 Thank you so much for coming. I know that it's a terrible traffic morning And we expect that people will continue to trickle in as they stagger out of the metro or out of uber, which is apparently charging triple Rate this morning taking advantage of the traffic problems in DC. We were just chatting about that in the corridor I'm Liza Mundy. I'm a DC area journalist and director of the bread-winning and caregiving program here at New America Which is a fancy term for our work family program We are dedicated to the reality that men and women alike are breadwinners and caregivers these days then we need to Innovate and update our workplace and government policies to recognize that and to make it more possible for men and women to fulfill these obligations, so we're very interested in work-life balance, but we're also very interested in inclusion and gender inclusion in in all Sectors of the of the labor market and obviously we'll be talking about the tech sector today And New America for those of you in case you haven't been here. We're about a decade old. We're a think tank dedicated to new ideas and Creating a safe place for the radical center To coming up with ideas that are are not not that are independent minded and non-partisan So we're very happy to have you here this morning We're very happy to have Vivek Wadhwa here to talk about the book of essays that he Has put together and contributed to called innovating women looking at the the situation for women in the American tech sector and this is a this is an area I think that we're hoping to do more and more work in because Women have made inroads into a lot of fields that they were shut out of for a long time Medicine these days has been pretty hospitable to women doctors their fields of medicine like pediatrics and OBGYN But not just those fields also fields like dermatology and some surgical fields that are dominated by women now Psychology accounting veterinary medicine The these are fields that have flipped from being majority male to being majority female. So women are doing well in some Some of our white-collar professions, but the tech sector is has been a really hard nut for women to crack and I was thinking some research I was doing recently about the the US Senate. I was astonished to To learn that as early as the 1990s in the US Senate There had only ever been one or two female senators at any given time So back those of you who remember the Anita Hill hearings or who've even heard of the Anita Hill hearings Even at that point there had only been one or two women in the US Senate. It's a little better in the Senate today We've got 20 women senators. So we're one fifth, but the tech sector is kind of like the US Senate in the 1950s, I mean, it's it's really it's really extraordinary. So So Vivek is going to talk about why that is and what we can do about it just as a little bit of an introduction He has affiliations that any number of distinguished universities. You're affiliated with Duke University here on the East Coast, but you live in Silicon Valley and you're affiliated with Stanford and also with Singularity University and so And I think for people in the DC area may also know you from your you're writing on leadership for the Washington Post so You had it sounds like kind of an epiphany moment when you realize even though you lived in Silicon Valley It sort of took an epiphany for you to realize how absent women are And I wonder if you could just talk about that moment Yeah, we moved to Silicon Valley about four four and a half years ago my wife said she wanted to be there so we moved to Silicon Valley and I had been researching entrepreneurship. I had been researching US immigration policy and I was in love with Silicon Valley. I mean I called it the perfect meritocracy I wrote about how amazing it was how welcome it was to immigrants because it has documented that 52% of the startups in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants and they were immigrants from all over the world It wasn't one country was practically every country you can name had founders who were creating Silicon Valley companies So I thought it was a model of what any industry should be Diverse it as possible could possibly be and I've also been researching entrepreneurship I had documented what makes an entrepreneur what makes them tip. I've been working very closely with Kaufman Foundation and a lot of their Their work on entrepreneurship over the last few years was with you know in collaboration with my teams and And You know excited we went to Silicon Valley I also as a hobby do writing so I used to write for business week and then when I went there I got invited by the local tech blog tech crunch to write for them tech crunch is like the Washington Post of Silicon Valley and I was at a tech crunch my big tech crunch event. This is literally about four or five months after landing at Silicon Valley and We're sitting there me we we have happened to be seated in the the front area and Mark Zuckerberg was sitting next to us and it was amazing You know this little kid wearing a hoodie and then you look at him He's the box okay, but you read about so I was sort of you know It was like you know, oh, wow look at who is sitting next to so my wife in the middle of the Event says like you know something strange over here. I said, yeah, we're sitting next to Mark Zuckerberg Did you didn't you recognize him? She says no no no no look around well, what don't you see and I know my first impression was well, they're mostly young kids So I didn't say that and I mean I played dumb I mean in fact I was dumb and she says where the women she got really angry at me where the women and It was like the Twilight Zone if you folks watch the Twilight Zone It's like getting into an alien world and suddenly you see something is wrong imagine going to city and Everything looks normal to you until you notice there are no children Right, or they're no in this case. There are no women in the audience. It was almost all male And we started watching very closely was happening on stage. There were two women that whole evening on stage one was Staff that there was a circus performer No women on stage And it was like I mean after she said that that whole evening started bothering me Where are the women where the women what's going on over here because I was writing for Tech Rancher I wasn't taking any money from them. I was just writing for them because It was my way of giving back to Silicon Valley and it was a cool tech blog so I could write stupid things and in the tech blog that I couldn't get away with in academic publications or in business week so I was writing provocative articles for them and It was a weird experience Where are the women and then I went back home? I didn't sleep much last night because I started thinking, you know Flashback to my own research. I had been researching Silicon Valley and I realized that in all the entrepreneurship research I had done for Kaufman Foundation in which we had surveyed and interviewed literally thousands of people over the years. I Didn't even have a field recording the gender of the person we interviewed. I Didn't think gender was was relevant or important or a factor in entrepreneurship until I realized that one of the genders is missing from the tech industry that I've been writing so much about and The next few weeks it was like It was a wake-up call when I started then researching the company that started going doing simple things like going to the websites of all the top companies Microsoft Apple Google go to Microsoft site for example There was not one woman anywhere and the executive team in the management team And I don't think there was anyone there was a woman on the board as well They started looking through the websites looking for chief technology officers All male. There were a few exceptions Mirissa Meyer was in the senior executive Google. You had Padma Shri warrior at Cisco, but I could name all the all the women in Tech And they would fit on the fingers of your hand. I mean it was that ridiculous and Then I went back and started looking at my own academic research and it was driving me crazy that I didn't have Yeah, you know, you've had this feeling sometimes. How could I be so dumb that the Sherlock Holmes? Oh what a fool I've been yeah, exactly So then I literally I spent tens of hours going through my own research and and re-engineering it basically because you can Figure out the difference between a man and a woman most of the time by looking at the name If it's Joe or John the likelihood it's a man Right and same thing with Indian names that there were a lot of Indian names in it and Chinese names I could do that. So about the 20 25 percent that weren't black and white. I started making phone calls I started looking up the companies going to websites googling started reverse engineering all of those things I went to a sample of five of my last research was 500 people who had interviewed I literally went So every one of them and re-engineered to figure out with this thing and I was surprised that eight percent of our sample was women Which which was high actually compared to what I learned later on eight percent eight percent was was women and This is the perfect meritocracy and this research was entrepreneurship in the tech sector in the tech sector exactly This is specifically the tech sector and then I started and this was all across the United States So it wasn't just Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley was actually I looked at it further The data set became so small that they were hardly any test Silicon Valley There were more outside Silicon Valley than anywhere else and then I started looking at other research and Calling up my friends my you know professor friends asking them for research and Then I made again. I had card branch publishing right now tech branch So wrote a piece for TechCrunch saying Silicon Valley you and your venture capital have a gender problem So this event was in December that blog was in February That's how you know how much time it took me to research And I was even more shocked at what happened after that piece talk about that please. Oh my god Welcome to the world of writing about gender. Oh my god. I mean When I write about immigration even today I get Slander's comments I get I've received death threats for for talking about how important immigration is to America's prosperity And to be highlighting the fact that the majority of startups in Silicon Valley. I found it by immigrants I was used to that. I would you know, you you basically If you're able to read any of my Washington Post columns on immigration or even when I talk about foreigners in any way, you'll find that they get Satuated with negative nasty comments. These people come out and drove them. They attack you fine You get used to it and it used to bother me at first now sort of I just laugh It's the same it's the same cut and paste you see over and over again on women I had no idea what was going to happen that suddenly the the comment section lit up like you won't believe Hundreds of comments nasty nasty nasty comments emails coming to me social media attacks Friends writing to me Warning me not to discuss this topic because I I should be tech before becoming an academic I had founded two technology companies I should be a CEO and I knew who's who of the Technology industry and I knew the leading venture capitalist. So I was connected at the top echelons of Silicon Valley some of my my Friends, I mean I I don't call them friends anymore. They're writing to me saying Vivek. They're easier ways of getting laid Come with us and we'll help you out I mean comments like that from these are people you read about you know when you you know go through a Silicon Valley list of Industry moguls some of these people aren't on those big amazing lists and then others advising saying Vivek, you're new to Silicon Valley This is not something you want to be delving into And I'm sort of sitting there saying what happened. What's going on here? They went home and I showed my wife some of these comments and she too was shocked and the first reaction was oh my god Well, we've just moved over here. We don't want to get kicked out of Silicon Valley So that was my you know by waking up That was my experience. It was just a wake-up call from it How do you account for the level of hostility that you encountered and raising the issue because it's pretty Self-evident, right? It's not like you were exposing something that it's not self-evident. I mean the fact that I didn't know it Okay, I'm I mean, I'm I mean, I'm not a sexist I was also wasn't a feminist now people call me a feminist and I've come to the point that I'm saying I'm proud of Being a feminist call me a make my day. There's nothing wrong with a feminist everyone Guys feel proud of being called macho. Okay, even would women feel ashamed of being called feminists So now my it is make my day call me a feminist But the point is that I wasn't I was never a sexist either, right? I was just an average guy and I didn't know there was a problem I didn't be an academic. I should have had the responsibility of recording gender and noting it and I Didn't so if I if I was that dumb, how can I blame? Now the people who you know who've been attacking me. Okay, absolutely blame them. They're bunch of sexist jerks. I mean I'll take them on any day, but the vast majority are like me So again, how do you account then for when you say, okay? It's not self-evident, but it is true that any of us could go on the websites It's like not you can't argue with the numbers that you see on the website or the absence of women So it's not it's not open to debate. I would not I would not read those articles Which featured which were about women or women's inclusion? I didn't see me You know you when you go and look at articles online the certain articles which are of interest to you read them other articles You don't read so there was not never an area of interest to me before because it didn't seem relevant I mean, I didn't see what the big deal was about until I stepped into the debate Right and again, I'm sorry the question is why do you think you got such a look for example? The emails that you could have gotten the people could have said, oh, yes, we know this is a problem We see and we're doing our best, you know, we're we're but that's not what you got you got hostility and then because they Because the attitude is that women or feminists burn your bras, you know all of this anti-feminism Stuff the attitude is that women are just complaining about nothing. How dare they how dare they ask for their rights They ask for the human rights. I mean, it's that sort of attitude and we're better than them and then in the Junior sectors of the tech industry. You've got these nerds who think that they have better coding powers than women do So it's a systematic problem with it may be a 10 to 20 percent of the of the Silicon rice. I'm not talking about the majority. I'm talking about a Small but significant part of it and you've got these sexist jerks everywhere So that they end to end up being in the venture capital firms because they come from New York City Fresh out of investment banking to New York City. They they get greedy and I want to exploit the You know Silicon Valley tech industry so they move over there and then the VC firm the way it works in VC firms is that Everyone votes and there's one down about the person doesn't get funding And if you have women going in front of VCs one of one of the one of the jerks in the meeting will ask her about What do you what is your husband? Has he given you permission to be to be here what happens when you have children? I mean all these are the type of questions women are asked all the time but your question about Why and how it's they must have been abused as children or something I don't know what their problem is why they're so unsure themselves It could just be an inferiority complex that they've come across women who are smarter than they are and their only way of You know counting for it was that we're superior to women. I don't know. I mean it They said this is not my upbringing and this is Not something that I even thought about until I step into this debate and now I battle these people all the time read any of my articles Read go to the comment sections and you'll see all the negative nasty hatred The venom that I have to bear with you know Whenever I step into this thing and also This is they no no longer do that But when I and I actually quoted some of the tweets in this without with that and naming the other people If you look at the people who were attacking me You know so soon afterwards there was a chorus of Celebrities from Silicon Valley telling Mike Arrington who was the head of TechCrunch to fire me from TechCrunch Never mind the TechCrunch didn't pay me anything. I was just doing this as you know as a hobby They wanted me fired from TechCrunch one very Established very senior investors guys considered to be a legend in Silicon Valley called me a fraud academic fraud all of his basically challenged my academic credentials publicly and He did that several times afterwards because of what I've written about women This is Silicon Valley and yet this is one of the most desirable sectors of our economy, right? This is the most glamorous and desirable places to work and one of the One of the the sort of phenomena that I worry about I was sitting around with a group actually of women from finance and we were talking about the areas where women have been able to emerge as leaders and one of the areas is Happens to be university presidents and specifically there was a period not that long ago in the Ivy League Where half of Ivy League presidents were female actually and and but the joke that one of the women made was yes Back when being a university president was a great job was a really cushy job And you got just to sort of hang out in this really nice house You know that then it was a male domain But but now that it's a really hard grinding job that requires constant fundraising You know, they're gonna hand it over to the women and similarly I mean even in politics as women are making progress politics is becoming a harder You know less respected job by the minute and so here we have the tech sector You know which gets all this glorious press all this glamour great products. I mean talk about Apple Talk about let's just talk to talk about some numbers You have a sentence in your book that that top management there are no women Steve job was one of the biggest sexist in Silicon Valley I mean that that's a fact Steve Jobs had was arrogant. He mistreated his employees There's a dark side to Steve job. We don't talk about because we glamorize him We love his products But the reality is that he wasn't such a wonderful human being when it came to Tweeting about you know, tweeting other people. That's the reality of it So Silicon Valley despite the fact we glamorize it has a dark side That's just the way it is and this is the dark side. I've been battling I've made myself very unpopular with some of Silicon Valley's most Established players my attitude is That's great. I mean, I love how is your social life in Silicon Valley? Actually, you know the amazing thing is I get really like a rockstar now when I go to conferences because Women I mean they have been thanking me for this. There are there's okay, even in women There's probably a two or three percent the community which which has been attacking me mindlessly I mean, that's a separate discussion, but pretty 95% of women have been strongly supportive of it And probably about 70 80% of men have been strongly supportive about it so the people I care about have been supporting me and I get treated with a lot of respect and It's amazing how much support I've received even for this book You know, I want can I talk to detail about about yeah, so I started on this path of writing about women and so after that article I Decided to write more about it. That's the way I am that you take me on provoke me and you might just make my day So I wrote several more articles about it and to the point that aren't and also was getting pissed off But they were within tech points They were really really angry at me because they were getting battered by by their supporters and people love, you know the community there and for Vivek Wadhwa being you know Mad dog whatever I mean, you know, they call me everything under the sun and They were very resentful. Maybe I kept writing about it because I believed in the cause and then I started doing more research on it and Now with three years later now four years later. I decided that I'm gonna publish a paper on this I want to express opinion and I could even you can't express opinion and papers if you didn't read any academic paper dull and boring and they have to sort of hedge their opinion by Contradicting everything they've said so they'll sit there take a stand one second And then they'll cite everyone else that disagrees with them That's the way academic papers are dull and boring. So I want to express a strong opinion over here So I thought I'll write a book about it. The problem is who's a guy to write about women. I mean I might as well be writing about I mean any other problem that women have a bit. So so there was a dilemma I had And then also I had spent a lot of my own money on research And I wanted to get permission to spend another 30 or 40,000 dollars on this thing I have to go to the boss whenever I have to make any major spending decisions My wife I know who the I know who the boss is I basically I went to her and I said to win there I'm thinking of writing a book about this and I also want to spend you know, but I said probably 30 40,000 dollars and She very thoughtfully says Vivek Fine, I mean you can spend whatever you want to spend but If women really care about this cause if they really appreciate what you're doing for them Why don't you get them to help you? Because I also told her that you know, it's going to be tricky for a guy to write a book about women and their problems so The light went off in my head saying that look I talk about advancing technologies I talk about how technology is changing the world and we're gonna help us solve big problems and so on And one of the things I talk about in my lectures on advancing technologies is crowdfunding crowd creating the fact that now We have the ability to to gather the I Mean to get thousands of people millions of people to work with us on the causes We believe in the light went off saying hey, why don't I crowd fund this? Why don't I do what I coach startups to do is just forget the venture capitalist go and Do a Kickstarter in the go-go campaign and let the crowd fund it So I started thinking about it. I said, you know, that could be a cool idea I don't know if anyone's ever crowdfunded a book before I don't know if someone has anyone's ever crowd created a book before But let's crowd created my goal was to raise Initially $25,000 and then I said $40,000 That's because I you know I decided that all the money from this Every penny we raise from the book is going to go to a fund for women to educate them to inspire them to fund them And so on so it said I'm not gonna take any money from this So why don't we just raise more money than we need so instead of 25 30,000 I'll just say $40,000 and my ambition was to have 30 women working with me on this book And I was nervous with 30 women work with me. I was shocked that we Ended up getting $96,000 including some a grant from Google for the book. So 40 became 96 And I said 30 or 40 we had more than 500 women sign up to crowd create the book from us for us out of the 500 to signed up 200 were were you know were were listeners and watching and but 300 were actively actively Working on this so that we would so I engage fried Chadia fry is an amazing woman She's based in New York City African-American journalist. She's been she's got her own You know radio show and so on she should be an NPR So I sent a message to my mailing list asking for volunteers and she's on my mailing list And she wrote back saying we like I want to work with you on this project So she agreed to be my co-author and we got together and we laid out the structure of the book what we wanted to say in the book all the data immediate all the research we needed the anecdotes we needed and We essentially had a crowd creating platform in which we invited our Ambassadors the ambassadors were the women who agreed to help us with the book and to help us with social media when the book was done and Within six weeks we did research that would have taken us years to do because it's painstaking to have to be able to gather opinions and Come to consensus and then to get anecdotes together to interview people. It's really you know, have you written books before? Yes, yeah, so you know how long it takes it takes years to write books Within six weeks I did not material to write several books and then for I you know went and distilled it And then I spent a few weeks more Polishing it and getting it into the final format, but we were able to crowd create this book And I was really nervous. I was afraid that I would get slammed for For a book that didn't hold together or there are too many voices. Why to the contrary every review I've received every comment I mean every day I get emails from women from all over the world thanking me for writing it. They say it inspired them They give me to their daughters Basically and and and all the ambassadors they've been raving about it. So every comment that I've read about the books So far has been positive I mean there's no one who's read the book has criticized it, which is amazing because I Again crowd creating you could crowd create garbage, but it doesn't look like if we've got a great guy But I think we've created crowd created a pretty solid work Right, and it doesn't read like a cacophony of voices I mean you've got you've got disparate people writing essays that hold together as essays But it was a challenge to put everyone's voices in yes because it wasn't you know So there are two or three chapters that I've written where I took a stand and put my name on it because that's strong opinion Yes, but for the other chapters it was really really trying to synthesize the voices of women, right? It was tricky doing it taking all the information we had and turning it into something which which was consistent right and some of the Chapters are our essays by women who prevailed and they're inspiring stories and here's how I did it and some of them And I have to say these were the ones that were the most interesting to me are women describing the barriers and women describing sexual harassment Really sort of shocking things that happen to them in meetings with high-level executives or like Heidi Royson Who has now become a legendary venture capitalist is one of the leading people in Silicon Valley She basically opened up and and poured a heart out and talked about how Disgusting you know how venture capitalists treated her. She's in a meeting Pitching her company and you've got this jerk. They're making symbols with his hand right coming on to her sexually while she's in a meeting now there she goes out to dinner with it with with the with the client and the I mean this is a You know very senior executive He said they've got a gift He closed your eyes and he unzips his his pants and puts her hand on his penis That's the Heidi Rosen talking about it Kim police who's who founded Marimba. She was one of the most successful entrepreneurs doing the dot-com era She sold her company for half a billion dollars She gets ripped apart in Forbes for being a failure an example of what not to do and and you know, I mean And when she was successful Basically, you know, they made her a glamour goal rather than focusing on her strength and I thought that was really interesting I mean, I'd like to go back at some point to the sexual harassment part of it But the woman that you just talked about who founded Marimba and and had the problem that People kept saying oh the focus is on you your you're being glamorized. They're not talking about or this is what she Felt they weren't talking about her product or her business They were talking about her and you do think of the women in the tech industry to whom that happens I mean Marissa Meyer I think would be an example where the focus is just constantly on her as And sometimes on the company in the product But it really is a it's I hadn't thought about that until I read her essay that that can be a problem And I guess it's when when women are rare enough that I don't know the story sometimes somehow becomes about her as a personality As opposed to what she's doing Kim is extremely competent She earned her success right the fact that she's good-looking the fact that the Publications decided to focus on her sex appeal versus her company isn't her fault because I know that she she was obsessed with trying to To talk about her technology and so on and she felt betrayed a couple of times when the interviews Weren't about her technology or her achievements, but they were about her looks how she dressed and things like that She was very unhappy by it, but the treatment she received afterwards was even more shocking the the you know the disgusting Articles that followed and then the beer being called a failure. She wasn't a failure Someone who sells a company for half a billion dollars is not a failure. I mean, I'd have to be a failure like I know I would take that I would take that failure But she opened up and she poured her heart out for the book as well So that's the type of support I've had in Silicon Valley the greatest women over there as well as ordinary women You know, I tried very hard not to make this about the Cheryl's and the Marissa's and you know the successful women So it was more about average women because they're the ones whose voices are never heard So now we have hundreds of women who regard this as their as their baby This is you know, they're so proud they would never get featured in the press yet They're featured in a book and and they're really this is giving them a lot of encouragement And they're promoting the heck out of this and they're doing a wonderful job now getting the word out about You know about the importance of adding more women to be successful So let's try to break down some of the Some of the reasons that or and some of the data that that you and various Contributors talk about in the book to try to understand what the barriers are to women in this industry one of the disturbing data points that several essayists mentioned is the fact that there are fewer Female computer scientists now than there were in the 1980s. So this is a field where we've actually seen a decline Can you talk about why? Why do you think that's happening? Remember the movie social network about Zuckerberg Go back and think about women you saw in it how they were dressed. They're already bikinis The guys were the cool guys the guys were dominating it So the stereotypes the images we have in our heads are of the guys doing all the grunt work and the girls basically being entertainment So that's the image that exists of Silicon Valley if you think about now now now I've got to blame parents as well when You know parents don't encourage their children generally to get into engineering very few parents do some of them Enlightenment do encourage them to study math and science and get into the heart into the heart sciences Otherwise they may be encouraged to be doctors, but they won't be encouraged to be engineers So it starts off a childhood with women getting less encouragement to get into STEM and hardcore engineering And then the women who do get the encouragement from their parents typically when they go to college when they go to school when you know high school University etc They're treated differently than the guys are even the professors won't be there examples and their professors basically Mistreating the girls basically holding up to a different standard and not providing them encouragement and then they defy the odds and get their degrees and then they join the workplace all male and Their bosses don't treat them respectfully their rape. They grow up. I mean it's a sort of horrible experience that the women have in the workplace sexually harassed and they get discouraged they're very few make it to management So they end up dropping out of the field. So They're very few role models So all sorts through the entire system women are discouraged and disparaged they're left out Why would you know a young woman who's starting a career? I want to walk into a snake pit like this when she could be doing very well in other fields So this is why the proportion of women studying computer science dropped from 38 percent in the 1980s to 17 percent You know as a two or three years ago because this is considered to be a You know a man's field not for women women That's that's the serious problem in the tech industry and Professors so you've identified a lot of things you've identified professors not encouraging Talented young women students or actively discouraging them the lack of role models But again the snake pit aspect of it, you know the sexual harassment part of it like those are three separate things actually But it happens. I called you Lisa again. I'm sorry. That's right. I like that But it's happened systematically to women's career and that's what the problem is that women who do make it there have to be really really really tough and most human beings You know can't go through this, you know Wherever they go. It's the same thing. They looked at differently. They expected to dress differently. I mean why I mean Why would you put up with this when you have so many other choices? This is what the problem that the tech industry faces then look at the tech industry itself I mean I had a battle with Twitter CEO about the fact that there were no women on his board The excuse in the tech industry always is the pipeline the pipeline the pipeline so when I took on dick Costolo for Not having any women on the board that's happened in the New York Times His first reaction was to attack me like the boys club does so instead of calling me an academic fraud He said Vivek what was the carrot top of academic sources? Yeah, what did he mean by that? Carrot top is a comedian. Yeah, yeah He used to be comedian also. Yeah carrot on became very successful. He didn't he had to drop out and do something different for Living so he must have resented carrot up his whole life. So this was a chance to get back at that. Yeah Yeah, so basically this way he called me a failed comedian except carrot up isn't a failed comedian carrot ups Got 17 million dollars or something ridiculous in the back Okay, that's more than Costolo had before his company went public But regardless he was his way of venting and calling me an academic fraud because this said this This Silicon Valley mafia the way I call them they call me an academic fraud You know, they've said it on Twitter said it publicly. So Costolo basically Echoed the same sentiment that I'm an academic fraud because I've been raising these issues Except he didn't get away with it for three or four years ago. They could get away with the boys club would get away with it No longer. There was a chorus of of of negative You know negative article social media they were I mean What was acceptable even four or five years ago in Silicon Valley is no longer so Silicon Valley can't get away with this behavior anymore So he had to back off and finally add a woman to his board But the point is that this is the excuse that they make consistently is the pipeline if you look at the Twitter board You've got two flunkies on it college dropouts. You've got a psychology major English major French literature Anything but computer science. So we keep talking about they're not being enough women studying computer science But when you have Peter Thiel PayPal billionaire offering children a hundred thousand dollars not to go to college getting them to drop out of college How can you know the boys club argue that women must have Computer science degrees and masters and PhDs and the boys can be dropouts Where does this pipeline issue ever come in when you don't even need a degree to be in computer science? When you don't need a degree to be on the board of Twitter Right. So why is this dual standard? If a woman or an African and we've been talking about women, right? But it's even worse for African-Americans. It's worse for Latinos If an African-American woman dropped out of college or an African-American guy dropped out of college We've the Silicon Valley will be joking about them selling drugs, right? They'd be they'd be disparaging them talking about them and and completely write them off If a white guy drops out of Stanford, he's a hero He'll get six-figure job offers and they'll be bending over backwards to to fund his his company Why this dual standard if we think about it for women dropped out of of college Would she be have VCs tripping over each other to give her money? No way. She would be considered to failure She couldn't cut it That's the attitude we would have about women or Latinos or blacks doing that So how is Silicon Valley able to preserve this image of being in meritocracy when the exclusion is not just you know gender as you point out, but it's exclusion of African-Americans Silicon Valley can no longer get away with it got away with it for the last if you read the article Every week. There's now there's one or more articles Calling our Silicon Valley for its sexism. I you know, I wrote the first few but there's a chorus of opinion I mean there were people who wrote about it before I did as well I can't take credit for it, but I was louder than most people were about it now There's a chorus of opinion and it's widely accepted even within Silicon Valley or Silicon Valley as a problem I mean this issue about releasing gender data I started hammering into these tech companies about a year ago But the fact that I want gender data I spoke to executives I know some of the execs of these tech companies are my friends So I started telling them look I want your gender data I want to know exactly how many women there are in management roles and so on they wouldn't release it They considered to be a trade secret Google break broke ranks and and and I appreciate Google for what they did because they also Contacted me you know week before that gave me all the data because they and in fact I had one of the senior execs on Google called me up and say Vivek Thank you for being so persistent on it. You gave us a cover We needed to go and make the changes we needed to make internally and trust us We're dead serious about fixing this problem. So they gave me the data. They said it's not good It was 19% were of the tech workforce was women which is actually higher than expected to be I thought it would be in the low teams at Google It was higher than expected and they said we're gonna fix it They have a firm wide commitment to fix this and then you had Facebook and and yahoo and all you know The major tech companies have now started all falling on this ward and saying okay here our numbers We know we did wrong. We're gonna fix it and there were also I know women from within those organizations who were pushing for the release of this data as well The trouble is the women women speak up. They're called feminists and marginalized. They their careers suffer and This is why they've learned not to speak up So then so being on the outside is easier for me being an Indian guy with no agenda To be vocal that it is for women Right, I would have been called labeled a feminist and completely marginalize marginalized, right But I was just trying to identify some of the various forces that were being brought to bear And if I understand correctly and correct me if I'm wrong I think that Jesse Jackson was also going around shareholder's meetings, but putting pressure at shareholders meetings To increase the diversity as well There's some internal pressure to publish this data There are people like you from the outside writing about it And then there are people at shareholders meetings also asking for release of the data So all the forces of the universe have come together to shame Silicon Valley So not all of them, but some of them now, I know But there's enough pressure that Silicon Valley is coming clean and there's widespread agreement that they need to clean up They're even the venture capital firms are embarrassed take the top venture capital firm and recent Horowitz You go to the website. They got pictures of women all over the website now Now that doesn't mean that they fix the problem. If you look at their senior investment partners all male If you look at their investments majority male, they may have funded if you know handful of Women CEO who have come to the women's CEOs, but they won't disclose the number the numbers But the fact is at least a website has pictures of women on it That's right, but it's not like calendar pin-up kind of pictures, right? Like that Talk about the bunnies at the conferences, right? Well, I'm not going to defend if you do recent Horowitz over here because entrepreneurs ago they talked about the bunnies that the You know that they meet over there because they have beautiful women that you see there young bright women and so on and so on You still have that at these venture capital firms but at least they now become conscious about it and the good firms are Seriously looking to add women partners and fix the problem And so talking about the venture capital again one of the things again trying to sort of break down what the what the various factors are You know the the percentage of women in computer science might be one of them Although you've sort of exploded that as as important But you also talk about pattern what do you talk about pattern recognition? So the venture capitalists who give money are more likely to give money to say okay We gave money to this white male and it worked out. Well, so we're just going to look for the same pattern in the people we give money to Liza in in Washington, DC people will be shocked to hear this because here if you had Senator or congressman or Business executive saying that we do pattern recognition You would think that they would go to jail for that right because that's discriminates another word discriminates Just against the law to be hiring people or funding people or to be favoring people based on patterns But they openly talk about it Again, I'm not gonna make I may I named one of Silicon Valley's most legendary iconic venture capitalists where he talked about the fact that When he sees you know someone that looks like Zuckerberg when he sees a white male nerd He sees he takes gets confused very easily and he tends to fund them They openly admit it they openly admit to ageism to sexism to racism and they have a word for pattern recognition Vicious show off about their pattern recognition capabilities They this is a bragging point of pride in Silicon Valley Even now that they talk about the ability to recognize a successful entrepreneur when they see one and they openly admit that that Said that successful that happened entrepreneur happens to look like Mark Zuckerberg nerdy white male Now the stereotype is changing Silicon Valley because people like me went there started achieving success and We started helping each other and we founded our own organizations and we defied the odds and we broke into the boys club So Indians have now become part of the boys club as have some Chinese So when I say white male nerds that includes people with who happened to be from India. We're part of the boys club So they've opened up the male nerds the male nerd so yeah But it's still so you it can be a middle-aged Indian and still get funding like a You know a Stanford dropout world because they've been enough successful Indians who have happened to be older than the white boys are so we're part of the boys club and but when you know this pattern recognition I wonder how successful it really is because presumably there have been some failures also and so We gave money to this nerdy white guy and it really didn't work out. So maybe we shouldn't give it to this nerdy white guy Maybe we should be Actually, the New Republic had on their cover a couple of weeks ago. I think Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had just had sort of one disastrous failure after another but could still get money showered Because he looked like a white nerd right a Kauffman Foundation did an analysis of the venture capital system and if I'm paraphrasing you but they found was that you could throw darts and And I'd have a better record than the track than the venture capitalist have had in other words The venture capital community as a whole is underperformed. They're you know the stock indices So this is how effective pattern recognition is that it doesn't work that they have failed and since this entire system is in Decline because they've been making the wrong investments Okay, so pattern recognition doesn't doesn't work just a disaster We have probably wasted hundreds of billions of dollars Because of the stupid pattern recognition the sexism this racism that We see in Silicon Valley and this is why I'm fighting this battle because it's bad for the US economy It's bad for Silicon Valley. It's bad for the industry. It's bad for women. It's bad for minorities It's bad bad bad bad bad. This is why I'm so vocal about it So I'm taking the the arrows in my back the Indian with the arrows in his back Okay, so let's talk for a second about Xerox because You know, you've talked about Twitter. You've talked about some of the companies that are failing the the gender and diversity standard but Xerox has done pretty well and what I wonder is Whether the old line Established companies that have HR policies that have sexual harassment policies the staid old workplaces Where measures have been in place for a long time? Are maybe doing a better job than the new Star glamorous startups where maybe corners get cut or where just that the policies haven't been in place So anyway, just talk about Xerox a little bit Xerox. Sophie Vanderbroek is the chief technology officer. She says that Her about 40% of her recruits tend to be women now despite this, you know, this excuses about the pipeline So she's able to bring in top women engineers and into her research. She heads up the research for Xerox I mean, so she has done very very well on diversity Xerox has a black woman CEO Who took over from a woman CEO as well two women CEOs so they have really they have They excel at gender diversity and they're doing an amazing job And they've shown that women can can cut it in the corporate world and that the playing field can be level IBM is also working very hard on this So, yeah, it has a woman CEO. I mean, so When I mean and and these these companies may not be growing at at phenomenal Sorry, it's always somebody from Silicon Valley calling. It's my wife. Oh, it's your wife. Yeah, I'm not gonna put her on speakerphone No, I won't So We're talking about IBM and wait, so basically IBM and Xerox they may not be growing at phenomenal rates But the fact that these companies aren't imploding given the fact that they've had antiquated technologies and so on shows that Big companies can actually benefit from this but if you look at every other data point every study that's been done Which looked at you know where you have women on board and so on shows it by having diversity you win Yes, yes that that that finding that that that companies that have women on boards do better companies or you know Diversity on boards period companies that have diversities and top management. I'm just not convinced that anybody's really listening to this Like you could say yes pattern pattern recognitions not working out Yes, companies do better when they have women on boards But at least in Silicon Valley it You're saying that the message is starting to get through the message is trying to get through and they're paying it lip service At least so I talked about in recent Harvard's now having pictures of women on their board So it means that they realize that there's a they have a PR problem over here to fix But I expect that given a little bit more time There will be a lot of other pressure on them because for example, the National Metro Capital Association I Was shocked when they invited me to give a keynote at their big conference a few months ago I was shocked because you got to realize that I've been a big critic of the venture capital system And I've been equally blunt about it So I thought when I went there there'd be lynch mobs out to get me quite to the contrary they were clapping cheering encouraging and the man the management of the NVCA said that we think they agree with me and they're ashamed of the Gender diversity of their firms and they agree with me that their companies need to start releasing the data now The next campaign we need to launch and and perhaps you should help me with this is demanding that venture capital firms Release gender data about the investments that they make the reason why we can ask for that is because they're taking public funds You have state pension funds. We're putting money into it. You have You know, I mean all these public sources putting money into it So they should therefore they should be accountable to be part where the money goes We should be demanding that they release a gender data because if they did Suddenly you would have these these sexist VCs when they're when they're in these meetings squirming and looking at each other You know funny if they started harassing women and and turning women down just because they didn't think that they fit the patterns They would be under pressure to clean up their act So that's the next battle that needs to be fought is to get the venture capital firms to release gender data Okay, that's interesting. So do you think it could be true as I was sort of trying to suggest you have you have Xerox You have IBM you have a half of the defense contracting big defense contractor companies that are led by women You have General Motors led by women now and again, these are old line firms that have had HR policies in place for a long time They know the sexual harassment law I think more kind of traditional workplaces and then out in Silicon Valley You've got companies that were started by roommates, right? You know networks of friends, right the front boy who know each other who are getting venture capital from Man who know each other who are looking for a certain pattern a certain type Gradually expanding that and you also have non traditional workplaces and you have a lot of business being conducted at Conferences and one of the sort of shocking and important essays. I thought was the one talking about the The things that go on at conferences the level of sexual harassment that goes on at conferences And it made me wonder whether this is a you know It's a non-traditional industry where a lot of the stuff that happens is happening in kind of non traditional work place settings Where nobody's policing it nobody's paying attention that's true that's exactly how it is and They're getting away with it. They've been getting away with it and some of the some of the contributors It sounds like are calling on the organizers of conferences to try and police the behavior that well Tech crunch again leading conference They had two companies in one event one of them was stitch here in which they built did a hackathon in which They displayed women's breasts another one was Forget this is it gets even more disgusting than that, but these were on stage at a conference now fortunately Valley Wag which is the Gauker Which is I now has a branch of Silicon Valley. They highlighted embarrass these conferences and they had to apologize So conferences has now started issuing statements saying that we're not gonna allow sexual Stuff happened on our stage and they're saying what we're gonna try to include women in the panels and so on but You still it's still a boy's club. It's disgusting. I mean, I wouldn't want to be a woman going to a conference It's in Silicon Valley even now Right, that's just the way it is and what I thought about when I read that particular essay There was a study that came out a couple of months ago that showed and this was looking at women's scientists That an extraordinary percentage of women's scientists have been sexually assaulted doing their field research when they're out on the field They're not in a lab. They're not at the university, but they're out, you know somewhere in in You know in in some sort of setting that's remote and and something happens And there was a an essay in the New York Times op ed section last Sunday by a woman to whom this had happened She was out doing field research and she was sexually assaulted and it really drove her back into the lab And she spent really her career in a lab as opposed to being out doing the kind of scientific research that she wanted And she was calling and she said, you know when this happened to me. There was nobody I could even turn to you I mean, there's nobody policing what goes on in the field for scientists and she was positing that Universities or whoever is overseeing the research Should have should have a system should have should have some sort of policy or program developed to Preserve women's safety when they're out doing field research and again That made me think of these conferences where nobody's really paying attention And I know that that when people start setting policies or regulations that you know The view is then that oh well There's not gonna be fun anymore because they're calling for these policies and their regulations and we're not gonna be having but but I Guess you know workplace environment is sort of morphing and changing and so we figured out how to regulate Not completely, but we figured out sort of an approach or many many organizations and companies have for when something happens in the office But since a lot of what's going on is not going on in the office Then we have to figure out what to do about that without it being seen as you know Just reigning on the parade I completely agree with you that there's a big big problem with that Systematic problems when I'm saying that these conferences are not say it's a one thing to have an event local event We where you go to It's another thing to go to an event off-site where you have all these hotel rooms around and you have these drunken males having an excuse to to misbehave It all I can say is the good news is we're talking about it is being reported on and this but this has always been happening It's only now that that women are speaking up that men are speaking up that the media is speaking up This did not happen before it recently as a year or two ago. You didn't read about this stuff It's not they just started happening the reason why we were where we know so much about it is because we're speaking up about it That's a big step forward. Yeah, I have one other question and then we'll open it up to questions in terms of women's Retention in these workplaces I'm an outsider to Silicon Valley and when I think about the big tech firms I really think about amenities like you hear so much and in fact I was in the officers of Twitter in New York not long ago and they've got beer on tap They've got you know chocolate covered pretzels. They've got gummy. I mean they've got all these snacks They got this huge snack counter and and an alcohol and so all these great And you hear it went to Twitter went public the celebration was in the strip club across the street Oh, really? It was in a strip club. Yeah, they had they had a celebration there I Didn't know that but I think that should have gotten more attention than it did so there were no there so there weren't any Stripers in the in the workplace that I was in but there were a lot of amenities and when you and when you think about the Campuses out on the West Coast you think about, you know The cafeterias and the ping-pong tables and the childcare and all the great stuff So it seems like it would be a pretty cushy environment to work in and so maybe good for like working mothers working parents Because you've got these money because you don't have the daycare centers You don't have you don't have a daycare, so you've got the ping-pong table, but not the day care But why don't they have the nurseries over there, right? So actually so how is it in fact? A more competitive cutthroat long hours Family unfriendly environment than someone like me might might think because we're focusing on the amenities It's a family unfriendly environment And this is why they prefer the young males who don't have families and this is why the VCs Give them the money and give women a hard time never mind that It's it's causing a decimation of the entire system because the formula doesn't work If you had more women let startups you'd have lower lower failure rates you'd have higher economic returns You'd have better products the economy would benefit if we only if we would open up our eyes Well, so let me open it up to questions then people Yeah from the back. I actually just wanted to follow up directly on that last point about sort of caregiver bias that Happens in the workplace in the tech industry I mean, how how do we make these women employees seem like or Make it clear that they are Equally valuable to the workplace despite their caregiver Responsibilities as is it putting in place policies like paid family leave or child care And I can't help but think that all of these high that the few Highly credentialed women that are in the field if they leave because of a lack of support systems This is a domestic brain drain. We are losing talent that we have invested in And they're already so few of them only 17% as you say so I just wonder how before we make them feel that way We have to believe that way Which means that executive management has to have that value system and they don't right now The fact is that if you look at the board, and this is why I've been attacking the boards my I deliberately picked a fight with the CEO of Twitter. It wasn't accidental I knew what I was doing and I knew would create major controversy when I did that interview with the New York Times Because it starts with the boards If you're gonna have an all-male board the likelihood is you're gonna have an all-male executive team If you're an all-male executive team, it's likely that you're gonna have an all-male senior management team If an all-male senior management team, it's likely you're gonna have an all-male company So until we now get 50-50 boards and have women on the board asking why This chief technology officer isn't a woman or why we aren't considering women candidates and have a sensitivity to the needs Of women up there until you have the board asking why don't you know before you? Have this because big party or before you invest more in these perks Why don't you have a daycare center for women and publicize it? Why don't we now look at our hiring practices and so on you don't have women at the top you're not gonna have women at the bottom and this is why we have to start by holding them accountable at the board level and Then we have to have a real belief there real policies there to encourage women So what's what's hard to make sense of for me is you were talking about caregiver bias Which is not hiring someone because you're worried about that they're gonna become a parent or they're not gonna be committed or somehow Exhibiting bias against a parent specifically a working mother in the workplace And yet a lot of these big tech companies have have pretty good paid parental leave maternity leave and paternity leave So the policies at least for paid leave are on the books. They're not in most tech companies Not in most so the big ones have have made there some of them have some policies But by and large they don't this is a foreign concept of the tech industry okay, I Have a I have a different question, but it's a very discouraging that we're having the same discussion 30 years after I Discussed these issues about leave and getting leave for for women for for care for you know for various benefits, but Anyway, my my question is you know, we're seeing Coding camps for girls and efforts to for STEM education and and I'm wondering if If we will see some change Because there is an emphasis now to get girls in these fields. Do you think that that's encouraging? Yes, it's very encouraging. In fact Google has been leading the charge on some of these girl girls camps and the tech industry is now Realized it has to do something about the problem itself Overall everything is moving the right direction But the most important there are two other things which are very relevant here Which are happening which are going to make the difference number one women are now helping each other The mentoring didn't happen as recently as 10 or 15 years ago if you speak to because I've interviewed hundreds of women Speak to the older women older women they talk about other women not helping them if you talk to the younger women They talk about women being very helpful That's a generational shift that's happened and then you can it's so clear You know you you can see that shift between the old and the new so now you have for example Day after tomorrow. There's a big event in Silicon Valley called women to owe There'll be a thousand women there and women helping each other brah-rah-rah. We can succeed. It's so amazing Amazing wonderful conference. I'm going out of my way to be there because it's to me It's the most important event at Silicon Valley Women for women. The other thing is that the cost of technology is dropped exponentially. It's a long discussion but before Venture capital was was mandatory for starting a software technology business because you needed to buy servers you needed to buy Expensive hardware minimum cost of starting a business would be about three million dollars or so today all you need is a laptop and Food and you can start a company also to create technologies outside the tech industry Health based technologies sensor based technologies to be able to do you know 3d printing to be able to create new energy Technologies the cost of doing all of these things is dropped exponentially So venture capital which has been holding women back has become irrelevant Now VCs worry about be being left out of the system They suck up to the young entrepreneurs because they're worried that they'll miss out on some idea on some big new thing So women basically are now primed to lead the new era of innovation. In fact If you look at every this is something I discussed in in a couple of chapters in the book you look at every data point the future belongs to women because They're they're getting better educated. They're having greater success. They're mentoring each other Technology is moving their direction everything every data point to look at says that within a decade from now We will not be having these discussions. It may have been the 30 years ago We had these discussions and nothing changed in the tech industry It will change because it has to change everything is in favor of women We would probably be debating how do we be more inclusive towards men Which is 20 years from now. That's a debate. I want to be having Thank you. Um, I Was just in Silicon Valley last four days and working with the global innovation summit and the folks that organized that and they had a small dinner last Thursday night and Half the group was women and so I was really that there was Silicon Valley. Yeah last Thursday night It was a small group of 14 people but at any rate about half of more women and one of the things that So he's you probably know Victor Huang. He's trying to take the global innovation Ecosystem of Silicon Valley global And I think he's doing I don't know a fairly good job of trying to be look at But I wanted to ask you about two or three things one is the sort of increasing focus on collaboration and in the last number of years, but particularly last year or two and The you know the women tend to be greater collaborators in my mind than men And so there's that question the second is the younger generation of men I always feel working on gender issues here in Washington that My hope is that the younger generation of men that I work with are much more sensitized than the older generation So I wanted you to talk about the generation issues and then those younger men that are fathers are A whole subset among themselves. They want to be home with their kids It's a different Let me answer the question before I forget them number one about collaboration. I've researched why Silicon Valley works This is another line of research have done and written extensively about is it? Why is there's only one why is there only one Silicon Valley? Why is it that regions are spent billions of dollars and have nothing to show for it? The answer is because Silicon Valley is one giant network Silicon Valley learned that by cooperating collaborating by exchanging ideas by encouraging failure by by glamorizing failure and Just generally by idea sharing you could you could win and that's why the system system Silicon Valley works as well as it does Second part of it women women have not been helping each other It used to be that if you look at the older generation of women, they would defy the odds and achieve success by being like the guys They would be the town boys. They would be dressed up like the men They would be behaving like the men and when they achieve success They didn't want to identify with women because they were afraid of being labeled feminists So there is it became that look if we can make it so can you I mean and so women did not help women This has changed dramatically over the last five or seven years last two or three years Night and day over what it was. So all of that is goodness as far as the young boys go They're two they're two types of young boys. One is a spoiled disgusting brats who you read about I mean and the sad thing is that a lot of these these really super successful companies are done by these sexist You know jerky brats. I mean I The dropouts especially because when you drop out of college, you don't learn the social skills You don't need to learn then, you know, you don't deal with rejection failure You don't learn to have to collaborate with people to work with people So, you know Thiel and company may talk about the drop kids dropping out of school and Starting companies in the 17 But you never develop the social skills that you do because the social skills we develop about collaboration come from working in teams Even being rejected even having women, you know, turn you down when you come out of them You develop sensitivity to that you learn, you know, what does work? What doesn't work? You learn how to behave if you don't go to college. You don't learn those things You basically, you know, go to high school and then you're now sitting in this lab writing code all day You don't have the social skills you should have the problem is that many of these The moguls over there are this generation So now the good news is that the outlier you also have an entire crop of you know Children coming out who are very sensible, you know, who are connected to each other who are global and so on and so on So it's good and bad The problem is that a lot of the people we put on a pedestal are these spoiled brats The third question I forgot Well fathers who have daughters tend to be very supportive. This is why I have so many friends because a lot of the males Who are supporting me have daughters and they realize that they don't want their daughters to be left out that their generation may have been different But they don't they want the next generation to be different. So This is why I would say 80% of men have been supporting me 10% of them have been Negative negative negative 10% are in between they'll say dumb things every now and then but they really don't mean it That's a rough estimate. No scientific basis to that. Thank you Thank you so much for you know Raising awareness around this issue and for writing this book and as you said, you know I mean, I'm a woman in technology. I've been in the field for 14 years. I'm just glad that this conversation is happening I feel like this is the right time Finally, it's actually happening. So thank you so much for for making this happen I just want to share a You know a personal Story and then I want to move on to two questions that I have You did a good job of you know talking about the Entire workflow of a of you know getting a woman to Interested in stem subjects getting a girl interested in stem subjects the challenges she experiences there and then moving forward You know when she's in college the experiences she has there and then finally in the workforce Which is where we've focused most of our conversation today, but just on a personal note I just you know, it was very heartbreaking for me to experience what my sister just went through the over this past summer She has I have a niece seven-year-old niece My sister wanted to put her in coding school to go back to the the other You know ladies comment in coding school and my seven-year-old niece just looked back at my sister and said but none of my friends are there You know, so I think it's important To get girls to be encouraged in technology and engineering to also create that ecosystem Where hey your friends are coding with you and make it you can design products that are of concern to you And I know there are a lot of coding schools around the country that are mushrooming And focusing on this issue. I would like to thank the four men who are in this room For attending this event and my question is how do you get the men to attend these events? So that's my first question I don't know the answer It's always like this. I mean normally there'll just be one or two men who just happened to be dragged there because they had to pick up their wives or something I Hope that's not why you guys are here Because I'm just coming back from Atlanta. I was at the GSMA connected women event same thing full of talented young women in the technology sector two men who Were at the event. So it was very brave of them. I feel to attend. I hope that changes I really hope that we can start to see a lot more men in these events My question the other question is I know there is a movement going on in the US to change this mindset Are you seeing a similar movement around the world? Are you seeing trends change around the world as well? And if so, you know if you could share those examples that would be great around the world It's mixed. I mean the Europe is very active in In trying to level the playing field and have more women on board and so on and so on India there's The IT industry has been shamed into it. So if you look at the IT industry, they're at the lower echelons. They have Much, I mean about a third are women now except the executive ranks almost no women in Middle East increasingly women are finding that They can get into technology and it's an outlet for them because they don't have to go to work physically They can work from home. They can form their own communities That's what you're seeing a lot of women entrepreneurship in the Middle East surprisingly the numbers in some parts of the Middle East are better than Silicon Valley because It's a it's a safe way for women to be working and to be part of the workforce and to be contributing So it's mixed all over the world because they're able to do it from their homes and not have to So it's mixed all over the world. There's a group of Afghan women particularly that that I'm most impressed with which Citadel software whatever it's called up about the name of it But they're doing some amazing things to bring Afghani women into the into the fold So it's mixed all over the world But overall it's happening and this is why it's important for Silicon Valley to lead the charge because it's a trendsetter Until we fix Silicon Valley. We won't fix it after the world. Hi, I have two questions. The first one I hope is is pretty easy. I read that France is requiring programming to be in the high school curriculum And I wonder if you think that is is a good way to at least expose Girls to stem and and hopefully create sort of that community everyone has a little bit of background in program I think coding has become a basic skill just like reading and writing you have to understand technology now So it's a it's a great idea to start introducing it early So my second question which I I hope is easy, but I fear is not I work at the open technology Institute here at the New America Foundation and on the technology team where I work There are there are no women and we have open jobs and we'll get maybe a hundred applicants and of them maybe two will be women and I wonder what is is there something in the way that we're doing our job descriptions something in the way We're portraying our culture because I can even open you need to go out and recruit in women's colleges Go there and set up to set up a booth and have your people go there and meet these women and tell them about why such a wonderful place to work and then You know come up with some women-friendly policies and advertise us so you'll find that If you do that you'll you'll attract women there because right now they don't know I mean well How is a woman supposed to know this is a women-friendly place that you're looking for women? They look at the ads like everywhere else and they were first of all the very few women in the field Secondly, they've the word of mouth from what about the know that it's good to go to companies like Xerox Because they're women-friendly and where they have friends who have gone So until you have because a lot of it is through word of mouth So you'll have to just create that word of mouth yourself Hi a confession I bristled when you mentioned that people were mindlessly attacking you How do you react to criticism for especially from women for whom nothing about us without us is a core Tenant of their activism So how do you respond to allegations of tone policing and when you're invited to give a keynote? Are you willing to recommend a woman instead saying if you're gonna talk about this issue? Maybe I shouldn't be the person on the stage Here's a woman who can talk about her own experiences in her own words. You know I've I've been at I've taken quite a bit of fire from some feminists who basically Resentful of the fact that I'm getting all this publicity and the fact that my name is listed first on the book Now as far as the book goes I had no choice. I told the publishers I wanted to this to be you know book for women by women I didn't even want to have my name on it But they wouldn't publish it without my name because I had enough of a name that I could get the attention And the reason why I'm getting all the media coverage is because I'm a guy talking about it If I was a woman talking about it that media coverage wouldn't happen. So yes, I can and when I do the interviews I always mention for I always Encourage them to interview some of the the women who contribute to the book and I work very hard on trying to include them But the choice is either I don't speak and we get no coverage or I speak and I take the fire So I've decided that because the vast majority of women do appreciate the fact that the guy is speaking up for them The few of them who feel jealous or resentful of it. I can't help it They'll there'll always be people who are unhappy, but I have to do what I have to speak for my heart I have to do what I can. This is the cause. I believe in this is why I'm speaking up about it the fact that You know 50% of the the discussion here is is is is women It could have been two women on on stage over here, but it wouldn't have been the same discussion So it is what it is. I You know I've tried it done my best to put women forward as much as I can But I'm going to speak up whether some people aren't happy with it or not So there's you know if you look on Amazon for example, I happen to be looking yesterday They're 15 reviews 14 of them extremely positive. One of them is this This you know feminist who was very unhappy that I'm getting all the attention for this She basically slammed me on it But what happened was that she went on Twitter and started posting a whole series of negative comments I decided to ignore her but on the social media account someone retweeted her tweets without comment And she took it as harassment by me. So she's basically going on saying Vivek was harassing her I didn't harass I didn't even know who she was and nothing to do with it So then she posted a Google thing. She posted negative reviews there So I went on her Google page and I commented on it and explained look I am deeply apologetic I took responsibility for whatever if someone you know affiliated with the innovating women has retweeted her tweet First of all, I'm not convinced that that's a negative because I've encouraged Even on my Twitter account. I retweet negative tweets people who are attacking me I retweet it because I don't because I also retweet people who are saying good things about me I want to maintain a balance of good and bad so that people who are following me know that there's criticism and There's praise. So it's the same thing over here. So first of all, I don't think it's a bad thing Secondly, I said I humbly apologize and I you know and I necessitated and want to offend her So I apologize on her page. I don't know what else I can do This is demand about me not doing media interviews or me not being on panels I'm sorry. I can't do that because that'll take away from the cause I believe in I'm allowed to speak About my view is that when you see injustice, you have to speak about it no matter where it happens And if you don't speak up, you are complicit in it So I am going to speak about any injustice whether or not people feel offended because I also had an African-American Comment that hey, he's also talking on behalf of African-Americans. How dare he? Well, I'm sorry. I see an injustice there and I'm going to speak up about it whether they like it or not That's my attitude Well, that seems like a good note to conclude on thank you all so much who braved all the various traffic delays to get Here this morning. This was a great discussion. Thank you so much for coming and Vivek will be signing copies of the book out outside and So I hope you'll get one. Thank you again for coming. Thank you