 I want to now invite to the stage our panelists. I'm going to introduce each one of you if you'd please come on up to the stage. Kim Bannerman, our emcee. A 12 year veteran of the tech industry, Kim started out in consulting and moved to business development before finding her passion in the community and developer relations space. She founded the Seattle chapter of Startup Chicks and both the Atlanta and Seattle Cloud Foundry Meetup Groups. When she's not on an airplane, she's helping her blended family of four daughters and one son navigate through everything from coding camps to high school and college. Opal Perry, Opal Perry is the vice president and divisional chief information officer for claims at Allstate Insurance where she leads a global engineering team focused on digital transformation. Opal is active in creating and enhancing diverse technology communities and organizations and is also an executive sponsor of the Allstate Pride Employee Resource Group which promotes an inclusive work environment for LGBTQ Allstate employees and their allies. The US Air Force veteran, Opal and her wife, Lisa, currently reside in Evanston, Illinois. Kyla McMullen is a tenure track faculty member at the University of Florida. She earned her master's and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan where she is the first underrepresented woman to graduate with a doctor in computer science and engineering. She is also the conference chair for the National Society of Blacks in Computing. Cornelia Davis is senior director of technology at Pivotal where she works on the technology strategy for both Pivotal and for Pivotal customers. She is an industry veteran with almost three decades of experience in image processing, scientific visualization, distributed systems and web application architectures and cloud native platforms. Cornelia is also an activist working on achieving a better gender balance in technology related disciplines and is active with the girls who code. When she's not doing these things you can find her on a yoga mat or in her kitchen. And finally, Rachel Reynitz is an IBM fellow and CTO of IBM Bluemix Garage. The Bluemix Garages are consulting labs housed in starting communities that partner with clients of all sizes to transform how they design, develop and deploy engaging cloud applications. She leads clients on adoption of new technologies and is currently focused on applying agile methods to building cloud applications with clients. Welcome. So, do you want to do each panelist? Each panelist is going to tell a little story, supporting or in response to the framework and then we're gonna open it up to questions on the floor. All right, so get them ready. Kim, why don't you start? Sure. So about five years ago I kind of came to a crossroads in my career. I wanted off the hamster wheel of managing national sales teams to be on an airplane all the time, funny enough I'm still on airplanes, it's fine. Good thing I like to travel. And I wanted to do something different and so women in tech friend of mine and she said, what are your superpowers? Like what are you talking about? She already knew. And so she convinced me to apply for a position inside of her company, working for a very supportive CTO and a great team of folks and that was tier three CenturyLink and that's how I started this journey with Clifondry. But really the story I want to tell is I was always the person behind the scenes elevating other people and I still love to do that. That's one of my favorite things, especially if you're doing great work in our community, in your new, I want to make people feel welcome, right? So I've never really spoke at a conference before and two things happened. It was my first interconnect when I worked at IBM and the CTO that I reported to said, what is up with this panel? It's the same people all the time. What are we doing here? And they said, you know what, like you're so right. Let's mix it up a little bit. Rachel spoke, he put me up there and I was like, oh no, you don't want to put me up there. He's like, you can do that. No, I'm serious. Like I just got here back in October. This is like March. Like I'm still kind of sort of ripping up. He's like, you got it. It's a 10 minute light and talk, you can do it. He sat down with me. He gave me his deck. We prepped speaker nose. It was amazing. He really spent a ton of time with me that he didn't have on his calendar to get me ready for this. And I sat at the table and I went right after the OpenSec Foundation spoke and Claude Founder was speaking after that and Sam Ramji was sitting next to me and he said, just focus on me. He's like, I've heard you speak before. This is gonna totally be fine. And he said, I know people say don't focus on someone in the audience because that's when you mess up and you forget your lines. He's like, but it'll be fine. And so that's what I did. And that was the first time I ever spoke in front of a big crowd like that other than to close, you know, customer or something like that. And we're 17, I think 15 or 1700 people in the room. It was insane. And after that, I was like, oh wow, okay. I can do this. This is great. A lot to people that call themselves allies. I wanna say, make sure that you're doing the work as well. You kind of tie that off. And also don't just lean on the diversity in your community to do all the hard work, right? And those are kind of two things that can tie into these push and pull things inside of a community or a company. And if I was not for those key people in my life in the last five years, there's no way I'd be doing what I really love to do right now. So. For me, it's, I'm a very affiliative person. So it's all about the team. It's all about that cohesive team that's doing big things. And I've had the opportunity throughout my career and in the last six years at Allstate to be part of a number of different teams. And I love each team. You know, I've got special memories and special things we do together. But really over the last three years, I've been the most thrilled at our composed labs effort where we've been building lean and agile methods and labs at Allstate. And I've just been, I've been so thrilled because I came into Allstate. I was recruited in as a change agent to help transform technology. And it's a big mission. And I had a lot of ideas and was working with other people and initiatives. But after a few years, you know, you start going like, I know we're making progress, but there's still so much more to be done. And I had some other colleagues coming in from other roles and other sides. And I remember when I sat down with our head and had an infrastructure one day to talk to him. And I was just kind of geeking out, trying to sell him on all the stuff I wanted to do around CI, CD pipelines. And he was like, oh my God, you're the first person here that's talked to me about Chef and Puppet and all these things. And then I knew I had a kindred spirit. And as he started picking up speed within the organization and my good friend who ran the PMO came in, which is a really non-traditional thing and a lean and agile transformation. Like a lot of companies talk about, the PMO is gonna be the last bastion of resistance to new ways of working. And she just jumped right on board and we had this really diverse senior leadership team getting the support and then empowering other people throughout the enterprise to do it. And it's been thrilling to me. I was on assignment for almost two years in Belfast, Northern Ireland. And it was really meaningful to me too that we created a global leadership team with people from different backgrounds and skills. It was doing the work together but it's just also the organic way it started coming together to me. There's all the direct work and when you find yourself having the sidebar with people and finding commonality or you start to realize like somebody had a really bad day or week and then everybody's just even on a text message chained together venting and supporting each other or people notice you look a little down in the hallway. Like there's so many different ways it's expressed but it's that real spirit of belonging. And then when you start accomplishing things as a team the real pride to be able to see it reflected in other people not just in yourself. So that's just really, really thrilling to me. The common theme going on here very much like Opal with this sense of community and belonging. My story is actually towards the very beginning of my journey when I was in high school. I didn't know what I wanted to major in but looking back I should have known because every single toy I had was computerized. I wanted everything that had a screen but when I was in high school every person who ever did computer science I'm like well that's not me, that doesn't look like me. So you know in high school I'm like all right well do I have to just not have any friends and I'm gonna get a Dragon Ball Z T-shirt and just not care about my hair and just like I was literally in my head trying to figure out how in the world do I turn into a white boy to do this class. Like that was exactly what I said to myself if I can be candid but in the end I was like you know I'm just gonna take the class and if I don't like it I can switch to something else. So then there was also a new teacher who came in, Mr. Ware and Mr. Ware was someone who had just completed his master so he was still very young. He was a black man who was studying computer science and you know we do the warm up exercise. He could talk to us about the basketball game and then come back and we talk about logic. And I really remember having that thought in my head like whoa he is a normal person and he is doing computer science and just having that sort of depiction of a person who I didn't see as you know kind of being weird or eccentric because who wants to sign up for that right? So I wanted to just have just a picture of someone who I could attain to be even though we're two different genders. I said you know what here I'm actually my big brother. You know I can see myself following in those steps. So the importance of just having someone that you can look up to whose shoes you can see yourselves in is just it was transformative for me. So the first thing I have to say before I even tell my story is I just tweeted any day that you have a chance to meet Karen Holtzblatt is a really good day. Unbelievable. So thank you. So you know it's interesting because I've been doing this for about 30 years and I almost never have thought about leaving because I really really really really love what I do and I had for the first 25 years that I was doing this I would occasionally notice that I was the only woman in the room or a room of 50 people but for the most part I didn't really pay that much attention to it. And in reflection, I mean this definitely speaks to the the belonging part. It's to somewhat a bit of a reflection of the way that I grew up because I was the kid I was the girl who didn't care about gender when I was a kid I was out there playing soccer with the boys. And so I actually always had a lot of male friends and I think that that allowed me to be part of that group and not see that as a barrier. So that's certainly part of my story but the other part of the framework that really resonates with me and I thank you for this because it actually took a weight off my shoulders is that I'm a woman and am I really supposed to just be interested in socially relevant programs? Because I kind of felt bad that what really got me going was whatever cool technology problem was out there. And so I think that you've given me permission not to fit in a particular box. You've given me permission to really look at that and say yes, in fact, I consider myself a change junkie. And so being in this technology area is the perfect place for being a change junkie. And if you look at that table that Karen showed, by far and away the tallest bar in that bar chart was learning something new. And so that really, really resonated with me. And the fact that it's the same things that motivate men in the field is just eye-opening. That's liberating. Thank you. Rachel, you wanna wrap us up? Yeah, so we're gonna talk about family. So I was progressing my career. I was a fairly senior technical leader in IBM and heading towards the next level, which is the significant level becoming a technical executive and distinguished engineer. And I was at a point in my life where I was like, all right, if I wanna have a child, I need to do it soon. And I did not have a partner. And so then it's like, all right, am I gonna have a child, am I gonna do this on my own? I had a great discussion with some friends of mine and I said, you know, I don't know about doing this and I'm worried about my career and the impact. And one of my friends said to me, he said, you know, you will gain skills that will help you in your career. I was like, really? He was absolutely right. I was an inpatient person and I am now a patient person. According to me, according to my 12-year-old, not so much. But you know, and it's amazing how it worked. I take care of all these things and I'm patient and I negotiate and I get home and my 12-year-old goes, I'm like, what, you know, it's definitely very different. So I had my daughter. I did donor insemination. I was very open about it at work, including to my senior vice president when I was up for promotion. And it was fine, it was fine. But to reach that next level required a lot of travel. You know, it required being networked. It required being known. I was actually in consulting when I had my daughter and doing so, I also talked with my VP at the time, like I can't do the same kind of work. I traveled 75% before I had my daughter and she found me a role that was more internally facing but still in the same area, leveraging the skills I led, service oriented architecture and taking out to the field for IBM. And I figured it out. And the company did support me. We were talking about, they didn't pay for the nanny or anything, but I lived with my sister so I did have a co-parent and she would travel with me. My mother would travel with me. And some of the time it was great. My daughter's been to Istanbul. My daughter's been to Madrid. She can tell you that's the Iosofia, stuff like that. However, it's not always great either when you go to Austin and they're in a hotel room and my daughter's sick and you have to go find a pediatrician or a jet lag kid is not a fun thing. So it's trade-offs. Honestly, it's been harder more recently. So with going towards IBM Fellow and just with the Blumix Garage going worldwide so I have nine labs throughout the world, it's actually become more demanding in terms of travel. And my daughter is more demanding in terms of being more vocal and feeling more like I'm not there enough and things like that. And I have cut back on some of that. Again, you can ask my daughter what she thinks but and it is this weird time of the solilo... It's a constant trade-off. There's a lot of trade-offs, right? But I do feel like I am a successful parent. I like my daughter most of the time. My mother says I'm a good daughter. I also have the aging parent thing and they promoted me. So it's going okay. But there's always trade-offs. And so I guess my core message to you is everyone's path is unique. And you are in a privileged position to start out with. You are educated. You are educated in a field that is in demand, right? You can find the companies, you can find the supportive organizations. As long as you keep developing your skills and you keep current, you will have choices. So you can make your own path and you do have to make choices along the way and decide whether you're gonna have a kid and how you're gonna do that. But you're in a great situation to do all kinds of terrific things. Thank you so much. So, encouraging stories, a little nearer to home than RBG. Questions? Who's got a question? I was wondering, has any of you ever considered leaving tech and if you cared to share the story? Yeah, there's been points. It's funny because I was having this conversation earlier this week. I said, so I've been in tech almost well over 12 years. And if I had known what I shouldn't have been putting up with a long time ago when I first started out in tech, I don't think I would still be here. I just felt like that was just how life was. And like you had to put up with these microaggressions. You have to put up with these comments. You have to put up with various things that happened from all different types of people and we don't. I wanted to leave tech about, the first time I said I want to rage quit tech was about six months ago. And I don't want to get into, it was a compounding different things that were happening and various places of getting interrupted, all these crazy things that I thought we had left behind a long time ago. But yeah, it gives me more value to be here than to leave. And that's why I stay. Somebody else wanna share? Yeah, I'll chime in. I think that it's been rare. I will say that it's gotten harder the further I get in my career, which I don't think is unusual. I think that there's fewer people, fewer women, the further you get in your career. And so it has gotten harder. And referring back to the framework, it wasn't said directly, but indirectly in some of the things, it was about those stretch assignments. It was about getting the opportunity to learn that new thing and do that new thing. And that when those opportunities aren't coming, that's when I wonder at this stage of my career, am I gonna get those opportunities? Is somebody gonna help move me to the point where I get the next stretch goal? Because that is something that is documented and understood that women don't tend to be given the opportunities for the stretch goals as often as men. And that it hasn't gotten to the point where I wanna leave the industry, but it's one of those things where I wonder whether I'm gonna get that opportunity to move to the next level. So I think that's something that we as an industry really need to look at. Kind of sponsorship. Well, I think this is where push and support comes, right? So you can hear her. And around her, she's looking for someone to push. And what I'm hoping is if you know you need push and support, go get someone and say, I need a push. Would you please do it? Cause I can't tell you, it works if you do it that way. Okay, so don't give up. Remember guys are just guys. They're your little brothers and those annoying little boys that you played with. Do not forget that's what they really like on the inside, okay? Other questions from our young people. So I've heard like all these horror stories of like these like aspiring engineers and like computer scientists like that walk into college and as soon as they start taking like these math courses and all that, like they get bored and they back out and like they have to completely like reorient their focus. So like, was there any like ever a time in your like educational like part of tech like that you found to be boring as like push past? Oh my God, yes. I took material science and my professor was a monotone. It was Friday morning and a friend of mine was a TA for the class and I'd seen him out drinking Thursday nights like I haven't seen your homework, you know? And it was the worst class. I did the worst in it in my college career, but you know, I did pass, right? So, you know, there's some stuff you just got to motor through, right? You know, I mean, it's not all exciting, cool. I had some great professors like physics was awesome, but that's just, I mean, that's life no matter what you study, right? Economics was not fun either and that wasn't a tech class. I had some really tough times probably for a variety of different reasons. And I think my salvation was finding networks of friends. I was on the crew team and there was a great group that were from all different majors. And that was sort of like where I would go to my refuge when I had a tough time. Some of it was just the academics were really challenging. I was studying computer engineering. I had always done super well in my high school and then you just hit this, you know, you kind of maybe the big fish in the small pond of high school and then I'm at university and I'm in this really big pond of all of these people that seem to find their direction. Some of it, honestly, I was studying computer engineering and there's one other woman who graduated in my year in my class back then and there was just even some like blatant sexism. I remember having a male lab partner we went to talk to our professor about what we were doing and he like engaged with my male lab partner and then he turned and he looked at me and he said, well, what did you do this weekend? And it was just like, wow, this is, you know, I'm here to like try to absorb all this knowledge. And in addition to whatever's just challenging to me, there's someone not even willing to interface. But again, I just found my way by going and finding the groups and the supportive elements, the male and female classmates and people that just were like, no, you can do this, we can do this. Let's make it happen. And I'm so glad I persevered, but I definitely, I've never thought since I've been professionally out in the field about leaving, but I had some moments at university of thinking like, is this what's right for me? And I've been so pleased I personally persevered. I can think of just one mentality you should think of. So I actually teach an intro to Java freshman 500 person sort of course. And one thing that I've noticed is that lots of people will come when they're the valedictorian, salutatorian, top 1% of their high schools and they haven't experienced much adversity. So if you come in already saying, you know what, this is going to be a challenge and you can accept, okay, I may not be good at everything but I have the resources, I have the skills, I can build these networks to become better at it. Cause those are the students you typically see that they're very talented but they may just fall by the wayside and dropped out as you mentioned because they're not used to ever having anything be hard. So I would say just going with the mentality, this is going to be hard but guess what? You're a rubber band, you can just bounce back. Thank you. That's college in general. Yeah. Nice class. Yeah. Another question. Just wanted to say thank you for sharing all of your stories. It's been very helpful. And my question for you is when you do have those moments of doubt or you feel maybe I'm not good enough or maybe I'm not the best, how do you get past that? And what do you tell yourself? And how do you make it work? I go to people I'm close to, for some of the dialogue, because some of it's correct. I just had this happen. I've been asked to do something, to run something that I haven't done before and I talked with my VP about it and I say, I can do this, it's not that I can't do it but I have not done this before. And he's like, we're gonna get you help and I also have some stuff going on personal side and he's like, you're not in it on your own. And I have an idea, I have this great idea I got while I'm here and I'm gonna go talk to my best buddy Kyle, right? And I can go to Kyle and ask him all the stupid questions. There are questions that I don't really wanna ask, I don't wanna show that I don't know stuff sometimes, right? But with Kyle, I have 100% credibility and he's brilliant. If he agrees with me, it's a good idea and he'll also help me take it forward. So it's, for me, it's finding those people and sometimes it is the self-talk that just says you can do this, you know? One of the things that it applies even more broadly then to just your question there is that sometimes, I mentioned, they mentioned in my intro that I practice yoga and one of my favorite yoga instructors once said, suffering is the resistance to what is. And so when those voices, I agree with Karen, shoo him away, but at the same time, having a little bit of shoo it away in kind of a, okay, it's there. Acknowledge that it's okay, I'm feeling bad and don't stress about you feeling bad about yourself. Just send it on its way. It's kinda like the monkey mind, you send it on its way. And then the other thing is just telling yourself, look, I have felt like this before and I figured it out. And you will feel like that again and you will figure it out. And so after a while, you start to realize, gee, every single time I feel this way, it's okay, acknowledge it, let it be there, but I always figure it out and that makes it easier to send that on its way. So you will figure it out. Just one of the things people like when I talk about this, self-doubt is the inner noise of trying to do something new. There's no such thing as knowing how to tango before you take a lesson. And so those beginning times, you're gonna feel like you don't know how to dance. You're not in any flow. You're supposed to feel like that. Anytime you take up something new. I've been doing this 30 years. And when I said I think I'll address women in tech, that's exactly how I felt. Ooh, will anyone listen to me, blah, blah, blah. Just because you have a feeling doesn't mean you stop, you just go hi. Oh, I guess I'm doing something hard. Who else wants to share on that? I'm gonna apologize real quick. I have a 230 session that I'm speaking at. So I'm going to thank you all and excuse myself. We aren't stopping till 230 though, right? So what's that? Right? I mean, we're still on time, right? We have about a minute. Yeah, I'm on a different stage. I'm on a different stage here too, right? Thank you. So I don't know if we want one last comment. I did want to say one other comment. So yeah, that's definitely a feeling that you can have. And aside from making sure you have the positive self-talk, I actually asked my boss if I could see my letters of recommendation from my job and they were open. And I felt so awesome. Like these people think these things about me. Like it's, you know, just reading and I come back to it from time to time. So if ever you have something where people just said positive things about you, like it'll be like, I can do this. I get this. Somebody told me to make a happy file. Probably like six years ago. And I was like, what's that? No, all the little text messages, all the little tweets, all the little emails, things like that. And you just put them all in a folder and, you know, in a cloud and you like, whatever, put them on a, you know, a USB drive, however you want to do it. And so I really thought that was a little silly. And I was like, well, why would I want to do that? I've got all these different, you know, platforms. And of course we remember MySpace, right? That's gone. Not, I mean, it's not really, but it is. I mean, so I'm like, well, what if these things do go away? You want to show my countdown? That's actually a pretty good idea. So I started, I kind of put it all together when I was kind of in this transition period before I'm on the path I'm on now. And so I just, I just add little things to the happy file. And then when I feel awful or I'm in tears or what's happening and I just go through and I just start reading through the happy file. It works. I think that's great. You guys have really great positive strategies. I need to use more of those. I have to admit, I've also learned in my life, like if I think I can't do something or shouldn't do something or I'm not the best person to do it and I see it an opportunity and then someone incompetent gets that opportunity and I have to sit there and be a victim of, that's when you're incompetent and say, I remember that now when I think, why me? Because who else is it going to be? And to try to step into that opportunity. I want to mention one other thing that's kind of related which is you need to forgive yourself when you make mistakes. Everybody screws up. Everybody says the thing they shouldn't, right? Everybody interrupts their boss at some point when they shouldn't, you know? There are some things that you can avoid. The thing is to learn from it and to move on and forgive yourself and that's very important because if you're afraid of making those mistakes, you won't put yourself forward and you won't take risk, right? And it was great. I had a team member tell me that she's been really inspired because I acknowledge my mistakes to my team. I'll say you're totally right. I got that one wrong, you know? And it's really inspired her to feel more like she can share and doesn't have to hide that maybe something and go the way it should, those kinds of things. Well, everybody, great panel, yes? Come do something, yeah? I'm expecting it. I want to see emails and things like that. Telling me what you tried and come up and talk to me and you know, be part of the, be part of the change. Thank you all.