How do women survive in the cutthroat and male-dominated tech industry?
“There’s power in the pack. If we could have done it alone it would have happened by now,” said Shelley Zalis, CEO of IPSOS OTX and one of five women who spoke last Tuesday at TheWrap’s first New York Power Women’s Breakfast.
Zalis was joined by Rachel Sklar, founder of Change The Ratio/The List; Joanna Pena-Bickley, head of IBM Interactive Experience; Gayle Troberman, chief marketing officer of iHeartMedia and Whitney Bouck, SVP of global marketing at Box discussing the role of women in leadership roles in media and technology.
“The notion of owning your power, acknowledging it, acknowledging the power of other women and acknowledging the shell game of who gets to wield power is really important,” said Sklar, pointing out that it’s important for women to be conscious of their ability and the things keeping them from owning that ability.
“I think it’s important to stop and say, ‘How am I giving up my power? What power should I be taking? If I were a man what would I be doing? Would I be having this reaction or would I be swinging it around?’” she said.
The panel also discussed the rise of the internet and its impact on media content and its consumption.
“There’s a really interesting trend going on that it’s not just us as marketers that need to create content. Now content can be created by anyone, it is literally democratized,” said Bouck. “That means that we as marketers can also encourage conversation from a very wide array of contributors and be able to bring that to a targeted audience.”