Girl Up Texas Coalition
Meet Our 2019 Speakers
Shelmina Babai Abji
former VP at IBM, Girl Up Advisory Board
Shelmina Babai Abji is a global empowerment speaker, a former IBM Vice President, distinguished alumni, board member, an angel investor and an advisor to C-suite executives. Shelmina’s passion is gender equality in leadership, and she has been focused on sharing her insights to accelerate the success of other women into senior leadership roles. Her insights and life’s journey have inspired and transformed thousands of women and girls she has touched at conferences, corporations and educational institutions.
Shelmina was born in Tanzania in a family with very strong values and limited material wealth. She had to leave home at 15 to obtain higher education and was the first person in her family to obtain a college degree. Her education was her passport out of poverty.
Transcending fear and turning every challenge into an opportunity for growth, she rose to become one of the highest ranking women of color at IBM while raising her children as a single mother since they were 2 and 4. Shelmina has degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. She started her career as a software developer and then moved into sales and sales leadership. As part of IBM’s top talent, she has received extensive leadership training at IBM, Harvard University and UCLA.
She has spoken at many corporations and conferences including Google, Edward Jones, WITHOrg, AAHOA, Girl Up Leadership Summit, Young Women Empowered career day, NCWIT awards gala, Women In Computer Science at University of Oregon in Eugene and Young Women in Business leadership conference at Harvard University.
Shelmina serves on the advisory board of Girl Up founded by United Nations foundation which engages girls to stand up for girls globally, empowering each other and changing our world. Shelmina serves on the board of TiE-Seattle: world’s largest non profit global organization that fosters entrepreneurship.
Based on the tremendous transformation, she has witnessed in many women, she is now extending her sphere of influence by writing a book.
Monica Mehta
financial journalist, investor, and author of The Entrepreneurial Instinct
Monica Mehta is a finance expert that offers cultural commentary on money — how it impacts the economy, politics and our ability to lead entrepreneurial lives. She is currently a Managing Principal at Texas based Seventh Capital, with 20 years of experience as a principal investor. Mehta is a regular commentator on the economy for Real Time with Bill Maher, CNBC, CNN, HLN, Fox News, Fox Business, PBS, MSNBC, Bloomberg TV, ABC News and the Adam Carolla Show. She has written finance columns for WSJ, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, INC Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine and her advice has been covered by Forbes, The New York Times, Yahoo Finance and recommended by The Small Business Administration.
Her first book The Entrepreneurial Instinct: How Everyone Has the Innate Ability to Start a Successful Small Business (McGraw-Hill | 2012) explores the role of behavior and brain science in our ability to take entrepreneurial risks, be adaptable and bounce back after failure. The book received praise from the CEO of Mastercard, former CEO Comp USA, former CEO Borders Books, The Wharton School, Dartmouth Tuck, a Fed economist, INC Magazine, BloombergTV, among others and was awarded Best Start-up Book of 2012 by Small Business Trends, Finalist for Best Book of 2012 in Business & Economics by Foreword Reviews and Best Book of 2012 by the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
Mehta’s second book Backslide (late fall 2019) focuses on women and power. Challenging the notion that equality for women is an inevitability, Backslide explores the roles women have played throughout the ages, from prehistory to present day, to uncover five levers of power that across centuries and continents determine women’s status in society. Today, the key levers point to a modern day regression in status for women; how we experience the backslide depends on class. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, Backslide includes insight from historians, archeologists, social scientists, activists, politicians, business leaders, religious scholars, pop culture figures to uncover the solutions needed to strengthen the levers that hold the key to lasting equality for women.
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Mehta serves on think tanks for Sonoma County Winegrowers, Wharton’s Global Initiative for Environmental Leadership and Pepperdine University’s America Project. She has served as an ambassador for Operation Hope in conjunction with the White House, to empower economic mobility by teaching five million at-risk kids financial literacy basics and provide one million middle and high school students entrepreneurship training. Mehta has assisted hundreds of entrepreneurs through her work with the NY Business Solutions Center and the Wharton Small Business Development Center. She is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Annise Parker
former Mayor of Houston,
President/CEO of The Victory Fund
Victory Fund and Victory Institute President & CEO Annise Parker is the first former elected official to lead the organizations, having served six years as a Houston City Council member, six years as City Controller, and six years as Mayor of the city. She is one of only two women to have been elected mayor, and is the only person in Houston history to have held the offices of council member, controller and mayor. She was the first openly LGBTQ mayor of a major American city.
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In 2010 Time magazine named Mayor Parker one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was named top US mayor and seventh ranked world mayor in 2014 by City Mayors Foundation. While Mayor, Annise was also a member of President Obama’s Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, chaired the U.S. Conference of Mayors Criminal and Social Justice Committee, was a steering committee member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, and served on the boards of the Texas Environmental Research Consortium and Houston Galveston Area Council. She is a past Fellow of the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
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She currently serves on the Policy and Global Affairs Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the boards of Houston Botanic Garden, Houston BARC Foundation, Patient Care Intervention Council, and the Climate Disclosure Project (CDP).
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Her first LGBTQ organizing event was the Texas Gay Conference in 1975, and she was a founding member of the Rice University Gay and Lesbian Support Group in 1979. She served as President of the Houston Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, Co-Chair of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, Co-Chair of the Lesbian and Gay Democrats of Texas and Treasurer of the Names Project Houston.
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Mayor Parker graduated from Rice University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree. In the private sector, she spent 20 years working in the oil and gas industry, including 18 years with Mosbacher Energy Company. She also co-owned Inklings, a lesbian/feminist bookstore for 10 years.
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Mayor Parker and her wife Kathy Hubbard have been together for more than 28 years and are advocates for adoption, with three daughters, a son and a grandson.