One of the most significant things that happen at GLAM is the exposure the girls get to female leaders and world changers. Meeting these industry titans in person and hearing first-hand their personal stories of when they were a young girl, and the choices they made that helped them overcome adversity and move mountains, have an indelible impact on the girls. They realize that these incredible women are real people, just like them, and that if they can do it, so can the girls.
Sanyin Siang was GLAM’s very first closing keynote when she addressed the girls in 2016, the program’s inaugural year. The mother of three children under the age of 9, Sanyin has applied the expertise she has acquired in leadership to her role as a mother. In her own words, “Positional power means very little to a 5-year-old and so it's really doubling down on influence and persuasion and shaping the type of environment that would help facilitate the good choices I hope my kids would make. Those same ideas apply also to leadership and how we foster teams and shaping of choices via organizational culture.”
One anecdote Sanyin likes to tell is of the time her children were arguing. To help them truly “see” each other, she had them sit across from each other and draw each other!
GLAM’s purpose is to empower girls and help them dream big, in an effort to close the gender gap in essential fields like Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Math (STEAM), where having a diverse workforce benefits society as a whole. Sanyin was an ideal founding keynote in that she has advocated for this her whole career. Whether it be in her work as a CEO coach, educator, startup advisor or author, she shows individuals and organizations how to discover their inner champions and then gives them the tools to develop their superpowers.
Sanyin co-founded and leads Duke University's Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics at its Fuqua School of Business and is a professor with Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. She is a prolific writer and has contributed innumerable articles on LinkedIn (where she is one of the “Top 20 Global Influencers”) and other media including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Huffington Post. She is the author of The Launch Book, available on Amazon.
To learn more about the incredible women involved in GLAM and the life-changing impact the program has on the girls participating, please follow our pages on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.