 So, welcome. We believe in starting on time. So, welcome to Standing Tall in the Room. This is sponsored by the Women of OpenStack, which is a growing and vibrant organization within the OpenStack community. And we have a number of events over this session. And this one is our sponsored discussion. And we're going to talk about how to be, you know, have your voice heard in where you're the minority. So, I'm going to start with introductions. So, I'll start with myself since I'm the moderator. So, my name is Beth Cohen and I work for Verizon as a product manager. I'm actually not working on OpenStack these days, although I was one of the authors of the OpenStack architecture and design book that was written last year. Yay, read it. And I've been involved in OpenStack since the Boston Cactus Summit. I think that's three years ago now. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to Nali. Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Nali Zhang. I'm now an OpenStack Korea user group leader. I work at CloudDoc. I'm short of installing OpenStack and Cloud Storage Solutions. My name is Sheila Sabi and I work at Comcast as an OpenStack operations engineer. And I started contributing to OpenStack docs under the summit in Hong Kong. Hi, my name is Elizabeth K. Joseph. I work over at HP and in my role there, I work on the OpenStack project directly in the infrastructure. So, Garrett and Jenkins and all that stuff you interact with when you're contributing to OpenStack. It's the team I'm on that runs all of that stuff. I started working at OpenStack about two and a half years ago when I started HP. Okay, so if you didn't hear it, my name is Radha Ratnopaki and I'm from IBM Research and I'm the person with the loudspeaker at Research for everything related to OpenStack. And we're a vibrant community in research, but being researchers, we tend to go in different directions and it's my job to make sure that we go in the right direction. I'm Rainia Moser. I am recently a software development manager at Rackspace working on the build, release and deploy systems for going from upstream OpenStack all the way to the Rackspace public cloud. And I'm currently transitioning into a product management role there in the digital practice area working with applications for web content management and e-commerce on top of infrastructure, cloud infrastructure. So that's me. Thank you. So this is our agenda. And so one of the things is that as women, we often face, I think I'll put it politely, diversity in our job. And so I'm going to turn it over to Nali who's going to tell us about what empowers Nali every day. I prepared my introduced report. I pass it. I am an OpenStack Korea user group leader. So our community year of great, 2011, by Jaeseok Art. Now, second leader, it's me, vice president, staff and we have six part and operator. We have a home page and a Facebook group and now it's member card, maybe 4,000 over. Our community major group. Actually, I talk about how to be competent and what makes self-confidence. Fashion, effort, sharing makes you to be competent. First, have a passion for work. Fashion could be explained by strong feeling about something. The way to have a passion is to love what you do. When you do have and work passionately, you can get more energy and confidence. Being passionate is not enough. Act upon your goal. Take action with passion. When I heard the first OpenStack day in Korea, I didn't have enough time to focus the event during time and I didn't know how to prepare the event. But I tried to do my best and didn't give up. So the event was quite successful. The experience is an opportunity to learn and grow for me. Second, effort is worth it. Four years ago, OpenStack is not well-known in Korea. I couldn't find a user guide, experienced engineers, and instructions. I should have done by myself. But I would not give up learning. I worked hard to learn. So the effort, I became an expert and leader of OpenStack Korea user group. I could find a job that right for me. I have worked at Cloud Ike for a few months ago. I'm in charge of installing OpenStack and Cloud Story solutions. Our CEO's post expands to come here for me. Actually, I dreamed to attend in OpenStack Summit. Finally, my dreams come true. I'm so happy. Anyway, making it first is the big thing worth it. Last, working together and share ideas. I have to difficult to installing OpenStack. I asked two community members, and I could run faster and find solutions more easily. Don't try to do it all on your own. Working together allows for a better view inside knowledge sharing. Working together is better than working alone. When you have a passion, don't give up and work together. You can stand tall in the room with others. Thank you. What are some of the things that women face when they join the OpenStack community? I think as a woman, it can be intimidating getting involved with the OpenStack community given the ratio of males to females. I think we can all see that there's definitely a gap there. Although I did find out that today there are 9% of women at the conference and the last one was 5%, so there has been some growth, which is great. Stereotyping, sexism, those are all issues that we still face, but I find that if you speak out and join the Women of OpenStack group and join the mailing list, ask questions and get involved, there are many supporters that will help you out and cheer on for you. We should mention yesterday there was a half-day session of the Alley session that was actually designed specifically for men or the majority to learn how to integrate minorities into the organization and into the community because there's a lot of hidden bias, which it's our responsibility from our side and it's also the responsibility of the community to be inclusive. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Liz, who is going to give us some tips on overcoming shyness. Thank you. I'm very shy, so I can't actually give you tips about going to cocktail parties where you don't know anyone because I would just go home. I'd like to speak more into the context of a developer standpoint from contributing to the OpenStack community. Every day in my work, I'm in chat channels, I'm participating on mailing lists, and I was recently working with a mentee and I realized in the course of working with her that each one of these things was a major challenge for her. Posting to the mailing list is really scary the first time. The OpenStack dev mailing list, there's thousands of people on that, so she didn't want to get her grammar wrong, she wanted to make sure her points were clear, so I reviewed her email before sending it and it was all good. She's brilliant, right? It was fine. And so I realized that there are a lot of these steps in our community that a lot of the developers take for granted that are actually really hard for new contributors. So going even on IRC, it's a text-based wall of text, and you don't know what's going on and there's joins and parts and these things that are not people talking, and it's confusing and can be fast-moving at times. So in working with her, I realized one of the things that helped, because I don't remember from when I got involved. I mean, it just feels like I've always been doing open source. But when working with her, I realized it was really a matter of just going out and doing it. So I had her join meetings and then we went into mailing list threads and getting her to reply and respond and get engaged. And then talking about code review itself, that's also a scary thing. I mean, you may be used to doing code inside of a company, but now you're putting it out there on the Internet. Anyone on the Internet can do code review on OpenStack projects. So a lot of people end up being really apprehensive or shy about putting their code up there and having it out there in the community for review by anyone. And really, that's another one. If you just put yourself out there, I mean, like you said, the community is actually quite friendly. In the context of code review, I also recommend reviewing other people's code because if people see you commenting on their code and giving responses that when your reviews come up, they're more likely to look at it and more likely to treat you like a human because, you know, you were nice on their code reviews. They're probably going to be nice on yours. And even if it takes a few tries, I mean, we've all been there, where I think one of my patches early on in OpenStack had like 28 patch sets. It was really awful. But I got there and it was okay. Like no one said I was a worse person for it. You know, I was still accepted in the community and I'm a core member of the infrastructure team now. So it didn't really hold me back. I mean, you can, you just go out there and start doing it. Another place that I think shyness in our community comes up is giving talks and being in panels and things that places like the OpenStack Summit. And one of the really good things that the women of OpenStack panel did this cycle was they hosted one webinar. Was it, I think? Yes. Yeah, they did a webinar specifically designed towards telling people, explaining to people how to submit a talk for summit and how to get it accepted. So it went through the process of writing a talk in a way that had topics that were interesting and things that were appropriate for the summit. And then how to go about, you know, getting support for that because there's a voting system and then there's track leads who make decisions on partially based on votes and ours also on content. So they had this really great webinar that was supportive of people trying to submit talks. So I highly recommend looking up those resources for that. And in general, for public speaking and being on panels, it takes practice, but there's only one way to get practice. So I encourage you to put it forth talks. If you're really too scared about it, join up with a colleague and do a talk together, then you're both scared on the stage. But it actually is really helpful, especially collaborating on something and having, like, bouncing your ideas of someone in the process of creating your talk. So, yeah, that's what I've got. If anyone else has comments about shyness. Well, we split it among six, yeah. So actually, I should give a little history of how this panel came together. So I was at the Paris Summit and, you know, during the working session, I suggested that we do some more workshops around empowerment because I think, as you said, a lot of it is just gaining confidence in your ability to get up and talk. And so I went on the Women of OpenStack mailing list and linked in and said, I'm going to be submitting a talk who wants to join. And these lovely ladies all volunteered. And then Nali, you had submitted a talk separately, and then the track chairs suggested that we merge the two talks together. So I thought that was really excellent. Anyway, anyone else? Just adding on the shyness, even though we are talking about women, men are shy too. And engineers in particular, it may actually be more of our personality type than actually much to do with our gender. So do know that as you're working with other people, look for those shy people that have the brilliant ideas that will get up there and be scared with you. It helps them grow, it helps you grow, and it is a great experience. I strongly encouraged two extremely introverted people on my team to give a talk last year in Paris, and they hated me for it. But once it was over, they felt great because they're like, people are listening, we have opinions, we can be the thought leaders, and continue to grow their career. So I think it has more, it may have a lot to do with our personalities. I'm not shy. Yeah, another tip for the men is to attend the women's workshops because some of these things are kind of addressed and highlighted more in the women's workshops. And we welcome everyone. Yes, we are gender neutral. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Radha to talk about some of your most empowering moments, and I know others will probably want to share as well. Yeah, well, I'm going to be a representative sample of IBM and our empowering moments within the organization. But before I get there, I mean, to feel empowered is really to feel as if you have a sense of authority to go and do something. So in my world, I look on it as a time to take some action. So whenever I feel I need to take action, I empower myself on my own and I go do it. And 90% of the time, it works well. I mean, there are a few occasions when I shouldn't have taken action, but it's okay. 90% is good enough as a metric. So I do want to reflect a little bit back on one of the observations in the Women of Open Stack breakfast, which happened earlier today. And for those of you who are not there, one of my colleagues who's in the audience, Nina, actually made a very good point. And that was in the open development environment, there is a technical meritocracy. So it doesn't really matter what you've done in the past or what your titles are or what your degrees are and whether you have a PhD or don't have a PhD. It's really what you bring to the table and what you give back to the community. And that, by itself, I think is a very empowering kind of attribute. So feel empowered to contribute and success follows once you start contributing. So I think that is a very empowering moment. There's another sort of aspect which I think works very well for women. So I know we'll open the mic up for questions later, and I have a question to the audience. What is the one thing that you feel women do a lot better than the men? There's one unique thing. Thank you very much. But there is one where we're way ahead, you know. Perception. Perception is kind of getting there. It helps. Listen helps. But there's a bigger word which includes all those things. Communication. Empathy. Communication. We're getting there. We're getting there. Collaboration. Who said it? Thank you. So, you know, that is the one quality that women really are very good at. And some of the examples I've seen when you have women leaders in the open community in the various projects is when there's a diverse set of opinions, women leader is often able to bring them all together and go ahead in a very collaborative manner, sort of driving towards consensus by including everybody. So that is, I think, actually a great strength, and I would like to encourage all women to build on that strength. Personally, for me, you know, just raising my hand to be on the panel was an empowering moment. At the Atlanta summit, I raised my hand to be track chair for one of the topics. It was a topic which was very dear to us from an IBM cloud strategy point of view. And so I felt, you know, it was great. It was like bringing in what we wanted to do at work, as well as in the open community. It had to do around hybrid clouds. So those were my personal empowering moments, but I'm sure there are many others out there. My advice is just seize it and look for the opportunity and just go for it. So I'd like to open up to other panelists to offer their most empowering moments as well. Don't be shy. I can go first if you want me to. Sure. Yeah, we have time, you know. Okay. I'm watching this. She's watching the time. So I've been blessed, honestly blessed, to be part of the OpenStack community now for over three years. And by moving out of engineering, I find myself with a little more free time because I'm not on call 24-7 when things go wrong. And I made the comment to my daughter, who is Marin. Shout out to Marin when she watches the video. She's 10. She's in fourth grade, almost fifth grade. This is when their gender awareness starts to set in, their insecurities getting picked on for being good at math, which she is because she's got her daddy's engineer brain. And I made the comment to her that I was looking forward this summer to getting to pick up a new language because I haven't gotten a chance to really learn anything new from a programming point of view. And she said, can I help? Can I learn as well? And that was just a great moment so that all my talking, all my traveling, the time away, the hours up, the cranky mommy that comes, it turned to that moment of can I help? Can I learn too? And that was a really great kind of culmination of my career and helps keep me going and building this better inclusive world for her. That's fantastic because I've been a complete disaster on that front. So my daughter just refuses to look at computer science and for some reason she's gone into the electrical aspect of engineering, which I shunned. My daughter's a statistician. She's either going to be a mathematician, a computer scientist, or an actor. Those are her top three choices right now. So one thing I'd like to bring up before we open up to the audience's questions is yesterday on Twitter feed there was a pointer to an article that ran in Fortune magazine that said that women who were raised by working women earn on average 23% more than women who were raised by women who stayed at home. So I'd like some comments about that. I hope she gets to make more than me when she gets into the workforce then. She has to, statistically she will. Great, that's good for her. Any other comments? I can actually comment because I had a mixed world for actually being raised. My mother worked from home for quite a bit of time and then she also worked out of the home and so it was a mix and I got to have the best of both worlds. And I personally struggled when she was born. Do I take a step back? I already slowed down. You slow down a little bit when a child is born as any parent really does. And I feel like I did take a little bit of a speed bump but I chose to go back to work and it was hard. It was really hard but for me personally that was a great and rewarding experience. At the same time I'm very cautious not to judge those women or those fathers actually that choose to stay home and work full time because that is a different kind of gift that you're able to give to your children. I'm blessed with an extremely extroverted, well-adjusted child who hates the idea of homeschool and all of that. Like I want to go to school. But it is a different kind of gift than economic gain so that would be my addition to the commentary. So thank you. I'll just add one thing and then I'm going to open it up. My grandmother worked full time for her entire life but my mother actually chose to stay home and I think I felt my grandmother was more of a role model for me than my mother. Although I actually realized years later I always wondered what my mother was doing when I was in school and I realized she had four children in seven years so I know exactly what she was doing. She was working really hard. So with that I'd like to open it up to the audience for questions and comments. So there's a... Hello. I'll go first. I'm not shy either. You guys let off the panel discussion talking about in general terms about biases and discriminations and whatnot. Could you give more specific like anecdotes about something that you faced and how you were able to overcome it and maybe what you learned from that? So one of the earliest one was very early in my career was when you're in a team meeting and you want to offer an opinion and you start talking about something and there was always another engineer generally male because when I started in the industry there weren't that many women at that time either and it would always be then a point, counterpoint and then another guy would tag on and even though they didn't completely agree with each other they felt they had to stand against me. So, you know, and outside they were kind of good guys. I mean there was nothing really wrong with them. So I think it just came out of the whole culture. I started my work back in India. I worked at Tata Consultancy Services. So I think it was a bit of that to the point where I was a systems engineer for tandem computers and there was one day there was the reports were printing out very wrongly and so there was a bug obviously somewhere in the spooler and I was told to debug it and I'm sitting in the debugger and I'm going nowhere and like everybody, oh, she doesn't know anything and then my manager came and said, oh, you know, it's taking a long time. I said, I really need help. Could you help me? So I think that might have been now in hindsight the most empowering moment ever. So when he sat next to me he couldn't find the problem either. So then it was sent to, you know, tandem US and then some, you know, there was some cryptic command you had to run and then it was solved and it was taken care of. But those are kind of the biases wherein it's kind of assumed that the woman engineer is good but not as good as everybody else. So we kind of feel we have to go the extra mile. Now, of course, over all these years things have improved and things have changed. I no longer feel that, but that could just be because, you know, I'm at a different level and I'm doing something different. But people who start off early in their careers, that's the kind of bias. That's one obvious one I could think of. You can take turns. Okay, so I was in a similar situation where I was working on a maintenance with one of my colleagues or actually a group of them. And final part of the maintenance was to reboot the server. Once the server was rebooted it just didn't come back up at all. And we had no idea what was going on but I started troubleshooting it for about 20 minutes and then I passed it over to the person who was in charge of that server and he asked me what I did and I told him everything and he proceeded to do the exact same thing because he didn't believe that I did it properly and he accidentally didn't mute the conference bridge that we were on and I was called all kinds of names from this blah blah blah she doesn't know what she's talking about. Anyway, so at the end he ended up being on the bridge for another five hours while they got the vendor involved but I think that is common where to your point we're just not doing the right thing or we're not as smart as the males in the industry. That's the perception. It's not reality. Yeah, I mean I've been very very lucky to have teams that I've worked on throughout my career have been really supportive and very amazing to work with they've always given me chances I've never had a story like that so, yay! Thanks for the proof! But I will say that once I step outside of my team all the gloves are off the world of the internet is really harsh People assume that I have certain roles I assume if I'm at a booth because we put engineers at our HP booth all the time but they assume I'm with HR or I'm with sales and so they won't ask me technical questions and then when they ask me HRE questions and I'm just like I don't know I work on open source I don't even know about HP I mean there's a lot of assumptions out there and it can be really exhausting because you think you're there and you're an engineer but there's a lot of bias in women and how we communicate and balancing our assertive and our responsive styles so that we don't get labeled with the B word but that we're not pushovers either Yeah, I agree So I'd like to take another question Hey, and actually it's a little bit related it's kind of a comment and a question so I struggle a bit with this whole topic because I've actually worked with great people, men and women included and I've always kind of felt included yesterday I was in a customer and it was kind of funny that I was the only one who people didn't introduce themselves to and so I kind of sat back and looked and said okay, is it because I have jeans on? Nope You know I was trying to figure out why and the only thing I could think of is just because because you're a woman So that was kind of tough but you know what, I'm sorry I'm standing on my tiptoes Can I do it? Don't be sorry, you can just adjust the mic down So The other thing is I also struggle with this because I do work with a bunch of great men and women and so how can we foster the men maybe in the room who are looking to have a diverse team and are supporting the women like how can we help proliferate or kind of how can we spread out those good behaviors and encourage more of that I don't want to just talk about some of the bad things but how can we do some of the more good things and I got to add the owl skills workshop ally but I have to add even and I'm not trying to bash anybody who is involved in it I've read the description and it just said to teach men and that crushed me a little bit because I was like there are guys that do a lot of this stuff and who know a lot of this stuff I guess I'm trying to figure out how we focus on some positive a bit more yes yes I think it's also to teach women some women also suffer from that behavior and I can say as some I have to admit there's ageism too and I'm older and it's definitely gotten better I don't know if anybody saw the Mad Men finale yesterday yay but you know that show really highlighted the absolute blatant sexism of that period and I actually grew up during that period and that was absolutely spot on true just total stuff that is completely unacceptable today so we have come a long way and so to summarize that one it was every time you see a positive behavior that good cultural vibe highlight it call it out make it public reward people for it and I'd also say look at encouraging it from a diversity of thought point of view gender makes everyone scared ethnicity makes people scared age makes people scared if you look at it from a diversity of thought point of view it's a little more accessible a little less intimidating and little less risk that you're going to offend somebody so we have one more question and I'm gonna actually still continue to harp on his question actually anecdotally addressing that I also work on an amazing team I have a manager who has an amazing amount of confidence in me and it's interesting to see when this happens and it's completely unintentional with I'm the only I'm the only woman on my team and and the guys will make mistakes or they will do things that are sexist and it's unintentional and they don't mean it and it just happens and the two stories I'm gonna I keep turning around because you asked the question but the mic's here two examples I had my annual review last year and my manager had one ding for me I interrupt people in conversations and in meetings right because yes a man who interrupts a man who is forward is bold and assertive and a woman who interrupts is disrespectful and this is a societal belief two days after I got dinged for that in my review I was in a meeting with my boss and I was talking and my boss cut me off let me tell you he and I had a little conversation after that he about crawled underneath his desk so he hasn't called me out on interrupting people since then so my my so my take away from that particular thing is to gently point it out because it was not something that they had noticed before I mean this is a guy who had a good chance on me he gave me my first engineering position I moved into engineering from project management I mean this is what's completely unintentional another thing I've had is I've been in meetings and I've asked an intelligent question in the meeting had it be fully answered five minutes later had the person sitting next to me ask the exact same question had somebody else start to answer it the other one woman in the room happened to be in sales operation said hang on hang on Courtney already asked that question and we already answered it and again it was pointing out that this had happened so I think we're close to time so that's to give you the examples of what happened and it's and it was and it's completely unintentional somebody somebody is standing actually I want to do an announcement let me check how much time we have oh we have four minutes okay right so we have one more question and then I know Sheila wants to have an announcement to make okay two more questions sorry I just wanted to start out with a bit of a story and then have a question so the first time I ever experienced any kind of gender bias was in high school I was awarded a college scholarship and there was a big ceremony and I was going up to collect it myself and I heard a man sitting next to me say oh what a shame they're wasting a scholarship on a girl and I was I was shocked because it had never occurred to me that I was any different than anybody else in that room and I'm so my question when a woman when any of the women in this room go into a meeting where there's men and women or maybe a majority of men do you go in thinking of yourself first as a woman and then as an equal or then as a worker or engineer or whatever else you go in feeling like an equal as an engineer as I happen to be and who happens to be a woman and I guess my concern is that sometimes we separate ourselves and we kind of limit ourselves by thinking by starting off thinking we're different and we have a little less to contribute I mean we should not separate ourselves we have to go in as an equal you always have to believe you're an equal I mean and if you run into the bias then you've got to address it you know one-on-one with the person that would be my suggestion but it's always as Rainier said you know diversity of thought I mean you might think differently and there might be another man who thinks differently as well and you want to be inclusive of that thought as well and you have to resist as much as you can letting that bias be a reflection of your self-worth it is very very difficult I'm not going to lie I do take it personally and there have been periods in my life where I have thought less of myself because of comments or that bias and hopefully you have network you have a board of directors a circle of friends that you can talk it through and pick yourself back up when that does happen because it can be very devastating okay thank you okay just a shout out to all the men in this room I think this was targeted to this session was meant for men right how do they work well with women how do they make the most out of the diverse workforce so thank you for all of you I think we've got about 40% men which is great treat us as equals that's all we're asking and feel free to disagree as well even though we're right but wait we value your support okay I look on them as supporters so to finish up Sheila has an announcement to make yes so I'm also very very lucky to be on a team our management team our team all the teams I work with are very supportive of women we have a number of females working on OpenStack as of today I think we're at 5 or 5 women across and this just in from our VP we are giving away the two Tokyo Summit OpenStack tickets to the women of OpenStack to women who cannot make it because we won the Super User Awards today wonderful yay excellent so I think with that we are done and we delivered on time thank you everyone