 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here at the Grace Hopper Women in Celebration here in Houston, Texas for our wrap up of the three days of live coverage. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. I'm Rebecca Knight, co-host this week, and it's been my pleasure to have the Tech Truth Fellows here with us as well. And also, my pleasure, Rebecca, to let you do all the interviews because you won, you were amazing. Two, the dynamic was awesome. You had great guests and it was great to see you up here. It was a pleasure. I had a great time. This has been a wonderful week. And you guys have done a great job. The Tech Truth Fellows is part of the partnership with the Ground Truth Project and SiliconANGLE Media. Congratulations. You guys are the inaugural class of the Tech Truth. Legendary, soon to be legends. Thanks for doing your work. I appreciate all the stories you filed. Thank you for having us. What's the coolest thing you guys have seen? Pooja, what was the coolest thing you've seen? I think just the coolest part about Grace Hopper, because this is my first time at Grace Hopper, and it was just how well done it is because it's a career fair, but from the people I've spoken to and from the recruiters, it's people aren't really, people aren't searching just for jobs. They're searching for career advice. They're searching for conversations. When you're waiting in line, people are talking to each other. They're not just trying to push everyone out of the way and get their resume out there. So I think it's created a culture around career fairs that I haven't seen before and I think that's really great. So it's not just resume, get a job. It's a galvanizing force. That's the forcing function for people to get together. It's the excuse to party. Exactly. Okay, so you guys have done some reports. Any cool reports that you guys have done? Any groundbreaking stories? What's the top story coming out of this show from your perspective? What's your reports? I think one thing that I'm really coming out of this with is the importance of intersectionality in terms of women in tech. It's not just about gender. It's about race, ethnicity, and a variety of backgrounds. I went to a really interesting panel and talked to some people earlier today about whether we should anonymize certain data when you're applying for a job because historically women and people of color have had bias against them even though they've been just as qualified as men. And so I found some really interesting insights from people who are creating tech tools to kind of intervene with this unconscious bias. But then there's also some questions of is that really the best way to go about it? Should we just be pushing these companies to be diverse without some sort of tech tool intervening? So I think there's a really interesting conversation about this intersectionality of women in tech. That's a great story. Got any other top stories? Peter, go ahead. Sure, for ourselves I think the top story has been this women daycare tech thing that we're doing. We had some terrific interviews yesterday including one with a project manager, a young woman, about 30 years old who has two kids and she was really feeling blessed to be here and it was our honor to interview her. She talked about how she wanted to go here since she was a senior in college and it just made us so much more grateful that we're seniors in high school and we're able to come here, yeah. Well great to have you two high school students from Palo Alto High School, well representing Palo Alto and a shout out to Esther Wojewski, your teacher and advisor and advisor to the tech truth. Rebecca, you've been interviewing the people. What's your take? Because you had some amazing guests. You had a rocket science, you had an Astra just on the last segment and a CIO of a big financial capital one and the list goes on and on and on. What's your observation? Any dots that you can connect? Any epiphanies? Yes, I really vacillated between moments of feeling, oh, are women still putting up with all of the stuff in their jobs and in their workforce just coming to work wanting to be a good engineer, be a good data scientist, be a good researcher and still putting up with sexism toward feeling, oh my God, these women are going to be, forget Hillary, these are going to be 47, 48, 49th president of the United States, it's just amazing. So I really felt the talent and the confidence and the energy around technology changing everything about our daily lives. I want to ask you a personal question. You were talking off camera about being parents. As a mom of young kids and I have four, a little bit older, what's your thoughts for their future? How do you see this evolving, this community? How do you see this? My eight year old is already in a coding club at school. She loves it, she's coding mazes for her little sister who's five. And now I know about the programming languages. So I've got to find out which language she's learning and then, and then, and then. Good to start with that one. But okay, we'll get back to that slide. No, but I think that the point is that I want my daughters to be into technology, understand technology, be comfortable with technology. But I also want them to do what they want to do too. But with the understanding that technology is going to be a part of it. So if they major in journalism, it's journalism and computer science. If they major in policy, it's policy and computer science. So it's really changing the way that they go to school. What interview blew you away from here? What was, if you have one, or favorite, what was the one that hit you the most? So many, so many. I mean, obviously I was very starstruck talking to Jeanette Epps, the astronaut. I really love these two sisters that came on. They are Ashley Conard and Chelsea Conard, two young women who said they were each other's mentors. They came to each other for career advice. And it just was so inspirational to see this real sister relationship, but also a real professional, collegial relationship as well. And they were fun too. They weren't boring and they were exciting. I mean, I was blown away by that too. Okay, journalism. What do you guys see in this career around journalism? Did you see any journalism out there here? Was it any technology coming out of the woodwork around some of the folks you talked to? I mean, you had a Microsoft on. Was that a gamer? Was that a gaming thing? What's some of the cool things? Yeah, so I was, I interviewed today on theCUBE a gaming evangelist and she is, I mean, 23 years old, which is very young. And she was just, I think she had a great Twitter platform. And in terms of journalism, it's just great to see how technology is being used so widely to get people's opinions out there. She shared a lot about how game developers can be more inclusive. And she really uses Twitter as a platform for that to get her opinions out there. So I think technology as a medium is a great way to get your opinions out there without being accredited to a certain company. Karris, what issue do you see out there with this community as it grows? That has the most longevity in terms of conversation, narrative at a global or national level that you would see that's out here. Is it the diversity? Is it the gender pay or gap? I mean, is there, what key things that are going to go on and on and on? Yeah, in terms of like things not having solutions or in terms of things that are going to be on the internet. Just the ongoing dialogue that's going to be the center of the conversation. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's that, even though we've been talking about how it's incredible, you know, I think there are approximately 12,000 people who ended up attending this year. And this is every person I talked to said, this is such a great place where it's, but it's also the only place where they can look around and every person around them is a woman in tech. And that's just not something that men have to deal with. And so, you know, there was a report that Anita Borg put out earlier this week where only 21.7% of tech jobs of their top 60 companies are held by women. And so, I mean, though this is an amazing celebration. The numbers are tiny still. Yeah, the numbers are very small. And for so many of these women, this is the one, these are the only three days of the year that they get to look around and feel like they are also a part of the community. And so I think that's what, you know, we just kind of have to keep pushing forward on because that's going to be a problem and a solution that is many, many years in making. I mean, it's going to come from childhood. It's going to go into college. It's going to go into schools. So I think there's a lot of ways to go on that. Tori, I want to get your thoughts on something because we were having a conversation on the kickoff and also our podcast, which is up on SoundCloud, our Silicon Valley Friday show. We talked about youth, the youth, and you guys with the ground truth. And this is Charlie Sennett's mission. A lot of youth, you guys do the youth unemployment, he's done some stuff, a lot of stuff about the youth. And what's going on in the tech industry is a shift to the new generation youth, millennials, or whatever I heard about. I'd have marked the millennials differently there. There is a real cultural shift where companies have to embrace the youth. So I want to get your thoughts because I know you'll be a little bit edgy. That's why I want to go to you on this one first is, what does it take? Because a lot of people here are young. I mean, I'm blown away by the demographics. It's a lot of younger folks. Thoughts about the youth here, where it was a trajectory of youth, how do companies embrace the youth culture? I mean, these people, some people running companies don't even know how to use email. Never mind youth, they don't even use email. I think that it's interesting that you mentioned the disparity between older people and younger people understanding technology, as I think it relates a lot to journalism as well. People always say, you know, children are the future. The youth are the future. I think that there is, you just mentioned a 23 year old tech evangelist who's doing amazing work. I think there are so many exciting intelligent people. I think that I hope that they will be respected for their ideas and for their merit, regardless of their age, because there's a whole spectrum here as well. I think that's very well represented in terms of an age diversity. I think, yeah, it's just one of those, it's another factor that we should try to overlook. We should try to get past judging people based on gender, judging people based on their race, judging people based on their religion, and their age as well. We should be looking more at just ideas coming out of people and if they're good ideas, we should run with them. Seth, we talked about this on another segment earlier and we kicked off and I want to get you guys' thoughts on this. I was watching the keynote from Dell World where Dave Vellante was at, and Jeff M. L. who's the CEO of GE, General Electric, made a comment and says, us industrial companies are going to be, went to bed one day and the next day we woke up and now we're a software company. And this seems to be the theme here within Grace Hopper that software is now permeated from being a geek, IT, male dominated situation to embedded in the fabric of life. So now that shifts demographics just statistically. About 50% of the voters are women but now products have to be built for everyone, not male for male. This is an interesting dynamic that no one's really kind of talking about. I want to get your thoughts on that topic. So I think one thing that I've really come across at Grace Hopper is it's called a celebration of women in computing. But from the conversations I've had, it's really a celebration of inclusivity because one topic of conversation was that there's a thousand men this year at Grace Hopper. And for most of the people that I've spoken to, they said, yeah, I mean, why shouldn't there be men at this event? Because the whole conference is on the premise of being inclusive and getting as many different kinds of voices in the tech industry as possible. So if they, I think that's the basic principle of this conference is getting more people involved because there is a disparity and then that in itself will improve the kinds of products we're using in the industry on a whole. It works both ways. Inclusivity is about including men because they need to be in part of the dialogue, right? Is that the premise? They need to be allies, exactly. And I think I was talking to someone really, a student who said, well, you know, most of the time it's a thousand women for every 14,000 men. So they, you know, they can. They deserve it. They can not deserve it, but they can learn what it's like to be the minority at a conference like this. Karis, you want to add? I just wanted to add something on that. I think it's super interesting to see that really to make the statement that every company is a tech company now. And I think that actually that kind of offers a unique opportunity for these corporations who usually may not have put as much effort into their tech team to really start from the ground up and be inclusive and be thoughtful about how they're creating that tech team. I talked with one woman earlier today who didn't major in computer science, but she taught herself to code doing a variety of this through this organization called Girl Development. And so she was actually able to get a job as a UI engineer at Macy's without getting a degree in computer science. And you don't think about Macy's as being a tech company, but she said when she got there, she was amazed that about a third of their tech team was women. And so I mean, you know, you talk about tech companies, usually we just say Google and Facebook, but there are I think every single company here is thinking about that. I mean, Disney is here, you know, I mean, talk about not being a tech company. So I think that it actually is a unique opportunity for these companies to think differently about who they're hiring. Yeah, one of my observations here at the show, so my third year here is that it is disproportionate all women, which I actually like, I think it's good for the networking and some of the bonding going on. I think it should be more men, obviously, but Marissa Elena Yen has said something to your interview that I heard that was important was the work that she's doing around coding in inner cities is having people with their peer groups in a little bit of clusters so that they don't feel isolated, right? So you're seeing a social network effect around collaboration. That is a super important dynamic and it's certainly happening here. In my observation, the report would be the networking and the bonds and the social fabric is going to be an integral part. And this is a new dilemma. This is now, it's not some user group and some, you know, reddit or subreddit. This is like an industry. Thoughts on the role of collaboration, social networking and social graphs or whatever you want to call it. That's definitely something that's very unique about Grace Hopper is that it creates a safe space for women. I mean, everywhere is a safe space for men. So this is a safe space for women to collaborate and to communicate and to say, hey, this thing happened to me. Is this okay? Another woman will say, no, it's not okay. You know, we can do something about it. Here's how. Here's some problems that we need to tackle. We're not quite there yet. That's I think a big underlying pervasive theme of this entire conference is that we're not quite there yet. What do we have to do? How can other people help us? Why should they help us? How do we motivate them? Research that came from Accenture and Girls Who Code yesterday showed that when you have groups of kids, like young girls and boys working together in coding camps, that actually is really detrimental to the girls and that's not working. You need to make a space specifically for women so that they feel so included and it's a really inclusive environment. So they had data on that. Yes, that was part of their research report. Any other thoughts? Peter, do you feel isolated here as one of the younger males? No, not at all actually, yeah. So a little bit about my own personal background. My mom and grandma are involved in tech, so I've grown up pretty conscious of that in my household and it's really great to be here at this conference and kind of take that in and realize that a lot of other men in tech should share that sentiment, if you will. What was your big walk away? What's your big aha moment here? Just seeing how Grace Hopper's legacy is being fulfilled, it's really terrific, yeah. I wish the cameras could pan and show everyone the booths and everything because there's so much excitement and energy here. I can ask Peter, I just, oh sorry, I just wanted to ask Peter a question. As a young white man, like how have you learned anything at this conference? Do you think that has prepared you to be a better ally and you want to help and raise up other voices? Absolutely, yeah. Just going back to John's point earlier, communication is absolutely essential and I think encouraging positive dialogue between men and women in the workplace and outside the workplace is really probably the best thing you could do. Are there some things you can think of that you can go back to your high school and do for other people? Sure, yeah, I could communicate, get involved more with low income programs and help spread the word. I think that's really the big takeaway for myself. Alicia, any thoughts from your standpoint? Yeah, just to go back to that question, when we were interviewing mothers, actually Peter was, he went away and he was like, oh, I feel so empowered. I'm not even a woman and I feel empowered. So I think. Is he an inner woman? I know, exactly. So yeah, my big takeaway is just that everyone here loves their job, absolutely loves their job. They wouldn't come here if they didn't, you know? And I think in an atmosphere like that, not just of women in tech, but of ambitious women in tech is especially important. That's great. Well, as a guy, I can tell you that I'm always struggling with how to find the dialogue with women in a way without stepping on myself because I tend to say things, he's very East Coast way, but what I learn is trying to be more empathetic, but I'm not a woman so I can truly walk in the shoes. Well said. I'll stop talking. Rebecca, thoughts. I know, Tori, I want to leave with that. Rebecca, I want to leave with you with that. I think that that's exactly right. And seeing, as Pooja said, this is such a well-designed conference designed by women. And it is about collaboration, community, but it also has this real hard science bent too. So I think that there's just so much woman power here in this room. I'm overwhelmed. I'm for clumped. Yeah, and Tori brings up a good point. Tongue and cheek aside, the mansplaining thing that's been going around has been interesting. We're done, we're sick of it. How could guys be better? I mean, besides, how could they not get into the trap of mansplaining? Because that surfaces the unconscious biases. They're trying to be good, but end up stepping on themselves. So I want to, you talk about this a little bit, because I talked with an engineer at Verizon, yesterday, who did a panel on mentorship, and she pointed out, listen, I've been an engineer for 20 years. The fact of the matter is most of my mentors were male. And so she talked about some kind of the pitfalls and opportunities there. And she said, one of the biggest things that frustrated her is that men often were almost too scared to give her feedback because they were scared to insult her. And so she said, I wasn't growing in the same way my male colleagues were, because my male managers weren't being honest with me because they were scared to give that feedback and worry that it would be misconstrued. And so I actually think that kind of goes back to what Peter has learned. And what I think is really important is that communication is just very key, to be able to just see each other as equals and not try to treat people differently because of their gender. And so just because women need that feedback to grow, men need that feedback to grow. And that shouldn't be something you hesitate on just because you're worried about stepping on someone's toes. And I think as long as men and women really see each other eye to eye, really respect each other, that's going to be honest. Then they'll be honest and that will be taken as very genuine. So I thought that was an interesting insight. The woman that we actually talked to before coming here, she explained it as not being able to fit into the boys club, as I say. She didn't get invited to go out with her beers or just go to social events with them, baseball, games. So I think that it's not just the dialogue, but the action. Yeah. This is a very basic analysis of it, but I think this is what the root of it is is that people are afraid to get a little weird and uncomfortable. People are hesitant to talk about issues that Grace Hopper has done a great job of bringing up, but I think that's just it is, I mean, we're not, we all make mistakes and we all have our own biases. And I think the most important thing is to keep your ears open and to not be afraid to get uncomfortable to talk about issues of intersectionality, especially in the tech world. Yeah. Well, you guys done an amazing job. It's been my pleasure to have you guys work with us and great to see your work product on SiliconANGLE.com, TheGroundTruthProject.org, all the contents there. You'll be seeing it around the web, hopefully being published at all the places possible. And Palo Alto High School students, thanks for joining us. Great job. We're wrapping up Grace Hopper and Rebecca, great job, you did an amazing job. Well done. Thank you, thank you very much. It was my pleasure. It was my pleasure. Great to co-host with you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much. You watching theCUBE here live at Grace Hopper, women in celebration. Thanks for watching.