 Hey everyone, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. On your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Pereskevi, the EVP of Global AWS Strategic Alliances, at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company. And Danielle Graschoff, one of our CUBE alumni, joins us, ISV PSA Director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart and women in tech. Thank you, Lisa. So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank. What does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? Sure. So let's just start. Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem, usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rubira, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. Yes, I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years as we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed, we wanna have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep paced with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course I benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. I just think that I've been able to get a seat at the table, I think that I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think they give me a platform in order to do that like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that if you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job and that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there. A lot of value, absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you were seeing from a gender and diversity perspective in tech? We know that the numbers of women in technical positions, there's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up. But what are some of the trends that you're seeing? So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the summit and we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave, seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because we feel collectively women, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership. They don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring, a salary and hiring guide, a career and hiring guide every year. And the data points in that it's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So. Absolutely, only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls in Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome, conundrum before, but Danielle, talk to us about AWS's specific focus here to get these numbers up. I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how I think we're approaching it top and bottom. We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work. And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things. But then also more flexible working arrangements. But then also early, how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school? And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS to technology and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid to late career, but how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS. We have a great military program, but then also just that early high school career, getting them in that trajectory. Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel, there's something wrong with me, I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did. We had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What, because that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age. Some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African-American woman said to me, Sue, and I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, Sue, it's really different for me as an African-American woman or she identified as non-binary, but she was relating to African-American women. She said, your white woman, your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that. But those are the things that we need to educate people on those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group, so much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... It used to be a couple of years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple of years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's, work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, these are not lived experiences for these folks so they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. Right, so as I, when I go back to that careers in hiring God, that is my focus today really because the more data that we have, I mean, and the data takes, you know, we need people to participate in order to accurately get a hold of that data. So that's why we're asking, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action, then we can't get the right, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website, jeffersonfrank.com, the high in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a, you know, Daniela and I, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute. Some of the other things that we're doing we're partnering, as I mentioned, more of these events we're doing around the summits. We're gonna be having more ED&I events and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership. The number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers, it inspires me and I feel like, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. Absolutely, we needed it. I love that metaphor. I do too, but to your point, to get those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else, we need, it's a help me help you situation. So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching, go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. Thank you for having me, Lisa. Thank you. My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of the AWS Partner Showcase. Thanks for your time.