Mojia Shen, a graduate from UWC-USA, is currently studying in Wellesley College. While studying at Wellesley, Mojia founded Flavory & Revive to help stay-at-home mothers sell homemade meals to young professionals and started a non-profit in China to support families who have lost their only child. Mojia also represented China at the G(irls)20 Summit.

On January 10th, as the fourth speaker of the GenEQ Series hosted by UWC Changshu's students, she spoke on topics from shattering glass ceilings to the psychological differences that set men and women apart in the STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) fields, as a software engineer herself, and the importance of breaching the gap and becoming aware of unconscious gender bias. Below is her full speech.

I was born and raised in a small city called Qinhuangdao in Hebei Province. I was about to do Gaokao and attend a Chinese university when I got a chance to go to UWC. Like many of you, I was interested in international relations and wanted to work for the UN, so going to UWC was adream come true.

UWC was the greatest but also most difficult two years of my life. It turned my 16 years of world values upside down. It taught me to champion what makes me unique and planted the seed of social entrepreneurship in me. I learned that to make any change happen I need to take the initiative.

GenEQ's poster

UWC deconstructed many of my traditional values, one of which is gender. As a young girl from China, I always believed I could do anything, and there is no difference between genders. Yet the majority of society, even members of my family struggle with that idea. I get comments on my appearance my whole life. It seems they always have a lower expectations for girls than for guys. My relatives always tell me not to work so hard, because one day I will get married and sacrifice my career for my family. My role as a mother and wife always seem more important.

From many late night conversations with my friends, I realized those are some of the common challenges faced by women all over the world. I took those problems personally. When I was applying to college, against the popular views, I didn't apply to the Ivies. I knew Wellesley, the all-women’s liberal arts college that educated remarkable women such as Hillary Clinton and Song Mei Ling, was the choice for me.

It didn't take long for me to find my entrepreneurial self. It was first inspired by the Clinton Global Initiative to start my nonprofit called Revive. It builds support groups to help families who have lost their only child under the one child policy to overcome depression. Seeing the organization growing from 10 members to over 100, and noticing the drastic improvement in the families’ psychological well-being, I knew that I was making an impact.

Showing my non-profit "Revive" at the Clinton Global Initiative

I kept the momentum. During my freshman winter, I went to visit a friend whom I met at UWC-Mahindra. From spending time with her mother, I learned the challenges faced by many Mexican women. Most of them after taking maternity leave can’t find jobs and couldn’t provide for their children. While I was helping her cook to sell to her neighbors, I had an idea to hone the power of technology to empower women like her. I wanted to build a tech platform to sell homemade meals to young professionals.

During my freshman summer, I got an opportunity to attend Draper University, a program in Silicon Valley aiming to train superheroes to change the world through entrepreneurship. It was there that I incubated my startup and gained the understanding on what a startup is.

Attending  a program in Silicon Valley

It was then August 2015 when I had to decide whether I want to return to Wellesley for my second year. Going back to school would be predictable. I already had 14 years of that. Yet no one knew what would happen if I go to Mexico to run the startup. I didn't know much about the country and never run a startup before. All I knew was I was so young and I wanted to make a difference. If I succeed, I will learn a lot; if I fail, which is highly likely, I would learn even more.

I chose the road less taken, and landed in Mexico with nothing but a dream.

The startup life was nothing like what I expected. The society glorifies entrepreneurship and changing the world. It makes us believe it's all about the flowers and the award, and you can build a billion dollar startup overnight. In reality it’s all about the hard work. I quickly started testing the market and talking to the potential customers in my broken Spanish. I had countless meetings and went to all the meetup events in order to find a technical co-founder. I needed to quickly expand my network in Mexico, and figure out how things work. My team and I worked on three versions of the product and tested them in the market. After half a year of trials, we didn’t see the product being a fit in the market. My struggles taught me there is so much I didn't know. So I decided to go back to school and got in the field of technology.

Colleagues in my startup

Amidst the startup craziness, I had the honor to represent China to attend G(irls)20 Summit in Turkey, an event that brings together one woman from each G20 countries to advice the leaders on their gender initiatives. As a woman in the field of entrepreneurship and technology, I was always in the man’s club. I decided to speak up and get more women in. Here is what I found:

Till 2016, 72.6% of women enrolled in college compared to 65.8% of men (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Yet up until 2015, women still made up only 20% of the computing workforce, with less than 10% of them women of color (National Center for Women and Information Technology, 2015). In the mid-1980s, 37% of computer science majors were women, compared to only 18% in 2012 (Gilpin, 2014). The amount of women in tech has decreased.

Now let’s look at entrepreneurship. Only 18% of all the startups are led by a woman and 10% of the global funding goes to a woman-led startup (Crunchbase, 2016).

This number is even scarier if you only look at leadership. Only 4.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

I decided to take a step further to understand the why. Here is what I found.

The lack of representation of women in entrepreneurship and technology are essentially two big problems: getting young women in and promoting and retaining them.

First, why are there so few girls deciding to get in those fields?

Women lack self-efficacy. It means we don't think we can do it. I had exactly this problem. I didn’t dare taking computer science in college at first because I thought I wasn’t smart enough. However, were we born to believe the guys are smarter? No, we are socialized to do so. In elementary school, parents express lower expectation for daughters’ than sons’ abilities in math and science (Furnham, Reeves & Budhani, 2002). They also believe success achieved by daughter is attributed to hard work, whereas success achieved by son is attributed to innate talent (Raty, Vanska, Kasanen, Karkkainen, 2002).

Besides low self-efficacy, women also suffer from negative gender stereotypes, most of them unconscious. People believe male are more agentic and women are more communal. They also perceive greater similarity between MALE & SCIENTIST than female & scientist (Carli etal., 2016), because scientists are seen as highly agentic and less communal.

Lastly, women thought they don't belong in the field. Entrepreneurship and tech companies have a masculine culture of workout, beers and all-nighters that women aren’t attracted to. When we think about startups, we think about John coding with his frat brothers in the basement, haven’t showed for a week. True or not, at least this is the media’s portrait. This turns many women away. The lack of women in the field leads to fewer women getting in because they thought its not for them, which in turn leads to even fewer women in.

G(irls)20 Summit 

Getting women in is only half the story. 56% of the women in tech leave their organization mid-level (NCWIT, 2016). One of the biggest reasons is they aren’t promoted to leadership. One of the fundamental reasons is people associate leadership with male qualities. However, there are more overlaps between leaders and female qualities than leaders with male. Male and female also don’t differ in traits associated with leadership; they only differ in physical aggression.

The time intensive jobs are not compatible with family lives. The jobs of childcare and housework unfortunately still land on the mothers. Between a man who can work 15 hours a day and a woman who is just as good if not better who can only work 8 hours, companies choose the former.

Another big roadblock is sexual harassment. 1 in 3 woman has reported being sexually harassed in the workforce. Many of them are taken advantage of when they seek promotion. And when women are sexually harassed, 70% don’t speak up, because if they do, they will burn their bridge insides their company.

Lastly, women are not seen as competent. To be considered exceptional, women must exhibit higher levels of performance than man. They are even punished for having too much agency. The best example is Hillary Clinton. Whenever she applies to a new job, in this case, twice for presidency, her popularity plummets. Yet whenever she gets that job, such as first lady or secretary ofstates, her popularity rises off the chart. She hasn’t changed much, only people’s psychology does. Americans love Hillary as long as she doesn’t ask for a promotion. Another study is by Linda Carli, my psychology professor. In a group discussion, when men disagree, people notice it; yet when women disagree, people notice it and criticize them for it.

Getting angry about it isn't constructive enough. We need to turn feelings into actions. There are a zillion things organizations can do, but let’s talk about what we can do, especially if you are interested in the field of technology and entrepreneurship.

First, take risk and take initiative. Women don’t take nearly as many risks as men do. When I chose to go to Mexico, I had no idea what to expect. But I knew between doing it then and doing 10 years later, I should do it then because I didn’t have mortgages, children to nurture and elders to take care of. We are so lucky to be so young, because we can afford to fail a thousand times and still be fine. In fact 99% of the world don't take risk because they fear failure, so fail early and fail fast.

Second, become an expert and speak up. With the Internet, you don't need a doctor’s degree to become an expert. I have seen way too many people who say they are passionate about woman in tech but can’t speak five minutes about it. Simply googling for an hour gives you enough background to talk intelligently. Then talk about it.

Third, never limit yourself. Can you image our best friend telling us: “you are not pretty enough”, “you are not smart enough to do science”, and “nobody will take you seriously”. You can’t right? That friend is real. It lives in our head. Our biggest enemy is ourselves. We say those words, the most malicious, condescending words to ourselves all the time. Attend to your emotional hygiene, and don’t limit yourself in your head. Of course, you are beautiful in a very unique way, you are smarter than you think, and you are on your way to change the world.