 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube, covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for The Cube at EMC World 2015. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm joined with two special guests, Stella Lowe, who's the Global Communications at EMC, who runs Global Communications and Amy Posey, neuro-facilitator at Peak Teams. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you. Thank you, good to see you again, John. So, you had a session, Women of the World, we did it last year with a great Cube session last year. So, I want to ask a couple quick questions. What's going on with Women of the World? Well, you guys just came from there, you guys were on a panel. And then, what is a neuro-facilitator? And then, let's get into it. Let's talk about men and women, how we work together. Okay, great, so let's start with Women of World. So, last year we talked about the challenges that we face and how we reframe them into opportunities and we had some fantastic panelists. But this year, I was really interested in the science behind men and women. So, it's clear that we're different and we're all wired for success, but we're wired differently. And we kind of knew that already. I know we talked about it before, John. But we now have the science behind it. We can look at brain scans and we can see that we have different brain patterns. We think differently. Different parts of the brain fire up in terms of motivation and stress. And people like Amy here who've done lots of work into this have all this data. So, it was great to have her on the panel to discuss it. So, I got to give you a plug because EMC does all kinds of things, the Formula One cars, motorcycles, getting the data and understanding the race. But now you're dealing with people. So, what is going on? Tell us what's up with neuro-facilitator and let's share with us. So, a neuro-facilitator is maybe the best made-up job title in the world that I gave myself. So, essentially what I do is I look at information about the brain and I curate the research that's out there. So, there's a lot of new technology to actually read and look inside our heads. We all have a brain but we don't necessarily all know how it works. So, there's a lot more research and tools to read our brains and take a look inside. So, what I do is I take that research and work with neuroscientists and neurobiologists at Stanford, Columbia, UCLA and reach out and figure out how do we take that information and make it easier, solitate. And I do it in the scope of leadership at organizations like EMC and other technology companies to figure out how do we work better? What information is out there? Soft skills and sort of relationship skills have always been sort of squishy, right? So, now there's a lot more science and information about our brains that are informing it. The data's out there. What I do and what my job is is to pull the data and figure out how do we make it into practical, useful applications for us at work, at home, wherever we are. So, that's essentially what I'm doing. So, you guys discussed how men and women are different. Actually, look at the data. We have a lot of qualitative data. I mean, keep counselors in business, you know? Families in the workforce balance is important but we have a lot of that data but what's the numbers? What is your findings? So, what's interesting is looking at men and women's brains what's fascinating is that we are more alike than dissimilar in looking at a brain. If you looked at a brain scan, one of a man and woman, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two but they're now finding and looking at different parts of the brain and different functions. So, for instance, men have approximately 6% more gray matter than women. So, in terms of the gray matter, that's the thinking brain essentially and women have more white matter than gray matter about 9% more than men and the white matter is what connects the brain and communicates both front and back and side to side and so, you can make some extrapolation of that information and say, you know, men may focus more on issues, solutions, problems whereas women sort of think more broadly or wider. So, I mean, they're generalities but a lot of this science is fascinating. There's also some interesting science about the hippocampus which is sort of deep if this is your brain, it's deep inside the brain and the hippocampus is the memory center and it's what they're finding is that for women, they tend to store emotional memories more effectively so happy, sad, fearful, those types of emotions get stored more effectively in the hippocampus whereas men oftentimes during stress, the hippocampus actually has a challenge in making connections. So, that's where again, some of the focus and determination and silo viewed sometimes that men have in situations or problems comes into play. There's one other piece, the interior cingulate cortex which is sort of within the brain and that's the brain's error detector and it turns out it's a little bit bigger in women. So, women sort of tend to look for issues, problems, maybe less solution focused especially under times of stress and a lot of this data is interesting. It causes you to make some generalities, not everybody is going to operate in that way, your mileage may vary but it's good because it helps us inform some of the quirky behavior that we deal with at work and figuring out why do you do that? Why do you do that? Yeah, and it's all about women being better or women using more of the brain or less of the brain. It's simply about if our brains are working differently we both bring different things to the table and how do you take both of those benefits and bring them forward into better outcomes? I mean, this is always great to talk about because in the workforce people are different and so differences is a term that we use like, you know, with kids some learn differently, some evolve differently and men and women have differences. So, the data shows that, that's clear. I want to share a quote that my wife shared on Facebook it says, mother, a worried mother does better research than the FBI. So, I bring that up because, you know, it's instinctive. So, a lot of it's also biological and also environmental. Talk about the dynamics around that wiring because you're wired by your upbringing too. That affects you and what's the data show in the biology? So, it's interesting because the key piece is that it's not just the biological brain differences. It's a whole host of factors that leave a footprint on us and our behavior. So, it's our education. It's our, you know, where we grew up, our culture is part of that. It's also gender stereotypes that play a role in how we operate and I think all of those things leave a footprint and lead us to different behaviors and so you can't just say it's the information that's on our brains. It's a whole host of factors that influence. So, my study of looking at how the brains are a little bit different and what the research is coming, it's blended in with research around leadership and things like confidence and motivation in the workplace, bias in the workplace and they're showing very different things. So, for instance, if you think about confidence, we did an interesting exercise in the event at Women of World and I asked, you know, there's a lot about confidence and confidence is essentially the will or motivation to act. So, how many women in the room would go up for a job that they were really interested in and fascinated by but maybe weren't 100% qualified for? Like, how many of you have maybe turned down that job or decided not to apply because it wasn't the right time? Like, you're pretty competent but not 100% confident in it and it was funny because large majority, yeah. All the women's hands went up that I could see. The way in the room. So, then I asked and I flipped the question in the room and I asked the men in the room. I said, okay, if you were only about 50% confident for a job that you were going up for, would you? Of course, right? Like, yes, I'm up for it. They'll fabricate some stuff on their resume and make them look bigger. So, exactly. So, what's interesting is testosterone plays a role in confidence and motivation at work and it turns out men have 10 times the amount of testosterone as women do. So, part of that is that aggression. We both have it but that aggressive factor, that idea to go after something to be more confident, women are behind the curve in that from the research that I've seen. So, it takes more effort to be able to have the confidence to go for it and to sort of break down those barriers that exist for women to go after those jobs that they want, even if it's not 100%. And so, we did an exercise in boosting confidence and testosterone called power posing and Amy Cutty out of Harvard does a whole TED talk on it, which is fascinating but the idea is that you put your chest back, you put your hands on your hips and it helps boost your testosterone up to about 20% and it reduces cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So, it's a quick way. You don't do it in front of people. You do it sort of on the slide or else you don't look very nice to others but you boost your confidence by doing that and it's just a small sort of brain hack that you can do to give yourself an upper hand knowing the science behind it. So, it's a behavior changing type of research that's coming out, which I think is really good. That's really interesting, but now it translates into leadership and execution in the workforce. So, people are different, but men and women are different. That changes the dynamic around what good is because if you're pointing about women not asking for that job or having confidence to feel like I'm not going to go for it like a man, bravado, whatever testosterone, that doesn't mean that that's the benchmark of what drive means. So, this came up with Microsoft CEO at the Anita Board Conference, which we had a cube there and this is a big issue. So, how do HR, how do the managers, how do people recognize the differences and what is the data show and can you share your thoughts on that? Yeah, so I think a lot of it comes down to bias and bias is essentially a shortcut that we use in our brains to take less energy and it's not a bad thing. It's something we all do and it's conscious and it's unconscious. So, bias I think is a key piece of that and the research on bias is fascinating. It's very popular topic these days because I think being able to do a couple of things, be aware that there are hundreds of biases and they're both conscious and unconscious. Acknowledge that it exists, but not legitimize it, not make that okay. The third piece is to counter it and being able to counter bias by making sure that people have opportunities and even though you may have removed hypothetical barriers, explicitly stating that you want people, men or women, to apply for promotions, be this type of leader. Not just assume that because there are no barriers that it's okay, but really be explicit in how you give people opportunities and let them know that they're out there. I think that's really key. Yeah, that brings up the point around work life balance because, you know, live with family of four kids, it's stressful just in and of itself to have four kids, but then I go to the workforce and the same with women too. So there's also a home dynamic in leadership and biases and roles. What's your take on any data on how that shifting persona realities, if you will, shapes the data? So it's interesting because it's something that we even talked about in the session that it's a struggle and that career from Intel was talking about that there's a period of time that actually is really tough to keep women in the workforce and it's that time where you're growing your family, you're growing your career, and oftentimes things sort of struggle. And I read something recently around women in STEM careers over a 10 year period, 42% of women drop out of the workforce in comparison to 17% of men. And so I think there's a lot of ways to go in terms of being able to set up environments where work and life is integrated because it's not even balanced anymore. It's integration and how do you set up structures so that people can do that through how they work, through how they connect with others? And to me, that's a big piece is how do you keep people in the workforce and still contributing in that critical point in time? And Intel hasn't figured it out, it's a tough challenge. And it's- So you brought up STEM and we're a big fans of women in tech obviously because we love tech athletes, we love to promote people who are rock stars in technology, whether it's developers, the leaders, and I also have two daughters. And so two questions, one is women in tech, anything you could share that the data can talk to to either inspire, give some insight. And two, for the young women out there that might not have that cultural baggage that my generation's at least are worse than older than they have from a previous bias. So motivating young daughters out there and then how you deal with the career advice for existing women. So the motivating young women to get into tech, they've shared a really absolutely fascinating statistic that between the ages of 12 and 18, it's incredibly important to have a male support model for young girls to get into STEM careers, that it was absolutely critical for their success. And it's funny because the question came up like, why can't that be a woman too? And what's interesting and what we find is, oftentimes we give men the short shrift when they try and support women and we don't want to do that, we want to support men supporting women because when that happens, we all win. And so I think that's a big piece of it, is starting young and starting with male support as well as female support. Yeah, and I know so many women who cite men as key mentors in their career or in their early life. And it's really important that men feel that they can do that. And this goes back down the wiring data that you have, the data on how they're wired. It's okay guys to understand that it's not an apples to apples, so to speak, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, whatever that phrase is. But that's really what the data shows. And being explicit to men to say, we want you to support women. Instead of having men take a backseat feeling like, maybe this isn't my battle to fight, it's really important to then encourage men to speak up too in those situations. To think about sort of women in tech, one of a really interesting piece of research that I've seen is about team intelligence and what happens on teams. And Anita Woolley from Carnegie Mellon produces really fascinating piece of research on the three things that a team needs to be more intelligent. It's not just getting the smartest people in the room with the highest IQ, that's a part of it. You want table stakes, you want to start with smart people. But she found that having women, more women on a team, actually improved the team's overall intelligence, the collective intelligence and success of a team. So more women was the first one. The second was there's this ability and women tend to be better at it, but the ability to read someone's thoughts and emotions just by looking at their eyes. So it's called reading in the mind's eyes. So just taking a look and being able to sense behavior and what someone's thinking and feeling, and then being able to adjust behavior to that and pivot on that. Not just focusing on the task in hand, but the cohesion of a team with that skill made a difference. And- It's a total team sport now. Yes. That's what you're saying. Yes. In terms of, I use sport analogy, but- Yeah. But women now, you see women's sports is booming. This brings up your awesome research that you just did for the folks out there. Stella was leading this information generation study and the diversity of use cases now with tech, which is why we love tech so much, is not just the geeky programmer traditional male role. You mentioned team. You got UX design. You have real time, agile. So you have more of a, whether it's a rowing analogy or whatever sport or music. Collaboration. Collaboration is key. And there's so many new disciplines. I mean, I'll share data that I have on theCUBE looking at all the six years and women and men. The pattern that's coming up is women loves of visualization. It's weird. I don't know if that's just sort of the data, but like data scientists that render into reporting and visualization, not like just making slides like in the data. So, but they're not writing maybe not Python code. So what do you guys see similar patterns in terms of information generation? It's sexy to have an eye watch. It's cool. So, Beth Crayer from Intel on the panel, she gave a great statistic that actually it's more, it's women that are more likely to make a decision on consumer tech than men. And yet, a lot of the focus is about trying to build tech for men. And then, you know, if consumer tech companies want to get this right, they need to start thinking about what are women looking for? Because they're the ones that are out there making those decisions. The majority of those decisions. Yeah, I mean, it's an old saying back on the day when I was right out of college and doing my first startup was the wife test. Everything goes by the wife because you want to have collaborative decision making. And that's kind of been seen as a negative bias or reinforcement bias. But I think what guys mean is like, they want to get their partner involved. So, how do we change the biases? And, you know, where I talked to a guy who said the word geek is reinforcing the bias or nerd. We're like, I use that term all the time with science. Is there, I mean, we had the lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins around the gender discrimination. She wasn't included. I mean, what's your take on all of this? I mean, how does someone practically take the data and put it into practice? I think the big thing is, you know, like I said, acknowledging that it exists, right? It's out there. We've been, I feel like our brains haven't necessarily adapted to the modern workplace and the challenges that we've dealt with because the modern workplace is something that was invented in the 1960s and our brains have evolved over a long time. So being able to handle some of the challenges that we have, especially on how men and women operate differently at the workplace, I think is key. But calling it out and making it okay to acknowledge it, but then counter where it needs to be countered, where it's not right and being explicit and having the conversations, I think is the big piece. And that's what struck me with the Kleiner Perkins deal was let's have the conversation. It's out there. A lot of times people are reticent to have the conversation because it's awkward and I need to be PC and I'm worried about things. It's the elephant in the room, right? It absolutely is. The dialogue is far better than leaving it. People are afraid, I mean, guys are afraid, women are afraid, so it's a negative cycle if it's not out in the open. That's what you're saying. And the idea is, what can we do collectively better to be more positive, to frame it more positively? Because I think that makes a bigger difference in terms of talking about, oh, we're different. How are we the same? How can we work together? What is the connection point that you bring? You bring, we all bring different skills and talents to the table. I think it's really taking a look at that and talking about it and calling it out and say, I'm not great at this. You're great at this, let's work together on what we can do more effectively. Okay, team sports is great and the diversity of workforce and tech is an issue. That's awesome. So I'd ask you kind of a different question for both of you guys. What's the biggest surprise in the data? And it could be what reinforces the belief or insight into something new, share a surprise. It could be pleasant or creepy or share it. So I think a surprise for me is intuition. So we always talk about women having intuition and I've heard men say, you know, my wife is so intuitive, she kind of gets it and I've heard that in the workplace as well. I think the biggest surprise for me was that we can now see, we've now proved that intuition is a thing that women have and it's about this kind of web thinking and connecting the dots. So we sort of store these memories deep inside and then when we see something similar, we then make that connection. We call it intuition but it's actually some, it's a kind of super recall, if you like and replaying that situation. But that I think was the biggest surprise for me. Amy? So I would think that the thing that always astonishes me is the workplace environment and how we set up environments sometimes to shoot ourselves in the foot. So often we'll set up a competitive environment, whatever it is, and it's internal competition. Well it turns out that the way that the brain chemicals work in women is that competition actually throws us into stress or threat cycle much more easily than it does to men. But men need it to be able to get to optimal arousal. There's a lot of interest in research from Amy Arniston at Yale and that piece of how you can manipulate your environment to be more successful together to me is absolutely key. And being able to pull out elements of competition but also elements of collaboration. You kind of knew it but the science validates it and you go, this is why we need to make sure there's a balance between the two so everyone's successful. So to me that's the aha. I could listen to Amy all day. And how we apply it to the workplace, that's the next big step. Yeah, you guys are awesome and thanks so much for sharing and I wish we could go along, we're getting the hook here on time but is there any links and locations, websites people can go to to get more information on the studies, the science? So I spent a lot of my day curating and looking for more research so peakteams.com slash blog is where I do a lot of my writing and suggestions. What's the URL? It's peakteams, P-E-A-K-T-E-A-M-S dot com. And so I run our blog and kind of put my musings every once in a while up there so that people can see what I'm working on but they can reach out at any time and I'm on Twitter at peakteams geek, speaking of geeks, I embrace the geek mentality. Good, well we have, I think geek's confident personally but final point, I'll give you the last word Amy. If you can have a magic wand to take the science and change the preferred vision of the future with respect to men and women, working cohesively together, understanding that we're different decoupled in science now, what would you want to see for the environment, workforce, life balance, what would be the magic wand that you would change? I think being able to make women more confident by helping reduce bias with everybody. So being more keyed in to those biases that we have and those automatic things we do to shortcut and to be more aware of them and work on them together and not see them as bad but see them as human. So I think that's my big takeaway is remove more bias. Love that. That's fantastic. Stella Lowe and Amy Posey here inside theCUBE. Thanks so much, congratulations on all your great work. Great panel will continue. Of course, we have a special channel on SiliconANGLE.tv for women in tech, go to SiliconANGLE.tv. We've got a lot of CUBE alumni, we had another one here today with Amy. Thank you for joining us. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back. Day three, bringing it to a close here inside theCUBE live in Las Vegas. I'm John Forrey, we'll be right back after this short break.