For International Women’s Day, the WoW Wednesday programme of World of Women, a Web3 community founded around an NFT collection of portraits of women, invited its CEO Shannon Snow. After years at Google and Meta, she talks about bias in tech, impostor syndrome and how she protects her mental health.
Spaces not built for women
At 14, Shannon Snow joined a Jesuit high school that had only just started admitting girls: she understood that she was living in a world “not created for me”. She then chose Wellesley College, a women’s college. On her first day at the campus radio, facing a room full of technical equipment, she realised there was no “tech guy” to wait for: the women had to step up. She then spent eleven and a half years at Google and worked at Meta, where she ended up leading US entertainment, before joining World of Women.
She did not always feel bias directly, but noticed signals. At Google, she jokes, when no one knew whom to promote, they picked “the tallest guy with the best hair”. One of her role models, Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo and Autodesk, told her that being a woman is hard until a certain level, when being the only woman in the room becomes an advantage. Her lesson: your authenticity is your advantage. Female employees later told her she had shown them they could lead without becoming “more stiff, more masculine”.
Impostor syndrome and mental health
For Snow, impostor syndrome comes partly from workplaces built around one narrow image of success. In her one-on-ones at Google, most people, all brilliant, feared they had been hired by mistake. She says she did not suffer from it herself, because early Google was a group of young people figuring things out: if you are willing to learn and work hard, no one is more qualified than you.
Web3 is always on and feedback is very personal, so World of Women has a counselor on staff. She starts each day with water, yoga, journaling and gratitude, and repeats to her team that “health is number one”. The company also introduced no-meeting Tuesdays to protect time for deep work.
Finding your tribe
Her advice to women entering Web3: know why you are there, master one thing you are passionate about, and let that confidence spread. She also recommends building two kinds of support: a global community that shares your values, and people nearby, such as local meetups or women-in-tech groups in Miami, where she lives. Away from work, aerial arts, yoga and paddleboarding bring her into a “flow state” that she tries to recreate for her team with clear goals and plans.