 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco, Musconi West for the Red Hat Summit, and we're covering three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host. John Troyer, our next guest is Jennifer Clover, creator and executive producer of the Chasing Grace Project, formerly CUBE alumni who's on the Cloud Now Awards at Google. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. So, obviously Open Source has been amazing growth, okay, and it's kind of democratized software. Right. You got a project in my opinion, I think it's democratizing, getting the word out on the tech issues around women in tech. And more importantly, it's inspirational, but it's also informational. Take a minute and explain. What is the project Chasing Grace? I'll say Grace Hopper. Right, right. Well, the Chasing Grace Project is a documentary series of six episodes about women in tech. The name does lend itself to Grace. We named it after Grace Hopper because she really exemplifies the grit and the excellence that we're all chasing all the time. It's also this idea that we're chasing the idea of grace in the face of adversity. It's not always easy, but the women who we've interviewed and talked to exhibit amazing grace and are super inspiring. So, the series doesn't shy away from adversity, but it certainly focuses on stories of resilience. And when did you start the project? And what's, as your episodes, Netflix is on DVD, I mean, where do I? Let's hope. We hope so. Started the project, excuse me, about a year and a half ago. I put a call for stories out in a number of women in tech forums. I belong to, was inundated with responses. Women are ready to share their stories. Spent every Friday for about four or five months on back-to-back calls with women. Produced the trailer last May, year ago. Released it in September, and since then it's been a whirlwind. Lots of interest, lots of men and women wanting to share their stories as well as people wanting to underwrite the work, which is fabulous because it relies on sponsors. So, yeah, we're about a year and a half in. We just finished episode one and screened it. We've got four or five more to go. So, we're early, we're early. But it's happening in fact. And share some stories because, you know, I saw the trailer, it's phenomenal. There's women in tech, and the culture of the Brogue culture, people talk about that all the time, it's male-dominated, right? And you've seen here with Red Hat Summit, there's women here but still dominated by men. The culture has to evolve. And I think a lot of men are smart and see it. Some are, some are learning. I would call learning a bigger percentage. Sure, sure. What are you finding that women who are really driving the change has been the big trend line? And how is the men reacting? Because the men got to be involved too, because they also have to take responsibility for the change. Absolutely, absolutely. I would say that by women sharing their stories, we are starting to change culture. I'm actually keynoting today at the Women's Leadership Lunge at Red Hat Summit. I'm going to talk about that, the impact of story on cultural change because there's a lot of reasons cited for the decline of women in tech because it's actually, we've gone backwards. There's actually fewer than ever before. But many things are cited. So the pipeline issue, poor education, but the biggest thing cited is the culture. And the culture's changed over the course of the last decade in particular. And so the women we've talked to, their stories of resilience are starting to change that culture. When people talk and share experiences and stories, there's empathy that comes from both men and women who hear those stories. And I think that that starts to change culture. And it's starting to happen. I think we are pivoting, right? It's happening, but there's still a lot of work to do. Jennifer, at the keynote, or at the luncheon here, the Women's Leadership Luncheon, anything else that you'll be bringing up, that sounds like part of your message here that you're going to be bringing today and if you want to share right before you go up? Yeah, sure. So we're going, like I said, I'll talk about the impact of story on culture. I'll talk about the stories of resilience. I'm going to share a few stories from women who we've actually interviewed and featured in episode one, because you can't see episode one online because we're in discussions with distributors. I'm going to share those stories with this audience. And I think folks can, like I said, learn from those and gain empathy and walk away, hopefully, with action. That seems great. The storytelling, of course, is key, right? We're in an interesting place in our culture today and I think social media, the 10 or 20 years of social media we've had has as part of that. I know my feed is filled with incredible women leaders in tech and frankly, it's much better for it. But you do sense a sense of almost weariness in some folks, right? Because this is one, they get shit on. Can I say that, John? But also, you'd like to, eventually, if you're a woman in tech, you'd like to be able to talk about tech, not just being a woman in tech. I mean, is that just where we are in society right now? I think so. And you know, it's a marathon, not a sprint, right? It's going to take a long time. It took a long time to get us to this place. It's going to take a long time to move us forward. But yeah, women do want to build tech and not have to advocate for themselves, but hopefully projects like the Chasing Grace Project and other work that's happening out there, there's a lot of initiatives that have sprung up in the last few years are helping to do that so that the women who are building can build. What's your big takeaway from the work you've done so far? It could be something that didn't surprise you, that you knew was pretty obvious. And what surprised you? What's some of the things that's come out of it that's personal learnings for you? Yeah, I think the power that comes from giving women a platform to be seen and heard for their experiences. Every, almost every woman I've talked to says I feel so alone. They're in an office with mostly men. There might be another woman, but they feel so alone. When they share their stories and they see other women sharing their stories, they know they're not alone, right? There may be few of them, but the stories are very similar. And I think that men learn a lot when they see women sharing their stories too, because they don't know, right? The experiences that we all have are very different. We're walking through the same industry, but our day-to-day experiences are quite different. And so learning what that's like, both for women, for men, there are men that are going to be featured in the series and women of other women. So just the power in that. Most women tell me I don't really have a story. Well, you both know that when you dig a little bit, everybody has a story. Everybody has a story. Multiple stories, so yeah. So let me ask you a question. So this has come up with some of my interviews on women in tech, and that is that it kind of comes up subtly. It's not really put out there, like you said, aggressively, but they say there's also a women-women pressure. And so how do you, how have you found that come up? Because it's not just women and men. I've heard women say, you know, there's pressure, there's other pressures from other women. Do more or do less. And it's kind of an individual thing, but it's also kind of a code as well to stick together. Same time, there's a women and women dynamic. What have you found on that? Mostly I've found, I think there's a shift happening. Mostly I've found that women are forming community and supporting each other. And everyone has a different definition of feminism or womenism as some women have called it. But I think there are some women who've told me, usually the older generations who have told me, there's only one, there's only room for one woman at the table, right? There's only one woman makes it to leadership and she's kind of like very protective of that space, right? But we're seeing that less and less and less. You know, I don't want to turn this into, I hate to turn this into a versus scenario, right? But especially online, I see a lot of interaction of men or coming up and saying, well, either trying to explain to women what their problem is or, but also saying educate me, like take your time to educate me because I can't be bothered to kind of figure it out myself. But also trying to stand up themselves and lead the charge. And so one of my personal things I do, I sit back and let the women talk and listen to them about what they want to do. Any particular, you know, advice you have for folks who are listening and who might want to, you know, what do you do? I guess sit down and pay attention. Yeah, I'd say, listen, listen to the stories, listen to what women need and want out of their male allies and advocates. And listen to the women who you already are friends and colleagues with. What do they need from you? Start there and then build your way out. I remember when I first started the Chasing Grace Project, I was actually advised by people, well, don't feature men at all because, you know, they can't speak for women. And that's very true. But I've decided that we will feature both men and women because we're all part of the industry, right? You know, I talk about the futures being built by all of us. We need more women in leadership. We don't need just women in leadership, right? We need men and women. So I think though, right now at this moment in time, men should listen and ask their, like I said, their inside circle of women that are friends and colleagues, what can I do? What do you need in terms of my support? And it's inclusion too. There's a time to have, you know, certain all women and then men as well. Right. Kind of the right balance. Right. Well, I got to ask you, obviously Red Hat is an open source world. Community is huge. Obviously tech has a community and some will argue how robust it is and fair it is. Communities have their own kind of personality. But the role of the community becomes super critical. Can you just share your thoughts and views of how the role of the community can up its game a bit on inclusion and diversity? And I put inclusion first because inclusion and diversity, that seems to be the trend in my interviews is diversity and inclusion now is inclusion and diversity. But the community has some self-policing mechanisms. There's kind of a self-governance dynamic of communities. So it's an opportunity. What do you attribute? It is an opportunity. There's a lot of things that are talked about within the open source community in terms of how to advance inclusion in a positive way. One is enforcement. So at events like this, there's a code of conduct. They become very popular. Right, everybody has one for good reason, but everybody's doing them now. But I've, you know, I worked at the Linux Foundation for 12 years when you have an incident at an event. If you don't enforce your code of conduct, it doesn't mean anything. So I think that's one very tangible example of something you can do. We certainly tried at the Linux Foundation, but I remember it was a challenge, right? Like if something happened, what was the level of issue and how would we enforce that and address it? So I think the community can do that. I think start there, yeah. What's your take on the Linux Foundation since you brought it up? Lots of going on there. CNCF is exploding in growth. Part of that, Jim Zemmels doing a great job. And what's your, as you look at the Linux Foundation, since you have the history, where it's come from and where it's going, what's your view of that? I was part of the Linux Foundation before it was called the Linux Foundation. It was called open source development labs, way, way back. But, you know, always impressed with what the Linux Foundation's doing. CNCF in particular is on fire. I watched my social media feeds last week from about KubeCon and Copenhagen, a lot of friends there. You know, open source is the underpinning of society, right? If the world we live in is a digital one and we're building that digital existence for tomorrow, the infrastructure is open source. So it's just going to become more and more relevant. Yeah, and they're doing a great job. And it's an opportunity for the community to change things. Yeah, yeah. And there's a good mindset in the open source community with the Linux Foundation. Very growth oriented, growth mindset. Love the vibe there. They got good vibes and they're very open and inclusive. There's some projects that are really prioritizing DNI, one of which is called Foundry Foundation. Abby Kearns has done an amazing job there. The Node.js community I think is pretty progressive. So yeah, it's encouraging. Yep, Abby was on theCUBE. We were there, Copenhagen. Great, great. Thanks for coming on. What's next for you? Just your life's a whirlwind. Yeah, you know, I'm in Chicago next week for a shoot. We're shooting episode two, which is focused on women and leadership roles. There's only 11% of executive positions in Silicon Valley are held by women. So it's a provocative topic because a lot of women haven't experienced that. So we want more to do that. Well, if you need any men for the show, John and I will happily volunteer to be stand-ins and backdrops and- Fantastic, thank you. Thanks for coming on. There's theCUBE coverage here, live, Moscone West in San Francisco for Red Hat Summit 2018. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.