March 24, 2022 • 28 mins
This week, Chelsea is sitting down with Match Group CEO Shar Dubey. They discuss the state of women in business, the progress we’ve made (and lost), the impact of COVID-19 on women in the workplace, and what needs to happen next to achieve equality in this industry and beyond.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton, and this season on in fact,
we're celebrating Women's History Month. I'll be talking with trailblazing
women at the top of their fields about their personal journeys,
the progress women have made, and how far we still
have to go. Today, we're talking about women in business
with Shar Dubai. She's the CEO of Match Group, which
(00:27):
owns and operates some of the world's most popular and
profitable online dating companies, including tender Match, ok Cupid, and Hinge.
Full disclosure, I came to Noshar because I'm on the
board of IC, which owns a majority stake in Match Group.
Back in nineteen sixty three, Katherine Graham became the first
woman to lead a Fortune five hundred company. But since then,
(00:51):
the number of women in charge of major companies hasn't
exactly skyrocketed, in fact, far from it. In the Fortune
where the Match Group falls, only seven percent of CEOs
or women, and the percent of female CEOs of color
like Shar only one percent. And yet, as you may
(01:11):
have heard, study after study shows that companies with women
in leadership roles are more profitable than those led solely
by men. So why aren't there more women and what
or who is holding women back. Shar has a unique
vantage point on all this, and she's used to being
one of the only women in the room. She studied
engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and received a
(01:35):
master's in engineering from Ohio State. Since joining the Match
Group in two thousand and six, she's held a number
of leadership positions, including CEO and president of Tinder, and
she became CEO of Match Group in March twenty twenty. Yes,
March twenty twenty. That means she took the helm of
a major company whose product was dating just as the
(01:56):
pandemic was starting. And while many CEOs kept quiet on
social justice issues, Shar has been unafraid to speak out,
including an opposition to the new anti woman anti abortion
law in Texas, where Match Group is based, and in
support of Congress reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. Well, Shar,
(02:22):
thank you so much for being part of this podcast series,
and I have been fortunate to know you now for
a number of years and believe that many people listening
to us may not know that apps that are part
of their maybe daily life, but you know, at least
probably weekly or monthly life, are part of a company
(02:44):
match that's helped by a woman by you, and so
I thought we could just start kind of at the beginning.
When did you know you were interested in science and engineering.
I'm so excited to be here. It's the first time
I'm doing a podcast, so hopefully we'll get at this right.
I'm your first podcast. You are my first podcast. I
(03:05):
feel very honored. Thank you. I grew up in a
small town in the northeastern part of India and my
dad was a professor of mechanical engineering. So I grew
up on the campus of an engineering school and that's
sort of what exposed me to science and technology at
(03:26):
the time, which was a different sort of technology. Because
this is seventies and eighties. The Internet hadn't come around yet,
let alone smartphones and apps, right, and I was certainly
exposed to engineering. I think the appeal for it was
more the fact that very few girls were doing it.
It was a field that was dominated by boys and men,
(03:49):
so that was an appeal that wasn't daunting to you,
That's exactly right. I wanted to show that I could
do something that was not expected of me, and so
I think that was the appeal I applied to one
of the top engineering schools in India called the I
It's sort of the MT. This was in the late eighties.
(04:09):
So I found myself being the only girl in most
of my classes in engineering school. And looking back at
that experience, I think a lot of those four years
is what shape who I ended up becoming as an
adult and a leader. And when you were in your
engineering classes and you were one of a few or
(04:31):
the only girl, were you ever intimidated or did you
just continue to feel like I have to prove what
I can do and what girls can do. I think
I went in with a lot more confidence than I
should have, and the first few weeks were challenging. I
found myself in these classes with eighty two hundred boys,
(04:53):
and nobody wanted to sit next to me. My lab
partner wouldn't come do his lab and I think it,
but he took credit for your work. I'm sure yes.
And so I did actually believe it or not think
about quitting for about the first time and only time
in my life. And there was a girl who was
(05:14):
a few years senior to me. She told me, she said,
if you're going to quit, who is that going to hurt,
you're the one that's going to lose, and so gritted
up and I did, and I ended up becoming really
good friends with most of my classmates afterwards. And how
do you think that set of experiences of being one
(05:34):
of the few women, of having to continually prove yourself
to your classmates, probably to your faculty, how do you
think that has shaped you as a leader today. You know,
there's a few things that I think it taught me.
One how to navigate a world that was different looking,
(05:55):
and most people didn't expect me to be there, and
I had to figure out how to stand out enough
of standing out visually anyways, but how do I minimize
that visual standout and prove that I deserved to be there?
And I think those were skills that sort of came
into play even after I came to this country and
(06:18):
my first job in this country, where I was the
first woman engineer they ever hired and the first foreigner.
I was the first person they did the HNB processing for.
It was an aerospace engine manufacturing company in rural Pennsylvania.
So I would say a culture shock both for me
and for everybody there. But I think my experience at
(06:41):
I It certainly gave me the confidence to be able
to navigate that. And how do you think now about
creating opportunities for women at match Ensuring that women who
may not have yet the internal grit and gratitude and
pretty unshakable confidence that you clearly have had throughout your
(07:04):
life can come to believe in themselves and can prove
to themselves as well as of course to their colleagues
and to you, what they can do. One of the
things I feel really proud about what Mandy and I
accomplish at least at Match. Mandy Ginsburg, who was the
CEO of Match Group before me. When we started here
(07:25):
about fifteen years ago, we were the only two women
in leadership positions, and today I think thirty eight percent
of our VP and above positions are women. And a
lot of that comes from people seeing you doing the
things that you do, talking about all the challenges that
(07:47):
you have to face. We were both young moms at
the time when we started, and we were very comfortable
talking about having to run to the doctor's office, or
having to get up in the middle of a meeting
and to pick up the kid from school because they
were sick, or what have you. And that made other women,
I think, more comfortable bringing their entire lives to work
(08:11):
versus compartmentalizing working home. We were also we found we
were able to attract more women and we were able
to close more women in the interview process, and some
of that is what has led to Match Group in
general being a company that has been much more welcoming
(08:33):
and comfortable for women to work at. Not to mention,
we've had two CEOs in a row who are women. Yes,
it certainly matters. It matters because there are still so
few women CEOs sitting atop big companies. Do you feel
any pressure by being one of the few women's CEOs
of a company of matches size in the United States?
(08:57):
You know, I was thinking about this. The first women's
CEO of a Fortune five hundred company, it was Katherine Graham.
And last year, in twenty twenty one, there are only
forty one women who are CEOs of Fortune five hundred companies, like,
not even one per year in the interim, And so
that's eight percent, right, So any which way you look
(09:20):
at it, it's single digit percentage of women that are
at the top. What gives me a little bit of
hope and comfort though, is just as college degrees when
women started going to college and there was a big
acceleration of college degrees among women. First came education, then
came other fields like medicine is one where nobody questions
(09:43):
the presence of women there. I do think both technology,
which is very underrepresented by women, and also business leadership
is hopefully going to be one that gets accelerated much
faster over the next decade, because I do se a
lot more women in mid and SDIU management positions who
(10:04):
are sort of a few years from getting there. I think,
and hopefully we will regain all the progress that we
did lose over the last couple of years of COVID,
where we know millions of women at every trunch of
leadership and across a multitude of professions left because they
couldn't manage being a parent and a professional. How do
(10:27):
you think about match supporting the many thousands of people
who work at the company over these still uncertain times.
We are lucky that we have a business where we
can actually work one hundred percent remote, which is what
we've been doing for most of the last couple of years.
But that hasn't been easy for women who have to
(10:50):
juggle the childcare and all the dozens of things that
they have to take care of. But even going forward,
one of the things that I am worried about and
starting to think about how to address is as this
sort of hybrid remote work becomes the norm, nobody we
(11:11):
all know, at least in our industry, nobody's coming back
to a nine to five, five days a week sort
of schedule anymore. So whatever form that takes, I do
think women are going to over index in terms of
being more remote and what does that do by way
of mentorship, by way of opportunities. It is challenging to
(11:36):
build relationships when you're not face to face and in
person and having all of those sidebar conversations, which is
very difficult to do on zoom. And what sort of
unconscious or subconscious biases will that create and how are
we going to measure it once this becomes the norm
in some ways, So it is definitely an area for
(11:58):
all of us to be thinking about and how we're
going to solve it. I share your concern that as
long as we do exist in sort of uncertain hybrid dynamics,
women will continue to be disadvantaged. So I do think
as much certainty that can be built in so that
women can plan on our lives and the totality of
our lives. I do believe will matter a great deal.
(12:23):
We'll be right back stay with us. You know we
talked about how hard it is to build working relationships remotely.
It's also hard to build romantic relationships remotely. And you
(12:46):
became CEO of Match, like right before COVID nineteen exploded.
Can you talk about what you saw among Match users
that I think people might be surprised to hear. A
business took a real hit in the first few weeks
when this COVID thing was just starting around the second
(13:06):
week of March. Everything from activity and usage to propensity
to pay, all of it took a hit. But then,
and of course, it was a big scramble to try
to figure out what do we have to change everything
from our marketing creatives. Right we have people going out
to restaurants on dates that didn't seem like the right
(13:28):
message to be airing at the time. We had to
rejigger entire product roadmap. We knew, okay, if people are
not going to be able to meet in person, what
are they going to do? There was a part of
me that was excited about this because I always thought
video was such a great tool to sort of bridge
the disconnect that happens between those online conversations and the
(13:51):
first time you meet someone in real life. And I
always thought it's such a great half date tool, if
you will, and a prolog a prologue maybe, yeah, exactly.
And I've been trying to experiment with videos since twenty
eleven and it never took off. But it felt like
(14:11):
this was it. This was the moment for video and
fortunately for us, about middle to end of April, things
started looking better. People were coming to our platforms in
larger numbers. The surprising thing that happened was women on
our platforms were more engaged, were messaging more. We're talking
(14:33):
for longer than we've ever seen before. And what do
you make of that? Shore So I have two hypothesis
on it. One women, You know, we all need human connection,
and women needed more. We need to be able to
talk it out, empathize with people. People in the US.
We're reaching out to people in Italy because that was
(14:55):
the first country that had been heavily hit, So it
wasn't just about the Roman intent necessarily. People truly wanted
and were craving for this human connection. And we jokingly
also said men are spending time playing video games and
women are on our platforms trying to make human connections.
But I really do think that was what drove a
(15:17):
surge and activity on our platforms. And by summer we
were in much better shape, having transformed all of our
product marketing strategy and plans, and you increased revenue for them.
We did. We had we turned the business that has
done pretty well. We just announced our earnings. We had
(15:38):
twenty five percent increase in our revenue. Really remarkable. Sure,
I think one of the things that has always impressed
me about you is, just as you were reflecting that
you don't stop being a mom. You know, when you
walk into your office or onto a zoom screen these days,
you don't check your humanity either. As a leader, you
(15:59):
are so fully yourself and you have used your platform
to talk about issues that you think are really important,
really important to you as a woman, really important to
you as a person. You know. I'm thinking particularly about
the horrifically restrictive new laws and Texas as relates to
abortion care and the really just a horrific reality of
(16:21):
violence against women in every country, including here in the
United States, and so just you want to know why
it is so important for you to be your full
self and why it is so important for you to
take a stand on issues that clearly matter to you
and you believe it should matter to all of us.
One of the things I've realized is trying to not
(16:43):
be your full, authentic self is kind of stressful. You know,
it's stressful to know what to bring and what not do,
how to compartmentalize things. I've never been very good at that.
So this is who I am in all facets of
life in terms of some of these issues. We are
a social product. We bring people together for this very
(17:08):
important and existential need that we all have, that of love, relationships,
and human connection. But it's not always great, and it
is absolutely our responsibility, both as a company as well
as leaders of the company, to make sure we are
leading the way of making this new world online, a
(17:32):
world is safe, a place for the future generation. I
think about it. Ten years ago, we weren't on these
digital platforms. It's just been a decade since so much
of our lives has moved online. But for our kids,
they are digital native. This is the world they know,
and they're going to spend more and more parts of
(17:53):
their life on these platforms. And for us as human beings,
we've spent hundreds and hundreds of years trying to figure
out what is the proper code of conduct and rules
of behavior and laws and law enforcement of interpersonal connection
in the real world. And obviously none of us know
(18:14):
how to navigate this well in this digital world. Whether
it is how anonymous should we be, what are the
laws and who is responsible for enforcing these laws, and
so there's a lot of things we have to figure out.
I think, and I always say, it is going to
take the trifecta of regulators, technology platform leaders, as well
(18:37):
as all of us society in general to figure out
what is it that we want from these platforms, because
safety and privacy can sometimes be at odds because you
need more of your information out there so people can
make the platform safer, but then you know, you do
lose some of your privacy. So there's a host of complicated,
(18:57):
difficult questions we have to collectively figure out. And I
do think it is not just my responsibility, but our
collective responsibility to figure that out. In terms of sort
of social issues that are somewhat unrelated to the business itself.
That's a trickier ground. And for the Texas laws, the
(19:19):
stands I took. That was a personal thing for me
because somebody asked me for comment, and I just in
good faith couldn't say no comment because I felt passionately
that we cannot after making all of this progress, we
can't go back. This is not the right thing. And
I did get a lot of feedback about this is
not a place for a CEO to be making comments on,
(19:42):
and I get it, I understand that, but it is
it's just something I felt really passionately about and I
couldn't keep quiet. Well, I've never understood well, I mean,
I do understand it's power protecting itself, But from a
moral perspective, I've never understood the stance that business leaders
(20:04):
shouldn't have opinions or perspectives on anything outside of their
narrowly defined business. Because, of course, things like voting rights
impact business. Of course, things like reproductive choice impact your business,
if only because it impacts the people who you're employing.
But that should matter, and so certainly it matters to
(20:26):
me that you are modeling a different type of CEO
than often what we have seen, even in more recent times.
We're taking a quick break. Stay with us. We talked
(20:50):
about how you think of supporting opportunities for women at
kind of a holistic company level. I am curious, though,
what advice you give to women, women who are engineers,
or maybe not engineers, but who want to become competent,
qualified and excellent leaders. And when people come and ask
you for advice, what do you say to them? Yeah,
(21:12):
you know, for women or anybody who is trying to
break into a world where there are not many of them,
they're underrepresented. You sort of have this initial hurdle of
getting people to look past and see past the very
obvious difference that they see. Right, we all have We're humans,
we have patterns, We have stereotypes in our brains about
(21:36):
who should or should not be in certain positions or
roles or jobs, and we act on that. And for
someone who looks different and sounds different, they have to
get past it. So one of the big advice I
have not just for people who are trying to break through,
but it's hopefully helpful to everyone, is instead of focusing
(21:58):
a lot of energy on trying to figure out how
to overcome your weaknesses, spend the extra amount of energy
in finding out what your particular strength or superpower is
and work on enhancing it, because that is what gives
you the advantage and the edge, and it makes you
(22:18):
stand out and have people look past the fact that
you're a woman or a woman of color or whatever
it is, and focus on this other thing that's relevant
for the business. Early on, I realized my superpower in
some ways is memory. I have a very good memory,
(22:38):
and I can retain and sort of extract random bits
of facts and data and numbers, and it gave me
a real advantage when I was in groups. I would
remember things we've tried before. I'd be able to get
patterns and come up with solutions more quickly. And I realize,
(23:00):
is that's what gave me the edge and the advantage,
and had people sort of set up and notice this
particular thing that I brought. And so I decided, Okay,
this is going to be a thing that I'm going
to work very hard on preserving and sharpening. And so
it's been well over a decade that I've never taken
notes ever, so I don't write anything down. I forced
(23:24):
myself to remember everything and retrieve it from memory, which
keeps me sort of sharper on that front. Wow. Sure,
I thought I had a pretty good memory, but I
write things down to help groove it into my memory.
I think I now need to practice, I guess, being
a more active listener and mental catalog er. That's just extraordinary.
(23:45):
We spoke earlier about kind of the statistic that we
still haven't broken ten percent of fortune five hundred CEOs
being women. Is it that statistic or is there another
statistic that particularly empowers you or maybe enrageous slash inspires
you to keep doing what you're doing, but also to
(24:06):
keep supporting other women in business. The biggest run for
me is actually girls in computer science and technology. In
the seventies, as more and more women started going to
college and getting degrees, every degree from life sciences, business, law,
computer science was going up, and most of the other
(24:28):
fields except computer science edged up very close to that
forty forty five fifty percent by early eighties. In nineteen
eighty four, the percentage of college graduates that were computer
science degrees that were girls was around thirty seven percent.
I think so, But then it started dropping and it
(24:49):
fell all the way to eighteen to twenty percent, and
it's been in that zone for a long time, and
there's probably many reasons, but the fundamental reason for that
particular inflection point in nineteen eighty four is the popularity
of PCs, which were initially introduced for video gaming, and
(25:12):
they were mostly used by boys. Parents bought them for
their sons, and they, obviously, by the time they got
to college, had a real advantage and headstart in programming
and computers in general, and girls found themselves falling behind
and hence more insecure. And then this led to this
whole social programming of girls are not good in computer science,
(25:37):
and it's now led to this place where only about
twenty percent of computer science graduates in the US are girls.
And here we are much of our lives, almost every
part of our life is now dominated by technology and
computer science, and we have still a very small percentage
(25:58):
of women coming into this field. People keep complaining about
not having tech leaders who are women, but that's the
reason we've had two decades of underrepresentation in this field.
And I'm hoping I am seeing anecdotal evidence that more
and more girls are getting interested in this area. I
(26:20):
keep telling young girls teenagers in particular. I don't understand
why you can do it. It It has the most flexibility.
You can join any industry you want. It is one
of the highest paid jobs you will get. It is
such a fantastic job for girls, and it actually plays
to the web thinking we naturally always do. You know,
We're always doing this if then else in our heads
(26:42):
all the time, and we're very good at it. And
my real hope is that trend changes and we are
much more normalized, because at the end of the day,
we do want women to be influencing these technologies of
the future, especially as we navigate all the questions that
you've spoke about earlier, how we think about privacy and safety,
(27:03):
especially for women. Well, Sara, you'll be happy to know
my parents actually gave me a computer. Will Santa gave
me a computer in nineteen eighty seven. Math games and
Carmen San Diego were my great passions as a child
or my computer and I'm so thankful that they did
bring technology into my life when I was quite little.
And I'm very grateful for your time today, Shara. Thank
(27:24):
you so much for the conversation and thanks for making
me your first podcast. It was my pleasure, Chelsea, it
was so fun. You can find shar Dubey on Twitter
at underscore shar Dubai. In Fact is brought to you
by iHeartRadio. We are produced by a mighty group of
(27:47):
women and one amazing man, Erica Goodmanson, Mart Harr, Sarah Horrowitz,
Jessmin Molly, and Justin Wright, with help from Lindsay Hoffman,
Barry Lurie Joyce, A Kuban, Julie Supran, Mike Taylor, and
Emily Young. Original music is by Justin Wright. If you
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(28:09):
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Apple Podcasts.
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton, and this season on in fact,
we're celebrating Women's History Month. I'll be talking with trailblazing
women at the top of their fields about their personal journeys,
the progress women have made, and how far we still
have to go. Today, we're talking about women in business
with Shar Dubai. She's the CEO of Match Group, which
(00:27):
owns and operates some of the world's most popular and
profitable online dating companies, including tender Match, ok Cupid, and Hinge.
Full disclosure, I came to Noshar because I'm on the
board of IC, which owns a majority stake in Match Group.
Back in nineteen sixty three, Katherine Graham became the first
woman to lead a Fortune five hundred company. But since then,
(00:51):
the number of women in charge of major companies hasn't
exactly skyrocketed, in fact, far from it. In the Fortune
where the Match Group falls, only seven percent of CEOs
or women, and the percent of female CEOs of color
like Shar only one percent. And yet, as you may
(01:11):
have heard, study after study shows that companies with women
in leadership roles are more profitable than those led solely
by men. So why aren't there more women and what
or who is holding women back. Shar has a unique
vantage point on all this, and she's used to being
one of the only women in the room. She studied
engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and received a
(01:35):
master's in engineering from Ohio State. Since joining the Match
Group in two thousand and six, she's held a number
of leadership positions, including CEO and president of Tinder, and
she became CEO of Match Group in March twenty twenty. Yes,
March twenty twenty. That means she took the helm of
a major company whose product was dating just as the
(01:56):
pandemic was starting. And while many CEOs kept quiet on
social justice issues, Shar has been unafraid to speak out,
including an opposition to the new anti woman anti abortion
law in Texas, where Match Group is based, and in
support of Congress reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. Well, Shar,
(02:22):
thank you so much for being part of this podcast series,
and I have been fortunate to know you now for
a number of years and believe that many people listening
to us may not know that apps that are part
of their maybe daily life, but you know, at least
probably weekly or monthly life, are part of a company
(02:44):
match that's helped by a woman by you, and so
I thought we could just start kind of at the beginning.
When did you know you were interested in science and engineering.
I'm so excited to be here. It's the first time
I'm doing a podcast, so hopefully we'll get at this right.
I'm your first podcast. You are my first podcast. I
(03:05):
feel very honored. Thank you. I grew up in a
small town in the northeastern part of India and my
dad was a professor of mechanical engineering. So I grew
up on the campus of an engineering school and that's
sort of what exposed me to science and technology at
(03:26):
the time, which was a different sort of technology. Because
this is seventies and eighties. The Internet hadn't come around yet,
let alone smartphones and apps, right, and I was certainly
exposed to engineering. I think the appeal for it was
more the fact that very few girls were doing it.
It was a field that was dominated by boys and men,
(03:49):
so that was an appeal that wasn't daunting to you,
That's exactly right. I wanted to show that I could
do something that was not expected of me, and so
I think that was the appeal I applied to one
of the top engineering schools in India called the I
It's sort of the MT. This was in the late eighties.
(04:09):
So I found myself being the only girl in most
of my classes in engineering school. And looking back at
that experience, I think a lot of those four years
is what shape who I ended up becoming as an
adult and a leader. And when you were in your
engineering classes and you were one of a few or
(04:31):
the only girl, were you ever intimidated or did you
just continue to feel like I have to prove what
I can do and what girls can do. I think
I went in with a lot more confidence than I
should have, and the first few weeks were challenging. I
found myself in these classes with eighty two hundred boys,
(04:53):
and nobody wanted to sit next to me. My lab
partner wouldn't come do his lab and I think it,
but he took credit for your work. I'm sure yes.
And so I did actually believe it or not think
about quitting for about the first time and only time
in my life. And there was a girl who was
(05:14):
a few years senior to me. She told me, she said,
if you're going to quit, who is that going to hurt,
you're the one that's going to lose, and so gritted
up and I did, and I ended up becoming really
good friends with most of my classmates afterwards. And how
do you think that set of experiences of being one
(05:34):
of the few women, of having to continually prove yourself
to your classmates, probably to your faculty, how do you
think that has shaped you as a leader today. You know,
there's a few things that I think it taught me.
One how to navigate a world that was different looking,
(05:55):
and most people didn't expect me to be there, and
I had to figure out how to stand out enough
of standing out visually anyways, but how do I minimize
that visual standout and prove that I deserved to be there?
And I think those were skills that sort of came
into play even after I came to this country and
(06:18):
my first job in this country, where I was the
first woman engineer they ever hired and the first foreigner.
I was the first person they did the HNB processing for.
It was an aerospace engine manufacturing company in rural Pennsylvania.
So I would say a culture shock both for me
and for everybody there. But I think my experience at
(06:41):
I It certainly gave me the confidence to be able
to navigate that. And how do you think now about
creating opportunities for women at match Ensuring that women who
may not have yet the internal grit and gratitude and
pretty unshakable confidence that you clearly have had throughout your
(07:04):
life can come to believe in themselves and can prove
to themselves as well as of course to their colleagues
and to you, what they can do. One of the
things I feel really proud about what Mandy and I
accomplish at least at Match. Mandy Ginsburg, who was the
CEO of Match Group before me. When we started here
(07:25):
about fifteen years ago, we were the only two women
in leadership positions, and today I think thirty eight percent
of our VP and above positions are women. And a
lot of that comes from people seeing you doing the
things that you do, talking about all the challenges that
(07:47):
you have to face. We were both young moms at
the time when we started, and we were very comfortable
talking about having to run to the doctor's office, or
having to get up in the middle of a meeting
and to pick up the kid from school because they
were sick, or what have you. And that made other women,
I think, more comfortable bringing their entire lives to work
(08:11):
versus compartmentalizing working home. We were also we found we
were able to attract more women and we were able
to close more women in the interview process, and some
of that is what has led to Match Group in
general being a company that has been much more welcoming
(08:33):
and comfortable for women to work at. Not to mention,
we've had two CEOs in a row who are women. Yes,
it certainly matters. It matters because there are still so
few women CEOs sitting atop big companies. Do you feel
any pressure by being one of the few women's CEOs
of a company of matches size in the United States?
(08:57):
You know, I was thinking about this. The first women's
CEO of a Fortune five hundred company, it was Katherine Graham.
And last year, in twenty twenty one, there are only
forty one women who are CEOs of Fortune five hundred companies, like,
not even one per year in the interim, And so
that's eight percent, right, So any which way you look
(09:20):
at it, it's single digit percentage of women that are
at the top. What gives me a little bit of
hope and comfort though, is just as college degrees when
women started going to college and there was a big
acceleration of college degrees among women. First came education, then
came other fields like medicine is one where nobody questions
(09:43):
the presence of women there. I do think both technology,
which is very underrepresented by women, and also business leadership
is hopefully going to be one that gets accelerated much
faster over the next decade, because I do se a
lot more women in mid and SDIU management positions who
(10:04):
are sort of a few years from getting there. I think,
and hopefully we will regain all the progress that we
did lose over the last couple of years of COVID,
where we know millions of women at every trunch of
leadership and across a multitude of professions left because they
couldn't manage being a parent and a professional. How do
(10:27):
you think about match supporting the many thousands of people
who work at the company over these still uncertain times.
We are lucky that we have a business where we
can actually work one hundred percent remote, which is what
we've been doing for most of the last couple of years.
But that hasn't been easy for women who have to
(10:50):
juggle the childcare and all the dozens of things that
they have to take care of. But even going forward,
one of the things that I am worried about and
starting to think about how to address is as this
sort of hybrid remote work becomes the norm, nobody we
(11:11):
all know, at least in our industry, nobody's coming back
to a nine to five, five days a week sort
of schedule anymore. So whatever form that takes, I do
think women are going to over index in terms of
being more remote and what does that do by way
of mentorship, by way of opportunities. It is challenging to
(11:36):
build relationships when you're not face to face and in
person and having all of those sidebar conversations, which is
very difficult to do on zoom. And what sort of
unconscious or subconscious biases will that create and how are
we going to measure it once this becomes the norm
in some ways, So it is definitely an area for
(11:58):
all of us to be thinking about and how we're
going to solve it. I share your concern that as
long as we do exist in sort of uncertain hybrid dynamics,
women will continue to be disadvantaged. So I do think
as much certainty that can be built in so that
women can plan on our lives and the totality of
our lives. I do believe will matter a great deal.
(12:23):
We'll be right back stay with us. You know we
talked about how hard it is to build working relationships remotely.
It's also hard to build romantic relationships remotely. And you
(12:46):
became CEO of Match, like right before COVID nineteen exploded.
Can you talk about what you saw among Match users
that I think people might be surprised to hear. A
business took a real hit in the first few weeks
when this COVID thing was just starting around the second
(13:06):
week of March. Everything from activity and usage to propensity
to pay, all of it took a hit. But then,
and of course, it was a big scramble to try
to figure out what do we have to change everything
from our marketing creatives. Right we have people going out
to restaurants on dates that didn't seem like the right
(13:28):
message to be airing at the time. We had to
rejigger entire product roadmap. We knew, okay, if people are
not going to be able to meet in person, what
are they going to do? There was a part of
me that was excited about this because I always thought
video was such a great tool to sort of bridge
the disconnect that happens between those online conversations and the
(13:51):
first time you meet someone in real life. And I
always thought it's such a great half date tool, if
you will, and a prolog a prologue maybe, yeah, exactly.
And I've been trying to experiment with videos since twenty
eleven and it never took off. But it felt like
(14:11):
this was it. This was the moment for video and
fortunately for us, about middle to end of April, things
started looking better. People were coming to our platforms in
larger numbers. The surprising thing that happened was women on
our platforms were more engaged, were messaging more. We're talking
(14:33):
for longer than we've ever seen before. And what do
you make of that? Shore So I have two hypothesis
on it. One women, You know, we all need human connection,
and women needed more. We need to be able to
talk it out, empathize with people. People in the US.
We're reaching out to people in Italy because that was
(14:55):
the first country that had been heavily hit, So it
wasn't just about the Roman intent necessarily. People truly wanted
and were craving for this human connection. And we jokingly
also said men are spending time playing video games and
women are on our platforms trying to make human connections.
But I really do think that was what drove a
(15:17):
surge and activity on our platforms. And by summer we
were in much better shape, having transformed all of our
product marketing strategy and plans, and you increased revenue for them.
We did. We had we turned the business that has
done pretty well. We just announced our earnings. We had
(15:38):
twenty five percent increase in our revenue. Really remarkable. Sure,
I think one of the things that has always impressed
me about you is, just as you were reflecting that
you don't stop being a mom. You know, when you
walk into your office or onto a zoom screen these days,
you don't check your humanity either. As a leader, you
(15:59):
are so fully yourself and you have used your platform
to talk about issues that you think are really important,
really important to you as a woman, really important to
you as a person. You know. I'm thinking particularly about
the horrifically restrictive new laws and Texas as relates to
abortion care and the really just a horrific reality of
(16:21):
violence against women in every country, including here in the
United States, and so just you want to know why
it is so important for you to be your full
self and why it is so important for you to
take a stand on issues that clearly matter to you
and you believe it should matter to all of us.
One of the things I've realized is trying to not
(16:43):
be your full, authentic self is kind of stressful. You know,
it's stressful to know what to bring and what not do,
how to compartmentalize things. I've never been very good at that.
So this is who I am in all facets of
life in terms of some of these issues. We are
a social product. We bring people together for this very
(17:08):
important and existential need that we all have, that of love, relationships,
and human connection. But it's not always great, and it
is absolutely our responsibility, both as a company as well
as leaders of the company, to make sure we are
leading the way of making this new world online, a
(17:32):
world is safe, a place for the future generation. I
think about it. Ten years ago, we weren't on these
digital platforms. It's just been a decade since so much
of our lives has moved online. But for our kids,
they are digital native. This is the world they know,
and they're going to spend more and more parts of
(17:53):
their life on these platforms. And for us as human beings,
we've spent hundreds and hundreds of years trying to figure
out what is the proper code of conduct and rules
of behavior and laws and law enforcement of interpersonal connection
in the real world. And obviously none of us know
(18:14):
how to navigate this well in this digital world. Whether
it is how anonymous should we be, what are the
laws and who is responsible for enforcing these laws, and
so there's a lot of things we have to figure out.
I think, and I always say, it is going to
take the trifecta of regulators, technology platform leaders, as well
(18:37):
as all of us society in general to figure out
what is it that we want from these platforms, because
safety and privacy can sometimes be at odds because you
need more of your information out there so people can
make the platform safer, but then you know, you do
lose some of your privacy. So there's a host of complicated,
(18:57):
difficult questions we have to collectively figure out. And I
do think it is not just my responsibility, but our
collective responsibility to figure that out. In terms of sort
of social issues that are somewhat unrelated to the business itself.
That's a trickier ground. And for the Texas laws, the
(19:19):
stands I took. That was a personal thing for me
because somebody asked me for comment, and I just in
good faith couldn't say no comment because I felt passionately
that we cannot after making all of this progress, we
can't go back. This is not the right thing. And
I did get a lot of feedback about this is
not a place for a CEO to be making comments on,
(19:42):
and I get it, I understand that, but it is
it's just something I felt really passionately about and I
couldn't keep quiet. Well, I've never understood well, I mean,
I do understand it's power protecting itself, But from a
moral perspective, I've never understood the stance that business leaders
(20:04):
shouldn't have opinions or perspectives on anything outside of their
narrowly defined business. Because, of course, things like voting rights
impact business. Of course, things like reproductive choice impact your business,
if only because it impacts the people who you're employing.
But that should matter, and so certainly it matters to
(20:26):
me that you are modeling a different type of CEO
than often what we have seen, even in more recent times.
We're taking a quick break. Stay with us. We talked
(20:50):
about how you think of supporting opportunities for women at
kind of a holistic company level. I am curious, though,
what advice you give to women, women who are engineers,
or maybe not engineers, but who want to become competent,
qualified and excellent leaders. And when people come and ask
you for advice, what do you say to them? Yeah,
(21:12):
you know, for women or anybody who is trying to
break into a world where there are not many of them,
they're underrepresented. You sort of have this initial hurdle of
getting people to look past and see past the very
obvious difference that they see. Right, we all have We're humans,
we have patterns, We have stereotypes in our brains about
(21:36):
who should or should not be in certain positions or
roles or jobs, and we act on that. And for
someone who looks different and sounds different, they have to
get past it. So one of the big advice I
have not just for people who are trying to break through,
but it's hopefully helpful to everyone, is instead of focusing
(21:58):
a lot of energy on trying to figure out how
to overcome your weaknesses, spend the extra amount of energy
in finding out what your particular strength or superpower is
and work on enhancing it, because that is what gives
you the advantage and the edge, and it makes you
(22:18):
stand out and have people look past the fact that
you're a woman or a woman of color or whatever
it is, and focus on this other thing that's relevant
for the business. Early on, I realized my superpower in
some ways is memory. I have a very good memory,
(22:38):
and I can retain and sort of extract random bits
of facts and data and numbers, and it gave me
a real advantage when I was in groups. I would
remember things we've tried before. I'd be able to get
patterns and come up with solutions more quickly. And I realize,
(23:00):
is that's what gave me the edge and the advantage,
and had people sort of set up and notice this
particular thing that I brought. And so I decided, Okay,
this is going to be a thing that I'm going
to work very hard on preserving and sharpening. And so
it's been well over a decade that I've never taken
notes ever, so I don't write anything down. I forced
(23:24):
myself to remember everything and retrieve it from memory, which
keeps me sort of sharper on that front. Wow. Sure,
I thought I had a pretty good memory, but I
write things down to help groove it into my memory.
I think I now need to practice, I guess, being
a more active listener and mental catalog er. That's just extraordinary.
(23:45):
We spoke earlier about kind of the statistic that we
still haven't broken ten percent of fortune five hundred CEOs
being women. Is it that statistic or is there another
statistic that particularly empowers you or maybe enrageous slash inspires
you to keep doing what you're doing, but also to
(24:06):
keep supporting other women in business. The biggest run for
me is actually girls in computer science and technology. In
the seventies, as more and more women started going to
college and getting degrees, every degree from life sciences, business, law,
computer science was going up, and most of the other
(24:28):
fields except computer science edged up very close to that
forty forty five fifty percent by early eighties. In nineteen
eighty four, the percentage of college graduates that were computer
science degrees that were girls was around thirty seven percent.
I think so, But then it started dropping and it
(24:49):
fell all the way to eighteen to twenty percent, and
it's been in that zone for a long time, and
there's probably many reasons, but the fundamental reason for that
particular inflection point in nineteen eighty four is the popularity
of PCs, which were initially introduced for video gaming, and
(25:12):
they were mostly used by boys. Parents bought them for
their sons, and they, obviously, by the time they got
to college, had a real advantage and headstart in programming
and computers in general, and girls found themselves falling behind
and hence more insecure. And then this led to this
whole social programming of girls are not good in computer science,
(25:37):
and it's now led to this place where only about
twenty percent of computer science graduates in the US are girls.
And here we are much of our lives, almost every
part of our life is now dominated by technology and
computer science, and we have still a very small percentage
(25:58):
of women coming into this field. People keep complaining about
not having tech leaders who are women, but that's the
reason we've had two decades of underrepresentation in this field.
And I'm hoping I am seeing anecdotal evidence that more
and more girls are getting interested in this area. I
(26:20):
keep telling young girls teenagers in particular. I don't understand
why you can do it. It It has the most flexibility.
You can join any industry you want. It is one
of the highest paid jobs you will get. It is
such a fantastic job for girls, and it actually plays
to the web thinking we naturally always do. You know,
We're always doing this if then else in our heads
(26:42):
all the time, and we're very good at it. And
my real hope is that trend changes and we are
much more normalized, because at the end of the day,
we do want women to be influencing these technologies of
the future, especially as we navigate all the questions that
you've spoke about earlier, how we think about privacy and safety,
(27:03):
especially for women. Well, Sara, you'll be happy to know
my parents actually gave me a computer. Will Santa gave
me a computer in nineteen eighty seven. Math games and
Carmen San Diego were my great passions as a child
or my computer and I'm so thankful that they did
bring technology into my life when I was quite little.
And I'm very grateful for your time today, Shara. Thank
(27:24):
you so much for the conversation and thanks for making
me your first podcast. It was my pleasure, Chelsea, it
was so fun. You can find shar Dubey on Twitter
at underscore shar Dubai. In Fact is brought to you
by iHeartRadio. We are produced by a mighty group of
(27:47):
women and one amazing man, Erica Goodmanson, Mart Harr, Sarah Horrowitz,
Jessmin Molly, and Justin Wright, with help from Lindsay Hoffman,
Barry Lurie Joyce, A Kuban, Julie Supran, Mike Taylor, and
Emily Young. Original music is by Justin Wright. If you
liked this episode of In Fact, please make sure to
subscribe so you never miss an episode, and tell your
(28:09):
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