 Hi everyone. Welcome to my talk. I'm Rupa Dasher, CEO and founder of ThriveWide. The WIDE stands for Women in Science and Engineering. We are a tiny charitable nonprofit based in the U.S., and we focus on retaining women engineers and technical PMs in the industry who are working full-time and dropping out. We used to be called code chicks, you might know that name. I rebranded to ThriveWide in 2020 so that we have a broader umbrella for our programs and can now include women in science. This is a quick overview of what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to cover a lot of things, so we'll go pretty quickly through the slides so that we have enough time at the end for questions. A really busy slide to just capture what's happened over the last 12 to 13 years and the trajectory of code chicks to ThriveWide. A little bit about my background. I've been a software developer for 27 years, covering telecom, data com, mobile apps, virtualization, e-commerce, a whole bunch of other things, a bunch of multinational companies and a lot of startups. Throughout my career, I was doing reasonably well until the late 2000s when I ran into the real problem of not getting promoted, not getting traction in my career, not getting visibility, etc., so I desperately looked around for some help and looked at Anita Borg Institute, Grace Hopper, IEEE 3, ACM did the whole thing and nobody could help me and nobody wanted to even talk about women that are actually working. They only wanted to talk about research or senior leadership or students, that's it. So that kind of forced me to start my own thing, which is what code chicks was and that's how I started back in 2009 as my side gig, which kind of grew into something else. So I'm going to talk a little bit about why I do what I do and why I quit my very, very lucrative job with lots of benefits, etc., etc., to just go off on a tangent and do this full time. So in 2018, I took this class at UC Berkeley and at the end of the class, the professor pulled me aside and said, Rupa, you need to rethink your life, at which point my jaw dropped and I'm like, what, really? And she said, what you're doing for your day job, they can find someone else to do. What you're doing with code chicks on the side, only you can do. So you figure out what impact you want to make with your life and go that route. So I was needless to say pretty shocked and I kind of blew her off. This is the first time in my life I was actually getting paid to have a lot of money and doing pretty visible stuff. I was running all of the backend infrastructure for Walmart.com, which is globally, so a lot of responsibility and visibility. So like, yeah, whatever, okay. And then a couple of weeks later, I'm driving to work. This is the Bay Area, so one-way commute is one and a half hours. So three hours commuting back and forth to work. I'm sitting on the parking lot of the highway on 85 and I'm listening to NPR, which is what I usually listen to. And there's this program where this guy was saying something about, you know, what to do with your life or something. I forget what the topic was, but he said, just think that you got hit by a bus. So whether you got hit by a bus or a truck and you're lying on the ground, you're lying on the road, you're bleeding, you know you're gonna die. What is your number one regret? And I was sitting in my car, I was like, huh, I never thought about that. And so, anyway, long story short, I was like, you know what, I never really gave Code Chicks a full shot. Like my full time, dedicated, you know, approach and just everything I could, like a commitment. And well, two days later, I looked at my finances and said, you know what, I'm gonna tighten my belt six to eight months and drain my savings. I have no health insurance, blah, blah, blah, you know. Here in the US, you know what that means. And I quit my job in end of 2018 and went full time January 4, 2019 on my nonprofit with no pay, no benefits, no nothing and just trying to get her off the ground. And knock on wood. I'm still at it. We have grown but COVID hit, so that was kind of awful. But hopefully we're gonna crawl out of the depths in the next few years if the recession doesn't get too bad. And then we'll see if we can actually make some progress. So anyway, that's that's my story of why I quit my job. And I started doing this full time. So let's talk a little bit about the problem we're trying to address. That's white wise. Some of you may have seen this. This is a rather old study, it's 2008. The newer studies, which I haven't actually had a chance to look at, claim that the dropout rate is higher than 56% at this point. So at that time, that's 56% of women in technology left the industry. My gut feel is right now with COVID and everything is well over 70%. Some other statistics, the rate of dropout. It's double that of the dropout rate for men. Which is pretty hideous because the hiring rate for women is a lot lower than the hiring rate for men. So it's called a leaky pipeline. You don't hire too many and whatever you've got, we're leaving. So it's not a good situation. So that's the problem I'm trying to address with white wise with a variety of programs, which I'm going to go over. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about what we've done in the last 10 years to address the mentorship aspect, specifically on the technical side of things because that's what we've done a lot of. The first thing almost 10 years ago was my first technical talk with a live demo on stage with seven pieces of hardware and a very unreliable Wi-Fi connection at PyCon USA in 2013. That's when I unveiled my first version of the PyDorbell where I did a demo of home automation that I had built on the first Raspberry Pi. This is well before James who created the Ring Dorbell. This is well before he did anything with the Ring Dorbell. One funny thing was that all the PyCon organizers at that time thought that I was a guy until I showed up. I shouldn't have seen their faces. Anyway, I got to meet Eben Upton because he was the keynote speaker that year. People just couldn't believe that a girl could do a hard core project like that and do a live demo on stage at PyCon USA. So maybe that was kind of cool. That same year, we also did our first international competition, All Woman Team. This was a competition that was run by the Open Networking Foundation to build an SDN controller using OpenFlow. SDN stands for Software Defined Networking using OpenFlow, which is an open source standard. So anyway, four months, nights and weekends because all of us had full-time jobs. Maybe we were doing this nights and weekends. 10,000 lines of C code, full test harness, full functional test harness, and a Raspberry port. We submitted all of that on time. And I do want to mention we had some legal issues because one of the companies that one of our engineers worked at came back and said that she couldn't work on this project even though it was open source. And prominently on their website, it says, we are staunch supporters of open source. And they wouldn't let her work on an open source project. So anyway, I had to pull some serious strings and finally going through some legal hoops and I had to actually threaten them. So if you don't let her work, I'm going to make this really, really, really public. You're going to look really bad. So anyway, eventually they said, okay, she can work on it for the next two months. And you have to have a Bachelor of MIT license. I was like, no problem, I can do that. That's what we usually do. So anyway, thank you, Cisco. Anyway, so submitted, we were placed eighth in the world. We didn't win the grand prize of 50K, which would have been a lot of money. But we were eighth in the world, not too bad. The following year, we did a hands-on workshop. Once again, at Picon. This was Picon Canada at Montreal. So I bought, configured and shipped all the hardware for 60 students from San Jose, California to Montreal. I was hoping that the customs people wouldn't block it and they didn't. Thank God it worked out. We had 75 students show up. We ran out of hardware kits and we ran out of seats. The workshop went supremely well. And we were the only all women team to run a hardware and software hands-on workshop at Picon ever. That was a good thing to do. 2012, almost 10 years ago, was a talk that I did with Christina and Chuki who were both at Google at that point on lessons learned from all of us on the technical ladder and some tips and tricks. We had like 300 attendees show up. They had to close the doors because there was some fire hazard or something. But yeah, that was the first time that we spoke at Grayshopper. Since then we've spoken three or four times at Grayshopper. Some other things that we've done, some Arduino workshops, OpenShift workshops, a whole bunch of stuff. We only do open source, which is why I'm here. No closed source for private stuff. One thing I want to talk about is our flagship program, which is a partnership with SRI International, which is a premier institution with very, very deep technical roots and SRI is Stanford Research Institute, in case you don't know. So we partnered with them in 2019 to run a pilot program to pair our members with senior researchers and open source projects that are hosted by SRI. It was a pilot, nobody had ever done it before, nobody knew how to do it, so we gave it a shot. And so we had five participants, five months, in between results, because it's very hard to have free time after your whole time job to be doing something like this. If we all see an assembly base, low-level coding, the program is now on hold due to a lack of resources. Also COVID just decimated us. But that is a program I'm hoping to start back up once we have a little bit of funding and resources. All right, let's talk about the data, because that's what I came here to share. Before I share this, I want to say this is data that I gathered in 2019 from a survey at our in-person conference. That was our last in-person conference before COVID hit. I've taken snapshots of the surveys with the questions and the responses, and I want to just remind people that the audience is primarily technical women developers and technical PMs who work in the industry. First question, how much do you know about open source? 64% use it. They don't know much about contribution. They don't know anything about contribution. They don't understand anything about open source communities, practices, or culture, or guidelines, nothing. They just know how to use it. They know how to clone it, they know how to use it. Include it in whatever they're building, and that's about it, which was very interesting. How interested are you in learning about and contributing to open source? This is surprising. 80%, probably more than 80%, are very interested in learning more. A lot of people want to become contributors. There's a significant portion, like 12%, want to actually become maintainers. I'm not sure they understand what maintainer is or means, but they still want to do it. There's definitely very high interest from the community in doing it. They have no idea what to do or how to go about it. Which open source contribution methods are you interested in? I wanted to understand, this is my question, to understand the altruistic aspect of people. Do they want to be contributing in a, you know, I don't want money kind of way, or they want to get paid for it. Greater than 60%, very high interest in projects that are hosted by reputable nonprofits and educational institutions, which is, they don't get paid for this. And there's actually low interest in any projects that are hosted by a for-profit company where you get paid to do this. And this was very surprising. I think if I did this, if I asked this question to the mail crowd, it would be a flip because I think everybody wants to get paid to do this. But the women have a much more altruistic interest in this. How many years have you worked in the industry? There's some demographics that I wanted to share. This is 2019 pre-COVID, largely what I call junior developers, you know, zero to about six, seven years of experience. It's some senior dev profiles. I do want to add, like since 2020, since COVID, we've gone virtual with our conferences. And I see a big uptick in the 10 to 20 years of experience range and a lot of international attendees. So that's been kind of interesting. I'm hoping I can run the survey next year again at our virtual conference and see what the difference is and what COVID did to all of us. I wanted to throw this in because this is such a big problem. What is the biggest reason you might leave the tech industry? Number one reason, bar none, bad managers. And number two, high stress. Everybody has stress. I mean, the men also have stress. But the bad management is like an overwhelming issue. Once again, this is pre-COVID. If you look at the options that I asked for, there's one choice that says no support at home with kids and house chores. And I suspect if I ran this again in like next year, this particular choice would be either number one or number two. Because that has been hugely problematic with COVID and everybody working from home. So why is this happening? As I mentioned, this is a funny slide to nail home the point that managers can be really bad. Are you training your managers adequately to handle the current and next generation workforce? That's a question to ask, especially for the companies. Getting promoted is almost impossible or it seems almost impossible. Nobody really knows how to do that. And every company is different and even within companies, different business units and teams are different. So is there a measurement being done on a regular basis to gauge effectiveness of the current policies in place? That's a question to ask. Everybody knows this pay inequity and transparency. Can we have a little less of the echo? Thank you. So most companies are making good progress on this and there is currently an effort to provide much more guidance to all employees on pay structure and expectation performance and stuff. But we're still not there. And I just wanted to highlight, you know, with the pay difference, when women retire, you have a minimum of 70k less in retirement, probably a heck of a lot more. And the other aspect is, as we all age, women have more expensive healthcare issues than the men do. So on one hand, you have low finances for retirement and then you have high expenses on the healthcare side. So it's a double whammy. This one is the hardest to address, especially for, you know, Asian and South Asian demographics, which is a lot of our membership. We are all a product of the society that we grew up in. And Asian societies have some very, very serious issues with cultural expectations that we had to talk yesterday from VMware on open source in Asia. I forget where her name was, but she did a really good talk. She was Japanese. But yeah, and I agreed totally with her, you know, the expectations for, you know, parenting, for not being very prominent in order to keep the ego balance and power balance at work, you know, to work, all that shows up in a big, big way, a big negative way for the women, actually. So we have fingers pointed at us from every direction. In particular, studies have shown that women are more critical of other women than men are. So that was kind of an eye-opening study that happened. So this brings me to what we do at Thrive White. So we are uniquely focused on retaining the women who are already working. Yeah, we do a little bit of recruiting, but mostly it's retention. And we base our methodology on the practices followed by open source communities, which has existed for many decades. Our primary community is women engineers, women PMs and allies, both men and women. And by PM, I mean product, program and project managers. Typically on the technical ladder, when, you know, when the women get really frustrated because they can't get promoted or get the right projects, we see a shift from the technical ladder to the PM ladder, because that seems to be the only way to to kind of progress and still stay in the tech industry. So this is why I expanded it to not just the technical ladder, but also the PM ladder is because most of the women on the PM ladder are very, very technical. They all come from engineering backgrounds. And the women plus means anyone who identifies as a woman, regardless of their gender journey, so any LGBTQIA plus, we've always had had awesome members from from that community since day one. So we don't really think twice about it. A quick run through of our of our pillars and our programs. So we have three pillars, education, mentorship and sponsorship, and advocacy. And I've tried to highlight some of the programs that are tied to each of the pillars and those in those rectangular boxes. The ones that are bolded are the ones that I'm still running all virtually. The ones that are not bolded are on hold because of resource issues and mainly funding. So I want to highlight that we have our micro conference coming up in a week and a half, September 27th through 29th. I will I will show you the link to to click on to register for it. It's all virtual. So please do join us. We have keynotes. We have hands on workshops and panel sessions. And this time I'm adding a leadership track with very senior leaders doing keynotes to tell us what they actually do. One thing I want to highlight is the allyship aspect, especially at one of these conferences like LF conferences where it's mostly men. Having good male allies is critical for us to retain the women that are already here. And there are a lot of men that want to help, that are interested in helping and have no idea what to do. Or they Google something and they find something easy to do and they try it and backfires and they give up and they're like, I'm never doing this again. I don't want to be an ally. So for all those people, we have an allyship trading package that we offer to companies and corporations where we will come in and do a hands on workshop with some homework associated with it so that both men and women can learn some of the basics of allyship, what to do, what not to do, how to do it and how to be consistent and so that it becomes a sustainable practice. And things hopefully will change in the workplace to make it easier for women to thrive and survive and grow. A quick run through of some of the feedback on our programs. I don't want to run through all of these right now, but generally we get pretty good ratings for all of our programs including the conference, the safe space programs that we do at both of the conference and the separate program and the ally training workshop that we do. So pretty high ratings. I wanted to recap what works and what doesn't work. Number one thing is psychological safety. A lot of people talk about it, especially now. There have been some research papers on this. It is very easy to talk about. It is very difficult to do. To achieve psychological safety, you have to have a very, very deep connection with the audience and you have to really understand what helps them, even from their cultural background, what helps them feel psychologically safe and it can be quite different depending on which country you're from. So that is the number one thing. Obviously, mentors and sponsors, people already know about that. The other thing I want to highlight is the discipline aspect. Everything that you do is not going to be totally easy. So it takes effort, sacrifice, a lot of discipline, have realistic goals and try to meet them. What doesn't work? Complaining and not actually doing the work. That usually doesn't work. Not having realistic goals is another aspect because then you just kind of spin in the same place and not get anywhere. And then expecting practices to be easy and like a silver bullet approach to things. It's like, oh, I'm just going to do this one thing one time and everything will be fine. That's not how it works because this whole space is rooted in behavioral and mindset change and that in human beings is extremely difficult. So it takes a long time and it takes constant work. So those are the things that work and don't work. This is our website and that's a tiny URL to join us. There's a get newsletter right here button. We publish our newsletter once a month on the Thursday of each month. We've had good feedback on the fact that we have some good articles in it. We have technical articles, we have non-technical articles and I usually do like a state of the org spiel at the beginning. So please do join us and sign up to get the newsletter. There's also a button for the micro conference which is in one and a half weeks, week after next. So feel free to look at that and register for it. We'd love to see you there and with that may the code be with you. That's our slogan and I'm Rupa. I will take questions now. Thank you for coming. Any questions, any feedback? Oh yes. I'm wondering if you have statistics around first time contributors becoming sustainable contributors like how often do they come back and have it be a sustained contribution versus the one-offs? So we did that study 2015. We had 20 to 25 women contributing to various projects. 18 of them dropped out for a variety of reasons. I haven't run the study yet again. At this time with COVID, it's been extremely difficult to get anybody to do anything, especially out of their normal work timings because now work just overflows into everything. Everybody's working from home and some company cultures are such that you will work when I ask you to work which is 24-7. So it's very very difficult for the women to actually carve out time even if they want to. They really really want to. They're very interested but just physically they're too exhausted with family and everything else. So I haven't done that but even even pre-COVID it was not good. There were certain contributors who like the two that survived. It was their job to do that. Like the company paid them to do that which is why they survived. So I mean you see this huge problem where if the company is sponsoring and paying for you to do that it is somewhat doable and sustainable. If they don't it's like impossible. It's impossible. Yeah. Good question. Any other questions? Yeah. Thank you again for the great talk and I loved learning more about Thrive Boys. So my question was more you picked up a build on the region on the Asian region but do you have as part of the survey kind of more reflections or trends from across the globe? So let's say kind of Africa or Europe or any differences I'll be interested to hear. So the survey was 2019. It was an in-person conference in the Bay Area. So it was a very local crowd that showed up and it's very South Asian. I would love to have participation mostly from EU and Africa like we have like zero footprint in Africa. I would love to have like some footprint in Africa and see what's happening there because that's like a huge undiscovered territory. And I'm hoping that with the virtual, all conferences are virtual right now, we've seen huge traction from India, from Australia, New Zealand, from Brazil, from part of the EU actually, Germany, UK, nothing from Africa, nothing from India. Okay, so that's what I've seen so far that I'm trying to see how to tap into like Africa for instance you know that's like I have no connection but if you can help me with that that would be awesome because I would love to run the survey like either probably like next our next conference is April not another one in September for next year. I would love to do the survey in April next year and see what has changed what the demographics look like at this point. I don't have any direct I was thinking some of our developers in our team humanitarian open street map they're based in East Africa but at this conference I've heard of Oskar, open source community Africa or Chicago's Africa as a network that might be useful to connect. Oh I will try to connect, thank you. Any other questions? Thank you, thank you for coming and thank you for listening.