Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw

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 Stokes 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:...

Dr. Sandy Chung never planned to become a doctor. She grew up in a trailer park, on Medicaid, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who couldn't get professional jobs in the U.S. despite their advanced degrees. Her mom sold clothes in a factory. Her dad was a waiter before the family eventually opened a Chinese restaurant. And in the fourth grade, standing at a bus stop trying to figure out what to b...

Recorded live at the WBL Summit — part of the Inspiring Women WBL Series. A real estate executive in New York spent years as the only woman at the table in a male-dominated industry, learning the rules of a game no one had taught her. Her husband, watching her navigate corporate rooms full of men, kept asking pointed questions. Why did you say it that way? Don't you see how that lands? That was th...

Dr. Debra Clary started her career at 4 AM, driving a Frito-Lay route truck in Detroit as a Teamster. Three decades later, she had held senior leadership roles across four Fortune 50 brands (Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel's, and Humana), spent nearly 17 years building Humana's Leadership Institute, performed a one-woman off-Broadway show, and written The Curiosity Curve, a research-backed leade...

A venture capitalist in London watched her closest friend disappear into postpartum depression. Texts, calls, visits, the slow realization that the transition into motherhood had no real support system around it. That was the moment Kate Ryder stopped writing about problems and started building for them. Twelve years later, Maven Clinic is the largest virtual care clinic for women's and family hea...

A nurse in neurotrauma and cardiac services, someone who had spent her entire adult life inside the healthcare system, was sent home from the ER repeatedly, told it was probably a migraine, given pain medication, and dismissed. It took losing her vision before anyone took her seriously. Sandy Goldstein had a congenital heart defect she didn't know about until her 20s. A hole in her heart was routi...

Raised in the high Himalayas, educated across 22 homes in multiple countries, and fluent in five languages , Simmi Singh was never going to follow a conventional path. She started out wanting to be a UN translator. A mentor stopped her and said: you have a voice of your own. That single conversation redirected her toward management consulting at Booz Allen and Ernst and Young, then entrepreneurshi...

Five years ago, Laurie McGraw launched Inspiring Women on International Women's Day — her own birthday — with a simple belief: when women lead, we build a more just and equitable society. What followed was hundreds of conversations with some of the most remarkable women in leadership, healthcare, tech, business, and beyond. This episode is different. There's no single guest. Instead, Laurie steps ...