 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are on the ground in Silicon Valley at the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We're really excited to come down and talk to some of the guests, the award winners as well, some of the folks from Anita Borg. So we're really psyched for this segment to be joined by Elizabeth Ames of EP. Strategic Marketing and Alliance is welcome. Thank you. I'm delighted that you're here and I'm delighted to be talking to you. Absolutely. So, Anita Borg is giving out some great awards. You're giving out Women of Vision Awards. We just talked to some of the student award winners, but you're also giving away a top company award. Talk a little bit about that program. Yeah, that program is really set up to look at quantitative metrics. So what we're looking at is what is the representation of women at the entry level, the mid-level, the senior level, executive level in technical roles within companies and the percent of women that they're bringing in and they're recruiting and also their promotion. And so we score quantitatively, we add up all of those scores and we announce a winner. And this year we also announced for the first time a leadership index of companies and there's 12 companies on that leadership index. So do you just query a broad range of companies or do they apply to be part of the program or how do you select which companies you're drawing data from? You know, companies choose to participate. And so I would like to say that there were 35 companies that participated this year and I think all 35 deserve a round of applause because, you know, quite frankly, there are a lot of companies out there that aren't willing to talk about what they're doing or share their numbers and really be quantitative and think about it and really understand where they are. Right. So then you give them, I mean, kind of what's the process? Do you go through publicly available information? They fill out a form. I mean, how do you, what are some of the metrics that you guys are pulling data around? Yeah. That's a really great question. They submit data to us. That data is all handled confidentially. That's part of the reason that they're willing to do that. The metrics that we look at are the percent of women at entry, mid, senior and executive level in their technical organizations. We give them very specific definitions of technical and what that means so that they're all measuring the same type of technical workers. Then we give them definition of what is entry level, what's mid, what's senior executive, so that we're really comparing apples to apples. Okay. And then you have some type of a scoring mechanism. You add up the numbers and from that you give an award. Yeah. We use a widely accepted statistical methodology called Zscores. They get a Zscore for every single metric. We sum up the Zscores, the one with the highest score is the winner. The ones that are on the leadership index are the companies that were above the mean. So they're top performers within the industry. Okay. And then do you aggregate the data and deliver it back like, you know, it's kind of typical best practices for a survey so people can see, you know, here's your score, here's the mean, or here's the average? Yes. Yes, we do. We actually spend time reporting back with every single one of the companies. We show them how they scored on every metric against the industry mean and also against higher performing companies. And we help guide them in terms of the things that they might want to consider working on. Okay. So highlight what a good company looks like. Where are they scoring high? How does what they do get reflected in not only their score, but actually being the type of company that you guys are trying to encourage? Yeah, you know, that's a great question because really the best companies, they're scoring significantly higher than the industry mean. So what you see a lot of times is you see a total number of 21% of women in technical roles within the U.S. But the best companies, they're at 30 or over 30% of women in their technical workforce. And usually those companies see pretty consistent performance from entry level all the way through executive level. It might not be 30% all the way through, but it gets pretty close for those top companies. Whereas in the industry mean, what you see is you see a significant fall off from entry level all the way through to executive level. So the percentage of women at the entry level is around 25%, but the percentage of women at the executive level is closer to 12% or 13%. So you literally have a fall off of 50%, right? And we know from research that that fall off is really why women leave and not only did they leave those companies, but they leave the industry. So 13 companies above the mean out of 35, that means there was a lot that weren't doing so well, but they volunteered to participate. So when you communicate back to those companies, what's their reaction and say, you thought you were doing okay? That's why you put your thing in, but we've got not bad news. Are they receptive? Are they looking for ways to get better? What's kind of their reception to the data? For a lot of these companies, some of them are participating because they want to benchmark where they are. And they want to understand where they are relative to the industry. So this is really great information for them. And for almost every company that participates, there is something that they're doing well and there is some bright spot. And for all of them, there's probably areas that they can work on, whether they're on the leadership index or they're not on the leadership index. I mean, nobody's completely cracked the code. We're not at 50-50. We all got lots of work to do. Okay, good. And so talk about trends. You've been doing this for a while. Within the aggregate of the data, what are some of the things you can report back that you guys are seeing, trends, changes, encouraging things? Well, sort of, I refer to this as the good news and the bad news all at once. We saw an absolute increase in women from 2013 to 2014 in technical roles. It didn't change the industry percentage. We're still stuck at 21%. And to be honest with you, that's the number that we've been at for four years. So one could look at that and say, four years and we're stuck at 21%. One could also say, well, at least it's stable and it's not going backwards. So we have something to work with here to move forward. It's hard to move that industry percentage, but really, that's what we're after. We really want to move that industry percentage. Right. Well, do you cover it all, because there are women in technical firms that aren't necessarily in technical roles, and that's something we cover a lot. There's a lot of jobs to do at Google. There's a lot of jobs to do at Facebook and at Yahoo and on and on and on. There aren't necessarily CS based jobs. Do you look at those as well as part of the process in terms of women and tech that are just not in the tech tech? We really focus on women in technical roles. So while there may be women who have CS degrees that are in marketing or whatever, some other department within these companies, we don't actually count them in this case. We're really looking for women that are doing technical work, that they're in technical jobs. That really is our mission to increase that percentage, that number. Great. Last word, Anita Borg does a lot of great stuff. We went to our first Grace Hopper Celebration on Women Computing last year. It was eye-opening. We hope to go back again. What are some of the other initiatives that Anita Borg is doing to help this cause? Well, we have quite a few things. We have a fabulous online network for technical women called Sisters. It's existed for quite a long time, and it's a global online network. I think we have about seven or eight thousand women in that network around the world. It's really kind of a great mutual support kind of thing for them. We also have a program that we launched this year called ABI.Local, which is location-based communities. We have one in New York that's up and running. They do all kinds of events in their local area, including a GHC-1, which is sort of a one-day version of a mini Grace Hopper. And we'll be launching other cities this year, five other cities in the U.S., including Boston, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Austin, Washington D.C. So mini Grace Hoppers. Sort of, yeah. Like, well, local communities that can put on different events. And little one-day Grace Hoppers are kind of one of that one-day GHCs. Well, Elizabeth, thanks for taking a minute. Congratulations on the awards tonight. Really a fantastic event. Thank you so much. We're really glad you're here. Absolutely. So I'm Jeff Frick. We're on the ground with Elizabeth Ames from the Anita Borg Institute. It's the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards here in Silicon Valley. If you want to know how your company's doing, are you doing a good job? Reach out to Elizabeth. Get involved in the survey. If even if you're not doing a good job, as you said, you can get benchmarked and do a better job next year. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube. Thanks for watching.