AAN Executive Director Tiffany Shackelford was a keynote speaker at Hack the Gender Gap, an event produced by MediaShift and West Virginia University which brought together college-aged women to “help them see themselves as entrepreneurs and leaders in journalism and technology.”:

Shackelford said Gen Xers like her have “just sort of taken on being men, right, like I act like a man…I think about my Naval aviator dad in my head and I think, ‘What would daddy do?’ And that’s how I act,” she said.

She said it worked to push her career forward, but “that’s bullshit and that sucks and that’s why these [events] are important.” Shackelford wants to teach women to “understand how to think, how to celebrate differences and how to say ‘yes, this is my point of view and we’re 52 f***ing percent so, yeah, you are gonna listen.’”