 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We are in Miami, Florida for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here for two days of coverage around cybersecurity and the impact to the enterprises and society. We have a great guest here to kick off the event, Linda Babcock, Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University. Author of the book, Ask for It, and she has a new book she's working on, and we'll get into that. Thanks for joining me, thanks for coming on. Now I'm really happy to be here, thanks. So, Carnegie Mellon, great, great university. They stole a bunch of people when I was in school in the computer science department. Very well known for that as well. It's kind of a revolving door. Economics, math, machine learning, all the good stuff there. What's going on at Carnegie Mellon? What's new in your world? Well, it's just actually just a great place to be because of the focus on interdisciplinary work. Problems in the world don't come as disciplines. They come with multiple perspectives needed, and so it's just a place where people can flourish, attack ideas from all kinds of angles, and so it's a really great place to be. One of the things I hear a lot about, and we cover a lot about the skills gap, certainly there's more job openings than there are jobs. And it's interesting, a lot of the jobs that are new haven't been skilled before in the classic university setting, so a lot of these jobs like cyber security, cloud computing, blockchain, crypto economics, token economics, all kind of have a math economic theme to them. So you get computer science, you got economics and policy. Seem to be the key areas around some of these new skills and challenges we face as a society. What's your take on all this? Well actually there's a lot going on in this area at Carnegie Mellon. Actually the economics group at Carnegie Mellon is been proposing a new major that really focuses on this interface between economics, machine learning, and technology. And I think it's going to train our students just for the next generation of problems that the world of tech is going to have. So it's very exciting. So let's talk about your book, Ask for It. Okay. It's not a new book that's been around for a while but you give a talk here. What's the talking track here at the event? Yeah so I have a couple of themes of research and it focuses on women's barriers to advancement in organizations. And so most of the work that I did with this book and my first book Women Don't Ask was looking about how men and women approach negotiation differently. And kind of the bottom line is that women are less likely to negotiate than men over all kinds of things like pay, like opportunities for advancement, like the next promotion. And it really harms them in the workplace because men are always out there asking for it. And organizations reward that. And so the book was really about shedding light on this disparity and what organizations can do about it and what women can do about it themselves, how they can learn to negotiate more effectively. What did you learn when you were writing the book around some of the use cases and best practices that women were doing in the field? Was it more aggressive style? Was it more collaborative? You're seeing a lot more solidarity amongst women themselves and men are getting involved. A lot of companies are kind of talking the game. Some are walking the talk. What are the big findings that you've learned? Well, I'd say that the approaches that women use are a lot different than the approaches that men use. And it's because our world lets men do a lot of different things. It lets them engage in a cooperative way. It lets them be very competitive. But our world has a very narrow view about what's acceptable behavior for women. I often call it a tightrope because women are kind of balancing that they need to go out and assert themselves but they have to do it in a way that our society finds acceptable. And that that tightrope constrains women and doesn't allow them to be their authentic selves. And so it makes it difficult for women to navigate that. What's your take on the balancing of being aggressive and the pressure companies have to keep the women population certainly pipelining in tech we see it all the time. And the whole me too thing and the pressure that goes on because norms are forming, right? Is there any new data that you can share around how the norms are forming and what men can do, particularly I get this question a lot and I always ask myself, what am I doing? Can I do something different? Because I want to be inclusive and I want to do the right thing but sometimes I don't know what to do. Yeah, of course. And it's really important that men get involved in this conversation as allies. And like you said, sometimes men don't know what to do because they feel like maybe they don't have standing to be in the conversation when it's about women. And we all need men as allies if women are going to try to reach equality at some point. But the new data really suggests negotiation may be playing a role, the work that Cheryl Sandberg lean in but the newest work that we have shows that actually the day to day things that happen at work that's holding women back. So let me tell you about that. So what we find is if you think about your calendar and what you do all day, there are tasks that you can classify as being promotable. That is, they're really your core job responsibility. They're noticed, rewarded. But there's lots of other things that happen in your organization that are often below the surface that are important to do, valued, but actually not rewarded. And what our research finds is that men spend much more time than women at the tasks that are these promotable tasks that are rewarded. Women spend much more time than men on these tasks that we call non-promotable that are not rewarded. And it's really holding women back. And how men can help is that the reason that women are doing these tasks is because everyone is asking them to do these tasks. And so what men can do is start asking men to do some of these things that are important but yet not rewarded because the portfolios now are really out of balance and women are really shouldering the burden of these tasks disproportionately. So get on the wave of the promotional or the promotional oriented things. Bet more and the men can come and pick up the slack on some of the things that were quote delegated to the women because they could order the kitchen food or whatever meals. Help others with their work. Someone has to hire the summer interns. Someone has to organize events. Someone has to resolve underlying conflicts. Those are all really important things. Women get tasked with them and that really doesn't allow them to focus on their core job responsibilities. And so men can step up to the plate, start doing their fair share of that work and really then allow women to reach their full potential. I've been thinking a lot about this lately around how collaboration software and how collaborative teams, you start to see the big successful companies like Amazon that have this two pizza team concept. Smaller teams, team oriented. If you're doing it during a team, these things go, you know, you give and you get. So I think it's probably a better environment. Is that happening or no? It's unclear how teams kind of shake out for women in this setting because there's actually some research that shows when a team produces an output and the supervisor trying to figure out like who really made the output, who was the valued player on the team. They often overvalue the contributions of men and undervalue the contributions of women. So actually team projects can be problematic if women don't get their fair share of credit. So the bias is everywhere? The bias is everywhere and you know, it's not that people are trying to discriminate against women. It's just that it's a subconscious implicit bias and so affects our judgments in ways that we don't even realize. It's actually probably amplifies that, you know, the GamerGate and a lot of things on digital and digital communities, we see a lot where people are hiding behind their avatars. That's also a pretty bad environment. So we've been doing a lot of thinking and reporting around communities and data. I wanted to give you a thought because I never really probed at this, but is there any economic incentives? And actually you're an economics professor. You're seeing things like crypto economics and tokens and all kinds of new things. Is there a potential path towards bringing an incentive system that's cutting edge? What's the, is there any progressive thinking around any kind of incentive systems for organizations or individuals? Well, when you think about incentives and me being an economist, I think about those a lot and I merge that with my work on the barriers to women's advancement. I think incentives is one area that you can actually play a big role and that is that organizational leaders should be incentivized to see that they have equal advancement for their male and female employees in their workforce. Because if they don't, it means they're losing out on this potential that women have, that they aren't able to fully be productive. And so that's a place I think that incentives can really be important. I was talking to a great leader and he said, and I'm quoting him, and I feel the same way, he says, our incentive is business. We get a better outcome when we include women. And I said, okay, can you give data? And he goes, yeah, we make software. And half of the people that use our software are women. Or women, right. So why don't we have women. And I'm like, oh, that makes a lot of sense that the bias that should be in there for women, for women created by women for women. And women spend more money as consumers than men. And so having women on teams allows them to see perspectives that men may not see. And so it can really add to new innovative thinking that hadn't been there before by including women. Well, I'm excited that there's a little bit of movement in tech. Certainly in venture capital, you're starting to see a lot more women come in, still more boardroom work to do. But I think there's a nice sign that there's more jobs that are computer related that aren't just coding. I mean, that's male dominant pretty much now and still is for a while. But there's a lot more skills. There's all kinds of range now in computer science that's interesting. How is that affecting some of the new pipelining of women? Well, I think the good news is that there are, is increasing levels of women's attainment in STEM fields. And so there are more and more female workers entering the labor market today. We just have to make sure that those workers are valued and feel included when they do join tech companies. Otherwise they will leave. Because what happens unfortunately sometimes in tech is it doesn't feel inclusive for women and the quit rate for women in tech is over twice the rate for men. Some of the reasons are is they're not feeling valued in their positions, they're not seeing their advancement. And so with this new wave of female workers, we have to make sure that those workplaces are ready to accept them and include them. That's great. Well, Ask For It is a great book. I went through it and it's a great handbook. I learned a lot. It really is a handbook around just standing up and taking what you can. You got a new book you're working on. What's that going to look like? What are some of the themes in the new book? Yeah, so the new book is on these promotable tasks and the way I like to think about it is there's so much attention to work-life balance. How do you manage both of those? With your career, your family, how does that work? But our work actually focuses on work-work balance. And what we mean is paying attention to the things that you do at work. Making sure that those things that you're doing are the things that are most valuable for your employer and are going to be most valuable for your career. So it's a really different focus on the day-to-day ways that you spend your time at work and how that can propel women to the next level. That's awesome. Linda, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. What do you think of the event here, Kronos Global Cybersecurity Summit? Well, I got to say it's not my typical event, but I'm having a good time learning more about what's happening in the tech industry today. Cyber protection is certainly a cutting-edge issue and certainly on the East Coast and Washington D, certainly with national defense and all kinds of things happening. Ransomware is a big topic that's kicked around here. The town's getting taken out like, oh my God. Wanting Bitcoin in return, taking your systems out. Learning all kinds of new stuff to add to my toolkit. Great to have you on. Thanks for your insight. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE. We are here at Miami Beach for the Kronos Cyber Protection Conference. Thank you for watching.