 Welcome everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science Conference, WIDS 2022 live from Stanford at the Ariyaga Alumni Center. I'm Lisa Martin. My next guest has joined me. Sharon Hutchins is here, the VP and Chief of AI Plus Data Operations at Intuit. Sharon, welcome. Thank you. Excited to be here. So this is your first WIDS? Very first WIDS. But Intuit and WIDS go way back. That's right. Intuit and WIDS goes way back. I'm relatively new to the organization, but Intuit has been a long time sponsor of WIDS. And we love this organization. We have great alignment with our goals. WIDS has a passion and commitment to advancing women in technology and data science. And we have the same goal added to it. We are at 30% women in technology with a goal of hitting 37% by 2024. And I know that WIDS has a great goal of 30 by 30. So that's awesome. 30 by 30. And here we are around, I think it's still less than 25% of STEM positions are filled by women. But obviously you're ahead of that on Intuit. Congratulations. We're ahead of that. And I think part of the reason why we're ahead of that is because we've got great programs at Intuit to support women. One of our key programs is Tech Women at Intuit. And so it's an internal initiative where we focus on attracting, retaining, and advancing women. So it's a great way for women across technology to support one another. I'm sure you've heard of the term, there's power in the pack. Yes. And we believe that when we connect women, we can help elevate their voices, which elevates our business and elevates our products. It does. Some stats I was looking at recently that just showed if there was even 30% females at the executive level, how much more profitable organizations can be and how much higher performance they can have. So the data is there, that suggests this is a really smart business decision to be making. Absolutely, absolutely. The data is no lie. I see it firsthand in my own business. And in fact, at Intuit, we've got a broader initiative around diversity and inclusion. It's led from the top. We have set goals across the company and we hold ourselves accountable because we know that if there are more women at the table and more diversity at the table all around, we make better business decisions. And if you look at our product suite, which is TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and MailChimp, we've got a diverse customer base of 100,000, sorry, 100 million customers. Wow. And so it's a lot of diversity in our customer base and we want a lot of diversity in the company. That's fantastic that there's such a dedicated effort to it. You just came in here from the Curb Your Panel and talked to me about that. What were some of the key things that were discussed? Yeah, I have my notebook open here because there were so many great takeaways from actually just from the day in general, I'm just so at awe at the types of issues that women are tackling across different industries. They're tackling bias and we know that bias is corrected when women are at the table. But from a career perspective, some of the things that were mentioned from the panel is the fact that women need to own their own careers and they need to actively manage their careers. And there's only so much your manager can do and should do. You've got to be in the driver's seat, driving your own career. One of the things that we've done and into it is we've implemented sort of a self-promoting process. So twice a year during our promotion period, either your manager can nominate you for a promotion or you can self-promote. So it's all about you creating a portfolio of all of your great work. And of course, managers are very supportive of the process and support women and all technologists in crafting their portfolios for a fair chance at promotion. And so we just believe that if you take bias out of career progression, you can close that fair and equitable gap that we see sometimes across industries with compensation. This is, that would be great if we can ever get there. One of the things that's nice about Woods, I think it was last year or the year before they opened it up to high school students. So it was so nice walking in this morning seeing the young, fresh faces, the mature faces. You bring up a great point of women need to be their own, many to create their own personal board of directors and really be able to be at the helm of their career. Did you find that the audience is receptive to that? Do they have the confidence to be able to do that? Yeah, absolutely. And that was a point that was raised a couple of times this morning. There were women who talked about having great mentors, but it is more important to have a board of your personal board of directors than one mentor because you've gotta make sure that you sort of tackle all aspects of your career life. And it's not all about the technology. A good portion of how you spend your time and where you spend your time is collaborating and negotiating and communicating across the company. And so that's very important. So that was a key message that folks shared this morning. That's good. That's incredibly important. I wish we had more time. You've got to run to the airport. Sharon, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing what Intuit and Woods are doing together, your involvement and some of the great messages. Welcome. Inspiring messages from the career panel. That's right, exactly. And for all of the young, expiring high school students, yes, we want them to check out Intuit at www.intuit.com careers. Intuit.com, is it slash careers? Slash careers. Slash careers, perfect. I'm an Intuit customer, I will say. Awesome. Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Sharon. Bye-bye. For Sharon Hutchins, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2022.