 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, been profiling the leaders in the technology world, women in technology, from developers to the boardroom, everything in between. We have two great guests, remoting in from Malaysia. Nancy Wang is the general manager, also CUBE alumni from AWS Data Protection, and founder and board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, advanceawit.org. And of course, Kate Watts is the executive director of advancingwomenintech.org. So it's awit.org. Nancy, Kate, thanks for coming all the way across remotely from Malaysia. Of course, we're coming to you as fast as our internet bandwidth will allow us. And I'm just thrilled today that you get to see a whole nother aspect of my life, right? Cause typically we talk about AWS and here we're talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. Well, Nancy, I love the fact that you're spending a lot of time taking the empowerment to go out and help the industries and helping with the advancement of women in tech. Kate, you're the executive director. It's a 501C3, it's nonprofit, dedicated to accelerating the careers of women in groups in tech. Can you talk about the organization? Yes, I can. So advancing women in tech was founded in 2017 in order to fix some of the pathway problems that we're seeing on the rise to leadership in the industry. And so we specifically focus on supporting mid-level women in technical roles, get into higher positions. We do that in a few different ways, through mentorship programs, through building technical skills, and by connecting people to a supportive community. So you have your peer network and then a vertical sort of relationships to help you navigate the next steps in your career. So today we've served about 40,000 individuals globally and we're just looking to expand our reach and impact and be able to better support women in the industry. Nancy, talk about the creation, the origination story, have this all come together? Obviously the momentum, everyone in the industry has been focused on this for a long time. Where did AWIT come from? Advancing Women Technology, that's the acronym, Advancing Women Technology, or where did it come from? What's the origination story? Yeah, so AWIT really originated from this desire that I had to Kate's point around, well, if you look around, right? And don't take my word for it, right? Look at stats, look at news reports, or just frankly, go on your LinkedIn and see how many women in underrepresented groups are in senior technical leadership roles, right? Out in the companies whose names we all know. And so that was my case back in 2016. And so when I first got the idea, and back then I was actually at Google, just another large tech company in the Valley, right? It was about how do we get more role models? How we get more, for example, women into leadership roles so they can bring up the next generation, right? And so this is actually part of a longer speech that I'm about to give on Wednesday. This is part of the U.S. State Department Speaker Program. In fact, that's why Kate and I are here in Malaysia right now is working with over 200 women entrepreneurs from all over in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Borneo, so many countries where having more women entrepreneurs can help raise the GDP, right? And that fits within our overall mission of getting more women into top leadership roles in tech. You know, I was talking about Teresa Carlson, she came on the program as well for this year, this next season we're going to do, and she mentioned the decision in the U.S. progress and international, and she's saying as much as it's still bad numbers, it's worse than outside the United States and needs to get better. Can you comment on the global aspect? You brought that up. I think it's super important to highlight that it's just not one area, it's a global evolution. Absolutely, so let me start, and I'd love to actually have Kate talk about our current programs and all of the international groups that we're working with. So as Teresa aptly mentioned, there is so much work to be done not just outside the U.S. and North America's where typically tech nonprofits will focus, but rather if you think about the one-to-end model, right? For example, when I was doing the product market fit workshop for the U.S. State Department, I had women dialing in from rice fields, right? So let me just pause there for a moment. They were holding their cell phones up near towers, near trees, just so that they can get a few minutes of time with me to do a workshop and how to accelerate their business. So if you don't call that the desire to propel oneself or accelerate oneself, not sure what is, right? And so it's really that passion that drove me to spend the next week and a half here working with local entrepreneurs, working with policymakers, so we can take advantage and really leverage that passion that people have, right? To accelerate more business globally. And so that's why Kate will be leading our contingent with the United Nations Women Group, right? That is focused on women's economic empowerment because that's super important, right? One aspect can be sure, getting more directors, vice presidents into companies like Google and Amazon, but another is also how do you encourage more women around the world to start businesses, right? To reach economic and freedom independence, right? To overcome some of the maybe social barriers to becoming a leader in their own country. Yes, and if I think about our own programs and our model of being very intentional about supporting the learning development and skills of women and members of underrepresented groups, we focused very much on providing global access to a number of our programs. For instance, our product management certification on Coursera or engineering management, our upcoming Women Founders Accelerator. We provide both access that you can get from anywhere and then also very intentional programming that connects people into the networks to be able to further their networks and what they've learned through the skills online, so. Yeah, and something Kate just told me recently is these courses that Kate's mentioning, right? She was instrumental in working with the American Council on Education. And so that our learners can actually get up to six college credits for taking these courses on product management, engineering management, on cloud product management. And most recently, we had our first organic, one of our very first organic testimonials was from a women's tech boot camp in Nigeria, right? So if you think about the worldwide impact of these upskilling courses where frankly in the US we might take for granted, right? Around the world, as I mentioned, there are women dialing in from rice patties from other, for example, outside the corporate buildings in order to access this content. You think about the idea of, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead, Kate. I was going to say, if you can't see it, you can't become it. And so we are very intentional about ensuring that we have, we're spotlighting the expertise of women and we are broadcasting that everywhere. So that anybody coming up can gain the skills and the networks to be able to succeed in this industry. We'll make sure we get those links so we can promote them. Obviously, we feel the same way getting the word out. I think a couple of things I'd like to ask you guys cause I think you hit a great points. One is the economic advantage. The numbers prove that diverse teams perform better. Number one, that's clear. So good point there. But I want to get your thoughts on the entrepreneurial equation. You mentioned founders and startups and there's also different makeups in different countries. It's not like the big corporations. Sometimes it's smaller business in certain areas. The different cultures have different business sizes and business types. How do you guys see that factoring in outside the United States? I'll say it's the big tech companies. Okay. Yeah. The easy lower the access to get in education than stay with them in other countries. Is it the same or is it more diverse in terms of business? So what really actually got us started with the U.S. State Department was around our work with women founders. I love for Kate to actually share her experience working with AWS startups in that capacity. But frankly, we looked at the content and the mentoring programs that were providing women who wanted to be executives. You know, quickly realized a lot of those same skills such as finding customers, right? Scaling your product and building channels can also apply to women founders, not just executives. And so early supporters of our efforts from firms such as Modrona up in Seattle, Emergence Ventures, Decibel Ventures in the Bay Area and a few others that we're working with right now, right? They believed in the mission and really helped us scale out what is now our existing platform and offerings for women founders. Those are great firms by the way and they also are very founder friendly and also understand the global workforce. I mean, that's a whole nother dimension. Kate, what's your reaction to all that? Yes, we have been very intentional about taking the product expertise and the learnings of women and in our network. We first worked with AWS startups to support the development of the curriculum for the recent accelerator for women founders that was held last spring. And so we're able to support 25 founders and also brought in the expertise of about 20 or 30 women from advancing women in tech to be able to be the lead instructors and mentors for that. And so we have really realized that with this network and this individual sort of focus on product, expertise, building strong teams, we can take that information and bring it to folks everywhere. And so there is very much the intentionality of allowing founders, allowing individuals to take the lessons and bring it to their individual circumstances and the cultures in which they are operating. But the product sense is a skill that we can support the development of and we're proud to do so. That's awesome Nancy. I want to ask you some, normally we talk about data storage and AWS cloud greatness and goodness. Here it's different. And you also work full-time at AWS and you're the founder and the chairman of this great organization. How do you balance both? And do you get it? They're getting behind you on this. Amazon getting behind AWS, getting behind you on this. Well, as I say, it's always easier to negotiate on the way in but jokes aside, I have to say the leadership has been tremendously supportive. If you think about, for example, my leaders, Wayne Duceau who's also been on the show multiple times, Bill Vass who's also been on the show multiple times. They're both founders and also operators entrepreneurs at heart. So they understand that it is important, right? For all of us. It's really incumbent on all of us who are in positions to do so to create a pathway for more people to be in leadership roles, for more people to be successful entrepreneurs. So no, I mean, if you just looked at LinkedIn they're always up voting my vote. So they reached to more audiences and frankly they're rooting for us back home in the US while we're in Malaysia this week. That's awesome. And I think that's a good culture to have that empowerment. And I think that's very healthy. What's next for you guys? What's on the agenda? Take us through the activities. I know that you got a ton of things happening. You got your event out there which is why you're out there. There's a bunch of other activities. I think you guys call it the Advancing Women Tech Week. Yes, this week we are having a week of programming that you can check out at advancingwomenintech.org that is spotlighting the expertise of a number of women in our space. So it is three days of programming, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday if you are in the US. So the seventh through the ninth but available globally. We are also going to be in New York next week for the event at the UN and are looking to continue to support our mentorship programs and also our work supporting women founders throughout the year. All right, I have to ask you guys if you don't mind get a little mark of data so you can share with us here at theCUBE. What are you hearing this year that's different in the conversation space around the topics, the interests? Obviously I've seen massive amounts of global acceleration around conversations, more video, things like this. More stories are scaling. A lot more LinkedIn activity. It just seems like it's a lot different this year. Can you guys share any kind of current trends you're seeing relative to the conversations and topics being discussed across the community? Well, I think from a needle moving perspective, right? I think due to the efforts of wonderful organizations including theCUBE for spotlighting all of these awesome women, right? Trailblazing women and the nonprofits, the government entities that we work with. There's definitely more emphasis on creating access and creating pathways. So that's probably one thing that you're seeing is more women and more investors posting about their activities. Number two, from a global trend perspective, right? The rise of women in security. I noticed that on your agenda today you had Lena Smart, who's a good friend of mine, Chief Information Security Officer at MongoDB, right? She and I are actually quite involved in helping founders, especially early-stage founders in the security space. And so globally, from a pure technical perspective, right? There's more increasing regulations around data privacy, data sovereignty, right? For example, India's in a few weeks about to get their first data protection regulation there locally. So all of that is giving rise to yet another wave of opportunity and we want women founders uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity. I love it. Kate, reaction to that. Founders, more pathways. Sounds like a neural network. It sounds like AI enabled. Yes, and speaking of AI, with the rise of that, we are also hearing from many community members the importance of continuing to build their skills, upskill, learn to be able to keep up with the latest trends. There's a lot of people wondering what does this mean for my own career? And so they're turning to organizations like Advancing Women in Tech to find communities to both learn the latest information but also build their networks so that they are able to move forward regardless of what the industry does. I love the work you guys are doing. It's so impressive. I think the economic angle is new. It's more amplified this year. It's always kind of been there and continues to be. What do you guys hope for by next year this time? What do you hope to see different from a needle moving perspective to use your word Nancy for next year? What's the visual output in your mind? I wanna see real effort made towards 50-50 representation in all tech leadership roles. And I'd like to see that happen by 2050. Kate, anything on your end? I love that. I'm gonna go a little bit more touchy-feely. I want everybody in our space to understand that the skills that they build and the networks they have carry with them regardless of wherever they go. And so to be able to really lean in and learn and continue to develop the career that you wanna have. So whether that be at a large organization or within your own business that you've got the potential to move forward on that within you. Nancy Kate, thank you so much for your contribution. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the organization. What are you guys looking for? Any kind of PSA you wanna share with the folks watching? Absolutely. So if you're in a position to be a mentor, join as a mentor, right? Help elevate and accelerate the next generation of women leaders. If you're an investor, help us invest in more women-started companies, right? Women-founded startups. And lastly, if you are women looking to accelerate your career, come join our community. We have resources, we have mentors and we have investors who are willing to come in on the ground floor and help you accelerate your business. Great work. Thank you so much for participating in our International Women's Day 23 program. And we look to keep this going quarterly. We'll see you next year, next time. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Shawn. Okay, women leaders here. Thanks for having us. All over the world coming together for a great celebration, but really highlighting the accomplishments, the pathways, the investment, the mentoring, everything in between. It's the cube bringing in as much as we can. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.