Draft:Morgan Mercer (3)

Early Life and Education
Morgan Mercer is the founder and CEO of Vantage Point, which is a pioneering virtual reality demonstration of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Mercer is from North Carolina, where she grew up as bi-racial in the south. She experienced quite a bit of racism and conflict based on skin color first-hand, as well as political conflict, as her father is a conservative Republican and her mother a liberal Democrat. She attended East Carolina University where she studied Business and Marketing.

Career
Prior to founding Vantage Point, she served as the Head of Digital for an e-commerce startup and an Analyst for a digital agency, mentored at and won numerous hackathons, and was a panelist for General Assembly and VR Fest. She has been regarded as one of the Top 10 Female Tech Innovators in history by TechRadar and has been featured in 4+ dozen publications. She was also regarded by the UN Women chapter as a “Champion of Change” in the “Era of Equity.” Her website introduces her as the “most prominent female technologist of all time.”

Pain Point
Morgan Mercer is a two-time survivor of sexual violence herself, and so she understood how difficult the topic was for people to talk about. After a talk with Sara Elizabeth Dill, she realized that no one knew how to identify core intervention points, the appropriate actions to take in an intervention, and how to respond if someone came forward with their story. In fact, 54% of women report workplace harassment. Additionally, despite mandatory sexual harassment trainings in many states across the United States, cases of harassment are still on the rise. By sharing her experience with others, she identified a pain point of the lack of societal education around sexual violence in general. She wanted to educate people on how to deal with various societal issues that she had experienced throughout her lifetime through the creation of shared experiences and anti-bias training.

Innovation
After realizing that society lacks proper education around the topic of sexual harassment in the workplace, she began looking into different training methods, and found that immersive training has a retention rate of 90%, compared to the knowledge retention rate of traditional training methods, which is 20%. She decided to develop a technology that will place a person in a virtual workplace where they witness a situation of sexual harassment and then learn how to deal with these types of situations properly. This social VR company came to be known as Vantage Point, and it aimed to inform users on how to tackle these kinds of situations in a professional and empathetic manner. To see from someone’s “Vantage Point” is to see from a new perspective. As of 2020, Vantage Point has raised $3.75 million for her anti-bias training platform, a feat that has only been done by a few of minority women.

Impact on Society Today
Through her journey, Morgan has definitely accomplished a lot as a pioneer for equality and paving the road for other minority and female innovators. She has found a way to address topics that are not widely recognized and addressed as they should be, and has found a impactful way to shine light on many different societal issues.