January: Member's Meeting

February: Jane Woodward, Stanford University, Consulting Assistant Professor, Petroleum Engineering
Jane Woodward is a founding shareholder of Mineral Acquisition Partners, Inc. (MAP) and serves as its President and CEO. MAP focuses solely on the acquisition and management of natural gas royalty interests – and more recently, renewable energy royalty interests primarily associated with commercial wind and solar projects – all in the onshore United States. The firm is committed to a more sustainable energy future and dedicates a significant share of its carried interest income to initiatives related this theme.

Since 1990, Ms. Woodward has been a Consulting Associate Professor at Stanford University where she teaches classes on energy and environment in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. In 1988, she co-founded Community Impact, a Bay Area public service volunteer organization now called Hands On Bay Area. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a BA in Geology, she also has an MS in Engineering and Petroleum Geology and an MBA, both from Stanford.

Ms. Woodward serves on the Management Board of Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Advisory Board of the new Stanford Center for Energy Efficiency and the Advisory Board of SunEdison. She also sits on the Advisory Board of the Family Office Exchange and is a Trustee Associate of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Foundation.

March: Tina Lee, "The Case for Women’s Colleges in the 21st Century"
Tina Lee grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and has become one of the youngest members of the Board of Trustees of Mills College, a women’s college in Oakland. Having had held roles in both start-ups and large corporations, Tina's professional background includes industry experience in management consulting, staffing and recruiting, and publishing. In 2003, Tina was instrumental in launching Hyphen Magazine, a successful Asian American focused art and culture magazine. She also played a key role in developing the Mentorship Program at the Women's Technology Cluster, the nation's first technology and biotech industry business incubator specifically targeted to women entrepreneurs. While working as a management consultant at Accenture, Tina helped Fortune 100 clients in the telecommunications and high-tech industries implement technology solutions and re-engineer business processes to enhance performance. As a recruiting manager and account executive at Robert Half International, Tina helped build a new permanent placement division focused on Information Technology staffing in the East Bay Metropolitan Area. Tina is currently launching her first entrepreneurial endeavor – a civic minded retail clothing chain aimed at politically and socially engaged urban professional women.

In addition, Tina is a published author and an active community member. She holds a B.A. in Political, Legal and Economic Analysis with an emphasis in Economics and an MBA from Mills College, where she currently serves on the Board of Trustees. Tina is also a board member of Good Ol' Girls, a political, professional, and social network for progressive women in politics, government, non-profit, law, technology, the arts, and business.

About the topic:
With so many women obtaining college degrees and pursuing professional careers in the past 40 years, you'd assume gender equity would no longer be an in issue in the 21st century. Sadly, this is not the case.

While women now hold 51% of managerial positions, they represent only 16% of Fortune 1000 corporate officers, 10% of power positions such as CEO and COO, and 5% of those holding top earning jobs. In government, women represent only 15% of the 535 seats in Congress and 14% of the 100 seats in the Senate. But of those women at the top, 33% of female Fortune 1000 board members are graduates of women's colleges, as are 36% of the highest-paid female officers at those companies, and 20% of Congresswomen, including our very own Barbara Lee and Nancy Pelosi. Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, graduated from a women's college, as did Hillary Clinton, our first viable female presidential candidate.

With women now comprising more than 55% of undergraduate enrollment across the country and only 2% of those being enrolled in women's colleges, why are alumnae of single-sex colleges so well represented among our nation's top leadership ranks?

In this Thursday Morning Dialogue, we will discover why there is still a compelling case for women's colleges in the 21st century and how they can to propel the next generation of women forward.

April: Susan Lucas-Conwell, From Betty Crocker to Cartier: Connecting the Dots to Silicon Valley
Susan Lucas-Conwell, CEO of SDForum, will share amusing anecdotes and insights from her unexpected personal and professional journey from Manhattan to Paris to Silicon Valley. Her personal story includes uprooting her French husband and four children in Paris and crossing the physical and cultural divide to California. Having been an American in Paris and being perceived a foreigner in Silicon Valley, she draws some interesting comparisons between the two cultures—the ways of doing business, schooling children, and living life.

About the speaker:
Susan is an accomplished CEO, entrepreneur, business development and marketing executive with global experience. She is the CEO of SDForum, Silicon Valley’s largest and oldest high-tech non-profit that provides education and a networking community of technologists, entrepreneurs, VCs and others. Her professional career includes marketing for General Mills and senior management positions at Cartier International, Bausch & Lomb (Ray Ban) and Chateau and Country (a French internet start-up). She also founded Clear-Day, an international business accelerator working with a portfolio of companies such as Nokia and a European private equity firm.

She graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in economic history, a Masters degree in economic history from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from The Wharton School. She is a frequent speaker at business schools and conferences in Europe and the US.

May: Teresa Williamson, founder of TangoDiva.com and author, Flying Solo, a book about traveling by yourself as a woman
Teresa Rodriguez Williamson is a jet-setter extraordinaire. She discovered that traveling can be the perfect antidote for anything ailing the soul. And, believing so, she created TangoDiva.com—a worldwide online social network and travel magazine for women. Her dream was to connect and empower woman around the globe with the wisdom she gleaned from her solo sojourns. She authored FLY SOLO: The 50 Best Places on Earth for a Girl to Travel Alone (Penguin 2007). A few of her TV appearances include LIVE with Regis and Kelly, NBC-NY, FOX, CBS, and ABC Sydney. Her advice has been written up in over a thousand media outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ELLE, Marie Claire, Allure, SELF, and Real Simple. Her varied career has included advertising, working for Richard Simmons and the Australian TV game show, “Blind Date.” She hosts "Travels with Tango Diva" on KTRB 860 AM in California.

Teresa will be speaking about how she arrived at this amazing career and why she believes traveling solo is the best thing a woman can do for herself.

June: Christina Bernal, Former Ballerina and Nun, Founder of The Bernal Method, Spiritual Advisor and Educator, speaking on "A Life of Spiritual and Artistic Trailblazing and Innovations"
Christina Bernal has lived a life more fascinating than fiction. When she was 14, she became the youngest dancer to join the San Francisco Ballet Company. Then at 18, she entered the Society of the Sacred Heart to live a contemplative life as a nun. She thought she would never dance again but she was allowed to interpret the Psalms in dance and danced the first Mass at the 1968 National Theology Convention in San Francisco. Time Magazine covered this event with an article titled The Dancing Nun.

After seven years, Christina left the convent when post-Vatican II eliminated semi-cloistered orders. She was invited by Lew Christensen, then Director of the San Francisco Ballet, to "come back home" where she continued her dance career and began teaching. It was at SFB that she met and married a well-known ballet dancer, Laurence Matthews. Christina and Laurence moved to New York City where Christina taught dance for 22 years and began her specialty working with injured dancers including those from Martha Graham and Paul Taylor Dance Companies, Dance Theater of Harlem, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. She developed The Bernal Method which instructs dancers how the body works and the alignment that prevents injuries from occurring. She is living proof that her Method works – at age 62, she continues to dance and has never been injured. For the fifth year, Christina will be hosting an International Dance Seminar based on her Bernal Method in Stockholm.

Christina may have left the convent in 1970 but not her faith. Now back in the Bay Area, she serves as a spiritual counselor, educator in scripture and theology and continues the Liturgical Dance Movement that she started as The Dancing Nun. Her spirituality and teaching is “Wholeness, Healthfulness and Holiness.” She also has a background in home birth midwifery and nutrition and runs “Faith & Fashion,” an eBay business, which donates a portion of all sales to those most in need in Nigeria, the Sudan and Africa. She has been filmed for a documentary which has not yet been released.

July: Barbara Kate Repa, Senior Contibuting Editor, Caring.com
Barbara Kate, a lawyer and journalist, has devoted her career to editing and writing about legal issues for consumers. She’s the author of WillMaker (Nolo), best-selling software that enables consumers to write their own wills, healthcare directives, powers of attorney, and final arrangements. She's also an instructor for AIDS caregivers, teaching about legal end-of-life issues and funeral planning, and she recently wrote the content for a website for those searching for long-term care in California.

August: Members-Only Salon Discussion facilitated by our president, Katie Povejsil

September: Anne Cribbs, Olympic gold medalist and former president/CEO of BASOC (Bay Area Sports Organizing Committee), which prepared the Bay Area’s bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics and current Chair of the 2009 National Senior Games to be held in the Bay Area in August 2009.

October: Jane Frommer, Scientis, IBM Research Labs speaking on nano-technology

November 20 (third Thursday): Bo Caldwell, author of Distant Land of My Father

December 18 (third Thursday): Mari Baker, CEO of Navigenics, consumer genetic testing company
Ms. Baker was most recently an executive-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which she joined in 2006. Prior to that, she was president of BabyCenter, LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company. Under her leadership, BabyCenter became the world's leading Web site for new and expectant parents, winning numerous online health awards and expanding significantly offline and internationally.

Prior to her tenure with BabyCenter and Johnson & Johnson, she was a senior vice president at Intuit, Inc., which she joined in 1989 as product manager for Quicken. Ms. Baker led the growth of Quicken into the No. 1 personal finance product in the world, along with international expansion and the launch of Quicken.com. Ms. Baker also held executive or product management positions at Now Software, Migent Software and E.F. Hutton.

Ms. Baker attended Stanford University, graduating with degrees in economics and sociology. She served on the board of trustees of Stanford University from 1996 to 2003, including oversight of the Stanford Medical Center, and continues to serve as a trustee emeritus. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Cozi Group and is a member of the Young Presidents' Organization.