 Hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for Shorts. Today we're pleased to bring you this month's installment of the E4C webinar series, focusing on strategies to build a more gender-equal tech sector. My name is Yana Aranda and I'm the president of E4C and I'll be your moderator for today's webinar. With the webinar you're participating in today, it will be archived on our webinars page and our YouTube channel. You can find both links noted on the slide that you are seeing right now. Information on upcoming webinars is available on our webinars page. If you're any E4C member, you will receive invitations to upcoming webinars directly in your inbox. If you have any questions, comments or recommendations for future speakers and topics, please contact the E4C webinars team at webinars at engineeringforchange.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about Engineering for Change. E4C is a knowledge organization and a global community of more than one million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities around the globe. Some of these challenges include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture and information and communication technologies. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and style leaders, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our Solutions Library, professional development resources and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships and more. E4C members also enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E4C site, the better we'll be able to serve you resources aligned to your needs. We invite you to visit our website, engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and sign up. If you're interested in learning more about ICT tools that bring women into tech in various ways, we invite you to explore the E4C Solutions Library after the webinar. An example of the type of tech you'll find is Plant Village, which is an online user-moderate Q&A form dedicated to the goal of helping people grow their own food. It is an open resource that helps farmers solve plant-related questions and includes the NeuroApp, which is a digital system to help farmers diagnose crop disease in the fields without an internet connection. The full report in the Solutions Library provides more information about technical performance, compliance with standards, academic research and user provision models of the system. All information is sourced by E4C research fellows and reviewed by our community of experts and it's available to E4C members free of charge. So definitely take the time to check it out. So a few housekeeping items before we get started. And I see some of you are already doing this. Let's practice using WebEx by telling us where you are in the chat box, which is located at the bottom right of your screen so you can type your location there. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slide. You can use this window to share your marks during the webinar. So we have Switzerland, New York, I saw someone type in earlier India. I'm also here, excuse myself here, Colorado, Portland, brilliant. We're glad you're here and joining us. If you have any technical questions, feel free to send a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin. Alright during the webinar, please use the Q&A window which is located below the chat to type in your questions for the presenter. Again if you do not see this, you should be able to try, you should be able to see the icon in the middle of the slide and open it that way. If you're just listening to audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening a WebEx app in a different browser. The first few webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PDH, please sign in and go to your member dashboards to access the PDH form. The link is also available on the slide in front of you right now. So with that, I would like to introduce to you today some phenomenal speakers. First we have Ursula Wynhoman, who is an international lawyer with 22 years of experience. She joined the ITU, which is the International Telecommunications Union in 2017 as a representative at the United Nations. The ITU is the UN specialized agency for information and communication technologies or ITTs with a mission to connect the world. Ursula leads UN relations and represents the agency and Secretary General at the UN in New York. She has the ITU's UN liaison office and works at the intersection of technology and development, promoting digital inclusion and the use of ITTs for sustainable development. Previously, Ursula spent 14 years with the UN Global Compact, the UN's corporate sustainability initiative. Her last position was chief social sustainability governance and legal and a member of the Executive Committee. Ursula led the UNGC's work on human rights and decent work, gender equality, poverty and inequality, peace, anti-corruption, and the rule of law. We're so honored to have you here with us, Ursula. And we will also join today by Asobi Gaitan, who is the Community Mounder of Equal Global Partnership to Bridge the Gender Digital Divide. The initiative was over 90 partners and co-founded by ITU, the International Trade Center, UN Women, GSMA, and UN University. She has over eight years of experience working with quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyze international policy and development, specializing in technical assistance to achieve sustainable development goals, with particular focus on SEG-5, which is gender equality. Prior to joining ITU, Lolly worked as an international consultant for the International Trade Center's flagship initiative for Women's Economic Empowerment, G-Trade. And as previously worked for international think tanks and universities, the researcher and lecturers were relating to international policy, business development, and political science. She holds a PhD in International Law and Economics from Baconi University in Italy. Welcome, Lolly. We're thrilled to have you join us as well. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ursula, and we will move forward. Welcome to Lolly first. My apologies. Thank you so much for that correction. There we go, Lolly. It is all yours. Should be there. Welcome, Lolly. So you should be presenting for now, Lolly, and you can feel free to advance the slide. Yes. Okay. Let's say you're on mute. There we go. I can also advance the slides on your behalf. Thank you so much, Diana. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, perfect. Sorry, I just have one complication here to pass the slides. I don't know why it's not during the icon to pass the slides. Yeah. So the icon is there to try advancing the slides on the left-hand side of the slide. Yup, and down arrow above the numbers. Yeah. And you first use admin can change the slides for you. So why don't you go ahead and I'm sorry about that. I don't know what's going on, but yes, good morning and good afternoon, everyone, depending on which side of the world you are. Thank you so much for joining the webinar today and we really want to say thank you to you, to E4C for hosting and organizing this webinar series that I understand that it's a series you are delivering to spread really the words on the importance of technology to make up better and more inclusive for everyone. So I was rightly introduced by Yana. I'm Loli Gaetan. I'm the community manager of Equals Global Partnership and I'm also research analyst here at the International Telecommunication Union. We are based here in Geneva in Switzerland and it's a great pleasure to be connected with you. Today in this part of my presentation I will walk you through what is Equals, the structure of the Global Partnership, what the partners are doing, who are the partners our work and also the actions that each of any of our partners are taking in order to reach this 50-50% gender balance in ICPs. So if we can maybe pass this slide please. Thank you so much. Okay, so what is Equals? Before going to what is Equals I would like to share with you why is Equals. So we all know and to give you just some statistics and data about the lack of connectivity we have still 3.9 billion people still not connected to the Internet. So the proportion of men using the Internet nowadays is higher than the proportion of women using the Internet in two-thirds of the country's worldwide. Additionally, still women are not adequately represented as stakeholders, as co-creators beneficiaries of technology-based interventions and there often this happens because they are lacking of some access to technology, digital skills and media and information like therapy. So in terms of data quality as well, so we are not having or not gathering enough data in order to deliver good research and see what steps needs to be taken in order to close this digital gender device. So having said this, the goal of the global partnership Equals is to create an unstoppable movement where women and girls are equal participants in the digital technology revolution. How do we work? How equals work? As I told you before, we are based in ITU so the secretariat of equals is in Geneva and we work, our governance structure is kind of we work in four different areas that are coalitions. We have one steering committee and we have one annual meeting which is the annual meeting where all the equals principles of the members of the partnership get together in order to see what has been delivered and what are the actions that they need to take in order to deliver more on this topic. So the steering committee, as I mentioned before, this global partnership was created in 2017 by five co-founders. So we have in the first line as you can see, so we have the Global Society Mobile Association, we have UN Women we have the UN University Computing and Society International Telecommunications Union and International Trade Center so those are the five co-founders. Besides that, in the steering committee we also have our financial contributors or donors and the organizations leading the work in each of the coalitions that I will explain to you about later. So today as you can see we have more than 90 partners from every region of the world. We just put in this slide some of them to give you an idea of the variety of the partners that we have in Equals. So we have from governments, we have private sector, we have NGOs and we have academia. And you will see later why we have this variety of partners in the partnership. So each of them responded to this call to action that we set up back in 2017 and the idea was initially and still is the idea of setting up these collaborative and coordinated frameworks to make specific measurable pledges across three focus area coalitions in one research group. Next slide please. Time that we get a new partner approved to be on board of Equals a commitment has to be made by the partner and this partner will commit to implement impact driven action to make substantive progress towards SDG5. So the commitments have very strict characteristics I should say, so they should be specific measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. Next slide please. So some of the key achievements just to give you an idea of what we are doing in terms of advocacy. So Equals would recognize the G20 Leaders Declaration was also included as the digital inclusion co-share of the W20 and we are always trying to be present in these key events such as the European Development Days. We also did a panel during the Commission on the Status of Women in New York in past March World Economic Forum. We have organized some a couple of sessions there during the Mobile World Congress with this forum, etc. This is from the site of advocacy and raise awareness. We have also our big annual event each year is the flagship event of Equals which is more is known as the Equals in Take a Work. So with this annual event that we organized at the Secretariat, we are recognizing initiatives, projects and other programs that are contributing to our goal which is reach the gender digital device. So in the past couple of years, and as you can see the numbers there, so we have received over 1,800 nominations from every corner of the world. This year the award ceremony will take place in the Internet Governance Forum in Berlin in November. So we invite you all joining this webinar and we invite you to send and submit your initiatives or projects you're working on for next year's awards. Next please. Okay, so as I was mentioning before, the creation of Equals, we work in four different coalitions of, I would say actions. So these four areas of actions we have access, skills, leadership and research. Basically we decided to have these four areas of actions since those are the challenges that women and girls are facing in the digital age. So we needed to embrace these challenges as the actions that we need to take as the Equals partnership. So despite we know that there are a growing number of digital equality initiatives around the world ranging from awareness racing events to mentoring, skills tutoring, but the lack of coordinated effort toward digital inclusion is like the key and has ultimately led many projects that are similar sometimes in nature being less effective, you know, because of the lack of coordination and diffusion. Next slide please. So we have the Access Coalition the first area of action that we have. Each area is, we have one institution that is leading one or two institutions leading in each area of action. So in the Access Coalition, the Coalition Leader is GSMA. Why the Access? So we know that women are 12% less likely to use the internet compared to men globally for different reasons that we've been doing some research at the Secretariat as well and the research groups of Equals mostly cultural barriers are not allowing as well to reach, to increase this percentage of use of internet. Also 33% fewer women are online compared to men in all of the 47 UN designated least developed countries. So that's why the Access Coalition was created and it's focused on reducing the gender gap in internet access and use. Next slide please. So what's the work of the Coalition specifically so they share information and experience and best practices and they identify high impact initiatives or actions so they can work in a coordinated way on both initiatives. They identify countries where there can be, they can have coordinated action so lately they have been working a lot in Bangladesh and Randa for example and they advocate so this is the advocacy element of this global partnership I must say is like a cross cutting issue on the four areas in where we work. So next slide please. So now we pass to the Skills Coalition. The Skills Coalition, the leaders of the Skills Coalition is UNESCO and Germany. So why the Skills Coalition? It is estimated that 90% of all future jobs will have a digital component and unfortunately only 17 of technology jobs are held by women. So with this in mind for us it's very relevant to start the work and the promotion of STEM team education for girls at the schools. So then they feel like motivated in taking this decision of following a career in the ICTs related to the ICT sector for the tertiary education mainly. So if you can see there there is a picture of one of our last activities that we did in Ethiopia. This is during the girls in ICT day in April and you see there all the girls we did a boot camp, one day boot camp in Addis and they are doing this signal of equals which is like the two arms like that. So supporting as well the initiative we have some partners delivering in the boot camp some technical capacity and capacity building there and it was a great experience for all of us. Next please. So the work that we do in the coalition at the coalition level for the skills is basically a bit of developing principles guidelines and good practices as well. In particular for gender transformative skills training and evaluation we are spending the international girls in ICT day campaign so the international girls in ICT is another initiative of international the ITU of ITU and we are trying to do this campaign as well as every day is girls in ICT day. They also launched the equals digital skills grassroots innovation fund. This is a fund in where managed by the web foundation and they are providing support to institutions local institutions in different countries that are working, providing capacity building and training to women and girls in technology topics. And we built a virtual skills school. The idea is to provide 35 digital skills training to girls and women who cannot attend onsite class. And again raise awareness of the importance of gender equality in digital and physical space. Next slide please. Okay so this is the third action of equals which is leadership, the leadership coalition. This coalition is the leaders of the international trade center and UN women so why this coalition because women now make up approximately 50% of the global force and yet 2% of venture capital tech funding to start up with female founders in Silicon Valley. So we have a very high investment in women on SMEs in the tech sector and also we need to increase the idea on this coalition is increase the senior management position in technology companies. So that's why the equals leadership coalition aims to address the barriers that prevent women from investing to the top of their choosing technology field. Next slide please. Some work of the coalition so the activities are designed concretely in five main areas. So the first one mobilization and building a professional network women in tech. Identifying capacity building workshops for women entrepreneurs. We do a multi-tech holder call for good practices and encouraging tech to sign up to the web and we are identifying local initiatives for connecting entrepreneurs to investors. Besides that as well we are trying to get some influence at the policy level so with some policy recommendations for regulatory agencies and governments. In this area probably Ursula will also mention some of the great work she's doing from the ITU New York office since she's been leading some of the initiatives that we have under the leadership coalition such as round table and road maps for investors and also the gender task force. Next slide please. So last but not least is the research group. This research group is a cross cutting group around the three areas access skills and leadership. We have over 30 members and the leader of the research group is the UN University Access and Society section. So next slide please. So about the coalition for us as I mentioned at the beginning of the webinar so evidence and data are needed to inform policy to reach the gender digital divide because if we don't have the data we don't know where to go, what actions to take so that's why for us it's very relevant this research group. Yet only 41 countries collect data on women participation on women in national economy. So we have a comprised group of experts from every corner of the world as you saw in the map that I previously showed and we are trying to look for the causes and the remedies for gender tech inequalities and motivating our other members in order to take action. Next slide please. So the work of the coalition basically through research in the sense that we are developing robust and rigorous methodologies for selecting, evaluating, analyzing and presenting quantitative and qualitative data. There is from a wide and highly diversity variety of sources. So the first output and since this partnership was created recently like it's just a year's born, the first output of the research group was the inaugural report. So in this report they did a very very in depth analysis of the state of gender equality in the three coalition areas, access skills and leadership. You can find this report in the website of equals.org so I really invite you to have a look of that you will find the report complete and you will find as well a brief of the report. Besides that we also developed a centralized knowledge sharing platform that will serve as a core resource for coalition members of the Equal Secretariat and other interested stakeholders. Next slide please. So these are our latest reports so in terms of a bit of research, so the first product from the research group, they work in this report for a year and a half taking stock data and evidence on gender equality in digital access skills and leadership. This report was launched in March I think, yes March during the commission on the status of women. We had a very interesting discussion there and then I included this other report that was not, it's not a let's say a product of the research group, but it's a product of the skills coalition and is this I'd blush if I could close in gender divides in digital skills through education. And with that I would like just to finish with some recommendations for closing the digital skills gender gap that you will find as well in the reports. So basically the conclusions of the report, in the recommendations of the report, we came up with 15 recommendations. So the first one is try to adopt sustained, varied and life-wide approaches. The second one is establish incentive targets and quotas. The third, embed ICT informal education. The fourth recommendation is supporting engaging experiences. The fifth is emphasize meaningful use and tangible benefits. The sixth, encourage collaborative and peer learning. The seventh is create the safest spaces and meet women where they are. The eighth, examine exclusionary practices and language. The ninth, recruit and train gender sensitive teachers. The tenth promote role models and mentors. The 11th bring parents on board. 12th leverage community connections and recruit allies. 13th support technology autonomy and women's digital rights. 14th use universal service and access funds. And 15th collect and use data and set actionable indicators and targets. So having said this, enumerating these 15 recommendations from the research report, and I'd blush if I could, so I finished my presentation. Thank you so much for the attention. Thank you, Lolly, that was very insightful and 15 recommendations that we'll have to be sure to capture and share with our attendees. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Ursula to dive a little deeper. Exactly. Perfect, by the way, thanks so much. Hi everybody. And I just would like to add to Lolly's thanks so much to you guys for inviting us to work with you on this webinar today. And really delighted to participate. Before I dive in, just wanted to add one thing about equals and important things that it's actually an open partnership. So other organizations are very welcome to join. It doesn't cost anything. And also individuals as well are able to get involved. And so any who are interested to do so, we'd love to follow up with you. So the jumping off point for the remainder of this presentation, basically, you know, why does equals seek to mobilize partners around the issues of access, skills, leadership and research? Basically, because all of these different areas are both part of the problem, but also progress in these interconnected areas is absolutely critical to the solution. And so in this latter part of the presentation, we're going to do a deeper dive, particularly around what Lolly described as a leadership dimension, around gender equality and the tech workplace. And then we'll conclude very briefly with a few recent developments here at the United Nations. I should add because we didn't say the ITU, for any who are not familiar, is the UN Specialized Agency for Information Communication Technology. So when looked at from the point of view of the workplace, ICT access and digital skills are clearly really key to building the pipeline for future tech employees, managers and entrepreneurs. However, what happens in the workplace and entrepreneurial ecosystem is critical to keeping women in tech and drawing women into tech in the first place. And so too often the focus is only on hiring women and the lack of gender diversity in tech is painted as mainly a pipeline issue. However, studies show that there's a huge turnover of women in tech. Estimates range from 40 to 50%. Harvard Business Review, for instance, has estimated that 41% of women working in tech eventually end up leaving the field compared with just 17% of men. And the situation is even worse for women entrepreneurs in tech. Of the 43% venture capital that Lolly mentioned that goes to women entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs with deep tech businesses not specifically catered to women, such as e-commerce websites, etc., on fashion, face even more obstacles in trying to get funding for their businesses. So why are these challenges the way they are and why is turnover so high? Well, it's not the work. It turned out it's actually the work environment in many tech settings that is the challenge and needs to be systematically and holistically fixed. One study, for instance, of 716 women who left tech after an average of seven years found that almost all liked the work itself, but almost all were unhappy with the work environment. Research funded by NSF, for instance, surveyed 5,300 women who had earned engineering degrees of all types over the last 50 years and 38% were no longer working as engineers because of the working environment. So many of us are familiar with the results of studies that show, for instance, that when presented with lines of code written by a woman and a man, respectively, the code written by a woman is judged as better if the gender of the coders is not known and as inferior to the men's code if their gender is known. There's also a frequently repeated study, including by Yale, that shows that applications and resumes, applications for jobs and resumes with a female name on them are treated less favorably than the same resume with randomly assigned man's name on them. Unconscious bias also finds its way into performance evaluations. A study of 248 performance reviews for high performers in tech found that around 88% of the women's reviews contained critical feedback compared to around 59% of the men's. A negative personality criticism was far more likely to show up in critical reviews of women than of men, in only two out of the 83 critical reviews received by men in the study, but in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women. Perhaps helping to explain the low percentage of VC capital that goes to women entrepreneurs, a study by Harvard Business School Water and MIT found that the same percentage to investors narrated by a man was rated as more persuasive, logical and fact-based than when narrated by a woman at a rate of 68% to 32%. And when negotiating for a salary increase, a study by Harvard and CMU found that women who asked for a higher salary were rated as more difficult to work with and less nice, while men were not perceived negatively from negotiating. Let's move slide. So this slide here and apologies, when we made it landscape, I think it got distorted. So apologies to IEEE because this is actually the results of a really interesting IEEE women in tech survey. And it echoes findings such as these in other surveys unpacking some of the working environment experiences that women in tech members, that their women in tech membership have had and so there is actually a beautiful flyer that they've created which looks much more attractive than this one. So apologies for that. But as you can see here, it's a little hard to read, but what it reports is that something like 28% of these women surveyed have experienced unwanted sexual advances, a whole lot of non-inclusive behavior, 33% have experienced negative outcomes in their careers that they believe were attributed to being female. Some of the non-inclusive behavior they experienced were 58% having been asked inappropriate questions during job interviews, 71% saying that questions or comments were addressed to males when they questions should have been addressed to them because they were the subject matter expert. 39% have felt that they were assigned task or administrative tasks compared with men at the same level and 37% felt that they were excluded from networking opportunities. And then finally 51% felt the need to speak less about their family at work to be taken seriously so that not feeling that they can bring their whole self to the workplace. So basically experiences such as those help explain why perhaps why only 25% of computer jobs are currently held by women and only 12% of engineers at Silicon Valley startups are women at the moment. 5% of leadership positions in the tech sector are held by women and 7% of partners at the top 100 venture capital firms and also women are far more likely than men at any age to be in junior positions. But so clearly there's not a simple solution to what really is most likely a result to a large extent of unconscious bias that pervades the tech and really every other sector that both men and women have because these biases, these stereotypes as women and men we have them. So this is not a women versus men issue at all. Really gender equality is an issue for all of us and stereotypes and expectations based on gender really harmful for women and men as well. So basically as I said there's no simple solution and similarly sitting back and waiting for times to change is also not an attractive option. So the World Economic Forum has estimated that it may take around 200 years to close the economic gender gap at the current rates of progress. So not only is this all profoundly unfair, it also flies in the face of extensive research on the strong business and economic case for tackling bias and embracing inclusion. Joining forces through global partnerships such as equals to share and learn together and engage in collective action is one way that we can all amplify our efforts and help speed up progress. Also organizations do need to take more responsibility to make their workplaces more inclusive and not with an initiative just here or there but in a more holistic systemic way to really cut back that 200 year trajectory. So what I now wanted to share with you is more about what we can do as individuals in our own work environments to help make a difference and speed up progress. So traditionally there's been a lot of focus on what the CEO says of an organization and does on these kinds of issues and also on the policies that companies and organizations have in place and these are definitely really really really important however there's other elements which also should be looked at. Particularly are the daily interactions that we have with managers colleagues, team members and clients and rather than a single catalytic event that pushes a lot of women out the door many experience a build up or slow grinding down over time that makes them feel that they do not belong and that they're not welcome. And in a nutshell to bring about a more inclusive tech sector we all have a role to play. Gender equality really will require the efforts of all of us. So this kind of thinking the idea that in addition to what our organization is doing, what's the leadership of organizations doing, the policies they're putting in place, there's this idea that there are things that we as individuals can do whether we're a woman or a man that can help create more inclusive environments that will also be more productive and innovative. So this and the current situation is painted in some of the statistics that I slide earlier led to this project carried out for the IEEE and equal. It was a working group that came up with this idea of 25 ways to be a more inclusive engineer and each of the practices in the five areas we're going to show you are footnoted with links to research that explains why that practice is important. And as a reminder these actions are meant as a compliment and not as a substitute for what organizations need themselves to do and the leadership roles that CEOs can and should take to support gender equality. So the first area is in business leadership and as you can see here some of the practices are about being sensitive to the impact of micro inequities and the unconscious biases that and assumptions and stereotypes that can creep in even to daily conversations that might inadvertently reinforce stereotypes and even you know at the water cooler we can hear assumptions and things being made. So these are opportunities as well to help interrupt fixed mindset talk by questioning language like natural talent or leaders or that someone on the other side is not leadership material a leopard doesn't change its spots or either you've got it or you don't. Another one is about how important it is to encourage others to apply or ask for a certain position award or role because a lot of research says that women are a lot less likely to apply for these things including because of the existence of these bias and stereotypes which have been internalized. The importance of not underestimating the power of simply encouraging others to take on a project and to do so in ways that does not set up people to fail. Also the importance of just supervising people to be honest and fair in feedback for employees of all genders and creating opportunities to have substantive discussions on performance in private. So these are just some of them and there's many more there's a lot more detail elaborated as it's noted as well in the actual 25 ways document. The next category is about process and system leadership and at this point I might just speed up a little bit because I know we're running short of time and I want to make sure we have time for your questions and comments etc. So in this area it covers things like being inclusive in the products and processes developed, being mindful of potential differentiated impacts on different people, proactively seeking to expand and diversify your networks. A lot of research shows that our own networks professional and personal tend to look a lot like ourselves so it really can pay off to be proactive and try and reach out and build connections with people who are different from ourselves and that that can be beneficial all around. From the organizational level as was actually mentioned by Lolly one can encourage one's company or organization to sign the Women's Empowerment Principle which are seven principles that look across the workplace, marketplace and community and really speak to the kind of policies that such organizations can adopt really holistically and systemically embrace and gender equality and achieve their own goals in this. Jumping ahead to the next category development and monitoring this is about among other things taking up opportunities to mentor and sponsor people of different genders and minorities and once again there's a really important difference between mentoring which is really valuable but also sponsoring is where you speak up about someone else and their talents in ways that really matter and can help them to get ahead and this tends to happen a lot less for women than for men. Offering speaking opportunities to women and minorities is really key and some people have made pledges for instance not to speak on any all male panels also known as manals and instead to encourage that the invitation be extended to women and minorities from their organization and even asking as well the organization before they accept speaking what is the gender balance of the particular panel. Jumping ahead to the area of empathy this is about among other things looking for and taking up opportunities to really understand the experiences of others and how they may be different from your own. A workplace and work environment may be super fun and engaging for some but it's very easy to extrapolate from that and think that everybody experiences that way but in fact that may not be the case so the opportunity to engage with people, understand people's experiences is really really valuable. Similarly there's a lot around meeting dynamics, making space for women and men's voices, paying attention to who's being interrupted and in fact there's even an interesting study that shows that the women judges on the US Supreme Court are interrupted many, many more times even by their fellow male judges and even by lawyers in front of them than the male judges and widespread practices and once again just to reiterate a lot of this is unconscious so it's really about being aware and I think this 25 wave document can help identify some of the ways that as women and men we may not always be acting as inclusively as we can in a way that can really help make a difference in the tech workplace and indeed all spaces. This also includes the importance of avoiding making assumptions about people because of their gender or family status including as to their goals, needs, likes or dislikes and similarly even just not assuming if you're a manager that everything is fine unless people complain to you instead proactively checking in with people to find out about their needs and concerns is really really helpful. The final category is about diversity and inclusive leadership and it's an opportunity among other things to make executive and others aware of the business case for increasing women and underrepresented groups in the workforce. There's so many studies that talk about how it's so beneficial for companies. It helps to be more productive and innovative as well as be just much greater places to work and really reduce turnover etc. There are opportunities here as well in terms of many of us have been in the situation where they say a client or a partner who may just assume that the woman is the more junior and refer questions and comments to the men in the room. So in fact if it is a woman who's the subject matter expert or who's leading the project the really importance of ensure that the client or the partner is directed to the right people. Because it's one of the things that really grinds you down over time to have that so often happen. Also one of the other points here very important is really around the collecting of data and I think so often because a lot of these things are just not so visible until you really look at it collecting data around these things is really helpful in making the helping to build the feeling the need to actually make change and create these more inclusive work spaces. So I just wanted to also briefly mention the issue of backlash and fatigue to diversity inclusion. This is also a reality that we even have here at the United Nations and so there's at least two different approaches. One is and this is actually the first one is the approach that the UN Secretary General has adopted and announced in March at the UN Women's Conference. He describes it as pushing back against the pushback and he says boldly in a way that perhaps only he could. The power is never given, it's taken. But another approach and I think these can both coexist as well is working to try and design and implement programs on diversity inclusion that minimise the risk of backlash and effectively respond if it does occur. So some of the kinds of actions that can be taken in this regard is having a really clear statement of support from the organisation's leadership on the strategic importance of the actions and also the benefit for all employees not just for women for instance of having a more inclusive work environment and really showing that they value diversity inclusion for what it brings to the organisation including in areas like innovation productivity etc and not just for its own sake. Having the details just as I referred to just briefly a few moments ago engaging men is absolutely critical as I mentioned before these issues are for women and men and gender equality is for all of us and needs to also be a priority to engagement particularly in environments that have majority men is not going to get very far unless men understand these efforts and why they're of value and why they're important and many influential men as well are willing to act as allies in support of these efforts. There's a few other types of actions there that are recommended. So just very briefly then and this will just take less than a minute I just wanted to flag some recent UN calls to address gender digital divide. So for instance there's an annual resolution that takes place at the United Nations called ICT information communication technology for sustainable development. This is a resolution of the General Assembly member states and they have languages you can see there really calling on addressing gender digital divide welcoming initiatives such as e-calls international girls in ICT day which is the fourth Thursday in April and it's a wonderful way to help promote tech careers to girls and calling really on all stakeholders once again seeing the role for us all to play in this regard. UN Secretary General's internal strategy interestingly highlights the issue for women entrepreneurs and how to increase their participation. And then finally the UN Secretary General had a high level panel on digital cooperation. It just came out with its report on 10 June and recommendation 1C is around this issue of inclusion and once again calling on all the private sector civil society governments to adopt policies I will stop and thanks so much. Looking forward to any comments or questions. Thank you Ursula a lot of tangible recommendations things that could be planned to play and we're certainly hopeful that our attendees will take some of these and try to implement them and whatever level of the organizations that they are a part of where there's opportunity. So at this point we'd like to open up the floor to any questions from our attendees I'll go ahead and get us started. I was really interested in seeing these recommendations but also would love to hear from both or either of you Loli or Ursula based on the work of some of the research. Can you provide any examples of organizations be it private sector or public that are implementing some of these recommendations or doing things right if you will to really bring women in more effectively into the tech sector. Some examples that have maybe shown promise no case studies that you can provide. Yes sure I think that there's actually many and I think if you look at these different practices that we mentioned it would be hard to find any organization that's currently doing all of those things. Many organizations are doing some of these things and that is I think really exciting and a great basis to build on. The real issue I think in order to make progress happen much faster is that it needs to be more holistic and systematic and not just rely on a few champions or to think oh well we have a program here or there or we have someone working on diversity inclusion to just get on and do whatever we're doing and then they're going to handle that. It's really the idea of that we really all have a role to play including as you said no matter where we are in the organization definitely you pick a tech company they've all got something so it's really not an issue of not doing anything it's more just being more deliberate intentional holistic looking at a lot more of these practices and really trying to internalize these ideas across the organization so I mean I could just list tech companies but in a way I mentioned the backlash issue and I think in a way part of why that may be occurring is that and including in some companies where they're seeing it even more it may well be because some of these diverse inclusion efforts are actually starting to have headway and so you know it may well even be if you look at ones that have the biggest backlash they may also have to look at their practices. Lolly I don't know if you want to add anything to that or Lolly? Oh Lolly you're mute. Hi sorry hello. No worries hi we can hear you. Yeah I totally agree with what Ursula just have said and just adding to that it's true that everywhere now the topic in general of gender it's been mainstreaming at the institutional level like internally in the organizations like for example private sectors that we work a lot and we have Microsoft we're getting IBM they are working internally in order to improve like regulations and policies to promote more women in senior management positions so that's one that's something that is key for them for management in tech companies and I think it's something we've been working with them very closely. Another question I have and Lolly you spoke about you know the skills coalition and some of the work that's being done by equal some of the programs being run and certainly ensuring that those fields are taught to particularly girls is a major part of that I would love to hear a little bit more also about how we are passing on also these practices some of these principles and integrating them into the mindset starting at K-12 starting at the very early point where a lot of these biases are introduced. Can you share anything about that? Is that something that's being pursued as well in parallel with the digital skills training? Yes if I understand well your question yeah we are our partners members in the skills coalition yeah they are working a lot with governments closely with governments in order to mainstream all these gender sites and also to provide like recommendations in terms of how to include in the educational programs of you know from primary education secondary education mostly elements already of tech in their programs. So we do that with the government and we are trying to spread the world and share all these information through our networks the networks that we are creating we've been like only two years let's say in this partnership global level but we are trying our best in order to share all these actions that can be replicated no because the idea is that we share best practices and we see what has worked and what not try to improve and then we are sharing and I just give you a very quick example on the skills coalition we have an African girls initiative which is a bootcamp of six months if I'm not mistaken six months camp for African girls and we this project was replicated and it's been replicated now for the Arab women and girls can code initiatives so we are trying to you know sharing from different regions and different parts of the world of course each region has different characteristics so we take care as well and we see how we can we can transplant let's say these projects and these initiatives in different parts. Clearly and given that eFIRC which is a lot of entrepreneurs who are leveraging technology to improve quality of life and many of them are in fact women. One of the things that really perks up my interest personally is the initiatives that you have related to connecting entrepreneurs to investors given the limited funding dollars that are going to female founders of such enterprises. Are there any also some examples that you can share of these types of initiatives events maybe whether it's stateside or India or Africa that maybe you think have been doing a great job I suppose of connecting, of making these connections. So I think this question is right perfect for Ursula since I was mentioning it in my presentation so Ursula which is the special representative of ITU in New York she's been leading in particular in this topic of investors and how they can improve from the investors perspective and the women entrepreneurs perspective they can improve the linkages between them in order to really like you know support each other. So Ursula I don't know if you have some nice examples you can share. Absolutely one of the main things we've been doing is actually working with the investors that are kind of at the top of the food chain that have a big impact on venture capital as well as that engage companies as well and it's been very focused on pension funds and big asset managers working with them to raise their awareness of a lot of these kinds of issues because it's really quite surprising while there are a lot of initiatives that have tended to look for instance increasingly at environmental issues as it comes to issues of gender equality there have been some initiatives that have more on gender like women's specific funds or gender lens investing but the most of the investing the mainstream investing hasn't really looked at this much today so we've been doing roundtables with them to raise their awareness and coming up with good practices that they think that they could implement to try and make a difference because they have a really big role in venture capital they provide a lot of the funding for that as limited partners and as they also engage companies as well and then in addition the leadership coalition has this fantastic webinar series you can see information about it and join in at equals.org website where they have had a number of webinars around the issue of getting funding and other different kinds of challenges and issues that women entrepreneurs in tech face just a couple of the things that we've been working on to date but it's just such a key issue and as I mentioned even the UN Secretary General highlighted how critical it is because it's just so low and as a result it's not just them missing out we're all missing out because it's an amazing solution they could be bringing to make all our labs better I couldn't agree with you more. Violent agreements well with that I do apologize we did go over time but it's just you know there's such a great opportunity for us to dig into these issues and we are thrilled at E4C to continue to also advocate and share this message and these opportunities and really raise awareness around the work that is left to do which is significant. So I would like to thank you both Ursula and Molly for doing this today from across the world and for all of our listeners thank you for attending if you are interested in getting your PhD please feel free to go to the link here and there are questions that we didn't address or you'd like to follow up on feel free to email us at the webinars at engineering4change.org and of course we encourage you to become E4C members to get information on upcoming webinars we will be following up with all of our listeners and our entire membership regarding the recording of this webinar along with some of the resources that were shared by our distinguished panelists so thank you everyone have a fantastic morning evening or afternoon wherever you may be and we will catch you on the next E4C webinar bye bye