 I want to thank you for being here today at the Diversity Luncheon. My name is Caitlin, and I run content at the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I also oversee our diversity initiatives. We believe that the most effective way to perpetuate diversity is to show rather than tell, which is why we had over a 100% increase in women-identified speakers at Silicon Valley Summit this last June, where 11% of attendees were women. And at Summit here today, 12% of attendees identify as women or non-binary, and 18% of speakers are women. So these percentages might sound low in the grand scheme of things, but when you consider that only 3% of the open-source industry is comprised of women, that's some pretty awesome representation. So that wasn't an accident. I want to give a huge thank you to our sponsors, Google and IBM, for helping us put on this Diversity Luncheon. Perhaps some of you have been following the escalating case against Harvey Weinstein that broke earlier this week. My Twitter feed is packed with commentary about the objectification of women in Hollywood, the historically limitless power of a man thought of as a visionary by his peers and the general public, and the ordeal that women must endure when they choose to simply tell their story, the story of what happened to them. Emily Nussbaum, a TV critic for the New Yorker commented, one of the most striking things about all these pieces is how many women left the business after discovering this was how it worked. The business of course refers to Hollywood, but it struck me that this could just as easily be the tech industry. We may not be as glamorous as Hollywood, but in a certain light that raises the stakes. The women who come forward in Silicon Valley and throughout the tech world to share stories of harassment, inequality, and microaggressions have much more to lose. They aren't movie stars. There are people passionate about what they do who depend on their job to survive and who can't risk burning bridges with powerful people in their field. At our diversity lunch in this past June in Santa Clara, we talked extensively about the problem of retention in the tech industry. Women leave the field at an alarming rate when as Emily Nussbaum wrote, they discover this is how it works. This doesn't just refer to sexual harassment and I think it's important to mention that. That is the most extreme form of subjugation against women. It has to do with tech culture, which we'll discuss. It has to do with unconscious bias, which we all have, and which compels men and women alike to overlook or undervalue a woman's achievements. The tech industry has a lot of power and it's up to the people within this industry, you and me, to decide how that power is used. Just this morning news broke that Twitter suspended actress Rose McGowan's Twitter account for speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, who assaulted her. Who on the inside of that Twitter building made this decision? The latest national center for women informational technology or NCWIT data shows that women leave tech at twice the rate of men and that number has been increasing since 1991. A Harvard business review study found that as many as 50% of women working in science, engineering and technology will over time leave because of hostile work environments. We can't afford to lose women in these roles. Data shows that a mere 3% of the open source population is women, while women make up 25% of the tech industry overall. And this isn't because women don't want to be here. The women in the documentary you're about to watch the trailer for love being in tech. Look around this room. Your women colleagues are here because they love what they do. And it turns out they're pretty darn good at it too. A 2017 study comparing acceptance rates of contributions from men and women in an open source software community found that women's contributions were accepted more often than men's, but only when their gender was hidden. If those same contributions were made by a contributor with a female gendered username or profile picture, their poll request acceptance rate went down 11%. What does that show us? Well, on the one hand, it shows unequivocally that women in the open source community are extremely strong programmers. On the other hand, it is a painful demonstration of gender bias. Someone who continued to see gender bias plaguing her colleagues was Jennifer Clover. Some of you may know her. She was the VP of communications for the Linux Foundation for many years and has recently founded her own PR firm. For more than 15 years, Jennifer has been a woman in tech and has been recognized for her storytelling acumen by Business Insider who ranked her among the best PR people in tech for her video storytelling works. Jennifer kept seeing different versions of the same story play out and she finally decided to do something about it. The Chasing Grace project is a six episode documentary series about women in tech. Each episode is focused on a different topic within the women in tech narrative. The project aims to give a voice to the everyday woman in the industry, not just the ones who make the headlines. I'm extremely proud to announce that the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Abby Kerns, especially, have been a sponsor of this fabulous documentary. Jennifer couldn't be here today as she's in the process of filming part of the series, but we're going to show the trailer before we kick off a discussion with our awesome panelists based on the topics in the series. So without further ado, I present the trailer for the Chasing Grace project. We are delivering today the new I-Photo. So our new mission is to bring the world closer together. This is the place that made nerd cool. We like to take the old way of doing things and just completely change it. That's part of who we are. If you are a young guy and you're coming out of Stanford and you're wearing a hoodie, you can have really high aspirations and be very rebellious and people think you're super genius. But if you're a woman and you do the same thing, if they think that you're a bitch, it's a big problem. Being a woman in tech, it's this interesting balance of both being very female because you are and not being too female because you can't relate to your coworkers then. Sometimes you feel like you're really a part of this fun nerdy group and other parts of it where you're just like, wow, I am so alone. So I started at a Silicon Valley-based startup. I was so excited to be in the tech space. But the leadership was all male. The board's all male. People who in particular wielded power were all male and oftentimes were less experienced than women underneath them who could have been promoted but weren't. Tech industry leaders have been spending a lot less time lately talking about their plans to change the world and a lot more time promising to change their work culture. It seems like every day another tech leader resigns or gets fired is more women come forward with stories of harassment and discrimination. It's a lonely and very, very difficult existence and you have a lot of micro-insults or injuries that you encounter as a woman. Everything from your opinion being ignored in a meeting or being asked to do all the housework in that team. The engineers who are mostly men got all the perks. The engineers who are mostly men got to leave work early and go to the whiskey lounge and have drinks on the company where all the client services people who were mostly women had to stay at work and do our thing. There's a wage gap and then there's also like a perks and respect gap as well which is very real and worth just as much as money. We were about to host a women in tech meetup and some men were posting, oh, we should go hit on the women at this meetup. So I posted this behavior is not tolerated. They said, you seem cute so I'll keep it simple for you. We don't like your feminist influence in all of these groups and suddenly I was having fake Facebook accounts made of me, fake GitHub accounts made of me, fake dating profiles. Somehow people got my phone number. It was a really frustrating, kind of scary time because I didn't know where it was coming from, I didn't know where it would end and I didn't know if it was going to stay all online or if it was going to happen in person. I found myself sitting awake and I thinking, when is this going to stop? What's the point of supporting these communities if this stuff keeps happening? I don't want women to have to deal with this. For people who are looking at computer science and tech and saying, hey, gosh, this is a terrible industry. I don't want to be in it. It's always some story and it's a bro culture. What I would say is the only way to change a bro culture is to be in it. And if you're not in it, if you don't have numbers, if you don't have people in leadership, if you don't have enough women in an organization, it doesn't change. We are absolutely going to see an increase in women entrepreneurs because women want to have control over their lives. I love working in tech and as crazy as the community might be and the startup land might be around it, I love being able to just build things. I've always loved building things and I want to still be there on the front lines and help this community grow. I'm most definitely chasing grace. I have no idea what I can achieve being a woman in tech. For me, chasing grace is all about seeing my own potential through to the very end and chasing that wherever it takes me. We're not only chasing after grace, we're chasing with grace. It's a constant working with it. Sometimes grace is ahead of you, sometimes it's with you, sometimes it's way behind you and you probably need to let it catch up with you. I think chasing grace means to me embracing the complete power and grace of who we are as women and to know that your time is here, your time is now and to be everything you can be right now. So when I think of the wisdom as Donna who's like eight years old down the line, at that point I'm not chasing grace, I just am grace but I want to be able to reach that point also sooner than eight years old. As you can see, there are some pretty important stories to be told. The project aims to provide the blueprints for other women to find their paths, hopefully preventing the extinction of women in tech and helping to retain the best and brightest talent in the world. If you're interested in staying up to date on the project, sign up for updates at chasengracefilm.com. You can also follow them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or email Jennifer directly at Jennifer at wickedflicksproductions.com. And now I am excited to introduce today's panelists. As I introduce each one of you, please come join me on stage. Kiti Gross is a software engineer at Pivotal currently working on the Build Packs team. She has given talks about PCF products at Silicon Valley Summit and Shanghai as well as Spring One platform in Las Vegas. Welcome Kiti. Swetha graduated from UC Berkeley two years ago and started working at IBM on its open source team. Since then, she has been a full-time open source contributor to Cloud Foundry primarily using Go. Emma is a software engineer at SAP SE. As part of the machine learning team, she contributes substantially to the design and build of SAP Cloud Infrastructure, which hosts and trains machine learning models. Sarah Novotny is head of the open source strategy group for Google Cloud Platform. She has long been an open source community champion in communities such as Kubernetes and ran large-scale technology infrastructures even before a web scale had a name. She co-founded Blue Gecko and launched a free-to-play game platform supporting Hawken. Abby Kearns is the executive director of Cloud Foundry Foundation where she alms the ecosystem of developers, users, and applications running on Cloud Foundry and works closely with the board to drive the foundation's vision and grow the open source project. Prior to the foundation, Abby focused on Pivotal Cloud Foundry as part of the product management team at Pivotal and spent many years at Verizon during the early days of cloud services. Welcome, everybody. I'm gonna try to make this full screen. Hi, welcome. We've got a really varied group of women here today. Abby, you've been in the tech industry for 20 years. Swetha, you've been out of school for two, so I'm really interested to hear how your experiences are different from one another and where there's overlap. So let's talk about the culture of tech. What are some of the keywords you hear when we talk about the tech industry? Question for the audience, question for panelists. Cutting edge, progressive, transformation, innovative, lucrative, forward thinking. Revolutionary. Revolutionary. Disruptive. Disruptive, absolutely. Yeah, and so if it's the most disruptive, cutting edge industry in the world with the most lucrative career opportunities, how do we, one, ensure women have access to these careers and two, that they want to be there to pursue them? Sarah? How do we ensure this? How do we ensure this? I think Nithya actually gave a great quote in that trailer, which is, if you want to change a culture, you have to be there. But that really belies a lot of strength that, especially in those lonely moments, is hard to muster. And so I think very important to being able to make sure women have these opportunities is making sure that there are groups and support structures and allies who are public and identified and helping when women aren't feeling heard, when women aren't feeling engaged, when opportunities are not being offered, when they should. Is it a? There's something ironic about not having a voice here. Thank you. I think one thing that has occurred to me a lot since joining this industry is that we also need to reframe why you'd want to be in it. And that reason shouldn't just be for being present, although that's a meaningful reason. When we frame the benefits of being in tech as bouncy castles, potato chips, breakfast at work, et cetera, et cetera, I think we aren't appealing to as broad a set of communities as we could. Diverse applicants are often going to be interested in having meaning and having that pitched to them, explaining why it matters that they're there and what the community is like and how they can give back through it. The bouncy castles reference is from an article that's available on this. If you look up bouncy castles tech, you'll probably find it. I can't really tell you that. I have something to say about that. We can really change the culture if we help women to experience the culture. I know from my experience, I wasn't supposed to study computer science. I wanted to go to school and study, be a doctor. But somehow I got accepted into computer science. I'm like, whoa, okay, so I don't want to stay at home. I want to go to school this year. I don't want to stay with my parents. And I started attending the classes. I got programming assignments and the first few assignments were really engaging, you know. I felt really good when I could solve the little programming exercises. And I had stimulating discussions with my peers and we optimized these algorithms and I'm like, whoa, I can really do this. I can own it. And so if more women are introduced, if they experience it, then they can make decisions if this is what they want or not. I think this is really, really important for women, not just young women, women of every age that, I mean, they hear about technology, but I think we should also do our part by taking it to them. I have actually a very similar kind of feeling about all of this. I think it's really important to start at a much lower level. We need to kind of show, and I think we need to showcase stories, diverse stories to say that, you know, even though there is a bro culture, you might experience it and there are these stories out there. There are a lot of people, women who are doing great things. And if you highlight that you can be successful and create role models for younger women, I think it would make them more comfortable getting into a field that they don't have that much information about. And if we spread that, I think you can get a huge pool of women in the workforce and that would start helping. Like I think the same quote Nithya had said, spoke to me too, you have to be in it to change it. There's an interesting counterpoint on all of this, which is in order to bring women in, there have to be role models and they can't all be women in their 80s from the 60s programming. So we have to find ways with the women who are mid-career today to grow them, showcase them, give them opportunities in order to make it, make it seem possible, make the possible growth in a career look realistic. I have like Abby been in this 20 plus years and I actually sat on one hand, or sat and counted on one hand the number of women I know in their 50s who have positions of leadership in tech and that was really disheartening as I looked at my next 10 years. So how do we change culture? How do we change the tech culture? How has it changed in the last 10 years? Do you see it moving forward? I will say how has it changed? I mean, in my career, the last five years in particular, it's dramatically different. We talk about diversity and inclusivity. When I started my career, that wasn't not remotely even a topic that was discussed. It was ignored or was acknowledged as a real need. And I think I spent the first part of my career fitting in, trying to fit into the culture that existed as opposed to having the culture embrace me and me being overly authentic. So I think authenticity is so much more relevant now and I think it is important. But I've talked about this before and I'd love to hear from some of you that aren't as old as I am. For me, I learn a lot from you because you see things in ways that I don't see anymore and I've become so numb to a lot of things, I just miss them. I don't see them, I don't hear it anymore and it's really incumbent on you to say, hey, actually that's screwed up or that's not right or really helping me see that because sometimes I've just become so numb to a lot of things, I don't see them anymore. Which I don't know if that's sad or not. Hi, I have something to add to that. This was one of the things I was thinking about that you just said and it's really true. On the other hand, I've not been in the industry for the last 10 years, but I do know that the communication in technology has really, really improved and we have so much to do now in the cloud and I feel that this is an aspect that women can really leverage on because now you can work remotely, right? If you have kids, you have some things to do, you can speak in your house and decide to work remotely and I think this is something that the leadership of technical companies should look into because they should have policies that allow women to work from home and by this way, it's possible that more women get interested in technology. That's a good point for remote work. Yeah, very interesting. From my experience, I think the biggest thing, so again, I can't speak for 10 years but my dad's an engineer so he's been in the industry for a while too and I think the biggest reason I'm sitting here and doing all of these things is having him actually as a role model. I mean, he's not a woman, but yeah. But he supported me so much and I think that's something that helped me quite a bit. There was never a question of you shouldn't do that, maybe you won't like it because you're a girl. It was him pushing me behind. I still remember going into high school and my dad going, hey, why don't you try that programming class over there or why don't you try that econ or try some science out and he was always trying to expose me to everything and I feel like that's the kind of culture we need to create at a young age and it can't just be women because women are only half the population and I think it's important to have good role models, both women and men who showed the way, right? As Sarah was saying, there's not that many women you can all look up to so sometimes you need to find the right support channels elsewhere and I felt like he definitely gave me the confidence to do whatever I want. Never let my gender or difficulty stop me from achieving what I want. Do you have anything to add? In particular. What is the role of role models and what is the responsibility of other women in the tech industry to help lift each other up as well as carve out their own individual paths? How do we have those things coexist? Do you have a thought of that? Abby, what you said about always staying receptive to people pointing things out even if you've ceased to see them or maybe the markers moved on what we're noticing and what's mattering right now. Staying receptive really, really matters. I can tell you that in my career it has been more often women actually who have kind of kept me in my place and so we really need to drive forward this idea that you need to lift people up even if maybe it seems like they have it easier than you even if it was harder when you were younger. I guess I don't have a really good suggestion on that other than I hope we do better. I think you described it fairly well though. It's staying open to hearing these voices because I am in the same boat as Abby. There's so much that I have been taught for so many years to just let it roll off your back, don't worry about it, don't rise to the bait. So they didn't listen this time, go at it again and you internalize these things. And I find myself to your point about women, women helping keep each other down. I found myself at one point always doing or asking for the sort of the social tasks of women and I actually had to double check that. And like my team, I'd have a team of men and women. We need to go ahead and we're all running an event together but somebody needs to go make sure there are napkins on every table. I asked the women and they didn't even recognize it for the first half dozen times and I really had to check myself on that. Fortunately, someone called me on it and staying open to that, noticing it and then changing your behaviors is important but this isn't just a problem in tech and that's the other thing that I think we have to recognize. It's a problem across culture broadly and while we are moving tech, we are also moving that broader culture and the bigger the group you're trying to move, the more slowly it moves and the more carefully you have to help it move otherwise you end up with immune reactions and bad responses but you have to balance it and it's, this is one of the reasons it takes a very long time. I also think that in addition to what they've said, I also think that women, we should recognize that we are role models, every one of us and that our achievements are significant and that we, in the industry, while in the industry we inspire our children, I don't have any children yet but we inspire those around us and I think when it comes from the inside, when we know that we are watching whatever demanding for higher raises and you know, stuff like that, we are watching because we've ended, we've worked hard for it and if we tell this to ourselves all the time, we begin to believe it and this is one way to start from ourselves and then move out to other people to try to help the entire community. So why should women stay in tech? It's awesome because this is one of the places that we can make the most impact in the world on things, whatever is interesting to us, whether it's healthcare or shiny social apps, wait, no. New infrastructure, new ways to communicate, new ways to support people, medical technology, we can go on and on and on and on with ways that we have impact in the world. Why would you not wanna stay? Because it's hard, it is hard. It's imperative that we stay because where the technology is going now it isn't going to virtually impact every aspect of our lives and if we do not have diverse voices that are part of that development process, an entire population is going to get missed through. I mean, the concept of cognitive bias and AI machine learning freaks me out because I'm really concerned that if we start relying on machine learning and AI to drive so many behaviors from who goes to prison to who gets licensing to healthcare treatments and if that is being created and decided by one half of the population or a quarter of the population there's a lot of things that are gonna get missed like when airbags first were invented and they killed women and children because they were created by men and tested on men and women weren't part of that consideration process. So AI machine learning just the impact it's going to have on our everyday lives. If women and not just men and women but I would like to see underrepresented minorities and more people at the table broad socioeconomic participation because we're going to miss something because we don't have that perspective and it's going to have dramatic impacts. How do we hold companies and leaders responsible? How do we hold them accountable to committing to this decision? We're all talking about diversity and inclusion and all of these companies are trying to boost their number filter. How do we actually get them to meet those not just from a number standpoint but from an inner sort of how do we get them to help change the system? I think that leadership should be judged based on the policies they have in place and how they implement like the KPIs. Their successes should be judged by how much they have women inclusive programs what actually they do to make sure women are brought to the leadership positions. So because I think this is where the men come in because they are hired there and so and they are in leadership positions and if you really, really want to support women this is what I think should be done to bring more women to aspire to these positions. I think there's also something to be said for taking as many opportunities to express dissatisfaction as you reasonably can. That sounds strange but I've realized in the last couple years how many times I just quietly make a decision that like this does not seem like a company I would like to work at or like this does not seem like a team I would want to be on at all, et cetera, et cetera and there isn't actually that large of a loss to me. To me personally and everybody has to gauge this for themselves but there isn't that large of a loss for me to be like I am not continuing at this interview process because two of your bosses gave me out and here's how you can look into some programs that might help them with that problem. So they're like tiny things we can do I think to respond in little ways to let people course correct. Maybe they don't know what they're doing. There's also great examples to this point not around necessarily companies but using their products as examples because there was a fantastic video on Twitter that I saw recently where an African American man actually he may have been an African man, a man of color put his hand underneath a soap dispenser and just waved and waved, put a white towel on his hand and got soap out of the soap dispenser. So at this point we now know that somewhere somebody built a product that doesn't see dark colored skin when that is really an important part of dispensing soap for a broad culture. So that sort of engagement either through not participating with those products or at some point there's options for legislation, things like that that are like there are ways to adjust and hold people accountable through product as well as individual experience. I'd say social media has obviously made a huge difference in the consumer feedback loop to products. The recent Dove ad was a great example of the quick response on social media and then the quick retraction. So I mean obviously it's great to see that. In terms of your question, how to hold people accountable, I would love to see CEOs and boards have MBOs tied to this. I would love to have it accountable at the very top level that this is a responsibility you have to build a sustainable and financially successful and viable culture and that should be an MBO. I think we talk a lot about what women can do for other women and what leadership can do. What about just your male colleagues, your male allies? I have so many men who always ask me what can I do? How can I show support? What would you say to respond to that question? Holla back. So like when you hear a female colleague say something in a room and they're not being acknowledged, be like, hey, I really liked so and so's idea. That was great what they said there. Or when you see somebody maybe being treated in a way that makes them just physically uncomfortable, like be the person who takes that for them and says like, that's not cool. There's so much you can do just by being a decent human being. And so in some ways it's like such a hard question and in some ways it's like the easiest question possible. Just care for the people around you. Don't make them always, always have the burden. I second that sentiment. Like right here I can see a few people from my team who I'm hoping came to support me, not just for the panel, but and I think that's like the easiest way is to appear, show, you know, acknowledge their ideas. I think I've had, I've been very fortunate to work both on the IBM side and the Cloud Foundry side to have people who have listened to my ideas. I mean, I'm on this panel also because of them and their support and I think that's kind of like the best example, you know, men have to set an example for other men as well of, you know, treating women equally and with the same respect. I had another thought really important. Educate yourself about the things that can be done poorly because so many times we don't know what we're doing that hurts other people or makes them feel excluded and that's not your fault really innately that you haven't had the experiences that would make you familiar with that, but just educate yourself. Like read articles, talk to the people around you, find out what it is because then it's way easier to identify it or stop it or not do it in the first place. Or like your earlier point, take feedback really well. Yes, I was going to suggest. So lots of my male friends from the industry have said, but when I try to help, I then get told that I'm white knighting, I'm coming to their rescue. And so there is a double edged sword in that, but take feedback well. Understand, be gracious, learn how individuals want to be supported. We women and people of color are not a single class who can be supported in a single way. So it's really important to understand that some people want to be supported in particular ways. Others feel othered by talking about just binary genders you need to learn and understand how to engage with the individuals who feel excluded and then find ways to help them be more included and more even-handedly engaged with. And I think that's a really good point. I think this is a women in tech panel and we're talking about diversity in tech, but obviously each one of you is an individual with a very different experience. We have people of different ages, different ethnicities. What are some of your experiences? Do you identify as a woman in tech? Do you identify as a person of color in tech? And if you identify in that way, how has that strengthened your experience or hindered your experience? It's a personal question. So I think at work or like when I think about this like professionally, I don't really identify myself as a woman in tech. I just kind of identify myself as an engineer. But when I talk to a lot of people who are younger than me, I do try to take on that role that I'm a woman who did this path and that goes, I try to push my sister to be exposed not to limit herself, my cousins. People who are younger than me, if I can show them that I can do this, then in those kind of scenarios, I like to say I'm a woman in tech, woman in science, I've been through it. But when it comes to work, I like to associate myself as an engineer. And I just kind of like to take the gender out of it and just let my work speak for me. Men, I was gonna go the same path. I don't necessarily identify as a woman in tech, although I am a woman who has been in tech, who has been in science for so many years. I do this work because I love it, not because I'm necessarily trying to change the culture. When I get frustrated, I have to move the culture. But that isn't always around a gendered issue or a diversity issue or an inclusion issue. It can be about a technical issue as well. Yeah, actually to push that even further, I realize I don't usually do panels like this. Nope, nope, and it has a little bit to do with not seeing myself that way and also really not wanting that to just be the representation. When I started as a programmer, which was really not that long ago, one of the first things I happened to be invited to is to sit on a panel about being a woman with an atypical background in queer in tech. And I was like, I don't wanna do that. I just wanna be a woman with an atypical background in queer in tech and talking about technical shit, like a badass. That's my goal. And part of the reason that I responded to this is I was like, I guess I've done that. I can do this too. But yeah, just presenting what you wanna present. Be like, I'm gonna talk about some build packs now, y'all. So if you don't wanna talk about being a woman in tech. Sure, now we move on to different topics. I will pallette that. I mean, none of us wanna sit up here and talk about how awkward it is to be another. I mean, nobody does. I've started doing it more recently and this is only in the last year or so that I've started doing that because it is important, as you both pointed out, to set the tone and say, this is not acceptable. This is where we need to go and really challenge other people to be part of that conversation. And it's a hard conversation to have and it's awkward and you're with people that you work with and it's professional and you don't wanna be known as, you know, that's what you're a champion because you wanna be known for champion, great tech ideas and putting that out there. But I do think it's intensely important and that's why we have this event here to build that opportunity and we're in an open source community and if we can't do it here, where can you do it? If you can't build that inclusivity in an open source culture and I think, you know, that's why I've become more passionate about it lately but none of us wanna wear that name tag around. I'll follow on with what Abby said because for many, many years, as selfish as it sounds, I would answer two people who asked me, I see zero upside for me in talking about this, none. I cannot improve my standing in the community by being, you know, the whistle-blower, the shrill person, the person who is seen as the divisive voice trying to change the culture. I see no way to improve my standing technically through doing this. It will actually make me be perceived worse. I will be pushed away from the culture that I'm trying to learn from. I saw no value to me as in professional growth and much like Abby as I got older, I realized that that was part of the problem in a lot of ways and as hard as it is and as little as I see there will be, you know, personal value, it's a good growing experience for me, so I'm here. Thank you for being here. Do we wanna take some questions from the audience? Yes. I'm towards the idea of, first, maybe wonder why, or for example, there's a standard company now, P7000, which sets standards for all the new systems and KTI, AI, and I wonder, you must always dream in a hospital exactly, gender, after a lot of opportunities to go beneath the company and the private and the, I mean, I know in the United States, people tend to see the state as something up there that can stay away from them. I'm reticent to see that that's what's going on. First of all, I don't think any particular question came up. That's gonna be hard. But I think it's a little more incidental that those of us from the US didn't bring up politics as something related to this and a lot of the questions it had to do with what we can do personally and that's a big part. There is this idea of like, what can I do in my day to day? But you're right. There are things we can do outside of our day to day and outside of our companies to be lobbying for better practices. There's a lot we could be doing. So for those of you who didn't hear the question, very broadly, it was why did none of us bring up any sort of political action or expectation of the government to help us make these changes and make the cultural shifts that we've been talking about? And I'll add one tiny answer to that, which is I think for those of us from the US, avoiding politics is kind of a hobby right now. Another question? I'll just do this for a bit. Thank you, Sarah. So I have a question and it's about how can we help with salaries and women? Women are generally underpaid and I want to just briefly say sort of my story a year and a half ago, I was probably on the very, very low end of a scale for my position and I didn't know until I started to look at switching and a colleague, well now a colleague said how much are you asking for? And he suggested a number that was five digits higher and I was like, what? And I chose to pay it forward when another female colleague was also changing within the company and she said how much should I ask for? And I gave her a number that was also five digits higher. She didn't ask for it and I have to say that the manager who offered her a position gave her a higher number. And so I think all of us, both women and men can sort of help with that and I'm curious to see how you guys feel about that or what you've done or heard as well. I'll answer quickly, because I've both run a company and been a mentor to people individually for a long time and almost anytime a woman says, I'm going for a new job, I will by default say ask for a minimum of 20% more than you're getting now. Just like, I'm not even gonna ask what you make, just ask 20% more and if you don't think that's a outrageous number, go for 30 because until someone says no then you're not gonna know what your actual value is. And then there's the counterpoint of that which is you still do get people saying no because you're a woman and that is the harder side but I think the easier piece for us to address directly is the personal undervaluing and believing that the number that we have today is the best number we can get. Yeah, along that line actually, I think there are a lot of hacks that can help with that and telling people 10 or 20%, one of mine is also just, I always ask for more and that got to feel weird a while ago but just like having it be a rule for yourself, you exercise in the morning, you always ask for more money, you ask for 10 or 20% even if it feels really weird, like if you make it a rule it doesn't, your feelings don't have to get into it as much. And always counter. Yeah. So just to follow on, what do you do in that harder situation when they say no? Why? Ask why? Ask why. Have that be part of the conversation when you discuss it, okay, why? If they said, well, we don't have that kind of money or hey, that's actually not market, just but gives you a data point. Another point is always have a second offer. So always be looking in parallel so that you can compare and contrast and also then play the two offers against one another. Kim's like, that works. All right, next questions. Nobody else. Do we have to do a raffle like this morning? No, no raffle. Questions, sorry, good, okay. Yeah, from something from the very beginning, I think you said the number is 3% in open source, that's women there and 25 in tech in general. And then the very, one of the very last comments of your panel was by Abby saying, if not in our community where then, that feels off, like we are struggling but we also feel like we might be the ones, whereas do you see where that might be coming from? Sure, I understand, are you saying that it doesn't, it feels like there's more than 3%? No, if we only have 3% compared to tech overall having 25, but you're also saying if not in our community where else would we see us changing the culture? But it seems like we're exceptionally struggling amongst tech. But the point is with open source, what's the point of open source? The point of open source is to get more people to the table. And if my point was we have the easiest and greatest potential to change things in an open source community because everyone can participate and we can open that up and we can be as inclusive as we want, there doesn't have to be a bar to get in, you don't have to be an employee, you don't have to, you can just say, hey, would you like to be part of this community? And really extending that to a lot of different people with a lot of different backgrounds, with a lot of different skill sets. I also think Abby's point was around if we can't have this discussion in open source, where can we have it? Because open source is supposed to be about coming to common choices through influence and leadership. And yes, I agree, we are failing in the point of diversity. I do this all day, every day, and it's a hard space. Got another question? So you spoke earlier about, there was some mention in the video we saw as well, about the rates at which women leave tech, being twice as high as that of men. And people in mid-career, we need to grow them in order to have the role models for the people just going in. But I was hoping you could elaborate on what sort of support structures would help you. Like I'm mid-career now and I'm considering leaving, so why should I stay? I'm so tired. May I make a suggestion in lieu of leaving tech? Just leave your company. Okay, maybe do that again. And I know that's hard, but I've been thinking about that a lot lately, that it's like tech is really, really broad. And sometimes I think this narrative of struggle can convince us that we need to push through in our current bad situation, as opposed to seeking out all of the cool ways we can be in tech. Like go work for a non-profit you love. Go work for a publication you love. Everybody needs programmers or any other part of tech. Everybody needs product. Everybody needs your skills. I think you could stay in tech and maybe find a community that's more appropriate. And maybe even that gives you more of a reason to get through the BS, even if the BS remains. Start your own company. Make the change you want. Oh, there we go. Tuck behind you. So my question is around any tactics that you might have for dealing with someone or reacting with someone when you get very negative microaggression, microinsult, some of the things they were talking about. When something actually happens to you, how you deal with it. So for example, I presented at a conference last week about diversity and inclusion in tech, generally. One of the things I talked about was mansplaining. And the feedback I got directly when I did the Q&A at the end, a man put his hand up and directly in front of this audience that was, I'd say it was a 95% mail. This man told me that he found my comment insulting and that I shouldn't be talking about mansplaining in that context. And I kind of froze, didn't really know how to respond. So I guess I just wanted to know if you have any tactics to suggest how we can react in that situation. Yeah, so at that point you are maybe on the stage and you would not like to cause a scene. I think the best thing to do is to say, maybe I'm sorry you feel that way about what I have just said. And we can discuss about it later on, just and then continue giving your talk. I think that's the most appropriate way to handle such situations because you don't want to cause a scene and you are not also happy with the response you've got. But you still have to do what you went there to do. I know. There's definitely the causing a scene option. Although I do like with what you just described, there is a, like, spraming it in your head as the like, let's talk about it at beers at the end of this conference over like, let's take this outside. But like, you can be thinking that in your head. But to Yui's point, sometimes causes a scene. I think the only times I've ever been willing to do that, though, were when I anticipated it, which is another crappy thing about being in these situations when like you were thinking about it beforehand, like, what if somebody says something like this and I'm gonna be so ready? Oh, that doesn't feel great. But times when you've had that opportunity, let them have it cause a scene. My first response was, yeah, cause a scene, but sometimes that doesn't always work. One thing that I, and I've been reading a lot of blogs about this lately is using that as an opportunity to help everyone else learn and maybe say, let's talk about that right now with everyone here and say in a way that this seems like a great learning opportunity. Let me explain one more time what mansplaining is. I think we have time for one final question. Well, one of the issues is people who currently have are in a position to take advantage of their existing power. What's the incentive they have to give that up, I guess, to those who are asking for it? How do you create that environment? I mean, what, we talked about having Batna's, right, which is what the best alternative in when you're negotiating. This kind of sounds like a really long negotiation, right? With an established culture. How do you, you know, what's our Batna? Any thoughts? One of the things that leaders in every company need to be doing is growing the next group of leaders. And so I don't think this is an either or. I don't think it's giving up power. I think it's reinvigorating a company and making the company and the leadership in that company stronger. And I think the more we can make that point that growing women is not taking something away from men, the stronger this movement becomes, the stronger these companies and the industry and the world become. We are not trying to take anything away. We are trying to bring broader perspective, make the world, make your product, make your company, make your life better through different perspectives. And that's it. It is not a zero sum game, exactly. It's a positive sum game. That was the last question you said. That's a great way to end. Well, thank you to all of our panelists and thank you to Google and IBM for sponsoring and thank you to all of you for showing up.