KEYNOTE
You can have it all.
You can't carry it all.
45 minutes, plus Q&A. In person or virtual. Drawn from the memoir 26.2: Running Toward Acceptance.
Every organization has women who are very good at their jobs and quietly running on empty. They take help graciously and pay it back before anyone notices. They are the first to volunteer and the last to ask. Their managers call them reliable. They are also the ones you lose.
I was one of them for thirty years, as a statistics professor, a founder, and a consultant to the largest companies in medicine. This talk is the story of how I found out what that was costing, told through the places it showed up: a graduate classroom where the women blamed themselves and the men blamed the materials, a company built in a spare bedroom, and mile thirteen of a marathon, where my daughter ran off with my fanny pack and I had to decide whether to finish without it.
It is not a talk about doing less. It is a talk about what it takes to keep the people who do the most.
WHO IT'S FOR
Leadership teams
Women's leadership programs and employee networks
Industry conferences and sales meetings
Graduate and professional programs
WHAT THE ROOM LEAVES WITH
Why the woman who never asks is the first one you'll lose
How to accept help without turning it into a debt
What “having it all” actually costs, and who pays
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Candace Gunnarsson, EdD, is a health outcomes researcher, entrepreneur, and author. She founded S² Statistical Solutions, Inc. from a spare bedroom and sold it to a global CRO, then returned to the university to build and teach its first HEOR program. Her research has appeared in more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and earned Health Services Research's Article of the Year. She now owns Gunnarsson Consulting, LLC, and works mainly with medical device companies. At almost sixty she ran her first marathon. Her memoir, 26.2: Running Toward Acceptance, is coming in 2027.
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