world.

Deidre Woollard: Yeah, interesting. One of the things that seems to say to me though, is that women still seem to need to do more of the work. Why is it important for men to also do this work as well?

Julia Boorstin: Look here's the thing, all the data shows that diversity is valuable for business, companies will be more successful if there are women and people of color on every team. Men will benefit from understanding this research and men will benefit from leading in some of the ways that have enabled women to defy the odds. All of the traits that enabled women to be successful in grab a tiny piece of that two percent of venture capital funding, those are traits that will help men defy the odds that they're up against in whatever situation they're facing. I think we need to understand that these female leadership traits are universally valuable and that everyone of any gender needs to break free from these stereotypes of what a leader looks like and act like and how they behave. I think that's a Step 1 in this process. But I also think that there's some really interesting research about how diversity bringing an outsiders to a situation helps some people who are there in the first place level up their game.

There's a great study in the book about the Greek system and how fraternity and sorority members assume that everyone has a shared language, I don't know if you remember this study, this is one of my favorite ones and they found that when you brought in an outside or someone who is not part of that fraternity or sorority, the people in the original group were like, wait a second, I can't assume that this person is going to agree with me, I have to make sure I'm really sure of my assumptions, I'm really sure about my own way of addressing this problem. I think that we all get better when there are people who are different from us, who were interacting with or who are joining our group and we have to think about if we all want to be our best selves at work, we should surround ourselves with people who have different assumptions, perceptions and backgrounds than we do.

Deidre Woollard: Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the reasons I think this book is so important. Last question for you, what makes you most optimistic about the future of female leadership and entrepreneurship?

Julia Boorstin: There are so many reasons I'm optimistic, one of which is that these women have defied amazing odds against them, massive odds against them, and they're still taking on some of the most important challenges of our time. I'm particularly optimistic about the way they're taking a long-term plan. These next couple of years may be tough, but they want to enact a systemic change of whatever industry they're tackling, whether it's retail or healthcare or the agriculture industry. I'm optimistic because of these women's amazing stories and because of their long-term approach. I'm also optimistic that everyone is going to start to adopt the strategies of that female leaders have traditionally taken because I believe this is a moment for change in the business world.

We're coming out of the pandemic, we are facing record inflation, concerns about a recession, there's still a war going on in Ukraine, we're in a new phase of constant uncertainty. I believe that this is a time for everyone and every company to think about how they're going to be moving through the world, leaders need to think about how they're connecting with their employees, their customers in an entirely different way than they did 20 years ago. I think this is a time where everyone is going to benefit from those traditionally female leadership traits and if you want to succeed right now, things like empathy are table stakes. This is the time to really dive in and understand how these women have defied the odds and take those skills, take those strategies, and have everyone adopt them right now because we are facing so many challenges, we need a new tool set to navigate them.

Deidre Woollard: Empathy are table stakes, that's very powerful, I love that. The book is When Women Lead and Julia, thank you so much for your time today.

Julia Boorstin: Thank you for having me.

Chris Hill: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.