 from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here at VMware in beautiful sunny Palo Alto, California. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, and I'm joined by Lori Mackenzie. She is the executive director of the Claimant Institute for Research at Stanford University. Lori, thank you so much for joining us here today. So happy to be here. So we were talking before the cameras were rolling about your research, and one of the things you were talking about is the frozen middle, and I really like that terminology because there's so much research about the subtle biases that women face in the workplace, and how management can make all the difference. Yes. So tell us a little bit about this frozen middle and about the strategies you're using to help middle managers become better managers. You know, people often say, employees leave managers, they don't leave companies, and so the manager really is setting the experience of every employee, and so our question is this, can you help managers be more inclusive in a way it makes them feel like they're both better managers and better business leaders? So what we do is we do experiments with them, we say try this or try that, that will block bias and make you more effective. For example, do you know what you're evaluating people on? Do you have a toolkit for that? What kind of dashboard might you create to make yourself more effective? It turns out when managers create something themselves based on gender research, and it helps them be more effective. They'll even fight new HR people trying to change them back to a different process because they know it works. And for me, that's the win-win. Managers co-design it, it's based on gender research, and because it makes them more effective, they're more likely to redo these processes themselves, even if they don't have any HR support. So part of it is training, but it also sounds like a lot of it is also ownership too. Yes, absolutely. What we've found is sometimes inclusion or diversity training is decoupled from what people do every day at work. What if we put them together and talk about you creating something, using the gender knowledge, and thinking about what you do every day at work. When you couple those back together, that's when it really matters to managers and makes them feel more effective. So often, diversity and gender issues is part of the HR function of a company, absolutely. But your approach is really different. Tell us a little bit about how you recommend companies think about gender and diversity. So you need diversity and inclusion to live somewhere. You need an owner of it, and it makes sense that it's owned by the HR function. And we think that's essential. And it makes sense because it starts with hiring or with people. Because it starts with people. These are all people. And people crosses every single function from marketing to technology to law. And that makes sense. It's necessary, but not sufficient to motivate change. Change happens because each function and each person believes that it improves what they're doing. So for example, the rollout of something like agile software development, software developers use it because they were told it makes them develop better software. What if we approach diversity like that? Managers start to be curious about it and engage in it because they saw it made them better. Developing software that was unbiased. Their team meetings went better. More voices were included. People weren't leaving. When you embed it in what people do every day, that's when it's not something that disappears when the HR person disappears. It's embedded in what people do every day and we think that's really important. And you were also talking about, you were talking about thinking about this in terms of product rollout, but also in terms of how people are introduced and how they interact. So we've discovered language matters. And often if we don't think strategically about language, stereotypes will guide how we call people regardless of who they are. So we might tend to say, I love working with Lori. She's so great. She's my best friend. And I appreciate working with, let's say Brian because he's a strong leader and very strategic. And even though I think they're both really great and really strategic, the audience takes a very different perspective of what people's contribution is. So language matters, how we introduce people. I always tell people, look closely at your LinkedIn profile. Look at how you're endorsing people and try to use language that reflects your values which are both very driving, strategic and collaborative team working. Combine them. Don't default to one or the other based on stereotypes. So can you, let's unpack that a little bit more in terms of the stereotypes and the way you describe Lori on the one hand and Brian on the other. How is it different? And what would you say is typically done and what should we be thinking about to do better? Well it turns out that men and women leaders behave very similarly. That we describe their successes and failures very differently in language based on stereotypes. So if we're not thinking about what do I want to say and instead think about what I happen to say, we'll wind up describing them very differently for the exact same outcome. Some descriptions are more aligned with getting promoted and some are more aligned with kind of that helper supporter type person. And over time you could start to see someone gaining an advantage based on how we perceive them and not their actual contribution. So one of our recommendations is to think strategically about language to prevent that kind of perception difference from being replicated in how we introduce people, how we describe them, how we talk about them. In terms of diversity programs, we were talking a little bit about this before the show started. Does it matter where you start? Do you start with thinking about being more inclusive of women or with minorities or people of different sexual orientations? I mean, where do you start and does it matter? That's such a great question. It's something I grapple with all the time. And in all my years of working in this field, my new line is there is no trickle down diversity. And what I mean by that is by working on the kind of the broadest segment, for example, women, does not mean that black women, Latina women and Asian women will benefit for their fair share of these efforts. And it might be harder to design for everyone, men of color, sexually diverse people, people with disabilities. But if we don't start there, it seems like we never get there. So my new perspective is we really have to start with the hard questions. And in the end, whatever we develop will benefit far more people than starting somewhere and having to make up for the fact that we didn't include everybody equally in our programs. As the executive director of the Klayman Institute at Stanford, what do you make of what's happening right now in Uber, in Silicon Valley? We've seen so much really depressing, horrible news coming out. And this is just a couple of years after the Ellen Powell lawsuit. Why aren't things better? And what's your take? So the mechanism of what's behind all the news today is the same, it's privilege. That someone's story is believed and someone's story is not believed. And we act on the stories that more align with our cultural norms of expectation, high performance, and that perpetuates itself. And to tell you the truth, there are many days when I just can't look at the newsfeed. But then I hope that every day I get a little bolder. I've found I've spoken a little more strongly. I've pushed a little harder. I've tried not to be complacent myself. But more importantly, I'm trying to support the men and women who are trying to make a difference because we're all feeling a little bit beat down by some of the news. And I think now more than ever we need to support the well-intentioned people who are trying to do good and know that it's a long view and we're in it for the long run. So let's not get distracted by anything but keep pushing forward even down to making sure our daughters know that they matter. That if something happens to them, it matters. And then our sons, it matters that they're good men, that they grow up not to have locker talk. I think all of that matters. And are you working on anything in particular right now that is directly, I mean, of course it directly, it all addresses it, but that really is about what you're hearing women's tales from Silicon Valley? You know, what's really exciting about being at an institute that's over 40 years old? Is that we have a range of topics that we work on? And at the Claim Institute we've been working on breaking the culture of sexual assault for two years now. And we're looking at what are the cultural configurations that enable these actions to be kind of happened frequently? And what can we do to address the culture in which assault and harassment happens? So we've been studying things like how do you announce, how does a company make an announcement about their findings about sexual assault? Does it matter that you announce with a big statistic? Does it matter that you say these things are unacceptable or to just say it's part of kind of everyday life? So we're studying the language of these announcements, we're studying the frequency of them and it's something we've been working on for years because I think when you think about gender equality, it's complex and it's got a lot of dimensions. And if we only go in one direction, we're going to miss something. So I think it's always keeping your eye on all the barriers that women face from harassment to language to promotions to access and figuring out what are common ways that we can address and attack all of those issues and find workable solutions. What is your best advice to a, let's say a male executive in Silicon Valley who says, Lori, I want my company to be different. I want it to be a more welcoming, inclusive, nurturing culture for everyone. What would you say to him? I would say start with the assumption that everything might have bias in it. Then- Because we're human? Because we're human. Okay, okay. And just like software, you always assume there's something you can debug and you're looking for ways that it might be broken and we're often complacent about how people are treated in team meetings, how we hire, who gets promoted, and if we assume that there could be a bug in any one of those processes and we're vigilant about getting better and better over time at tracking them and proving them and then getting ahead of them, that's where a company can take real traction. But the moment we become complacent, we actually open the door to more bias because then we stop looking and the bias is always going to be there. But I like what you said, too, about assume that there's something you can't debug. I mean, that's real softwares, but you're talking their language. Right, right. And I talked to a lot of male executives, very well-intended, who really want solutions. So part of my optimism is there are a lot of well-intentioned people in all of these companies. Let's give them the tools and perspectives to be effective and I think we will continue to see positive momentum even though the environment right now is a little hostile. I think keep driving forward with the long view. Make your cultures as inclusive and safe for all your employees as possible and take a good hard look at where there might be bias and let's not be afraid to tackle it together. And now let's give advice to that young woman who's starting out at a company in Silicon Valley who maybe is freshly graduated from college and has never experienced the workforce before. What would you say to her? I'd say you're awesome. And you know, there are challenges for everyone. Even CEOs get coached about their presence and everything else and there probably will be more barriers as a woman or a woman of color that you're going to have to get better at. But I'm like Gloria Steinem, I'm a hope of holic. I believe we can all develop the skills. I think we should work together, break the barriers and develop the skills, but in the end of the day, your voice matters and having you develop the future of technology matters. So let's work on that together. Lori Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for theCUBE. This is Women Transforming Technology. We'll be right back.