 Live from Houston, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Houston, Texas for the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm with Jeff Frick, the general manager of theCUBE. Our next guest is Lisa Dougal, who's the chief diversity officer for PWC Consulting. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Great to see you, great to chat with you. Before we came on, we were talking about you at Carnegie Belom back in the 80s, and we just had Eileen Fagan off, we're going to do it. Another 80s throwback like me and Jeff. Back to the 80s, hot tub time machine. Whatever you want to call it, it's a lot of fun. So thanks for spending some time with us. Oh, my pleasure. So first, what are you working on? So that's the first point we've learned. That's a good question to ask. What are you working on? What am I working on? So for me personally, I do a number of different things, right? As my role as chief diversity officer, I am creating and evolving and implementing programs that help all kinds of diversity in the workplace, which ranges from women to minorities to men as well, which is one of our big focus areas, right? As a partner in the practice, I'm also a retail consumer partner. So I work with retail and consumer clients on transforming their businesses from strategy to execution. Digital transformation is hot right now. I mean, everything is being automated. I mean, everything's addressable now. Internet of Things creates 100% data acquisition. It does, but I think at the same time, it's created such a wealth of, I will call it information, old school, or data terminology, right? I think companies are struggling with how do you parse through? How do you tell the story? How do you figure out, A, what the data is telling you to take the consumer industry for one, right? They've got huge amounts of consumer data now. The question is, how do you use it? How do you turn it into innovation? One of the things you were mentioning before you came on was that you did a thesis at Carnegie Mellon back in the 80s where you were going to say a computer science major, but everyone had to code, which is great. I paid back in the 80s. And maybe we should re-institute that across the university. I agree, I think everything one should code is like math and science. To me, I think it's a requisite skill for everybody. But you say your thesis was decision-making using computers. Now, fast forward to today where we were just chatting about for the first time in modern business history, you can actually measure everything. So no more excuses. If you could actually measure everything. Right, so the question becomes what do you want to measure, right? Yeah, so what does that do with a business? How does that change everything? And I think it's a combination of measurement which looks historical and that's important, right? With predictive and where the world is going, it's predictive analytics, behavioral analytics, right? Because that enables us to figure out how we want to change. We're only ever looking backwards. We get a static point in time and that's informative and you need that. And as we talked before, you need to be able to parse through the data and decide which is relevant and which is really the lever you want to pull. But I think more and more we're seeing companies doing data modeling and data predictive analytics on just about everything, right? Right, and Merv Adrian loves to talk about data in motion from Gartner. And it's no longer good enough to have it look at it and then decide what you're going to do. Now really with Spark and some of the new technologies, you actually have an opportunity to look at the data in motion in a transaction in a retail environment and change the transaction midstream to hopefully get to a better outcome. So what are you seeing kind of out in the world of some of these more advanced retailers and some of the things that are working on it? I think that's happening. I think the ability to drop coupons as people walk by the aisle is more and more prevalent, right? Not just any coupon, but we know you buy a lot of milk, right? I think you're going to see more and more price changing based on the consumer. I know you, you've been into my store, you're a loyal customer. I'll pop you the milk at this price where somebody else might pay a higher price. I think the world is open in terms of how these companies are using not just the data they collect on the products and the technologies, but also on you as the individual. Lisa, I want to get your thoughts on a concept that we've been kind of gleaming out of the data here at Grace Hopper and other events we've been to around women in computing, but more importantly also computer science and that there's a lot of different semantics. People argue about women versus ladies, this versus that. There's so many different biases. I mean, I'm biased, whatever, all that stuff's happening. But one constant in all this is that there's two depth variables, transparency and always learning. And that seems to be a driver of a lot of change here. And you mentioned digital transformation. What are you seeing out there that's really driving the opportunities around transparency? You could say data, access. If you have data then things are transparent. Always be learning, there's new opportunities. So those seem to be a big pivot points here at this event here where there's a lot of opportunities. There's a subtle conversation of not just the pay thing and the gender equality on pay, but opportunities is the big theme we're seeing here. Absolutely, I am really energized by being here, right? First of all, to see so many young women all passionate about technology and computing and really being inserted in the right ways. I've had women come up to me even on the escalator, shake my hand and say hello, you're from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Let me ask you what you do during your day, right? I think in my day, A, there was no place to go. And even if you did, you were trying to navigate a very different world and you were trying to perhaps not be you, but be somebody else, right? How do you fit into the man's world? I used to watch all sports all weekend so I can make sure I can participate in office conversation when I got in on Monday mornings, right? I think to hear the conversations that the women are having that are very technology driven, but also very much authentic to who they are, is where we're going. See, if you were a young lady in tech, now you actually program the fantasy games so that you'd win that game every week. Yeah, that's right. You write the code, but there's a lot of coding, a lot of developers here, phenomenal growth in developers. We just had a young girl just graduated. She's phenomenal, Natalia, and she got into it. She started in journalism major and second year in, she switched into computer science because she was tinkering with wearables. Which is terrific, right? One of the conversations I like to have with our young women about PwC in particular, but a lot of parts of the industry is the ability to combine industry or sector knowledge with the technology, right? So I was talking to one woman who said, well, you know, I just switched out of pre-med. I really like medicine, but I got into coding. And I said, well, have you thought about, you know, the whole arena of the healthcare industry is dramatically changing, right? We're moving to the point where we have, you know, patient information, hospital information, drug trial information, and we can integrate all that. You could stay with healthcare and still do technology and coding. And she's looking at me like, she'd never thought about that. That's revelation. You said early in the old days, you had to try to beat someone else, try to fit into a man's world. But now you're saying, you know, just follow your passion and this technology behind it. Interesting enough, there's also an effect on the men. Like I had a Facebook post on my flight down here at the Wi-Fi on the plane, and I typed in my Facebook friends, hey, real question, is it politically incorrect to say I love women in tech? And I kind of put that out there as kind of a link bait, but all of a sudden the arguments were, wait, politically correct. Love is four versions of love. It's like all this argument. And one comment. It's getting very deep, right? And it's getting very deep. But the one comment was just be yourself. I tell our women that all the time. And all our people, right? But I think this shift to the workplace openness where you can be authentic. And I find often our young women in particular get guidance from mentors who are men and they try to emulate that. And some of that is good, but you have to emulate that while being authentic to who you are. Otherwise you run that risk of perhaps being perceived inauthentic or it comes off a little bit too canned, right? What's your best advice to men? Because one of the things that we're seeing is a trend now and certainly is that men inclusion is also into the conversation. It seems to be a big thing. Absolutely. We are doing that as a firm both in the US and globally. We're a 10 by 10 impact sponsor for HeForShe, which is the UN's initiative with companies, governments and not-for-profits to engage men in a conversation about raising awareness around women. And for us it's women in the workplace, right? So there are really a couple of things I think men can do. One is listen and actively engage with the women and not just women at your level, women who are millennials as well. If you can't, if not comfortable having that conversation, which I know many women and men both aren't, it's hard to put yourself in their shoes, right? The second is to really be an advocate, right? Think about when you walk into meetings, who's not in the room? Are the people looking all like you? What do you do about that, right? And I think the third is make it personal, you know? Be involved and know what's going on and know how you can help. It seems so simple, right? When you just lay it out there, right? Those are not complicated concepts, but to put them in practice is, you know, it takes an active, you know, kind of thinking about it, right? To really make it have to impact change. It does, and I think more, it is natural for people to gravitate to people who are like them, particularly in the workspace. We get very comfortable on our own, let's call them echo chambers. And then you move with your echo chamber, and your echo chamber might have a little diversity, but likely it doesn't have a lot of generational diversity. It may or may not have all kinds of racial, ethnic, gender diversity. And so you might meet somebody on the outside who's a little different, but you go back to your go-tos who are still in your echo chamber. So I think the goal is to get into multiple echo chambers, right? It's also a comfort zone, right? I mean, people like what's familiar to them and pushing the comfort zone barrier is one issue right now. Be uncomfortable. Be uncomfortable, be comfortable, and the uncomfortable is how I like to say it, right? Describe that, and describe what people should look for. I mean, and everyone has their own struggles and journeys. What, how do people cope with that? So I often have this conversation with men. They say, well, how do I talk to women about being women? And I said, well, that's probably not the first conversation you should be having, right? Talk to them about who they are and what's important to you. And then the relationship, we have to build what we call familiarity, comfort, and trust. And once you've built that, you can have a conversation perhaps about what a woman's plans are if she's pregnant. But you can't just walk in and that'd be the first. Yeah, you can't blurt it out. Right, things off. It's not a locker room. It's not a good icebreaker. So Lisa, you know, there's a lot of talk about what's the right thing to do and what does right mean? And clearly it's the right thing to do in terms of morally and as a human being to include people. But really, there's a bottom line positive and impact, too. There's a better outcome impact. And PwC, you guys do a lot of analysis, you work a lot of companies. So there's some studies you can share, some facts or figures that you guys have discovered about how there's really great bottom line, better decisions, better products, better profitability, when you have a diverse point of view that you bring to a problem set. Absolutely, there are a number of different ways to look at that. I think you're right. It is the right thing to do. It's the moral thing to do. People want to feel good about it. But at the end of the day, we know that diversity is good for business performance. And there are a number of studies out there that talk about board composition and how now women on boards has been legislated in enough countries around the world for long enough now, you can correlate long-term 10, 15 year performance with the performance of those companies. And we see that those companies perform better. You can look at just the diversity. I mean, another angle of looking at it is we do a lot of work with millennials and millennial studies, right? And the people coming off at campus are more geographic, gender, ethnic, minority, diverse than any generations we've seen at a very long time, right? There are more women coming off of campus in general than men right now and they're doing very well, right? So there's also the zero sum game that says if we don't figure out how to accommodate, attract, promote, retain women, then we're not going to be able to get the best of the best of the workforce and you become at a competitive disadvantage. Well, it's quality. That's the competitive advantage is the quality that you get with the diversity. Absolutely. How do you manage that process? Because some would say diversity slows things down because you have different perspectives, but the outputs higher quality. Higher quality and more innovation, right? And one of the things we like to do is talk about diversity in a number of different angles. So there's race, gender, sexual orientation. There's also in our business diversity of degrees. So we have coders working with MBAs, working with lawyers, doctors, strategists and part of that is the way you get the best thinking and the most innovative solutions to your problems. And I think when you begin to develop and define it that way, there are places for more people to get on the wheel, so to speak, right? Everybody is thinking about diversity, not just you look different or you experience, but you bring a different perspective to the problem because you have a different background where you grew up and what you studied. It's just funny that in being diverse, you're actually leveraging people's biases to get to a better solution. Absolutely, I think the other way around. That's right. And I think that there's a movement now and we're really moving from thinking about being equal to thinking about being equitable, right? Equal would say if you have three kids peering over a fence, one's four foot, one's five foot, one's six foot, give them all a one foot box. Well, that's not going to get the four foot guy over the fence, right? What you really have to do is give them each a size box that they need, right? So the six foot kid probably doesn't need a box at all if it's a five foot fence, right? The five foot kid might need a little step stool and the four foot kid probably needs a large queue, right? That's being equitable, it's not necessarily being equal. Based on the outcome, absolutely. Based on the outcome of the objective. Versus some statistical equitable formula. Correct, so I think in business we're moving more to looking at that outcome based. Being equitable across outcomes, equitable, thank you. Not just being equal, because I think for a long term it was treat everybody the same and that's diversity. It's really appreciate everybody for their differences and let them play to their strengths. And use the data science tools available, go daddy put out the survey results of their salaries to you seeing the University of Virginia professor Brian gave a keynote today about the software that they're building an open source for tooling. But the data's going to be key. But at the end of the day, management drives the outcome objective. So as someone at the senior level who's had a good journey from the 80s, Eileen Bagan talked about the same thing. You're now at the top of the pyramid, the flywheel's developing, there's some good in migration with women coming into the field. How's the balance, how's that flywheel working for the mentoring, the pipeline and the operationalizing? I'll give you one example, right? So we have a women in technology. What started as a program, it's now part of our business, right? We started about two and a half years ago with 30 women who were trying to figure out in technology, you could be a long-term implementation projects for six months, a year, two years and only operate in the same echo chamber, right? So how do you network with other women, how do you meet them? It's now 1400 people strong and one of the pillars of it is a mentorship program. We had, and it doesn't sound like a lot, but see from where you start, right? Increase of way for sales. We started with needing, having about 50 women mentored, right? We're up to hundreds of women being mentored and last time we opened the program, we had 150 leaders, not just, we had other people, but leaders sign up within the first few days to mentor the women. So in my mind, that's- Success. That's success, it's a big change, right? I didn't need to prompt them, I didn't need to call them. Good job, good job on your role there. Thank you. So that's part of the change. That network effect, there's an app for that. Now, the network effect is a dynamic now. So going back to the theory of socialization and social theory, as you get a network effect going on, there's a good social vibe going on. Talk about that dynamic. It's kind of qualitative and then be, might be some numbers associated, but talk about the network effect of that viral growth, if you will. I think you sort of have a, it's now an important and good and rewarded thing to do, right? But I also think there's a millennial factor there. Right, so what we've been able to see is as our tech women come in off a campus, they're beginning to get opportunities that change the game around women in the community, right? So we brought a number of two year, three year out women with us and had them help us in the planning of being here all the way from designing our website, to putting together the booth, to submitting and speaking. So they got speaker slots, which gives them amazing exposure, which then sends that social dynamic in a number of ways, right? You have them wanting to, other people wanting to emulate it. You have leaders reaching out to me and saying, wow, we didn't know Emily did that. That is great, right? She spoke to 900 people yesterday. And so that changes the social landscape. It makes it acceptable. It certainly does, and it's great amplification. So as we wrap here, at least, I think that's a great segue. Talk about the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. It's a very different kind of conference. It's a very different kind of feel. Why is it important to PWC? Why do you guys invest in this show? And the example you gave is just a great lead into it. Well, I think it's for a number of reasons. It's a great source of recruits, right? So we want to be here, and we want to meet the young people coming off of campus, who maybe we might not meet in our structured campus environment, right? I think the second is it's a great opportunity for our young women to promote and develop themselves and gain skills that way we would never gain. The third is just to empower our women just by being here. And even the emails I'm getting from our women who are not here and our men who are not here, the fact that we are here has sort of had a little bit of a viral effect. It's a FOMO. You're missing out. People want to be here. You're missing out. It's an amazing experience. It's really helped put, in some ways, women in technology in a little different league, right? A lot of the alliances and a lot of the conferences we do are, we do 15 major conferences now, and we support leadership for women events at all of them. But this is one of the few that's not alliance-based. It's not being at SAP with SAP or being at OWL with Oracle, which are great things for us to do. But this is for the women, about the women, and the development of the women. It's an exciting time, and we're excited to document it, and thanks for spending the time sharing your insights and data and perspective here on theCUBE. Well, thank you so much, John and Jeff. It's been amazing. Appreciate having me. It's our pleasure. We're so inspired. It's really awesome. And if you want to be part of theCUBE, we are hiring. We're looking for women, digital scientists, data analysts, on-air hosts, and we've been shamed a little bit for having an all-male team here. I was just going to ask you. We are looking for powerful, strong, smart women who want to join theCUBE. We're hiring, so contact us offline. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more live coverage here in Houston, Texas at the Grace Hopper Celebration. We'll be right back.