 Hello everybody. Good afternoon. I'm very excited to moderate this panel today. Thank you all for coming. We still have people joining but we will not delay it more than this. So I'm Tara Akavan. I am co-founder and chief technology officer of a startup in Montreal called Iris Tech and I'm volunteering at SID as marketing vice chair for a few years now. So Women in Tech is a new initiative in SID since last year. This is the second year and like every other organization I have mixed feelings about this. So part of me knows that there are 50% of the population are women. We occupy 50% of job opportunities and we only sit at 10% of the table. So we have a say probably about 10% on average. So there is a need for such panels to talk about women in technology, how great they are doing to educate the new generation, to talk about the risks, how to handle the risks, how to build a career around it. And on the other side, I really wish there was no need for women in tech. We don't have many tech panels, right? So for now that we still need women in tech and there's a huge gap, please join me in welcoming our four amazing panelists today on the panel. Robin Burrell, founder and chief product officer at Red Flight. Poppy Crom, chief scientist at Dolby and adduct professor at Stanford University. Welcome. Rosalie Hu, CEO at LX Wireless. Welcome. Nadia Ichinomia, director of IT at Sony Pictures. She's also the founder of Women in Tech Hollywood. So I'll sit down as well. Let's start with a quick intro. We can do a two to three minute intro. You can tell us about your story, your background, how you got where you are today. We'll start with you, Nadia. My name is Nadia Ichinomia and like you said, I work for Sony Pictures in the technology group. I've been there for about 11 years. I started my, I started at USC, fight on, and I was a business major there. I moved to IBM and I was in sales for about five years and then moved to Germany. I speak fluent German. I'm half Japanese, half German. I spent two years as vice president of EDS Germany and then decided to, the natural thing for me to do was move to Hollywood and become a producer. So I did that and became a TV producer and then decided to go back into more on the business side with MGM and then later on with Sony Pictures in technology. And I'm also an activist. Four years ago, my co-founder and I started Women in Technology Hollywood. We have 1600 members and we're growing quickly. That's about it back. Thank you. You want to continue, Rosalie? My name is Rosalie Hull. Actually, I'm originally from China. I was walking for American company called Amazon for 21 years before I moved to U.S. I started as an engineer and I've been a sales girl job and then I take leader, take my first leadership position at age of 29. That time I also be very proud to be a mom. I took seven years from a small manager to business leaders for Amazon China. Actually, my last role in Amazon China is to manage the 300 million U.S. business. And then in 2016, I decided to move to U.S. and that time I got chance to take job as the CEO of Elix Wireless, the company I'm working right now. Actually, it's a startup from 2013, spin off from UBC. It's amazing technology for wireless charging. And I'm going, if I have a chance, I'm going to share more information. Thank you. Thank you. Poppy, please go ahead. Yes. Hi. I'm Poppy Crum. I'm chief scientist at Dolby laboratories and adjunct professor at Stanford. My role, I've been at Dolby for about eight years now and before I joined Dolby, I'm actually a computational neurophysiologist. I was research faculty in the medical school and biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins. My work at Stanford, even though I'm at Dolby, focuses on sort of the immersiveness of the capabilities of immersive technology and gaming to sort of change our brains and the neuroplastic aspects of how we intersect with our technology and the impact it has on our bodies and how we interact with the world. But that's not where I started. I go way back and I actually, my undergrad, I went to Music Conservatory. I'm a violinist and I was a violinist and an engineer. And realized while I was a musician, I was always interested in the other things. I worked at radio stations. I worked at NPR, the local version. And spent a lot of time making records on the side just because it was kind of my passion. And realized I have absolute pitch. So every sound I hear, I can write it down. It's kind of a party trick. It's very annoying if you are a musician because it means you hear your own brain. It's hard to, you spend your time trying to turn your own brain off so that you can make sure you're in tune with everyone else. And because of that, I started taking neuroscience classes and sort of fell in love with science from neuroscience and my physics classes I was taking and followed that path of starting out and realizing there was a different level of reduction I kept trying to get to that I wanted to solve a problem at. So I went from being a mu a violinist. I'm still a violinist too. I did a master's degree in experimental psychology then my PhDs in neuroscience and then went on and studied biomedical engineering and many other things and I'm really happy bringing this together with technology because there's that the complement of the future right now is very powerful. Amazing. Thank you. Robin please go ahead. Thank you so much. Yes. So hello everyone and welcome. My name is Robin Burrell. I am the chief digital product officer at red flight and also the founder. My story starts at also having graduated from USC. So I am in my old stomping grounds. It's great. But I studied cinema and television. I went to USC film school and I never expected myself to be in working in tech although it makes sense because even when I was very little I was always the one who was setting up the cable, programming the time on the VCR, making sure that the electronics were working in the house, fixing the air conditioner. I always had like a tendency towards tinkering with appliances and kind of mechanical engineering 101 type stuff. So I ended up having my first part of my career in film and TV what I went to school for and I worked as an apprentice for Oliver Stone and Sam Raimi and I worked for Miramax and worked on a lot of films that many people call their their favorite movies but because I started very young I also kind of saw the entertainment industry for what it was at a very early age and I knew that I wanted to do more. So while I was very successful by the age of 25 I knew that there was something bigger out there and little did I know was how big technology was going to be in all of our lives because this was before the iPhone which I think kind of revolutionized everything. So during kind of that transition period where I was trying to figure out how I wanted to create a bigger impact on the world I'd been doing a lot of philanthropy throughout throughout my life my short life at the time but you know doing a lot of volunteer work and things like that in the community. So I applied to be an ambassador of Goodwill and Peace which is a privately funded ambassadorial ship through Rotary and ended up serving a two-year term in Mexico where I launched a nonprofit program for kids to teach them arts and humanities and dance and literature and poetry but then also did a lot of work in the community and met with diplomats and heads of state and traveled throughout Mexico. This not to go into too much like political detail but this was around the time when NAFTA was kind of falling apart for Mexico thriving for Canadians not so much Mexico so my job was to kind of build amnesty with it with the country. Anyway kind of fast forward I ended up getting back into the professional world kind of after my short stint of finding myself through philanthropy and I got scooped up by Sony and worked for Sony electronics and I think this was truly the beginning of my pivot and I look at my career from media into tech because everything that followed after that became a tech oriented position. Now I didn't study computer science as I mentioned I went to film school but I was programming websites in my free time and I didn't even know what a computer science degree was I just knew that I loved what this new world of online and digital was becoming. So while I was I ended up working at Sony electronics for a bit in Mexico City came back here to the states and shortly thereafter I got picked up by a small social network called MySpace and I was the second employee on the mobile team there and ended up working there for several years building MySpace from the ground up and mobile launched it in over 36 countries across Microsoft and BlackBerry and Apple and Google and kind of saw this whole new promise of an online identity that each of us were is starting to create through our mobile devices. So that really was my entree into tech and it was kind of birth by fire because again I didn't have a formal degree in it but because I was working at one of the largest startups at the time you learn a lot by just being boots on the ground at a company like MySpace. So I went on then after that to join match.com where I was the head of mobile I ended up offering a patent that powers Tinder so really have always been kind of at the start of something big I don't know if it's coincidence or luck but was there for a bit and then ended up joining Amazon and what's really became interesting was after working for all these major tech companies I felt a gap in fulfillment and empowerment and leadership and I decided to do something absolutely crazy and insane just be an entrepreneur and start my own company and here I am today and it's it's been great and been doing a lot of great projects hopefully we'll have a chance to talk about some of the stuff that we're all doing now. Definitely thank you very much so I love contradictions we talked about all the glory of your career path all the achievements immediately after that I want to jump into your biggest mistakes your lessons learned what you learned what was the biggest career point tipping point for you in your career. I'll start with you Nadia. Great well let's see I I tend not to dwell on my mistakes or failures because I really feel that every memory I have has brought me every incident that that I've had has brought me to this point it'd be hard to erase that and unravel it but in terms of one thing that I have discovered later in life then and I kind of wish I had known earlier was I as half half Japanese half German there was really no culture I ever fit. It's already conflict there. Yeah it was it was always hard for me to fit in anywhere and I tried to do that a lot you know but I didn't really fit in with the Japanese culture and I didn't fit in with the German culture and and so once I was able to kind of own who I am then things became a lot more relaxed for me and I didn't have to try and strive to be something that I that I'm not and instead I could just not be afraid of who I am and not be afraid of my power as a woman and and it's just made me a lot happier so that was one of the things that I've I've learned over time was to accept yourself as you are and be happy with it and kind of like I think of like my early years as like living incognito to who I really am so that's when I when I'm young I'm around young people I always say you know show up minute one with who you are versus trying to pretend you're something that you're not or pushing things down that you're not. So earlier we had a we had a quick chat about how women in leadership and power positions sometimes try to try to fit in and try to mimic how men do the leadership how and and that is very bad because it becomes the same it's the same thing it's not the nature that the whole reason that we need diversity is because we want women to bring all those aspects of womenhood which is not there on the table so I know Poppy this is this is topic which is close to you Do you have anything to add there? Sure I mean I think that fits into some of the things I would have said I definitely believe not just about gender but about anything that we have to you know technology's future is has to be about personalization it has to be about optimization of our context of our individual qualities and that you know technology we don't want it to be assistance to us we want to you know technology to be you move towards an extension of our own agency and we want to assure robust experiences for everything that we that we we create but the same goes for how we interact with each other and the same goes for recognizing those differences you know so so at the core of the things I believe is that we do have to be you know embracing those differences and recognizing that one size doesn't fit all which which kind of gets to you ask me to come up with my you know sort of big learning point a transition in my my career and there isn't a particular anecdote I'll give but what I will say is there there's a pivot point for me with regard to a mind shift and you know I think we're all strong willed people up here with them and in the audience and and there was a point at which I switched from you know and started you know time is our most precious thing and it isn't whether we're in business or anywhere and it just frankly is the most precious thing we have and every interaction we have with someone that communication I would I you know I like to be right in places but it's not about right or wrong it's about whether the information and the data that you care to exchange with someone is actually experienced and taken in in the way that you want want it to be and it was a really pivotal point where I stopped making it about you know a two that it was up to someone else to make sure that that happened it's you know it doesn't matter what's happening on other site it is my job to make sure that what I want you know what I care about being exchanged in that you know when I'm talking to someone else or I'm presenting is experienced on the other side and that comes in lots of different shapes and sizes and when you own that it means that you know other people might not be bringing their best but that doesn't matter it's your job and the the real thing then you have to recognize is that you know as much as we have this cliche that we want to always bring our our best and you want to you know know how to bring your best to every day and every interaction and everything you do that's just ain't reality and it's not possible when you've got a lot going on you know what you what what I shifted towards is look I've got to know how to make sure that when I am at my absolute worst I'm still good enough and I'm still okay and making sure that what I'm doing is being shared because frankly I probably haven't had enough sleep I've got too much going on and I might not be prepared maybe I've cared for two parents who have passed away I have a daughter I've got a lot of things in my life and I don't want those on the table in my interactions and I don't want someone else to feel them and I do a lot of you know and so I started thinking about that is how do I train myself to know to be my own self-critic to know if I'm going to be able to handle it because if I can't if I know what it feels like to be at my worst I know when to say when I have to say no and that's way better than trying to push through you know when you have to step back but I also know how to make sure that I I can feel that I mean I quick a couple examples are you know I do a lot of public I if I'm giving a talk you will see that hour before or even hours before I try to make myself as nervous as possible I plan for what if I don't sleep what if I you know what if things go in a different direction what if I get an email from work that has my brain in a different place I have to know how that feels so that I can still deliver what I need to deliver because nobody else needs to have that part of me with them and so training myself to be that way one of the the piece of advice I often give to my students or to anyone is you know go run a marathon but but not after you've trained go run it tomorrow I promise you will finish and the point is it's 26 miles we can all go walk 26 miles think of it as a giant street fair people are going to give you food and water every other minute like shower you with confetti every mile and you know just know what it feels like because you're going to get in that what you're going to get is you're going to know how what it takes you to recover and that's that's really important you're going to know what that what that time horizon looks like what your time series looks like and the things that help you do it and then you're slowly and you're and you're going to finish and you're going to know it's not about the 26 miles it's about all those mundane pieces where you feel really awful and horrible but actually you don't because you recover and and knowing your recovery and knowing how to bring that is like the best skill like I draw upon it all the time I've I've run a lot of marathons but the ones that have taught me the most are the ones where I was out of shape and I think that's yeah it's part of that mindset yeah I love that analogy Robin do you want to take this question as well and tell us maybe the biggest lesson learned or the mistake that you made which was which taught you something that you would like to share with us sure well I agree with Nadia I don't think there's any mistakes because everything that in the moment I perceived was my world falling apart or bad decision was just life showing me what I really needed to know and learn and so without those mistakes I probably wouldn't be here so I don't regret any of it if I can give kind of some areas that I wish I was better in you know I do regret and this was you know LinkedIn has kind of changed all this in social media but I think back to all the amazing people I've met over the course of my career and who I've lost touch with and so and it's easy because we're constantly in the in the now or being pulled by something that we think is happening in the future and the only time we look back is for regrets but there's so much in so many great people in our past that we shouldn't lose contact with so I do when I think back I think oh gosh I wish I didn't lose touch with this person so I would say that's one thing I would say you know I've had times in my career where I felt alone in something that was happening at my job whether it was some form of discrimination or unfairness or some sort of injustice and I kind of I would flee the scene either emotionally and mentally or literally leave the job and I think that now we're in a space a collective consciousness that's a shift is happening where women people of color or young people ageism people who are at kind of at the very senior part of their career don't have to be afraid to stand up for themselves when they see problems happening in the workplace and it's a real advantage of living in today's world because I feel as though even five years ago you know certain circumstances happen in my career where I didn't feel as though I had a voice so I don't know if I regret it because I don't know if I would have been in a supportive space to be able to kind of say hey that's not fair or this happened to me and I think there should be some action taken but I think now we're at the precipice of that all being changed so I would encourage anyone that feels afraid or feels though there's some sort of discrimination in their workplace to really be able to voice that now I would hope because I'm starting now to to defend others that I see not being treated fairly so yeah that's a great point um religion background stereotypes women of color people of color uh being minority in any aspect has has all those points like all the me too thumbs up action I'll I'll go back and to that point with Nadia and I'll discuss something you did but before I do that I want to go back to Rosalie and um get maybe a lessons learned or a big mistake you did in your career if any okay of course um we all have those kind of lessons to learn all clear the most things I'm thinking of um if time back I can do it differently is um back to like my age of middle 13s so um at the afternoon my boss come to my office says why not you take a big role um that time I'm a leader for a business unit which is about five percent of the company and my boss want my to take basically the second chair of the company it's about at least 30 percent of the revenues of the company and at the moment I'm just thinking no I don't want to take it um I've been that business unit for more than almost 10 years and then I familiar with every corner of that business I know every person in factory on the market the whole the major customers and my managers walk with me for more than five years we all know each other so we kind of like a family I don't want to leave my family that time I'm sort um but um although finally I take that job I talk that job and I'm running really successful that one so everyone has his own comfortable zoom but when you have a chance to get a big role I'd like to say the outside world is colorful so you will get more um chance to see the colorful world so if you got chance to do that grab it don't let person to push you especially your boss that's the thing so I am trying to catch every opportunities not only for myself also for my team yeah that's also very close to my experience because I think I don't know if there is a neurological reason for this or it's education or environment but women tend to take risk less than men and they tend to feel like they need to be more qualified sometimes over qualified for a position for to to jump for that and idea you have an experience similar experience when you move to Germany right do you want to share that story with us briefly sure so I think what it is actually is culture in the Indian culture and the Chinese culture I think that stem fields are more encouraged we've worked with a lot of outs you know companies in India and where they have a third of their engineers are female so so I do definitely think the culture has a huge impact on that so yeah back in back when I was working in eds Germany I had the opportunity to take on a role that that I was pretty under qualified for in a way I it was in my I think I was about 26 and the role I took on was a vice president of eds Germany and all the other vice presidents were in their 40s 20 years older than me and German and male and you know I I looked at it like what can I bring to the table that hasn't been done before here and is not faking something because I'm not into being you know trying to I hate the fake it do you make it expression that you can't stand that expression but so what I did was I I turned the traditional leadership model which is the pyramid of the person at the top and then the pyramid going down I turned that upside down it's called servant leadership and I basically put myself at the bottom and then I put everyone that reported to me as the experts and they really were because I moved from IBM selling hardware and software to an eds which is a services business very different um and you know I just whenever there was like okay Nadia like you're here to save the day I said no actually I'm not you are here to save the day let's what would you do what are your ideas and that became really effective and so it's it's something the servant leadership model is something that I I I lived and I had to live it that way because I really like I said was underqualified for the job but it in on the court it worked really well to make the people that worked for me the experts because they could solve the problems and then they were the experts uh and so um that's something that I wanted to to share is something that was that was pretty great thank you um Rosalie you're a CEO of a startup right now with all the ups and downs I leave that um so they say CEOs the CEO job is the loneliest job on the planet um so how do you how do you manage that like uh what are some of the challenges that you have in this new role is a few years that you took on this role right um maybe you can touch base on managing your board um how does that work there are not so many women uh that have a seat there so whatever you want to share as challenges there for the audience um yeah I've been this job for two years almost so yes I totally agree CEO is most lonely job in the world so um as my previous career I always had some mentor on that so she's he's kind of uh can um everything you know in the job side you can rely on even just for the spirit side but right now as a CEO I always describe this job like you are driver to drive our vehicle so your team is just like the other components of the vehicle so you need to make the direction of your company and you come to rely on anyone to do that you are you are the brain of your company so but you still have a lot of things you are not familiar with you need to make the decision some kind of your lack of the knowledge so what I'm thinking about is um kind of cut this mental um to small pieces for example I I didn't have any fundraising experience but as a startup you should do that so I'm target my chairman is my mentor for that but also for the technology side for elix our technology is no one did before we basically we are innovation something but you have to rely on the people your team on technology side especially for the technology inventor for that also for the market because this is widest charging since you don't have to copy a model for market side you need to develop the market by yourself so um sometimes you know you can acquire talent from the other company but not 100% because we did things people never done before so kind of this um to make a company to moving forward a little bit at this moment thank you I want to change the topic a little bit poppy you teach a class you you teach many classes at some where you're an adjust and junked professor and one of the challenges I feel always is that recently we have women in tech funds so there there is money for for women entrepreneurs to to found companies to come and bring new ideas to the industry but I don't think there are enough of them out there or they they accept the risk or just they kind of jump on the opportunity as we touched on touched based on it before how do you feel how do you how do you see this among your students and and what do you do about it what do you do about it is the thing I think we all should be talking about we can give it we can talk platitudes and advice all we want but we actually got to change and get make sure we actually do do the things we I know you have you have an absolute pitch but I'm going to ask you to to speak up sorry sorry so I agree something that Rosalie I really like that you said which I think feeds into Tara's question is you know this this concept of loneliness and it it scares a lot of people away loneliness and the unknown and you know I I have a couple of sayings again I like those but that you know I feel you when you're thinking about technology not just as a CEO but when you're trying to be ahead of ideas and you're in that space where you're looking for how things are going to change or you want to be at the cusp of something you have to be confident being lonely in your ideas because you know if everyone understands them and that is you know by that time you're probably late right if you have to be thinking about things that everybody even in your own company for sure is not going to understand or support and in that way you have to develop this confidence to be your own worst critic you know so you have to be insecure at yourself but then you have to know how to be confident that you've done that and you've thought through it and you can then be very you know take that confidence with you even if you know and that you've screwed nine scrutinized yourself in the right way and you know who you the people you know how to trust you know input and feedback but at the same time that might not be the only source of information a lot of it has to come from you and your own insights so you know in that way at my I do I teach one class at Stanford otherwise I'm full-time at dolly and then and but I teach a coding class I mean really my class is about you know that my students come in and they they code a ton of things it's it's a lot of coding it's a lot of game development but you know we're thinking about immersive technologies they're building for any you know current immersive technology you know or game controller or VRAR but the point is that I that's that's interesting here is I purposely put no requirements on my class and my reason for that is I don't want people to feel they need to have a requirement coming in we're going to make sure we get them to some place that they can and it it does help balance diversity and or make sure there is diversity in ways that I think wouldn't necessarily be there and you know that like something I've said before is you know you want to think who you want to be and what you want to know and then put yourself there don't think about what you've done in the past you don't need to have you know there are so many things that come together and I often tell people this it's you never know when you're learning something whether it's going to be you know it doesn't need to be the thing you do 10 years from now but it's going to be a critical part of that tool belt whether you're a CEO and you're having been a fundraiser in the 10 20 years ago that's going to be something you draw upon and I can think about 25 years ago I was I I soldered circuit boards for one of the designers of the original developers of the synthesizer simply because I wanted to have interesting chats with him you know and I relish that but you know I didn't want to care about soldering but when then I had to build my own lab at Hopkins you know I think there's nobody shows up to do that for you it was like oh yeah I know how to do that I know what I have to do and it's just this this tool I can draw upon that gives me autonomy to build the things I want to do and to not feel fettered by it and so in that same way with students and especially the female students that might come in I want to make sure that they have those tools and that they're developing each one of them even if it's not what they do in their future they're going to there's going to be some aspect of that confidence build that they've gotten through there that gives them insight my students build brain computer interfaces and they walk away in one week they walk away knowing that they did that and I like that thank you I was reading an article a while ago that was saying in 1980s the admissions for computer science was actually 50-50 with with women and men but in 2014 is 2080 so there there is definitely a cultural point point into that there is stereotypes that women cannot develop they're not good coders I have a computer engineering degree and I'm not a good coder by the way to fit into that stereotype but I don't code right so you can be a technologist without coding and I want to kind of marry this discussion to what we were discussing before Robin on on you going through a non-tech to a high-tech transition you were not you didn't study computer science you studied film and you ended up in a high-tech community and maybe you can share a bit of your story about the transition and how you do code actually you were coding before that yes yes I was I was coding an html self-taught but you're right I didn't have any formal training whatsoever and when you go into companies like amazon or IAC who's the parent company of match.com and tinder and a lot of other big.com websites you know engineers don't really see that as enough just because you're self-taught in a couple of programming languages doesn't make you at their level so respect is a big thing in tech organizations as I'm sure many of us have experienced and in order to kind of have that street cred and you know respect from your peers you do have to do a lot to to get there you know for me I had been successful in roles at major tech companies that got me at least you know half of the way there in terms of respect and credibility but it took my performance and being able to you know participate in scrum meetings and understand what agile you know product management is and all these different you know protocols and philosophies and building software that I had to really understand at a high level of proficiency in order for engineers to even listen to me but at the same time I think and this is really important for anyone wanting to get into tech or you're kind of on the outskirts of it and some other kind of ancillary support role or you're at a tech company but doing something traditional in terms of finance and marketing is that everyone always talks about STEM and everyone's pushing kids into coding you know I myself do that I host coding workshops for kids but I don't push them into coding I push them into tech and there's a difference because there's so many roles I mean as you can see from this diverse panel up here that are go beyond the coding the coding framework or as a computer software engineer there's you know social media management there's database engineering there's project management you know there's network infrastructure there's UI and UX whether it's the user interface or the user's journey you know from page to page that comes from having a little bit more of a creative mindset or a background in psychology and so I think a lot of kids are going into coding they just like math they get scared off when it gets really tough and then they don't want to have anything to do with it just like a lot of adults who don't even like math because of these traumatic experiences they had in high school with it and so I'm starting to see that in coding too and it's a real tragedy because there's so many lucrative careers that can get young people into the six figure zone without having to write a single line of code and that's really what we should be teaching our kids is that you know tech isn't just sitting in front of a computer by yourself not interacting with anyone all day and staring you know at syntax it's really so much larger than that and it's right for any type of personality and any type of skill set so you know I'm living proof of that but there's so many other people out there that are living proof of that but just that people don't see so yeah thank you poppy do you want to share your story from going uh I think you you started as a scientist right and then you ended up as a technologist at Dolby kind of so I think a little bit about yeah no I and I just actually want to come and remember I love your thoughts at the same time I really think that there is you know coding is not difficult for people to engage in and build basic things you know I can take people who haven't coded before and you know start them with almost drag and drop coding to the point where they can you know build a basic synthesizer or do something and having the dialogue helps give a mental representation that will likely make them more effective I think even if they're coming from backgrounds and you know it's we right now I think part of why leading in it's leading into the kind of question that Tara just asked which is you know I came from I'm a neurophysiologist I was in biomedical engineering department and I literally got my funding my PI funding which means that you get your labs and things and everybody's happy and you're happy and I woke up really ecstatic about that and then a few days later realized that I wanted to be working on slightly different problems and I wanted to move faster and I wanted to pivot and I wanted to be building things that actually were going to reach people and touch people in you know the near term and in the time frame that that I was thinking you know that I was going to experience and at this time you know this is in Adobe eight years there is something happening which is is pretty you know formidable with regard to how our lives are going to change and and that's that you are seeing the computational power of you know very progressive machine learning and deep learning you know be able to live on very tiny chips and and be part of all of our technologies well you know the world I come from computational neuroscience we've been thinking and working in machine learning and probabilistic models of our sensory experience because that's that's where I think you know for for a long time and it's now you know what I was seeing is that this was going to be evolving into how our technologies are intelligent to us and can really you know enhance our sensory experiences in ways that are quite progressive and that was extremely exciting and it's it's interesting because you know eight years ago someone might have asked me well wait how does that relate to technology and I think today it's like it is what the future of technology is and most companies have people that come from backgrounds and and think in these ways and we have to and so it's just it's you know there's there's this wonderful sort of proliferation of you know caring about our sensory interactions and thinking about technologies that interact with us and that means we've got to get these experiences right it's really what I call embodied user experience where your technology knows what you're experiencing on the inside and you know it's this really thoughtful progressive empathetic exchange thank you so Nadia do Hollywood Women in Tech code can they code yes so we want you to tell us a little bit of what Robin said you know there are so many different jobs out there and I'd love to love to talk to kids from you know kindergarten on and ask them what they think you know what their favorite apps are and like what they think you need to study in order to to participate in in creating any of that and and their answers are very interesting because it's always like math and engineering and science and and then I kind of point out well one of the people I work with has a music degree in composition or I'll talk to another you know one of my other colleagues as a psychologist or another colleague is you know an artist so and I and I think that that in order to you know put together the best user experiences having empathy is also really important and so so so it's I always find it interesting to talk to kids to see how early that programming starts with that only one type of person creates technology and it's actually quite quite eye-opening so in our women in technology group we have 1600 women and men from all the different studios and you know many of them have never coded in their life and some of them some of them have and the languages that that they started in perhaps are archaic these days Fortran etc cobalt but I think I think for for me my experience has been that that having curiosity is super important and and looking at the world and and going okay well how would I figure that out and also having an opinion about something so we have like I said 1600 women and men that comprises women in technology group and we have this exciting initiative called solve for equality by 2025 in Hollywood and technology and we're creating it right now that within seven years we want to disrupt discrimination racism and bias in technology in Hollywood which right now are you know they're not the most open accepting industries and they both are fraught with they didn't affect them at all nothing happened they are all working right half of Hollywood is not working today right so there's definitely some really really big challenges but I I firmly believe in the dignity of the human spirit and I think that when you do have many different voices at the table there's really nothing that can't be solved and you know when you think of gay marriage at the beginning of the Obama administration even Obama was against gay marriage and then within within two terms of his his his presidency it was passed as a federal law and that had so much to do with the entertainment business and bringing in into our into our living rooms characters from modern family and willing grace so I think the power of the entertainment industry is really amazing and then the technology industry you know having these crazy you know making water on Mars or you know sending Tesla to right sending men to the moon in Tesla well even in the 60s when they hadn't invented the metal alloys for for that that first moon launch so I think both these industries can be really potent solvers of these issues that they're fraught with and so I'm I'm very optimistic about the future thank you Rosalie I'm going to ask the last question from you and then we'll take questions from the audience I'm very excited that we have a very diverse audience I think we have more men than women that's amazing can we capture this from here cameras so before we get to the audience Rosalie we touched based on and cultural differences you have worked as as leaders we have the president of the SID taking picture of the audience so so Rosalie you have been in leadership positions in China and in in the US you do businesses with with different cultures what do you see there already Nadia touch point and this resonates with my experience of leaving and working in Asia when when I felt it's more diverse when I moved to Europe I thought it would get better it got worse when I got moved from Europe to to North America I was sure it's getting better and it got way worse so so what is your experience what do you think of the cultural differences and then in Alex is there anything you guys are doing about this of course there's cultural difference especially between China and the North America and fortunately I work with America company as I explained before for 21 years and right now although I'm managing a North America company and our last shareholders is from China and I have two of seven board from China so that's kind of mixed from Chinese and the North America so I'd like to say we need to respect each other's cultures I'm kind of in between to understand both maybe some of that not I can't say 100% so acting as a role to keep communication so and I always talk my team that communication is most important I took example that in my Vancouver office two doctors originally from Canada they both speak frequent English but they misunderstand each other that's true that's very true for our daily life so as a multicultural companies it's very important to double check the other's opinion when you come to a conclusion and there should be some point you can make it at the end so don't give up and also I take the advantage of as a woman because I'm I have another woman board members in my organizations so I think woman is some kind of better communication than men I believe so definitely thank you some of the men in the audience believe to that okay so we will take few questions we have like 10 minutes please go to the microphone if you have questions and my to just introduce myself my name is Subtik I work in Eastman and previously had done my PhD from Kent State at Liquid Institute my question to Dr. Papi Kram and others in the panel to create a gender equal society which we all desire which should be the priority that more women get into science and technology and STEM area or more women get into entrepreneurship well I think I can answer a little bit but I'm really interested I I think the key common denominator in both of those statements is more frankly you know and I would say that you know yes more into you know if you look at neuroscience is interesting if you look at neuroscience maybe people don't realize it's a pretty much people in terms of gender getting PhDs it's about 5050 right it's actually you know and but there's huge nutrition at the point of people getting tenured professors professorships and why I mean there's things with biological clocks there's things with you know the tenure process there's all sorts of things that happen that cause that and you can fix those things you have to do them more systemically for sure but the one thing I would say is you know getting people hired is one thing changing you know culture and inclusion and how you know numbers at the in in the room itself to me is fundamentally critical I I'm gonna let you all talk about entrepreneurship but I really do feel you have to change the numbers in all spaces of how people interact because you know I saw a woman who I know who's for a very large bank is leads all of their sales and she said her view is if you're you know under 33 percent if you know genders on the table and but it's not just gender it's everything it's just we need diverse opinions we have different perspectives and it's not it's how you make sure that you even include individuals that don't think the way you do and and there you know I think a lot of older corporate cultures you know forget about gender forget about diversity like to include like-minded opinions in the table and and once you break that open you start thinking differently so I'll pass off if I may add just want to use this opportunity we have a lot of supportive men in the audience a while ago I had two experiences with discrimination they both affected me a lot but what I got out of it is it's not just enough to talk about it when it happens I think we need everybody around the table to step up like I'm going to share one of you one of them with you we were interviewing for for a technical position and the person that we were interviewing was from a specific race when he left one of our colleagues who was part of the interview made a comment about yeah but this this race are like that and and if if we don't stop that right there I think we are not going to improve this just just having funds for women entrepreneurs or or talk about LGBT or talk about any minority different religions different races people of color talking about it is not enough like we need to stand up when we can and when we are not the target of that that systematic discrimination so we had a very friendly chat after that that you know what I'm more interested in your professional opinion about his CV and the interview let's let's put all those other things aside and we can talk about it maybe outside of a professional environment if you want to but here that doesn't doesn't make any sense and it doesn't make a change so yeah please Tara I just wanted to make one statement that I think and and I've said this before is you know when when you're in a a meeting that's a key meeting you know there and you look around and you know it isn't how you want it to be or you wish it were you know you have to think about what what's happening in that meeting that's so important it's information's being shared and everything is you know success ultimately is about how you know in terms of making sure we you know improve diversity and we break these things it's about how information is shared more progressively more how we democratize that better and that takes work and it takes an acknowledgement when there's you know when there's critical information being shared is that list right you know have we thought about that have we you know because if we keep you know if you do things by levels you're probably not including and empowering people to have the information they need to rise up to to to be able to bring their ideas to the table and it's like thinking through how do you you know how do you make sure that information and I'm using information broadly but I think it's something we need to think about all the time it's a group move right all of these changes it's not going to happen just by women just by men just by people of color it's like a whole society that needs to get more aware and and act on every single one of them other questions I saw some other hands in the audience before hello my name is David my question to the panel is each of you what one thing would you like to see change in our society for more young women to go into STEM industry um so I I'd like to recommend a couple books so one of the one of the books that I recommend is a is a book called women don't ask which is by Sarah Lashiver and camera first named Linda Babcock and it talks about these cultural things that you know girls grow up in a certain culture where they are they're doing babysitting and more like inside the home activities to earn money whereas the boys are mowing the lawns and stuff and and you might go out to dinner with your family and you see your your dad paying for things and so it's the culture that that we grow up in is so uh it's so um pervasive on on you know the the magazines that we see that promote um you know that looks are very important for women and those kind of things that we that we just kind of grow up in and that they're the air we breathe so that that book is really impacted me a lot in terms of making me aware of of uh things that I wasn't even asking for in in in a formal negotiation for Sally but also just um really very often in in the workplace um asking for things that I I didn't think that um that I could ask for um and the other book that I that I wanted to recommend was a book called solve for happy which is written by the former chief business officer of Google X Mo Goudat and um he he has this engineering approach to solving for happiness and and one of the things that was great reading it was um just it it strips away a lot of the illusions that we have separating each other so you mentioned this incident you had which I found really interesting and you know if that person that was being judgmental in that meeting really realized that and I know this sounds kind of come by yeah but it's like we're all sisters and brothers you know and we all have different opinions and different things we grow up in but to just kind of embrace that and um and just statistically people that are happier are more successful so I just want to put that out there because those were some really impactful books I've I've read and I think that if um if really any women read those books but just really anyone uh to get to get to get to know what uh what women are under I think men that have read the women don't ask book and have an under more of an understanding and more empathy for what might be pressing down a woman um in terms of asking and then bringing her to the table and then just uh and just the idea of um being happier as a person and being more of yourself and uh bringing that joy to work um you're gonna have more fun you're gonna attract more to you and you're gonna be yourself so just wanted to add that I want to share a book uh written by the previous uh Amazon uh chairman and CEO China uh this book called 25 years success in the past so actually I took this as a bible for my career so basically you can find a lot of reference uh when a marketing job a market job and when a new uh technology innovation what need you need to handle um for your company as well as for your life we have another question please go ahead hi uh my wife has been very successful in achieving distinction in her engineering field with her professional society uh at a very high level uh she's tried to migrate into the corporate board room with limited success um she's found that she does not receive great support from the very few women that also already occupy such positions um and she often talks about how effective the good old boys network is in um in preserving uh corporate America within the U.S. as we know it basically a white white boys club um and I'm sure most of you would probably agree with that oh yes I'm a sweet spot right I'm an immigrant I was younger when I started and I'm a woman so I think it's it's almost the same for everybody like uh in terms of a combo that makes it even more difficult so I was thinking as I was listening to you just occurred to me why not form a good old girls club you're doing it here you guys want to join well there actually is there is something called the girls lounge which is uh it's for women it's started by a friend of mine called Shelly's Alice and she has this group called the girls lounge and they put together women um women groups at traditionally uh very male-oriented events like the CES or the world economic forum so I would definitely urge you to look her up her name Shelly's Alice and her group is called the female quotient and her her one of our groups is called the girls lounge and they they have basically they have the good old boys network and that's fine and um but there also is a girls lounge which men are very much invited to so that is not really the anti-dote but it's just another another group so I'd urge you to look into that and it's a wonderful wonderful group that that I think that's really important the one thing I will say is there's you you struck a chord a bit with me because those types of you know it's within that you know that the you like people of like minds are having you know there's something there's a word that gets used a lot maybe not in all industry but I definitely hear it a lot it's relationship right I do not like that word we have got to get rid of the word relationship it doesn't mean you don't you don't have people that you work with that you respect highly but the concept of a relationship being critical in my work environment for me it's just fundamentally wrong and it should be about trust right I want to have people I trust I may have my friends that have similar things but I actively do not let it's very interesting because people who work for me even they'll they'll say the word but oh yeah I'm building a good relationship like no not relationship I'm building good trust with people and you know it's the things that I mean I mean it's an innocuous word but it fundamentally has a connotation that is inclusive or exclusive and not objective and I think that it's critical that we actually fundamentally care about these things because otherwise you're only going to proliferate the inclusivity of one group or another group and that's not what we want right we want people to trust each other and to succeed and to have diversity that can come in lots of shapes and sizes and lots of way working styles and a lot of different ways of achieving success and it's yeah you don't all have to get along perfectly you have to be civil and you have to trust each other and you have to know how to be good humans thank you we probably have time for our last question we talked a little bit about getting girls into STEM fields and and how do you bring that younger generation in we didn't talk much about the other end of the spectrum which is the exodus from the STEM field of women who are in their 30s and 40s and then in addition to that you know the follow-on question I have is do you think that women's perceived professional value continues to grow at the same rate as as their counterparts their male counterparts as they get older are they perceived as valuable and in how do you handle that how do you address that so I would love to address it because I was actually going to bring that up with one of the earlier questions for the sake of time I didn't go go there but it is a major major issue of retention once women have made it past them they've got these great careers they have this great position hanging on to them is really tough because once they get there they're in this battlefield against men and this kind of power struggle and a lot of women just after I think I read a really fascinating study that you know the average amount of time in tech companies for women is about four years and if you're a person of color it's half of that a lot of times in terms of the average because it's so hard once you get there to defend your space in command respect in a male dominated industry so it's a major major issue I think for me personally the times where I've been able to ride the wave of that is by having an internal mentor and that's something that you know maybe some people disagree with but you can't really ask for a mentor it's like asking someone you know to be in a relationship with you they kind of already sorry for that word but I mean trust to be in a trust in a romantic sense it's like asking someone in a romantic sense be mine when they're not interested or they're not you know available for whatever reason but it is so critical to have a mentor within these organizations to keep you there to keep you under your wing to defend you to be in the conference room with you and not let everyone mansplain what you just explained quite clearly and for me I see my excess success attributed to you know to be honest to white males who took me under their wing at every company I've never had a mentor that was a female and I've never had a mentor that was a person of color which is sad but still you know white males Indian males Asian males have always been there to help me and make sure I stayed and so I encourage you know not just the white males in this room but everyone in this room to kind of just be present to someone who may not seem happy in their role or maybe struggling or not kind of falling out of interest in the role because they're probably bumping up against these statistics and I really find the only solution because HR I'm sorry HR they're not going to help you it really is your boss and your leader making sure you stay and otherwise we lose so many good women and then it's even harder if they do leave to go start families unless there's someone there championing them back it's really hard to make that entrance that re-entry back into tech it's a major major issue I'm glad you brought it up thank you right I was one thing we were talking about is I have a rule to myself is when I think about and because I actually got my not my company added six to eight weeks to everyone's maternity and paternity leave because I showed up with a spreadsheet explaining to them that they were penalizing women for being not penalizing but it was not it was it actually cost a woman more to have a child if the more senior they were in the company and they immediately did not want that I mean that they they're very actually very very progressive which was wonderful it was just explaining what was but the thing that I look at and I think every woman here and elsewhere is there sometimes maybe benefits or things that exist from other companies or things that you might happen in your life that help you set you know be successful that maybe not may not be a benefit of your own company or may not exist in some place else how do you like mentally track that and think about okay this is something that is enabling me and I'm getting this from this source how do I make sure that this gets proliferated more because this is going to help right and there are different ways that you can think about that but it's like keeping there's an a vigilance that I think is to separate your own success the things that are enabling you and looking at those as is there some way to you know I and I there are a lot of specifics but I think that that's something that you constantly can be doing when you know at some level thank you very much so I'd like you to thank you guys ladies sorry thank you ladies very much that was an honest mistake I didn't plan it I want to thank you very much for sharing your story for putting in the time I know you some of you commuted so please put it give it up for for the we'll have you here for another while I would like to thank our sponsors