Quotes from Vivienne Ming

The tax on being different is massive.

Once you identify the intrinsically motivated people, you realize that fancy degrees can actually be a negative - that some of the people who have them are more focused on how others perceive them.

The bias tax is actually a loss in economy.

Who wants to get a worse diagnosis of their cancer, just to keep a human doctor in the job?

The tax on being different is largely implicit. People need not act maliciously for it to be levied. In fact, at its heart is a laudable sentiment: 'prove it to me.' The problem is that we are requiring different levels of proof without realising it.

My body became aligned with my identity, and it was profound.

After I transitioned, a lot of people said, 'I like you so much more now,' because before, I was unhappy. Making that change was a big part of becoming me. Whoever you are, as a gay man or a lesbian or a trans woman, embrace it. Turn it into an asset.

Looking at where you went to school is a proxy; you assume, because someone went to a good school, therefore they must have the qualities you desire, even though that's not actually really true.

Estrogen's a wonderful thing. I'd be doing the dishes and suddenly be like, 'Wait a minute - why am I crying?'

If my son came to me years from now and told me, 'I'm gay,' I'd say, 'That's wonderful. I'm so glad you know who you are.' But if he said, 'I want to be a woman,' I would say, 'Ahhh. This is gonna be hard. Let's get started.' Because it doesn't matter that that's where happiness lies - it's on the other side of a lot of struggle.

If you have a diverse workforce, then you have a much better chance of picking up on things that a lack of diversity would hide from them.

The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong - profoundly wrong.

Gender transition isn't about gender. It's about literally making yourself a better person because you know that's a better you.

I want to literally make people smarter by jamming things in their brains.

Because of the tax on being different, individual actors in the labour market from different backgrounds can rationally value the same opportunities differently.

If you tell someone, 'Hey, your daughter is going to win a Nobel Prize someday,' it makes it less likely. If you say, 'Your son is in danger of dropping out in the ninth grade,' it could make it more likely.

In 1958, my father graduated from secondary school as the highest-achieving student in the state of Kansas, earning a five-year scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He turned it down. For someone raised in a remote farming town, this would have been his opportunity to transform his life, a ticket to a bigger world.

What drives success, and the most successful students, is internal motivation.

Why did I go back to school? After working with giant snails as the manager of an abalone farm, who wouldn't be fascinated with the inner workings of the mind? They are a very contemplative species.

Human behavior is an enormously complex set of things, and that mixture of underlying things is different for different people, so it's not just complex, it's meta-complex.

It's important to me that talking about my experience not undermine those who choose differently. There can be a stigma for people who don't take the path I did, as though not having surgery means you're not really transitioning. No one should feel as though it's everything or nothing.

There are neural networks that can build whole apps from scratch - so why are we teaching high school kids to code?

Before I came out, people always asked me math questions. But once I became a woman, they stopped. There's unintended discrimination.

Passing on a full scholarship to MIT would be irrational for me, but to my father and his parents, what would have been the point of spending five years at one of the world's most prestigious universities if he just ended up back on the farm?