 From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE covering VMware Women Transforming Technology 2019. Brought to you by VMware. Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology event. VMware, WT squared one of my favorite events and I'm joined by two PhDs, both from, I'm going to say this one time, the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab. We've got Shannon Gill-Martin, Senior Research Scholar. Hi, Shannon. Hi. Great to have you here. Great to have you. We've got Caroline Simard, Managing Director of the Lab. Ladies, thank you so much for joining. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. So this event we were talking about before we started that you walk into the keynote, opening keynote, which of itself was electric, but the energy that comes into the room with, VMware was telling me a little while ago, about 1,500 live attendees, not even including those that are watching the live stream, the energy comes into the room and then of course this morning with Joy, I'm going to try to say her name, Bola Mweeney, Bola Mweeney, the poet of Co, the MIT researcher who started really sharing with us the significant biases in AI that the energy, if it could even be down that more, I can't even imagine it. So I can imagine the panel that you guys were on this morning was quite charged. The panel title was I found interesting, inclusive animators designing for change. So Caroline, talk to us about designing for change. You look at through a design lens, what does that mean? Yeah, so I think what kind of framed the morning and then Shannon was the moderator, so I want, she picked the topic of design, but I think what Joy really showed is the power that is possible to realize when women and women of color and people from different dimensions of identity are included in creating technology and how much better technology will be for society, if all voices are included. And I would also say that some of her comments also make it clear that it is fundamentally irresponsible not to have diversity at the table in designing the technology of tomorrow. The consequences on different kinds of people and different populations are significant. And so this is why Shannon really picked this idea of as engineers and designers and creators of this technology, how do you keep in mind the responsibility that you have? So yeah, talk to us more about the design and why that is so critical. And the way we positioned it for our panelists, it was titled inclusive innovators designing for change. And we were going to explore how meaningful change towards greater diversity and equity is realized in engineering cultures and in the very technology that's being created. More specifically though, how do individuals and communities of people design for change in their technical environments even when this environment may not be initially very receptive to new ways of interacting, to new ways of thinking, to new ways of achieving. And so the whole panel was premised on this idea of people are designers of change in their environments. How does that happen? How do people interface with barriers to those design processes? And what is advice for the younger generation as they look ahead to their pathways as designers for change? Yeah, cause change in any context of life is hard. Yup. Right, it's an uphill battle. But designing for that change, I'm curious what some of the commentary was from the panelists about when you're encountering, whether it's a company or a leadership group within a company that, to your point, and it isn't receptive, what were some of the comments or stories of how that was changed over time to be contraceptive and understand the massive potential that that change can have. I mean, we look at numbers like companies with women on the leadership committees are far more profitable. So what were some of those from I don't get it to, oh my gosh, why are we doing this sooner? And we had this amazing range of perspectives represented on the panel. So we had VMware's chief technology officer, Ray O'Farrell. And he was really talking about, from a leader perspective, a key idea here when there are barriers and blocks and inertia is to open things up and really start listening. And this is a skill and a talent and a group practice that is so little done, so infrequently done, so poorly done sometimes, but really key in the face of those barriers is to actually say, instead of shutting down, open up and start listening to what's happening. Another one of our panelists, Susan Fowler, who is the Time Magazine person of the year as one of the silence breakers in 2017, she was really talking about how you expect the steps. You're going to need to go through a lot of steps to make your voice heard. And ultimately for Susan, she made the decision to go public with what she had encountered and was facing and grappling with and struggling as were many of her colleagues. But she was really talking about the step-by-step process that's involved in a large organization. When you're hitting blocks, you've just got to keep on fighting that good fight and you also need to be doing your very best work at the same time. It's a high pressure situation. Absolutely, so. Absolutely, we also heard from Lisa Gelater, who's the CEO of TechWittable, an organization that's creating kind of a safe place for change agents to share their stories when they're encountering these blocks and this kind of unfair treatment. And she talked about also the need to do your best work but also the critical importance of community in being very more resilient as you're trying to drive change in your environment. And this is the kind of community that is being built today with this event. Is really paying attention, especially for her as a black woman engineer being the only one constantly at the table fighting you know for change. It's been something that she has realized she needs to be a lot of attention to so that she can be much more resilient as a leader for long-term change. Another topic that I think in terms of generating change that really came through both in the panel and during this morning's keynote in that we pay a lot of attention to at the lab is to really highlight bias, is to really diagnose what is really happening in organizations or in AI as we heard from Joy this morning. So a lot of people genuinely aspire to treat others fairly, right? But they don't realize that their workplaces are so far from being a meritocracy that there's these structural inequalities that are really embedded in all of the ways that people are working. And so when you're able to show people exactly how it shows up in their company, right? The promotion rates for women of color, for example, being lower than for other people. The exact points of data that they need to see that they're not treating people the same way and creating the same kind of pathways for impact for different kinds of people, then that has a lot of power to drive change because a lot of people then will be very motivated to say, okay, I see this is happening in my org every day. Now I can design a different approach, right? How do I redesign the way I'm working today in my units and take action? You should actually have the data. It's such a dichotomy at times that we're surrounded by data, especially in Silicon Valley. But one of the things that shocked me what Joy showed this morning is when she put on blast IBM, Microsoft, and what was at Face++, about looking at all of the built-in biases to facial recognition. But one of the things that really also I thought was interesting was that she went and showed this to these companies who responded and those numbers are actually improving. And then when she said, hey, Amazon. So the fact that even that one person is able to show, look at some of the massive problems that you're training these models to have, they need to be able to see that. So the highlight, I think the highlight, the bias, and the communicate, communicate, communicate, and listen are three critical elements. Exactly, exactly. One additional part of both Joy's presentation and Lisa's comments too, really spoke to action needing to take an intersectional approach. So Joy's data breaks it down by race and gender and all of the sudden you see completely different trends. Lisa spoke to that as well in her comments. Key to this designing for change process is really wearing the hat of someone who is looking through the world with an intersectional lens and understanding how different axes operate together uniquely for different groups. And that's when you see these biases being highlighted really in full force and full relief. So both of these points and these presentations really brought that up. Yeah, and the intersectionality that Joy talked about was even evident, and you could parallel it to why it was important to look at all these different sources of facial recognition data, how disparate some of them were. Right, I know, without that lens, you couldn't see all of that variation even across the different providers. Yeah, and she talked to about how everything is classified in a binary way, right, in terms of gender identity and where the data doesn't even see people who are non-binary. Exactly. So it's like, again. That's still a huge omission. Exactly, that we have a lot of more work to do to have data that truly captures all the dimensions we're interested in. It does, it does. Long way to go, but the fact that it's being highlighted and opportunities like not just what VMware does with the lab as well. So let's talk a little bit about the lab. It kind of got it started in 2013 when then Stanford president, Dr. John Hennessy, provided some funding. I had the opportunity to interview him last week, lovely man. Last year, VMware did a big endowment of about 15 million. What's going on? Caroline, we'll start with you. What's going on at the lab? What are you guys studying now? What are some of the breakthroughs that have been uncovered in the last 12 months? Yeah, so a big part of our lab's work, and since we began this work, has been to really bridge the gap between research and practice. And so a lot of why there's little progress being made is because you have a lot of research happening in the academy, in the ivory tower if you will, and then you have a lot of innovative practices being tested, but without necessarily the research foundation and the research frameworks to truly evaluate it. And so our work has been to really bridge those two things together and explore these boundaries so we can have more innovative research, but also more evidence-based practices come in. And since the VMware endowment, we've been able to really grow in our aspirations and the kind of data and the kind of research questions that we can really ask. One of them is this focus on a more intersectional, long-term study of really documenting the experience of women of color and really understanding the nature of their career pathways across racial dimensions and really highlighting a lot more of qualitative, deep insight to generate their stories and really centering their experience. The other one is very investing in large-scale data sets that capture gender, race, age, and other identity dimensions and look at their long-term career trajectories this is actually work that Shannon is leading. So we have an exciting data set where we have people through five years and we see what happens to them, who gets promoted, who doesn't, who gets top talent designation, who gets a salary increase, who and then we were excitingly looking at social network data, so who's meeting with who and then what kind of connections do you need to be able to advance in your career and are there some systematic inequalities there, right? And a big part of our work then is to design these interventions where we work with companies to test what we call a small wins approach. It always starts with diagnosis. Here's what's going on in your very specific workplace in your culture and then we co-design with leaders and managers. It doesn't work for us or HR or anybody to say, go do this or you should do this. It's really about really engaging managers who want to do better in coming up with the design fix, if you will, that they can come up with informed by our research, so it's a co-design process and then we roll it out and we test the outcomes pre and post. So we're doing a lot more work now to disseminate what we're learning through these interventions so that other organizations can implement this very similar approach. First, I love that it's called an intervention. Yeah. I think that's incredibly appropriate. Yeah, yes. Second, are you seeing an uptick in the last year of companies, obviously VMware and Dell being two great companies that are very focused on not just women in technology, but I loved how Joy said today, it's women and people of color are the underrepresented majority. Are you seeing an uptick of companies willing to accept the intervention and collaborate with you to really design from within for that change? Yes, absolutely. And I would say that in this industry, people are comfortable with piloting things and doing a little R&D experiment, right? So it's also a culturally appropriate way of thinking, okay, what if we tried this and see what happens? And so I see a lot of energy from organizations and based on what you were talking about, it's also, I think companies are aware that it's the overlapping dimensions of identity increasingly aware are within their own walls, but then in their customer, in their consumer base, right? So how is their product affecting different kinds of people? Is there, are their customers experiencing bias from the very platforms that they build? And so I think that's also a very powerful entryway into this intersectional conversation because the product is so foundational to the business of the company. It is especially event after event that we cover on theCUBE, customer experience in any industry is critical because as consumers of whatever it is, we have so much choice. Shannon, last question for you. One of the things that always interests me is the attrition rate being so high in technology. I'm curious what you guys are finding in the lab with mentioning following women on there, maybe their first five years, are you seeing any kind of glaringly obvious challenges that are driving that attrition? Is it, it's got to be more than the motherhood panels. Right, right, right. We're looking at a range of what we call pathway outcomes really for young people just starting out in their very first, second jobs, where they are several years later, we're looking at odds of promotion, odds of leaving the company, odds of moving in making a lateral move into some other kind of line of business, maybe taking them out of let's say a technical role and moving them into a non-technical role. Each and every one of those critical moments is worthy of deeper study for us. And what we're doing really is taking this intersectional lens and understanding how do those moments vary for different groups of women. It's not enough just to say all women have some X percentage of an attrition rate. We're trying to understand how attrition really varies by subgroups of women and how that varies over time with what interactions that precede it and then follow. One of the themes that we've been really looking at in, for instance, attrition stories is the assignments. Which projects, what kinds of assignments are people getting in their first few years on the job? How are some of those make or break with what net consequence for women, men from different racial ethnic backgrounds, different ages, different countries and understanding really the role of those assignments in someone's longer-term career pathway, just how important they are and what kinds of interventions we can design to really elevate access to the best assignments for everyone, basically. Right, so. Gosh, you guys, this is so fascinating and so inspiring what you're doing at the lab. I wish we had more time, but you'll have to come back next year. Exactly. Absolutely, we will. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. For The Cube, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at WT Squared. Thanks for watching.