 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 VMware. For the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology event, WT squared, one of my favorite events. Excited to welcome to theCUBE the CEO and founder of MotherCoters, Tina Lee. Tina, it's great to have you on the program. It's nice to be invited, thank you. So this event, one of my favorites because when you literally walk in, I would say where the registration is, you just feel this, it's a very natural, authentic sense of community of women wanting to engage with each other, share stories. And of course this morning's keynote kicked off with a bang with Joy Bull and Winnie talking and sharing about this massive bias and facial recognition technology. Like, wow, there's a lot of technology for good, but there's some real issues we've got to identify and fix. Tell me about your involvement in WT squared. What makes it worthy of your time? Well, anytime I can come and hang out with like-minded women who want to create change, I am all about it. And having that space to be together physically, I think is really important because to build authentic relationships, to build trust, to create, you know, a space where I can tell you stories I normally don't bring up at work, right? It requires us to have a dedicated time and space to be together to do that. So I am just so honored to be a part of this conference today. So tell me a little bit about your career journey and the impetus for MotherCoters. Yeah, so I started MotherCoters after my second child was born. And I had started my career as a management consultant at Accenture. I went on to become a technical recruiter and then went back to grad school and got a master's degree in learning design and technology from Stanford School of Education. So I was ready to find a way to use technology to change the world, to teach, you know, people how to engage politically and civically. And then once my second daughter was born, it just became increasingly difficult to keep up with my technical skills. I had been going to the meetups. I had been going to the hackathons. I had been going to these evening workshops. But after the second child came along, I was a mom with a two-year-old infant. So the only thing left to me was online learning. And it works for some people, not for me, not for many people. And what I was lacking was a community that was there to support me and just be there with me struggling through this. Someone, you know, people who would understand what I was going through. And I did not find that in most spaces. I was trying to get these technical skills from. So I thought, ooh, why don't we have our own meetup for moms, you know? And my grandmother had raised me. So I had envisioned moms over here with the laptops, grandmas over here with the kids. And it would just be this fun community-building experience. I put up a Google form and within less than a week, I had nearly 100 women saying, I want to come to the meetup. Well, some weren't even located in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I knew I had tapped into something. And to this day, I still get emails, tweets, you know, DMs from women all over the world seeing when is Mother Coders coming to our community. So I started Mother Coders really as a way to help moms, women who have become moms, gain technical skills so that they can get jobs that would enable them to contribute to shaping our future and also make a living that would enable them to take care of their families. One of the things that I was looking at when I was doing some research on you is some of the stats. So let's talk numbers for a second. Why this is so imperative and critical to betting on moms is smart. 90% women reinvest 90% of their income back into their families and communities. Women drive 85% of business and consumer purchasing with $2.1 trillion of spending attributable to moms alone. So you think of the Amazons of the world or online or brick-and-mortar retailers. This is an important community that needs to be involved in the design of technologies and products and services because it's going to have, the impact is probably not even quantifiable at this point. So it seems like a, this is so obvious yet to your point, I found myself in a situation where I didn't have other, I didn't have what I couldn't find when I was looking for, so I had to create it. And then suddenly there's this groundswell and that suddenly almost instantaneously of, wow, this is really, there's really a need here. Talk to me about getting women back in the workforce because I imagine as you were saying, oh my gosh, suddenly I have two kids under two. I don't have the time. Technology changes so quickly. How are you able to help women re-enter the workforce? Well, you know, what's really astonishing is even women who had been technical before becoming moms have a tremendous amount of trepidation about going back in. It's like, you already learned it. You used to be a software engineer. It shouldn't be that hard getting back in. But I think motherhood has a way of just wearing down your confidence and because the workplace is not friendly towards mothers, right? The mother penalty marks you as someone who's less committed to your career and less confident when that's the furthest from the truth because you have all these motivations to go in there, least of which is taking care of your family, right? So what we do is a lot of it is just confidence building and giving these moms a space to be with each other and reassuring each other and knowing that they're not alone, right? The technical skills will come. It's just time and effort. But the friendships that are forged, the sense of community and belonging that these moms create with each other is what sustains them. And when they get hit with those rejections because there's a gap in your resume or because someone spoke to you disrespectfully because you were a mom, you have someone to go back to and talk about what happened with so that you know you're not alone. That component is actually really, really important. We just don't do technical skills. We bring in women from the field to teach a specific topic so our moms get context around why data science, why AI is suddenly hot, what are the issues, right? And then the community part, all of those three things come together and at the end of our nine-week program, the moms walk away with a greater sense of purpose and more clarity about their career path and they also leave knowing they have a crew behind them that they can access any time because they had spent a fair amount of time and effort developing these relationships that are going to be strengthened over time. And to say strength in numbers, we can say that to imply to anything in life, but this is so true. Finding your tribe, if you will, of this isn't just me. This is a pandemic. And sharing those stories and helping their confidence, I think, is so critical. You led a workshop here at WT Square today. Talk to me about some of the stories that were shared along the lines of kind of helping some women maybe refine that confidence that used to be there. What were some of the things that came up today? Well, you know, the workplace hasn't really evolved and, you know, even Melinda Gates is talking about this. It was built for an era that was, that is gone, right? The reality is that now more than half of families comprised of dual income earners who are leading these families and they need income to lead these families into a place of economic security, right? So you talk about the workplace and what women endure naturally because our society hasn't set up to support them. All this pain and suffering is going to come out. And in spite of the setting that we have here, we don't know each other. We're just a bunch of strangers who came to talk to each other. They were very generous in revealing their pain, in revealing stories. So something that consistently came up with a lot of the participants is that there's this unspoken understanding that you don't talk about your kids. That if you're a mom and you talk about your kids, you kind of shoot yourself in the foot. In fact, sometimes it's not even tacit. It's explicit. Someone talked about how her manager would say things like, don't talk about your kids because you're stressing out the rest of the team because they don't understand and it doesn't matter. It's not relevant here. When that is such a huge part of your identity, everyone comes back to work on Monday morning to talk about what they did for the weekend. We're humans. Yeah. And if you are constantly in a position where you have to perform and hide yourself, you can just imagine how that would impact the way your creativity would come out or the ideas you would share or how you show up for your colleague. It's incredibly damaging. Yes. And we are just not enabling all this innovation and source of power that are locked up in moms, both in and outside of the workforce because we're not letting them back in once they get kicked out and coming back is so hard. So a lot of the stories that were shared has to do with these every day, not even like earth shattering events. It's just normal everyday interactions at the water cooler or Monday morning chatter that already makes moms feel even more isolated than they already are. So what are some of the things that you're going to take away from the workshop that will help influence the direction of mother coders throughout the rest of 2019 and into 2020? Well, you know, one of the stats that I always keep in my head is that 86% of women become mothers in the U.S. And for the large part, they're not doing it by themselves, right? So when we talk about moms, we're talking about families, right? And I have this hunch that men don't want to be at work all the time either, right? They don't want to be this bread-winning person who has to do all these things to appear masculine. And so it's damaging for everyone. And if we were to create some ways to release some pressure off of caregivers in general, right? Not just mothers, fathers, people caring for the elderly, even pet owners, everyone will feel better. Everyone would benefit. So my main takeaway leaving this conference is that the pain that the moms are feeling at work, the ones that are employed, are very similar to the ones that are trying to get back in, right? The pain, the biases, it runs across our culture, to be honest. And when you're trying to hack culture, it's all about storytelling. It's all about figuring out how do I make this resonate to people? How do I turn their stories into actionable steps that can be taken? And that was what their last question was, is what is the next step that you're going to take when you leave this room? And not surprisingly, everyone had an action step. I love that. Well Tina, thank you so much for sharing your story and excited to hear about great things that come from MotherCoders. Thanks for spending some time with me on theCUBE today. Thank you. My pleasure. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin at Women Transforming Technology for the annual. Thanks for watching.