Marissa Orr

Marissa Orr is the author of the bestseller Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, & The Workplace. On stage, Orr draws from her book and her successful 15-year career inside Google and Facebook to ask the question few have the nerve to ask: What have we gotten wrong about women at work?

To close the gender gap, what makes more sense: rewiring women’s personalities or rewiring the system to better meet their needs? Marissa Orr

With career-altering experiences inside two of Silicon Valley’s leading tech giants, Orr shares her views on women at work, structural norms and teamwork. She defies conventional wisdom by offering an entirely new and fresh perspective on corporate diversity, the gender gap and female leadership. 

Orr’s presentation blends in-depth research with poignant and humorous insights from her experiences ‘playing the game’ in the corporate trenches. It is her answer to Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s call for women to take charge, assert themselves in the workplace and “lean in” to their ambitions. Instead, Orr invites audiences to consider a revolutionary alternative path forward that has the power to change the lives of women in the corporate world and beyond. 

At Google, Orr was a founding member of its sales operation and strategy team and won the company’s highest honor: The Founder’s Award. When the company acquired YouTube, Orr became Head of Market Intelligence and Strategy, helping Google sell competitively for the first time. In 2016, she was courted away to join Facebook, where she came to understand our antiquated system of organizing employees, evaluating performance and motivating people—a male-devised system developed during the Industrial Age.

Marissa Orr is not a billionaire CEO sharing rarefied wisdom from the mountaintop. She is a former mid-level executive using her firsthand experience to unpack today’s flawed conventional approach to closing the gender gap–women becoming more like men. At a time when only 18% of women aspire to occupy C-suite positions, she shows how overhauling traditional hierarchy will result in greater diversity in corporate leadership, close the gender pay gap and foster healthier work environments for both genders. 

Books & Movies

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