 first round stage so please excuse me if I get confused yeah I'm a father first and foremost and then an entrepreneur as was told in the intro I was part of the founding team a title exited to JC and now building Unicast but this is one of the few times on the stage where I'm not pitching the company and that feels good we are about 40 people strong team by now in New York and Oslo and we recently pushed our share of women in the tech company Unicast from 17% to 36% in six months and I've been invited here today to talk about how we did that because I'm kind of tired of everything everyone talking about gender diversity as important but very few actually sharing how to do something about it so I'm going to share how we did that so first gonna talk about how can man and sadly man is often in control of a tech startup get woman into tech but also at the end how can woman get woman into tech it's all interconnected so we first started as everyone does realizing that we had a diversity deficit that's the start it's a problem it's a problem because our fairness principle but most because it's bad business studies have shown that more diverse teams actually perform better on the bottom line second then follows the internal discussions and why this is and how to fix it right everyone has been through that stage hopefully third nothing happens absolutely nothing happens no rush of women are applying to your tech jobs nothing happens and my thesis is that most companies stop here and they sit in their office and they wonder why does no one want to work here and they give up there's a couple of more steps as you can see here we went to step number four new internal discussions why did we fail and how to fix it and not only talk about it we had to reconvene and discuss this fifth we actually created a dedicated team to work on these topics we weren't expecting this anymore to happen by itself we had to treat this as any business mission set down a dedicated team to think of this and only this and then we admitted to the world that we had failed and whenever you see that logo there you can find our blog post on unicast.com describing in more detail we had to say to the world that we had failed also to commit ourselves to the solution and then we had to change our company culture and also how we communicated we actually went through all our texts on all our external sites and changed how we talk about ourselves and how we talk about future candidates as an example unicast unicast rule and we were calling ourselves the Knights of the unicast a fun start of the kind of thing what we later discovered was that a lot of women felt that to be unnecessary masculine we hadn't thought of that but in the process we learned it we removed the Knights so we relaunch our values with being your own CEO as the core value meaning creating a culture where every single individual in the company could shape the company as they saw fit themselves from everything to when you come in the morning to when you go in the afternoon when you take your vacations and how you prioritize your tasks we wanted to open up so the company was more approachable for a more diverse sets of human beings then we changed and opened up our hiring processes to avoid biases what we had learned was that when we had a hiring situation and they're hired 20 30 people the last 12 months we tended to end up hiring ourselves because the process wasn't good enough it wasn't structured enough so when push comes to shove I can more easily understand me than you so I ended up hiring me 20 30 times over so we had to change our entire hiring process and also open up that process to the world so that future candidates could see how we're hiring what we're looking for then we launched a diversity dashboard again showing the world how we're doing where we are doing well and we were doing not so well but daring to be transparent and then we did something very important we agree that it is okay to take longer to hire if you're looking for something in particular many come to me and say yeah that's all well and good but I have to hire the best candidates I have to saying that for me is as futile as saying as there's one person out there that you can have a more intimate relationship with if that was true you could never have a girlfriend or a boyfriend so that's true in a hiring situation as well there's always 10 20 candidates that are just a fit for the role but you have to give yourself the time to actually find that person and then comes the most important part I think a lot of companies fail to do you have to work hard you have to work hard on this and you have to learn and you have to iterate it will not be perfect the first time you have to do it again and again and again and then what you have to do you have to work harder this is not easy as anything you want to accomplish with a company you have to actually put a resources needed behind it and you have to be willing to change the company accordingly to achieve your goals that holds true for gender diversity as well so you have to want it you have to work hard and you have to work harder that's our secret recipe it's not like some magic bullet or a secret formula you just have to work really hard at it and this is just the start of our journey we have an internal ambition and goals to get this up to 50 percent we want to show other 10 companies that if you want this enough and if you work hard enough you can actually bring the gender balance up to where it should be matching the world around us 50 50 but there is another element that we can never escape and that is time there is 24 hours in a day and that's time restrained goes for all of us man or woman rich or poor and I had an experience a personal experience that led me to understand that this is a multifaceted topic it's not only what goes on in the workplace it's bigger than that so couple of months ago I was on a train ride with my daughter just me and her and we went into the family compartment and we saw this sign this is the sign for family on Norwegian trains it's fair to say that I didn't really feel at home so I went together with a designer and we changed the logo to something more fitting for me as a father and we sent it to NSB which is a train company no reaction but that's not the point of the story what I saw I'm gonna kind of internalize that day is that fixing something in the workplace is only half the story you have to also think about how you fix this at home because I was clearly not seen as a parent in in from that that's a certain interaction so if we don't think about the family life at the same time I think it will be harder for us to reach the 50% and the family perspective is something that we all have to think about all the time because this is a fact in Norway less men take paternity leave it's a downward trend men take less paternity leave it's a downward trend more women get custody of the breakups and more women take chores at home so well I think that the tech companies need to want it they need to work hard and work harder I think we need to expect the same from the family they need to want it they need to work hard and they need to work harder this is a picture you get if you search for work-life balance on certain picture services this is a sad sad picture so why is this important why do we need to focus on both what goes on in the companies and what goes on in the families it's very visible in this picture we need to fix this for this poor fellow that is not seeing his kid he's in the computer is building his tech startup he's not seeing the family we need to fix this for him we need to fix this for her she's only seeing the family she's not seeing the tech startup that's being built a computer away she needs to look up from that family and allow that man to come into it but most of all most of all we need to fix this for this poor little fellow because he's growing up seeing how his parents are both building tech companies and families and he or her will copy them so we all have to work harder on the companies we're building and the families that we're forming thank you