 From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE, covering women transforming technology. Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are on the ground at VMware in Palo Alto with the third annual women transforming technology event. And I'm very excited to be joined by the CEO of Women Who Code, Elena Percival. Elena, nice to have you here. Hi, thank you very much for having me. So tell me about Women Who Code. You started co-founded it a while ago. Give us a little bit of a background about what your organization is. Yeah, Women Who Code is the largest and most active community of technical women in the world. Our mission is to see women excel in technology careers. And that's because we have a vision of women becoming executives, technical executives, founders, board members, and of course, through pathway of being software engineers. So Women Who Code started originally back in 2011 as a community. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of that and what you've transformed it into today. Yeah, it started off as a local community and it was just a space to get together with other technologists. And what we really started to see is, it was this thing that was just fun and kind of our little secret for that first year. And we realized at one point, I said, hey, other women around the world deserve to have this as well. And that's really where the focus to grow globally came about and focus on women building up their skills and building up their leadership skills. And if you invite software engineers to a leadership and networking event, they won't come. But we hold an average of five free technical events every single day throughout the world. And at those events, they're primarily technology events where we weave in a little bit of leadership and networking, but it feels authentic. And it's an event that software engineers are excited to be. Five events per day, that's incredible. So VMware became a partner back in 2015 when you had around nine or 10,000 members. Now today it's over 137,000 global members. Talk to us about the strategic partnership with VMware and what that's enabled women who code to achieve. Yeah, we can't accomplish what we accomplish without the partners that support us. We try not to charge our members for anything. So those 1900 events we put on last year were free. We've given away $2.8 million in our weekly newsletter of scholarships and conference tickets, encouraging our community to go out there and engage in the broader tech community. And we can do those things. We can launch in the cities that we can launch in. We can elevate women as leaders around the world, but we can only do that through partners. And VMware is one of our founding partners. And what that took is someone in executive leadership to see who we could be. Because we were very small and we were very local when we came to VMware and talked to them about what our vision was and what we were going to accomplish. And I say now what I said back then is we've only scratched the surface of what we're going to achieve. There's some commonalities, some parallels that women who code has with VMware. This is the third annual women transforming technology event and at VMware here and it's sold out within hours. Walking into that room, it's very empowering. It's very, the excitement and the passion are there. And you just start to feel a sense of community. Tell me about the parallels that you see with VMware and some of the visions that they share about not just raising awareness for the diversity gaps and challenges but also taking a stand to be accountable in that space and what they announced this morning was Stanford with this massive $15 million investment in this innovation lab of actually wanting to dig deep into these barriers to help identify them to eradicate them. What are some of the visionary similarities with women who code in VMware? Yeah, so, I mean, what you see with that is, you know, you're investing in someone who or an organization that already has the potential. Our average age of our community is 30. We have a lot of trouble claiming that you achieve what you achieve in your career because of us. We know we play a part in it but we know that potential, that raw power exists within you and when someone sees and knows that that's there and gives you what you need to be able to harness that potential, you are able to achieve great things, global things. You're able to change the world and that's what we do for our members and their careers and that's what our partners like VMware do for us. I saw on your website, 80% of members experience a positive career impact after joining women who code 80% and Alina, that's huge. Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the people that you connect with, the sense of belonging. We had a woman at the end of our hackathon in Manila come up to our leaders there and she started crying. She said, I was about to leave the industry and I realize I have a place and that sense of belonging that you get from coming to a woman who code event that's very welcoming, it can really hope to override all of those unconscious biases that you encounter every day throughout the course of your career and it helps you to realize, oh, I'm not alone. There's a lot of really smart, talented women in the tech industry. There's people out there who want me to be in my job and being in my job isn't just for me. I'm lifting up the people around me as well. So one of the things that we hear a lot about is a lot of focus on STEM programs and getting young girls interested in STEM fields to study in college. But another thing that's huge is the attrition rates. Women are leaving technology at alarming rates and a lot of people think it's to go off and have children and it's actually not the case. What are some of the things that have surprised you about women kind of in that maybe mid-stage of their career that are leaving and how can women who code help to impact that positively? Yeah, so what you're speaking to is definitely the data showing that women are leaving their technical careers at a rate of 50% at the mid-career level and they're leaving their overall careers if you aggregate women in careers at a rate of 20% over a 30-year period. So that gap is huge and the industry is a great industry for women. You've got a lot of job security, a lot of job opportunity, a lot of flexibility. All of these things are great for women in their careers. But what you're encountering is often being the only or one of the only. You really don't overcome that until you're getting above 20, 25, 30% of that feeling of being the only on a team. And what I think is the biggest issue with women coming into their careers and what kind of wears you down is the unconscious bias. It's something that you encounter on a daily or multiple times a day basis. That thing that if you complained about a single one of them, you'd be the weird person who complains at your company. And so what women who code really does is, one, helps to create a sense of belonging. It helps to build domain-specific and non-domain-specific skills. It helps you to envision your career not just the next step in your career, but the step after that and the step after that. So it's really working to combat those things that you're coming to on a daily basis to provide that sense of community, to remind you, you do belong and to really help you envision and achieve your career goals long-term. So you have about 137,000 members globally. And when we had Lily Chang on earlier, she was talking about the Shanghai and Beijing and kind of what that sort of meant to her going back there now as part of on the board. Tell us, maybe give an example of a real shining star who had joined Women Who Code and was able to get that support and that guidance and that camaraderie to continue to be successful and actually be promoted and succeed. Yeah, so one example that I love is a woman came up to me at an event last year and she said, Haley and I was going to the Women Who Code Python events and I now today, because of what I learned, ended up choosing a path into data science. I'm a senior data scientist and this year I'm being flown across country to speak as an expert in data science. I would not be in this career path without Women Who Code. Another story that I love is a woman who came up to me at a hackathon and she told me her story that she had joined Women Who Code in February and she was going to our events and kind of figured out what she wanted to do and by the summer she had transitioned into a new job, gotten a job with the Weather Channel as a software engineer and she was making more than double any salary that she'd had prior to that. Wow. And so it's career direction, competing salary or competing job offers which really increases your likelihood of having a higher salary. Those are kind of two examples that I love. The one thing that we haven't talked about is our leadership program. We have a global leadership program which really actions you to build skill-based volunteering and become a local tech leader. It opens up lines of communication between you and executives at your company. You often get called in as a thought leader at companies. You typically will receive a promotion or a pay increase at a higher rate than you would otherwise. Some of our leaders get press mentions, get invited to be speakers at conferences or even advisors on advisory boards. And so when I look at the stories that are coming from our leaders, one of my favorite stories is a woman in Atlanta who she had a master's in CS. She was inside of the box, the person that every company wants to hire. She was incredibly shy and when she stepped up as a woman who code leader, she said, oh, Elena, I'm gonna be the worst leader. And okay, you've got this. At her first event, she stood up and she was like, my name's Erica, feel free to ask me questions and kind of sat down as quickly as possible. But she stood in the front of that room. She began to be perceived by the community and by herself as a leader. And in under one year, she was invited, she didn't even apply to speak at three different tech conferences. And she went from barely being able to say her name in front of a nice community to giving a talk to a standing room only crowd. Wow, and very impactful. And is that for other opportunities that you guys deliver in terms of public speaking or is that because she was able to, through women who code, just start to get more confidence in her own capabilities and in her own skin? Experience, confidence, self-perception, community perception. I had one lead at our community tell me that she became a leader at Women Who Code by regularly attending events. One day, the leader was running late. And so she said, oh, well, you know, I can probably get this started. I've been coming enough. So she went and stood at the front of the room, welcomed everyone, got everything going, set our pitch. And she said by the end of that three hour event, people thought she was a leader. And she began to think, oh, yeah, I'm a leader. And she says, hey, I know that I can get an interview anywhere I want. I know that this opens doors for me. I had one leader tell me that she interviewed with SpaceX. And they specifically told her in the interview that they were impressed with her Women Who Code leadership. And that was one of the reasons they were interviewing her. Wow, what have been some of the things that have really blown you away in the few years that this organization has been around? It's just the individual stories. It's every step of the way, the impact that it has in the lives of our leaders and our community. And I honestly feel every day that I get to do this for a job. With what VMware announced this morning with Stanford and this huge investment that they're making into Women's Leadership and Innovation Lab, to look at some significant barriers that women in technology are facing and to identify those barriers that we can then eradicate, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to from that research and how you think that can actually benefit Women Who Code? Yeah, I'm very excited to see what comes out from there. I think we need a lot more research to help us to understand at what point things are happening and at what things you can be doing that really help to overcome. I think that combining research with the real world in-person action that Women Who Code does and the work that we do with our community would have an even bigger impact. I also think what it speaks to is accountability. You know, a very large, very successful 20 year old organization standing up saying we actually want to study this and I think that there's a message there of accountability which is I think a very important one that other organizations can definitely learn from. Yeah, I think that also they're going to an organization outside of them and funding that and so the research that comes out of there might come back and say, you're doing this wrong. This is how you can be doing it better and so the fact that they're willing to make an investment and say, hey, we want to see this better, not only for us. It's not just going to be internal. The state is going out to the world. That's an investment in global change. That's not just holding that in at a personal or organizational level. Right, so in addition to that news that came out today, what are some of the things that you're going to walk away from this third annual Women Transforming Technology event going, ah, that was awesome. Now this gives me even more ideas for Women Who Code. Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity to connect with especially women who are in leadership positions and figure out how we can better service women at the higher tiers of their career because you don't stop needing support and you don't stop growing your career once you become a director or a vice president. You continue to invest in your career and you continue to need support and so I'm really looking for ways that we can better serve those women. And hopefully we start to see that attrition number of 50% start to come down. Definitely. Alaina, thanks so much for your time. It was a pleasure to chat with you and we wish you continued success with Women Who Code. Thank you. Thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at VMware for the third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching.