Los Angeles is the worst big city for women working in tech in the nation with females making only 82 cents for every dollar that their male counterparts pull in, according to a new report from the financial website SmartAsset that considers the gender pay gap, earnings after housing costs, women's representation in the tech workforce and four-year tech employment growth.
Eighty-two cents on the dollar is close to the national average. But, L.A.'s ranking was hurt most by the city's notoriously high housing costs. The report estimates women earn $44,517 after paying for a place to live, compared to $55,745 nationally.
Former BET Networks chief Debra Lee found it lonely at the top as one of the only women of color in the C-suite, so more than a decade ago she created Leading Women Defined.
After leaving the Viacom-run network in 2018, the executive leaned into her project. And she's looking to expand the invite-only gathering of powerful women that draws players like Michelle Obama and Hillary to a larger pool of founders, funders and others.
Bilingual Publisher Encantos Raises $2 Million to Launch Subscription Box, Expand Spanish Content
A then-tech executive at Oracle in 2015, Steven Wolfe Pereira was a new father and wanted to do some more meaningful work. So with his wife, who had run Twitter's multicultural market strategy, and their two good friends, they began pitching an idea of a bilingual children's book series to publishers.
"I was aghast at the responses I was getting," he said. "They were like, 'Latinos really don't read'. It was really insulting."