 Live from Houston, Texas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now, your host, Jeff Brick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Brick here on theCUBE. We are live from Houston, Texas. It's the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women Computing 2015. The first time I ever heard that expression, I was like, a celebration. It's not a summit, it's not a world. It's not a user conference, but it's a celebration. And it truly does capture the feeling at this show. It's like no other show that we go to. I think it's 12,000 women, plus my badge was 13,000 people who are really celebrating women in technology with a ton of different tracks, academic tracks, heavy tech tracks. They had a robotics kickoff in the keynote this morning as well as just a plethora of companies from every industry you can imagine because basically every company now is a software company. It's just what they wrap their software around. We're really excited for a return visit from last year. Sarah Clatterbeck, Director of Engineering, UI Development and User Experience at LinkedIn. Sarah, welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be back and talk to you again. So last year when we saw you, we got a tip that we need to go check out this Grace Hopper thing. We jumped on a plane from Vegas and met you in a small hallway in the back of the media center. Wow, really excited to bring the whole cube here. And I think when we talked, you said there was 8,000 people. Now it's 12, what's it got to be next year? I have no idea, but I think it could go 20,000 easily. Well, how long have you been coming? This is my sixth Grace Hopper. Your sixth, do you remember how many there were in the first one that you came to? Probably about 3,000, 2,000, something like that. So what do you think that really demonstrates in terms of the power of this conference, kind of the power of the movement, the power of the trend, in terms of engaging a lot more women in computer science? Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're really at an inflection point with women in computer science and there's a movement happening. The conference is getting bigger, awareness is getting more. I feel like the trend was going down for many years and now it's going to start bouncing up again. Yeah, well, a lot of the keynotes are talking about some of the computer science numbers for women still are kind of down from where they were. It's interesting how they split it out from STEM, computer science from STEM, the STEM numbers aren't so bad. The computer science numbers are bad. Yep. Any idea why that's happening or ways to get that turned around? So we have a few hypotheses about why it started to happen but mostly I'm interested in kind of how we can change the trajectory going forward. So in our LinkedIn women in tech program, we've been working on one track called Community and essentially our vision is to inspire more young women to study computer science. And so we invested a lot in that program this year. I've been leading that track and we tried something kind of innovative where we had a high school trainee program. The hypothesis of that was if they came on campus, spent a few months with us in technology, like having that experience of a tech company, they would be more likely to study computer science in the future. So did they come during school? Was it a summer internship program? Kind of how did they work it into their schedules? It was a full-time summer program. And we recruited from our partner organizations, Technovation and Girl Scouts. And we had seven in our cohort. It was a pilot program this year. And really great results that we saw. So we actually have OKRs or objectives and key results for our women in tech program. And the things we were measuring were what's the NPS score for the cohort? What percentage go on to study STEM generally? And what percentage go on to study computer science specifically? And we knocked it out on all of those metrics. Oh, awesome, congratulations. Thank you. I was going to say too, I imagine on a lot of these kind of young girl activities that people can kind of stay with them. Stay with them is more of kind of a longitudinal study where track it over a longer period of time and see what happens to these girls that get kind of this early boost into computer science. Yeah, so we're going to measure longitudinally. We're going to follow up with them over the next few years. And then we plan to invest more in that next year. I think we're going to target maybe around 20 students next year. And then also do a cohort focused on socioeconomic diversity. Now, were the girls that were selected, did they have kind of a predisposition? Or how did you, was there, what was the kind of the selection criteria? So they had to have some exposure to coding. That's why we pulled from our partner organizations. But other than that, we really were looking for a growth mindset, you know, the ability to learn new things and just a desire to try it out for a summer. Right, so we're connected on LinkedIn. And I love seeing your posts. We talked about it the other day. You say you don't post enough. I see Sarah posting all the time. And what I really love is you do so many things outside of work as well, really reaching out this a perfect example to younger girls. And I know one of the things you're very involved with is Girl Scouts. And everybody gets our Girl Scout cookies once a year. We love them. They come get the frozen thin mints and the freezer. And Girl Scouts does a lot, but I don't know that people think of Girl Scouts specifically as really kind of addressing STEM generally and computer science specifically. So I wonder if you can share some of those types of things you're doing specifically with the Girl Scouts to help again kind of encourage this pipeline into the problem. Yeah, so we have a few programs that we do in the STEM area with computer science specifically. So the biggest program we had is called Made With Code. It was actually funded by Google's Made With Code program. And we basically had about 40 mentors and about 40 girls who were already involved in our STEM programs. And they had a goal to introduce 15,000 girls to computer science this year. 15,000. And it was amazing. They owned the program. They owned the strategy around how to do that. And they gave courses at the libraries, at their schools. They organized hackathons. And it was amazing to see the numbers of the reach just grow throughout the region. And it was accepted, they dug it. It just was integrated as part of the rest of the program of all the other activities. Exactly. Yeah, that's terrific. So the other thing that you're very involved with that I love, and we've talked about it a lot over the last couple of days is mentorship. Yeah. And some people are delineating between mentorship and sponsorship. But you had an interesting post about kind of formal mentorship. Not informal mentorship. But even kind of mentorship at a distance. Yeah. You know, really kind of observing and learning and watching people that you wanted to emulate. I wonder if you could share with everyone kind of your perspective on that type of mentorship? Because it's not really traditional or not necessarily spoken often about. Yeah, so I was just musing on mentorship and the mentors that I've had. And I have had formal mentorship, but only a couple over my career. And I realized that some of the best learnings had come in this informal way. And the way I got that was by listening to people I admired, people who were doing well in their roles, and then also observing their behaviors. And I gave a couple examples in the post, but listening to leaders that I admire. An example of something I've heard is to take on projects that other people don't want to do. And that's a really a good opportunity to move the company forward or your organization forward in some interesting way by just picking up work that doesn't necessarily seem sexy, but has a huge impact. Right, and gives you really a chance to cut the line. Yeah. If you will, because that's not, if it's something that everyone else doesn't want to do, but it's clearly something that needs to be done, it gives you kind of an extra advantage of being able to really highlight what you're doing. Exactly, and so that's an example of something I heard from an informal mentor and my career. And have you done that a few times? Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and the other thing I think that's interesting about your statement is really focusing on behavior. Yeah. It's hard to change people's perceptions. It's hard to change people's bias. It's hard to change what people think, but what you can do is change behavior. And the behavior changes the way people think. And the greatest example someone shared with me is like seat belts, right? Nobody used to wear seat belts. Everybody hated seat belts. Well, the behavior, you got to put your seat belt on or you're going to get a ticket. Now guess what? Everybody subconsciously puts their seat belt on. So really it changed attitudes by really focusing on behavior. So I think that's a great tip as well. So looking forward to next year when we sit down to you at Grace Opera 2016, what will you have been working on? What are you looking forward to over the next six months? So a couple of interesting projects. I think LinkedIn more largely, we're going to be figuring out how we do integrating lynda.com and LinkedIn learning. Well, that's right. You guys got lynda.com. So I'm really excited to see how the platform can help people get skills that they need to advance their careers. And personally, I'm going to be working on some cool infrastructure projects this year that I'll be able to talk about next year. Oh, very good. All right, we won't have to spill the beans. All right, so Sarah, thanks again for stopping by. Really appreciate you coming back and coming on with this last year as well. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. Awesome. Just want to remind everybody, we're doing podcasts now. We're pretty excited. Of course, we call them cubecasts. We usually do a cubecast of the woman of the week every week and we do a cubecast of the guests of the week every week. You can find them on siliconangle.tv. Go to the features tab and look for women of the week or guests of the week. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching here live from the great opera celebration of women at computing in Houston, Texas. We'll be back after this short break.