Every March, the world celebrates women’s history, including the incredible contributions of female entrepreneurs. This year, Hippo was honored to invite Christa Quarles to tell us about her career path, the work she’s doing to ensure gender parity, and the power of speaking up when others stay silent. 

Currently the CEO of Corel, Christa has spent more than two decades leading companies and spearheading financial and operational initiatives. As the former CEO of OpenTable, she led a period of transformative change, successfully navigating the company’s conversion to cloud-based, small business solutions. She also previously served as Chief Business Officer of Nextdoor, Senior Vice President of Interactive Games at The Walt Disney Company, and Chief Financial Officer of Playdom.

But before all that, Christa played basketball at Carnegie Mellon University with Hippo’s own Director of People Strategy, Tracy Letzerich. This week, they reunited to talk about Christa’s experiences as a woman in the C-suite and her advice for both women and men looking to create a more equitable workplace.

It hasn’t always been easy, Christa says. “I started my career on Wall Street, and for those of you who have seen Wolf of Wall Street, it was not too far from that,” she says. “It was a hyper-masculine, hyper-aggressive environment. I was ambitious and wanted to succeed, so I looked around the room and thought, this is what I need to do.” 

A large part of the problem was simply a lack of women in the room, she explains. “Carnegie Mellon had a 6:1 male to female ratio, Harvard was 7:1, and then I went on to a West Coast investment bank where I was one of two female partners out of 65. To survive and thrive in this world, Christa found herself emulating those around her. “I kind of became a man. I rolled with it. So much so that I hid my first pregnancy until I couldn’t anymore because it didn’t feel safe to actually be pregnant.”

“One of the crimes in modern business today is that we hold out this single archetype of what leadership looks like, and we ask everybody to fit into it... The minute I started infusing my whole self, all of my humanity, I became ten times the leader.”

 

Unfortunately, Christa says, that feeling didn’t go away until she was named the CEO of OpenTable. Suddenly, Christa realized that she was the one in charge and didn’t need to emulate the men around her. That was the moment she came into her own as a leader, she says. “One of the crimes in modern business today is that we hold out this single archetype of what leadership looks like, and we ask everybody to fit into it. You actually lose the best part of your ability to lead, manage, grow and drive people. The minute I started infusing my whole self, all of my humanity, I became ten times the leader. I could connect with people at a highly emotive and empathetic level, and I began having real conversations I think a lot of leaders are afraid to have.”

Christa’s outspokenness made headlines in 2017 when, at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech, she literally called BS on the idea that “women don’t support other women.” She came back in 2018 to expand on her thoughts, then started a series of Medium posts about how to expose and dismantle the obstacles that continue to keep women from gaining complete parity in the workplace.

According to Christa, the solution is to start working together and pay it forward. “I always tell people, it’s not that you can change the rules of the game, you must. It is your moral obligation.” She explains that it all comes down to power, so it is important to study that power. “When you come into a room, understand where the power comes from, who owns it, and how it’s dispersed.” Only then, she says, can you figure out how to own your own power. She encourages women to make themselves seen—as their authentic selves—so they can stand up for the things they believe in.

"But my advice often is, find the other woman, whether she’s in the room or in your industry. Find ways of supporting each other."

 

The truth is, many women say they don’t feel like they can be their real selves at work—which not only hurts women, it hurts the companies they work for. People who feel they can be themselves at work produce better output, experience more job satisfaction, maximize performance, and are more actively engaged. So how do you fight the urge to “just fit in?” “When you’re the only woman in the room, it can be hard to be supportive of other women,” Christa points out. “But my advice often is, find the other woman, whether she’s in the room or in your industry. Find ways of supporting each other. I think when women have not historically supported each other, it’s because of scarcity.” 

In 2002, Christa recalls, she and her boss, Thom Weisel, went down to visit famed VC John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins to discuss the potential IPO of one of his investments--Google. When they arrived at the meeting, John had brought along another colleague into the room, a woman who was just about Christa’s age. After the meeting, Christa reached out to the woman, who turned out to be Aileen Lee, now a famous investor in her own right and whose iconic 2013 essay coined the term Unicorn.  

“That was nearly 20 years ago,” she says. “My generation was occasionally getting into the room where it happens. But once we were there, we were looking around and saying ‘let’s help each other out,’ ‘let’s support each other’. That support continues to this day where Christa sits on All Raise’s Board Xcelerate advisory committee, an organization founded by Aileen to change the representation of women in venture capital and to get more female founders funded. It’s all about following the money. 

“Money is power, and power will change the world. So how do we get more women more money? We have to talk about it.”

 

Christa knows that money can be a difficult topic for women to talk about, but she stresses that it’s absolutely essential. In America, women get paid 70 cents on the dollar compared to their male peers, a figure which dips even lower for women of color. Female founders are given 40 cents on the dollar compared to men, and women have less access to credit, even though they carry less debt than men. “Money is power,” Christa says. “Power will change the world. So how do we get more women more money? We have to talk about it.”

Over and over, research has shown that hiring more women and having more diverse teams makes businesses more successful. So why is there still such a shortfall? Christa puts this question to the C-suite. “I ask leaders, ‘If you knew there was one thing you could do that would reshape your profit and outcome and ultimately grow your business, you would do it, right?’ The data is there. It’s simple.” But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t gotten pushback. “People will ask, well, is it correlation or causation? My response when I get that question is: I don’t care! Even if that success is because you are forward-thinking in other areas of your business in addition to being more gender-diverse, it’s a sign to everybody else that, yeah, this is a forward-leaning company seeing success.”

She stresses that in addition to being the right thing to do, diversifying your staff and bringing more women onto the team is just good for business. As a board member for both Affirm and Kimberly-Clark, Christa has years of experience with the way boardrooms operate. She points out that boards used to think in order for a company to show altruism, they would have to sacrifice profit. “That is no more,” she says. “The modern consumer expects every organization, big and small, to be doing these things, to be considering the environment, gender, diversity. You want to be a forward-thinking company innovating along all of these dimensions because it is a sign and symbol that you are probably innovating in the rest of your business. The impact that all of this has on how a consumer will invest in your brand is extremely important.”

So what can a company do to improve its gender diversity? Counterintuitive as it sounds, Christa’s advice is to involve the men. The men on the team need to become allies, she insists, and that starts with listening and amplifying women’s stories. “First off, my advice to any man is to just ask a woman about her experiences. The next step is to care about it and then be a voice for them and say it out loud.” 

"The reality, no matter what excuse you may hear about there not being enough women in STEM, the reality is women are here NOW. It just took us looking at the problem, figuring out a way to solve it, and then ultimately holding ourselves accountable to the results."

 

When Christa joined OpenTable, her engineering department was only 18% women. She knew she needed to lead by example, so the first thing she did was talk to her CTO about the need to make a change and ask how they could do it together. “First thing I knew we needed to do was declare it. Publicly. The declarative intention is the most important step that leaders can make. This is how you can unleash the power of your organization,” she says. “So we made several changes to process and recruiting, and by the next quarter, we had improved that number to 50%. Even I was blown away by how quickly it happened. The reality, no matter what excuse you may hear about there not being enough women in STEM, the reality is women are here NOW. It just took us looking at the problem, figuring out a way to solve it, and then ultimately holding ourselves accountable to the results.” Organizations that continue not to lean into this, she says, will be left in the dust.

Sadly, the pandemic has made things even more difficult for women in the workplace. With extra responsibilities at home falling disproportionately on women, many women feel like they can’t be as ambitious at work. “The fact that women feel like they are failing when they are the only thing holding everything together is what I find the most heartbreaking,” Christa says. Again, she stresses the need to talk about it. Even if it begins by just confiding in a friend, eventually the conversation will grow so that women can start to set some expectations and boundaries in both the home and at work. “I was reading an article by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and she said ‘self-care is a political act,’ and I believe that. There is something to being the person that puts their oxygen mask on first. If you are not well, if you are not rested, your ability to take care of others and do good work diminishes. I love that statement.” 

We were inspired by Christa’s story and continued impact. Together, let’s be bold, let’s be curious, and let’s all be a part of the solution.

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