 Live from Vienna, Austria. It's theCUBE, covering .next Europe 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back here at the end of day one coverage of Nutanix.next in Vienna. Happy to have with me to wrap up for the day. Kate Russell is a technology reporter and author. Thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure, my pleasure. All right, Kate, for our audience, tell us a little bit about your background, your day job, your interest, things like that. Okay, so I'm a freelance technology reporter. I am the longest standing member of the BBC click reporting team, which is those of you who travel and watch BBC World, or know it's a BBC's technology program. I am also a columnist technology. I started out as a games reporter. They've moved into more serious reporting now. And I have now two, well three books out, two fiction books. Second fiction book came out just last week, actually. Well, congratulations. I'm juggling about a billion different technology-related, writing-related kind of career roles. And I educate as well. I do education, speak in universities, and I chair panels and conferences on digital policy for the government and stuff like that, so. Yeah, Kate, Kate, interesting. Everybody talks about kind of the modern economy. Everybody's juggling a lot of things, a lot of different roles, you kind of personify that. You have to spread your risk these days, particularly in the media with so many different branches of the media really struggling in the digital age to understand how they can monetize their product and their content. And when you're freelance, you can't have all your eggs in one basket. So I found being there 20 odd years as a freelancer, the way to sustain a workable income is to have it spread across lots of different micro-incomes, so when one of them implodes, your life doesn't implode with it. And from a technology space, so, you know, we said for the most part, I don't think we should call them smartphones anymore. They're just phones now, right? So what's kind of the biggest, most interesting thing that you've been covering in the tech space? Well, you know, I mean, as a technology reporter for the BBC, I get to do some really exciting stuff. So, you know, I went over to NASA this year and went to see the latest work that they're doing on the latest space robots. So they've got this tensile robot, which they're working on, which will be about 20 years before it goes out into space. But you know the Mars land at the rover, Curiosity, that basically weighs the same as an average-sized full-grown giraffe, to give you an example. And in order to land it safely on the surface of Mars, the Sky Crane technology that they used to land it softly had to be able to hold the equivalent of 139 giraffes. So, you know, that's the weight just to slow the velocity. So, you know, when you consider how bulky that is and how costly that is in terms of fuel and various different other things, and this tensile robot, it's like those squishy balls that you've got as a kid with sort of like poles and tendons. So they weigh virtually nothing, a couple of kilos. They can be flat-packed, so you can stack them in a cone of a, a nose cone of a rocket for launch. And when you get out into space, if you just pop them open, hang the scientific payload in the middle of them, and you can just throw them at planets. They don't need to land softly, because they just bounce. And it looks like a giant bucky ball, I believe, something like that. Exactly. So, you know, that kind of stuff is really exciting, getting to see, you know, the work that they're doing and the work that they're doing with the air traffic control for drone traffic management, which is going to be a really big issue over the coming years. There's going to be like 7 million commercial drones in the skies over America alone next year, and that needs to be managed. Businesses need to be able to, you know, profit in that business. It's a good business to be, to be, the government wants it to succeed, but they obviously need to make it safe. But then, you know, I also get to do really interesting things like look at a policy discussion, and you know, looking at the digital single market and how that's going to affect businesses across Europe is really interesting. Looking at how the new data protection regulations when we switch over to the GDPR is going to be really interesting. So I have kind of a very broad range of interests, right from space robots and drones and you know, and sort of really fun stuff like AI and robotics, all the way down to the nitty-gritty of sort of like policy and sort of like the startup sector in the digital area, because it changes every day and that's what's so exciting about it. Yeah, absolutely, but we are fortunate to live in a very diverse time when it comes to technology. When it comes to diversity, maybe speak to what brings you here to the Nutanix conference, the activities you were working on today. Yeah, well, I was very kindly invited to come and do two things. So the first thing today I did was was my workshop on diversity. Equal IT, equal IT equality, get it? Very clever. Thank you very much. But profiting from diversity in the tech world, so I did an executive track, and there were about 40 people joined me to talk about why diversity is good for business and there's lots of studies now showing that, you know, sort of if you've got a more diverse workforce then you're more able to attract and keep top talent. Your workforce is more in line with your consumers so you should be more customer oriented. And also, you know, there's a McKinsey study that's from earlier this year that actually shows your three times more likely to be profitable than your equivalent companies that have a less diverse management role. Because the problem is, the problem we got with diversity across the board, not just in technology, but technology is, I think, only 26% of digital jobs are helped by women and that number drops off to about 5% when you look at management level women. So we're really struggling to fix the diversity issue. So I did that workshop which was good today and then tomorrow morning I'm chairing a panel with some sparky startups in Europe, looking at how, you know, what it takes in Europe to be a successful tech startup and indeed whether that is massively different from other parts of the world, what's to our advantage and what's not. It's going to be a very quick panel so we're going to be, you know, it's going to be small but perfectly formed tomorrow morning. Yeah, Kate, totally agree, especially the diversity of ideas. If we've all been told that we can't keep doing what we're doing, but if we keep talking to the same people that we know, we're not going to change probably because you need to talk to somebody else so you can have different opinions, be able to bring in people with different viewpoints that will be able to help change what's happening there. Absolutely and you know what diversity, not just gender diversity, you know, ethnic diversity and, you know, orientation, identity, diversity, it's a really big subject for a lot of companies and right at the top of the big companies, they're all thinking about it and they're all trying to work out how to do it. And there's been this momentum in this drive really, you know, I've been 20 years reporting in technology and I guess the last five to eight years there's been this growing momentum for, you know, a real push to get more diverse representation in tech companies. And yet, when you look at actually pure IT jobs, only 16% of women hold those roles within tech companies and, or sorry, within any companies with the IT, the hard IT roles and that number has been dropping by half a percent year on year for a decade. So for five to eight years we've been pushing really hard to get more diverse representation inside tech companies and we're failing. We are still losing half a percent year on year. So, you know, this is the drum that I've started to bang now. I've been banging my sort of diversity drum for a, you know, coming up for a decade now. And we need to look at what we're doing and see the will is there now, the awareness is there, you know, the desire to change is there, but I think the methodology that we're using to make those changes, it's not working. So we really need to sit down and have a good hard look at what we're doing and say, okay, with all the best will in the world, what we're trying to do at the moment isn't working. Why not? How can we fix it? Yeah, Kate, it reminds me a little bit of, you know, for decades there's been talk about, you know, like IT needs to be greener. And it was one of those things, we know we need to do it, but it gets pushed down the priority list. Diversity, I think if you talk to any executive, they're going to say they understand the value of diversity, oh, but you know, and it gets down to the tactical level, oh, they made their decision based on however they were doing it. So how do we change the conversation? How do we, you know, how do you move the needle on a big, tough challenge like this? We know the statistic that last stuck in my mind recently about CEOs, 75% of CEOs have diversity, gender diversity and ethnic diversity in their top 10 list of priorities. So the will at the top is there, but I think what's missing maybe as we come down the management structure is that the kind of, the assistance and the additional knowledge and the training perhaps that's required to help the middle managers start bringing in a pipeline of good female candidates that can be progressed through the ranks. You know, it's really tough because there are so many things working against you. You know, we have a tendency to want to hire people that are like us. So if you're a middle-aged white man, the chances are you're going to have more affinity with another middle-aged white man. We tend to make a lot of snap decisions about, you know, when we're reading written content. So when you're reading a resume for the first time, we'll make snap judgments based on, you know, perhaps a name or, you know, some reference to some cultural reference within the list of jobs or maybe they mentioned something religious or something like that. And so people will make unconscious decisions that will filter people out. So anonymizing the application process so that your people who are looking to call in interviewees have no idea what gender, ethnicity, or sexual identity the people who are applying are. There's stuff like that you can do, but it takes money, it takes time, it takes a degree of skill or, you know, the commitment to bring in a consultant to help you. And, you know, it's all very well-having diversity on the top 10 list of things that you want to achieve, but unless you put some actual resources behind that, then it's only ever going to be, you know, a Christmas list of Santa Claus. You can send up that up the chimney or you want, but it's not going to come down very productively. You have to put it in the incentive plane at the HR group or something like that. Exactly. If you drive it to how they're paid, maybe they'll follow through. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. I mean, there's so many things. And also, you know, there's support mechanisms for when women do come into the workplace. You know, the number of women in managerial positions, a study, a McKinsey study from earlier this year, shows that it just drops off the higher and higher up the kind of like the structure, the corporate structure that they go. And yet that same study found that women don't get the same level to access to senior level mentors. And, you know, I think it's really important when you do get good, if you put a lot of effort into getting good female candidates in and you interview them and they are the best, because that's the other important thing is don't, obviously nobody is ever going to give you a job just because you're a woman, but you know, getting the women through the door, getting them into the interview seat, finding the best candidate from the diverse pool of people that you've managed to get in for interview. And then essentially, women, I think particularly in male dominated environments, they need a good mentoring system. And not for when it goes wrong, you know, so many people go, oh, everything's gone wrong, I need a mentor. That's the wrong time to get a mentor. You know, you need to get a mentor when you're happy, when you're relaxed, when you're confident so that your mentor and you can form a relationship and they understand who you are from a position of calm and centered, you know, sort of satisfaction. And then when something happens that you need help with, then they will understand the changes in you and you won't just be a woman acting hysterically. It'll be, you know, okay, I can help you with this and I can mediate that discussion. Also, the other thing I say is people taking on, everyone, everybody should take an unconscious bias test. Everybody. Okay, explain to us what that is. So basically, I'll give you a little anecdote. About six months ago, I think it was, somebody tweeted me saying, I'm putting together a conference on technology. I'm putting together a panel on technology. How would you like to add a bit of glamour to it? I was like, about to angry tweet back going, how would you like to do an unconscious bias test before you start insulting people on the internet? So an unconscious bias test is basically a test that throws at you a load of questions and the one that I did was based on, you had to name, apply the name to the job and, you know, in the roles and stuff like that. And it measures microscopic changes in hesitation and the time and stuff like that. So it's not something that you can just game, you know, and it's kind of obvious what the answers are, but it basically measures the time it takes you to do it. It reminds me of stuff I saw from Malcolm Gladwell's blink is to, you know, write with that unconscious bias. Yeah. So it turns out I suffer from unconscious gender bias. And I was shocked at first. I was like, outrage with myself. Or I would have took myself outside and slapped myself around the head with a wet fish. But as it turns out, I was a teenager in the 1970s and 80s. So I, you know, some of the biases of that era naturally rubbed off on me. It's called unconscious bias for a reason. But when you're aware of it, you can own it. You shouldn't try and change yourself, but when you're aware of it, you can own it and you can recognize it in others as well more importantly. So when somebody says something to you in the workplace that you think that's a bit sexist, you can actually check yourself and say, well, he's a middle-aged guy in his 50s. So, you know, I'm going to discuss it with him. I'm going to let him know how I feel. But rather than going from a position of anger and sort of upset, you can go from perhaps a slightly more centered position of understanding that I don't know if you realize what you did just now, but this is how that was to me. And this is why maybe you should think about changing the way. And I think it just allows you to have a much better, warmer dialogue with people rather than instantly getting into a sort of like a crunch conflict situation. As we come to an end, you've got the Kickstarter campaign, maybe you can spread your audience a little bit about that. Yeah, so I'm into fiction now. My first book was a sci-fi book based on the game of Elite Dangerous that got me into technology back in 1985, 1984 even. And so my second book of fantasy fiction is came out last week on Amazon, a bookkeeper's guide to practical sorcery. And right now I'm funding a crowd funder to have the audio book read by Brian Aldridge from the arches, Charles Collingwood, if you know the arches. He's got a wonderful British accent like this. And when I heard him reading another book, I was just like, that's the guy I want. So, but he's quite expensive. So I'm funding it right now on Kickstarter. So it's a bookkeeper's guide to practical sorcery, Kickstarter under my name. If anybody wants a good audio book. All right, well, Kate Russell, really appreciate you helping me come close out. Thank you so much. We're going to be back with a second day of coverage here from Nutanix.NEXT conference in Austria and Vienna, Austria. You're watching theCUBE.