 So, hi everyone, and thank you for being here. My name is Meraf Dean, and this is my colleague, Gometi Anandan, and we're gonna talk today about women leadership cohort. So before we start, a quick question to the audience. How many of you have been part of, or are still part of a cohort? That is like a group of people that support each other in to achieve a certain goal. Okay. So, I think this talk is gonna be very beneficial for most of you. We're gonna talk about, we're gonna give a brief background and tell you how this cohort was formed. We're gonna talk about the benefit of the cohort. We're gonna give you the secret ingredient of how to form such a successful cohort. And there's a key takeaway, one key takeaway. Okay, so, I would hold starts, started. So, we have, we all work in Red Hat, and we have senior leader, Perry Myers, who we're very lucky to have him on the crowd today. Gonna get back to him afterwards. And Perry has in his group two wonderful, well-accomplished women leaders, that's Gometi and Kate. And Perry was also mentoring me, so I'm from a different org. And then, Perry had a great idea. So, we knew all of us, and in your background, and we knew we were all at the next level of management. So, he figured, why don't I connect the dots and let them know each other? And this is basically how our cohort was started. This cohort is working extremely well. So, just to give you an understanding of what does it mean? So, we meet once a month. And in this, during the discussions, we bring up to the table very important topics. I listed a few here, just to give you the feeling of it. So, one example is to inspire ideas that were previously discounted as too ambitious. So, as women, we sometimes tend to, not to aim high, but rather to aim low. And this is a place where we kind of took these targets and break them down into something more achievable, doable. Another important topic is that we kind of advise each other because one of the hardest topic is how to be a mom and have a career at the same time. How do we manage that? We advise each other. We have the ability to expand the network via this cohort. So, for example, Gomathi here is mentoring one of the associate managers in my org. And I thought it was a good match because they're both trying to, doing the same path in their career before they become a manager. And of course, we require variety of perspective and learning opportunities. So, in short, this cohort is extremely beneficial then we kind of try to understand why? Because in the first place, none of us really looked for help or support to tell you the truth who are very good at where we were. We're well, we know our job, we're very professional, we're good at what we do. And still this cohort added something that wasn't there before. So we kind of tried to this talk, reverse engineer, to try to understand why makes it, what makes it so good, what added value does it give us? And it was kind of a surprising to profoundly understand this. What basically lies underneath that is that this cohort helps us to address gender related challenges together. And in order not to leave you like in this very high level statement, we're gonna give you some down to earth examples, three good concrete examples, and I'm gonna hand it over to Gamathie. Let's go into examples. Let me ask you a question first. How many of you here have felt like self-doubt? You think that you do not have the abilities to do the job that you are doing? There you go. Guess what? I'm part of that group as well, and that feeling has a name. It's called imposter syndrome. And it is basically you being insecure of your abilities that make you feel that you don't deserve to be in the role that you are in, even though you have all the qualities to be in the role and perform really well. There was a poll conducted by one poll which basically surveyed 4,000 adults. Two thirds of the adults said, two thirds of women in that group said that they rarely feel truly confident about their abilities and always had some sort of self-doubt. And the self-doubt most often arose in workplace settings. So imposter syndrome, workplace settings. It goes very well together. How does this cohort help me address this imposter syndrome? Basically, they provided the support that I need because I was able to trust Kate and Mirav and it helped me strengthen my self-esteem. During the meetings, we meet once a month, as Mirav mentioned earlier, and during the meetings, we talk about our insecurities. We highlight each other's abilities. Quote examples, hey, by the way, you did that, that's awesome. You know how much that means when you are feeling self-doubt, someone whom you think are really well-established and talented, state that to you in a personalized setting that makes a world of difference. And I hope you are able to have a group similar to what we have together to address your insecurities as well. Let's go to a different example. Women also tend to shy away from self-advocacy and personal brand range. I'm gonna quote another study here. You have to bear with me, you're gonna get a lot of numbers now. Harvard Business School did a research where they studied 4,000 working adults and 10,000 school-aged youth. In that study, they found out that 62%, that's more or less two-thirds, of the women and girls that they studied felt like they always rated themselves and their abilities far less favorably than the male and boys, men and boys in that group. The researchers were surprised by their finding. So they did more research and they found out that these insecurities or the way people rate or women and girls rate themselves less favorably started at a very young age, as young as being in sixth grade. So that is a huge problem. We have started having these self-doubt and inability to rate ourselves for what we are worth. And so they did more research and they found out that the way they rate themselves less favorably stems from the fact that women and girls think that they have their skills and abilities are far less than their counterparts, men and boys. So they wanted to, we wanted to talk about this. When we were having one of our discussions, we talked about how we don't promote ourselves, how we don't empower ourselves and do what we wanted to do. So I'll give you a specific example. When we started talking in the first few months, Mirab here got promoted to a senior manager. We both were so happy for her when we talked about her journey on how she got to being a senior manager. And at that point, I shared with Kate and Mirab that I feel I hold myself back sometimes because when it comes to my career development and progression, because I feel that people might see me being aggressive in when I warrant or talk for myself and I didn't want to be seemed aggressive. And immediately after I shared that, they both crushed those insecurities for me. Again, I wouldn't have shared these, of course I shared with my family and friends, but sharing with someone who is in a similar role as you in a workplace makes a huge difference, right? So what happened after that? We talked a little bit more about what we wanted to do in our career at Red Hat and beyond. And at the end of the meeting, Kate and I came back, came out of the meeting with a concrete plan of what we wanna do, how we wanna initiate these discussions with our respective manager for the next level in our careers. And we also set a timeline for that. Before we meet the next time, we will have this discussion with our respective managers. You know, what happens is the specificity gets lost sometimes when you talk to friends, you're like, oh, you need to talk to your manager, your friends encourage you, your family encourages you, but you don't get the specific timelines so you don't stick to it. The difference here is, as all very talented managers, we write down plenty of notes, we capture the notes and we assign action items in the document. So we both had an action in the document that was assigned to us, which said we talked to our respective managers about our career progression the next level to come up with a plan for it, not to say I want to get promoted, but to come up with a plan for it because that's the first step. About personal branding, that's another example I'm gonna talk about. So we talk about personal branding and branding in general. So I think the discussion started like, oh, somebody doesn't know me in the different org. And I was telling, oh, I normally do this where I figured if I take some tasks which is not related to my role in my day-to-day responsibilities, for instance, when I joined this group, the new group that I am in at Red Hat right now, well, it's not new really, I've been there more than two years now. I started running a program, a reward zone program where basically we distribute rewards for associates to recognize the work that they've done in that specific quarter. And I said I normally take these kinds of additional tasks or responsibilities just to put my name out there. I've learned that when people know your name, they tend to connect better the next time you reach out to them for anything, right? Doesn't necessarily have to be a favor but it makes the conversation, it makes the relationship much better when you reach out to someone and they already know your name. They are like, in their head, the connection goes on. Oh, this is Gometi, I've talked to her, I've seen an email from her and then they are much more open to responding to you. At least that's how I feel. So I figured someone else would feel that way too. So I shared that with Mirav and Kate and they thought it was a great idea and they said they would look for other opportunities. That's our way of promoting our self-brand. As I said, build confidence, practice self-empowerment and personal branding and hands it. The next myth, women tend to not have strong networks. I kind of learned something new. I'll show you a visual. I hope everyone can see this well. I did not know this statistic before I started preparing for this presentation. This is a LinkedIn research and based on this research, they say that women tend to have 14 to 38% less of a stronger network than men around the world. So it's not one country, it's not one geography. Everywhere, all around the world, women tend to have a weaker network than men. So why is networking so important? Social networks are critical to professional advancement. So let's talk about specific needs for men and women because they're different, apparently. Again, I did not know that when it comes to creating a network or using your network to your benefit. Men need centrality. What does that mean? Centrality means you have a lot of contacts, you have huge network, and those contacts in your network will help you create more networking contacts. So you have a huge network. Men need that. Women also need centrality, but women also need an extra additional thing, which is an inner circle. They need a trusted inner circle to help empower them, support them, and give the little boost that they need to reach out there to their central networks and help them enhance and leverage those networks for their professional development. So we talked about inner circle. My inner circle is my cohort. Hopefully you all have, and if you don't, create your own inner circles as well to build those stronger networks. I'm gonna give you an example about this and about networking. How it helped us. I'm gonna call out another person in our audience now. So we were talking in our discussions again, we were talking about our networks and how we know other people within Red Hat in different groups. And I think Mirab had that idea of, oh, we should bring in one of the senior leaders, women leaders to our group and so we can raise these questions and get their perspective. And Mirab said, should bring Karen. I know Karen. She'll be happy to come to talk to us and Karen did come to talk to us and it was a very, very, very useful session because she happens to be in the crowd. It happens to be in the crowd. And she answered all our questions. I think confirmed some of our beliefs, helped boost our confidence, did everything that we thought she would and did a little bit more. And after Karen left, we all got together and said, that was really good. That was really useful. Maybe we should try, think about someone else. And then Kate said, oh, I know someone else from a different business unit. So I'll reach out to her and we'll have her on our meeting next time. And we'll get her perspective from a different business unit point of view. Again, we wouldn't have reached out, I personally wouldn't have reached out to Karen to talk to her, raise my questions, share my thoughts, if not for this network. What else? I guess? Another visual. One of my favorite ones. So yesterday in our social event, I explained this to someone. I was talking to someone whom I never talked to and he asked me, what is your talk about? I was like, oh, it's about women leadership cohort. And he's like, I really don't understand. I think in 2023, everybody has equal opportunities. What is that we are talking about here? It seems like two backwards that we are talking, still talking about, women need additional opportunities and so on and so forth. So I told him, the difference is equality and equity. What is equality? Equality is giving equal opportunities, the same opportunities to everyone. That's equality. What's equity? Equity is giving the opportunities that people need, the addressing those gaps along with those opportunities so that whoever is not having the enough opportunity to whoever has those gaps, those gaps are addressed and eventually everybody's equal. So when there's equal opportunity, everybody has a fair chance at those opportunities as well. I hope those examples were helpful. I'm gonna hand it back to Mirab. Okay, so I hope that at this point, you're all convinced that having a cohort is a extremely beneficial thing for you all. Some of you are asking yourselves, okay, so let's say I wanna start one, what does it take? So we wrote some criteria, but please take it with a grain of salt because this is based on our own experience. It wasn't tested in lab or being researched or anything. Basically, we think three conditions should be met. The first one is that all the members should have some sort of a common ground. That could be a similar place, a position at work that wanna go to the next one, similar to what we have, could be around a specific goal. So for example, a group of people can form a cohort so that they can stand here next year and do a talk because it's scary as hell to stand here. So that's the first criteria. The second one is that the group has to be small. We think three to five top, that should be the optimal number and the reason is two-folded. First, some intimate things are being shared in these discussions. So it's very hard to do it in front of a very large audience so it needs to be small. And on the other hand, it also gives everyone, each member, sufficient time to talk and express themselves. Last but not least is of course, the technical stuff. You need to have easy means to communicate. That'd be easy, time zone or any other elements of communication. Okay, so almost last slide, the key takeaway. The key takeaway that we ask you to take from this talk. Remember Perry from the beginning? So we ask you to kind of be Perry. Be Perry in the sense of do a similar, Perry played a crucial role in forming this cohort. So this is kind of a call out to all leaders to try and connect others into similar cohorts because we believe it's gonna be extremely, extremely beneficial to them as it is to us. That's it, thank you. Yes, that's a fantastic question. I'm just gonna repeat it for the recording. So we have a question, how about having a man into the cohort? Not necessarily be a part of the cohort, but someone that you can ask questions to and extend the network and get his perspective and get to know us. So that is a fantastic idea. And yes, the plan is I guess to have some men. I don't think that a man can be a part of the cohort because then something gets lost. There's a certain thing of being a woman with women. Maybe there's gonna be another different cohort that combines men and women, that's a good idea. Yeah, I think I have a little bit more to add. So as you say, we have plans to reach out to other senior leaders who are not women and bring him or a different pronoun to our group. It doesn't matter who it is, right? All we want is to learn from others. It could be men, it could be women, it could be any marginalized group. That's our goal. The additional point I wanna add is the common ground that we had is that we are women, right? So obviously you could form a group which you have a common ground. So it could be men and two women or someone else and they can form a cohort. The key is they have some common ground, some common criteria that they are working towards because I think for us, that's what made this more successful. Go ahead, Yara. Okay, oh, you wanna answer his question. Okay, go ahead. Yes, of course. That was awkward. Hi, I don't know. What's up? No, I don't know. You're talking about, you know, you might wanna have a men's perspective, right? We work in a very men-dominant field. We always get the men's perspective. So when we find women, it's not like every woman have the same perspective, right? I have my perspective, Gomati has her perspective. When we talk, we're not like, yeah, yeah, we totally agree with each other. We're very different. And I do agree that, yes, we can have cohorts with men too, definitely. We want that, we want that communication, we want that network, but we already have it. We have the men, I mean, I work with what is the majority of men, we are like a few women in our team and we're trying to build all that, right? We don't need more, I would say. We want that support from a fellow woman in our team, in our workspace. And I totally agree with you, right? I totally agree that it is important, but it's missing the point. It's missing the point to this talk, in my opinion. I appreciate working with these females and I appreciate working with all the men in my team. And I mean, without the man, Perry, this wouldn't even exist. So the man is already there. So thank you, Perry. And I think that's, can I sum up to my answer? Thank you. Thank you. This is really awkward, I think, like this. Go ahead. Oh, I have a couple of... Okay. There shouldn't have been a discussion there. Yeah. Okay, I saw a few hands. Go ahead, please, to the last row. All right, so I don't think there's a question. There's just a statement that you made. So I'm going to repeat what she said. Okay, it doesn't have to be. It just occurred to be that our group formed the way it formed. She is a senior manager. We both are managers. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be similar levels or anything like that. All right, go ahead. So the question is, you work as an engineer and you don't have a lot of women engineers that work closely or in your group or within your extended network at Red Hat, or I don't know where you work from in your workplace. So what do you do in that situation? This is exactly where your leaders play a key role, right? Help you extend your network. I'm going to answer this and you can add on Mirab after. So I think you reach out to a leader that you look up to in your organization and ask them, help me find other people, other women, other, you know, from their own network of contacts to connect you with them, you know. I'm not saying it will work because we are all humans after all. You know, after a couple of sessions, it may work. It may not work, but at least you get that contact, right? So you get that introduction with someone whom you don't know that exists in other organizations. I did not know Mirab works in a different organization and again until I was introduced by Peri to Mirab. So essentially you need to reach out to one of your leaders in your organization and I'm sure they will be open to helping you find that contact and form the group that you want to. So if I may add something. Yes, please do. So that is a great question and I cannot just entirely relate to that, but just mind you, the similar ratio is I think in women managers because there are a few of us, I'm afraid, I know. So I think the best way would be to kind of find some other softwares, engineers, women engineers and then form yourself together and I don't know, kind of expand it. Like the ideas that can come out of this cohort could be great, like how do we go and prepare the next generation? Like I don't know, even from a university, but yeah, feel free to reach out to us afterwards. Can you try to ask, are there any issues and how are you using the work of that? Okay, so your initial question was like, how did Peri know whether we had common way of approaching things, like we have common things that would help us form a group better and then there was a subsequent question of how are things in terms of do we have differences of opinion or do we get along well, is that correct? Okay, so I don't know if Peri knew or not, all Peri knew was we were all getting new managers under us so we were going to be new manager of managers. So he said, oh, you guys can learn from each other and so I'm gonna connect you and he said did an email introduction to us. That's how, that was the key, right? The common ground was we were all going to be new manager of managers. So that was the common ground. To answer your subsequent question, which now it's completely blank, yeah, we do have different opinions but it is not like we get into arguments during our cohorts, we raise our opinions and we say, oh, I feel differently about this and I consider Mirav as my friend now and more than my coworker, she's my friend now and same with Kate, so I think we get along really well. Okay, you wanna add anything else? No, I said pretty well. All right, any more questions? I had someone else raise their hands. Five minutes, so. Uh-huh. What is the strong network? Strong network. So you can define it as something, depending on the size of the network. Oh, actually, let me reiterate the question first. So you would like to know or understand what a strong network means, right? So a strong network is something that you have, you can count it as number of people but in my opinion, I think it's how effective the people that you have in your network. So for instance, you need something, you need an opportunity or need to get a career advice or you need to get some information that you don't know yourself. These are the people that you have around you whom you can reach out to and potentially get the information you need. So it's like multiple sources of information who has different perspectives. So if I have to define a strong network, it has to be diverse, it has to be something that is easily reachable and you are gaining and also providing information to your network. In other words, you are giving as well as receiving benefits from the network. Yes, please. So I think a strong network would be a bit different because I think it was referred to men in that context. I think men are more bold in reaching out and extending the network and going high far more than women. So this is something that we should improve. Did that answer your question? It better. Okay. Any other questions? All right, so feel free to reach out to us if you want to discuss about this, if you disagree with us, we definitely want to hear about that as well because that's how we learn and we grow. Thank you for listening to us and giving us the opportunity to talk. Thank you for our leaders who came in to support us and the friends and everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.