 Welcome to the diversity luncheon. My name is Caitlin O'Connell, and I run content strategy and diversity initiatives at Cloud Foundry Foundation. I'm really pleased to see so many people in the room today. How many of you are attending this luncheon for the first time? Very cool. Thank you for being here. We have a wonderful event planned for you today. We are thrilled to be screening episode one of the Chasing Grace project produced and directed by Jennifer Clover. This documentary series devotes each episode to a different topic within the women in tech narrative. The project aims to give a voice to the everyday women working in tech, not just the ones who make the headlines. The focus of today's episode is the gender pay gap, which can lead to one million dollars in lost wages over the course of a woman's career. Not to mention the profound emotional deficit brought on by the feeling that she's always chasing something she cannot attain. This is a tangible manifestation of gender inequality in the workplace that disproportionately affects women of color and transgender employees. Following the documentary, Jennifer will be moderating a panel comprised of a group of women from all over the globe working in technology. Since last year's diversity lunch in Basel, and even since the luncheon in Boston this past April, there's been a sea change in the way we as a culture are talking about gender. I've been thinking about gender my whole life, but it's become apparent to me that about half the population hasn't given it a ton of thought until now. In the wake of the Me Too movement, and especially in the period following the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford in the United States, I've been ruminating on two interconnected topics, silence and anger. So much of what women have been forced to bury, the microaggressions, the harassment, the coded language, the glass ceiling is finally being talked about. We're sharing our stories and realizing we aren't the only ones. There is colossal power in breaking that silence. And when women talk about this, they can be angry. I think anger is something that scares men and potential allies away from having this conversation or being able to listen or believing women. But I want to say, we have every right to be angry. Our anger is part of what has galvanized this movement. It's part of what galvanizes every civil rights movement. And I will ask each of the men in this room to listen to and empathize with that anger from the women in their lives, instead of being afraid of or dismissing it. You might even find that we are less angry if you listen to us. But anger also can't be the only emotion that drives us. There must also be hope. Hope that we can really change a profoundly entrenched system of thought and action. And the change must be fundamentally intersectional. If you're not familiar with intersectionality, it's the notion that there are interlocking systems of disadvantage across race, gender, class, etc. It's why it's impossible to talk about class without talking about race, or why a movement that only uplifts cisgendered white women isn't true feminism. It's understanding that a person may be disadvantaged in ways invisible to the naked eye. It's also why the change must come from both directions, from within the system and from the voices outside the system trying to change it, which is why we need allies, like Daniel Jones, Steve Greenberg, and many other folks in the community. The foundation is committed to a code of conduct that includes five basic tenets. Be open, be inclusive, be kind, be transparent, and be curious. What's not included, but is something I think is foundational to who we are, is be the change. I'm extremely proud to tell you that since Boston Summit in April, we've doubled the number of women and non-binary speakers at Summit here today. We are now at a full, we are at a full 25% of non-male speakers. And it's not enough, but it's a change. It's incremental progress that has been facilitated by a team of people committed not only to digital transformation, but cultural transformation. I want to thank all of you for taking it upon yourselves to learn how to be the change, for participating in a conversation that isn't easy because there's no clear solution. Again, just like cloud technologies, there's no silver bullet that's going to overturn thousands of years of patriarchy and racism. But little by little, we can ship away at that stone together, and one really tangible manifestation of doing this is equal pay. So without further ado, I present to you, 80-20, the Chasing Grace Project on the gender gay path. Genders, hey, guys, thank you. I'd like to introduce our panelists. Jennifer Cloer, creator and executive producer of Portland, Oregon. Come on up. She lives in Portland, Oregon. She is the executive producer of the Chasing Grace Project. Welcome. Yeah, is it working? I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. For more than 15 years, Jennifer has been a woman in tech and has been recognized for her storytelling acumen by Business Insider. She's been ranked among the best PR people in tech for her video storytelling works. She co-founded Wicked Flix, a film and video production house working with companies and individuals to affect change through original content. She is also the founder and lead consultant at Rethinkit PR. Most recently, she was the VP of comms at the Linux Foundation and has been recognized by CIO.com as one of the most influential women in open source. I'd like to welcome to the stage, Ina Ivanova. She is the senior product manager at SAP Cloud Platform. She began at SAP as a developer and has worked on rolling out and enabling the adoption of cloud native patterns, methodologies and technologies with SAP Cloud Platform. Welcome. Next up, she's Zara Nwabara from Pivotal. She works on R&D, or she's the R&D technical program manager based in London. She's a service and product specialist, experienced, helping enterprises across diverse industries and stages of development improve their operational performance and capabilities through the application of evidence based project management methodologies. As Pivotal's research and development technical program manager in London, she works across various product teams to make feedback loops and communication more effective through the use of experimentation, process engineering and service design. Next up is Caroline Rennie from Comic Relief. She is the product practice lead. She focuses on building products which support 365 fundraising donations and sharing the progress of their work. Working with the engineering lead, Caroline has helped the organization transition from building one-off microsites to product suite, which is reusable and better utilizing Comic Relief's tech partners. Anushka Streets is the VP of engineering at Pfizer. She has over 20 years of software engineering experience across multiple sectors. She's highly experienced and has worked directly with a broad range of technologies and platforms, has managed the transformation of software development organizations as the industry has transitioned into cloud native based delivery. This includes the adoption of DevOps practices and importantly, driving the cultural changes and behaviors to make it a success. She is currently working at Pfizer, leading the engineering team that builds and operates their fin kit platform. And last but certainly not least is Tammy Van Ho, the distinguished engineer and director of Cloud Foundry at IBM. Tammy is a distinguished, she works in the IBM cloud division where she is currently responsible for Cloud Foundry services and enterprise enablement in IBM cloud. She's a veteran software developer and has held a number of roles in IBM, including chief technologist for development of virtualization and cloud management solutions, but with open stack. She's based in Rochester, Minnesota, where she and her husband Reed have raised three amazing daughters. Amazing. And thank you to the Cloud Foundry Foundation for having me here to screen episode one, episode two comes out in a month. So hopefully we can do some of that when that's done. But thank you for having me and for having the rest of the panelists and for creating a forum for these types of discussions. It's it's it's critical right now. First question to the panelists is what's your reaction to the episode? Whether that's your own experience with the pay gap or your perspective on the pay gap. Maybe it's the gender gap, which is a more general term for all of the gap that is involved in being a woman in tech. What was your reaction to the episode? I'll start. That was like watching my whole career. I've been through every one of those stages that those women talked about. I feel like I have felt throughout my career, like I'm always fighting my way to the table back to the table back to the table. I feel like, you know, I could I could so relate to what they were talking about, you know, take the bigger jobs, the harder jobs, the jobs no one else wants to, you know, try to stay in that stream. And then, you know, as I said, I raised three girls along the way, too. And so I was in and out and in and out as well. Fortunately, I feel that I've worked for a company for IBM that they pay attention to that. And there were times when I know I experienced a big pay gap and IBM rectified that very quickly. So I've been fortunate in that regard. But that was like watching my story. It was and it's shocking to me that it's still that way because I've been in the industry a long time. And I thought I had hoped that we had gotten beyond that by now. Yeah, we were talking about that last night. A lot of women who are more senior in their career have told me, I thought we took care of this. I thought it was done. But thank goodness people are talking and speaking up, which is the result. I think of many things going on in our culture right now. But because it hasn't changed, it just doesn't get talked about as much until now. Any other reactions to the piece? I. Oh, no, it's always on. I thought the bit that resonated with me, as well as the fact that I think I'd like my daughter to watch it, which I thought, I think she'd enjoy it, maybe with some of the some bleeps. Although she does live with me. The bit that resonated with me was the kind of economic story and the fact that we can all acknowledge the fact that it's just wrong to treat women or any other minority in a way that's kind of unsatisfactory like this, right? But when you boil it down, particularly when you're having conversations with kind of senior people in organisations who you're trying to get engagement from around this, actually taking the emotion out of it and turning it into something that is like cold hard cash related actually kind of makes it a lot, lot clearer. And it's a kind of the it mentioned it talked about kind of the impact on GDP and the impact on kind of welfare and all that kind of stuff. But I think it also has a massive impact on the kind of the future validity of your kind of UK PLC or USA PLC and the ability for them to actually be competitive in the marketplace going forward. When you look at other countries who are doing better with representation of women and of the minority. Like particularly India is doing a pretty good job that I kind of trying to rebalance that is they're in the foothills but they're doing some really good work about engaging young people and women in technology and Israel, Russia, the proportion of women entering that these countries are going to steal our lunch unless we get that kind of diversity issue sorted. So it's, you know, quite apart from the fact it's just wrong is I love it. It's stupid. OK, well, I can say. And I also agree. I think similar to Tammy. That's also been my experience and I am probably closer to the other end where I've just started or have been in this space for a few years. And I think the thing that came to my mind while the video is integrated is I'm just so exhausted and I'm so tired. And I was I was at a summit a couple of weeks ago. And one thing that was interesting, we actually sat down with our with our leadership, we had like our president there and several of our directors there to speak to a group of like the black pivots. So it was the first time that we've ever had a chance to meet together and be faced to sit face in the same room. And we were talking about what asking the president, like, how did you get to where you where you are today? And, you know, he kind of told his story and everybody has adversity. But what was interesting in my mind was that while he was telling us what he did, I was in my mind thinking, OK, now make that harder times three exponentially and how am I going to do it? And I just think it's interesting. What I really loved about the video is that it kind of shows, you know, I'll work for five years to get to where you were today because you were friends and there's no way for me to have those types of friends because these aren't my people. And there's only so much. I think there's a lot that we can do as allies, but we also have to realize how important it is to have to have people present that you can look up to and truly understand and empathize. And that empathy can come in the form of same same. It can come in the form of same different, but it has to be there. Yeah, I think for me, I just found that I think there's two very clear stories and sort of like, well, which one would you do? And I was like, well, no, which one have you done? And I'm the, oh, cool. Yeah, that's enough money. Thanks so much for the opportunity. And, you know, I think we have sort of a pre-talk beforehand the term lucky got used. Like, I think, let's shed it as like, I'm so lucky that another guy is I've worked with our dicks, basically, you're like, oh, that is lucky, isn't it? And then you're like, no, actually, there's an element of just like, what is right, what is, you know, what should be common decency and the sort of concept of being like, well, given this opportunity, so I don't want to throw it away by saying, actually, I think I think if you're offering this to somebody else, they would be on significantly more than this. Because then they could say, fine, we'll get that much more talented man. And then, like, goodbye, I'll just take what's being offered. I think that's something which is very hard and for a hard trait to get out of. And so it's something like, yeah, I wish I was the fuck you, lady, but I'm not at the moment. Yeah, I think when we made the peace, I was like, most of us are going to relate to Megan and want to be fairer, right? Like, oh, yeah, I've been there, but I don't want to be like that. Yeah, I'm more or less thinking that it's actually the internal barriers you put to yourself and not going, asking for getting what you deserve and getting what you're really worth. And that's kind of really a challenge initially. But you need to work hard to overcome this barriers and really get what you deserve out there. And that's, I've never really thought, maybe, of this like a challenge for myself only and never perceived myself like a minority. And even though I am, I'm usually the only or one out of two women in a room out there. But maybe it's related to my childhood and my parents. Very little told me that I'm worth it and I can do whatever I want to do. And I should perceive everyone not based on their gender, based on their race, based on where they come from. But really based on what they can do. Yeah, I am. This is working out now. Do you want to try this one? When I decided to do the project, one of the reasons that I did it was I have the same experience. My parents told me I could do anything I wanted to do, be anything I wanted to be. I'm a, you know, I grew up in the 90s, right? And 80s, 90s, you know, whatever. And then I got into the workplace and it was like, oh, wait a minute, this isn't quite what my parents told me it was going to be. So I think at least women of my generation, that was the big, like, what? Wait a minute. And also listening to millennials and Gen Z is coming up behind, I guess, I'm a Gen X, you know, they're not, they're not taking it, which is great. I'm learning a lot from them. So how do you know you're worth and how do you ask for what you need? Please sell us. You two seem to have assorted. So I think I get, I mean, I think a lot of people look to me and they're like, Chisa, like, how come you just asked for what you want? And I like, and why do you know? And I also sometimes people make fun of me because I talk about myself. And the bottom line is if I do not talk about no one else is going to do it for me, and that has been proven to me over and over again. And it's unfortunate, but it's a surprise when people actually do talk about me because I'm so used to having to do it myself. I'm so used to having to see that I've done something five times, have a white man say that I did this thing and then like be heard. And I think that's that's the reality that I live in. And it's interesting because I think like. I I'm very clear on my worth and over time. And it took it took an entire lifetime given I hopefully still a lot more. Anyway, left, but it took a long time for me to get to this point. And I think the other piece of it is that I just hate it. I've already mentioned this a couple of times. I hate inefficiencies and it's ineffective not to say something like it wastes time and that's my time. And and the other thing that I realized was that and I think this goes with any type of relationship, right? Whether it's your company or otherwise, if you're in an abusive relationship of any kind where you're not being treated the way that you should, it's time to leave. And I think having the fortitude to understand that when you're not getting what you deserve, you just have to go and find it someplace else. That's a really hard thing to do in any type of relationship. And I think that like I've been in those situations at the office. I've been in those situations in personal life and lessons repeat themselves regardless of what part of the life that you're in. And I think that if I'm going to learn it in one place, I'm going to make sure I apply it someplace else as opposed to having to learn the same lesson over again because one happened at school and the other one happened at work and the other one happened on the street. Like it doesn't matter. These are all the same lessons. And I think for me, that's what I realized. I can't keep wasting time by allowing the same things to happen to me over and over again just because it was in a different context when it's the same. It's SSDD. If you can look it up on Urban Dictionary, I'm not going to say it. It's SSDD. Okay, look that up. Everybody's on their phones right now. Yeah, one thing to add to that too. It is for me, it was hard to ask to figure out how to ask. And I was one of maybe less than six women in an organization of 300. And I totally resonated with I have nobody to talk to every day. I don't have any girlfriends at work. So one of the things I did was made the men in my team, my girlfriends. And girls understand what that means. And I've mentored young women through the years. And they ask, how do you stay in the loop? How do you know what's going on? I go, find a man in your team that you trust and make him your girlfriend. And they immediately go, oh. Absolutely. And that's how I learned to ask. Because I did have a very good male colleague who said, you need to come to my office. We need to talk. And so he taught me how to ask within the company I was at. And to maybe tell a comment on this, because I also have many girlfriends among my male colleagues. It goes both ways, which is a nice thing. Because for male colleagues, it's usually kind of, they try to accommodate all the girls around. And they try to really treat us better. And I really liked the talk today in the keynote. That's usually, at least for me, it works like, they're underestimating me. They don't trust that I can do as best as them. And they are giving me the easy way. And that's not how you want to be treated, of course. Because it leads to really lower self-esteem. And you really don't trust yourself when people approach you like that. And when you have such male colleagues, and when you talk to them, because they're wondering how to really set the environment to suit us, it's really helpful. It's a great transition to one of the themes we wanted to make sure to talk about on the panel. And that is the role of men in the community, and the women in tech community. Over the last four or five years, there's certainly been a movement to create a women in tech community, whether it's women who code, or girls who code, or communities like the one sitting in this room right now, or communities inside companies. Every major tech company has a women in tech group. Now it seems inside their company. And sometimes men can feel excluded, especially if it's called the women in tech group. So panelists, what's your advice to your male colleagues about how to get involved, how to be a male ally? So I think my one's working. So we, at Cromac Leaf, we fund four called Pillars of Our Work. And one of those used to be called Women and Girls. And it took having a workshop in which we were talking about sort of what we're going to be doing in the future for some of the guys in the room to just pitch up and say, you could call it something different, and then I would feel more included in that. We now have a pillar that we fund called Gender Justice, because everyone has some form of gender, whatever they want. But then you can relate to that, and you can see that it is right for there to be gender justice. So I think, for me, and this is because I feel like, again, going back to our lucky terms, I've had a great time as a woman in tech. So I've never felt like I needed to find those groups myself. But it just means that I see the purpose of having women in tech where it's just for women. But I think in order to actually get progress, it should be really focusing on gender justice rather than just saying it's a women's problem. Because if people perceive it as being a women's problem, then men probably won't engage that much. Plus it's not just a women's problem. I'm going to start reeling off some data I can. That completely resonates with me as well. And I think the IQ, I've had a fantastic career in tech, and I have been lucky. I've worked with, I can probably draw on my entire 20 years. I can probably draw on kind of one example where I felt I had been treated differently simply because of my gender. And maybe that, and perhaps just that one is bad, right? And most guys probably wouldn't have that experience to draw upon. But I kind of feel a little bit like the middle-aged white guy, if that kind of makes any sense. Because I've had those such positive experiences, because I work and have worked and continue to work with such kind of open, engaged, yeah, I'm one of three or four women in my office. But I do work with open, engaged, who I feel completely they're equal. I am lucky, right? But because of that, so the stories that you talk about, I find really, they don't resonate with me because I can't understand them. I don't, I've never felt them. And so I kind of feel like on that side, I'm kind of, tell me what I need to do to kind of understand. I completely accept it's real and it's happening and we've got to do something about it. But I kind of feel like I need to know what that is myself. Just, I grew up in a family of very dominant men. And so I learned at a very young age how to deal with dominant men. And the women in my family, aunts, my mom, were never intimidated by these dominant men either. So I had very good role models within the family. And I was told to, I can be whatever I want when I grow up, but first I had to go bail hay and I actually poured concrete for four years because it was family business. So I had a lot of exposure to male dominated environments. And so when I, I too have been very fortunate in all the organizations I've worked in, I haven't felt that, oh, here's a woman at the table. I mean, I fight for the recognition, but I haven't felt unwelcome amongst my male colleagues. And I can't always say the same for female colleagues. And I feel very strongly about this, that we as women, I don't feel we consciously help each other as much as men do. And yeah, the example there where the men get to travel together or golf together, what have you. And so in my career, I've made a conscious effort to find that quiet woman in the organization and lift her up and help her find her voice and to bring her along because we are few and far between in some organizations. And I think we do need to commit and work harder to bring others along, primarily women, and help them find their voice and achieve, how do you speak for yourself and how do you ask? And because there are a lot of really talented women out there that maybe are putting up with it, right? Okay, I have a list. In terms of, I mean, I think that there are a couple of things tangibly that I would love for people to leave with today. And one of them is don't test in production. I think oftentimes when we have conversations like this, it can be very hard for allies to figure out the right ways or the right places to engage. If there's a conversation that you know that needs to be had, don't have it the first time with the person that you want to have it with. Test on a safer place first and then when you're ready to actually release to production, go have the conversation. Do practice first, right? I get questions all the time about, for instance, my hair and I'm like, you could have Googled this, you could have asked somebody else first and then you could have come to me with a baseline understanding of, so I've done some research, this is my understanding, can I validate with you? That to me at least shows that you tried. I think that's one. Another one is, go someplace where you are the physical minority. One thing that I would say is, I think as a man, make an effort to go to Grace Hopper. And actually, it's interesting because that's one place where the women, like the men, there's a line at the bathroom there. It's crazy that we just started using the men's bathrooms. I mean, there were so many, but go someplace where you're a physical minority, not just like a minority, like culturally, but someplace where you will actually feel different because nobody looks like you, nobody's maybe speaking like you and that will help you build empathy. Go to church or go to a mosque with someone that you've never, and work on building that empathy. I think the other piece of it is, it's important to realize that your voice is probably actually more important because for instance, as a cis white male, the best person to convince another cis white male is someone that looks like you, right? And it's that buddy system where you absorb things better from people who are already within your in-group. And I think that that's a really important and powerful thing that allies need to understand. Like I can do a lot and share my stories and what have you, but it will still resonate better from your own kind, like from your own group. So those are three things, actually that I would say that you could leave with today and think about today and start today. I've got just a couple more questions for the panelists and then we want to open it up to audience questions. When we did this in Boston, we had a really great engagement from the audience. We have a kind of a nice compact group today, so I hope we can have some conversation. But before we kind of move on from how does the community work together, how do men in particular play a role, yesterday when we met as panelists kind of in prep, the Google manifesto came up. It's, you know, this was a little while ago where the Google employee wrote a manifesto about how women are, I think, genetically less able to be technologists. That was the gist of, there was a lot in it. If you haven't read it, there's a lot more in it. But the panelists brought it up and wanted to talk about, you know, was that a missed opportunity for conversation and does shutting that down so quickly by Google intimidate men from being able to have a constructive conversation. I thought that was an interesting, provocative way to talk about it. So, what are your thoughts on that, panelists? I do think, oh, I should probably talk about it. Yeah, I think we can all probably agree that the content of the manifesto was in many ways horrible and certainly the way it was put forward wasn't helpful in any way. However, and, you know, I don't want to be controversial here, but hey, there were threads, there were seeds of real grievance in that manifesto that actually got, the Google reaction to that was to fire the guy, you know, we've taken action, he's not, you know, he's not a problem anymore. We don't need to talk about this anymore and we're just gonna like, we're gonna stick it, done, that's it now, we're not gonna talk about this anymore. And I felt that was a hugely missed opportunity. Now, talking about testing in production, yeah, probably not a great idea to write a manifesto and like lob it out there and have that be the place where you test these kind of thoughts and feelings and perhaps that he needed to have some kind of safe space where he was working so he could time test some of these ideas with somebody safe, that would have been awesome. But I think by shutting it off and by essentially brushing it under the carpet, what that's done is made other people who might want to talk about some of those threads. So why do we think it's important to promote maybe women-only short lists for some jobs where there are no applications from women at all? Why is that important? Why can we have a conversation with him to help him to understand why we think that's important and can we get his point of view and why he thinks that's unfair and that makes him and his group feel marginalized? And I think, but we didn't have that conversation and the reaction was so swift and so abrupt as to say, well, actually, I'm a guy and I kind of feel some of those things, but now I'm scared. I don't want to talk about those things anymore. So instead, what's gonna happen? I'm just gonna let them fester and just, you know, I'm just gonna let them build resentment and instead of talking about these things, I'm just gonna think these things inside and actually I might be a leader of a company one day, and we just end up back in this thing. I think it's so important that we talk and that we encourage open communication and dialogue about these things and actively seek not to brush them under the carpet. Yeah, I think that Google missed an opportunity to do some data-led evidence of here's how our product's been improved since it's been, you know, by including more diversity into our teams, here's the improvements and here's the measurable success of having diverse teams and not having one-track mindsets. And instead it was just like, that guy's crazy. So you're like, no, no, but show us why that's crazy, rather than just saying, oh, we all know that's wrong. Like, you know, if people are feeling that way, back it up with evidence and, you know, someone will be, you may not change their mind, but you might potentially soothe the potential, you know, now quietened people who might be thinking similar things. I think there's a missed opportunity to really do an evidence-led counter to why it would be good. In the other missed opportunity there and the other danger that I saw there, I too was disappointed that that got shoved under the table closed so fast as not only the men who might seek to get greater understanding now are afraid to ask because of what might happen, but the message that went to young girls in school, and there was no counter, no opportunity to counter that manifesto for, you know, all these girls thinking potentially, you know, there's young women out there thinking, huh, well, I was thinking about being an engineer, but maybe I'm not cut out for it, maybe I won't take that advanced science class or that advanced math class. And I think that was a unintended consequence perhaps, but I believe that's gonna be real. And something that's, you know, we're gonna have to continue to infuse in, especially in the school age, and I go into schools, you know, for engineering week and the like, and there's always young women that say, yeah, I don't have the brain for math or for engineering. Why do you think that? So that didn't help, I don't think. Let's talk, before we turn over to the audience, let's talk just briefly about community because we are at an open source conference, community is a major priority. I mentioned that women in tech groups have been all the rage over the last four or five years. There's a community around women in tech building and growing. Is that making a difference? Because we know, based on the data and the news that you read, there is no progress for women in tech, right? Everything says we haven't moved the needle in 20 years. That's what the data says, but if you're working in tech every day, you know that things are starting to change. It's slow, it's incremental, but it is starting to change. Is community, are those communities of women in tech the gender justice groups? Are those making a difference? In 10 years it would be like that was the silver bullet, that's what did it. Women needed to feel like they belonged somewhere and a constructive conversation needed to happen, or are we gonna look back and go, well, that was a fad? I mean, I just don't want to monopolize the, okay. So, okay. I think that what's tricky about diversity and inclusivity is that diversity you can easily see, but inclusivity is something that's a little bit less tangible. And we talked yesterday also about the importance of safe spaces, which is what a lot of those groups are and the fact that you need to have safe spaces and people need to be able to exercise and build muscles so that when it comes time to use them, they're capable of doing so. I think that if we assume having safe spaces is enough, we're fooling ourselves, and that there needs to be more, which is the case for anything, right? Like whenever you're trying to change any type of system, you don't just make one tweak or one change in one area and say we fixed it. And when you think about changing a culture, it happens in a lot of different places and in a lot of different ways and they all need to happen. There are things that you can do that are incredibly disruptive and are huge shifts and there are others that are smaller and I think part of the issue is that in order to make those huge shifts, people really need to embrace that change. And I think it's interesting because, for instance, if you're cooking or baking, right, and a recipe needs more salt, you just put more salt in. But we don't do that in spaces like this, right? Even though the salt is ready, we know it's exactly the same salt as what we've already put in. But that's the other thing, like first you have to make sure that you have the right ingredients and that the environment is ready and set up for it when you're cooking. But then the other, so in other words, putting in the salt at the right time and sometimes it's just too late, right? Especially when you're baking. So that's one, like the right time and the right place is strategically making the changes. And then the other piece of it is, when the time comes, add it. And I think those are two things that need to happen. So it's not just a question of, okay, yes, we've got this one side thing. We have to take, we have to think about what the big steps look like and then take them when the time comes. But we also have to think about the fact that there are a lot of environmental and smaller things on the inclusive side that need to be happening and both of them need to be happening. And in order to get that level of buy-in, you really need everybody within a company to say, yes, like we understand this needs more salt. And we understand the time in this process of making this thing where the salt needs to go, we've agreed it's here at the beginning before we put it in the oven. Because afterwards it's already sealed up because we're making a pie, okay? Anyway. This needs more salt, that's the goal for this challenge. Yeah, so I mean, that's the thing. And that's what, when you think about inclusion and diversity, that's what it is. It's both of those things. The right place to put something in and making sure the environment is conducive and then when the time comes, actually doing it. Yeah, I think it's also about making sure that company cultures aren't founded around sort of unnecessary, excluding activities. So an example, I love beer. Said Brett Kavanaugh, but sorry. I also love beer, but in a good way. But I know that there are members on my team who do not love beer as much as I love beer. And if I hired people purely because they're a great cultural fit, because I can see us going down to our local bar after work and blowing off steam together, I'm gonna get, I could have, it could be the most mixed gender, mixed race. Everybody's here, but we all love beer. And it's completely irrelevant to the products that we're producing, and it's completely irrelevant to certain viewpoints, because the viewpoint of not liking beer is also valid, not to me. But so making sure that your company culture isn't built around something which isn't about making the best possible product for your company is probably one of the sort of, the things which I think might be excluding people without even meaning to it being very impactful on your business, say. So I would say that such groups of women supporting each other is maybe really the first step. So to really have a safe environment where you can test drive, what you wanna try, and to have someone similar to you that you can really directly trust, it doesn't take that much time, it's easier. But then really as a next step, we don't wanna have like separate groups of similar people, we are looking really for this inclusion step. And that's the next step that we're currently facing, I believe, heavily to really come to the point from this different groups of similar people that feel the trust and have their safe environment, and then go ahead and have really an inclusive environment where we don't judge each other, we don't put labels on each other and we build trust a bit more easier like this. Yeah, I think there's a culture change happening. I interviewed an expert last week and they talked about, you know, is this a movement, is it not a movement? And she said, it is a movement. When you know that it's no longer movement is when it's just the culture, it's just the way that it is. And it's starting to change. I mean, like you're talking about the beer stuff, you know, the Silicon Valley and like, you know, 10 years ago, the rise of Facebook and the startups in the Valley really created a culture and tech around beer pong and sleeping under your desks and all of these things that really were not inclusive activities, right? On a number of levels, that's starting to change. So there is good stuff happening and coming. Questions from the audience? Anything, anything you want to ask any of our panelists or comments about the film? How do you know you're not in the exact same place? Because they sounded like they felt they were respected, they were doing hard work. And how do you have conversations about pay given kind of taboos around that? Yeah. I was gonna say there's been amazing progress by if it just becomes your company culture. So if you look at what's happened at the BBC in the UK recently, they broadcast that they had a massive pay gap issue and they are now very publicly making that difference. And I think there is a responsibility of companies to have to say, this is what our pay gap is and this is how we're gonna fix it. And I agree that that may involve some people getting pay cuts and that's not ideal for that individual. But if they can justify why they're worth that much more than the other individual, then good for them, they should keep their money. But if they can't justify it, then either that person's money needs to meet them or they need to meet that person. It is hard to know at times and throughout my career in IBM, there's been times where it's been very clear to me, I know where I'm at in the pay scale because IBM was pretty open and transparent about that as where I sat with the industry in general. And then as a company, we kind of went and also went through a phase where, no, that's personal private information. It's company, we don't want everybody talking about salary within the company for whatever reason. We're coming back out of that again because it is important, because people are far more mobile from company to company, that it is important that every employee understands where their pay is competitively with the industry and their skill, their role that they've got. And so it's becoming more transparent again in those years when it wasn't, and I personally had no idea. Again, it's how do you ask? And if you are wondering how you stand against your peers in similar roles, again, it's personal for you, but you can make the request, the ask, a business ask. Here's my skills, here's what I feel. I bring value to this company. Where do my skills fit in the pay grid of the company you're with or where am I at or how do you see me in the industry or you can even do that research on your own. And then you've got some data to ask and we'll talk to your management about if you feel that you aren't being competitively paid. Yeah, also this is a really a great place for male allies to play a role. A lot of women I've talked to, they feel more comfortable asking a male, right? Like what are you making? Or sometimes a male ally will say, you're not getting paid. What are you getting paid? What? And all of a sudden you're like, ooh, right? Like okay, so I think that's something. And also I just have to plug because I love this organization and to your question it's an answer, it's a direct answer. Ladies Get Paid is an organization that hosts town halls all over the world, actually mostly US and Europe, but it's a place where until recently it was just women and you would talk about promotions and pay raises and what different people were getting paid in different roles and you can have a really open conversation about that. You still can, but Claire's actually featured in episode two. She got sued for gender discrimination and now men come to her groups, very few, but watch episode two for that juicy story. Sorry, another thing you can do, sorry to... Another thing that you can do that we do is encourage your organization to regularly benchmark salaries and to perform reviews against everybody regardless of what you are. You are a person doing a role and that salary gets benchmarked and that information should be publicly available to everybody when you're doing that. It's a quite straightforward thing to do. I have one more thing to add to that, actually. And I think it's a question of keeping in mind that make sure that you're not so comfortable in your company that you're not also doing your own checks and I think that when you're applying for a new job and you're ready to go into that salary negotiation, you do your research to make sure that you're where you're at and I think that even if you've been with a company for 10 years, you should still be continuously doing that research and making sure that against the market and even within the company that you're checking to make sure that what you're doing is what you're getting paid for what you're worth. And again, regardless of whether you love your company or not, depending on what your goals are and what you're trying to achieve, I think it's important to make sure that you're always keeping yourself turned on and aware of the fact that this is something that you should be monitoring because it's your money and it's your life. So the question I had relates to geography. So in certain parts of the world, certain states in the US would be more expensive to even live in, like New York or San Francisco. Switzerland seems to be a very expensive place to live. So how do you look at the market in regards to geography and where you live? Obviously the Linux Foundation that the Cloud Foundry is a part of we all kind of work remotely. So it's hard to say that my colleague who lives in San Francisco shouldn't make more than me because they have a more expensive life that they're living than I might over in, you know, Ohio or somewhere, something like that. So is there any kind of websites that would provide you with those types of monetary roles that you're working in and how that might relate to your geography and whether or not you should be paid more as my colleague in San Francisco? So I know certainly in the UK, yes, there is and there's quite big disparity between, there is literally the North-South divide in the UK and so our head office, I say our head office, our, the engineering center is in Cardiff which is in South Wales and there's a big difference in the cost of living in South Wales to central London. And although I do have engineers who are based out of London and so we, as part of our salary benchmarking, do actually split the UK into geographies and we do benchmarking not just on a UK basis but on a regional basis against, and it's against actual data so it's against actual organizations employing those roles in those geographies. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't similar data for the US and the rest of the world. Yeah, and it's just a question again, like when you do your research, making sure that you take into consideration how things differ region to region. I think that for people that travel a lot for work or effectively aren't necessarily working in the place that they live, that's also something else to be, to take into consideration because if you're traveling, the amount of stress that that takes on your life and so I think all of those things again when you're building your case, even if it's just for yourself, you should know your number and you should know why you have that number regardless of who you tell it to. And then it's a question of well if that's not, if I'm not at this number that I think that I deserve or maybe it's even more, you should be able to justify it for yourself first and foremost and that's just a question of doing the research and the sites definitely exist. Hi, I'm Shubhangi, I've come from India. I'm currently studying in Indian Institute of Technology and like Anushka said, it's very true that in India, a lot of companies are trying very hard to give opportunities, especially to students and I've experienced that because my school being one of the better schools of the country, a lot of opportunities flow in and I do struggle hard, I do work hard for them and when I get a certain opportunity, like even the opportunity that got me here, the diversity scholarship that I got because of which I'm here. Female peers, like you said, there's not enough girl love in women in tech. So you might have faced that during your early career and even seeing Abby open the summit, her keynote, that was very inspiring and even seeing you people and hearing all of your stories, it's very inspiring and I want to reach somewhere like one of you guys. So I just want to know your story, like what motivated you and what got you through to where you are in your early days and what was your motivation going through that phase? Great question. I think some of it came from just the way I grew up and the environment I grew up in, but my motivation was, and I've done multiple of these personality tests throughout my career, the Myers-Briggs and stuff and the one thing that always came through, ranked through constantly was I'm always striving to be competent, but I never see myself as competent. So I have this continuous drive to reinvent myself constantly and I partner with those around me, which are predominantly male, like I said, and build trust with the group that I'm in because like you said, there's not enough girl love, which is also why I've committed to girl love. I find, every organization I'm in, I find the women and I give them leadership opportunities and I give them visibility opportunities. So that's one thing I've personally committed to. I would encourage you to do or go find, and like I said too, find the men that you can trust and partner with them and it's hard. People ask me if I would ever live my 20s again, hell no, no. Because I was having babies and I was trying to build a career and it was incredibly difficult. The rest, sure, but that was hard. It is really, really hard because everybody's starting the race right out of school, right? And everyone's trying to find their niche and how are they gonna differentiate themselves and so you really have to look within your own strengths and what you value most about your own strengths, what you see as your strengths and how you can bring that to bear as your brand in your company and really capitalize on that strength you have and make sure everybody knows it, talk about yourself. Don't be afraid that if you're in a meeting whether it's virtual or physical, one technique I always used was if there was an action item that came out and I was new to a group and no one raised their hand to own it, I raised my hand and owned it because that gave me a reason to go talk to people and go partner with people and gave me an opportunity for them to get to know me and trust me and then I think inclusivity, a big piece of that is trust, right? If people know you and they know what you're gonna bring to the table, you tend to get invited along easier but you do have to, it is a lot of work to get there and somebody said earlier that it's exhausting. It was exhausting. I'm gonna go, thank you, thank you so much. I got the cue. So we're actually gonna wrap and we're gonna show a teaser for the next episode of Chasing Grace, which premieres on November 19th in New York City at the Saturday Night Live Studios, if anyone's familiar with that show. So if you'd like an invitation, let me know. But yeah, we're gonna show that trailer but thank you first to the panelists. What a great panel. Please, an applause for.