 All right, welcome to the Cloud Founders of a Diversity Luncheon. Thank you all for being here. My name is Keelah Huddle. I am a content for the foundation. I also oversee our diversity initiatives. Every time we approach one of our conferences, I kind of briefly ask myself, if we still need to have a diversity-specific event, and then a board member for a company being investigated for sexism, makes a sexist joke during the meeting in which they are discussing possible solutions, and I start planning on a state-of-the-art recipe panel. Being here, thank you for showing up. We have to continue to show up to make change. This is doing the work. I want to begin by introducing two special guests today. The foundation is proud to have on-site for the first time junior ambassadors. In a report we issued last year, we found that the shortage of skilled cloud developers will grow exponentially in the coming decade, meaning companies need more developers and more developers must be trained on cloud. We as a foundation also made a commitment to invest in the diversity of the open-source community by being actively inclusive, outspoken, and dedicated to seeking out underrepresented parties. The most effective way to perpetuate diversity is to show rather than tell. And in practicing, we had over a 100% increase in women-identified speakers since last year. We've seen over 11% of attendees are women-identified. That number may sound small, but in the tech and industry, it's pretty sizable. So how do we leave together the need for more skilled cloud developers and increase diversity in our open-source developer community? We look ahead to the next generation of developers. And that's what the junior ambassador program is for. Please join me in welcoming Sandra Nitham and Sydney Hull. She graduated from high school and will be attending her cluster in the fall. And Sydney just finished her freshman year at high school. Good to know them. Join us in the community realm. We're in today at 5.15 to 8.10. Make yourself available to them because one day you will likely be working alongside of them. So welcome, Sydney and Sandra. I also want to thank Cornelia and Elriza at Pivotal for all of the work they've done with the Girls Who Code program. And I want to give a big thank you to IBM for sponsoring this luncheon. So thank you. And now I'd like to introduce today's featured speaker, Karen Holtzblatt, who will be giving a presentation and then leading our panel. Karen is a thought leader, industry speaker, and author in computer-human interaction. She received the first Lifetime Award for practice from the Computer-Human Interaction Association for her impact on the industry. Karen has recently turned her energy to the challenges of women and technology and founded the Women in Tech Retention Project to understand women's experience at work and create interventions that help. Please join me in welcoming Karen. You having fun? I hear we're at the tail end of the conference. I like to see a nicely filled room and I like to see men showing up for a women in tech thing. So any man at your table, turn around and say thank you and you are my ally. Okay? So I've been leading teams for the last 30 years to help understand requirements and design. And as you can tell, I'm a little bit older than lots of you in the room, which means I was one of the first, or what we call the second wave women's movement and we broke down lots of doors because the rooms we were in, there were no women. There was all guys. Okay? So much to my chagrin eight years ago, because I do a lot of coaching of young people, they started coming up to me and crying. And recently I heard about senior leadership women, senior leadership in a group of women crying because what it's like to be in our industry. And that's when I started to think that it was time for us to really take responsibility for this ourselves, yeah? Okay? So I am known in my world for my hats, but we're having an intimate conversation here, so I'm going to take that on. Now, what was also going on, you have to understand that, you know, all of us who were in human-computer interaction started out as psychologists. So I started teaching gender relationships 40-something years ago. So the other thing that's kind of sad and scary is that the research is in no way advanced in the last 45 years. Now, the Anita Board Institute and all of our pipeline programs started way back in the late 70s and in the 80s. And it was also true that whereas the Suffragettes, that was first wave women's movement, okay, they were trying to get something pretty tangible, which was what? The vogue, you know? Okay, my generation, we were trying to get something pretty tangible, too, and that was we wanted to work, okay? We wanted to be paid because power and equality comes also with dollars, okay? Inside the family we're talking about, and we worked. Now, the sad news is that in all the other hero industries, so what's a hero industry? Anyone who works too much and is sort of compulsively obsessed with working, do you know, recognize the eye bankers, doctors, lawyers, right? Business, all those guys. From the late 70s and 80s until today, all of us have had a massive increase in women and they continue to go higher. And we, and only we, and only in our industry are women walking out. You got to turn it on if you think it's going on. All right, so we've had massive efforts for pipeline, getting young women in like the young women we have today. And we can talk all we want about leaning in leadership, except for one problem. When we get them in the door, 50% of them leave midway through their career, excuse me, 50% more than men. So if you have a hole in your corporate bucket, what happens? They're just gone, yes? We don't have to talk about how we get more women leaders if you're losing half of the potential candidates mid-career. So it turns out, as far as I can tell, virtually no one is trying to understand what's happening. So when I looked at this and all the young people that were still upset 30 years later, I thought, well, I'm a pretty good spokesperson people sort of thing. Maybe I better do something. So I started the women in tech retention project and we started with trying to understand, this is too loud, trying to understand why women stay. Now, if you want to understand why women leave, you don't start by asking why women leave. It's not any different than if you want to get the right requirements, you don't ask the customer what do you want because the customer knows everything about their world and their practice, but they don't pay any attention to it. And so if you ask them what they want, they always say things like, make it faster, right? Do it like this other thing I'm used to. And so what we learned in requirements and design is you go out into the field and you talk with people about what they're doing while they do it and that's what I'm known for. So if I want to understand why women leave, I have to first understand why they don't. And then when we look at women who leave, we have to ask if it's because they don't have that stuff, yes? Do you understand what's going on? So we went out into the field and we talked with women using our user-centered design processes to understand why they stay. And the result of that is the at-work framework, which I'm going to breeze through here today and use as the context for our conversation. And we wanted to be sure we knew what we were talking about and so from that we made a survey. And so hundreds of interviews later, the Women Retention Project, which like open source, started and has started as a grassroots, 100% unfunded effort, has a way of understanding what's going on, a measurement tool, and we're now working on intervention techniques and also even games because if we're talking about early career, we are talking about people in their 20s up till about 40 because those of us who kind of made it, we figured it out. You know, we know what we're doing, you know? Otherwise you would have marched with your feet long ago. So in our survey, the sad news is that 49% of the women are still saying they're thinking of leaving and that should scare you. And when I go and talk to very large, very well-known corporations, they say to me, of course it couldn't be happening here. And I say, you want to check those numbers? And then they come back and go, well, I'm sure it's different here, but yes, they are leaving. So don't pretend. And we are living in the middle of a media storm, as you all know, which means we better take it seriously as an industry. And I think we better understand. Yes? With me? OK. So let's do it. The first, and the most important reason women stay, is because they feel in a tight, cohesive group up to something that matters. They feel like they can lead and they can follow. They are heard and they're asked for their opinion. They participate in a group in which they have a sense of belonging and they are connected. And if they're not in a product team, then instead they talk about partnering, dynamic individual partnership. In other words, the psychological sense of connection is critical. And why would that be surprising? Because who would want to go to work every day feeling alienated existentially? I mean, think about it. And if you think the guys don't come to work for the same exact reason, well, we are, the next survey is going to have men in it, so I'll know better than anecdotally. But you all know this, right? You know that guy who works with those other guys and he takes a job, you know that guy? And what happens when that guy goes to that other company? All his buddies come with him. Work is a social endeavor even for coders, okay? And when women feel that they're up to something that matters and that they can belong, then they stay. And almost every woman I talk to who leaves what's underneath it is the lack of that. It might sound like I'm invisible. It might sound like everyone interrupts me. But in the end, it's about that. Right now we're developing intervention techniques which include putting in more structure because women do better when they know the rules of engagement. One of the saddest pieces in our survey also is that 50% of the women don't know what they have to do to be successful. In other words, what does a successful deliverable look like? What does a successful good piece of code look like? What does it look like to do a job well done? How do you advance? What does that look like? 50% don't know. You think we could fix that, yes? All right, so there's other techniques that we can use that make the team process work better. And we're working on those but I got 20 minutes so I gotta fly, okay? All right, so now I have to do something here because this is less a factor than a sub-element because the up to something big part really counts. Now I don't know what's going on here because you guys a little more technical, you know, down in that cloud coding stuff. All the time people want to say stuff like, well, women need more socially relevant topics. If there were more socially relevant topics, women would come to hardcore tech. That is not what we heard. You see this one? I love my work because this one is social issues. You see that one? Is that the big one? No. What makes women crazy is being bored. They want to be on the bleeding edge of technology. They want to do the challenging work. They want a new hard problem and they hate being bored. They want to impact the industry. They want to make impact for their company and they want to invent the next thing. So stop it. They're motivated by the same stuff as men. Ready? But women may need different things than men. We may not like it. And many of the women that I like, for example, I'm about to tell you this principle. I asked one woman if she'd be on a panel so she reviewed a webinar and I said, so what did you think? And she said, I didn't like that push and support thing, Karen. I said, well, was it true for you? And she said, yes. There's a lot of things we don't like. But if we aren't honest about what's going on, we can't do anything. All right. So what does this look like? When there's a new job, unfortunately a lot of women will look at the 10 things you have to do and they'll go, oh, I don't have all 10 things. I can't apply. I need a whole other degree before I can apply for that job. And they'll say, angrily, the men don't think that. They'll apply if they just have three things. Well, women are mad because the men will take a stretch. The women don't like to. Story after story after story is women who are pushed by their teachers, by their husbands, by their coworkers, and by their managers. Did you see hidden figures? OK. You know the chalk scene? That's the push. Did you see it? That chalk scene where the man who has power, men, you have a job, says, you can do this. Go to the board. That's the push. And that story was shocking when I saw it because that happened to me. But pushing alone doesn't work. In fact, women leave under those circumstances because if you're pushed, like one woman who was a graduate of MIT, not a dummy, and she had a deal with a whole big fat, it was in fact open source. And they said, you're so smart, you can do it. And then they were done talking to her. And now she was alone in it. And she did this and that, but it wasn't sure how to start or how to think about it. So she'd go back to the manager and say, how is this? He's like, oh, you're good. You're so smart. Just keep going. Well, she just felt abandoned because women don't just need the push, but they need the support. What does support look like? It looks like someone to talk it over with, the leeway to fail, the idea that you can try things out and iterate a little bit. But mostly they don't want to be doing it alone. There's someone in your world you could push right now. There's someone in your world you could support right now. I want you to go home and do it. The push and support, it's not a management only problem. The team can do it too. Yes. Ready? Local role models. You know who this is, right? I know you know who this is. This is our Supreme Court justice. Now if you're a woman, you know that she's an amazing champion for women. And if you didn't know that, you need to go know that. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To me, I'm like, whoa, that's Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Right? The guys grow up and they go, yeah, I'm going to be a steep job. I'm going to be Bill Gates. You know, you go, I work a lot with young people. The guys all think they're going to be the next big brain. 30 years, maybe three big brains in the industry. I hate to tell you, you're not going to be, no, it's not happening. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg is scary because you forget that she had an amazingly supportive husband and you forget that she did law Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. She wasn't saying, I think I'll change the world. She was just doing her thing. Two years ago I had an opportunity to meet Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but she was still Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It did not help make her real to me. You know when you see little kids, all right, you've got a five-year-old and they're in a party and there's a seven-year-old and there's a nine-year-old. Who does a five-year-old play with? The seven-year-old. And when they're nine, they want to talk to the 12-year-old, not the 17-year-old. When we want to think about where we're going in life, we want someone who's just a little bit more experienced. We look at the next level up to find out what might life be like there. What we found in talking to women is that they thrived when they had local role models. We tend to have a bad habit of, you know, I was at Grace Hopper last year. So they trotted out not only the head of a big, big, big corporation, then she trotted out the amazing women. And one of them was a top-level VP who had twins, worked, and also wrote a children's book at the same time. This is a real story. Good for her. She does not help anyone think they can do it because she's like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, yes? What women need and when they thrive is when they look for local role models, people with a little bit more experience than they have. And they look at them and they want to say, let's talk it over. And they look at their life and they say, is that a life I could live? And if the answer is no, I can't live that life, then they don't want to be a manager. And even a director-level woman I talked to when she looked at the VP, EVP up above her, she's like, oh no, I couldn't do that. And she'd already made it because she didn't like that life he lived. If you have one-year experience, what are you? You're a local role model. How's your life? Are you a good role model? You all know who you've been chickened to go ask to talk to who's a little bit more than you, yeah? All right, I want you to talk to them next week. And what about family issues? Everyone wants to make that the problem, but HP and the industry in the 80s gave the best benefits ever, and so did Sweden and every other country. And if you look, the issues of benefits and women and children are no different across any of the hero industries, no different. What does it mean? It means that's not why people are leaving. It is not a homework balance problem. No matter what women tell you, and I've interviewed a lot of them who said they were leaving and they said because of their kids, and at the end, as one of them said to me, she looked at me and she said, I didn't leave because of my kids, did I? I said, no, you didn't. She said, I left because I was bored. I said, yes, you did. But women appreciate when the team and the manager have non-judgmental flexibility. So when they have to take care of that kid, they don't sneak out of the office and make sure no one sees. They don't have to worry about it. They're accommodated to. It's a team thing again, yeah? Everything I'm talking to you about is a product development and engineering problem. We're not going to fix it with a workshop. We're not going to fix it with networking. And we're not going to fix it by expecting every woman who's only 11%, did you say, of the people here to take on every other woman as their mentor? I didn't get where I was with a bunch of women. I got where I was with a bunch of men. We can't be looking to HR to fix this. We have to and can do it by changing factors on the graph. And that's what we're working on. But we can't stop here if we do not acknowledge that women come in with tons of baggage. This has been documented for years and we certainly found it again. Is they live with a negative voice in their ear and it keeps going like this? No, I don't think you can do that. That's too hard. What are they thinking about me? Maybe they're not thinking I'm good enough. I don't think they think I'm good enough. Did you see that guy? They moved their head in a funny way. I'm sure that means they didn't like me. They come home and they hyper-judge themselves. And they think that the men don't do that. I don't know how courageous you guys are. Are you courageous? Can I ask you a question? All right, are you ready? How many men ever feel like they're not good enough and come home with low self-esteem? Okay, women, would you please look around? You know if you live with them, you know what they're like. But what do we do? They come home. They whine and moan. Wining and moaning is part of a relationship. It's very important. They think they're not good enough. Someone's going to do this. I don't know if I'm going to advance. And you say, oh, honey, you're wonderful. You're so terrific. I know you can do it. We kiss them on two cheeks. We dress them up the next day. We kick them out the door and back they go into the war. Everybody has those voices, but women are pretty plagued. And so if we do not deal with techniques to help them think through how to hold their personal power, how to always be professional, what professional behavior looks like, how to stand their ground, how to handle straight talk, and how to look at that guy. I call that guy a dybbuk. It's a dybbuk in Jewish. And this is what you do. You got one of those guys? You got one? Okay, here's how you do it. Shut up! Part of what we're doing with my students is we're creating board games to look at cases to help people think through this and do a bunch of reframing. So the fixes problem, we believe you need to have intervention techniques in the industry and work, and we need intervention techniques for women themselves. And if we do that, then we're going to be able to retain more women. And if we also do what maybe is being done this week, fire people who need to be fired in our company. Yeah? All right, so if you want to join us, be part of it. Go out to incontextdesign.com, women in tech. And from that, I'm going to turn it over to Kamie.