Transcript of episode 002 - Jeffery Epstien, MIT, and the women who spoke up

Bridget Todd: 00:00 This episode includes mentions of sex trafficking, sex crimes against minors and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unboxed Creative.
Bridget Todd: 00:18 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is: There Are No Girls on the Internet. You've probably heard about American financier, Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein pled guilty and was convicted in 2008, procuring an underage girl for sex. In July of last year, he was arrested on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking. He was found dead in prison in August. In addition to his connection to powerful political figures like bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth's son: Prince Andrew, and credibly accused rapist: President Donald Trump, Epstein also had deep connections to the tech world despite being a convicted sex offender. On September 7th, Ronan Farrow published an exposé in the New Yorker that found that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, had a deeper fundraising relationship with Epstein than it had previously acknowledged, even as officials knew he was a convicted sex offender and at the university went to great lengths to cover it up.
Bridget Todd: 01:13 Now here's just some of what Farrow found. Even though Epstein was disqualified at MIT's official donor database, the media lab continued to accept money from him, consulted him about the use of funds, and by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent both publicly and within the university. Epstein appeared to act as a go-between for wealthy donors like Bill Gates to pump money into MIT. According to Farrow, MIT's efforts to conceal Epstein's connections to the university went so far that staff referred to Epstein as Voldemort, or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Whistleblower Signe Swenson, a former MIT development associate, told Farrow that the lab's leadership made it explicit, even in her earliest days with them, that Epstein's donations had to be kept secret.
Bridget Todd: 01:55 Staffers knew about MIT's relationship with Epstein. Prominent faculty advisor, Ethan Zuckerman resigned in protest. After Farrow's piece was published, Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, resigned.
Speaker 2: 02:08 In the latest fallout connected to Jeffrey Epstein, MIT is opening an investigation into its ties to the financier and convicted sex offender. The announcement came just one day after the New Yorker revealed that MIT's Media Lab was attempting to conceal donations from Epstein.
Bridget Todd: 02:27 Now there's a lot to say about Jeffrey Epstein, but this story isn't really about him. It's about courage, community and power. We hear a lot about Epstein's horrific crimes and most people credit Ronan Farrow with bringing their full scope to light. But even before Ronan Farrow's piece was published, women in the MIT community spoke up and we should honor their voices too.
Speaker 3: 02:48 To the future. MIT's Media Lab, a place that follows crazy ideas, wherever they may lead.
Speaker 4: 02:56 We get to think about the future. What does the world look like 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? What should it look like?
Bridget Todd: 03:03 The MIT Media Lab is an important place, CBS even dubbed it: the Future Factory. And it's where technologist: Arwa Mboya, knew she had to be.
Arwa Mboya: 03:13 Yeah, I came here because it is a place for misfits, the Media Lab. It is interdisciplinary and has the intersection of tech and art and design, and that was what I was looking for when I graduated from undergrad. I worked for a couple years back in Nairobi where I'm from and became a VR developer on the side, on top of my job, and needed to... I was like looking for somewhere to find myself and I'd heard about the Media Lab and how civic-minded one of the groups was, called Civic Media. Our motto is: tech for social change, and I was like, "Well, that sounds like exactly what I want to do." So I applied and then it worked out.
Bridget Todd: 04:01 Arwa was raised in shaped by a community of strong, resilient women. And that upbringing has been a big part of how she shows up to the world today.
Arwa Mboya: 04:09 Yeah, for sure. I mean, my work is always about women and it's always about women in Africa. Sometimes it's a bit more general than that, but I have worked in Nairobi my whole life. I've studied away from Nairobi, but always try to bring back my research and the questions that I'm asking to home and the women that I've worked with in informal settlements in Kenya. That's just my research, but how I approach studying and how I approach being in big institutions is definitely inspired by how I was raised by my mom and my grandma, and I have a thousand aunts. Grew up in something of a matriarchy, I would say. So, yeah, for sure.
Bridget Todd: 04:54 So you were raised in a community of strong, badass women?
Arwa Mboya: 04:58 Yeah, and really scary ones too. So you look at them with a lot of love and admiration, but also a lot of fear.
Bridget Todd: 05:05 Arwa works with virtual reality. That means she has to be able to imagine worlds that haven't even been seen yet. It's a spirit that drives her, both personally and professionally. Do you think that that work has helped you imagine a future where things can be better than they are?
Arwa Mboya: 05:24 Yeah, I would say so. I think I've always had that in me before I started playing on VR and AI, and I think those projects are things that are already within me as opposed to things that have made me think a certain way. I grew up just reading and listening to a lot of amazing women and men, actually. Both my grandpas are fantastic men and have been so influential in shaping Kenya and imagining Kenya differently that I would say it's totally in me. When I was talking against my director, it wasn't even so much that I was imagining a different future. It was more like: this current present, something is off. Something is not right. And everything I've been taught since growing up is: if something's not right, you fix it or you say something about it, but you don't sit around and do nothing.
Bridget Todd: 06:23 As a grad student in the Media Lab, Arwa published a piece in The Tech, MIT's student publication, about the university's connection to Jeffrey Epstein. In it, she called for the resignation of Joi Ito, the head of the MIT media lab. Her piece ran weeks before Ronan Farrow would go on to echo her points in his New Yorker exposé on September 7th. The only difference is: Arwa called for Ito to resign, and after Farrow's piece was published, he actually did.
Bridget Todd: 06:48 Did you ever feel like people have an easier time taking the situation seriously when it's reported by a white man?
Arwa Mboya: 06:55 Yeah, for sure. And I appreciate Ronan Farrow's work a lot. And we actually got to meet him and we talked about this. But Signe Swenson, she was the real hero of the story. She was the actual whistleblower. And sometimes people treat me like I was a whistleblower when I didn't whistleblow anything. I just had the same information that everybody else had and said my opinion about it. And for sure, even on the comments on my article, there were so many comments that had to do with my race and ethnicity and where I'm from, as opposed to not agreeing with me and my ideas. It was very much like, "Well, you're not from America, you don't know what we're talking about." And then Ronan Farrow writes this article and, of course, everyone just jumped ship. And I totally understood my director resigning after that.
Arwa Mboya: 07:46 I was just more shocked of how many people said, "Oh, we were wrong," after the article. Because to me, it's like we already had that information beforehand and people had made up their decision to support him at that point, and it's only when a powerful, and not just white man, but a powerful white man writes about it, that it's enough to sway people's opinions or feelings, or at least their vocal ones.
Bridget Todd: 08:13 I heard an NPR interview where you described your meeting with Ito, where he basically said: I agree with all the things that you're saying. All the things that you say I did, I totally did. You're completely right. Except, I don't think I should lose my job over it.
Arwa Mboya: 08:27 Yeah, and there were a lot of people who felt that way and a lot of people still feel that way because he was the heart of the Media Lab and a lot of people depended on him for their projects, for funding. Other people were coming into the Media Lab for the first time under his leadership. So it makes sense that some people feel that way. I think the Ronan Farrow thing was interesting because we had that one afternoon and then it was that same afternoon that Ronan Farrow's article dropped. So between our meeting and him resigning was maybe four to five hours, really not much.
Bridget Todd: 09:06 Wow.
Arwa Mboya: 09:06 Yeah. So it was, overall, really shocking. But to me that's, again, a power thing. It's a totally different situation if one first-year masters student who has no power whatsoever says you should resign and it's a totally different thing if Ronan Farrow comes after you. And he has a lot on stake, it's not just his job at the Media Lab, he has a lot of venture capital and a lot of other endeavors that I think must have been in his head to protect. I don't know what it was that made him cave in at that moment.
Bridget Todd: 09:42 It's easy to think about marginalized people who speak up and these situations as being fearless, but Arwa actually remembers being pretty scared and doing it anyway. She drew strength from the courage of other women and girls on the continent.
Arwa Mboya: 09:55 The fear I was feeling was actually from my mom because she didn't want me to write the article. I don't like disagreeing with my mom, but we just did on this particular issue. And she was coming from a perspective of fear or trying to take care of her baby that she has sent to America to study. She was scared that something might happen to my degree or that I might lose my visa or something and not be able to finish. But I don't know, I didn't have that fear so much and I just happened to be reading a really amazing book called: Beneath the Tamarind Tree, which is by Isha Sesay of CNN about the Boko Haram Bring-Back-Our-Girls story and Nigeria. Then amount of courage there was so wild that it just so happened that this is all happening at the same time and I'm seeing myself as such a small player and seeing the thing that I want to do is not that big compared to some of the things that these girls went through and some of the things that they fought for against literal terrorists.
Arwa Mboya: 11:02 And I was like, "Okay, if they have this kind of courage to stand with a gun to their face and not change their religion, because it's what they believe in," then if I believe in this thing, then the least I can do is say it with my chest. That was how I was feeling. I was actually feeling empowered and inspired while I was writing it. I sometimes describe myself as a radical feminist, but there's nothing radical about it. It's just that the word 'feminist' sometimes seems radical to people. But I just am a product of so many amazing woman that it's not shocking that I searched for even more inspiration from other women on the continent, around the world.
Bridget Todd: 11:48 After her letter calling for Ito to resign was published, things got rough for Arwa. What was the climate like for you at MIT after you published your piece?
Arwa Mboya: 11:59 It sucked. The very next day or the day after I published this article, a website comes out saying we support Joi Ito and it's signed by pretty much every professor at the Media Lab and it's signed by all my colleagues and all these people. And it's a direct response to my one article. And so it wasn't nice. I was getting some not nice comments, but I was able to ignore most of them and feel okay, but it really highlighted to me how fearful people can get when you speak the truth or when you say your own truth. Because for me, a whole website springing up with it signed with all these hundreds of names just because one student wrote an article, is shocking to me. And that student has no power. I don't know why there was so much fear or so much anger, so much defense because nobody else...
Arwa Mboya: 13:00 There was lots of articles about it. There was lots of articles that were very nonpartisan and saying what happened, but nobody asked for him to resign, except me. And it's almost as if that one statement or that one article was a wave through the Media Lab and everyone was pushing back as if what I said might break the whole Media Lab, or make it fall apart. And some people still today think it's my fault for sure. There's nothing I can do about that and I'm not willing to try to pound it to those people, but it just showed me. It really taught me the power of words.
Bridget Todd: 13:40 We'll be right back after this quick break.
Bridget Todd: 13:49 And we're back. By establishing financial relationships with respected organizations like MIT, Epstein got powerful people, mostly men, to provide cover, protection and most importantly, reputational redemption. Once you've got the protection of that kind of power, it can be hard to penetrate.
Bridget Todd: 14:08 Power: powerful friends, powerful names, powerful money, all of it makes it harder for people who exist outside of that power to speak out about bad behavior.
Bridget Todd: 14:18 Why do you think the Media Lab overlooked Epstein's crimes? Do you think it was just the money and they didn't care where it came from? Or do you think it was something else?
Arwa Mboya: 14:27 I know that some people knew and some people didn't know. So I can really only speak for the person that I know for sure knew, which is Joi. And the rest, I don't know. He wielded a lot of power in this lab. We do know for a fact that there were people who, including my advisor, Ethan Zuckerman, who spoke out and said that this was not a good idea, and said that we shouldn't take money from Epstein. And they were ignored. The hard, cold truth is that money is power and there is a massive incentive to ignore certain problems or ethics if you're going to get power by ignoring them. I think the other thing to remember with the Epstein situation is that he wasn't giving the Media Lab that much money anyway.
Arwa Mboya: 15:18 I think a lot of the money that was in... An MIT report just came out on the funding issue and we found out that Joi was actually trying to secure a much bigger pot of funding for his own venture capital funds, so huge incentive to ignore what was on the surface. And then the other thing is just, I don't think men get it all the time. Sometimes, I really think that some people thought that it's just not that big a deal because they have no understanding on what that relationship even in and of itself without money means for the victims of Epstein's. We have no idea how this consolidation of power represses the victims and silences them.
Bridget Todd: 16:06 It almost sounds like Epstein was trying to use his money to create this cover so that if anybody ever tried to call him out on his actions, he could just be like, "Oh, well look at all these powerful influential men I surround myself with."
Arwa Mboya: 16:18 In some ways, it was really smart because he didn't actually have that much money. He wasn't a Bill Gates that, but had enough to know the right people and actually build a social circle around himself that included politicians, scientists, artists, businessmen, and it was so strong that everybody wanted to be a part of it. And it was Epstein's name that you had to know to get in that circle.
Bridget Todd: 16:49 Arwa still thinks highly of MIT, but the backlash she faced for speaking out against Joi Ito, showed her that things are not always as shiny as they look from the outside.
Arwa Mboya: 16:58 And I think the Media Lab... It's hard because I love this place. I've had a fantastic two years, I've learned so much, I've grown so much and I wouldn't change it for anything. But I think this experience has just been such an example of that, because it is so shiny on the outside, it's so glamorous, everyone wants to be here, but that doesn't mean that we don't have issues, institutional issues of power and race and class and all these other things that might make the place not so amazing.
Bridget Todd: 17:31 Do you think that there should be more scrutiny on other powerful men who had financial entanglements with Epstein? I feel like a lot of them have been able to skirt public scrutiny and public question asking about what exactly their dealings with this person were.
Arwa Mboya: 17:46 Oh yeah, for sure. I can't speak for much more than MIT, but I know even Harvard had relations with, took a lot of money from Epstein, but they just declined to even talk about it. And so they took the 'mum' path and everyone forgot about it. Whereas at MIT, it was so widely talked about. And Epstein's network is so extensive that going through every single man who interacted with him, or women for that matter, actually, and took money from him and what they knew and how they knew it, is extremely difficult. So I don't know how to do that, but there should be a way larger conversation around these networks of power, whether we isolate individuals within them or not. And I think that also has a lot to do with who's willing to speak, who's willing to come forward with information, because when we don't know anything, all we can do is speculate and they have power and that doesn't really work. So I don't know. I feel like everyone should be held accountable for sure, but I don't even know where you start with Epstein.
Bridget Todd: 19:04 I almost wonder if this is part of a deliberate strategy of Epstein's: getting his money in so many powerful places and hands and institutions that untangling it almost seems impossible.
Arwa Mboya: 19:14 Yeah, and I'm a firm believer of nothing is impossible, but there's such a close link, and I'm not saying that anyone who took his money did anything more than that, but, especially with the people who were closer with him, there is a link with those people and victims. And I think right now, what needs to happen is that the victim's narratives need to be centered and the people who have been hurt by Epstein need to have space to say, "This is how I was hurt. This is how I'm feeling. This is what I need to recover," and if they feel up for it, "These are the people who hurt me, beyond Epstein."
Bridget Todd: 19:53 It's hard to admit that people and institutions that mean a lot to us are actually fostering abusive behavior. Joi was a beloved figure at MIT and that made it that much harder for the community to reckon with the fact that he enabled, benefited from and covered up for an abuser.
Arwa Mboya: 20:09 Joi, himself, was a figure of so much awe and inspiration and resource to the Media Lab students and faculty, that people didn't want to believe that he had done this thing that they didn't agree with. And it was much easier if we just said, "Okay, hush, hush, let's sweep it under the rug and move on and pretend like this never happened." And so I understand that to some degree, but the world is constantly changing. And I think if you're always that person on the bottom of the ladder in certain societies, it always comes from the bottom up. It's always that change in institutions is never going to happen by the people for who the institution is working.
Arwa Mboya: 20:54 The media was working for me. It wasn't I was always having a great time, but I didn't have the same feelings about the director that most of my naysayers had. I wasn't actually giving up funding for a specific project by calling him out. So in other ways it was easier for me than I... I get why it was easier for me than other people, but for a place that calls itself the Future Factory, for a place that prides itself in imagining and creating the future, literally, the standard has got to be higher and it's got to be higher not from a tech perspective but from a human perspective too.
Speaker 6: 21:39 So this is where it starts to look like the Academy awards. So first I want to invite up the winners of the $250,000 disobedience award, the second largest cash prize at MIT, I would say, after the Lemelson Award for innovation. So Tarana Burke and Sherry Marts and BethAnn McLaughlin, please come up. With this award, we are recognizing their leadership and dedication in amplifying the voices of survivors of sexual violence and harassment, formatting positive change towards gender equality and demonstrating defiance in the face of oppression and apathy. Thank you very much.
Bridget Todd: 22:15 In 2017, MIT started the Disobedience Award, a yearly award given to people in tech who speak truth to power. The award came with a $250,000, no-strings-attached prize. In 2018, it was awarded to Me To creator Tarana Burke, BethAnn McLaughlin and Sherry Marts as representatives of Me Too and the Me Too in STEM movement, that highlighted people speaking up against sexual harassment in technology. The physical award is a glass orb, and in a particularly disgusting piece of irony, because of his financial contributions to MIT, convicted sex offender and serial predator: Epstein, received a replica of that very award that same year too.
Bridget Todd: 22:54 I know you're infuriated now, but this is where the story gets a little bit brighter. My friend Sabrina Hersi Issa is the kind of person I hope that you all have in your lives. Mentor doesn't really cover just how impactful she's been in my home life. She's a human rights technologist and the founder of BeBold media and Sabrina has never stopped uplifting other women or speaking truth to power, even when she gets shit for it. Sabrina had never spoken to Arwa, but she did read her story.
Sabrina Hersi I...: 23:20 A friend of mine sent me a link to Arwa's op-ed in the MIT student newspaper. When I read it, first I thought this was so beautifully written and it was written from a place of love and leadership and clearly this was a voice of someone who cares deeply, not just for women and children, but for a community. Then I saw the arc of how her op ed-was being received in the MIT community and in the broader technology community, and that is when things started to not sit well with me. In Bridget and our star women in technology community, I saw Arwa's op-ed being received as: this is a brave call for students, but I saw a lot of echoing of helplessness from very powerful women in technology and a lot of wringing of hands and a lot of, "Oh, what do we do now?" Or, "I feel hopeless." And when I read Arwa's op-ed, I felt the opposite of hopeless. I felt hope.
Sabrina Hersi I...: 24:28 I felt, "Oh, if this is what someone could say with so much to lose and so much on the line, then anything is possible." And then I got absorbed in the broader public conversation around Epstein and MIT, and I saw Arwa being demonized and being framed her. I saw Arwa's public leadership being framed as a problem instead of a blessing, and I was not okay watching that. I saw Reddit forums where people were, "If she doesn't like it, she can go back to Africa." I saw a lot of hate being spewed on Twitter. The further the rings of influence went out, the more I saw this woman's brave call of public leadership being received how most black women, who practice moral courage in public spaces, being received. I was not okay with that. You know me and I walked through fires in the past where that was the arc that played out and I knew I could not, in good conscious, do nothing and be okay with that or say nothing and do okay with that more.
Bridget Todd: 25:53 More There Are No Girls On The Internet, after this quick break.
Bridget Todd: 26:04 And we're back. Even though they had never met, Sabrina was inspired by Arwa's actions at MIT. She remembered all the times in her our own career that she spoke out against sexism and racism and got vitriol for it. Speaking out, takes guts and leadership, and Sabrina couldn't re-watch the pattern of a woman without institutional power behind her being criticized for daring to speak up for what's right, even as Ronan Farrow was praised for doing the exact same thing. And while his reporting was a big part of why Ito stepped down, it wasn't Farrow who was risking his personal safety by speaking up, it was Arwa.
Sabrina Hersi I...: 26:37 The thing about this that really struck me was not just the vulnerability of her visibility when she did step up and speak out and say something. She was met with, not even no support, but with a lot of hatred and anger. But the invisibility of her leadership when a white guy says the same thing that she said and he's not even a part of the MIT community, Ronan Farrow's safety was never going in question. And I wasn't okay with watching yet another pattern of someone outside of a community and institution with prestige be validated as a legitimate voice. I didn't want my silence to be complicit in continuing that pattern.
Bridget Todd: 27:30 Sabrina thought that Arwa should get some kind of recognition for her actions at MIT. That's when Sabrina got the idea for the Bold Prize.
Sabrina Hersi I...: 27:36 MIT has this thing called the Disobedience Prize. It is a $250,000 cash award, no strings attached, given to social change leaders who speak truth to power and practice moral leadership and ethics. And I thought: MIT has no right to say what ethical leadership looks like if they are letting this man stay in this role, if they're letting this happen to young black women in their community. So I was like, "Hey, I have a voice and I have power and I can do something." And I did say something. I wanted this young woman to know that I her. And then I was like, "You know what, why don't I give you an award?"
Sabrina Hersi I...: 28:23 So I was thinking, would it be okay if I crowdfunded a leadership prize for you? And she was like, "That would be really sweet. Thank you so much."
Sabrina Hersi I...: 28:30 I wrote a letter that you see on ballparks.com where I said that I do not know her, but I admire her courage and that I wasn't okay watching a young black woman speak up and lead with courage and not only not be seen but also be harmed for it. There's the world as it is and the world as it should be. And if we want to build the world as it should be, then we need to reframe what leadership looks like so that when these events happen, people like Arwa are not seen as the bad actors, they're seen as the future, they're seen as world builders. So I wanted to use my voice and my power and my relationship and resources to shift the conversation from blame to leadership; from the world as it is to the world that it should be and that it is not just her right to speak out to protect women in her community, but also it's within all of our abilities to speak out and do the same thing.
Sabrina Hersi I...: 29:42 The other piece that did not sit well with me was watching really powerful people that we both know, not recognize their own power and agency. So I believe in the power of invitation and I don't believe that they weren't doing anything out of malice or ignorance, but the fact that an opportunity for them to participate in something different and transformative wasn't there. So I decided to create it. We are going to refashion the Disobedience Prize and we're going to make it the Bold Prize. I called it the Bold Prize for three specific reasons. One, when Ethan Zuckerman first announced his thing, that's when I was like, "Someone should give him an award." The second thing, in Arwa's piece, she uses the phrase, "I stand by my adviser." Ethan Zuckerman's her advisor and she wrote, "I stand by my advisor and his bold decision to step down." And I was like, "Oh, that word: bold."
Sabrina Hersi I...: 30:37 And then three: when I was in a situation where I was speaking out against sexual misconduct and racial injustice, one of the people who were complicit in covering it up, had the audacity to call me, "Bold." And I thought to myself, "Yeah, I am bold and maybe this wouldn't be so hard if more people were."
Bridget Todd: 31:01 MIT's Media Lab is called the Future Factory, but do we even want a future designed by powerful people that would look the other way when it comes to abuse? What kind of future would that leave us with?
Sabrina Hersi I...: 31:10 The choices that MIT made to enable Epstein and be complicit in covering for a sexual predator, those deliberate decisions and choices that were made outside of a moral compass. And so to somehow envelope that into: they need to be leaders on what ethics look like, and not only just what ethics look like, but what the future can be in a whole. I don't want a future imagined by people you participate in systems like that. I want to build a future with leaders like Arwa, who not only practice to make choices to do the heart... [Inaudible 00:32:02] some heart into it anyway, but our willing to absorb the blow back that comes with it because it's the right thing to do.
Bridget Todd: 32:10 Through crowdfunding, Sabrina raised over $40,000 for Arwa as the inaugural recipient of the Bold Prize. The average donation was $75.
Arwa Mboya: 32:21 I was just so in awe. I was like, "Oh my God, thank you so much," But not just because this was a stranger, and not just any stranger, she was a black woman as well and had just somehow seen my pain from far away, or seeing the struggle, and was like, "I need to do something for this woman." And so that was the true prize for me: how many people came together to support my voice when I had felt for a long time that I was on the outside of things.
Bridget Todd: 32:49 I feel, just for journalistic integrity purposes, I should say, I'm one of the donators of that.
Arwa Mboya: 32:54 Aw, thank you.
Bridget Todd: 32:57 I agree. I thought the idea that Sabrina, who has been a really powerful force in my own life, just personally, would reach out to you like that, I thought that was so beautiful. And it really goes back to what you were saying at the beginning of our interview, about being lifted up by this community of black women and lifting them up as well. It is really special and I think it was important for me, even though you and I had never met. It was important for me to let you know that people out there had your back. We were rooting for you, watching what you were doing. Your bravery and your courage reverberates.
Arwa Mboya: 33:40 Thank you.
Bridget Todd: 33:40 You never know who is going to be seeing what you did and that's going to be the reason why they speak up.
Arwa Mboya: 33:45 Thank you. Yeah, I think that's also been another big thing that I've gained, is: you just never know whose life you're going to touch or where your words will reach. And there's been so many random people who were saying what you're saying, like, "Oh, you gave me the courage to do this. Or you gave me the courage to write this and to say this," and whatever. And I've been like, "Okay, this can be a movement." The Bold Prize can be a movement. It can be something that people aspire to get.
Arwa Mboya: 34:19 I didn't have a vendetta against Joi personally either. So it wasn't like I wanted him fired or to resign and would only be happy once that happened, because clearly this issue was deeply structural within MIT as well. So I felt vindicated time after, with the bowl prize and with the letters of support by people encouraging me to keep speaking my mind. But we still have so much work to do as an institution here.
Bridget Todd: 34:54 What's your advice for other women, about speaking truth to power even when it's tough?
Arwa Mboya: 34:58 The first is I really think it is a lonely process and it isn't easy. I've learned that firsthand. And I think, this might sound mythical, but I think drawing power from others before you do what you need to do is so important because you're going to need so much energy to keep going and to not backtrack on what you said because people don't agree with you. And so, if that's reading or if that's talking to actual people, or if that's listening to Lizzo, literally drawing power from other women in history and time because there are so many who have done the thing that you want to do. It's so important, it gives you stamina.
Bridget Todd: 35:44 Institutions like MIT are powerful, but so are women. So is community. Women being in community with each other and lifting each other up and inspiring each other to speak our truths, well, that's powerful enough to create new systems. And women can envision bolder futures and brighter realities may come together.
Bridget Todd: 36:03 There Are No Girls On The Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unboxed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tara Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.
Bridget Todd: 36:17 For more podcasts from iHeart, Check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.