I've been speaking with Sylvia Acevedo who's telling me about a rule she learned when she was a kid. This rule she says has been a big force in her life and helped shape her impressive career. It's called the rule of three knows. I ask her to demonstrate with some role play.
I'm playing a grumpy old man who's actually working on a cheese playing. She's playing. She'll be off if she's playing. So first I would ask her if you would like to find someone who's only a cheese.
And I would say, do I look like I need to eat more cookies over, get off my first half. No. And I'd say, you know, my cookies, you can eat them for yourself or you can give them the really very delicious people in your work and your family would really enjoy having these cookies. So I would really encourage that.
I'm retired and my wife died and I have no family. I don't want your cookies to get off my first little girl. All right. Well, you know, sir, it sounds like you would need some more friends.
And I would encourage you to buy a box of cookies and take it to your neighbor. And you can meet your neighbors and they would really enjoy getting this box of cookies from you, sir. Who exactly is this clutter and determined woman? I'm Sylvia, also David.
I'm CEO, Girl Scouts of the USA. And what exactly is the Girl Scouts mission? Pretty girls have heard of in his car. They're making world a better place.
But I'm guessing there's a lot you don't know about the Girl Scouts. Including the fact that the cookie sales, which generate more than $700 million a year, are you going to assess any dating back to the organization's founder? Yes. Because she faced the same dilemma that many girls and women's organizations face, which is girls and women's organizations get less than 10% of every film drop a dollar.
And they're going to know about Sylvia, I was afraid of two. How her low income, the teen background did not exactly pay the way for future success. She said, girls like you don't go to college, how she became a rocket scientist, and then a tech executive, again, swimming against the tide. You know, I got all this great qualifications and experience.
They said, well, you're a woman. And the problems of Girl Scouts are dealing with today. Like, how does they relevant in an increasingly digital world? And what to do about the Boy Scouts?
So you cannot call females and then organization girls. We are the owners and so-called property owners, train my knowledge of the phrase Girl Scouts. Which we are for the CEO of an organization who've been a member of said organization when they were a child. But that's the case with Sylvia Cazado.
Today, on free comments radio, Girl Scout power then, now and forever. From Stitcher and gum Productions, this is free comments radio. The podcast explores the inside of everything. Here's your host, Steven Dumber.
Here's a question. What do Nancy Pelosi Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have in common? Sure, they're all female members of the United States Congress and Democrats, but it goes beyond that. All free female secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton, Conteles, and Emma and Albright.
They all have the same thing in common too. But also, Taylor Swift, Meghan Markle, Queen Latifa, Melinda Gates, Venus, and Serena Williams, and nearly every female astronaut has ever been in space. Yes, all these women were once Girl Scouts, as was Sylvia Ocasio-Cortez. So what I want to know is which came first?
Sylvia Ocasio-Cortez, the disciplined self-starter or Sylvia Ocasio-Cortez, and what I mean by that is, you know, you've got this remarkable record of accomplishment and discipline and intellect. Much of accomplished with not very much advantage and often active disadvantage. You also, though, joined the Girl Scouts when you were young and you said that gave you a big boost. But you were someone who it seems had so much drive that I wonder if you really needed the Girl Scouts.
I wonder which direction the arrow is traveling in. So not 14 years ago, somebody was doing research at Stanford and they called me and they said, you know, you're one of the first Hispanic male or females who have ever gotten your graduate engineering degree from Stanford. And unfortunately, you're still one of the few. So they said, so how did all this happen?
You know, your parents, your counselors know. And so they kept saying, well, how are you prepared with the math and the science? And they kept asking, it did go back to that pivotal Girl Scout experience. I'll submit a recent published book for middle school readers called Path to the Stars, My Dream from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientists.
I did this book tour and I went across the country, Urban, Rural Urban areas, and what I was struck with. I saw that as a Girl Scout older, so when they were in the early ages in elementary school, there's just this exuberance enthusiasm and raising their hands. By the time they get to middle school, they don't raise their hands. And so much so that I started to institute a rule that I would only take questions if they were alternating boy, Girl, and we do know that in classrooms, we'll be called on more than girls.
And I think about in our girl only space, I think that's why Girl Scouts tend to over index in so many non-traditional fields, half of all female individuals in our girl Scouts. So I think that girl only environment allows you to try things safely. And also, if you don't succeed the first time, it's not like, okay, you try that you're not going to be good at it. You're not good at computers, it's getting away from it.
You get to try it, try it, try it, try it, you either decide you like it or you see success in it. And I know that's what happened to me. I'll submit it with 61 years old. She was born in South Dakota.
This morning in South Dakota, I grew up in Los Angeles, New Mexico. My grandparents were born in Mexico, my mom was born in Mexico, my dad was born in El Paso, Texas. And we went into Spanish, we came out to be a little paycheck to paycheck sometimes ran out of money. We had to live with other family members.
This was my reality because of where we lived. Unfortunately, there was a health epidemic of men and judges my sister got really sick. And we moved because my mother realized the only part of town where people got sick was in the history neighborhood that we lived. And we moved to another part of town.
But I didn't like it because I had all my friends, everything that I knew there. But at that point, Girl followed me in Pastor Nate that come to see Girl Scouts. And then I just fell in love with Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts were founded in 1912 by a Georgia woman in Juliet, Gordon Lowe.
She'd been inspired by the boys' come out. Lowe and her girls had the space to learn self-reliance in everything from camping and cooking to citizenship and career training. It was on a Girl Scout camping trip that Sylvia Osvato first got interested in science. My true leader, Tommy, just looking at the night sky.
She helped me understand that there were constellations and there was, you know, planets. And I had no idea. I just knew there were twinkly lights. But she remembered that and later on encouraged me to earn my science badge.
And it wasn't successful at first. And she'd been quite a few times before I was successful. I was a bit of trying to get her science badge by launching an S.E.'s model rocket. She had a really hard time getting it off the ground.
I was like, what is this? Well, that might rocket go up. And so I learned about this invisible forest called gravity that keeps things down. And in fact, I really did get kind of really inspired it.
Like, try to figure out how you break gravity's breath. How do you break gravity's breath? This is something Osvato learned to do again and again. She started playing basketball.
Even though her parents thought that wasn't something a girl should be doing. And she got really good. She started playing music. And of course, she chose the drums.
And again, she got really good. Osvato was so frustrated after the family car broke down on a trip that she said about learning auto repair. Even though she wasn't old enough to drive. She also started thinking big about her academic future.
When I was in fourth grade, my fourth grade teacher Mrs Baldwin showed different pictures of colleges across America. And I'm in the two-hour desert. It was one of the driest and most erin deserts. One of the pictures Mrs Baldwin showed was a Stanford University.
So you see these green burnt hills and limestone buildings with a red-time roof. And I did learn that I want to go there. She would go on Stanford for graduate school. But first, there were some other hurdles.
Like, high school college counselor. When she walked out and she looked at me, she said, what are you doing here? And I said, I don't know if you go to college counseling. And she said, girls like you don't go to college.
And to be fair, statistically, she was probably right. But that means she was right and saying she said, but by that time, that was just my first know. And so I just stood up and wanted her office. And she followed me and said, what do you want to study?
And I said, I want to be an engineer. And she laughed at the time around 1% of undergraduate engineering degrees were earned by women. So I met in Mexico State University. And I became an industrial engineer, a systems engineer.
And my first job out of college was as a rocket scientist at NASA's D.P.L. I think a lot of people hear a story like that about your counselor telling you that girls like you don't go to college. It's so insulting. And I think that most people think that they put themselves in that position.
They would imagine themselves responding with anger or hurt or resentment. And you sound and appear to be the kind of person who was able to, that kind of thing roll off you. And then get to the next level. Keep pushing for your goal.
I'm really curious whether you think that ability is your natural characteristic, whether you learn that. It was hard to learn and really if you had an advice for people who, when they face a no, failure, how to not let the weight of that failure keep them moving forward. That's a great question. And I think that has to do a lot with problem solving and how to solve the problem.
And when you think about that, you're not just trying to solve the problem for yourself. You're also trying to, you know, I mean, they're needing, they're also trying to solve. I know in my career, I faced this quite a bit. There was one company that I was working for and I wanted to move from the best sales to international sales.
And I saw that there were some openings for people who, you know, could speak Spanish and had this technical background. And I could not, again, it took months. And there was just always some excuse why, you know, why he doesn't fit. And so I kept trying to figure out, so how do I get this so that they can't say no.
And, you know, I love numbers, right? So numbers are sort of my superpowers. So I did a lot of data analysis and I showed that if their penetration of some international accounts was the same as my accounts, that region would have hundreds of millions of dollars more in sales. And I created this presentation.
And so I got that five minutes with that really busy sales VP and I flipped through the presentation. And he looked at that and he's like, oh my gosh, this is really great. And so we went to grab it and he said, well, can't I have it? And I put my hand up and I said, hey, can't it comes with me?
And I finally got the job. Considering her early fascination with the night sky and with rockets and with science generally, you might be surprised to oscillate or didn't stay at JPL, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Or return there after she got her graduate degree. I asked her why not.
The thing was when you're working with NASA and especially when you're working with missions, they're going to different planets, payday or Christmas is when that actual spacecraft is passing that planet. And I was able to work right when Voyager 2 was doing its live by of Jupiter and its moons in Europa. And I got to do a lot of data analysis and actually create algorithms around that of all the data that was coming back from the telemetry devices. Then the other project was solar polar solar polar polar.
We were planning to send space craft to the Sun. The solar polar project had been conceived in the late 1950s. I was able to work at JPL in 1979, but the mission still had a long way to go. The science itself fascinated her.
You had to think about all these different things that were going to happen. And even some material to handle the radiation and obviously the heat, the temperature fluctuations, the mass rotating up, some material that this planet had been created yet. But the timetable of the project was a problem. And I realized it was going to be not just months, not just years, it could be decades before the next rate of that happened.
Indeed, solar polar later renamed the Parker Solar Probe, was finally launched last year in 2018. I surveyed out and not interested in waiting out. So she got that graduate degree in engineering from Stanford. And then I saw everything happening around Silicon Valley and I really liked the pace.
I was fortunate to graduate from Stanford, right at sort of ground zero of the internet explosion. Over the next few decades, I surveyed out for Apple, Dell, Autodesk, and Interverse Job IBM. We were creating the state of the art storage devices. And I brought an innovation lens to it.
Instead of just doing it the way everybody did it, I kind of took a step back. And I thought what can we do to make this an improved experience for the workers as well as improve our manufacturing output. Well, I did that with a few projects and manufacturing outcomes went out. So there was also so good that I was given this amazing climate to help design the brand new state of the art manufacturing facility.
But working out, I noticed that. Man would have this way of coaching each other and networking with each other. And I saw that a few women that were there. We weren't doing that and no one was doing that for us.
So I went to my boss and said what would take to get promoted to get to these other levels. And he looked at me like what? What do you think of doing that? And he couldn't even imagine that.
And I said, well, let's just make it hypothetical. If you were wanting to be that, what would you have to do? And he said, you'd have to have sales experience, product all these experience. And that was kind of the ticket.
And I said, OK, I want to do that. And so at that point, I applied, I accepted into the IBM sales program. And then I just went checking the box and kept working on getting myself into these other types of jobs, product marketing, into having profit and loss responsibilities and executive. Later at Autodesk, I'll have to be able to work under Carol Bartz, one of the few female CEOs in tech.
Well, it was really a different thing. I'm going to have a female CEO. And there were, I think, I counted 36 people that had revenue responsibilities across the organization. And that was the only female, obviously, in addition, Carol.
But the moment I got hired, everyone kept saying, oh, gosh, we're going to have to start wearing skirts now. Is this like the only thing you can get promoted? And remember thinking, oh, there's 35 of you. And there's like me and Carol.
Were there more females hired over time in senior positions there? Yes, absolutely. Carol was really good about making sure that we looked high and low for the right talent. And I was just like, you just looked within your networks, but really going to different areas.
There's research. I don't know if you've heard about it. What's called between B syndrome, in which in corporate settings, institutional settings, powerful women tend to be harder on female support. And it's then on male subordinates.
And I'm curious to know whether from your personal experience or observation, if you've seen that, if you believe that research, so maybe what to do about it. You know, I've always heard about the anodily. And I know that myself in my career, I always tried to tweet others the way I wanted to be treated. So I always made sure that we created opportunities for others.
And that's, I think that Girl Scout Max and I'm always looking at the camera better than you found it. You look at Girl Scout's and we're going to grow only environment. We really try to make sure that Girl's Learning about Collaboration and Teamwork ethics, working well with others. I am curious to know your views on the gender pay gap generally.
There's a lot of argument over the degree of the gap, the causes of the gap, the consequences, and what should be done about it. As we speak, the US Women's National Team Soccer players are suing their own federation over gender bias and paid its revenue. So what's your position? In technology, one of the things I would do when I took over departments, I would do that gender analysis.
And I would find huge disparities. And in one case, those women that was being paid $30,000 a year and the analyzer worked through doing, we were paying $95,000 for that job. And she didn't know, she didn't know how different she was having to do the same job. She was one of many examples.
That was probably the most extreme. But I realized that not a lot of women had that curting confidence as for the additional stock options to ask, is this the best salary? Asking all those questions, to make sure I was getting treated fairly and getting adequately compensated. So a lot of women aren't raised that way, don't think that way.
Or there are practices and policies that don't reinforce that. But you know, at Girl Scouts, one of the things we're working on is thinking about how do we work to use the power of our purse to help out on that gender pay gap. And making sure we're working with partners who are committed to the same job same pay and committed to having at least 3% female leadership. So you were on the board of Girl Scouts of the United States of America for several years.
And then you became Interim CEO and then CEO, come here to go. When you took over your organization was having some difficulty in terms of membership and leadership. Can you describe what was coming in, what were the fixes or challenges you immediately turned to? You know, one of the things about being on the board is your strategy and governance, your non-incomberational execution.
And meaning that technology executive, I was always in my head playing all these scenarios like what would I do? So when that opportunity came, it was really focused on really three things. It's about membership, it's about the movement and it's about money. And to get people very focused, that's what we're about.
We're about the girl. We have to provide a fun, relevant and safe experience for the girl. And so many girls across America now have digital advice and their hands as their mom or their parents. So let's get programming that helps them not just be users of technology, but the creators and the vendors and designers.
We have this amazing ability to reach girls across America. So we have a scale that's unmatched. And right now we're using that to create the workforce in the future. Coming up after the break, how girls are trying to create that workforce.
Things like design thinking is robotics. There's data analytics, there's coding, programming, engineering, cybersecurity, and it's not forget to cash out. That makes all this possible. The cookie program is really to teach you these really great business skills and also to provide the funding for the organization.
Coming up right after this. With her engineering background and along career in tech firms and a little bit of science thrown in, you can see why Silvia Osavato was an appealing choice to run the girl scouts. Its mission is essentially to empower girls to succeed in life. In an increasingly digital world, success often means an intense engagement with technology.
In that regard, girls and women are trailing. They are severely underrepresented at tech firms, especially senior leadership, where we hold about one in ten positions. There are, of course, many possible factors behind this underrepresentation, but Osavato is determined to at least turn some nose into the S's. So you just have to keep taking away the instructions.
To that end, the girls scouts have been adding a lot of badges and programs that promote STEM learning, science, technology, engineering, and math. And so there's things like design thinking, there's robotics, there's data analytics, there's NASA, that is about space science, there's citizen science, there's coding, programming, engineering, cybersecurity, that is just really great. We'll always focus on outdoors and leadership. But it's so important right now to make sure that we can get girls the skills they need to lead in the 21st century.
And our cybersecurity in particular has been massively successful. You know, in our first eight months, over 75,000 badges have been earned. And that's just girls five to ten. Our older girls' representatives are coming out.
And that's because we really have a team. We have psychologists on staff. We have PTs academics as well as practitioners in the field. But then we put it in a way that girls learn and lead really well.
So people say, how do you inside your security? Your security team is also about malware and networking. If you look at the standard ways people are saying, well, networking and other physical layers of sub-stack, protocols and first layers of physical. I tell you seven eight-year-old girls are like, check out.
And they're defense, I tell you seven eight-year-old girls. So we ask you to sit in a circle and talk with your friends. You think they're going to do that? Absolutely.
And then we give them a ball of yarn, and they pass the yarn to another as they're speaking. And you see that in a way that is incredibly relevant to them. Let's talk about economics of girls' cookies. So from what I see on the most recent form, 990 tax return, a girl's file, a total revenue to the organization was just over $130 million.
But girls' kooky revenues, 990 is not floated, so that's true. That is true. When you're buying girls' g who makes your cookies? We have two different papers.
We call ABC and the other one is a little brand bigger. One of them is more of a contract or ABC, but a little brand bigger used to be owned by college, but it's in the process of being sold. It sounds as though the cookie program is really a very, very key component of girls' girls. Both for entrepreneurial and goal setting and financial purposes within the girls' guts.
Yes. So one of the reasons that we have been able to thrive for over 100 years is Julie Gordon-Lo. When she learned about an enterprise in Girl Scout Council in Oklahoma that was doing a cookie sale, she immediately saw that that was how we could fund movement. I'm so grateful for that because that has allowed us to continue to be inclusive and diverse from the very beginning, because the cookie program did fund our growth and funds and supports the organization.
Now, in terms of the money-staying local, a percentage of that varies per council of dollar state within the troops so the girls can use their cookie cash for different programs. Let's say I really wanted to re-integrate and say I'm all in favor of female accomplishments and female entrepreneurship, etc. But I'm a little uncomfortable in the state of poor health and obesity. The foundation of the girls' financial mountain is built on cookies, which are both very sugary and fattening.
Again, I'm going to pray that I'm being as devilish and advocate as I possibly be. But let's say I say that. What do you say to that? The thing is, once a year, it's indulgence.
Our cookie portion is a remain small. We have these gigantic cookies. And what you're doing your dollar is going to really create a female entrepreneur. You're teaching girls, money skills, business skills, management skills, customer, business ethics skills.
And this is a single girl's first business. And we only offer that once a year, three months a year. I wondered about the once a year factor as well. You know, scarcity is a powerful force and it tends to drive demand.
But it also may leave opportunity or money on the table. I really think about organizations attitude toward either lengthening the selling time or maybe there would be two or three seasons a year. Because it's hard to imagine that an organization could oversee an operation that is so successful and so profitable. And not want to say, hey, if we did it twice a year, we could bring in maybe two X or one, eight Xs a month.
What's your position on that? You're really thinking like a for-profit business. We're really focused on the girl. And the cookie program is really to teach her these really great business skills and also to provide the funding for the organization.
The girls' guts are often held up as an example of a successful social enterprise nonprofit or what you call a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. This does not, of course, entirely shielded from competition. In 2003, the girls have nearly three million youth members along with just under a million-per-dollar volunteers. They've since fallen to below two million-per-dollar members.
Some competition lately has come from the boys' guts. Okay, the girls' guts relationship with the boys' guts of America. How would you describe that relationship when we're just starters? Separate.
Okay. I understand that the girls' guts are presently suing the boys' guts and gives them background on that. So they made a change in their policy and decided to accept girls. But we are the owners and social property owners, train mic owners of girls' guts.
The phrase girl's guts. So you cannot call people in that organization and females in that organization girls' guts. We are the girls' guts. So let's just back up.
The boys' guts began to admit female scouts. Correct? Is that essentially what triggered this contentious moment? Yeah, they decided to open up their membership to girls.
Did your organization approach them and try to have animal discussions about how to work this out or did it quickly get to the lawyers? They told us that they were making that decision. So it wasn't like bringing us in. They decided what we're going to do.
And then we would share with them that there were all these instances of people calling females in that organization girls' guts and that is our organization. So I know your membership is behind somewhat, but the boys' guts membership has fallen much faster than yours. If you thought this was to why that is, do you think the girls' guts are more valuable to the modern American girl than the boys' guts are the modern American boy? You know, I really can't.
You know, we can judge them on their organization. But what I can say about girls' guts is we really are focused on that girl-only experience and to create a program that works for them that is designed around the way girls learn and lead and that's really what we're experts in. I'm really curious. Your thoughts on same-sex education generally.
A lot of great women's-only colleges have over the past 40 or 50 years come co-ed. I know the research on same-sex education is kind of mixed in progress right now. It's really hard to find a difference. But do you think that is a loss for society?
I know that historically we're talking about the college level. and certainly there's fewer of them. You know, I used to live in Texas and Austin Texas and across the state, there's just a huge growth of the number of all girls' public schools. So, you know, I really saw that big increase.
We live in a college world. We are talking about girls. You know, we work with girls 5 to 18 and want to get them that confidence and the skills that they can be successful in life in the United States of the world and clearly our outcomes show that they can. So I'm guessing that the girls' guts of USA will not ever accept boys.
You know, just like any good business, you focus on what you do well. And we are experts in how girls learn lead. I'm curious to know about the girls' guts policy, I guess, on policy. I can think of a number of issues that are in the news today that a female organization would have a particular take on whether it's immigration, whether it's abortion and so on.
And so what is the official position on politics and policy and the endorsement of candidates and things like that? We're a nonpartisan organization. We exist for the girls. So we don't tell girls what to value what to think.
So a couple of years ago when there were a lot of praise and a lot of different things people said, hey, girls have to be in the middle of that. And we were like, no. What we did do is we realized what people want is change, especially change in policies and politics. And we said, well, let's make sure that girls understand how you do that in a democracy, regardless of what it is.
So we're teaching girls how to create the change they want to see in the world of change. So they want to see, but we're not telling them what that is. So let's say I'm a Girl Scout troop and I decide that for instance Elizabeth Warren, I think is a great presidential candidate and I want to participate and help in campaign events for Elizabeth Warren and I want all of our girls to go in their scapping forms. All I would or no.
So what we encourage people is to, we really encourage you to get out the boat. We encourage you to encourage people to go out and vote. But as a girl scout indoors as a girl scout, that's not what our organization is about. Because as though the line between what's political and what's not political is much, much blurrier these days than it used to be.
And I'm just curious whether that line is a little bit harder to navigate for the girls' guns. And it might have been 20, 30, 50 years ago. You know, there are hope people trying to push us one way or the other. It's interesting.
I can be in one part of the country and say, are message exactly what people say, oh my god, you are from New York, you are so liberal. I can then take that exact same message. You have another part of the country. Oh my god, you guys are just so conservative.
Get with the Times Girls out. Okay, thank you so much. It was great to speak with you. Oh, it was wonderful.
I really enjoyed it. And keep going, girl, cookies. Come here next time, I'm free, I'm free. There's Coke and Pepsi, Boeing and Airbus.
The sharks and the jets, all famous Duopoly's. Is it time to add one more? Republicans and Democrats. Could be that most of the things you hate about politics are due to how Republicans and Democrats have committed to job off competition.
So the parties have divided the voters and kind of sort of ignored the ones in the middle. Because if the middle voter is unhappy, which most middle voters are today in America, what can they do? America is hidden do-op. That's next time.
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