Morgan Mercer
| Morgan Mercer | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| 🏳️ Nationality | American |
| 🏫 Education | Business and Marketing |
| 🎓 Alma mater | East Carolina University |
| 💼 Occupation | Founder and CEO |
Morgan Mercer is the founder and CEO of Vantage Point,[1] a pioneering virtual reality program on sexual assault education through simulated learning.[2]
Describing herself as a product enthusiast and an idealist, she was named as one of the Top 10 Female Tech Innovators by TechRadar in 2018.[3]
Early life and education[edit]
Mercer hails from North Carolina. Growing up as bi-racial in the south, her memories of everyday life were full of examples of flagrant racism.[4] In addition to experiencing conflict based on skin color first-hand, she also experienced political conflict as her Father is a conservative Republican and her Mother a liberal Democrat. She studied Business and Marketing at East Carolina University.
Mercer is a two-time survivor of sexual harassment, and is aware of how difficult it is for some people to talk about.[5] After her experience of sexual violence, she realized that, as a society, we are unsure how to identify core intervention points, what actions are appropriate to take while intervening, and how to respond to someone coming forward with their own experience of harassment, assault or other form of sexual violence. Through sharing her own experience with people around her, she identified a societal pain point of the lack of societal education around sexual violence in general.
Through her understanding of various societal issues that she experienced in childhood and adulthood, she wanted to educate people on how to deal with these issues through the creation of shared experiences and anti-bias training. Her goal of striving to increase empathy in order to teach and inspire people to be their best selves resulted in her developing a product to solve various societal issues. She became a catalyst of building shared experiences and better understanding through her founded company.[4]
Career[edit]
Prior to her founding of Vantage Point, Mercer had served as the Head of Digital for an e-commerce startup and an Analyst for a digital agency.[2]
Mercer was inspired by her experiences of biases and sexual violence to create a platform that worked on creating shared experiences and increasing empathy. The pain point that she aimed to solve with her innovation was the inner biases of people that create issues such as racial inequity and sexual harassment. Her first focus was sexual harassment in the workplace, in which 38% of women and 13% of men have experienced. While researching knowledge retention rates in various training methods, Mercer found that immersive training has a retention rate of 90%, which traditional training methods have a knowledge retention rate of 20%.[6] She began focusing on Virtual Reality as a possible immersive training method to help educate people about their internal biases and learn how to intervene in certain situations. Mercer had the idea of a virtual reality as a sexual harassment training program in November 2016.[7] To solve sexual harassment in the workplace, she developed a technology that places the person in a virtual workplace where they witness a situation of sexual harassment and learn about how to deal with the situations in a correct manner.
In 2017, she founded the social VR company that came to be known as Vantage Point based in Los Angeles, California.[2] Currently, Vantage Point works as enterprise training around Workplace Anti-Sexual Harassment training, with goals to expand to internal bias and anti-racism training as well. The goal of Vantage Point is to utilize the power of virtual reality to "communicate the contextual nuances of problems related to harassment, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”[1] In an interview with The Helm, Morgan Mercer describes the technology; "Instead of explaining a feeling, because feelings are deeply subjective and deeply steeped in personal context, we will immerse you in a scenario and use photo-realistic characters. So instead of being at your office at your workplace [during sexual harassment training], we immerse you at an office party, or in a conference room, or eating lunch with a colleague. Then we’ll introduce you to photo-realistic characters using invasion of personal space, tonality, gaze—the contextual nuances that actually make up the majority of things like harassment and diversity bias problems. We will train people around their comprehension gaps or what they don’t realize they’re doing wrong. Basically, it’s a way to build empathy and a relationship to a problem in a way that’s actually tangible and able to be grasped."[1]
As of 2020, Vantage Point has raised $3.75 million for her anti-bias training platform, a feat done only by a few of minority women.[1] Investors include Samara Hernandez, Dana Wright, and Adrian Fenty.[4] Morgan Mercer is a pioneer for equality and paving the road for other minority and female innovators.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Vantage Point Is Solving Systemic Racism with Virtual Reality". The Helm. 2020-06-08. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "WoW Woman in VR | Morgan Mercer, founder of Vantage Point". WOMEN OF WEARABLES. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
- ↑ August 2018, Olivia Tambini 23. "10 female tech innovators you may not have heard of". TechRadar. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Ark, Tom Vander. "Startup Tackling Systemic Racism With Virtual Reality Training". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
- ↑ "Can VR teach us how to deal with sexual harassment?". the Guardian. 2018-05-01. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
- ↑ August 2018, Olivia Tambini 23. "10 female tech innovators you may not have heard of". TechRadar. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
- ↑ "How Virtual Reality Is Helping To Empower Women". British Vogue. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
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