Girls Who Run the World is a blueprint for badassery and bravery. Think How I Built This for teen girls and young women, featuring the entrepreneurs behind Rent the Runway, Stitch Fix, Pop Sugar, Glossier, Minted, Soul Cycle, Mitu. These are the sometimes messy, always bold, inside stories of the entrepreneurs fighting bias in hiring (Blendoor), sequencing genes to empower with personal health information (23andMe) and saving premie babies (Embrace). Stuffed with how-to’s, advice, worst fumbles and best comebacks, this is pure inspiration for enterprising young gals. 

Find out where Sara Blakely does her best inventing. Learn how Coolhaus got its engine-less food truck to Coachella to launch. See what Emma Mcilroy visualizes when she needs to calm down. Then, in back, learn how to write a business plan, file a patent, and brainstorm a killer business idea.

The Backstory

My first distinct memory of thinking about career is from third grade. My elementary school held a career fair with dozens of workshops. I attended cake decorating and hairdressing.

I certainly never pictured myself inventing something important, or leading something important and definitely not starting something important. I didn’t know what that looked like. 

Growing up, my dad was the career person. He was a lawyer at a fancy firm and did all kinds of important civil rights work which drew much outside acclaim. Mom was a teacher, but her work was secondary. Her real focus was the home front. In college, l had no burning passion for what to pursue so I studied literature like my mom had done. I did what was familiar. 

My first true breakout came when I moved alone to San Francisco post college. I weirdly ended up doing communications for a biotech start-up just having their IPO. Entrepreneurs were everywhere in my midst, and I lived in a group house of Stanford business school students. A few years in that environment and I decided to apply and got in. If I hadn’t had the exposure, I never would have taken my path.

At that time, in 1995, not a single CEO in the Fortune 500 was female. The impressive leaders starring in our case studies were basically all men. The message was clear: Business is the provenance of men. Moneymaking and change making is the provenance of men. This gets reinforced continually, most recently with Forbes list “America’s Top 100 Innovative Leaders” containing a ridiculous 99 men and 1 woman.

It’s not surprising then that girls and women routinely take themselves out of contention before the competition begins. Females in 30 of 30 countries studied underestimate their smarts while males in all 30 do the opposite. Twenty-three percent of elementary school girls believe they will never achieve their dream career. In a Korn Ferry study, two-thirds of female CEOs said they only thought of being CEO when someone told them or asked them. At my teenager’s school, girls in the highest level math nightly triple-check eachothers work so they don’t lose face in front of the guys. 

Seeing all that is possible has to happen really young. A powerful study “Who Invents in America” found a powerful “exposure effect.” Girls that grew up in zip codes with a high percentage of female patent holders were much more likely to file patents themselves as adults while exposure to male patent holders had no impact. 

Really, You can’t be what you can’t see.

This notion became very real when my now 14-year-old daughter Emma popped out into the world with her hands akimbo on her hips, ready to issue orders. At age 5, directing her dolls and check check checking through the long to-do lists she kept on her giant white board (what 5-year-old wants a white board for her birthday?), she was already powerful enough to lead an army, or even a small nation, and certainly a company. But would she ever be a CEO?

A freakishly small number of women become CEO. Just 6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are female — and the number has barely budged in decades. 

Girls Who Run the World is how we make female CEOs a norm. Girls read a whole book of stories about relatable, imperfect women who create products that sell in the billions and solve major problems like premie babies dying all over the developing world — and they start imagining themselves doing that.

These entrepreneurs didn’t and don’t internalize the pervasive put-down culture that derails so many girls. Why were they able to  resist all the messages about women’s work? They lived in the same world — what makes the difference?  And these founders have taken real risk. They struck out on their own to do things that they dreamed up themselves. What made them able to do that? 

I noticed that after I interviewed these entrepreneurs, there was a rub-off effect. In almost every case, the innovator hadn’t known what she was doing starting off, but rather waded in and figured it out. I started feeling, wow, many things aren’t rocket science. When I heard about all their trip-ups and skinned knees, I felt, wow, them too? 

The way we change the future?

Raise up a generation of girls who expect to be CEO.