Encouraging Girls to Ask Questions, Dream Bigger

Hello! Welcome to Wells $treet, where I’ve kicked “The Man” to the curb for much of June and put women in charge of the narrative. I feel better already (sorry, guys). Check out previous girl power columns here.

Today’s column stands out from the others, though, as the woman I profile doesn’t share corporate war stories or dispense advice for surviving business battles. Instead, *she’s* the one who’s learning… from the very people she’s committed to serve.

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If you’re not a working mother, or you don’t have daughters, or there are no women in your life, today’s column is probably not for you.

And yet…

There’s something we can all learn from Illana Raia.

“I was a lawyer for many years, a really happy, really nerdy lawyer,” Illana told me during a Facebook Live interview. She’d been inspired by her grandmother, who was also a lawyer. That’s right, her grandmother. “The picture of her graduating class is just guys, and then right in the middle was a little blonde lawyer.” (Illana kept newspaper stories about her grandmother arguing before the bench — “Every single one of them would comment on what she was wearing in the courtroom.”)

Illana’s own experience in the legal industry was a positive one. ”It was just about how hard you worked,” she says. “I did not ever feel diminished in any way because I was the only woman in the room, ever.” She credits strong mentors, both male and female.

And then one day in 2014 she walked away from the law.

Illana hungered to do something more meaningful. Her kids were grown by this time, and an old idea started gnawing at her.

From Legal Eagle to Être Girls

Going back a few years, as Illana was working her way up the corporate law ladder, she realized that her daughter, who was in middle school, “did not really know what I did every day for a living, and it bothered me.” She felt like she wasn’t mentoring her daughter.

When she retired in 2014, the idea of mentoring girls returned. Illana says research shows that confidence levels in 14-year-old girls can plummet 30%. They quit sports twice as often as boys do at that age. So she wanted to create a place where girls could meet successful women — including athletes — who were confident and who did not quit.

She originally planned to host a “girl summit,” but a friend told her, “This is a little bit bigger than that.” So in 2016 Illana launched Être Girls (“être” is French for “to be”) and she built a rudimentary website. Then she formed a board made up of tweens and teens as advisors, girls who told her what kinds of careers they wanted to learn about. But these girls didn’t want to just talk about it or read about it. “They wanted to go and meet the women.”

Illana contacted a friend who worked at Spotify, and the friend welcomed about a dozen Être girls to company headquarters. The teenagers explored the facility and interviewed six women who worked for the music streaming service. “It was [while] watching these girls spin in the boardroom chairs at Spotify that I thought, ‘This is what we should be doing. This is exactly the heart of it.’”

Since then, Être has taken girls on field trips to a variety of companies and even the New York Stock Exchange. Illana has launched “Club Être,” which she calls a “club-in-a-box” for girls who want to mentor younger girls at school. There’s “Être Campus” for young women heading to college, and she created a speakers bureau of Être TED-Ed speakers.

Geez, I coulda used this myself back in the day.

Être Girls visits the NYSE/Courtesy Illana Raia

How to find a mentor? First, ask.

If you’re a middle-schooler or high school girl — or you know one — Illana says you (or she) should take advantage of Instagram or LinkedIn and reach out.

Find someone in a career you’re interested in and write something very simple, like, “I saw something you wrote” or “I saw you speak somewhere,” and add, “I think I’m interested in that. Would you answer a question by email? Could I DM you one question?” Keep it light but specific.

You’ll be surprised by the supportive responses.

In fact, this is the exact approach Illana often took for her new book, “The Epic Mentor Guide.”

180 Women, 180 Different Questions

In the book, Être girls ask 180 questions of 180 successful women ranging from astronaut Anna Fisher to supermodel Tyra Banks.

“The book came about because when Covid hit, we could no longer go into companies,” Illana explains. She moved physical Être meetups to Zoom, and something amazing happened. “Girls from much further away started joining, so I would have a Zoom and you’d see someone in Turkey or in India… which stunned and thrilled me.” These girls were asking the same questions as their American counterparts — How do I land this internship? How can I ask about inclusion in an interview? How can I use TikTok to network?

An idea clicked in Illana’s head. “Why aren’t we collecting all of these questions and getting the answers?” So that’s what she did: She took the best and most interesting questions, then tracked down the right experts for answers. “We got questions about neurosurgery. We got questions about really unusual archeology, construction, architecture, poker strategy, a skydiver.” (Not every question could be answered — “I had a really specific question about veterinary medicine, and it was very specific to a very specific type of animal, and a very specific type of injury,” Illana recalls. “The level of detail was staggering.”)

Each page of the book reads like a daily dose of inspiration, as short, direct questions from girls receive short, insightful answers from women mentors. A couple of examples:

Être Question: ”What’s the first thing we should do before asking someone to be our mentor?”

”Offer to be of service before you ask for anything. That’s how you build lasting relationships” — Michele Ghee, CEO of Ebony and Jet.

Être Question: ”What if we don’t know exactly what we want to do or where we want to work yet? In other words, what happens if we can’t pick one specific career path?”

”Focus on skills you excel in, then apply these to industries or problems you’re passionate about. Remember that a job is not forever, and you aren’t defined by your title or the company you work for. Just like life, careers are about the journey, not the destination — so do what you love, but when what you love changes, don’t be afraid to change with it.“ — Sarah Wilson, pro skier-turned-robotics engineer

Illana’s favorite answers come from women who’ve pivoted. “I love Dawn Porter, when she talks about going from practicing law to making movies with Oprah, and she talks about the ‘what if?’ Ask yourself the ‘what if?’”

Most rewarding for Illana has been watching so many girls grow into confident young women. “I’ve seen girls who might be really reticent on the bus as we’re going somewhere,” she says. But once they’re in the boardroom to grill the women they’re visiting, “Their hands are up, their voices are loud and they’re asking profound questions.”

What questions do you have? Hey, seriously, got a question for me about getting into journalism? Join the discussion below, or 📫 jane@janewells.com.

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