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Smart Women, Smart Power
Beyond the Spin: Truth, Media, and Democracy
00:36:11
Dr. Kathleen McInnis dives into Nina Jankowicz's past, from leaving government, suing Fox News, and ultimately using the sum of her experiences to inspire the creation of the American Sunlight Project.
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- [00:04]
A
This is Smart Women, Smart Power, a podcast that features conversations with some of the world's most powerful women. We feature thought leaders at all career levels where we explore, among other things, the many contributions that women make to the fields of international business, national security, foreign policy, and international development. Does having women in positions of power influence the outcomes of decisions in these fields? Why or why not? Join me, Dr. Kathleen McInnes, Director of the Smart Women's Smart Power Initiative at the center for Strategic and International Studies, for these incredible conversations. Nina Jankowicz knows what it's like to be attacked for defending the truth, and she's now on a mission to increase the cost of lives that undermine our democracy. On this episode, we'll dive into Nina's past from leaving government, suing Fox News, and ultimately using some of her experiences to inspire the creation of the American Sunlight project. I'm Dr. Kathleen McInnis and this is Smart Women, Smart Power. So, hi, Nina. Welcome to the podcast. It's so wonderful to see you here today in CSIS headquarters.
- [01:17]
B
Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
- [01:19]
A
So, to get us started, what drew you into the world of disinformation and online? I mean, because some of your work sort of looks at online radicalization as well, how to, how to be a woman online, that sort of. How did you get into that space?
- [01:37]
B
Somewhat accidentally. So I am a Russianist by training. I did my two degrees in Russian and East European studies, spent time in Russia and Ukraine, and I, I noticed early on in my career when I was at the National Democratic Institute working on programs to support democracy in Russia and Belarus, that the Internet was increasingly becoming essentially a weapon for Russia. This was pre Maidan, pre kind of.
- [02:03]
A
Right. So, yeah.
- [02:04]
B
What year was that then? Like 2012, 2013?
- [02:07]
A
Yeah. So it was obvious to you then?
- [02:09]
B
Yeah, I mean, it was clear that NDI and organizations in the democracy space were being lied about by the Russian government and its proxies on the Internet and that we in the west were really unprepared to counter those lies. In fact, kind of the guidance that we and the democracy support community got at the time was like, don't give it any credibility, don't respond. And to me, as a millennial, as somebody who had grown up with every social media platform known to man, probably some ill advised like that just seemed like the wrong tack to take. And so I pushed pretty hard on the team at the time that we should get on Twitter, that we should make sure all of our web presence was super up to date. Because otherwise, we were handing the narrative ground to the Russians when we and our partners were under attack. And then in 2013, obviously, Euromaidan happened. We had this big onslaught of what we were all then calling just fake news. Right, right. Against Ukrainians. And that's when it really became clear to me, and that's when I decided I want to go do something in the field, first of all, because I was in my mid-20s at the time, and I was like, if I'm going to do it, now's the time. I don't have kids, not a lot of possessions. Let's go. So I went to Ukraine for a and was supposed to be doing research on kind of the ways that social movements use social media in order to get the word out. Yur Maidan obviously had really relied on Facebook and Twitter to kind of get its message out, both the pros and the cons of the kind of abilities of social media. But when I got there, it was 2016, fall of 2016. What else happened at that time? Right. Consequential election. And watching that from Kyiv and the way that our partners, not only in Ukraine, but in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, were grappling with the news, not only of Trump's election, but of the revelations about Russian interference in the US Election, that's when I felt like I had something really unique to offer. I knew Russia really well. I understood kind of the motivations of Russian foreign policy, had been intimately acquainted with their online tactics, and was watching this all develop from Ukraine. And I thought, you know, there's some lessons to be from our partners and allies in Central and Eastern Europe, and I think now's the time to tell their stories.
- [04:32]
A
Well, so many questions. When did you realize you sort of hinted at it here, but a little bit more explicitly, like, when did you realize that this was going from, like, a PR challenge to a strategic threat?
- [04:47]
B
I think as early as 2013. At that point, we saw the Russian government again pushing back on US Government and its partners online in a very strategic and coordinated way. And for the most part, folks in that sphere really were not rising to meet the challenge. And I think relied on or thought we could rely on the power and strength of our institutions and information literacy to keep us afloat.
- [05:19]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [05:20]
B
And don't get me wrong, information literacy is one of the things I think we need to invest a lot in, but I think we thought it was much higher. It was at that time. So, yeah, in 2012 and 2013, it started to become clear to me and when you're 25 and you're in your first and second job in Washington, you don't feel like there's a lot you can do. But for once in my career, my timing is not very good, typically. But in 2016, 2017, I think I got the timing just right. And it's been a really interesting time to be working on these issues. And my career has since taken me a little bit farther away from Russia, Ukraine, which I'm sure we'll get to. But I still think at the heart of it, it's this autocratic versus democratic struggle for the control of information. That's what we're talking about. And now those autocratic trends have come here to the States.
- [06:14]
A
It's a struggle for the control of information towards the end of building systems of either authoritarian or democratic systems of governance.
- [06:23]
B
Right.
- [06:24]
A
It's. It's amazing to me how this has truly been a main line of effort for Russia.
- [06:35]
B
Absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. And not just against us for the past eight years. My first book, how to Lose the Information War, looks at how this has been a key part of Russian domestic and foreign policy since you could say, 2005. If we're talking about kind of the modern online information environment, if you go back even further, obviously you've got the propaganda of the Soviet years, which Thomas Rid writes about in his book Active Measures, and chronicles in a really, really interesting way. But obviously, this is something the Russians are very practiced at, and that playbook has been replicated in other autocratic states around the world. And frankly, parts of it have been lifted and employed in our own country as well.
- [07:13]
A
Yeah. If I could sort of delve into that a little bit more at Smart Women's Smart Power. We've actually been doing some research on Russia, its utilization of gender as a mechanism for promoting, promulgating disinformation. Do you have any thoughts on what you're seeing or trends that you've noticed or anything?
- [07:35]
B
Absolutely. This is actually one of the reasons I got into the study of online harms of women. So when I was researching for my first book, I kept running into these women in places like Ukraine and Georgia who, you know, we'd be talking about some deep foreign policy issue, and they'd stop me and they'd say, nina, I actually want to talk to you about something personal, if that's okay. And as kind of a pseudo journalist, you never. Yeah, yep. You never stop somebody when they say something like that. Yep. And they tell me about the ways that these shadowy forces online were denigrating them sexually either in that era, kind of putting them into what we call cheap fakes. So not deep fake sexual imagery, but like superimposing their face on someone else's body. One woman had a sex tape that was alleged to be her, shared, actually, it wasn't her, and she was able to disprove that. But other women weren't so lucky. Russia has a history of going after women who oppose it with sexualized sorts of lies that especially in countries like Georgia and Ukraine, which are quite patriarchal, quite misogynistic, they find fodder. And so this is when I started to really research gender disinformation. I've also looked at the ways that Russia uses it domestically. And if you look at Russian state media coverage on RT on Channel One and other state media outlets, the ways that women are portrayed, it's just very black and white. It's like either she is a saint, she's the Mother Teresa, she is a mother. Look at her. The self sacrifice. Or it's this crazy woman who's gone totally off the deep end. There is no in between. You either do it all or you are doing nothing. And it's very, very gendered. Russia also tries to report on gender equity. So it'll be like, ah, look at this parliamentarian and the Dumais, and she's amazing doing it all. But on the other hand, they don't report on the things like the decriminalization of domestic abuse in Russia. Right, right. So they try to have it all and claim that Russian women are in a great spot. But in reality, they're pushing these gender dynamics which are replicated in the coverage and propaganda that they spread abroad as well.
- [09:45]
A
Well, and it's, it, it points to the, the need for deeper dives than just representation when it comes to gender. Right. And gender equity. Like, I think a lot of the discourse focuses on having women in these positions. That's important, that's great. But there's a deeper story that has to be told. And also women can be bad actors in these situations as well. So it's much more nuanced, isn't it?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, a lot of the people who are spreading gender disinformation and using gendered tropes against the likes of Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton and probably some Republican women as well in the Russian government are women. But the other thing, I get a lot of pushback sometimes when I'm talking to other disinformation researchers who don't understand the utility of doing Gender disaggregated studies on disinformation coming from both foreign and domestic.
- [10:35]
A
Interesting.
- [10:36]
B
Wow. Yeah, they're just like, it's just disinformation. Why should we care whether it's about gender or not? But there is a whole listeners I just face palmed. There is a whole kind of sector of disinformation that focuses specifically on marginalized communities, women especially from Russia, LGBT communities, and people of color. And it's important, important to understand that because they're disproportionately affected. So that's become kind of my. One of my soapbox issues also, like.
- [11:07]
A
If they're using these tools in these specific ways against these demographics, like, if that's the tool, if that's what they're doing, let's understand that strategy. Let's understand that play in much more detail. We're supposed to be in the national security world understanding what our adversaries are doing so we can counter that.
- [11:27]
B
Yeah, yeah. When I first wrote in 2021 for a study I did for the WOL center on Gender disinformation, where we looked at women running for office in 2020, as well as different case studies of the way that China, Russia and Iran all use gender disinformation, and I said gender disinformation is a national security issue and should be understood through that lens. I literally got laughed at. Like, people did not understand it. Now I'm happy to say, four years later, I just a couple weeks ago was at a conference in Brussels sponsored by the EEAS with like, strong support of NATO as well on gender and identity based disinformation as a national security issue. So perhaps if we don't get it, certainly our colleagues in Europe do. And now the gender and identity based dimensions of disinformation and information operations have been included in NATO's strategic priorities, which is a really exciting step and I hope to see that continue and not get potentially pared back in the years to come.
- [12:29]
A
One of the wonderful virtues of NATO is that once it's there, it's hard to roll back.
- [12:34]
B
I hope you're right.
- [12:38]
A
Just as a side note, we still have troops in Kosovo. Yeah, well, excuse me. Now it's more relevant to have troops in Kosovo. But in the early Afghanistan years, we were wondering, why can't we pull our brigade or battalion from Kosovo and put it in Afghanistan? Well, because NATO wouldn't let. Anyway, that's a digression before we leave Russia. Yeah, because you're an expert and I'm just so fascinated by your insights when you look at the disinformation campaign that they've waged, what. What are you expecting to see from them moving forward?
- [13:19]
B
Well, that's a rough one because I think they've achieved what they've wanted to achieve. We have an administration incoming in the United States that seems to be willing to make concessions without involving the say so of our Ukrainian allies to Putin. We have a president who has actively undermined and questioned the strategic importance of institutions like NATO. And of course, we have members of Congress who have actively shared Russian disinformation from the floor of Congress in service of goals related to not funding our allies in Ukraine. And so I'm not saying that Ukraine is Russia's only strategic objective, of course, but they have a much more malleable administration in the second Trump administration, I think, than they certainly did in the Biden administration, but perhaps even in the first Trump administration, because Trump was an unknown then and now. Not only do we know that Trump and Putin have continued their relationship since Trump has been out of office, he's got roligarchs like Elon Musk who have maintained a relationship with Putin or kind of curried that relationship with Putin since then. And so in terms of information operations, if I were Russia, the cost benefit's not really there. I mean, like, focus on the high level diplomacy and relationship building, because that's where you're going to see the biggest bang for your buck. In the next couple of years, I think we might see the information operations retrained on the eu, where I think the EU and NATO, although NATO to a lesser degree, given our involvement and funding of NATO and, you know, kind of the fact that we can veto certain things, I think the EU is going to have to pick up a lot of the slack for the defense and support of Ukraine. If things go the way we think they will in the United States. And so I think there's going to be a huge effort to lobby, except not really lobby, to influence online both EU citizens and parliamentarians and officials who are making those decisions. Luckily, the EU is a little bit savvier about these issues than we are.
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A
Well, the decision you brought with you today was the decision to start your organization, the American Sunlight Project. So could you tell us about the project and where did you get the name American Sunlight?
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B
Well, around this time last year, maybe a little bit earlier, I started to kind of peek my head over the parapet, having gone through the wringer with a nationwide harassment campaign that had been trained on me. And I think we'll get to the details of that in a little bit. But it seemed like anybody who was doing research on disinformation, taking a stand for the truth, even basically just doing their job in the federal government as a journalist, as an academic, or a think tank employee, was finding themselves on the receiving end, if not of harassment, then of investigations from Congress, document requests, lawsuits. And having gone through the worst of some of that myself, I felt kind of uniquely prepared to take on that behemoth and say, you know what? I've been lied about. I've been smeared. The work that I did in government. And let's get into that.
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A
So what happened?
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B
So, in 2022, I was appointed to lead a body called the Disinformation Governance Board, which is admittedly a very bad name that I did not come up with. This was in the Department of Homeland Security, and I was essentially the person who was gonna bring all of the different branches of DHS together to talk about this common threat of disinformation affecting the homeland. I'm sure the listeners of Smart Women, Smart Power, all know a lot about the Frankenstein that DHS is, but on the off chance that we have some who don't, you know, DHS is a pretty disparate agency with a lot of different.
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A
Department of Homeland Security.
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B
Yeah. A lot of different portfolios.
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A
Right.
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B
You've got your cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, and also the Federal Emergency Management Agency, fema, which deals with natural disasters, and Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard and the Secret Service. Right. They've all got portfolios that touch disinformation. And some had been doing work on disinformation, but there wasn't a real harmonization of efforts there. And that was my job, a very boring bureaucratic job, to set policy for the department and convene people and herd cats lovingly.
- [18:16]
A
Right? Yeah.
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B
Yep.
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A
This is, by the way, a normal thing to do in government land.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
For any given issue.
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B
And when I got brought in, my research and experience looking at similar efforts in other countries led me to recommend to my superiors that we be as transparent as possible in announcing the effort. Who I was, what we were intending to do somewhere along the way in the game of telephone, that got quite bungled, and they decided to announce it in a very untransparent way. That led. And I'm not excusing it, that led a lot of people to lie about what we were doing. They said that. And this is mostly coming from Fox News, but also coming from Republican members of Congress, bloggers, influencers, on both fringes of the political spectrum to say that we were gonna be a ministry of truth, that I was gonna be President Biden's chief censor. Tucker Carlson said that I would have the power to send men with guns to the homes of Americans with whom I disagreed.
- [19:19]
A
Wow.
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B
Yeah. He also called me a highly self confident young woman, which I think he meant as an insult. Yeah.
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A
Lots of woo. Yeah.
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B
But so when you have Tucker Carlson saying that Nina Jankowitz is gonna send people with guns to your house, if you say something bad on the Internet, it turns out that people get really mad.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so I had, by the way, at the time, I was in the last couple weeks of pregnancy, I was about to become a mom.
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A
So hang on a second.
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B
You are hugely pregnant.
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A
Hugely pregnant. Your body's going through hell.
- [19:59]
B
Yeah. And this deluge of lies and hate comes at me, stemmed by Fox News and members of Congress who I believe are knowingly lying about me. They know that Nina Jankowicz is not going to do all of this stuff. They also attack me in viciously personal ways. I have a musical theater hobby, or at least I did before I had a child and was attacked by, you know, the right wing media. And they found videos of me singing and made that out to be that, you know, I was Satan somehow. Wow. Yeah, it was.
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A
That's a leap.
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B
It was a lot. Musical theater is pretty wholesome.
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A
Right. You know, I like a play. I like. See? You know. Yeah.
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B
But so it was really. It was rough. And I made the decision to resign. Yeah, well.
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A
Yeah, nobody needs that crap.
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B
Well, and I'm not a stranger to online abuse. I mean, I study it. Right. And I had been exposed to it before some pretty vicious campaigns, but nothing to the point of, you know, weeks on end of the people who were just lying about me. They doxxed me and my family. I was recommended by a private security consultant that I hired to leave my home, but ended up electing not to because pregnant ladies come with a lot of stuff, and I was just a few weeks from giving birth, and I just didn't think it was. I couldn't. I couldn't.
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A
Yeah, totally, totally.
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B
We also had a dog and a cat at that point. So, like four beings and a pregnant lady's giant pregnancy sleeping pillow and all of the things that come with it. So I didn't leave. But I also didn't get a lot of support from the Biden administration. They kind of were deer in headlights. They kept telling me, it'll blow over. Of course, it didn't blow over because it was convenient. It was political. It was.
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A
It's a different thing.
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B
It was making people money. Frankly, I didn't find out until afterward, so obviously it was making Fox money, or else they wouldn't have continued to repeat my name and put my face on the screen over and over every hour, on the hour for more than three weeks, and then almost every week until the end of 2022. But it was also making members of Congress money. They used me in fundraising emails after I resigned, which I didn't find out about until after I left. I could have withstood all of that if I knew that the administration had my back and understood the level of threat and said, you know what? We're just gonna. We're gonna be behind you 100% of the way. We're behind the work. We think it's important. Which they clearly did, or else they wouldn't have created the group and brought me on. And I kept saying to them, I'm really happy to march my pregnant butt up to Capitol Hill and talk to Josh Hawley, talk to Chuck Grassley. I think I cut a pretty sympathetic figure right now for these family men, but I was told not to. And I think that was a really big misunderstanding about how disinformation works and the ways that we can diffuse it.
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A
Right. Diffusing, to me, human connection is a key way to diffuse it. It's hard to say the same things when you've interacted with somebody face to face. Yeah, that's a big misstep.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't communicate very much at all. They put out a fact sheet a couple days too late. The secretary went and did the Sunday shows. And we've all been talking about the Sunday shows in the aftermath of the election. Right. Those aren't the people that need to hear the message that the government needs to send. And I wasn't willing to light eight years of work on fire to be a cog in the wheel that at that point, it seemed like the work wasn't gonna go forward anyway. So I left and I had my baby. And the threats continued. The kind of disinformation and lies continued. And that's when I made the decision at the end of 2022, when I looked at the sheer number of times that I had continued to be talked about and referenced on Fox in a defamatory way, I made the decision to sue Fox for defamation, which wasn't easy either.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I just felt like somebody needed to stand up and say that when you are lying about people for profit and destroying their lives in the process. It is something that we should object to. The courts make that really difficult here, particularly if you're a public figure. You have to prove what's called actual malice. So the people who you are alleging to have lied about, you need to know that they were lying. And without going through the discovery process, it's really difficult to have that information. But I still felt it was important to take that stand and do that. And in the interim, I also had a cyber stalker I needed to get a protective order against who had been threatening my family and my son, who at that point was an infant. I was named in a frivolous civil suit that cost me tens of thousands of dollars to get dismissed. It's been rough. And so after all that happened, I kind of again put my head above the parapet and I saw this happening to other people in the space, perhaps not to the same degree, but they were ensnared in lawsuits that luckily their institutions were kind of defending them in. They were being smeared by bloggers and fringe media outlets. And as a result, their institutions and kind of the research that they did in some cases was crumbling around them. And as we headed toward the 2024 election, I said, this is really important that we keep defending these people.
- [25:19]
A
Ye.
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B
And so the American Sunlight Project is in part an effort to push back against these lies, to push back against the real kind of harassment and coordinated abuse of disinformation researchers. But it's also to carry the torch forward because again, I've been through hell already, so I'm able to kind of operate in the political space that many of my academic colleagues are unable to do. And you asked about the name. I thought it was important to remind people that even though they might disagree with me, I too am an American citizen. I care about my country. This is about protecting our national security, protecting everyone's right to participate in democracy.
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A
Right. And that's. It's post partisan. Right. This is not a partisan issue.
- [26:08]
B
It shouldn't be.
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A
This is the right to self expression. And because you run this tape forward, you can easily see the same playbook being run against these actors. Exactly. That hurt you.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So it's actually in everybody's interest to get a handle on this and take this seriously.
- [26:28]
B
Yeah. I've always said in four congressional testimonies that I've done, and my one deposition before Jim Jordan's subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government forgot that one that was also part of the 2022-20, 23, year of hell.
- [26:43]
A
I've always told.
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B
How did you survive that? I have a really great husband and a really good therapist.
- [26:48]
A
Yeah, fair, fair.
- [26:51]
B
And you know what? It's pretty flippant, but the other thing that got me through was having my baby. I honestly, I don't know how I would have survived if I hadn't had that grounding.
- [27:07]
A
Just presence.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. Even today when I get upset, you know, it's. One way to come back to Earth is to see him running around and now he's talking about volcano slugs and things like that all the time.
- [27:20]
A
And I'm like, tiny, crazy humans.
- [27:23]
B
Yes, yes. So I'm really lucky to have had that in my life at the time, because there's nothing that can remind you of kind of humanity, common humanity, and kind of purity than a kid. And frankly, when some of the abusers write to me on, usually Facebook, old men invariably write to me and say horrible things. And they've usually got a picture of their grandkids like them with their grandkids in their profile. And so sometimes when I'm feeling really cheeky, I will do a little bit of OSINT about them because they also have horrible OPSEC and IT security. So I can. I'm not hacking them, but I can tell. Okay, you worked here. You're a veteran. You did this. You've got these grandchildren. Their names are X, Y, and Z, and they're. This is literally posted on your Facebook page.
- [28:15]
A
Like, this is not super sleuthing. It's like, literally right there.
- [28:19]
B
Yeah. And so I say, hey, your grandson's the same age as my son. My dad also served in Vietnam. My brother was a high school football player and now coaches our high school team. We've got a lot in common. Sorry that you've been lied to about me. I promise you, I was just trying to do the best thing that I thought was good for our country. And sometimes they apologize. Right. And so, again, that human connection, that human factor, I think is so important, and it's one of the things that I think women bring to leadership more than our male colleagues do. And it's something I'm trying to carry forward. So, in addition to doing research, we uncovered a Russian bot network. We're tracking the information laundering cycle, targeting disinformation researchers. One of the things we hope to do with American sunlight in 2025, in this kind of brave new world of a second Trump administration is doing a lot more work getting outside of the Beltway and talking directly to people. It was hard to do that in our first year cuz we're kind of strapped for cash at the moment. But I want to go to places where we can find common connection and common cause and perhaps present a completely non partisan take on information literacy. And here's why. These systems that we all use as our public square every day, they're manipulating you. Whether you're on the left or the right of the political spectrum, they're manipulating you. And here's how you make your way through them. And also, as much as I love and write for the mainstream media, I think we all need to think about ways to go direct to voters on social in a more accessible way. And so that's the sort of thing that I'm thinking about. And again, one of the things that I hope to bring and like the unique perspective that I have in my leadership of this tiny little nonprofit that will be one year old soon. Well, congratulations.
- [30:11]
A
That's huge. Making it one year soon. You sort of hinted on this but. Or at this but. Do you think your gender as a woman has had an impact on the decisions, the decisions that you've taken? The decision to leave government, the decision to start the American Sunlight project?
- [30:33]
B
Yeah, I think, I think if I had been a white man leading the executive director of the disinformation governance board position, I think the backlash against me would have been extraordinarily different. Yeah.
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A
Well, again, like getting back to what you were saying earlier about the Russian playbook, right? There is an active campaign out there to undermine women and the bots find American women and do the same, right?
- [31:03]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Interestingly, there were Russian propaganda pieces that were essentially just the same reporting that Fox News had did, but translated into Russian and slightly different visuals with a reporter standing outside of dhs. Right. I mean, that was unsurprising. But I don't think that a man, even if he had a musical theater hobby. Let's not forget Jon Ossoff used to be in acapella groups and that was a thing for like a second and now no one cares. You know, even, even a guy with a musical theater hobby would not have been as ripe of a target. And in fact, they went after my pregnancy as well. I forget which one. But one Fox News commentator said, how could you give a pregnant person such an important job? And to their credit, one of the women on the panel said, because it's the law. But I mean it was everything. And so, I mean, I think if I hadn't been bringing a child into the world, perhaps I would have stuck around a little bit more. But I also was so deeply disappointed in the Biden administration. After all the pronouncements it made at the beginning of the administration bringing more women, more people of color into political appointments, a very predictable line of attack happens, and nothing came from them. I mean, I think that had a lot to do with my leaving. I just really did not feel supported. And I worry so much about the signal that that sends to other women and people of color considering entering public service. And in fact, I've had young women tell me that after seeing what happened to you, they're not sure they want to take on such a public stance. And that breaks my heart. So I try to equip people as much as possible with the tools they need to kind of withstand the pressure. And, you know, the other thing that I think about when I'm traveling a lot for work or, you know, yesterday my son was like, mommy, put down your phone. Which, yep, that is right on the money. I mean, I hope one day, when he's old enough to understand and his origin story and the time when he came into the world literally three weeks after I resigned from my dream job because of what happened and the reason I've been doing all this work since then, I hope it makes him proud. Right. And so, yeah, I think being a woman contributed to all of that. But also, you know, for all the women, the young women who come to me and say, how did you do this? I'm like, I don't know. I stumbled into all of it and made a lot of mistakes along the way. But I want to make sure that I hold my ground for them so that it's easier for them in the future.
- [33:53]
A
Well, to close out our conversation, I'd love your thoughts on what does power mean to you? Smart women. Smart power. What does power mean to you?
- [34:02]
B
I think power is something that needs to be wielded very delicately. And delicate is such a feminine word. Right. It's my first time managing a small to mid sized team. I've done research projects where I manage them. But to have, like, employees who are counting on me to get paid and to lead them in a path that elevates them. I mean, it's weighty. It's really weighty. And I feel. I joke about this a lot, but I feel very much like my role as a mom and my role as a manager and a leader of an organization are not too far apart. And I want what's best for my team just as I want what's best for my son. And so when I think about that, I don't just think about strategically, what are we going to do for the organization. I want to advance them and help them and, and move them to a place where they're gonna be better off because of that. And I think the same is true when we think about women's leadership of departments or countries. And, I mean, it's one of the reasons I fervently believe we need more women in leadership, because it's chess, not checkers. But even that is too male of a metaphor. It's. It's seeing the whole earth. Yeah, exactly.
- [35:33]
A
Nina, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing some really painful moments. And here's to paying it forward.
- [35:42]
B
Thank you. Thanks for what you do. This is a wonderful endeavor and I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak to you and your listeners.
- [35:52]
A
Subscribe to the Smart Women Smart Power podcast on Apple, Podcasts, Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to great content. Be sure to follow us on Twitter martwomen or you can follow me on Twitter jmcinnis1. Thanks for listening and join us next time.