 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, Texas. I am your host. I'm joined by my co-host, Tori Bedford. She is a Tech Truth Reporting Fellow, also who's been here at the conference all week getting the ground truth of stories. Our guest today is Rebecca Parsons. She is the Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks was recently awarded the Top Companies Award at the Grace Hopper Conference at the Anita Borg Institute. You were the top company of all companies for women to work, women to thrive in the technology industry. In accepting this award, Rebecca, you gave a really chilling speech, a Michelle Obama-esque speech, where you talked about how grateful you were for the award, and yet, we're not done. This is a fight we have to keep fighting equality. We're not there yet. How did you plan on talking about that in such impassioned tones? I mean, it was really chilling being a part of the audience. Well, I did plan to talk about it. I was pretty overcome by the moment. I've been in technology for a long time. I started programming when I was 13 years old, and so I've seen a lot, and it really is better. But then, I also spend a lot of time talking with women, and you hear their stories of the things that are still happening. And so, I firmly believe we should celebrate how far we've come, and this conference, the celebration of women in computing, 15,000 people and only 1,000 men. That's cause for celebration. But then, we'll go dancing tonight, and Monday morning, we'll be back to trying to address the problems that we still have. At a time when sexism in the workforce, sexism in the political election season is really part of this national dialogue, I mean, do you think that that played in at all to the message you wanted to send, too? Well, I think it is a lot of the stories that I hear from women about just their day-to-day existence, and some of it is the subtle things. I'm the only woman in the room, and so someone walks in and they say, I'd like a cup of coffee, and no man ever has to put up with that, because they just assume, oh, she's a woman, she must be the admin. And those things, day in and day out, who is it that's responsible for cleaning up the conference room after the meetings? The office housework, yeah. Exactly, and so even just those subtle things, having to speak more loudly for your point to get across because people will talk over you, those sorts of things, that's just the day-to-day reality for women in the workplace and for women in technology. So there was some recent data that was released, actually, yesterday morning from Accenture and Girls Who Code, and they talked to over 8,000 people, and they found a bunch, they found some research that showed that things are actually getting worse. We're actually not doing as well as we thought that we were, and they predicted that by 2025, we will go down 2% for the rates of women in technology. Do you think that we are, you mentioned that things are getting better, but they're showing that things are getting worse. I think there can be kind of room for both. What do you think? Yes, and I'm also talking, you know, over the time I've been in technology, things are definitely better. The, there is a lot that was just accepted back in the 80s, you know, the early 80s, the 70s, that is simply not socially acceptable now. I also do think that we are looking at a bit of a backlash when we look at the things that go on and Twitter and some of the online social media forums where, you know, women will speak out about something and the backlash can be horrendous, and that is going to drive people away or stop people from going into technology. I've heard from many women who say, you know, if I stay in tech, I'm just gonna go for my own company because I'm tired of putting up with this. So I do think we are in a period where it is, where it is getting more difficult, but as far as I'm concerned, that's just more of a throwing down the gauntlet. What needs to change in your mind? If you could snap your fingers and overnight, it would be a different landscape for women. What do you envisage? I look forward to the time when the baseline assumption is when I walk into a room, I'm assumed to be a human being who has particular skills and particular expertise and it's the same as if someone named Dave or someone named Mike walked into the room, that I don't want to be a woman in technology, I want to be a technologist, I want to be a computer scientist, not a woman computer scientist, and that's the day I look forward to where it doesn't matter anymore. We talked a little bit before the interview began about how agile is really becoming pervasive, not just in the technology industry, but really in terms of how organizations think about solving problems. Can you share a little bit about your perspective on that and then also what it means for the rise of women in the industry? Well, the agile manifesto lays out some very basic principles and values which come down really to visibility and transparency and rapid feedback, and while that's quite useful in software, that's just as useful for a marketing campaign or going through a complex contracting process for legal and we're seeing audits done that way where you have the kind of collaboration, so agile really is all about communication, collaboration, transparency, rapid feedback, building feedback cycles into a process where it's based on actual output as opposed to, oh, well I think I'm 80% done, well what does that really mean and how much time did it take you to get to 80 and how much time is it going to take you to get to 100? And we've done more of that, oh yes, my code is 87% done in technology, but you get those same kinds of things, oh yeah, we're really close, or think of an author writing a book, I'm really close to being done. I remember that from my dissertation when I worked on my PhD, really it's almost done. In all areas of life, if you start to think about, okay if I'm gonna try to solve a problem, what do I want, I want rapid feedback, am I getting close to a solution, am I getting closer to the truth and if I'm trying to create something for someone, I want feedback from you because you might have asked me for something but you might not really know what you want until you see it and so I can create something that is exactly what you asked for and not what you want and if I'm not constantly showing you things, okay this is how it's progressing, I'm never gonna know that until I'm complete and here is your final package, oops, that's not what I wanted and so we're actually seeing that and part of how it's changing technology is it's turning technology jobs into much more social jobs, it's not the lone programmer sitting in a room all by himself, it's a very collaborative process with different people on the team as well as with the people for whom you're trying to write the software and I think that makes it a much more interesting career. It is and research shows that that is what millennial and millennial women are looking for, they're looking to solve real problems, have an impact, and be in a more collaborative environment so that also could attract women. Yes. Tell me about when you first came to ThoughtWorks, you deliberated about whether or not it was the right place for you, you talked to a friend who told you everything that was wrong with the company, then you met with the founder who told you more that was wrong and you knew that it was the right place. Yeah. By that time, I had worked in many different companies in different industries. My standard line is there is no green grass. I've worked in manufacturing and technology and a startup at a government research lab, academia, so I had seen a lot of environments and I knew the kinds of things that really made me uncomfortable and that I didn't like and one of the things that really struck me about that conversation is when the founder said to me, I'm telling you all these things because I don't want you to think I'm stupid. I don't want you to think that I don't know that the problems are here and that was one of the things I realized just how committed to transparency he was and after having worked in other organizations where okay, if somebody tells you it's this bad then it's probably really this bad. If he tells you it's this bad, it's probably not quite as bad as that but he wants to make sure that you know the facts and that was very refreshing to me because I'm a scientist, I'm a problem solver. I want to deal with the reality, I want to deal with the world as it is not how somebody would like me to believe it is and so that commitment to transparency really made a difference. What are some of the ways that ThoughtWorks is recruiting more women, pertaining women, what do you think kind of, what are some of the different ways that they're setting themselves apart? Well I think part of it is looking in different places. If everybody is recruiting from the top five computer science schools, when you have Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon and dot, dot, dot, all recruiting at the same place there's going to be a lot of competition but there's a lot of good talent in other places. There are excellent computer science programs outside of the top five. There are also people who take non-traditional routes to get to a degree in technology so we're trying to recruit in some of those other pools and sometimes that means we find someone who really has the aptitude to be a software engineer but they don't have the experience and we're committing to giving them the training to allow them to develop a career in software engineering. Another thing that we like to do is we like to get very involved in the communities where we have offices, whether it's traditional technology communities getting involved with the user groups or also getting involved with other programs like we have an artist in residence in our New York office now. So we're trying to look at interesting intersections between technology and artist communities, activist communities, et cetera. Thank you so much, Rebecca Parsons. This has been a very informative interview. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. For Rebecca Knight and Tori Bedford, my co-host, this has been the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference live in Houston, Texas. We'll return after this break.