Media, equity, and influence

Pat Mitchell Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
From Evoke Media I'm Sabrina Merage Naim, with me is Kassia Binkowski, and this is Breaking Glass - a series of conversations with women around the world who are shattering glass ceilings and challenging social norms. They are audacious, gutsy, and their stories are echoed across borders and generations in a rallying cry that is changing the narrative for women everywhere. It's nearly impossible to give a proper introduction for Pat Mitchell without it turning into a novel. But we will do our best. We head to Atlanta today to speak with truly one of the most impactful women in the media world, Pat Mitchell. In the early 1970s, Pat was a single mother in New York City who was under qualified and over educated for a career in media. Through perseverance and taking some big risks, she eventually landed a position at NBC and over the course of three decades thereafter, she went on to build a distinguished career as the first woman to lead PBS, CNN, produce the first national program hosted by a woman telling the stories of women. She has won Emmys, Peabody's, and been nominated for Academy Awards. Sabrina, the focus of our discussion with Pat was how she used her career and platforms to further the stories and voices of women. At a time when it wasn't encouraged or popular. She took huge risks and pushed up against a deeply patriarchal system to open the door for more women in media. And it shows. Today that shows up in her work as the co founder and curator of TEDWomen, her book, Becoming a Dangerous Woman, and the daily work that she's doing to cultivate a network of women supporting other women. This lady is a legend. Take a listen. Pat, you've made a career telling the stories of women. And it's really a truly incredible honor for us to get to turn the tables on you. So thank you for joining us today.

Pat Mitchell
Thank you very much for this invitation, Sabrina.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Absolutely, it's our honor. You are an author, a producer, a media executive, the co founder and curator of TEDWomen, and on and on and on. But before any of that you were a divorced single mother. And I'd like to start the story there, if you don't mind. Take us back to 1971, you had just moved to New York City and you were working for Look magazine. What happened over the next year?

Pat Mitchell
I had left a secure profession of college teaching and with a small son, accepted an invitation to become a writer at a big city magazine, Look. Which at the time was one of the big news magazines. So exciting, unprepared in many ways for moving to New York City as a single mom and facing you know all those challenges, but loving every minute of this new life and feeling somewhat unprepared as we often do and bad imposter syndrome. It already kicked in for me, as I sat in that Look office with all those talented, experienced writers and I was doing my first article ever for a magazine like that. And actually, I had finished the writing but in the middle of the publication process for it, Look magazine declared bankruptcy. And I was in New York City unemployed with practically no severance pay, because I'd only been working there for a little under a year. And about to have my first big headline authored article, in Look magazine. And the news came to me in a telephone call that morning, and heard, "I don't know how to tell you this, but you're unemployed". And as I looked around, realizing I had gotten the news first that my colleagues still didn't seem to know. I made a note that the person telling me that was a television reporter. So the next several months were incredibly anxiety-producing, interview after interview, never being exactly right for the job, under experienced and over educated for everything, with a master's degree. I just kept hearing the same things over and over: "No, no, no". But I was determined to explore the area of media further since I fallen in love with writing. So I took the story that I had written for Look, I bought it back with my meager severance pay, and took it to NBC, where a friend did manage to get me an appointment with the news director who let me sit outside his office all day long. And finally, when he saw me, he said, "What are you doing here? You have no television experience. You've never even studied journalism in college or an English major, what are you doing here?" And I shoved the story across the table. And he looked at it. And he said, "Can you import this story about Chinese gang wars?" And of course, I said yes. As women often do, without knowing fully what yes meant, but knowing that if I didn't say, yes, that door would close again. And I'd heard plenty of no's. And the yes was what I was waiting for. So I said, "Yes, sure. Of course, I can". No idea what that meant. But I did with the help of some very supportive colleagues, went back to Chinatown. Got those same people to talk to me on camera. And my report went out on NBC News that evening. Everyone congratulated me. You've got a new job, you've got a new career, and the rest of us are still looking out on the streets for jobs. But of course, none of that was true. I had gotten lucky, and was in the right place at the right time when he needed that story. And I had the contacts and had done the research. But he didn't hire me, the same news director who let me, as he said, let me do that piece, told me go find a small town somewhere, learn the business. You don't start in New York City. But I was in New York, I had a son in school, I had a lease on an apartment. I couldn't just run and go find a small town somewhere. So where do you go from there? A waitress at night to pay the bills and the rent. And I interviewed every time I saw a job opening at any television station, radio station, newspaper, anything to do with media. And finally, after a quick freelance job with a male presidential campaign, the mayor of New York was running for president and I volunteered and did some commercials for him. As a result that introduced me to a station in Boston, the NBC station. They called and said, "we'll hire you as a producer of a political talk show. You're too old to be considered to go on the air". I was 26, by the way. And "you have a child and we don't hire mothers with children". This was 1972. You could say those things. And they did. And worse than saying them, they practiced them. They didn't hire women with children. And they did think 26 was too old to go in front of the camera. Anyway, that turned out to be a great opportunity. The station did a whole lot of programming, I got to make documentaries, eventually host daytime talk show and immediately organize the women in the station to start to advocate for more women in positions that make decisions. And that was the beginning of a long media career in which I'd like to think I used every opportunity, every position to further elevate the stories and ideas of women.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think that you certainly have and you've been credited with that over the decades. But I want to highlight something that you said earlier on, which was that you were lucky you were at the right place at the right time for that story, which I actually have to challenge a little bit because you say that you had the foresight to buy back your story, to go to this guy at NBC to put it in front of him even though he didn't want to take you seriously. You had, even at that point with very little experience, a gumption and a gutsiness that forced you into an uncomfortable position, whereas others maybe wouldn't have taken that opportunity. So that's not just the right place at the right time. That's a personality trait.

Pat Mitchell
You're absolutely right. And thank you for correcting me because I do that all the time with people as well. When they say oh, well, I just got lucky. My grandfather had a great saying that there is no such thing in the world as luck. It's just being prepared for the opportunity. So thank you for reminding me I was prepared. I had thought about it. I had strategized and more importantly and this is the message that is the most important to impart that I took a risk of myself, I took a risk. He could have slammed the door and said, "What are you doing here by?" But what would I have lost except an opportunity? So, yes, we have to. I got that early on from my grandmother who encouraged me to believe in myself above everything else.

Kassia Binkowski
Well, and your risks have paid off. I mean, over the course of your career, you're the first woman to lead PBS, and CNN, you've been nominated for Academy Awards, you've won Emmys. I mean, the list goes on and on and on, that your risks have truly paid off. You made a name for yourself in a male dominated industry since that time, I'm curious if you ever felt pressure to avoid women's issues, women's stories in order to compete in that man's world,

Pat Mitchell
From the very beginning to the very last job. And I know that's not the news you wanted to hear. But it is the reality from the very first position at WBC in Boston, I was told right off, stay away from women's stories, do not bring up women's issues, and do not bring a photograph of your son to your office. So everything that was about my life experiences, and what I was seeing with women in my community and around me, was off limits as far as the men who ran the television station. So that's what I meant by organizing the women because one of us may be a pest, two of us as a coalition, three of us is an alliance, to quote my good friend Gloria Steinem, which is true, one of us can't do it. That's why when there was just one in each television station, we really had issues and challenges to put forward women's stories. But when three of us came together and said, you know what we're going to do, we're going to do a whole day of programming, exclusively devoted to the lives and stories of women. And we managed to convince them to do this. It took a while. But we just never accepted no for an answer we kept coming back was, well, "we've got Gloria Steinem, we've got Florence Kennedy", we just kept throwing names at them, of famous, well known women that we had booked Helen Reddy who had a big song at the time, Liza Minnelli. We threw it all in. And eventually they said yes. And in 1974, we did 24 hours of programming for women, by women, produced directed by women, to just show that anything was possible, and more importantly, that women would show up for programming that was about them.

Sabrina Merage Naim
It really revolutionized, at the time, the media industry where what you were doing was, as you're saying, not accepted, not even on the agenda. And we're curious to understand, what was the impetus for you to knowingly walk into the lion's den, where you knew you were going to have so much pushback where you would be dismissed where you know, this just didn't happen? It wasn't a priority. For you to risk all of that to go and do this. What was that?

Pat Mitchell
Passion for what I believed the difference at such a show could make. Loving the opportunity to work with women. I had always enjoyed having women producers and the community of women and my women friends were a renewable source of energy in my life. So the opportunity to do that with a good friend and a producer, and to break new ground. I mean, it didn't exist, and it was outrageous to me. So that was a hard lesson to learn. But one that I took forward after that.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That makes so much sense. And since then you've really leveraged your platform to explore and share stories of women. I mean there's a clear career path now that you've dedicated so much of that passion and that outrage to doing this. Just recently, at the end of 2020, you wrote that never has better representation of women's lives, ideas, challenges and accomplishments been more needed to strengthen and sustain our democracy. I'm wondering if you can bring us up to speed. What does gender inequity in the media look like right now? How far have we come since that early day of you being told you can't put we can't hire you because you're a mother. We can't hire you because you're too you're too old to to host the show. How far have we come? How much more work do we have to do in the media industry?

Pat Mitchell
We've come a long way there is no question and part of it was helped by policy. And I always want to make that point in this conversation that sometimes advocacy is not enough. Sometimes you need that push that some people called quotas, the US government called it an incentive to hire women and people of color. And so that got us in the door. And I believe, by the way, such quotas and incentives are essential, again, to break the ceiling in boardrooms and make sure that there are more women in corporate boardrooms and across the board. But to the media itself, what that did is that changed the numbers. So when you look at the numbers of women working in media today, you absolutely must recognize the progress. But if you look at where those women are, and the lack of them still, and two key positions at the top, in the CEO jobs of most media companies are still held by men, primarily white men, and then in ownership. I mean, thank goodness for Oprah Winfrey, it's really hard to imagine that even now, after all this progress, Oprah is still, you know, among the few women who own and control their own media company. So I'm still advocating for that shift because we need to be in every decision making position, because it changes things. I know it in my own life. I sat in corporate boardrooms, where there was one of us, two of us, three of us, four of us, it made a difference.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, in a short period of time. And I think that we're seeing such strides. And to your point, there's still so much work to be done, I want to just double click on what you were saying about quotas, because in a recent conversation we had with Jeffrey Tobias Halter, who founded Why Women, which is all about women in corporate America. One of the things that he said was, it may sound strange, it may be controversial, but quotas work, especially in the beginning, when you are forced to look at the structure of your corporation or your organization, and you see the imbalances there, you are forced to cover those imbalances, then the culture eventually catches up. So I think that's just an interesting anecdote to include here. Because sometimes policy and quotas need to be forced on the culture, for those strides to be to be really seen and experienced.

Pat Mitchell
Sabrina, you and I know, all of us know, that people who have power do not give it up voluntarily. So if you have power to keep others out, so that your power is sustained, it's going to take something to break that glass, and quotas and done that. Quotas around the world on board membership for women have completely changed the picture. And when they tried to put quotas in place in the Nordic countries, and everybody went, "we can't find... 40% of our boards have to be women? We'll never find that". Well guess what? They found it and guess what else, the companies are doing better. So the evidence is really powerful, that when you have greater diversity and management in the boardroom, everything is better, including profits, and customer relationships. And yet in spite of that business data, we're losing ground. We're losing ground in corporate board seats for women, we're losing ground of the number of women who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, we're losing ground now. On every decade of progress women have made in business because of the pressures, the adverse an unfair pressures economically on women during this pandemic. So yes, we made progress. But we are going to probably need to look at incentives and quotas, again, in some cases to actually break the logjam, break the status quo. And that takes more than just advocacy, takes more than philanthropy. It takes more than the market. As it turns out, it takes all of those forces working together on behalf of promoting true equality.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right. And and I think that we will see, unfortunately, due to COVID, the number of women who have left the workforce is staggering. And we will be trying to catch up for a while most likely. So I agree with you that it takes so much of us to put our efforts together. I want to just go back to you've been kind of talking about the power dynamics between men and women in the media industry throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s. And I'm curious, more specifically, you worked In Hollywood, and you worked in Washington DC, what were the differences between the gender dynamics between those two places?

Pat Mitchell
They are very similar, very similar. They are both cities that have essentially one industry. LA, the industry is entertainment, Washington, it's politics. And they are both industries that are completely driven on power. So it's all in both places. And I mean, it's unique in some ways to those two cities. But it's certainly not unique. As you look at power structures all over the world, they'll always be those who have it, and are going to hold on to it as long as they can. And then those who want to disrupt that power structure, and find their own way in. It is starting to change in Hollywood, certainly, the power has become more diverse as the forms of media have changed so dramatically. I mean, when I worked there, there were the studios and the networks. And that was it. I mean, you know, you had powerful people, but there were fewer of them. Now, you know, the power is much more decentralized, and in many ways more democratized. Because of streaming platforms, because of all the great social media platforms like the two of you are using today. I mean, if you have a cell phone, you have power, but there is a danger in the power here too. And we have to be aware of it. And I believe, as each of us with our own uses of media, have to make very careful choices about how we're using every platform of influence and power that we all have.

Kassia Binkowski
So speaking of using your platform, you mentioned how quotas are necessary at the beginning to create that industry shift. And you yourself are an example of somebody who's been able to claw their way into a position of influence, and one of the few women who've really risen to the top of the media industry. Do you think women in the media industry who have the influence that you do have any obligation to create space for the stories and elevate the stories of women?

Pat Mitchell
I most certainly do. I emphatically do believe that women who find themselves or who have worked themselves into positions of power and influence have an absolute responsibility to drop the ladder behind them as they move up. And that means mentoring, in a really significant and real way. That means sponsoring in a real and significant way. And that means advocating for women every step of the way. When I first brought up a woman's name inside a corporate boardroom to come on, even all the other women looked at me and said, "don't play the women's card that's going to isolate you". And it reminded me of 1971. And that television station, when people were saying stay away from women's issues, we have a responsibility to each other, we really do. And when we show up for each other, that's the biggest lever we have for change, it's not going to change because other people are going to be as big an advocate or support us in the way that we can support each other. And I am extremely dismayed and disappointed when I see women, as we all have, ascend to power, be in positions of influence and decision making, and do not do well by their sisters. And that's not the way women throughout history have actually operated in general. We have survived and thrived when we supported each other.

Kassia Binkowski
Pat, who took care of you? Who lifted up, who was there to put the ladder down for you, who helped lift up your career? Where were your mentors?

Pat Mitchell
Well, interestingly enough, not very many of them were women, because there weren't very many women.

Kassia Binkowski
This is a common theme. We keep hearing this.

Pat Mitchell
I actually never worked for a woman boss. Isn't that incredible? Considering I worked in media for 35 years, and I had partners who were women, but only when I went out and did it on my own. So finding a mentor was was impossible actually and even finding allies was difficult as I mentioned, until there were more of us. But I did have a couple of women, early on, who were in positions of power and influence who I saw using it to support other women, and I had definitely been given that value by my grandmother. So she was always telling me, you know, be sure that you help others along the way, and that you maintain and sustain good friendships. She really understood a lot for essentially a third grade educated farm woman. And she had a big influence in my life. And I had a teacher, everybody has that one teacher who says, "I believe in you, you can do this". I had that teacher in the eighth grade, she changed my life. But in media? No, I didn't. So that's why it became so important to me, that when I worked myself into a position of authority, decision making, and the ability to greenlight projects, that was very much on my mind.

Sabrina Merage Naim
We've spoken a lot on this podcast with women across industries in almost every country about dispelling this myth of scarcity of opportunity. And how, you know when you started out your career, maybe that was more true than it is today. We cannot continue to operate with that sense of fear and that sense of competition because it cuts each other down in such a negative way, and damaging way. What we know is that when women support each other, when women have a sense of community, camaraderie and are sitting around the table, they do better, the companies profit more, the creativity and collaboration goes through the roof. So all of these things are similar themes, not just in the media industry, but across industries and across cultures, something that has been a similar theme that that we've seen a lot of. I'm curious now, you mentioned your grandmother and her influence on you. What about motherhood? You have raised six children, you balanced the roles of motherhood and media mogul, what did that juggle look like for you? And how did motherhood shape you as a journalist and a producer?

Pat Mitchell
One of the things that was used to separate us in the early days and and to some degree still is, is that the whole question of motherhood. In the early days of the women's movement, there was a huge divide between women who were married and had children, and not married and single women. And it was always this feeling that feminists were putting down mothers, hopefully your generation hasn't gone through this, but I still hear it. From time to time when I hear young women talk about how they don't want to be labeled a feminist because they are a mother and they have a different kind of life. Well in fact women all have a similar kind of life, we certainly have a similar inner life in terms of the values I believe we come into this world with. And that is an innate sense of listening deeply, empathy, there's no question we have more of that, I believe. And we see it when we look carefully at the models of the way women lead. For me, I have to thank you for acknowledging that I have six children and thirteen grandchildren. But I didn't raise the six children, I raised one of them fully as a single parent, all the way till he was in his late 20s when I married again, and I married a man with five wonderful children, four of whom were pretty much on their own by then one of whom was quite young. So I got the chance to do it again, at a later point in life, and it was much easier, as I'm sure you hear from others. As a single parent trying to balance her career. I never did it well, in my opinion.

Kassia Binkowski
I don't know a woman who does think she does it well.

Pat Mitchell
And that's another one of those common themes, where if we came together on that, instead of dividing ourselves into those who tried to do it well and those who don't seem to be trying to do it well, when in fact, we're all trying to do well. And my son of always says to me, "please, mom, forgive yourself. So you missed a few soccer games". Well, I missed a lot of soccer games. And they were many times when I felt unbelievable guilt about not being either with him are not being fully present at work. What woman hasn't felt that? Every mother I know feels that. But when I started, again, with a younger child, when I was at a different point in my career, I also realized how many of the joys, that I probably hadn't gotten the first time around too, and that's the beauty of being a grandparent, is grandparents make all the pain of children worth it. But anyway, I do think it is a struggle still, in spite of the progress that's been made for women to balance it in a way that feels good. Both at home, and wherever it is they they are working, although home is now where they're doing it all. But here again, I want to point out how much we need policy and law to help us and we don't have it. It is just incredible to my friends around the world that the US has such poor family policy across the board. Companies, they say to women, "you fix it", when in fact, companies and governments need to fix this. Because once again, we know it works, when there's a better family policy.

Kassia Binkowski
It's crippling, and I think COVID has only highlighted that, really put that under a microscope. You've spent 35 years in the industry, you have interviewed celebrities, politicians, global change, I mean, you name it, you've sat at the table with them. What have been some of the other common threads that you've seen between extraordinary women? You talk about womanhood and the guilt and the challenge of you know, keeping all the balls in the air. That's clearly one. What else have you seen as kind of common threads between the most extraordinary women that you've had the privilege of sitting down with?

Pat Mitchell
I have had the privilege of sitting down with extraordinary women, and it's continuing through my work. Now, one of the common themes that I hear often no matter where they are, where they're just starting their career or literally president of a country. You hear women talk about not feeling qualified enough. Not being enough. It's always surprising when you look into it. But you're the president of the company, or you're the president of the country. Yes, but I didn't tick all the boxes. Women, we we still feel we need to do that. Because there is that, for whatever reason, that feeling that we are not enough. So that is something I sense. Secondly, there is a move now to attack what many people describe as the final frontier of feminism, and that's our money. What are we doing with our money? And how are we using it to literally change systems and processes? How are we using it to invest in each other? Less than 2% of the capital in this country, investment capital goes to women led companies and businesses. That's outrageous. And that is going to keep certain things just the way they are. So how we use our money is a theme I hear often among women, no matter where they are, again, beginning or at a place where there's a lot of resources to consider. It's still, how are we making decisions about, how are we owning that? So the third thing, which kind of encompasses all of it, is how do we feel about our own power? If we are afraid of it, or don't want to embrace it fully because it brings, whatever the hesitations may be that we have culturally and socially inculcated, to literally say I have power, I have influence. And I'm going to use it differently. However I can. Not only to take risks and hopefully out of those risks, make change, but also to make an easier path to fulfillment for every woman and girl.

Sabrina Merage Naim
In 2019 you published your book, Becoming a Dangerous Woman, embracing risk to change the world. And you said that you use the word dangerous, as in fearless, not feared, which is a really important distinction. Talk a little bit about your work today, how your career path has translated to the work that you're doing today. Talk about that, and then talk about what you put into your book that you're really wanting to communicate to people.

Pat Mitchell
Well, let's begin with the definition of dangerous, which, as I do say, is not the one that makes us feel fear. And that is a kind of dangerous that women and girls are living with every day ever present around the world. So it was in full recognition that dangerous has that meaning for women. But my definition of dangerous was that it is what we needed to be more of, in order to face the challenges of dangerous times. And that, in essence, meant being more fearless, instead of fearful, being ready to be braver, and bolder, and embrace those risks, because they're necessary, we can't change anything by sitting on the sidelines. By letting other people jump in and get engaged. Speaking up, every time we witness injustice, or we experience it. And that's hard, because silence is always going to be a safer place to be. Speaking out for other women and for other communities who are marginalized or who are not represented at a table or in a room or in any place where, again, decisions are made. And then most importantly, dangerous to me means the difference we can make when we show up for each other. And if we do that we'll meet the challenges of dangerous times. So to prove that, I put together a group of women who didn't know each other. All leaders, leaders of countries, leaders of companies, leaders of social enterprises, nonprofits, and we called the cohort, the connected women leaders cohort, and we started having forums together. And we would take a subject like climate justice, or like food insecurity, or global health, or economic inequity. And together, even though none of us were so called experts, we would bring everything we could to bear in problem solving together. And we were successful in problem solving in many ways, meaning we put forth resolutions, ideas, solution based. And that just proves to me now, every time I get the chance to bring that group together, that what we share, what we have in common is so much more powerful than where our differences are. And if women around the world could recognize that stories are the bridges, that when we share our stories, as you're giving women an opportunity to do, in this podcast, when we share our stories, we share our learning, we share our experiences, we are doing the most dangerous thing we could do in terms of facing challenges and solving global threats and the challenges that face the world.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Pat, was there a moment in your career or your life that you can point to when you finally felt fearless? When you felt like you had the credibility or the influence, or that there was nothing left to lose? When was the moment for you when you really assumed that identity?

Pat Mitchell
More recently than you probably imagine. My 70th birthday, my husband said "what would you like to do going into our eighth decade?" And I said, "well, first of all, I'm going to dance on seven continents". So we did. You have to celebrate every age.

Kassia Binkowski
Absolutely.

Pat Mitchell
And then I realized that I did feel differently. I felt that I wasn't worried. I did have less to lose, yes, because I was no longer doing a full time job for a board or someone else that I had to report to. But I feel like I've been fearless in many ways throughout my life. But now I do feel kind of unfettered by those responsibilities. And that's why by the way, older women are the most dangerous population on the face of the earth. We are. It's been proven actually, we're the fastest growing and we're the ones who are getting more and more dangerous with every age. So I probably feel it more now. And what I wish I had felt at 30 and 40 and 50 was so much more of that fearlessness. I wish I had believed more strongly that it wasn't a scarce environment I was trying to move into, it was an abundant environment of opportunities, if only we created those opportunities for each other. So I wish I had known all that sooner. But I am determined now to use every single minute, every single platform, every place I have any power or influence, to do what Bella Abzug said, you know, she told me this in 1990, women must change the nature of power, rather than power changing the nature of women.

Kassia Binkowski
Pat, as somebody who has walked alongside, worked alongside so many of these glass breakers, so many of these heroines that you're talking about, how have you witnessed feminism evolve over your life? And perhaps more interestingly, is the urgency that we're all feeling right now, is it unique in any way? Or is this just the natural cycle repeating itself? I'm just curious to have that longer view lens?

Pat Mitchell
Yeah, I think that often, because in many ways, some of the reckonings that are going on, in particular with racial equity, remind me so much of the 60s. And I did come of age during the women's movement and the civil rights movement. So social justice was in my DNA from a very early age. And then we went through a period where, you know, everybody seemed to just sort of lay back and get comfortable with the progress we've made. And now I feel a different sense of urgency. And during that period of time, there was a move away from feminism. Women accepted the definitions that other people imposed on feminism instead of the one that it is, which is that all people are entitled to rights and freedoms, including women, and yet we don't have true equality anywhere in the world today. Not in one single country do we have full and true equality. I find the strongest voices in the room now are the young women. They are, I believe, coming back to understand that we can't have a just or even a sustainable world unless women are at all the tables where decisions are made, and they want to be there. So I feel like feminism has found a new generation of supporters and advocates and those voices will move us forward. That's what gives me hope.

Kassia Binkowski
I just want to know, with that power transferred to young women, with there being so much hope in that generation. What do you wish somebody would have told you? In 1971, as that young woman, as the single mother with career ambitions with social justice in her DNA, what do you wish somebody would have been whispering in your ear?

Pat Mitchell
It's gonna turn out okay.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Breaking Glass is a production of Evoke Media. Evoke is a nonprofit organization that exists in order to elevate the people and stories that are working to make the world a more unified and equitable place. Learn more at weareevokemedia.com