 Next speaker is Jill Anderson. She is Executive Vice President of Operations for Southern California Edison, one of the nation's largest electrical utilities. Prior to her current position, Ms. Anderson was Senior Vice President of Customer Service. She also served as Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning and Power Supply at Southern California Edison. She received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering degree from Boston University and an MBA from the New York University. Ms. Anderson serves or has served as member of numerous boards and has been recognized with many honors and awards, including top executive women in business. Welcome, Jill Anderson, and thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much. And I'm also gonna share a little bit of material to help supplement some of my talk. So thank you so much for having me today. I think that this has been really interesting to listen so far and I think the kind of topic that I'm gonna cover and dive into a little bit about how diversity, equity, and inclusion is thriving business decisions here at the firm I work for, Southern California Edison. I think that'll be a good compliment to some of the other speakers as we think about kind of how can diversity and advancing leaders in underrepresented groups help to advance some of our broader objectives. So I'm just gonna page through a few slides here, but the first thing I wanna actually do before I get into any details and specifics around who I work for and what we've been doing, I wanna introduce you to Ruby Rose-Yepez. So Ruby is one of more than 13,000 employees that we have at Edison. She's just one person out of so many who are working to help our company be a lot more diverse and a lot more inclusive. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about more about her and about what she's doing and how we are using diverse voices like Ruby's overall in my message today. But I think the main thing I want you to take away is that we see how diversity and inclusion and the progress in this really important area can really happen just one person at a time. So you're gonna hear more about Ruby, but let me start out talking to you a little bit more about what I do and what we do with Southern California Edison. So I'm the executive vice president of operations. I'm responsible for all the teams that are performing operations across the company. It's, we have 50,000 square mile service area. It's almost half of California. We serve 15 million customers. It's really significant when you think about the scope of what we're doing. We're supplying electricity to some of the most diverse populations in the country. And we also are, if you think about the service area that we have, it's from the ocean front and beautiful neighborhoods that are looking out in the ocean all the way up into the mountains. We actually have outages this weekend from some pretty significant snow events and then into the high desert. So our landscape is very diverse and our customers themselves, they speak dozens of languages. We do not have any single majority race or ethnic group. We've got some of the wealthiest people in the country and some of the most disadvantaged. And as a utility, unlike some other competitive businesses as a utility, we have to serve everyone. And so we can't slice out just a specific part of the population that's easiest for us or that we could reach the most cost effectively, that brings the highest margin. We have to power everyone. It's our job to keep the product that we sell affordable and accessible and safe. And part of that also is the vision that we have for where energy is going in the future. So right now, obviously we're 24 seven, we're focused on being safe in our operations and delivering energy to customers. We're keeping the lights on and the power flowing where we're helping all of our customers live their best life. But at the same time, we're really looking forward into the future. And this is an important part about why diversity is so critical to our mission. And so we think about the future in how the grid itself is getting greener. We think about it in electric vehicles and in clean buildings. And all of this is gonna require a huge change in how we operate as a utility. And that means that we are gonna require tens of millions of cars and trucks and appliances and nearly every single customer is going to be impacted as we make this major transformation in the business. And that means that we have to be able to reach all of that diverse landscape, those diverse communities. We have to be able to meet them where they are. We have to be able to understand what they need and speak their languages. And to do any of that well, we are gonna need people on our team who are woven into those communities, who understand the customers who we need to connect with. And that's where I would say diversity and inclusion, maybe where our story begins or where we are rooted as a business. And so I wanna share a little bit about how we are doing as a company. And I'll use the statistics for our parent company which is Edison International. I would say objectively, we are pretty far along the path as far as getting to a very diverse leadership team and a diverse workforce. But we also have work to do in a lot of important areas. As I said, it moves forward one person at a time with people like Ruby. And it gets down to really every hiring decision, every time we're creating a project team, every person that we're inviting to a meeting, what kind of development programs we had. We heard from the speakers before who benefited from those kind of programs. Who are we choosing to mentor? Each one of those individual decisions is what then rolls up into these big numbers that you see on this slide. And I won't go through each of the numbers but I think what is important is to understand that we believe that not only is being serious and focused about diversity and inclusion going to provide opportunities for people to thrive, for people to really be their best selves at work and therefore contribute as much as possible to where we're going. But it also benefits our customers. And we think that it's benefiting the industry as a whole. So we are trying to make sure that through, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the actions that we're taking but we really see it opportunity to be a leader in diversity in the energy industry and really in corporate America at large. So some of that also, as I said, comes down to the individual. And so I wanna dive a little bit more into Ruby. And Ruby is a senior advisor. She works in Southern California Edison's customer service team. She's such a great example of an individual who is making a difference. A little bit more about her background, like all of us here on the panel, she is a STEM education. She's an architect by training. She's passionate about clean buildings and helping our customers electrify and reduce or eliminate their dependence on fossil fuels. She isn't an official company spokesman. She doesn't work in our corporate communications department. She isn't an executive with a big fancy job title. She still has an incredible potential to connect with our customers and inspire other employees and other potential recruits to come and join our business. I've got a couple of screenshots here of videos that she puts out. As you can see, she's being very down to earth. She's right there in her own house, standing in her own driveway, talking about programs that are available to our customers and how she as a customer is taking advantage of those programs. We're looking at, while it's just one person, and when she first started doing this kind of outreach and posting this kind of material online, maybe she was reaching a couple of hundred people, you can see from the comments in the people who are asking her questions and who are engaging or sharing her content that she is reaching people. And so we're looking at opportunities like this, people like Ruby and looking ways to scale the reach that she has, putting the content that she's putting together out on our own broader corporate platforms and showing that really building and growing and being a diverse company is not something that we can delegate to a department called diversity. Often you have, maybe you have a chief diversity officer, you have an HR group who's in charge of tracking your statistics and putting together the slides like the one I showed you prior. To me, it's people like Ruby who are the ones who are helping us, one person at a time, one program at a time, one customer at a time, make a major difference in big steps forward in diversity. You know, I think it's important that we celebrate our progress and that we celebrate people like Ruby and we look at all of the, you know, some of the statistics I showed you before on how well we're doing, but we also, if we're going to continue to make meaningful change, we have to recognize and acknowledge the areas where we're not doing so well. So, you know, where I mentioned, or I can flip backwards, you can see where 70% of the company is considered diverse, but at the same time, we have only 36% of our executives right now are female and similar to the statistics that some of the pledges that Dr. Kaufman just shared, we also have pledges to get to a better representation of females and executives all the way to what we call the, we've signed the paradigm for parody gender equity pledge, where by 2030, we want to have equity in the leadership on gender. Now, there's other targeted efforts that we've done where we've created a skilled craft scholarship program specifically to attract black and African-American colleagues into our workforce, into our field and craft workforce. We've done education programs across the company in workforce and inclusion. And I also loved hearing Dr. Kaufman talk about being a part of a resource group. We have 12 business resource groups at Southern California Edison. And these are representing, you know, all kinds of interests of our team members from Caregivers Connect, which is about people caring for family members or elderly. I'm in that. I've got two young kids at home. So I'm pretty active in our Caregivers Connect program. We have Asian Pacific and Islander programs. We've got LGBTQ and even, you know, people who are focused in environmental or, you know, all across interests that we focus and we fund and we promote where we are encouraging people to become leaders in these organizations so that through that grassroots effort, they can help improve our workplace for people who have these shared interests. And so the last part I wanted to talk about is getting a little bit more about me and what I feel like I'm doing as an individual trying to help other individuals on this path to being a more diverse workplace, not just for my business, right, but for the whole industry. So, you know, my background is I'm a female in a male-dominated industry. I've worked in power plants and construction sites on engineering teams. And I would say for about 20 years, I have pretty much been one of the only women in the room, you know, in the classroom or on a project or in a boardroom or whatever have you. And it took me some time to be honest, to be comfortable in the concept that when you're the only woman in the room, that you're a role model. Some, you know, you're representing your gender to the other people who are in the room. You know, they think sometimes things you say or is, you know, representing, you know, whatever underrepresented group is not there. But also a role model to the people who look like you or who identify like you, but are earlier in their career and making decisions about their life and their choices that might be modeling after you. And so, once I kind of accepted this additional responsibility and saw not only the obligation in it, but also the privilege and the honor in being able to be someone who, you know, at this point in my career, I have a big job title. I'm leading a big team. I have 10,000 people in the operations organization that report up to me. I feel like this incredible opportunity that I have right now, I can be a champion of people in a way that makes a big difference in somebody's career. You know, I can work with others to really help move the needle on diversity, modeling it in my own actions and then also by holding my own leadership team accountable for what kind of contributions they're making for us being more diverse. But I still come back to that central premise that I've used throughout my talk here today that, you know, I think making a big difference can happen really still one person at a time. And so I selected a couple of examples on the slide here where these are all screenshots from Instagram where, you know, I'm giving a talk at a science-based camp in, you know, for summer school or bringing colleagues along with me to site visits or customer visits, really celebrating the successes of other colleagues underrepresented and people who are coming up in their career. Because I really believe that every interaction we have is an opportunity for us to make a deeper connection and have a positive impact on somebody's life. I'll give you one last quick example as I close. So I speak at a lot of internal events and I did a career conversation with a group of about a hundred people a few weeks ago. And at the end of my talk, I just invited anybody who wants to reach out to me and I'd be happy to connect one-on-one with you. And so one of the people who did a woman named Maribel, she took me up and we exchanged a couple of emails and I realized she's been at the company for about a year. I realized she'd probably benefit from some of the site visits that I had coming up. So I invited her to come along and she joined me out on a customer, looking at a solar and battery project. And we spent the whole day together. And for me, it was such a beneficial opportunity for me and I hope so for her because she got to see something that is laid out and set up for me to see but she got to come along, got to meet directly with a customer and I benefited with just her enthusiasm and energy and that excitement that comes from being one year into your job, being just one year out of, in this case, her engineering degree. And I think that that kind of action which really was no effort for me, the whole activity was gonna happen anyway but letting Maribel come along with me hopefully made her feel more included, made her feel more seen and let her have a front row seat to a job she might have in the future if she aspires at some point to rise up to this level. And so I see that as an opportunity where I'm out and I can keep doing that weekly. And I think what I hope to have a takeaway for everyone here is that it's a big problem. The gaps are still pretty large. We have a lot of ground to cover before we can be as diverse and inclusive as a world as we wanna be for our own children. But if each one of us sees it as our responsibility and sees an opportunity where we can make a difference in one other person's life, I think that the progress we can make in the next decade will be tremendous. And so I'll just close with that, close with my own contact information if anyone wants to connect on social media or reach out to me other ways. And thank you so much for including me in your talk today.