 Hey everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the campus at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, it's a beautiful place and they just had a number of sessions talking about a bunch of issues in tech around diversity and inclusion, robots taking over the world, a bunch of really high level topics. It's called the Stanford Future of Innovation. Check it out online, we'll have links to the website on and we're really excited to have the Professor Emerita, Myra Strober joining us and also the founder of the Clayman Institute. Myra, thanks for, it's been a few minutes with us. You're welcome. So you were on the diversity panel and I thought your opening was pretty funny, that we've been working on this problem, I think you said since 1972. We're making progress, there's a lot of conversation but it's really hasn't moved probably as far as you either hoped or expected that it would. Why do you think? Well, I think it has not moved as fast as I hoped or expected. Interestingly, when I founded the Clayman Institute, one of the deans who was a little nervous about having it be a permanent institute asked me if I'd be willing to agree that we could sunset the Institute when the problem was over and I smiled to myself and I said, sure, you let me know as soon as it's over and we'll sunset the Institute. But I think the reason it hasn't changed is because it's such a complicated problem. On the one hand it's very simple. I mean, what we need is commitment and then we need for people to examine the assumptions they usually make, challenge those assumptions for themselves, take action, measure their success, reward people who hire women and retain them and minorities. So it all sounds simple. But in fact, this sexism and racism is so ingrained in our society, it's so unconscious that it's a big task to get everybody to think differently. And unconscious bias is one of the big themes that the Claiming Institute talks about and teaches people about. And I think it's really valuable because people think unbiased news and Walter Cronkite had no bias and now Fox does. Well, the fact is we all have bias. We all grew up in this situation. We all see things through the filter of our own experience. So how do you, should people help kind of overcome, accepting I have bias, but to look beyond that, to work over it? Because it's not an easy thing to do. Well, I think the first step is to recognize that we all have bias and to not feel badly when someone asks us if we have it and we say, yes, we do, but to be committed to thinking about how to change it. And so instead of just hiring the person who comes to mind first, we should think, well, can I think of anybody that wouldn't come to mind first? Somebody else who might not be recognized who would also be a very good candidate here. And we need to think about, for instance, in technology, who do we send to conferences? Do we give everybody a fair shot at being a presenter at conferences? Or do we just think, oh, I just saw John present. He's terrific. I'll ask him to present. And then the next question is, suppose that Jane or Mary or Sarah is not as good as John as the presenter, how about giving that person some extra training so that she becomes really good at presenting? Right. And I think one of the real problems in terms of getting action done tomorrow or the next few minutes is we're all so busy, right? And we're all, everyone is just running a thousand miles a minute and it's just so easy to pick the known. What I've used before, not because I'm consciously not picking someone else, it's just it's so much quicker to just check that on my list and then move on to my next task. How do people institutionalize doing something different when that's kind of the normal behavior? Well, in our society, I think the answer is clear, money. So I think this has to be built into the bonus structure. If you hire someone and retain that person and that person is an unusual employee for your company, you should be rewarded. You should get additional bonus for that and not to say that everybody is gonna work on this just because of the bonus, but that will help to think about it and say, yes, I'm busy, but you know, I'd like that bonus and maybe I can think of somebody different. Right, right. Another thing that came up in the panel, there was conversation about, you know, a man maybe not intentionally, but really kind of sending the wrong message to him of my saying, you know, you don't need to come to that meeting we're having tonight at 6.30 because, you know, we know you got to home and get the kids or whatever. And you really brought up an interesting point, which is, and that's not necessarily the right thing to do, but more importantly, why is that meeting at 6.30? So really looking at it more of kind of a cultural infrastructure point of view, as opposed to the specific action that impacted that kind of transaction, if you will. Right, so this was really a problem at Stanford for people who were raising children, both women and men. Important meetings were held at five o'clock, six o'clock at night, and people who were raising children couldn't go to those meetings. So we all said, let's look at this, maybe we don't need to have the meeting at five or six and guess what, we didn't. So we had it at noon, and then people could come. So I think there's so many ways in which companies and organizations have been built by men, for men, at a time when they had wives at home, taking care of dinner and children, and that situation has changed. And that meeting was just always been at six, so it just kept rolling over for years and years, not necessarily an intentional thing, but that's just kind of the way that it evolved and that's where it was. Exactly, so that's a very simple thing. Look at your culture, more important than that, see if you're really making people feel comfortable. I mean, I told a story on the panel when I first was a student at MIT, I was one of three women in my class of 30 some, and I walked into my class the first day and the professor said, young lady, I think you're in the wrong room. And I said, no, I'm Myra Strober, and he said, oh, you're Myra Strober, well welcome then. And I thought to myself, somehow or other, I'm an honorary man here. And, you know, I was happy, I was welcomed finally, but that didn't mean that they had a culture of welcoming women. But it takes special gumption to be the one who's kind of cutting through the iceberg. There's a great maker series documentary on really women at the leading edge, breaking into these industries and really changing things from advertising to technology and down the road. So congratulations to you for running that ship and cracking that ice. I want to shift gears a little bit, so you've got a new book coming out. Yes. While sharing the work, give us a kind of an update. What's the book all about? What motivated it? How long have you been working on it? It's a memoir, and I've been working on it for five years because I had to stop writing like an academic and start writing for a regular audience. And the book is about my own career being a pioneer. It starts off of how I became a feminist on the Bay Bridge. So it's very silicone film. On the Bay Bridge. On the Bay Bridge. What year? 1970. Okay. 1970 on the Bay Bridge. And then it goes on to talk about my childhood and how come I came to be a pioneer. And my experiences at MIT, I was the first woman hired at the Stanford Business School, and it was 90 men and me, and there were only five women students. So I talk about all those experiences and what I've learned from them and what we can all learn from them. You're going to be bored if you're in a moderately evenly balanced situation. You're so used to kind of being one of the few. I think you like kind of breaking the ice out front. Well, when I started the Clayman Institute, we had a lot of women involved. So I had a time to be with a lot of women. All right, very good. And just kind of on the last little topic, the other one that came up in the panel was ageism. So there's plenty of talk of underrepresented minorities and women, and that gets a lot of pub right now, but not as much kind of on the ageism and we're probably right in the heart of it here in Silicon Valley, because there's this kind of engineering ethos that data and algorithms can sometimes do just fine and kind of wisdom and experience don't necessarily play as we're looking forward. So how does that play? What are you seeing from your seat as that issue kind of rises in relevance? Well, I think there are two separate issues here. One is that ageism is like sexism and racism in that we have pictures in our mind about what an older person looks like. So I always think to myself, when I think, I'm 75. When I think about 75, I think about my grandmother, but in fact, I don't look like my grandmother. I don't act like my grandmother. And all of us have to revise our notions of what it is to be an older person. And secondly, it is true that certain skills, particularly some skills that are valuable in Silicon Valley do depreciate over time. So if you got your computer science degree in 1990, by now you probably need some refreshing. And we need to have some new mechanisms to help people refresh their skills. So somebody who got their degree in 1990 who's now got a family and kids and they can't just take off and go back and get another master's degree for a year. But we need to have mechanisms, maybe a sports camp. John was talking about a sports camp for people to come back and retool. And we need to think about some system where it's not the case that you finish your education at 25 and that's it for the rest of your life. Right, right. Yeah, clearly. Well, Mara's great spending a few minutes with you. I look forward to getting the book. I didn't want to ask you what happened in 1970 in the Bay Bridge. I'll wait and read the book and get the ending. But great job on the panel and thanks for having us. You're welcome. Thank you. She's Myra Stroberg. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Catch you next time. Thanks for watching.