Aminatou Sow discusses her extraordinary journey that took her from Africa to Texas, from a job in a toy store to Google to co-host of one of today’s most brilliant podcasts, Call Your Girlfriend.
Announcer:
This archival episode of Design Matters originally dropped in June of 2018.
Aminatou Sow:
It is just not helpful to point out disparities and also be complicit in creating them. And so this is a thing that media does a lot where they’re like, “Well, there are no women in STEM.” And then you look at the science section of most magazines or newspapers, and they’re only quoting men.
Announcer:
From the Ted Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 14 years now, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative types about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about. On this podcast, Debbie Millman talks with Aminatou Sow about her podcast and her career in tech.
Aminatou Sow:
I think that especially in tech, we fetishize young people so much. Being the best at this thing at 30 is fine, but we’re literally all idiots.
Debbie Millman:
Aminatou Sow doesn’t like when people tell her she can’t do something. After being told that women in technology don’t mix, she created an online meeting hub for women in technology. She also went to work at Google. She was born in Guinea and lived all over the world before settling in New York City. She was named one of Forbes Magazine‘s 30 Under 30 in Tech and KQED’s Women to Watch. Today I’m going to talk to her about her popular podcast she co-hosts Call Your Girlfriend and her life as a digital pioneer. Aminatou Sow, welcome to Design Matters.
Aminatou Sow:
Oh my gosh, thank you. Hello.
Debbie Millman:
Hello. Aminatou is the Guinea version of Amina prophet Mohammed’s mother. But from what I understand, every country has a spin on the name. So for example, in Senegal it’s Aminata. You’ve said that when you meet other people from West Africa, they want to call you Aminata and that drives you nuts. You’ve also stated that what people call you categorizes them in different places in your life. So in what way?
Aminatou Sow:
Aminatou is the Guinean version of my… It’s the [inaudible 00:03:47] version of my name, really. Aminatou, and for me, I don’t feel precious about nicknames or the ways that people call you. I think that in different phases in your life, people will call you different things. And so in my family, I’m firmly Ami. That is a thing that just my father, my brother, sister, grandmas, and that’s very-
Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:04:12] sweet diminutive.
Aminatou Sow:
That’s where that’s from. I will never grow out of that name. And Amina was really, I think who I was when I moved to America. People said my name wrong a lot of times. And sometimes it annoys me, most times it doesn’t. I talk to a lot of other immigrant kids about this and I suspect that it’s true of even not it immigrant kids is that there is a way that you can reinvent yourself subtly. And for some people that is just like, please use my full name or they’ll use their middle name or whatever. And I think it’s looking back on it now, I think that it is just trying on different personalities. It’s like who can you be in the world? And so for me, professionally, I always write my name as Aminatou Sow. That’s the name my parents gave me. I’m proud of it, I love it. But most of my American friends call me Amina and it’s always a reminder of what phase of my life somebody met me in what they call me.
Debbie Millman:
And I understand your Starbucks name is Amanda.
Aminatou Sow:
Oh, yes. My Starbucks name is firmly Amanda. And the funniest thing about that is that I have a friend who is also an immigrant with a harder to pronounce name. And in college we met at a Starbucks and when they called out Amanda we’re like, “Wait, that’s my coffee.” So it made me very happy.
Debbie Millman:
Your family is from Guinea in Africa, and you’ve said that they were political refugees by the time you were born. So you grew up in Nigeria and Belgium. Your parents were diplomats.
Aminatou Sow:
I have been going back and trying to uncover a lot of my own family history because for as long as I have been a sentient, cogent person, we’ve always not lived where we are from. As much as my passport is from Guinea, I have never lived there. I don’t have a strong sense of that being home for me and politically it was never a place that was safe for us. I guess by the time my mom and my dad left for Nigeria, the political regime in place was not encouraging of people from our tribe. And so a lot of them had to find different opportunities in different places. And my dad lucked out and got this job in Lagos, Nigeria for this organization called The Economic Community of West African States.
It’s essentially the EU for African countries. So they do trading agreements and provides economic opportunities and gives people a place to live and a zone that they can all share. And that’s how my dad came to be an international civil servant. So it’s funny because there are many ways to be a diplomat and it’s just a status, but for a lot of people, they represent their country. And my dad got to work at this cool international organization his whole life. I always joke that he’s the only person I know that’s worked at one place his entire career and it makes no sense to me.
Debbie Millman:
That’s extraordinary. That’s quite an accomplishment.
Aminatou Sow:
He just retired and I was like this, “You worked here when you were 22 and you retired at 60 something. That’s wild.”
Debbie Millman:
Your mother was an engineer by trade. In fact, she was one of the first women to study at university in Guinea, but she was a stay-at-home mom. And in high school I read that you realized she was a genius and was actually smarter than your father and you didn’t understand why she was the one staying home.
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, honestly, it made no sense to me. The way that my parent explained it to us was that in my dad’s job category, due to conflicts of interest, a lot of times the wives do not work. And I would say that that was mostly true for a lot of the kids my age at my dad’s job. But I think that a lot of it is also just very old school, African sexism. She could have worked in anything. And the fact that I didn’t know until I was in middle school that my mother was a math genius was something that was just, it blew my mind. I was having so many problems with equations, quadratic equations, couldn’t figure them out. My dad is an economist by trade and also very good at math, but terrible kind of at explaining. And so everything always ended in tears.
It was like the math teacher can’t explain this to me. My dad is very impatient and here’s my mom, the person who makes all of our meals and picks out our clothes and kind of never gets any glory in our household, is the person who’s like, “Well, here’s how this works.” And the same thing happened in physics later on and the same thing… It’s like every time I had a problem in stem, my mom was who would fix it. And I think about it to this day. She passed away over a decade ago now, but I still think about how there wasn’t a path for her and she never complained about it. But it still, I think about that all the time. I was like, “You are your math genius and you just took care of these idiot children your whole life.” Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And your father was, you’ve written about how your father was the only black man you knew who had a day job.
Aminatou Sow:
In the very European environments that we were in because the path for a lot of French-speaking West African kids is that you go to France, you go to one of the bigger schools in France, and then that’s how you distinguish yourself. And I looked at a lot of my family, my uncles, other people that we knew, and I was like, “My dad is one of the few people I know with an office job, and he doesn’t get that much respect.” And I don’t know how I metabolize this as a really young kid, but I remember being eight years old and thinking France probably not the best place for me, I was an ambitious kid and I can’t quite explain it.
I was very curious. I wanted things, but I looked at this thing that my parents held up as the path that I was supposed to take. And it was like, “Well, you all are doing everything and it does not seem to me you have all the things that you want.” We actually didn’t have a lot of money growing up and certainly not enough status. And it was interesting to be in predominantly white environments and still there was nothing aggressively bad about it, but just see, “Oh, there’s not a place for me here.”
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you’ve always been a feminist, but can’t pin the origins of that identity down to a single cathartic moment. And you’ve said that you think a lot of it was being a girl in a conservative Muslim family.
Aminatou Sow:
And to my parents’ credit, my parents did a lot of really brave things that made me who I am today, and they were the first in their families that married for love. They did not have an arranged marriage. We can talk about whether that was good or bad. I have my feelings about it, but in their generation, that was kind of a nutty thing to do. Just say like, “Hey, we don’t care what our parents think. We’re going to choose each other.” And it had really big consequences for them. Also, when they got married, I was the oldest in my family and my dad never treated me less than a lot of my other cousins. My mom is one of 21 and my dad is one of eight or nine, and a lot of eldest boys, they get all the glory and they get all the prizes.
My dad never treated me differently, and that’s the thing that I felt at a really young age. We still had to go to Arabic school to learn Quran because my family was Muslim. We still had to do the whole respect your elders, whatever. But he never told me, “You will not get to make decisions in this family.” Let me play sports. My parents also did not circumcise me or my sister, which was a huge… I did not understand how monumental that was until later in life. And they just in their own quiet ways, my parents, they were not wave makers. I wouldn’t call my dad a liberal by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that there is something, even for very conservative men when they look at their daughters and can think, “If you are my legacy, I want you to have better than I have.” And I think my dad was able to do that for me in ways that were really concrete.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you communicated with your father through knowledge seeking. Can you tell me more about what that means?
Aminatou Sow:
It’s funny, it’s like we are learning how to become pals now, so my dad’s telling me more about his life and we’re becoming friends, but that was not true when I was growing up, I was kind of terrified of my dad, but one of the things that he always did was that he made us into very curious kids. We watch the eight o’clock news all the time at dinnertime. We talked about current events.
Debbie Millman:
You were voracious media consumers from what I understand.
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. He never cared about what your interpersonal relationships in school were. Nobody talked about boyfriends at the dinner table at my house, but it was very much like, “What do you think about the crisis in Burkina Faso? What is this flag?” And he would always grill you, and I think I internalized that a lot, but it was also the only vocabulary that we had for getting along. And so in the ways that things can be really tough with your family sometimes it’s like, “Okay, yeah, my dad and I do not have warm feelings for each other, but we are all caught up on the French crisis, so let’s talk about that and-
Debbie Millman:
Where does he live now?
Aminatou Sow:
He just moved back to Guinea. He just moved back from Brussels to Conakry in Guinea, and it’s the first time he’s lived there since the ’70s. So it’s just fascinating to watch him have this new phase of his life and we’re pals now. I’m like, “Okay.” I’m like, “How’s it going? How’s your wife doing?” Just all these questions that we could never ask each other. And I do think that, yes, I’m older, the tables have definitely turned, but at the same time he’s open to having that kind of relationship with me and I really appreciate it because I don’t come from a part of the world where a lot of kids get to have that kind of relationships with their parents.
Debbie Millman:
You said that you weren’t sure if marrying for love was a good or a bad thing.
Aminatou Sow:
Honestly, I think that I grew up really thinking that arranged marriage was very, very bad. I was like, “No, you have to be able to choose or whatever.” I think that it just depends on your cultural context. I’m like, “Probably will not work for me.” But I do think that there are parts of the world where if your families don’t get along, it has bigger consequences than just you and the person that you want to be with. And so it’s not for me, I do not think women should be forced into marrying people that they don’t want to marry. But if your family wants to set you up with someone and gives you a choice about, it’s like, “Hey, if you like this person,” that’s something that you should pursue.
I’m like, “Dating is hard.” If your parents want to get involved, my God, take it. It’s fascinating. It’s like I saw in my own parents’ marriage how a choice that was selfish in their culture really had lasting generational consequences. And I was like, “I wonder if they would’ve done it differently if they had known,” because they went through very tumultuous phase. But I think that by the end of my mom’s life, they had gotten to a point where they were like, “Oh, we like each other.” And I think that it literally took them 30 years. That’s fascinating.
Debbie Millman:
What made them brave enough to insist that you and your sister weren’t going to be circumcised or what is also called genitally mutilated?
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. Honestly, they never told us. Knowing a little bit, what I know now about my family because I know that my mom, it happened to my mom and it definitely marked her a lot. And knowing the kind of person that she is, I can see, and she’s very stubborn, being like, this is something that will never happen to my daughters. She was able to convey that with my dad. They were very modern people for even their time. And I think that also the isolation of not being in the home environment-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]
Aminatou Sow:
… the isolation of not being in the home environment, that was really easy to conceal, because I do… It’s funny, I remember a conversation with my mom where we were going on vacation with a lot of other women from Guinea, and she said, “If anybody asks you if this terrible thing has happened to you,” and she didn’t even describe it, she’s like, “If they start telling awful stories about a thing that hurt or whatever, don’t tell them that it’s ever happened to you.” And at the time, I didn’t understand, and I’m like, “Oh, you were shaking the table. I like this.”
Debbie Millman:
And when your grandmothers, I read, were trying to set you up in an arranged marriage, the fact that you weren’t circumcised prevented that from being able to happen, is that right?
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, I think it was mostly… The thing that stands out so much for me in that time period is that I’m one of the youngest people in my family now at this point, and I’m definitely the oldest, unmarried, and so I get the pressure all the time. Sometimes it’s funny, and then other times it’s not. There’s a side of the family that it’s actually not awesome from at all. But when it came to light that I was not circumcised, that was a point of concern, and it was like, “Well, let’s fix this. If we fix this, maybe you’ll find a man.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s preventing me from being in a relationship, thank you.”
But it was a way too where a choice that my parents made a long time ago, marrying for love, living overseas, now collides with the tradition of my family, it is very conservative. And my family tree, it goes back to seventh century West Africa, and it’s very Muslim, it’s very conservative, and I was like, “Yeah, if my parents hadn’t been those weird or rad people, that’s pressure I would’ve fallen to.”
Debbie Millman:
You went to boarding school in Jos, where you said it’s the only place in West Africa where you can grow strawberries and roses.
Aminatou Sow:
It’s true.
Debbie Millman:
And I understand you had to convince your parents to send you there. What made you want to go there so badly?
Aminatou Sow:
One, I really wanted to go to boarding school. I was like, “I’m in pursuit of better educational opportunities.” And there was this boarding school in France I really wanted to go to, but I also knew how my parents are, so I was like, “I have to make it seem like it’s their idea.” And so, my frame to them was, “Listen, here’s the life that I want for myself.” And I was definitely in the eighth grade, and I was like, “Here’s what I want to do in life.”
Debbie Millman:
And what was that?
Aminatou Sow:
And a lot of that for me was, I was like, “I just want a good job and I want to go to a good school.” Truly, there were no brand names attached. I was just like, “I want a different life, and here are a couple of ways that I can do that.” And I was like, “I think I want to live in America because it looks like there are Black people that do cool things.” I’m pretty sure I’d seen three episodes of The Cosbys, which is hilarious now, knowing everything you know about Bill Cosby, but it was one of those, “Oh, America seems like a place where Black people get to do magical things. Maybe this is what I want to do.” Or I was like, “Well, maybe I can live in France.” But I knew that I didn’t want to be home. And also, home life was a little tough, and I always had an independent streak. I’m like, “I’m 14 and I don’t want to live at home anymore, but I want to not live at home to go to school, not to run away.”
And so, I really wanted to go to the school in France, and my mom was kind of on board, and I think that at that 11th hour, she was like, “Wait, this girl is pulling a scam on me. That is too far away, can’t supervise her.”And she was like, “Listen, I’m all on board for you going to a school that you want to go to, but the south of France is a little too far for me.” So there was this American school in Jos that was four hours away, it was a very good school, it was run by missionaries. My parents were really on board. At first, I was like, “It’s kind of a religious school.” And my mom was like, “Christian people run good schools, it’s fine.” I had to take a test, I had to do an English immersion program that summer, because I went to French school my whole life, my entire life was in French, even though we lived in Nigeria, it was kind of shameful, I didn’t speak very good English.
Debbie Millman:
I understand you watched Daria and Friends religiously-
Aminatou Sow:
Religiously.
Debbie Millman:
… and repeated every word so you could get the accent just right.
Aminatou Sow:
I know, when I moved to America and everybody didn’t speak Chandler Bing, it was a huge disappointment to me. I was sold a fake [inaudible 00:20:20].
Debbie Millman:
You came to the US to go to the University of Texas at Austin.
Aminatou Sow:
Hook ’em Horns.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to pick UT Austin?
Aminatou Sow:
Man, I applied to 24 schools, I was such a nerd. I’m pretty sure it was 24 schools, definitely over 20 schools. Got into every single one of them, except for one. And I applied to all these schools because I love having choices, but then I’m paralyzed by the choices, so I made my dad write a check for every single school, and I was like, “I’m going to pick at the last minute, but I need you to write all these checks now.” And he was like, “You better not cash all of this in at the same time.” And I remember it being April 1, or whatever the deadline was that you were supposed to send things, and just not… I was like, “I don’t know where I want to go, this is terrible.”
And so, I convinced my parents to let me take a year off, and I was like, “Oh, this seems like a chill European thing that you could do.” And they were not weirded out by it. And my family had just recently moved to Belgium, and because I’d been at boarding school, I saw that my siblings were getting a lot closer than me, I was definitely odd man out. And so, I was like, “
Okay, this can work.” Two months into being at home, I was like, “Oh, there’s a reason I left here when I was 14. I cannot handle this.” So I then went back to the drawing board, and I was like, “Oh, what’s the school that will let me come in the spring?” And UT was top of that list, but I also wanted that movie college experience.
Debbie Millman:
You said you wanted a fantasy movie college experience.
Aminatou Sow:
I did, I wanted to go to the big school. My graduating class was 29 people, I had always been in these tiny environments, classes with 13 people and 10 people, and I was like, “What is the biggest place I can go to and be a number?” Everything that people don’t want from a big school, that’s what I wanted.
Debbie Millman:
What was it like when you got to Texas? It’s Texas. What was it like?
Aminatou Sow:
It’s Texas, but it’s Austin. I’m really happy that Texas was my first America home, because I think that it’s weird and expansive like me. Texas is weird. It’s not the South, it’s not… I love it. But Austin specifically was great. I was like, “Oh, I get to go to a good school.” UT is fine, but Austin itself was amazing, that kept me happy. I made a lot of friends who didn’t go to UT, or didn’t go to college, or had non-traditional backgrounds, and that made me happy too.
My dad was very disappointed that I went to UT and not to Yale, which was his first choice, and for a long time, he was just not happy about it at all. He was like, “You’re not listening to me, you’re not going to make anything of your life, whatever.” Because status and brand, especially to immigrant parents, that stuff matters a lot, because those are also the only paths that they understand. And so, he was like, “Well, here you go, throwing your whole life away, going to the school by the Mexican border.” And I was like, “Sir…” He sounded like the Black Donald Trump at the time to me. I was like, “This is not cool.” But it all worked out.
Debbie Millman:
You studied government, specifically political science, Middle Eastern studies.
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah, two different majors.
Debbie Millman:
And economics.
Aminatou Sow:
Economics. Government, Middle Eastern studies and economics, because my hero growing up was Christiane Amanpour.
Debbie Millman:
Of course.
Aminatou Sow:
So I was like, “Well, she reports a lot from the Middle East. How do I get to be Christiane Amanpour?” Yeah, so I did all those things, and look at me now, I don’t use any one of them.
Debbie Millman:
What did you want to be at that point? Did you want to be a newscaster or a journalist?
Aminatou Sow:
I don’t think I wanted to be a journalist, but I definitely… I cared a lot about the Middle East, I thought I wanted to work with refugees. I was like, “I want to work in a refugee camp, I want to help solve the Middle East peace,” whatever. And also, I think it’s because my dad was a diplomat, I was like, “Government is a thing that we can have in common, and economics is a thing that we can have in common.” And it was fine, but I think it wasn’t until my junior year in college where I was like, “Oh, I’m not…” Liberal arts is great, but I’m not learning a skill here. I’m like, “I know how to read books and I know how to write papers.” But I made all these friends that were in design school and the art school and business school and were engineers, and I was like, “You can leave college with skills? This is weird.” And the recession was looming, so I was like, “Something bad is going to happen.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, you graduated in 2007 when the global recession began.
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You went and lived with family in Belgium until you got an American visa, and seeking a government job, you moved to Washington D.C. where you didn’t know anyone and had no job prospects. You applied for dozens and dozens of jobs.
Aminatou Sow:
Oh my god, so many jobs.
Debbie Millman:
And finally got a job at a toy store to pay your rent. What was that like for you?
Aminatou Sow:
It was fine for me, but it’s so fascinating to live in a town like D.C. and not have a job that people think is important or valid. I’m really happy that I went through that phase of my life, because the one job that I did get offered while I was applying to all these things was this internship in John Kerry’s office. This woman called me and she was like, “Are you available to start tomorrow?” And through our conversation, it became very clear that she needed a diversity person, and she couldn’t say, “Are you black?” Or, “Are you from somewhere else?” But all of her questions were leading to that. But I was like, “I have no shame about this. Yeah, sure.”
And it was to be a press intern, so it was literally just making press clips. And I remember being like, “Okay, how much does this job pay?” And she was like, “It’s an internship on Capitol Hill, it pays nothing.” And I was like, “Okay, then I can’t take it because I support myself.” And I remember her just being very shocked talking to me and being like, “What is wrong with this 22-year-old? Everybody wants this job.” And that’s when it just dawned on me, I was like, “Oh, the reason all these jobs don’t pay a lot and have a lot of prestige is because people with rich families can afford to do that for them. This is how government works, this is how magazines work.” Just everything that I had my eye on, I could never figure out the economics of it, and so going to work at the toy store for me was a no-brainer. I was like, “My rent is $1,000 a month, I have zero money, and I need to pay my bills, I support myself, I come from not a wealthy family at all.” And it was great, I loved it.
Debbie Millman:
You then applied for asylum in the United States and got it. Can you talk about how that happened and why you had to do that?
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. So after the toy store, I went to work at this think tank, and it was great. I was learning a lot of things, and I was like, “Okay, this is what I’m meant to do, policy work.” So when you go to school in the US, you get what’s called optional practical training for a year, it is a status that you can apply for.
Debbie Millman:
That’s OPT.
Aminatou Sow:
OPT. And for a year, you are eligible to work. And at the end of that year, either you figure out a different status, and for a lot of people, that is an H-1B visa. They’re very competitive, a lot of companies compete for them for their employees, so it used to be that literally Microsoft would scoop up all of the OPT, and then the rest of the people would just be left out hanging.
But also, when you’re a 22-year-old with an entry level job and you have to convince your job like, “Hey, at the end of the year, can you sponsor me for a visa?” And the process is very murky and opaque, they just don’t make it easy. And for tech companies, the payoff is like, “We’re getting skilled engineering labor, we’ll import that.” But for everybody else, they’re like, “Do I really need a comms assistant for this thing?” And it costs a lot of money, and a lot of people don’t understand it.
But here’s the other truth is that if you went to school in America like I did, you’re pretty much only qualified for American jobs. When I thought about moving home to Belgium, they were all like, “You probably need one more year of college.” The equivalencies are different. And then, to go back to family history, I never had a home. I have a passport, but I’ve never had a home. And I was like, “America is my home, this is where I’m making my life. I chose to go to school here, I live here, I have nowhere else to go.” And one of my only options at the time was to apply for asylum, and for FGM asylum, because it was-
Debbie Millman:
What does FGM stand for?
Aminatou Sow:
Female genital mutilation. Because then there’s all this other family stuff that’s happening at the same time. And I was really, really, really lucky that somebody who was an alumni from UT took on my case pro bono, I had all of this legal help, I spoke English. I was not the typical asylum applicant, basically. The fact that I could fill out the forms on my own was just, that’s something. The fact that I had all of this pro bono, tens of thousands of dollars worth of help for free, I was so aware of my own privilege.
And even through that, whenever Republicans are like, “Just come here the right way.” I did everything, and it still took over two years, and the process sucks. Early on, somebody in the asylum office literally transposed my first and last name. That took a year to fix. The woman who interviewed me for intake was not clear on the law with students, so she referred me to a judge and then realized her mistake, but the process is not retroactive, so she’s like, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to do.” That takes another year. Show up at court, they’ve forgotten to send my file, don’t get back on the docket for another year, get there… It’s just like Kafkaesque proportions.
And when you’re transferred to a judge, you’re technically pleading guilty to a couple of charges, so one of them is you’re pleading guilty that you’re not a US citizen, fair. You’re saying that you’re a citizen of another country, fair. I’m like, “I’m pleading to those two.” And the third one is that you’ve been in the country illegally for X number of days. And because this woman referred me without knowing what the law was for students, I was like, “I’ve never been here illegally. I was under status for OPT.” It’s a very gray area of the law. And so, the judge was like, “I don’t know what to do with you.” The government lawyer was very much like, “Just plead to these charges, it’s not a big deal.” And I was like, “Sarah, I watch a lot of law and order.”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Aminatou Sow:
“I’m not pleading to something I didn’t do.” And here I am, with all of these lawyers who want to help me, and I’m like, “I’m doing everything right, and other people’s messing up is what is getting me here.” And at the end, when we finally resolved everything… And you’re supposed to stand a trial, show up at trial, it’s a very emotional day, and the government lawyer is like, “Actually, you are the kind of American we want here, you’re fine.” And then, the judge, who’s this very Republican judge, gives us elocution, it’s all very nice.
And I was irritated and sad more than anything, I was like, “This is actually really unnecessary. You wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money, you wasted my time, it caused me a lot of pain.” It’s just a very inefficient process, and there’s no compassion for people who are immigrants. I was like, “I did everything right.” I cannot tell you how just humbling it is to be somebody who knows how to navigate America and go into one of these refugee offices to get fingerprinted or whatever, and look at the other people who are there-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]
Aminatou Sow:
Offices to get fingerprinted or whatever and look at the other people who are there. A lot of them don’t speak English, they don’t have lawyers. The typical refugee, FGM refugee woman like me has children. She’s here. I was like, I don’t know what the right way is. I don’t know that not having compassion for people is something that we should be proud about in our immigration system because it’s broken even for the people who do it right.
Debbie Millman:
What do you think is the foundation of your resilience?
Aminatou Sow:
Man, I think about this all the time. I come from resilient women specifically. My mom was resilient, my grandmothers were resilient. I think that there is something about African women, whether it is the environment or it is just the life circumstances that you have, that if you make it to a certain age, you just get a different philosophy on life. I’m like, I come from a part of the world where if you make it to five, you’re probably going to have a longer life than most people.
My mom died when she was 49, even though we lived in Belgium. For our country, she’s still a statistic. Women in Guinea have a life expectancy average of about 50. I have seen some hard things, like hard things have happened to me, but I also think life is worth living and we’re very aware of that. So I don’t want to feed into some bullshit like African people are strong people narratives because I think a lot of times that’s how it gets misconstrued. Even in America, people think that black women specifically are just stronger, and that’s not true. It’s like we all have the same emotional reserves that everybody else has, but our lives can be more challenging. If you’re choosing to live, then you got to tap into that.
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Let’s talk about some of your career successes. In 2011, you co-founded Tech LadyMafia with Erie Meyer, formerly of the U.S. Digital Service at the White House, and now with Code for America. The impetus was an article that you both read about the dearth of women in technology, which you both knew was false since you each worked in tech. How did that lead you to launching Tech LadyMafia?
Aminatou Sow:
Especially in 2011, 2010, we would get a lot of these articles and the headline was always the same. Only five women know how to use a calculator. Seven women know how to computer. The media just feeling very proud about the fact that they’re pointing out disparities. The statistics are absolutely true. They are true. There are not enough women in STEM. It’s not representative of the population we have, that it’s not even representative of the number of women who are studying STEM.
That’s the other thing. I’m like, everybody talks about this leaky pipeline. I’m like, where are these women? The thing is that for Erie, and I was like, this is not true in our lives. First of all, we know every woman in this town who computers. That’s one thing. Also, it is just not helpful to point out disparities and also be complicit in creating them. So this is a thing that media does a lot where they’re like, “Well, there are no women in STEM.” Then you look at the science section of most magazines or newspapers and they’re only quoting men.
So the impetus really was saying, okay, we don’t have any mentors. We don’t trust the system, but we trust each other and we all feel a little lonely in our silos. I am a big believer in this concept of horizontal mentorship and horizontal loyalty and that I did not come up with. Please do a Google and read more about it. A thing that is true is that if you look around horizontally, you look at your peers, you can put your resources together. That’s what we did with Tech LadyMafia. There was nothing revolutionary about it. It was literally an email listserv.
We’re like, we are going to share resources. We are going to share salary information. We are going to share information about jobs. We have a men’s auxiliary, they plan our picnic every year and they give us salary advice. I’m like, “What do I need a dude for in tech?” I was like, “Tell me how much money you make.” I’m not trying to figure out how much these other ladies are just being just as underpaid as me. I think that for all of its success, it’s actually very simple. It’s like if you don’t accept the mentality of scarcity and you don’t accept when you are a marginalized person or a minority, that anybody who looks like you in the workplace is your competition. This is Highlander and there can only be one of you. You’re actually going to get very far.
I’m like, these are messages that capitalism and patriarchy tell you over and over again. There’s only room for one of you. You’re supposed to compete with each other. While you’re competing for the scraps, other people are building wealth. They’re building the future, they’re doing amazing things. If you just look around and just say, actually, if we hunt in a pack, we are stronger, which I think is so true for women, you will get to where you’re trying to get to so much faster.
Debbie Millman:
Can you share some of your early guerrilla promotion tactics and how you grew Tech LadyMafia early on?
Aminatou Sow:
My favorite one that we did is we had these cards that said Join the Mafia, and we would leave them in the women’s bathrooms at tech conferences and tech offices and venture capital offices. Nothing made me happier than when somebody gave me one. They were like, “You have to join this group.” I was like, “Yes, thank you.” So a lot of our recruiting honestly was like that, informally. Also, everybody in the group is referred by somebody. So everybody knows someone because we’re very much like, if there are other women in your office or there are other women in your lives, or you go to a conference and there’s only two of you, find that person and bring them into the fold.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about the brag section of Tech LadyMafia.
Aminatou Sow:
We ask people to tell us what they’re working on and what they’re proud of. I think a lot of women are really conditioned to be meek about their work and to… Even the word bragging has such a negative connotation. The truth is that if you actually look at a lot of studies about this, when men get together, they talk about work constantly. I’m like, this is why they’re always just like, they know where all the jobs are and they know where whatever is. When women get together, we’re just like, “How can I help you? How can I tend to you?” I think that we are deeply conditioned to feel shame about success around work.
Debbie Millman:
Why do you think that is?
Aminatou Sow:
I think that it’s a lot of things. That bragging is bad, and also you’re not supposed to take credit for your work. I think that that’s a thing that a lot of women struggle with. I truly don’t understand it because I’m like, well, if you’re doing the work and you’re doing it well, you should probably tell other people. Also, you can’t be what you can’t see. So part of starting the brag threads, for me it was one, I was like, I want to celebrate other people’s successes and also, I can’t celebrate what I don’t know about. So there is something really about just reclaiming the narrative of your own career. I’m like, if you’re good at your job, we should know about it. There’s nothing gross about talking about it.
Debbie Millman:
Has that brag section influenced how you think about or talk about your own achievements?
Aminatou Sow:
It has because it has challenged me a lot. I think that I’m somebody who has not had a traditional career path. It’s hard to feel part of a team sometimes. I think that when you’re sharing your accomplishments with your team, there’s a clear framework for how you can do that. You can frame it around the work and it’s part of teamwork. For me, I’m like, I work alone and I work in a silo. Sometimes I do feel that creeping in where I’m like, oh, I never… A friend challenged me about this recently. She’s like, “You never tell me when you win awards or when you do things,” or whatever.
Debbie Millman:
You even blushed when I talked about the Forbes 30 Under 30 when I introduced you.
Aminatou Sow:
That’s so embarrassing.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Aminatou Sow:
Well, listen, here’s my feeling about the Forbes 30 Under 30, thank you Forbes Magazine for that award. I think that especially in tech, we fetishize young people so much. I’m like, sure, being the best at this thing at 30 is fine, but we’re literally all idiots. You know what I mean? What is a 30-year-old going to teach you about the future of anything? Absolutely nothing at all. In doing this thing where we fetishize young people, we alienate a lot of older people, I think especially with women where there’s an age that you become really invisible at. I suspect that that’s around 40.
There is something about having more wisdom and having more work under your belt that will make you not feel like a fraud because young people constantly talk about imposter syndrome. It’s so in vogue for people in tech, especially women in tech, to talk about it. I actually think that imposter syndrome in small doses is good. I’m like, yeah, you don’t know anything.
Debbie Millman:
It certainly keeps people from being intolerable.
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. I’m like one, if you have imposter syndrome, it’s probably because you care about what you’re doing. It’s also because you’re trying not to be a fraud. I’m like, young people are frauds. We are all fraudulent. Just you put everything on social media, you’re just bragging about these accomplishments that are actually not concrete. I’m like, talk to me when you’ve had a failure. Talk to me when you’ve run a business into the ground, talk to me when you even have a resume that is five years… That is a thing.
So all of this to say, no shade to Forbes. I think they do a really important thing highlighting people, but I would be so much better served with who are the women executives over 50, who are people who have built a lifetime of making something. I think that we don’t talk about longevity in career. I think that that’s something that you talk about constantly. I loved your 99U talk last year because it was the first time that I had heard so much about your own path. I was like, wow, imagine starting a new thing in your 30s.
Debbie Millman:
Or 40s. Or 50s.
Aminatou Sow:
I know. The way that we talk about young people’s… I’m like, I don’t want to peak when I’m 28.
Debbie Millman:
I hear you.
Aminatou Sow:
That’s not the accomplishment I want to be known for.
Debbie Millman:
I hope I don’t peak until I’m in my late 70s.
Aminatou Sow:
I’ve always said that deep down inside, I feel 63. Even as an eight-year-old, I was like, 63 is the perfect number to me. This is the age I want to be, and I hope that I make it, and I hope that it’s a glorious time.
Debbie Millman:
It will be, Amina. I mean, there’s no question just sitting here and listening to you and looking at you while you’re talking. There’s no question in my mind.
Aminatou Sow:
You’re giving me chills. I got diagnosed with cancer at the end of last year and just in December, I didn’t think that I would be here now. There’s something very clarifying about illness too, where I’m like, okay, actually, all these values and things that I held onto, have now been tested for me, and I know my own bullshit. I know what is bullshit and I know what is true, and I hope that I can live up to my own values every day.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said this about your diagnosis. A lot of the language is about being a warrior or fighting and that actually, I think this is pretty bad because so many of the world’s messages to us are about strength all the time, and we’re always supposedly stronger than everyone, and we’re fighters and all these things. Sometimes that’s true, but we’re also human beings and we need all the help that we can get. Having cancer made that very, very real for me.
Aminatou Sow:
I tell my therapist all the time that the most humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me is getting cancer because I finally had to ask for help. I am very bad at asking for help. The thing about it too that’s fascinating, is that I’m always the first one to offer help wherever I’m at. I had to realize kind of how arrogant that is.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Aminatou Sow:
That you think that you can help people, but you cannot receive help. There’s something that puts all of your relationship at great imbalance when you do that. Getting cancer was, yeah, I was like, truly, I cannot do this by myself.
Debbie Millman:
Are you okay now?
Aminatou Sow:
Oh, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I’m so sorry that you had to go through this.
Aminatou Sow:
I’m in full remission. Thank you. I’m in full remission, which means a lot, but also means so little. It just means that you have no evidence of disease. It could come back, it might come back. It’ll probably come back. Who knows? Also, I’m like, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. So cancer is scary, but life is generally scary. Yeah, it’s like asking for help from your friends was like, it really humbled me this year. Also seeing who in my life showed up and who I prioritize versus who has actually always been there in my life.
Also, just realizing like, okay, this is what it means to be in community. You put the time in, you put the love in, and then now it’s your turn to cash out the check. I have amazing, amazing friends, whether it was from having to ask for help with the shower or having to ask for meals to be made or for my house to be cleaned or all sorts of things that I thought would be the end of me if I asked for help. I was like, oh, actually, this is pretty amazing.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that romantic relationships get a lot of ink, but nobody really talks about how much romance there is in being a friend.
Aminatou Sow:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Was that a motivation in starting your extraordinary podcast, Call Your Girlfriend with your friend Ann Friedman?
Aminatou Sow:
Yes. Oh my God, I am so in love with Ann Friedman. She is a wonderful human being, and doing a podcast is just another way to hang out with her and our awesome producer, Gina Delvac who thought up the show. So on one level, I’m like, yes, we get to make this very successful fun show every week, but I still just pinch myself that I get to work with these women every day.
I have worked with friends and I have lived with friends. All the things that people tell you not to do, they’re like, “Friends and work, that’s bad. Friend and living together, that’s bad. Friends and money, that’s bad.” I’m like, maybe that’s true for some people, but for me it has been the opposite because I’m like, actually, I don’t like people. So if I like you, it keeps me…
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Aminatou Sow:
Because I’m like, actually I don’t like people, so if I like you, it keeps me honest and I have to show up and I do my best work. And it is not about the business, but it’s about the relationship and what you get to learn from them.
Debbie Millman:
Why don’t you like people?
Aminatou Sow:
I mean people are just a lot. Also, I think truly for me, this also goes back to my family. I was a very shy kid, painfully shy, like eat lunch in the library, shy. But my parents were schmoozers. They had a job where they had to be schmoozers and we had to have people over all the time, so I kind of had to get over it. And so I feel that my whole childhood was learning to be around people, which is so against my nature. And now that I’m like, well, I make my own money and it’s my own time, I get to go back to my introvert ways.
Debbie Millman:
You said that you perform not being shy really well.
Aminatou Sow:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Love that.
Aminatou Sow:
100%. It’s like the things that you think that you can’t do. I was like, take an improv class for them and just learn. I was like, all of life is a performance. You don’t have to like it, but you can do it and then you can go home and lay on the floor for the rest of the day.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said our use of social media is a lot like performance art.
Aminatou Sow:
Oh, 100%. I’m always so shocked when people are unpleasant on social media. I’m like, are you kidding me? This is the one place where you can be your best person. And you make everybody fall in love with you and you don’t have to be a jerk. I was like, nobody here knows you. Be an asshole to your friends and family, those people know you. This is like be your best person here.
Debbie Millman:
Is it true you met Anne Friedman at a Gossip Girl viewing party in D.C.?
Aminatou Sow:
It always happens at prom. Yes. Our dear friend, [inaudible 00:49:45], who was a new friend to me at the time, and a friend of Anne’s, emailed a small group of people to come and watch Gossip Girl. I showed up in a homemade Chuck Hart’s Blair t-shirt that my college roommate Brittany had made for me. Thanks, Brittany. Still have the shirt.
In the ways that when you watch TV with people, you’re just like, okay, this is our thing. I like everyone, but I truly loved Anne. Everything she said was funny. The episode was 45 minutes. We left. And D.C. is so small, I remember leaving going out the door and just thinking like, oh, I bet you were walking in the same direction anyway because everybody lives in the same 10 block radius. And no, we went opposite ways. And I remember being really bummed out about it. I was like, “Ugh, how am I going to find this woman again? I guess I’ll look her up on Facebook.” And as soon as I got home, I already had a friend request from her.
Debbie Millman:
Oh wow.
Aminatou Sow:
And I was like, friends.
Debbie Millman:
The tagline for Call Your Girlfriend is a podcast for long distance besties, and you’ve described it as a freewheeling conversation modeled around a catch-up phone call you might have with a best friend. So similar to Tech Lady Mafia’s Origins, you launched it after being told by a man that women don’t make podcasts.
Aminatou Sow:
Yeah. I mean remember being at this party maybe or thing and just this guy being like, “Yeah, women, they just don’t have the attention to detail for it and they’re just not good at making…”
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.
Aminatou Sow:
And I just looked at him, I was like, you’re such an idiot. If you can make a thing, of course I can do it. But also every person in public radio is a woman. You know what I mean? It’s like if you look at the ranks of who is making all of our radio, they’re all women who went to liberal arts colleges. So I’m like, What does this doofus know? And it turns out he knew nothing. I was like, Your podcast is not doing great, sir. And I’m like, I figured this out. That’s usually a big motivator for me when people say some people can’t. I was like short of flying a rocket. I think that most people can learn how to do everything pretty fast.
Debbie Millman:
Every one of your shows is themed. And some sample episode titles include class warfare, get swole, businesswoman special. How do you select the topics you want to explore?
Aminatou Sow:
So we keep a running Google doc called The Vagenda.
Debbie Millman:
Oh. I want to talk to you about your word vigenius by the way.
Aminatou Sow:
Vigenius
Debbie Millman:
Is one of my favorite things I found about you.
Aminat
ou Sow:
We did not coin vigenius. Our friend Brandon in D.C. would say it all the time, and I think that’s also where the vagenda is from. You absorb all the words of your friends. But yeah, so we keep this running Google Doc, called the vagenda. And so Anna and I at this point in our friendship have lived longer apart than we have in the same city and we would in the classic way of millennials with jobs that they hate, we would Gchat all day and then be like, okay, “I’m going to call you later, but here all the things I want to talk about”. So we always had a list. The list has always been, that forum was not new for us because there’s a lot to cover. I’m like, sometimes you want to talk about Kanye, but also Paul Ryan is doing insane things in the house. We are ladies with vast interests.
Debbie Millman:
You have range.
Aminatou Sow:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
You have more range than anyone I think I’ve ever met.
Aminatou Sow:
But I think most people have range. They just refuse to put them in the same category.
Debbie Millman:
Well the thing about your and Anne’s range is that you’re smart and you’re informed and you’re not just riffing on something that you’ve heard. You’re riffing on something that you think, and I love that.
Aminatou Sow:
That’s, I think, why the show was so important for us to do because I do think that there is this feeling that the things that young women care about are frivolous. And so when you think about, I don’t know, conversations about skincare or conversations about reality TV or the Kardashians, I was like, no, these are things that people experience, but also you can be a smart person and like all of these things, but also for women, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the political is personal and the personal is political. So a lot of times there’re vehicles for having talks about other things. And so we are an independently owned show. We’re like three ladies with a surprisingly profitable media company. So it’s fun.
Debbie Millman:
Now I read that you did make your financial forecast for 2017. Last year in 2017.
Aminatou Sow:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
You didn’t make them this year for 2017.
Aminatou Sow:
We did. It’s the first time that the three of us sat down and we talked about our five-year goals together. We’re like, here’s what we want for the show, but also here’s what we want individually. Because I think that a thing that a lot of people don’t realize about our show is that it’s none of our primary jobs, and it could be, but we’re ladies who love side hustles. So I was like, the way that we stay in love with this baby is that it has to be a labor of love. But it was kind of the first time that we sat down and said, okay, here are the things I want to do. And for me, I was like, okay. I was like, “I want to host more things. I think I want to be a talk show host one day”. And I had never said that out loud. It felt good to have two other people say, “Okay, let’s help you get there” or think about the ways that we want to grow the show also. And it’s like I’ve never had a five-month plan and now I have a five-year plan and it is pretty exhilarating.
Debbie Millman:
In addition to Call Your Girlfriend last year, Wieden Kennedy launched On She Goes a travel platform for women of color. And you hosted season one of the podcast. What was that like for you?
Aminatou Sow:
It was pretty fun. I got to interview all of the women of color that I love about the ways that they travel. So everybody from Thao Win from Thao & the Get Down, stay Down-
Debbie Millman:
She’s amazing.
Aminatou Sow:
… And Roxanne Gay. And it was a very sweet show. I think that so many women actually have a sense of adventure. And also adventure doesn’t mean climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, for some of us it literally, it’s the thrill of walking into the business lounge of an airport. And in seeing ourselves more so being able to do that. And just unselfishly. Now I’m like, “Oh, I travel better. All these ladies gave me the tips in my life”. So it’s great.
Debbie Millman:
What other projects are you currently working on?
Aminatou Sow:
Well Anne and I are working on a book project, so we’ll be announcing that soon. What else am I working on? I was really lucky that when I got sick I was like, okay, I can’t work anymore. My entire life of hoarding money and being afraid of being poor again. My rainy day has finally come, so I’m going to cash out the rainy day fund. So I stopped working in January and I decided that in June is when I was going to figure out what I’m going to do, when I grow up. And so it’s felt really good to say no, but have a reason to say no to a lot of projects. When you’re little like, “Sorry, I have cancer. I can’t do this thing”. It’s quite exciting actually because nobody can guilt you about things. But I’m going to be hosting a couple of other podcasts this summer, some branded shows that I’m super, super excited about. And also just figuring it out. If you had told me even six months ago that I would not be working, because my identity is so tied up into being a productive person, and that I would be okay with it, I would’ve never believed you. And now I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, I have nothing to do except for figure myself out”. And it’s very fun.
Debbie Millman:
Has this change in the way you’re living your life impacted your need toward money in order to feel secure?
Aminatou Sow:
I’m still definitely a money hoarder because I was like, money just buys you freedom. That’s all it does. I was like, it doesn’t make you cooler than anybody. But I’m like, I walked away from a job at Google and they print money in the basement of that place and it is terrifying to leave. But if you leave and you’re like, oh, I know how to feed myself and I can pay my rent and I can afford the things that I want to do, everything is a little better. But I think that the thing that cancer did for me, honestly, is that I stopped hoarding other things. I use my nice dishes now every day. There’s no such thing as nice dishes in my household anymore. There are a couple of trips that I’ve always wanted to take and every year I go, Ugh, I need to save up more for it, or I need more time, or whatever.
Or I want to be at this phase of my life when I go on… I booked all of them and I’m like, I’m going. Because tomorrow’s not a guarantee. I’ve definitely become more vulnerable. I am doing a lot of things that I’m scared about, I’ve been scared of doing for a long time, and so far it’s paying out. I always ask myself, what’s the worst that can happen? And so far so good. It’s like the worst is maybe you’ll be humiliated a little. Maybe somebody will say no to you or maybe you’ll die. But guess what my mom always said, she was like, “You’re never going to get out this bitch alive”. So it’s all good.
Debbie Millman:
Aminatou, thank you so much for being on Design Matters today. Thank you for being such an important voice in our culture and thank you for being such an extraordinary inspiration.
Aminatou Sow:
Thank you for having me, Debbie Millman. I listen to your show all the time, so this is like a fever dream for me.
Debbie Millman:
It’s a fever dream for me as well because ditto.
Aminatou Sow:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
You can find out more about Aminatou Sow and her extraordinary work and her podcast at callyourgirlfriend.com. This is the 14th year I’ve been doing Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Announcer:
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PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:00:54]