Jennifer Siebel Newsom on her legacy as California’s first associate
California First Partner and documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s time in state workplace with Gov. Gavin Newsom concludes in January 2027, when the latter’s ultimate time period ends after eight years. The former Newsom stated she seems again with delight about not standing down on pay fairness and different points that plague girls, regardless of the flack she’s collected alongside the best way.
“I’m significantly happy with the work that we’ve executed when it comes to girls’s wealth and shutting the ladies’s wealth hole,” Siebel Newsom stated Tuesday on the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif., in dialog with Ellie Austin, the host of Fortune Daily and editorial director of Most Powerful Women.
Asked what metrics she needed her legacy as first associate to be judged on, Siebel Newsom began with pay. California has “the strongest equal pay legal guidelines within the nation,” she stated, and “a whole bunch of firms have signed on to our equal pay pledge.” She launched #EqualPayCA, a statewide marketing campaign aimed toward closing the gender pay hole, in 2019.
“But that wasn’t sufficient, which is why we turned to girls’s wealth,” she stated.
Siebel Newsom pointed to the financial literacy requirement in California high schools starting with the 2030-31 graduating class. She additionally cited CalKids, a financial savings program she stated was launched earlier than Trump Accounts to incentivize households to put money into their youngsters’s futures. She additionally highlighted expanded entry to capital for feminine entrepreneurs and broader entry to the her husband himself, a difficulty she discover early on that prompted her to work on making these circles larger.
For Siebel Newsom, the case is financial.
“Women anchor households, communities, and now, as you all know, the marketplace,” Siebel Newsom stated. “One of the explanations we’ve actually invested in California for all girls … is as a result of we all know that if girls should not in a position to thrive, how can their households, their communities, and the marketplace thrive?”
That concentrate on households runs by her different work. She stated investments in common pre-Ok, after-school packages, summer season faculty and faculty meals have been meant “to mitigate prices and stress to households in California,” and have saved them hundreds of {dollars} per 12 months.
“[I’m a] first associate as a result of I needed to be a associate to California’s girls, youngsters, and households,” she stated. Siebel Newsom took the title “first associate” as a substitute of “first girl” to sign inclusivity, recognizing California will someday have a girl or LGBTQ+ governor, and to emphasise the worth of partnership in authorities, according to the governor’s office.
She’s additionally made an effort to alter who will get heard in state authorities by launching California’s Women’s Wealth Advisory Council.
“I used to be uninterested in going into rooms the place the vast majority of the boys with entry, the vast majority of the folks with entry to my husband have been males, and some girls,” she stated. “I needed to increase publicity to authorities.”
A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford’s corporate affairs faculty, Siebel Newsom is a documentary filmmaker whose work consists of Miss Representation, The Mask You Live In and The Great American Lie.
Her newest movie, Miss Representation: Rise Up, expands on the unique by wanting on the backlash in opposition to girls’s progress and expertise used to harass and silence girls. It premiered on the Tribeca Festival in June. She stated it would premiere in New York City on Oct. 22. She and the governor have 4 youngsters.
