 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a great panel today. We have three guests. We have Hilary Burns at Caroline Lester, both reporting fellows for the Ground Truth Project and Tori Bedford, who is a field producer for the Ground Truth Project. It's great to have you guys on here. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. So I'll start with you, Tori, since you were a reporting fellow last year at the Grace Hopper Conference, tell our viewers what the Ground Truth Project is and what your mission is. So the Ground Truth Project is a nonprofit based in Boston and it hopes to encourage young journalists and early career journalists all around the world. So there are a series of fellowships going on pretty much at all times, different projects. There's one going across America right now that's looking at, it's called Crossing the Divide. It's looking at divides in America and it's a very divisive time for American politics so they're doing stories about that. And then obviously we are re-upping our women in tech, women in leadership fellowship this year, which we're really excited about. And so each of you are working on your own individual stories that then you will get back to Boston and produce. So Hilary, let's hear from you. What are you working on here? What's your topic? Sure, so most of my time spent at the Grace Hopper Celebration so far has been spent talking with students about their career aspirations, any barriers they foresee coming across, any concerns they have about entering a male-dominated industry. And it's really been fascinating hearing their stories. Some of them are international students, others are from universities all over the world and including Canada and the U.S. So it's been, they all have, it's been very inspirational to hear. So here, but here are the ones that are aspiring to careers in technology and they're here at Grace Hopper. But there must be other ones who are too discouraged. So they're not here. Are you also getting that angle too? Well, I think it's important for that group of women to see these women who do feel empowered and a lot of them use phrases like we are making a difference in the gender gap and that's, if I don't do it, who else will do it? So I think it's important for all aspiring technologists to hear these women's stories. Are they discouraged though? Because the headlines are bleak. I mean, we know that it's the numbers but then it's also the Google manifesto. It's the shenanigans of Travis Kalanick and people like him in Silicon Valley. What do they make of that? It's interesting. All of them are very intelligent, very aware of what's going on in the world. I've heard a mixed bag of responses from I try not to read too much because I don't want to go in expecting and having my own biases I want to see for myself. Others are saying, yeah, I am nervous and I want to see more women creating a path that I can then follow. So I think there are a lot of people that are optimistically optimistic about their future. Cautiously optimistic. Oh, thank you, thank you for the cracking me. But it's been interesting to hear all different perspectives. Great. Caroline, how about you? What are you working on? Yeah, so I am personally interested in the more personal stories of some of these women speaking at the conference. I've talked to four really wonderful, inspirational women. So one of my favorites, I just published a story on her. Chiako Asakawa, who is an IBM fellow, which is the highest honor you can receive at IBM. And she went blind at the age of 11 and has spent her life programming and creating programs and tools to help the blind access the world that is pretty hard to navigate if you don't have eyesight. So she is super inspirational, super smart, super funny. So it was a pleasure talking with her. And then I'm talking to a couple of three other women, Yasmin Mustafa, who started something called Roar for Good. We had her on the show. Oh, you did? Wonderful, great, yeah. So she's fantastic. I'm really glad you covered her. And then another woman named Sarah Echo Hawk, who sort of is an advocate and activist and is getting more young native women involved in STEM. And then finally, I'll be talking with Stephanie Lampkin of Blendor, who started this wonderful app to try and get, to try and overcome the implicit bias and unconscious bias that happens when people are hiring women or people of color in recruiting for them. So she's starting this app that she will then sell to companies or sell to other companies? So she's already started it. And she has a lot of major tech companies involved. I think Airbnb uses it. I want to say Salesforce uses it. You're going to have to check me on that one. But she's got about 5,000 people on it right now. Wow, wow. So the goal of these stories is to inspire other women by their special success. Exactly, so these are four radically different women coming to tech in radically different ways. And it's just really incredible to see how they've managed to overcome all sorts of obstacles in their way and not even overcome them, but sort of utilize them to their advantage and stake out a place for themselves in this industry. Great. Tori, what are the projects that you're working on here? So we've been hearing a lot about diversity. Diversity is super important. We've been hearing about how increasing diversity in a company makes your company better. It just brings in more perspectives. It brings in a diverse, and also what's really interesting is that in tech, it can catch people who have a diverse range of perspectives, can catch problems with products or with a code or with something and how it will be implemented out into the world. I caught this really interesting panel yesterday about disability and looking at how people with disabilities can make companies, specifically tech companies, can help to improve them. There's someone, Jennifer Jong, who is the accessibility program manager at Microsoft. She was really interesting. She was talking about how, I read a piece on this yesterday, she was talking about how when you bring people in with a disability, how they can catch things that other people just don't see or wouldn't normally notice. And also how when we create things for those with disabilities, you know, a lot of things that have been implemented by the Americans with Disabilities Act, like she talked about the button that you press to go through the door, how it can also be used by people who don't have disabilities and how it's important to, you know, it's important to create things that can be used by everybody but that have inclusion in mind. So what is the, why is that true? What is her perspective on why people with disabilities have these special ways to detect blind spots? So if you're creating something, there's no way that you can know how many users are going to be interacting with it. There's no way that you can predict that a person with a disability won't be using it. And so it's just really, it's diversity. It's really important to bring in different perspectives. So they had talked about a video, really beautiful promotional video that showed a range of visuals. It was very effective, but it had no sound and a blind person wouldn't get anything out of it. And so it's like, looking at a product, you need somebody to be in the room, just as you want women and people of color and a range of ethnicities, you want diversity, you want someone to be able to say, this isn't going to work for me, this isn't going to work for my child, this isn't going to work for a range of people. And that's a really effective and important thing that ultimately saves your company's bottom line because then you won't have to go back and change your product in the future. And fix it, fix it is a problem. And you'll spend more money fixing your product than you would if you had just talked about, had inclusion and diversity, if you would just consider that from the get-go, you ultimately save your company more money. So the question for the three of you really is that, as you said, we hear so much about the importance of diversity and getting a variety of perspectives and having people of different genders and races and cultures feel included and having a voice at the table. Is it really, I mean, I just want to know, I mean, is it, do companies really feel this way or is this what they say at Grace Hopper because this is what it makes sense to say to their target audience? It's totally possible that it's just a marketing ploy, it's totally possible that they're realizing that half the population makes money and can do things and that makes more money. I mean, a lot of tech is driven by the bottom line, it's driven by financials, but in the case of the disability thing, it's like, it almost doesn't matter. It is not only the right thing to do, if you need a financial incentive, that's not good. Obviously it's the right thing to do, so you should be doing it for that reason, but if you do also have a financial incentive, that's not bad. And if we're sort of driving more towards empowering women and giving women a voice and allowing women to do things and taking them seriously, ultimately that's not a bad thing. And just to add to that, I think there is a lot of research out there today. For example, having more women on corporate boards that that does impact the bottom line and obviously that's what companies are most concerned about. So I think that companies are starting to realize that having that diversity and inclusion is good for business as well as a marketing voice. Great. And I think, I mean, just to add, I also think that whether or not this is a good thing, I think companies do realize that that is important and they're realizing that it's necessary, I don't know, it's necessary to impact the bottom line and that is something that whether or not we like it is the most convincing factor for many of these companies. Great, great. I think it's also that when you have women moving up to positions of power, to the C-suite, to positions of leadership, they understand that women are people with skills and they are the ones who are hiring more women and that ultimately helps the bottom line. So as you have more and more women moving higher and higher to the top, that's when, like when we talk about the companies changing, that's because women are changing and they're changing the perspectives of men and everybody else in between that works at the company. Are women changing? I mean, I think that's a question too, is that we're all as collectively as a society becoming more aware that these biases exist in hiring and recruitment practices, but I think that's the question. Are women starting to change too, the way they behave in the workplace, the way they go about managing their careers? I mean, it's just changing minds, like changing other people's minds. That's a really interesting question though. One student I talked to who is from India talked about the gender discrimination she has faced and she said she did change how she acted. She shut down all emotions. She took any emotion out of her responses because her colleagues would say, oh, you're a woman, you're so emotional and she was tired of that. So it's an interesting question to look at. I don't know, I don't have the data in front of me, but it'd be interesting to look into that. Yeah, great. That's the next ground truth project. That's right. Excellent. Well, Hilary, Caroline, Tori, thanks so much for being on the queue. We've had a great, great fun talking to you. Yes, thank you for having us. We will have more from the Orange County Convention Center, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just after this.