Turns out I have more to say about my blog post topic from last week and the  “I.am FIRST: Science Is Rock & Roll Back-to-School Special” – a program that focused on a robotics science competition sponsored by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas – due to something else that I watched. On Monday, August 15th, HBO showed a documentary titled “Gloria: In Her Own Words” which is an excellent retrospective of activist and author Gloria Steinem.

Watching “I.am.FIRST”, I was struck by the number of young women who took part in the competition – many of them were people different ethnic and cultural background as well. Watching “Gloria: In Her Own Words”, I kept thinking that many of these young women wouldn’t be competing in a science competition if it wasn’t for leaders like Steinem.

Having diverse points of view, talents, backgrounds (men and women) working together to solve scientific problems is critical for 2 reasons:

1. In my mind, it’s just the way it should be. It’s right.
2. It gives us a competitive advantage in how we move projects and science forward. At Pfizer, I’m consistently struck by not only how collaborative people are but how bringing people of diverse talents and backgrounds together can come up with the best experiments, the best analysis of data and/or the best way to move programs forward. This is our competitive advantage and having technically excellent scientists of diverse backgrounds allows us to achieve this advantage.

This is something that we do well, and we have people like Steinem to thank for it.