Grateful for Zoom
ZARA MALIK, GWI ‘20
ZARA, A CURRENT JUNIOR STUDYING PSYCHOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, WRITES ABOUT THE UNEXPECTED UPSIDE OF TIME ON ZOOM.
Whether you're an incoming Girls Who Invest (GWI) scholar (yay! We can't wait to have you), a college student, or a recent grad embarking on your career, the COVID-19 pandemic has probably made it difficult to find things to be grateful for.
In fact, the one thing you're probably the least grateful for a year into this pandemic is Zoom. Being online 24/7 for every possible work and social event makes Zoom fatigue a real thing.
And yet, I think Zoom is one of the best things to have happened to women like us who are striving to be seen, heard, and understood in the asset management industry.
Zoom helps us be seen.
Starting your career in what is still very much a male dominated industry can be nerve-wracking. Often, one of the first challenges a young woman faces is whether to sit front and center at the conference table or hang towards the back of the room.
On Zoom, you will always be seen. Regardless of whether you are the CEO or a first-year analyst, Zoom allocates everyone a square box of exactly the same size. (Can you imagine if the CEO's box on Zoom were twice the size of everyone else's?
It seems silly, but that's probably how many young analysts feel when joining a large in-person meeting.) Not only that, but if you raise your hand on Zoom, your box gets moved to the top of everyone's screen irrespective of what your role, prior experiences, or knowledge might be.
Zoom helps us be heard. I was pretty shy as an elementary school student. I couldn’t bear raising my hand in class, so every day I would stay after school to ask my teacher any questions I had. While I’d like to think that I've overcome my shyness now, I appreciate how Zoom is designed in a way that could make it easier for people to speak up and share their point of view. Any time I'm feeling especially nervous about speaking up in class, I'll reformat my Zoom screen to speaker mode so that I can only see my professor. That way, when I speak up, it feels like I'm just talking one-on-one to him rather than a group of over 50 other students.
Zoom helps us be understood.
I still remember as an intern at Wellington Management this summer that we would be on calls with some of the most seasoned senior women at the firm and, every once in a while, their son or daughter would pop up unexpectedly in the background. It was funny, it made us smile, but most importantly it made it apparent just how many responsibilities women face on a regular basis to excel at work and take care of their families. While we knew before COVID-19 that women are often tasked with doing more than men in the household, seeing this unfold on Zoom somehow makes everything more real and relatable.
No doubt there is still work to do to get to 30% of global investable capital to managed by women by 2030. Yet I’d like to think that of all the suffering this pandemic has wrought, maybe Zoom can help young women like ourselves feel more seen, heard, and understood in the asset management industry. That is something I am definitely grateful for.
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