 Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show about the ways tech and innovation are making the world a happier, healthier, and more prosperous place. But today we're going to discuss something rather less bullish. One broad problem in the tech sector that has far-reaching significance is the gender gap, the fact that fewer women than men are employed in tech companies, they receive lower pay for comparable work, and they are more likely to endure sexual harassment in the workplace. But before we get into it, let me introduce our roundtable hosts. As always, I'm Paul Matsko, and I'm joined by Cato's director of emerging technology, Matthew Feeney. We are talking today with a special guest, Ashken Kazarian, who is the director of Civil Liberties at Tech Freedom. Welcome to the show, Ashken. Paul, thank you for having me. To start, Ashken, I wanted to ask you about how you ended up here in DC. You have a background in law. I think I saw that you went to Moscow State University for a law degree. Then you got a master's from Yale. You did a lot of research into law and the art world. So how did you go from that in Russia to Yale to DC to tech? Well, it's more linear than you would think, but it's also a little bit all over the place. So I think you should start by saying that I started my undergrad when I was 15. And everywhere in the world, aside from America, basically, you can get your law degrees or your undergraduate degree. So I started law school at 15. It was a five-year program. And I just kind of experimented with every single possible area of law, going from human rights to corporate law, to civil procedure, to intellectual property. And by the time I graduated, I had an idea that I wanted to continue studying law. That was one of the things that I wanted. And so I started a PhD, which is the one on art markets, which is all the expertise I have on that issue is just research into how countries actually regulate their art markets. And do they let art in? Do they let art out? What about art that was still in during wars? What about artist rights? All of us questions in the upcoming PhD feats that is still TBD, hopefully 2019, coming into your TV boxes. We will find some way to make that tech-related and have you back on the show to talk about it. Oh, absolutely. What about high-tech art? Something like that. So that was one part of my legal career. The other part was as I was in law school, Russia was going through a lot of changes. We had Vladimir Putin, our president, and our head of government, Dmitry Medvedev, kind of switch roles. And one became prime minister, the other one became president. And then suddenly, prime minister was more important than the president. And we've had a lot of laws adopted that were both taking parts of our free speech away and also implementing surveillance mechanisms, surveillance state that was even broader than we had imagined and knew from the Soviet times. That was a very formative time for me. And I, going into law school, knew I wanted to work for public interest. I didn't see myself in a law firm. I didn't see myself in a corporation. This helped me identify the areas that I was interested in. So having that all kind of in my head, but not having an outlet in Russia, because there are very few NGOs left because of the way we regulate NGOs. I did some volunteer work for this Glassness Defense Foundation, which is one of the oldest NGOs from Soviet times that protects journalist rights. And we would get calls from journalists in Siberia or all around the country saying, I think I'm being followed. I think something's going to happen to me or I'm being tapped. My phone is being tapped. And there are all this awful, horrible things that I saw. And there was no way of fighting them, I guess. At that point, at least I didn't see them. At the same time came an opportunity and an idea of studying abroad with full intention of returning. And so I did a Fox Fellowship at Yale University, which was, I would say, my first year at the Yale Law School. And as I was there, the war in Ukraine happened. And I think that really sealed for me understanding that Russia's not getting better and there is no way for me to be safe and for my family to be safe if I want to continue doing the work I was doing. And after that, I decided, okay, I'm going to get a master's of law from the law school that will help me establish myself more in the Western world with having a degree from this amazing school. And it was also the school that gave me an opportunity to dig into the policy, not care about the actual legal texts as much, which was great. So we were talking about economics and sociology and ethics. I think more than we actually talked about laws in that year. And yeah, that was my experience. I graduated in 2016 and I knew I wanted to do free speech online. I knew I wanted to do surveillance reform and searching for jobs. I found a job application online, which was tech freedom, applied, got it, moved to DC, have been in that job ever since, moved on from a legal fellow to now kind of heading all of our civil liberties projects, which just means that I do way more work. And I'm enjoying it a lot. I think moving to DC in 2016 was definitely an experience I'll be telling my grandchildren about. Yeah, so for people who don't know, what is tech freedom? Tech freedom is a non-partisan think tank here in Washington DC that does tech policy and that includes telecom policy. And that includes regulation of the internet in general. It includes free speech regulation online and also all of our civil liberties projects that are encryption and cybersecurity and surveillance reform, all of those areas, also AI and what's coming up next in that. We dab into sharing economy and all of the issues that surround innovation and technology in our always changing world. And I would say that our work kind of has two paths. One path is legal. We fell amicus briefs. We fell with agencies arguing our position and trying to move forward in that. And then there's a policy work, which is way less fast rewarding in a way because you go and you try to educate policymakers. You go to staffers. You go to same agencies and just talk to them about policies. You write op-eds. You create content like podcasts. We have a tech policy podcast. Please subscribe. I'm going to do that plug-in right now. We'll put a link in the notes. Thank you. And so we kind of just try to educate the public about what's going on right now in tech policy and also what's coming up down the pipeline. And in this career that you've had, when would you say you first became aware of gender disparity in the tech sector or even the DC policy world? I'm going to limit this to United States because obviously we can talk about this more globally. Day one would be a good example. And I was definitely the only lawyer woman in my organization that actually compared to other places that I've seen in DC, employs a lot of minorities and we do hire women. But I was the only female lawyer at that point and that was very interesting because I came from this little secluded law school world where honestly everyone was very aware of social dynamics and very interested in them. So day one, you kind of walk into a room and I'm not going to name a staffer who I was meeting with, but he assumed I was the secretary. And then my boss said, oh, no, no, this is Ash. She's one of our lawyers. She just came to us from the law school and this man became a little red, felt bad, but this is just a normal kind of dynamic part of the social dynamic that I think most of the women encounter, no matter what field they are in, if you're young, there's an assumption that you're in a lower position, if you're attractive, there's an assumption that, I don't know. There are a lot of assumptions and obviously I want to premise this by saying I'm not an expert in this area that is more kind of an intersection between feminism and ethics and just sociology. I'm a lawyer, but I was articles editor for Law and Feminism Journal. So I read a lot of literature about this and then I experienced the tech world myself. So I think I'm going to speak from my own experience and the knowledge that I have. Yeah. Well, in your good company here, I'm building tomorrow, we are rarely experts about the things we speak of sometimes, but you know, speak for yourself. I mean, by training, I'm a historian. So what I know about tech policy is what I learn on the job. So, so I think that situation where you go into a space that is dominated by men and then there are like, I mean, in that particular case, it's not intentional. It's not sexual harassment. It's not in, it's not, there's not mal intent behind it yet. At the end of the day, it still can leave female workers entering a male dominated space uncomfortable. Like it's an awkward social situation. I mean, so even in the least harmful or least overt cases, it's still a barrier to integration into the workplace. It's still, something has to be overcome. I think that's worth reminding me. A lot of the statistics will focus on what percentage of women in tech sectors have experienced sexual harassment directly. And that's a very bad thing. But even if someone hasn't experienced sexual harassment, that doesn't mean they haven't had problems because of the gender disparity in the workforce. Yes. And I think there is important to make a distinction between tech policy and policy world and the tech sector that we're going to talk about. So the tech policy world that obviously I'm and you guys are part of in DC is a bigger part of a policy world. And the number of women that are in it is different from a number of women that are in the tech world per se. Partially, we have more women in policy. And if you talk about tech policy, I think there are fewer. Just Matthew probably knows from all the coalition meetings and conferences that we have that we're still aware that there are less women. When you put together a panel, you always think about, OK, I got I got to make sure this is not for white dudes talking to each other because that's very easy to do. But there is an amazing network of women that exist in DC. And it's a very open and welcoming network. It's not on paper. It's just kind of out there. But when I meet young students and I meet women who are interested in this policy and they ask me, oh, how do I get into this particular kind of subfield or how do I get an internship at this place? There is always someone I can refer them to. And there's always knowledge that I can give them about my experience. That will help them. And so I think it's it's kind of growing and it's getting better. But we also have to keep in mind that it's important for us to be aware of it because when you shape policy, you need the minority voices. And we're right now just talking about women. Like let's talk about minority women. That's a whole different subcategory that experiences multiple different structures that are oppressing on them. So we have to be aware of that because those voices need to be in the room when policy decisions are made. What do you think about the the area that I know you you work quite a bit in? And I do, too. The surveillance in particular, I was just thinking about my my Twitter feed. And I would say that some of the the go-to people in that field are women, for sure, and like Fourth Amendment lawyers, professors that some of the best people out there are women. And I think what you just touched on is really important because it's worth reminding ourselves, you know, that when we're talking about surveillance and minority groups, of course, minorities in virtue of being minorities tend to be on the receiving end of it and have a unique perspective that white straight men might not have the same position to talk about that sort of stuff. But maybe we should shift to so there's there's tech policy, which is what we do here. There's law, which has more women. Yeah. And so Fourth Amendment lawyers that you talk about. Yeah, actually, the legal field has pretty much an even number of men and women as of right now, I would say. You look at law school graduates, it's yes, absolutely. So we're doing all right in there. Yeah, there are still issues with pay, pay discrepancies, but that just the over disparity with number of employees and rank of employees is much less severe in law versus. I mean, so the numbers I saw for the tech sector, tech sector, not tech policy was women composed about a third of the workforce at the major tech giants think your Microsofts or Facebooks or Google's. But even that somewhat obscures the real situation, which is when you look at the employment patterns, it tends to be support staff where female employees at those tech giants are clustered, you know, human resources and the like and not in the engineering and like, you know, direct engagement in creating tech sector. So like the discrepancy between that and other fields that require, you know, lots of education, lots of expertise and skill is quite striking, where we've essentially reached parity. There was this one study that was done, the striking divide even within STEM fields. So this isn't even just a you can't extrapolate across all of science and engineering and math, so obviously going back half a century, women are excluded from the workforce, you know, cultural forces of, you know, patriarchy and women need to stay in the domestic sphere. So there is a low female labor workforce participation rate in the mid 20th century, that number starts to rise. And in a lot of sectors, including in medicine, including in other areas of academic science, it's near parity, the number of female undergraduates to male undergraduates approaches parity today. But that you look at a trend chart of all these other fields, it's going up, up, up, reaching near parity by the 90s, except for computer programming, which goes tracks right along going up, up, up from the 20% tile climbs, and then it drops drastically in the 1980s, but only really for computer engineering. And in the 1980s, I don't think people expected, I mean, obviously, they didn't know about the digital revolution, the creation of Silicon Valley in its modern sense. I mean, back then, it was all about, you know, building literal computers, personal computers, not about the digital side, the internet side of that really. So it's the so to me, that's really instructive. Something was going on with in computer programming, specifically with these kind of unforeseeable consequences when computer programming became kind of the key to the modern global economy, taking everyone by surprise 1020 years later. Absolutely. Right now, I was actually talking to a professor just now who teaches economics at a very prestigious university. And she told me that a lot of the kids who used to go into economics major thinking that's the most lucrative major because they wanted a business education, not going to computer science. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Because you can get a six figure paycheck in theory straight out of school straight out of school. Yeah, they don't do graduate school anymore because we don't need to. And I think it's important that you touch upon the education part, because this starts at elementary school level, this starts at the set, like first elementary and secondary education, where the way the science classes are constructed, the way the syllabus is constructed, the way the school and their kind of just socio economic ratio is their last classes for minorities, their last classes for girls, and their organizations right now that are working to make that better. There are girls who code an amazing organization based in in the Bay Area that makes sure girls get not only training, but books sometimes and just syllabuses and outreach to know that there is math out there. I think so that's the number one kind of step ground zero of the issue. It's also partially the social influences and biases are society and we're talking about America and Europe. We're not even talking about countries that are still in a more developing stage that have different gender systems. Countries still think that women are the emotional part, rational versus emotional. We have a grandma master Nigel Short saying that women are just not hardwired to play chess, which I would argue is wrong because I beat my dad and he's really good. He has some kind of a ranking near the reputation of Russia when it comes to chess. But you know, this goes back to Aristotle. I'm sure people at Kato would love that I just dropped named Aristotle. Just for you, Aaron. And you know, it remains embedded in our social collective mind that women are the emotional ones. And when they should choose, you know, their major, they should choose a kind of their path, they should go into humanities. And this, I love my mother, but I remember around eighth or ninth grade, I said, you know, I want to become an astronomer. And she said, Well, there's only boys in that school. And they're all weird, too. Do you really want to do that? That was the limit that she put on me. And obviously, my mother is a law professor and has always been a feminist icon for me. But that question, honestly, I think I was really bad at math. So this would have never happened just because I'm not wired that way. But that exists in everyone's mind, not only I'm not saying only bad people think women are not wired to do hard sciences. I myself think I'm not wired to the hard sciences, whereas probably if I had a better math teacher or a special program that I could do after school, I'd be a software developer right now. Well, something that Paul dropped into the notes in preparation was a theory put forward by Alex Tabarak, who's an economist at George Mason, who he had this interesting theory that I haven't really unpacked. So I don't have strong opinions on it one way or the other. But so correct me if this summary isn't correct, but basically that actually women are better than men when it comes to or just as good at STEM, if not slightly better. But that men aren't as good at a wider field that actually women outperform men when it comes to a lot of the humanities and that that might account for some of the disparity that we see. It's not not what like some people might say, which is well, women aren't wired for it and men are. It's actually a very interesting other kind of thing going on according to Tabarak. Yeah, his his his ideas that, you know, you get to that crucial stage in upper high school where you're thinking about where you're going to college and what you're going to study, what your major going to be. And when you look at actual scores and advanced placement classes, and so this is a very U.S. context, but I think it applies more broadly. Women's scores in AP science, AP mathematics classes, any of the STEM fields are just as good as men's in high school. And yet fewer of them select STEM majors, especially computer programming majors in college than men. And so the question is why that makes no sense, right? So the disparity is not a function of anything inherent. They're doing just as well, just as qualified. But what he notes in the in the piece, which is quite fascinating, is that women outperform men on other measures. So they're outperforming in humanities, basically anything involving literacy and communication. And so they relative to their equal performance to men in STEM, they're outperforming men in other fields, which pushes some and then I think you layer on. So they're just it's not a function of male superiority in STEM. It's a function of male disability and everything that's not STEM, which I think is a really fascinating. It turns that all on its head. But I think you layer on top of that the cultural forces, right? I mean, and it's not malicious. Your mom was not trying to keep you from maximizing your dreams and what not. But there is that kind of informal pressure. There's this great Planet Money episode where they dig into this phenomenon, the drop in the number of women going into computer programming, computer science. They basically say it's this self-fulfilling prophecy that in the early 80s, we created a cultural narrative, which was that programming and computers are for nerds. It's the creation, the invention of the nerd really in the late 70s. And nerd somehow is a gendered figure. It's only a man. We gendered it. Yeah. So we created the nerd, we made him, made it male. And then we decided that was actually weird and uncool. And but someone to be pitied, but also someone to be admired for their smarts. But they were so socially inept. And then the nerd becomes the hero if he makes enough money. And if he acts in honestly, just if you watch any of those movies like Revenge of the Nerds or any of the 80s, they act like a really rapey manner. So if they make money and they trick a girl in the sleeping with them, that's like a core part of nerd movie culture in the 80s as well. So like I wasn't I wasn't born in the 80s. So I haven't seen those movies, but they sound horrible. They are. Yeah. If you really want to blast from the past, Revenge of the Nerds is probably the first one to start with. But well, it's problematic now. So it's there's that, but something that I've always found rather odd is and, you know, you can admire Steve Jobs for a lot of things, right? You know, clearly, you know, interesting innovative thinker. But I think it's really regrettable that a lot of people seem to think that because he was successful, we should idolize that form of management, right? It's like very odd, right? And I think some people might say, well, you know, in the long run, the nerds win. Look at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg. Look at they're doing really well. But there are other parts of that culture that aren't very healthy, right? And even today, though, like the Big Bang theory, which like a show I just hate to hate, because it's all about like nerdy guys and just fulfilling these stereotypes that I thought had died a while ago. And of course, you know, there's the attractive dumb girl who lives across the hall from these really smart guys. He hasn't watched Forever of Season One because they introduced two nerdy women into the mix. So I guess I cut off before, but well, so there is the nerdy woman that Sheldon or is it Sheldon who there are two nerdy, so Horowitz, Mary's a nerdy biologist who also makes way more money than him. And then Sheldon, Mary's, this is a lot of spoilers, guys. Big Bang theory is on season 10, so get over yourself. So and Sheldon, Mary's Amy Farrah Fowler, who is I want to say brain biologist, scientist who is who can actually keep up with him. Well, yeah, I'm I stand corrected. I guess I see the stereotype, but I see the stereotype and I see that this actually kind of is a great segue into what we're going to talk next, which is the workplace systems and that tech is a voice club. It really is. The thing is, you look at the Silicon Valley culture and you hear from women who have worked there and have gotten out or are still there. And the way it's structured is. The nerds are the top of the hill. They rule the show and they just they were weird in college, right? And kind of obviously over exaggerating and putting a negative spin on it. But they were anti-social and didn't really get with women and now they're cool and they make money and they're in Silicon Valley and they just go kind of and approach women in an irrespectful way. And they treat women in a way they shouldn't. Yeah. Well, they've been they've been imbued with a sense of toxic masculinity that comes out of that that sense of I mean, again, it's a it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You you you create a generation of people who are now, you know, they were kids. They were born in the 70s. They're kids in the 80s absorbing this idea of toxic masculinity, what it means to be a nerd. The the need for revenge to get back to show the world their stuff. And by now they're in their 40s. They're in their 40. Basically, all of our tech leadership, whether it's Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, even Mark Zuckerberg is a little bit younger, born in the 80s. But like there's a whole generation who are inculcated in that mindset, who now are adults with power and money and they're acting like they were kind of taught to act. Well, so in 2018, though, it's worth asking the question. I get asking Ash, right? Taking a look at the valley, do you think that enough people that view this as a problem? And then I suppose, secondly, what are the kind of solutions that the industry has tried to roll out, if any? All right. So let's start by saying that I don't think the value sees this as a problem. I think it's a problem that has been set out loud. And there are people who are fighting really good fight of trying to bring it up to the front. But this company still make money and they still keep the employers that are there. So unless an issue gets a huge publicity, nothing is going to happen. And this is a little sidetrack, but this is actually a San Francisco case that I've just been very appalled by. It's a professor that does. This is kind of innovation policy. So it applies that does anti vaping kind of research. And he has been accused of harassment by multiple graduate students. And you have a plethora of different things that has been accused off from cutting a student out of credit for the research we've done to discriminating them to harassing them to trying to basically assault them. And this professor, his name is David Glantz, he still gets government funding and he's still in tenure because there are not enough just not enough eyeballs on the issue. And so we had that one story go viral with Uber employee who talked about her experiences and how it was so bizarre. Basically, if your department did well, your supervisor would get would get everyone. Jackets is just kind of levered jackets that the bikers would get and was considered cool. But the only two women in a group wouldn't get them because it wasn't something girls would wear by the assumption of a supervisor. And that's just the top of iceberg. Obviously, she went through a lot of work, placed discrimination, and I encourage everyone to read about this. And I think this was partially the cause of a CEO stepping down. But this is not this is just localized incidents. And there is no framework to address addresses in Silicon Valley. Even if you look at startup startups and numbers, only 15% of the startups have at least a female co lead or a female CEO. They're just not enough women and they're not enough voices that would make this a structure that can be applied. And answering your question about what can be done. Awareness is the first one. People just talking about it. I think us talking about it is important because you guys obviously have a lot of listeners who maybe have heard pieces here and there but don't understand how awful and big the picture is. And talking about it then talking about the ethics, talking about workplace training, talking about being aware. A lot of people get upset if they hear that we should hire more women because they think they're taking jobs away from men or that it's kind of this weird affirmative action in workplace. But you can get better results and it's been shown that if you actually hire more women, your company gets better numbers, it gets better efficient, it gets just way ahead. So honestly, in the end, everyone wins. Well, it turns out that, you know, most businesses are in the business of selling to the American public and the American public is about half female. Imagine that. So you're going to be better off if your workforce reflects going into producing the products that the public are, you know, want. It's going to do a better job of that if it reflects the public. Even if you look at companies that are led by women, most of them are more in the kind of area that's still considered female. So shopping, dating, socializing, the companies that women are kind of putting forward. And I think it's amazing that they're creating these companies and they're just fascinating role models. But they still kind of in the tech world, they probably found funding and a niche because venture capitalists were like, oh, she knows, she knows about dating. She knows about clothing. Yeah, she can figure that out. We can give her money. She she seems smart and she she understands it. So that's still a problem. And with few women that headed companies that didn't do so well, I think they should be treated like men. So I'm forgetting her name, but the one who kind of created this company that's going to analyze her blood without. Oh, yeah, it was. She was on the cover of every magazine. She was. I forget. Elizabeth Holmes. Yes. Elizabeth Holmes or Thanatos. Or well, we all know what happened when Yahoo tried to bring in a female CEO and she just kind of ran around and gave you interviews. But they should have the singing standards applied to them as men. I am not saying take it easy on them. I'm just saying give them a chance. Yeah, I mean, it's actually interesting, you know, which companies there's almost these carve outs where it's like, OK, yes, we will let women run or be involved in these operations because we think of them as, you know, female spaces. You can even see that that when you look at the list of the tech companies with the highest percentage of female employees, it tends to be things like Pinterest, Pandora, eBay, whereas the ones with the fewest female employees are Microsoft, Google, right? So there's almost the consumer versus back end engineering folk difference. And yeah, so even where you see success, it's still kind of falling into these preconceived notions of how gender affects what can be produced and in technology. So it feels like we have a chicken or an egg problem, which is on the one hand, so there is a gender gap and there's the problem of sexual harassment and sexual sexual discrimination in the workforce. And the question on my mind, I don't have a satisfactory answer to this is, is the gender gap the cause of sexual discrimination or is sexual discrimination the cause of the gender gap? That makes sense. So, you know, you enter into a space that's dominated that's 80 percent male that you then allow a few token women in subservient roles, right, like at at Tesla in the New York article you sent or like they're going to experience sexual discrimination almost as a matter of course because men aren't used to working with them. They say stupid stuff. They sexually harass them even like. So one argument would be that the sexual discrimination is a function of the gender gap. The other would be to say, no, the gender gap is caused by sexual discrimination, making women feel unwelcome in the hostile workplace, being more likely to drop out, thus perpetuating the gender gap. So how do you grapple with which causes which with that relationship? I think the discrimination comes from within, right, comes from our societal structure and the way men grow up and see how they can treat women and the way male dominant workplaces operate. And so that kind of, I think, is the cause of a gender gap because, well, who do you want to hire? Do you want to hire John who was on the lacrosse team and he kind of, you know, can relate to your lacrosse days and using your frat? Just yeah, you guys can go out and get drinks. Or do you want to hire Jane who, well, has same, if not better grades and kind of can do the same, Jane can be into football. So for example, this is personal anecdote, but I watch a lot of American football and healthy amount. I watch the NFL Draft. I'm on a fantasy team, by the way, the only girl in my fantasy team. And I'm top free right now. I'm just saying I'm definitely making playoffs. And in a lot of settings when football comes up and I say something, I'm literally asked to name three players on the team. And I just go by naming the head coach and the defensive coordinator and the offensive coordinator and saying, well, you guys just drafted. Well, you just drafted Patrick Mahomes. Where are you talking about? And oh, you really know football. You're not faking it. So it's that mindset. It's that attitude towards women. And I don't think we really dive into it because obviously we can do this like we can do a whole series on this. But the workplace discrimination is also it's not just the harassment, which is awful. It's not just passing women for promotion or not hiring them. By the way, there has been a lot of research in both tech and just in general, where you would send resumes and they would be identical aside from the gender name on gender name on top. And if it's John, he had a higher chance than if it was a Jane. I once was asked during an interview for a job if I'm planning to have children anytime soon or getting married, which is illegal, by the way. Just just putting this out there. It's illegal. I didn't have any energy to sue. But this is kind of just that just top tip of iceberg. And then we have boys going to get a drink after work and not inviting girls or going to watch a game and not inviting the girls and then making decisions that are concerning about that concern the workflow. That some guy who was out with them gets a project, whereas you should have done that conversation in the office and heard different pitches. But no, instead, you just kind of assign it to the guy sitting next to you or a guy's going to smoke break. They are so many things that happen throughout just every work day that are just structured because of a discrimination that comes in decades and centuries and just thousands of years that we have built up that we don't even think about that affects women. And so I think I definitely think that creates a gender gap. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, and something else I put on the notes here, which is that it's not I mean, this truly is a global issue because the tech sector is a global sector. And America is the leading country for now. Yeah. And you go to Silicon Valley and we import as much talent as we educate ourselves here in the United States. So one of the other factors that plays into this is that the U.S. is a destination for global programmers. So STEM graduate students. I went to Penn State, you know, the overall majority of our computer science graduate students were from Indian subcontinent or East Asia, right? So lots of Chinese in the in Pakistani overwhelmingly male. So you have a lot of men coming from countries with a history of even I mean, in a sense, when it comes to gender and the workforce, they're a century behind the U.S. and the rest of the developing world. In some fields, you actually, if you look at India's numbers, I think in class right now for STEM in general and software to particularly they have an even number of men and women. The other thing though is who comes here, whose family, if the way those countries operate is you spend your money on the boy because the boy is going to go and make something of himself and be the provider. You don't usually invest in the girl and same applies with two people who employ. If you have a soft female software developer from India and a male one, your worried if a female one would get married and have children and want them to leave even though it's not really a thing in America. But you're worried about just continuity of investing into a foreign employer and going for a very painful, trust me, I've been for a immigration process. Not getting any easier either. Nope. No. What was it? It's actually I mean, we're expecting everyone in the tech sector is worried that essentially we're not going to see the effects of it for like 20 or 30 years. But the number of foreign graduate students are going to come into STEM programs is the number of visa approvals is just plummeting because the administration wants fewer of them. And you won't see ramifications now. There'll be a lag, but that means fewer people starting startups in Silicon Valley. Few were, you know, I mean, it was fascinating. Yeah. The number of foreigners and immigrants who start started startups is like 50 percent or something. It's insane. That was a moment in the last presidential election and the aftermath of it. I forget exactly when. But Steve Bannon, when he actually explicitly said something like, no, like, you know, I do worry about the Indian engineers coming here. He said, no, these are we have to be we have to have an immigration system that takes into account all education levels. And I'm totally fine to exclude the postgraduate Indian state. That was really chilling when I thought, wow, they that guy's got an ideology. That's for sure. Yeah. Now, for a second time, can we talk a little bit about what should we do? I mean, you've touched on this some ash, you know, workshops, awareness, self-education. And I suppose there's kind of two related questions here, which is what can we do and what should we do to address this gender disparity going forward? All right. So as I said, it has to be a mindset shift. We have to, as an industry, and I'm talking about both policy and the tech industry, we should be partnering with educators and schools and universities to demonstrate what kind of projects exist for women to come into. And we also need to be aware of the gender structures that exist within our organizations and within the industry and just navigate around them because these women are going to found our future and they're going to we need to encourage them to come into this world because they have the opportunity to shape the future in many amazing ways that we can't even imagine right now. So I think it has to be a very coordinated, not like one big council. There are a lot of wonderful organizations, as I already mentioned, girls who code, they're girls in tech, they're women in technology, they're DC Femme tech. And those are just few that I can name at the top of my head that work in this, but they need more publicity. They need more funding. They need fresh blood. 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