A few years back, I watched a professor ask a class "If there are two equally qualified 27-year old candidates and the only difference was their gender, who should you hire?" 10 minutes in, the whole class agreed that there was no "better" candidate. The professor proceeded to tell us that the woman may be thinking about kids and go on maternity leave at that age. He started to call the woman at one point "the risk" and the lesson was to mitigate risk in hiring. His argument was that women are inherently risky investments, even when all the data shows otherwise. This month, I kept thinking back to this one lesson in college, equating risk to women. And now with a female Vice President-elect, I can't help but be excited for a future when women are able to prove this lesson wrong. …see more