 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Rick here. We're on the ground in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley at SAP's Silicon Valley headquarters. We're here for a very special event, an evening event. It's the Makers Women Who Make America Women in Business, kind of a showing. It's a documentary put on by PBS, by Makers, it's running on KQED. So we sat, we watched the movie, then we had a great panel discussion afterwards and I'm really excited to have the moderator of the panel, Rachel Myrow from KQED. Welcome. Thank you for allowing me to be here. Our pleasure. So great job on the panel. Thank you. It got a little squirrely towards the end and some of the Q&A, but everything stayed pretty civil most of the way through. I think so. It's good to have a robust discussion. If you don't have argument, you don't have a robust discussion. So you're Silicon Valley reporter, so why does KQED have a Silicon Valley reporter? What does that say about the station? What are you finding? What's kind of your mission? We woke up and realized that a third of our audience, especially on the radio side, is coming from Santa Clara County. These are people trapped in traffic. They're a captive audience for us, you know, on the 101, on the 280. And very dedicated listeners. And we wanted to be there for them. And it's not that we haven't covered things in the past, we have a fabulous science team. We've had a reporter based on the peninsula in the past and he continues to be on our team. We just wanted to expand our coverage to deal not just with technology, because there's an army of reporters from around the world doing that, but to cover the region politically, economically, culturally, as well as covering the technology. So let's jump into tonight's topic, which is really women and women making a difference. And there seem to be kind of two tracks of the women that were in the program. One was the women who just knuckled down and just outtuffed everybody in a big company and just did it. Or left to start their own advertising firm, finance firm. Or the other ones who did startups. We've got both here in the Valley. What do you see and what are some of the characteristics that you think drive someone to go one way or the other? I think it's what your experience is. If like some of our panelists, you were lucky enough to have a mentor, you were lucky enough to have higher-ups recognize and promote you, then you're operating within the company that is providing that ready stage for achievement. If you can't get there, then you need to go outside. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the Rachel Gonzales, I was reading on the background, she has been at the bank for like 30 years. She worked herself up from a teller and now she's a B of A and she's a president of the Silicon Valley business. So you can really do it if you're in the right situation and you execute on those opportunities. I wish I could say the same for myself. I have moved twice from companies where I felt I had hit my glass ceiling. And I think every woman's situation is different. She needs to assess whether she has mentors, whether she can cultivate mentors, whether she needs to break through on her own. One of the topics that came up, your observation actually from the movie was the number of women that were profiled who went to all women's colleges and it brought up the subject of kind of single-sex education. I was wondering kind of what are your observations on single-sex education. What did you think of as you were watching the documentary? I was struck by the fact that there were so many leaders in business who had come up through the women's colleges. It strikes me that that's a rarity today. I certainly didn't see it in my own experience coming up through public schools, but I'm curious. There are so many studies that seem to suggest that girls lose their confidence about their skills and capacities somewhere around adolescence. And it seems to me there could be an argument for single-sex education, at least for part of your educational career. Yeah, for sure. Well, I have two daughters who went to single-sex middle school. And the most often stated fact is it's more about the little boy who just raises his hand before he knows the answer. And the girl doesn't raise her hand until she's thought it through. Thereby, she never gets a chance to raise her hand. And that comes to that question of cognitive bias that I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley are struggling with. In what ways am I perpetuating stereotypes, perpetuating bias towards men, towards women, towards everyone I come in contact with? I think we all have to take a hard look at ourselves, because the statistics suggest that our industry has a lot to improve. Yeah, for sure. I mean, as you said before we went on camera, the overt racism, the overt sexism is nothing like it used to be. But just simply looking at the data, looking at the numbers, bears the fruit that there's not a match in the numbers. The number of women running Fortune 500 companies is basically the same percentage as it's been for a while. We clearly have some work to do. Sheryl Sandberg hit a nerve with Lean In. And I think that's something that, whether you agree with her, whether you disagree with her, whether you want to think about it some more, clearly there's a situation we need to address. We don't need to go at it like the women we saw in the documentary, Hammer and Tong, demanding rights, suing for rights, starting companies to achieve the leadership potential they were capable of achieving. But we have to do something different than what we're doing now. But at the same time, we all look through a filter, right? There's no such thing as an unbiased view of anything. And even tonight, the main topic was about women, but then it got into race, it got into some other things. So clearly, we all bring a set of experiences, a point of view, kind of a view of things that is it almost more of a management of your filter as opposed to pretending that we can work without a filter? I also came away with the strong feeling that it's up to all of us, men, women, young, old, to be advocates for each other, to be mentors for each other. If you hear someone being badmouthed in an unfair way when they're not in the room, it's up to you to step forward. If you see someone who needs some good advice and you're in a position to give it, give it. Yeah. Great. Well, Rachel, thanks again for being here. Thanks for hosting the panel. It was a terrific job. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for being here. Absolutely. So I'm Jeff Frick. We're on the ground in Palo Alto at SAP at the Women Making Difference in America, Women in Business Show. Thanks.