Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw

Women are great savers, but 70% of their money sits in cash, while it has to last longer because women live longer. Dr. Sylvia Kwan has built her career closing that gap. Dr. Sylvia Kwan joins Laurie McGraw on Inspiring Women for a conversation about money, power, and why the financial industry has been quietly failing women for decades. Sylvia is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Ellevest, ...

Dr. Uché Blackstock spent almost a decade as an associate professor at NYU School of Medicine. From the outside she looked happy and successful — inside, she had never felt so invisible, undervalued, and underappreciated. So she left. When she wrote her resignation op-ed on why Black faculty leave academic medicine, she was sobbing — grieving the career she wished she could have had. That piece be...

Michellene Davis began her career as a trial litigator and public defender in Newark, where she kept arguing the same point to juries: if her client had had access to healthcare, none of them would be in that courtroom. That insight has shaped a career spanning law, government, and now national health equity. In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Michellene Davis, E...

Dr. Amber Michelle Hill spent 14 years inside medical research — as a neuroscientist, in the lab, on the preclinical side, and patient-facing — before she discovered the real reason 90% of clinical trials fail. And it has almost nothing to do with the science. In this Inspiring Women conversation, host Laurie McGraw sits down with the founder and CEO of Research Grid (R.grid), the London-based, VC...

What if the biggest health crisis in America is one almost no one is being treated for? In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Alexandra Drane, co-founder and CEO of ARCHANGELS, recorded at the WBL conference. Alexandra has spent her career proving a simple, radical idea: when life goes wrong, health goes wrong. After gathering more than one billion data points at he...

Mary Varghese Presti didn't plan to end up running healthcare AI for one of the most powerful technology companies on earth. She came to the United States at four years old, the daughter of an Indian nurse recruited by Penn Medicine during India's brain drain era. Growing up in Philadelphia in the shadow of one of the world's top nursing schools, she watched her mother and many of the women in her...

In this episode of Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw speaks with Dr. Veronica Mallett, a physician, educator, and trailblazer with four decades of experience advancing health equity and workforce representation in American medicine. Dr. Mallett is Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of the More in Common Alliance, a 10-year, $100 million partnership between Morehouse School of Medi...

Less than 2% of venture capital goes to female founders. When Laurie McGraw started Inspiring Women five years ago, the number was 2.4%. A few years later it had dropped to 1.8%. Absolute dollars going to women have grown, but the share of total capital has gone the other way, and the gap is now one of the largest unsolved problems in capital allocation. Laurie sits down with three women working t...

Meme Callnin had spent two decades inside global human capital consulting, building talent strategies, advising on M&A integrations, and leading the Mountain States for Mercer across all things human capital. Then she went to a Harvard executive program on women in the boardroom. And everything shifted. She came back with a clear mission. 2024 was going to be her year. Then she hit the wall: her f...