Name: The Riveter’s Amy Nelson: Moms 'seen as a distressed asset' at work
Uploaded: 2020-03-13
Duration: 4 min 10 s
Description: Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

When I got pregnant, I started asking myself, can I work? Can I have it all? And I think that's because the world around you seems to think that you can't. And that's dangerous because certainly women can just like men build their lives however they want. [ MUSIC ] My name is Amy Nelson and I am the founder and CEO of the, The Riveter. The Riveter is a modern union of working women. We have work spaces, programming events, all really designed to change the paradigm for working women in America today. And, we include men in that effort. We don't think you can change corporate America or the start- up landscape for women unless you include men in the effort. Men still meter the oxygen in so many ways. I think the Riveter stands apart because it is putting itself throughout the country, including in the middle of the country, and saying to women and to corporations and to men, that we can change this for working women and we can do it together. Many of our members are starting small businesses, some are starting venture scale. And what we do in that context is we provide the resources and programming to kind of get them going When you're starting a business, it's hard to know how do i do financial projections? Where do I go to to learn to pay taxes to how do I get venture capital funding? And so we have programming on and Office Hours around all of that. I was a corporate lawyer for 10 years before I started the Richter and I really thought I'd be a lawyer forever, and I went to law school. In fact, I was still paying off my loans, but I decided to start the record. But for me, the world really took a change when I became a mother or really when I became pregnant with my first daughter. When I told my colleagues I was going to be a mom. I think the perception and perspective of me kind of changed on a dime. And I started looking around me and really looking above to see where moms showed up in corporate America. And what I saw is that there weren't many. And it really struck me to my core. I think for most of my career, I thought, maybe there isn't gender bias. I'm succeeding in these male dominated arenas, right? Some maybe this isn't a thing or maybe it's something we can overcome just by the doing. I think mothers are still seeing it as a distressed asset in the American Workplace. I like to talk about the maternal wall a lot more than the glass ceiling, because I think the two are completely linked. And so I thought about what a different path would look like for me. And I thought about starting my own legal practice and going out on my own. I started going to different co working spaces to go to classes on how to write a business plan and all the things I needed to put in place because I'm super type and didn't have an MBA. And in those co working spaces, I found a lot of knowledge. But I didn't find other women. So I started asking other women, where do you go for community at this stage in our lives? Who do you talk to? And I found that all of us felt pretty isolated and didn't have that network. And so I decided instead of starting a legal practice, maybe the thing to do would be to build what I wanted. And that was the start of the Riveter. So the Riveter has raised $ 21 million and three rounds of funding. And I knew very little about the venture capital world before I started this and sometimes I wonder if I had known what I had begun Women today still get 2 % of EC funding and I don't know what the statistics are in mothers, but I know that it's much less. I receive questions in pitch after pitch about being a mother and managing two [ UNKNOWN ] company while I was having kids. I don't think my husband would have gotten the same questions, and I've asked a lot of my peers that are men and who are CEOs and fathers and they haven't gotten those questions. I decided to talk about I see motherhood as a straight. [ MUSIC ] Life is chaos, but it's kind of a calculated chaos. And the thing that keeps me going every day and all of this is that I really believe we are making change. I hear stories every day from Riveters about How the community has helped them the connections they've made, how they've gotten their business off the ground. So it's really important work. A lot of times people ask me if I'm doing this for my daughters, and I am but I'm also doing it for me. I deserve to be paid equally. I deserve all of these opportunities and we shouldn't have to wait another generation or one after that to get to that place. [ MUSIC ]

Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

The Riveter’s Amy Nelson: Moms 'seen as a distressed asset' at work

The company includes men in the conversation.