 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas. I'm joined today with our reporting fellows. This is our Tech Truth Fellowship in partnership with Silicon Angle Media and the Ground Truth Reporting Project. These are the next generation of great reporters who are going to be on the ground here at Grace Hopper getting great stories and finding out what's really going on with so many of these companies and great organizations. I'm going to introduce them and they can talk about their projects. First up we have Keras Hustad, Tori Bedford, and then Puja Sivaraman. I'm going to start with you, Keras. So tell me a little bit about yourself, where you work. Yeah, so I'm a journalist based in Chicago. I work for a publication called Chicago Inno and we cover hyper-local tech and startups in the Chicago and Illinois area. So we're really taking the non-silicon valley approach to what's happening in tech throughout our country. So tell me what you're going to be looking at here at Grace Hopper. Yeah, absolutely. So I think at a conference where you have 15,000 women in technology, it's a great opportunity to explore what happens when women are behind the tech that are going to create the infrastructure of tomorrow. Because we have so many examples of products that have missed features or have created sort of a discriminatory product feature because those tech teams were not diverse. And so what I want to do is look at a few tech companies and startups that are doing some, that already have diverse tech teams and to look at how the products, how that impacts their products. So that's one big thing I'm looking at is sort of how diversity impacts the actual tech products that will create the infrastructure of our future. So it's thinking about the end user and who that is and how she might perceive the product and then the design decisions that are made when that product is in. Yeah, absolutely. Because for so many of these tech companies, I'm looking at Apple directly in front of us, 50% of iPhone users are women. However, Apple's technical team is approximately 20% women. So the question is sort of, can you really say that you are innovating for your customer when you don't have the minds that represent your customer on your technical teams? Great, great. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Let's go on to you. Tori, what are you going to be looking at? First of all, tell me a little bit about yourself. So I work as a radio producer at WGBH, which is an NPR station based out of Boston. I do a little bit of reporting there and I produce a talk culture and news show. And I'm really intrigued by this fellowship because I feel that a lot of tech, we talk about the latest innovations, we talk about stuff that people are working on, it's very exciting, it's the future. But this angle, looking at it, looking at diversity is I think really, really important. And I think there's a huge effort and it's really interesting to look at the ways that companies are doing that. Something that I have been chasing after, I've been looking at VR, like virtual reality and AR, just kind of looking at kind of the intersection. There's this ethical question of the idea of identity. And so like if you go into VR, in most places you can be anybody you want in like a workplace, you know, you can create these avatars and so you can identify certain things. And a lot of times that's used to cover up your identity so that you won't face discrimination. For instance, like if you're a Muslim woman and you're a coder, you might face a bunch of hurdles that a white male coder wouldn't face. And so if you can present as or perform as this avatar that doesn't have those identifications, you could potentially get further. But that introduces a whole bunch of ethical issues where there's this erasure of identity, there's this erasure of culture, there's this gender blindness and race blindness. And so I think it's really interesting that's something that VR companies are tackling now and thinking about and what that kind of means for the future. Wow, I mean, you're blowing my mind with what you're saying. So what are you going to be specific? Are you going to be talking to a lot of these coders to these creators of these games? So there are a number of virtual reality companies that are kind of thinking about what it means to be a human being or any kind of character? These are deep questions. Yes, these are very deep questions. I think a lot of these problems that VR is dealing with, they're not necessarily the field that needs to, that feels that they need to solve them. But I think in a way, they're kind of doing their part. I mean, these are larger philosophical questions about humanity that need to be solved in the real world before they can be solved in the world of VR. But the world of VR is encountering them now. I think that's interesting. I think we see that in a lot of fields of technology where we have this technology and then as a culture, as humanity, we don't know how to deal with it. We don't know the etiquette of certain things that we've developed. We don't know how to interact with each other and to be the most ethical. And these are morality problems that I think is really exciting to look at in the future. Right. I mean, we are the first generation to be thinking about these things, tackling these things, having these technologies in our pockets. Yes. And so, no, that's... And we have to think about representation in these companies as well. We have to think about introducing different perspectives. We have to think about what might seem like a solution for one person or one group may not be the real solution for another group that they are hoping to represent. So I think that introduces the topic of inclusion and diversity in those companies as well. Great. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Pooja Sivaraman, tell me a little bit about yourself. So I recently graduated from Tufts University, which is near Boston, Massachusetts. Congratulations. Thank you. And I have always been... I'm a reporter for the Grand Youth Project right now, and I've always been interested in the intersection between technology and social justice. And I think in the tech industry there's a hesitation to talk about the social implications of products, but I think that's what this convention is about. It's about looking at input, who's going into the industry and output the kinds of products that are coming out of it. So I'm working on several stories, but I'm really interested in the gaming industry and specifically looking at Post Gamergate, which was a harassment movement that took place in 2014 that specifically targeted women gamers and game developers. And I'm trying to investigate whether that movement, which definitely brought a lot of attention to the fact that women are being harassed, women gamers and women game developers are being harassed. And being harassed through social media. Exactly. On the internet they're facing violent threats, they're being driven out of their homes, but... Because they are women gamers. Exactly. Because they don't fit the traditional stereotype of a brogrammer or a male sitting in his basement playing video games. And I think the Gamergate movement shows that there's this definite miscommunication between the people who are creating the games and the people who are using them, because 45% of gamers are women. And that's a really surprising statistic to some people because when you look at mainstream games, they're very sexist, they're very misogynistic and they don't seem to be made for a female audience. So I think that's the conversation that I'm looking into is that you have so many female gamers, why aren't there women creating games? And I mean, there are women creating games, but why aren't they getting funding? Why aren't they getting into the mainstream? Why aren't they on the forefront of the gaming industry? And so are you talking to gaming companies as well as sort of up-and-coming gamers? Absolutely. There's actually several really interesting panels at the Grace Hopper Convention itself from Microsoft Gaming and other gaming companies about how to improve diversity in their companies. So that's definitely something I'm interested in hearing about. And I think I also want to look at what's really fascinating to me about the gaming industries, there's this on-screen, off-screen relationship where you have female gamers and then you have female avatars on screen and you have sexism on screen and you have sexism in the industry. And I'm trying to look at how those two aspects of it correlate because what's interesting is there's been multiple psych studies about female gamers who often choose male avatars in games just because on screen it's perceived that male avatars are stronger or are better at the game. And similarly there's many female gamers who will turn their mic off when they're playing the games to almost erase their female identity. And I'm really interested in looking at these two dynamics of it, of the gamers themselves and the game developers who are trying to change that. And obviously those two populations tend to overlap because there are a lot of female gamers that see things on screen they don't like and are inspired to enter the gaming industry and create more inclusive games. Well, all of your projects get at such deep philosophical questions. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a woman? How do we perceive power? This being your first conference, what do you think is the mood? Can you just tell me a little bit about the vibe that you're picking up on here? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it is very optimistic but with the awareness that we have a ways to go. So actually there was a company who won a sort of data driven contest, or I don't want to say contest, it was analysis of basically the top tech companies and who is creating the most inclusive workplaces for women. And when the company that won actually had kind of like their acceptance speech, the CTO said, you know, this is really exciting but now is the time to redouble our efforts. You know, we've achieved gender parity at one stage of our company. Why can't it be across all of the companies? So I think that people are really excited that there are more women at this conference than there ever have been before. But I think they're also really excited about how to attack the next challenge. How do you get to that next level of inclusion? Right, right. And how about you? Are you finding that it's a positive mood? I think that it's interesting that you brought up these like larger philosophical questions that we're looking at because there's a lot of that. There's a lot of talk of, it's not so simple as just putting women somewhere. You know, you can't just hire women for a company, generally, there's so many complex facets to that in terms of diversity. So in a lot of times these policies that help women really help men and help human beings. And so that introduces the larger question. We were watching the keynotes and this IBM strategist, Lisa DeLuca came on and she was talking about how we are often encouraged to move in a certain direction. A lot of women feel this push to go towards STEM and to move toward, you know, and she was saying that it's important to remember that you have to follow your dreams and your passion as well, which sounds cliche, but she had always dreamed of writing a children's book. And so she had two sets of twins. After the first set of twins, she wrote this book and she got a grant and she, or she fundraised for it and she published it. And that book eventually helped her get hired at IBM because it helped to raise awareness for what she was working on and the subject of the book. That is a great note to end on. So I want to thank you very much again for joining us here with the cubes coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference. We are going to be looking at what these reporting fellows come up with. Thank you. I remember.