 Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, your host, and we are on the ground at Google with the CloudNow non-profit organization for women, honors and recognizes women in cloud computing and converging technologies. Tonight, CloudNow is celebrating their fifth annual top women in cloud innovations award. So we're very excited to be here with them. And my next guest is Julie Parker. Welcome, Julie. Hello. Welcome, Julie. Julie is from Kent, our TCS Reachers. You have actually been a speaker at the event tonight. And I'd love to have you share some of the groundbreaking research that you've been doing for CloudNow on current trends of women in technology. What are some of the key learnings from your most recent research study? Sure. So we've actually learned that most women are fairly satisfied with their jobs, which I think was very exciting to hear. Yet we're finding a segment of the population is not as satisfied, so called less than satisfied, and tend to be more on the individual contributor side. So potentially ones that are younger, starting off in their career, maybe not having the best experience in technology. Gender certainly plays a role, gender bias and discrimination, and potentially lack of female role models and mentors. Interesting. So if we look at some of the statistics, even from a VC perspective, right? VCs are very, it's a very male dominated industry. I've got a great friend who just launched her own startup a little over a year ago, and has a woman over 40. Really hard time, just getting a meeting with a VC. So we look at where women are today, having that challenge and kind of going, wow, the next generation of startups that materialize into tech giants are going to be male led. From a survey respondent perspective, what have been some of the biggest concerns maybe? Did it dive into that level of, is that that senior management is too much of a boys club? What were some of the specific findings? That is certainly one of the findings was that senior management is still perceived as a boys club, and only a quarter of the women in our survey indicated that they're women actually in the upper levels of management in their organizations. So that certainly is a challenge. There are a lot of gender barriers. So whether it's things like mansplaining, sort of speaking a derogatory way to women or directing highly technical questions to only men, those things are still fairly prevalent within the technology workplace. And that certainly is a problem where women, I think in some ways maybe come to expect gender bias and sort of are used to it. So some of the numbers weren't astronomical in terms of gender bias being commonplace in the workplace, but still higher than we'd like. Right, and one of the things that interests me is the attrition rate for women who start technology careers and leave at some point is over 50%. I often wonder, where are the leaks? I don't think it's a pipeline issue per se, but have any of the studies that you've done or this recent one kind of started evaluating at what point in their career are women leaving the technology industry and what careers are they choosing? Is that something that you've compiled? Yeah, we didn't go into where are they going, but what we did find is the women who were less than satisfied, 52% said that they were looking to either leave the company that they were at or leave the industry altogether. And that's a really big difference from the women who were at least satisfied or very satisfied where 80% said that they were gonna at least stay at their company either in the current role or a new role within that current organization. So that's a really big difference between those two groups. So we clearly have a population of women who are having negative experiences. Gender could be one of the factors, right? I know there's more than just gender as part of what would make a woman either be satisfied or not satisfied with their job, but that definitely seems to have a pretty impactful role. And you mentioned that one of the groups was a group of individual contributors. Correct. Was there any in terms of how long they'd been at a company? Were they fairly? We didn't look at 10 year per se, but more at the role. And when we looked at women who were in management positions or above, they were actually having these higher levels of satisfaction. And I certainly think that they've obviously overcome some of these barriers already. You know, have achieved some hurdles and earned whether it's credibility or something within the organization where they have a little bit more control over their future. And so I really think it's upon those women to help the future generations. Absolutely. To those individual contributors by being a positive role model, providing mentor, you know, for being a mentor for these women because I do think that that could really make all the difference in terms of keeping these women in the industry. Because if you think about the cost of the tech industry of having these women in and having them leave, you know, it could be losing really valuable resources that you don't want to lose. Absolutely. Did you guys profile the ROI differences? I, forgetting where I read this stat, that companies with women in senior management positions have a 34% higher ROI, which I thought was really interesting. It's something that should be kind of explored further. Another thing that I saw recently was that Forbes just released their 2016 list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. And there were 16 technology females, Cheryl Sandberg, Facebook's CEO, being the fifth year in a row on that list. And actually, one of the things, first I thought, only 16. And then I looked at the by industry and the only other industry that actually had a higher number of females was politics. Angela Merkel being number one. So I think that your study is very interesting. I also think that there's a lot of changes happening. It's, it's requires patience, right? Cause it's not, it's not quick, but cloud now organizations like Anita Borg, what we've been doing with Silicon Angle on the Cube and featuring women weekly for a long time. Those are clear demonstrations that women have a voice. They have a place in technology and we want to provide women more opportunities to share their voice and amplify that message. Talk with us about maybe some of the next research that you're going to be doing. Is it going to be digging deeper into any of these areas? Well, I definitely think the study will continue so that we can start to evaluate the trends and sort of see how the space is shifting. And I do think one of the inspirational things that I found out of this was that, you know, that women, I think it was like 83 or 82% said that they would recommend a career technology to their daughters, or they would support their daughters in that choice. Eight over 80%. That's fantastic. It was, it was huge. It was much higher than we expected. There were very few who said, you know, they wouldn't recommend it all. And I think that women persevere. Women are not afraid of a challenge and women are willing to work hard to get what they want and they want that for their daughter. So some of the comments that women had said were about, you know, being bold and being yourself and don't be afraid to be the only woman at the table, you know, speak your mind and there's value in that. And I think sometimes women don't feel maybe empowered to do that, you know, within such a male dominated industry and there were several women here that were still in school and looking at these kind of careers and, you know, the message I certainly would want to give to them is that if this is what you, you know, your passion, you know, you need to go for it and you need to not, you know, let anyone stand in your way. Absolutely. And hopefully you can find a good mentor, someone who can help you, you know, go along the way because I do think it's a huge compliment for someone to ask, you know, you to be a mentor to them for women. And most, you know, I haven't heard of a single woman ever turning down that kind of an opportunity to support a younger woman in their career. I love that some of the messages that came out from those mothers, be bold, you can do this. That's also, I agree with you, messages that I've heard echoed throughout tonight of don't put yourself in a box. I think one of the kind of the beliefs that I've always had, or not, I shouldn't say always, maybe recently is having a goal that scares you is a really good thing. If it's something that maybe a little butterflies in the stomach, that means it's something that is that you're excited about, it's worth pursuing and that sounds like not only some of the messages that were reflected in some of the survey respondents, but also things that you've heard here tonight. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it's a really a very inspirational message. You know, we look at, yes, there are challenges and there's going to be gender bias and we might even be contributing it to ourselves and not even, you know, wittingly knowing it. Absolutely. But I do think that, you know, women will take on the challenge and will continue to be successful because, you know, we see women successful all over the place. We see these examples and these are people that, you know, women can look up to and, you know, pursue their own dreams, you know, in those visions of those women. Absolutely, pursuing their own dreams. I love that. Julie Parker from Kent RTCS Research. Thank you so much for being on theCUBE. All right, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. You've been watching theCUBE. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I want to ask you if you know a female that should be on our show, filmed in our Palo Alto Studios, please tweet us at theCUBE, hashtag women in tech. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.