 from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE covering Big Data SV 2016. Now your host, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back. When we are here live in Silicon Valley for Big Data SV, Big Data Week, Strata Head Tube, this is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host of this segment is Jeff Frick and we have two exciting guests, Angela Gilles, strategic business development manager at Intel and Elizabeth Land, marketing consultant. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. Coincidentally, it's Women in Tech Wednesday on the siliconangle.tv. So great to see you. So one, I just want to quickly, you guys put a quick plug out. You have an event today, a luncheon, Women in Big Data, share the coordinates, the URL and what the event is. Yeah, we sure do. So our luncheon today is a luncheon meetup and we have featured speakers from VMware, SAS and Stanford. We've had about 170 folks coming over, women and their allies, coming to get together to have professional development and network at the conference. And the agenda is just to kind of shoot the breeze. Is there any presentations? Yes, we have three speakers with presentations from those companies, VMware, SAS and Stanford. And then we get together and we talk about what we learned at the presentation. We'll give the details, make sure they got it because it's coming up right now. So where? Well, if you look on the meetup, if you look on the meetup site, if you're a part of meetup, you can get... Want to make sure they get there? Look for the Women in Big Data. Okay, Women in Big Data. That's the search term. So talk about the dynamics, because one of the things we're proud of is we've done a lot of interviews and over 8,000 videos up on YouTube. I think we've over 4,000 CUBE interviews over the past six years. We're in our seventh season of theCUBE. And there are a lot of, plenty of great tech athletes, women out there doing great stuff and the world's changing. It's not just hardcore coding. There's a lot of other disciplines that are attracting the creativity and the value of an integrated kind of workforce. And it's not just a political thing. It's just the reality. I mean, Facebook says the numbers are more women than men. So there's a tech culture now that's completely native to everybody. It's not just a man thing anymore. So what are you guys seeing in the dynamics today? What's the update from your perspective, Angela? Well, I think we've still got a ways to go, right? So if you know, our CEO from Intel BK made a pledge that we want it to be at parity by 2020 and a $300 million investment to do that. And so we've been trying to hire as many women as we can into our big data fields. And that's why we brought this Women in Big Data Forum to the forefront because we wanna make sure that women are networking, we're connecting, we're inspiring, we're growing them, we're championing them. And so we want them to be a part of the forum and also to bring them into these technology companies. So specifically, just to add on to that, actually the numbers are working against us. So we have fewer women graduating in technical degrees than we did in the 1980s. So that creates a pipeline problem. So companies like Intel and all of our other sponsor companies for Women in Big Data in the big data space are having a harder time recruiting at parity with men. So one of the things we found when we were doing the Grace Hopper Women in Tech Celebration was we noticed that this pipelining is also career switches. We talked to a number of women who jumped in to say either computer science or tech field from somewhere else, else they vectored backansalism in migration there. But also Eileen Fagan at Quickend was on theCUBE and she put up something that was really fascinating to me which is, and she's our age, so she's seen, she's at the top of the pyramid and executive and she's seen that there's really a shortage of mentoring at the top too. So, and that the mentoring component is a huge deal. And that has to do with a lot of your network. And it's not just mentoring, it's actually sponsorships. That's one of the big deals. We've had heads of companies come in to talk to the group and they said the call to action for them is don't just mentor a woman, but sponsor her through up her career navigation up the ranks. So how do you delineate the two? What are kind of the important things that go from mentorship to sponsorship? You know, the some good actions that people can write down and try to do a better job. Yeah, I think of mentorship, you're looking at someone that has the skill set that you may not have that you're trying to achieve or working in an area that you wanna learn more about and so you can kind of use them as a coach or mimic some of the things that they're doing. But when you get into sponsorship, it's more having people who are in positions of power who can actually make decisions and bring people into their organizations higher and actually champion them to get a position. Whereas mentoring is kind of helping and steering along and providing guidance more so. You know, there's a lot of folks out there and that I talked to that are really passionate like we are. I mean, Jeff and I both have daughters and we have this conversation. So I kind of do the anecdotal little unscientific survey to ask questions and try to observe. You know, my daughters are geeky, they're very science oriented and they're actually straying away from the field and I try to kind of probe them and it's a vibe if you will out there. So I'm trying to understand what you guys have found and as well I'm trying to understand is how to talk to young women about that it's okay or how do you get them in a position to at least get a feel for it rather than that the natural reaction might be to stray away and then I say, no, no, it's good. You can be a, you know, computer science is so cool. Well, dad, you know, I'm gonna be pre-med or they go to something safe. So I think it's like a, how do you talk to young women and what do you guys have seen? I mean, I'd love to know. It's a role models I think and we as the women in big data group does some mentorship, we go into high schools and mentor high school kids and show them that there's, that this is an opportunity if they see a strong female, they can say, hey, I can be like you, it's a quick touch. So. And it's seeing more people in the industry, right? Who are doing what you wanna do and so I think the more that we can bring women into the engineering field and they get a chance to see people working in that area then they kind of aspire to be that and not turning them off at a very young age, right? Where they're like, okay, I can't do it. That fear factor. So a lot of programs that kind of start very early on in elementary school where they haven't been turned off or have been told, you know, it's not the right thing to do. I think it's where you also have to start. The girls who code. Girls who code. Girls who code is phenomenal, that's great. Yeah, so, you know, again, I'm trying to learn to be a good father because I'm trying to, you know, I wanna get the girls in a position to at least sample and make their own choices rather than being scared away. Yeah, so, Angie, I wanna follow up with you because we actually talked to Kim Stevenson and she talked about BK and that real commitment and really to set the goal, which is, you know, if you don't measure it and set a goal, you're never gonna get there. So what are some of the things that that investment is going towards at Intel specifically to move the ball down the field? Well, so a lot of it is going into our own hiring and retention. So the couple of things that we're doing, we're going into the high schools in terms of a pipeline. So we've adopted a couple of high schools, especially in the Oakland area. We're mentoring there. And then the recruitment effort at Intel has been really ratcheted up. So we've got a number of events where we target and bring underrepresented minorities into Intel to actually take on positions. So we're doing a, it's quite a bit. And I think since the year that the pledge was announced, they put out some new data where we are making progress to some of those goals. So it's the goal is to be at priority, right? With what's coming out of the university. So if the universities are graduating 13% women, then we want to see that in our market at Intel and in the employee base. I think the current current stats, 18 to 20% women. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And a shout out to a need a board organization that puts out on the Grace Hopper celebration. You know, they have an internal survey that companies can take and score themselves against an index that they've established. And they have an award for it for companies of vision. But what's nice is even if you don't win the award, again, at least if you're taking the steps, you know, you've got concrete, discrete things you can measure, you get a baseline, you can see if you're making progress against it, which is very, very important. The other thing I think it's important for people, remember, it's not just because it feels good and it's the right thing to do, but you actually get better business outcomes. Absolutely. When you have a diversity of opinions, different points of view, different ways to approach a problem. Higher profits. Higher profits. So what are some of the other things that your group specifically is doing? Is it the meetups or there's some other kind of activities people should know about? Yeah, we have a robust training calendar. So we just got together at Cloudera in February and had 45 women train up on all things Hadoop. And then we'll come up, we have a calendar of going forward of, we took a survey of what topics the women wanna see most and learn up, get spun up on. Then we have meetups where we actually listen to speakers and hear their point of view, their individual point of view and the company's perspectives that they bring. And then networking. I think we all know that professional development is highly correlated with how strong your network is. And so we do a lot of that. And then in addition, the mentoring that I spoke of, we mentoring down, but we're also gonna be building some additional programs peer mentoring. So the vibe of the show here, share with the folks, you got hundreds of people coming to your event, this luncheon. What, from the show perspective, can you share some insight into what you're seeing? I mean, whether women representation also just trends that you guys like. What we're seeing, so it's early yet, but I know a lot is being focused on analytics, right? So we wanna see women in the analytics field, we're trying to broaden what we mean by big data, right? So it's not just Hadoop, but it's, you know, what we're doing in the IoT space, what we're doing in machine learning, what we're doing as far as additional analytics are concerned in data science. So we wanna make sure that we have a broader umbrella and I think I'm seeing that in the conference so far. There's a lot of key areas that people can really get their arms around because you have, it's an art and science around the data science we're seeing, you're seeing the UI is huge, user experience, visualization, simplification, more elegant than you're seeing the hardcore maths, you have a range of skill sets now in this world. Yeah, security coming in, where does security play in the whole thing? It seems to be a ripe area. Yes, it is. Well, we'll have to bring it on the ground, production to one of the meetups and get some interviews, that'd be fun. And again, just for everybody, we're going back to Grace Hopper, we went last year, the year before, it was fantastic event, it's in Houston, I think in October, check it out if you don't, October 19th, thank you, the Grace Hopper Celebration and Women Computing, not only cool conference, but the best name of any conference. We're also gonna go to the Girls in Tech Catalyst conference in Phoenix for the first time April 19th and check that out. We've had the girls who coach us so much good things to do, so before we let you go, just give us a straight out plug, where do people go, what's the URL, how do they find more, what do they need to do to help you get out? Go to womeninbigdata.org for more information. Also, our LinkedIn is Women in Big Data Forum and they can meet us at the Hilton, the Almaden One Room today, right now, actually. Yeah. Okay, we'll let you go, this is real time, data in flight, they're flying off to their event. Thanks for the sharing. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be right back with more live coverage in Silicon Valley after this short break.