 and those who identify as women plus non-binary and allies. First, I'd like to acknowledge that while we may use language referring to gender in the binary of men and women, there is a spectrum of gender that includes non-binary folks. There are a multitude of nuanced experiences that we may not be able to adequately address in this session, but we are on the path to creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone in tech. Today, we have some speakers who are sharing their tech journeys with you. These are the stories of strong and accomplished women in open source. Some of the things we asked our speakers were, how did you get to this point in your career? What do you think the challenges were that you faced that were related to gender inequity in tech? And who has inspired you? And now allow me to play the video of our wonderful speakers sharing their insights. Hi, my name is Maria Cruz. I'm a program manager in the Google open source programs office. And I'm here to share a little bit about my experience. My name is Gina Jorgensen. I am a senior director within Google. And I work in Google Cloud Marketing. I'm Aish Sundar. And I lead Engprod for Google Kubernetes Engine. And I've been in the tech space for about 15-plus years now. And I've had a remarkable journey working both internally as part of different companies and also upstream in Kubernetes space. I am a white cisgender queer Latina immigrant in the US. I was born and raised in Argentina. I graduated from college with a BA in communications with an emphasis in journalism. And after that, I studied for a year in Berlin in the European College of Bureau of Arts, which is now the Park College Berlin. And upon returning to Argentina, I started working in a marketing startup. And after that, I moved on to work in the third sector, working in the nonprofit arm of an oil company, YPS. I entered the open source sector in 2013 when I joined Wikimedia Argentina as a communications manager. Wikimedia Argentina is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. And they focus on promoting Wikipedia at the local level. And then in 2014, I joined the Wikimedia Foundation and moved to San Francisco in 2015. And then in 2019, I started working as a contractor for a Google open source programs office. And in February 2020, I became a permanent employee working in community engagement for cloud-native projects. And my way into technology was pretty unconventional. I was in business school and was at an event as part of one of our entrepreneurship events that we were having at the business school. And I was talking to one of my professor's husbands who was at Microsoft and happened to be one of the founders of something called Windows NT. And he asked me a question about what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I think I probably had the only 30 seconds of clarity I've ever had in my entire life, which was that I wanted to work in accessible technology. Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I had 12 interviews at Microsoft. And I ended up with a job offer in the developer division working on a Windows embedded operating system. And at that point, honestly, I didn't know the difference between an Intel chip and a potato chip. And when they made me the offer, I said, hey, I am really going to need a technical mentor if I'm going to be successful here at Microsoft. And I started on a Monday. And on a Tuesday, I had a technical mentor who I met with three times a week. And I did that for many, many years. And he's still a mentor of mine today. But my way into technology was very, very different and unconventional compared to most people who had a computer science background or an engineering background. My background was in law. And I decided that I wanted to go into accessible technology. And then that's how I ended up there. So again, pretty unconventional. I spent 19 years at Microsoft. And about five months ago, I joined Google. And also, historically in my career, I've had a number of different disciplines that I've been part of, whether that was in the developer organization, whether that was in mergers and acquisitions, or business management. And my last three years, I spent actually in engineering designing our online cloud marketplaces. I started in tech about 15 years ago. Funnily enough, tech wasn't my first choice. Back in the days, I wanted to go more into medicine. But as luck and life would have it, things took one direction, another. And computer and tech was my second interest or love. And I started going into that space. I've been working in multiple companies throughout. And connecting the dots now, looking backward from where I came and where I am right now, I know that each job has taught me something different. I've learned a lot of different skills from each place that I worked in. And that has gone a long way in making me who I am today. I would love to share some of those with you folks. My first job out of college was in, with Thompson Rogers, a long time back. It was an amazing experience because that's the first time I started into the tech industry, started learning what it meant to work as part of a technical team towards a product. But the biggest learning I would say that I took from that experience was more around how to build a work family, how to go about working together as a team. It's not just what you do, but how you do that also matters. So that's something I learned a lot from working in my first job. And then from there, I moved on to work in Microsoft for a few years. The biggest learning there in my career was around how to work hard and also play harder, which I still carry on till this day in my team. We all work a lot and work hard towards the impactful deliverables that we are all driving. But at the same time, we have a lot of fun while doing it at the job and even outside of the job. And then after a couple of years, few years in Microsoft, I moved to Google, which was a phenomenal experience. I started off as part of Google Photos even before it was Google Photos. And I had the incredible experience of being part of like a startup world within Google. And the first thing that struck me at that point was how open Google was. I was able to work with people across different disciplines, be it Eng, Eng productivity, UX, program management, product management, and across different hierarchical levels without having any boundaries. And as a woman in a big work environment and as a part of an underrepresented community, it was extremely empowering for me to be part of a really fast-paced upcoming product and make a huge impact and difference there. And from there, a few years down the line, I moved to Cloud, which is where I am right now within Google. And I would say it's been the most enriching experience and the most growth I've had both professionally and personally in my career. I opened up a lot of doors around learning to manage a team, built a diverse and a thriving team, and contribute towards cutting-edge technology that we work on today. And Cloud is the place where I got introduced to open source as well, Kubernetes. And I had a wonderful opportunity to contribute upstream where I met a lot of awesome allies, mentors, and peers who I still get inspired from and had a great opportunity to collaborate and contribute upstream as well. When I moved to the US, I thought I would continue to grow on the path that I had set for myself, but instead it pretty much felt like I was starting from scratch. A lot of this had to do with not knowing how professional ladders were designing the organization that I was joining and also what titles meant in terms of independent execution and professional levels. I also learned about race and racial equity in the US. I learned that I am a Latina and not a white person like I thought I was for most of my life. And I became acquainted with a particular persona that I describe as the white man working tech. And I think of this display of a personality as opposed to this person's actual abilities and knowledge. For example, I realized that some white men will speak with confidence about issues they are not familiar with. And they are also able to draw from others ideas that they present as their own. They are in other occasions, they are also able to anticipate what is the right thing to say based on the response they are getting from the audience when they are presenting something. So as a speaker of English as a second language, it took me some time to understand that people can lie, pretend and manipulate you when they are speaking in English. Maybe people who studied other languages can relate to this. When you study a second language, everything that comes in that language is perceived as being better, higher quality and even more professional. In this sense, I had to decolonize my mind. And I quickly realized that people can be loudmouth and falsifiers in English as well as in Spanish. And after I decoupled these concepts and I decolonized myself, I realized it's not just white men. And this is where I think gender theory can bring a lot of light to this concept. We have a tendency to associate traits like collaborative, conciliatory, flexible, inclusive with women and traits like aggressive, individualistic and competitive with men. When in reality people from all genders can carry these qualities. I have worked with women who are aggressive in their pursuits as most men can be. And I have worked with men who are collaborative and inclusive like usually women are. And I made an emphasis in these definitions of gender as a social construct and gender performativity because I think this can speak volumes to any work environment, but in particular to tech. Tech is a very competitive industry. It moves fast and it's hard to break into. And this may explain why some people become aggressive and individualistic and adopt other personality traits to survive. I'm particularly interested in Judith Butler because her study of phenomenology and feminist theory describes how social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture and all manner of symbolic social gain. In other words, phenomenology describes how our acts and our words can shape the reality that we live in. What challenges have I faced and have I faced as a result of gender inequality? And I would say that I've been pretty fortunate. I've had a lot of amazing incredible female and male mentors and leaders who I've been able to work for and work with and who have been my champions and who have been my cheerleaders and who have helped me along the way, especially in times when they saw things in me that I didn't see in myself. And they really helped me just figure out what experiences I wanted and where I could provide value. And one of the biggest challenges I faced not having a technical background going into technology was that I wasn't technical at the time. And I also wasn't the smartest person in the room. There's tons of brilliant, brilliant people in technology. And one of the things that I had to overcome was I'm not the smartest, I'm not the most technical, but you know what? I do know I'm the most hardworking. And so I put that into every practice, every problem I was trying to solve, every business challenge, every technical challenge I was ever trying to solve. I worked super, super, super hard to become the subject matter expert in it. And I did that by talking to customers and being really fanatical about what the user experience was, what data we had, and then trying to formulate an opinion based on a whole bunch of different factors and data points. And that was really challenging. The second challenge for me that I think we all face, a number of people face is how do you establish boundaries Before children, I did not have any boundaries. I worked endlessly. I loved working. I still love working, but I loved working because it felt like a puzzle I was trying to solve. Every problem that I didn't understand right away, it was just like trying to solve a puzzle and I love that. But I didn't have any boundaries. And when I had children, I learned quickly that I had to start establishing some boundaries about my work and my professional life. And having boundaries, establishing them when you had them before and then sticking to them. And that's really challenging at every, every phase in your career, whether you're the most junior person or the most senior person, having boundaries and sticking to them. And I found that there were times that people didn't respect my boundaries and I was trying really hard to maintain them. And there were other times people were really respectful. And I found out in most instances when you had a boundary that was known, people respected them. But it was up to you to maintain it. And that was something that I consistently was challenged with, right? To go from no boundaries at all, to actually having some that created a sense of normalcy in my life. I would love to also talk about a few instances, especially in upstream, in Kubernetes community, where I've really had a lot of growing experience as well. This was like back when I started leading the Kubernetes 1.13 release. I, again, one thing led to another and I was nominated to lead the release for Kubernetes. It was an amazing experience in my life where I had to work through, persist through multiple roadblocks and learn a lot to be able to stay effective and lead the release through success. This was, again, as a release leader, I had to wear multiple hats. It was not just learning the technical side of things and working with people who are veterans in the area, but also being able to influence others without authority, being able to foresee risk factors to the release and mitigate them, motivate a 20% release team and take them all in a unified direction, interact with multiple SIGs and prioritize the feature and put the release front and center. There were so many different hats and skills that I had to learn. Looking back, I would say that was one of the best experiences in my life. It was one of those few times where I really thrived in my career and I felt that taught me a lot along the way as well. We can choose to reproduce the violence that oppresses us or we can choose to create something different. So if I can let you to live with anything from this talk today is the fact that we create the context that we're working every day. We do it in the way we communicate, the way we involve others and the way we behave ourselves. So how can we make this a space that everybody can enjoy? How can we build our sense of being based on collaboration and compassion instead of violence and aggression? I learned two very, very important lessons as a kid. One from my mom and one from my dad and my mom taught me always how to stand up for other people and she always believed in you need to walk a mile and somebody else's shoes before you ever judge. And my dad said that's super important but the most important thing you can do is learn to stand up for yourself and I realized I really would struggle to stand up for other people if I couldn't first stand up for myself. And so, how do you support one another? First, you've got to learn to support yourself. Any negative talk, any of these feelings that you're an imposter or whatnot you've got to let that go. That's energy not just completely wasted, right? It goes into a space that doesn't help you. It doesn't catapult you forward. And I was talking to a friend of mine and they were doing the same thing. They were just telling me all the reasons why they were beating themselves up about this thing that they were thinking through. And I remember saying, if I came to you with the same problem, you would support me. You'd be my biggest advocate. You'd be my biggest cheerleader. Why are you talking to yourself this way? And she was kind of taken aback and stunned and I was like, you've got to be your best advocate. Learn to stand up for yourself that you're capable of. And so then coming to the point of how do you support one another? When you can stand up for yourself, you can actually know, like show up in a room and it kind of comes back to like, how are you present and how do you show up in your everyday life personally and professionally? Are you show up and thinking about a million other things or are you showing up and giving attention to the thing that's happening in the moment? Being present, you recognize so many things that you wouldn't have recognized if you were multitasking. You recognize what it's your turn to speak. You recognize what it's your turn to present. You recognize what somebody may have had a bad day. You recognize body language. You recognize tone. You recognize the feeling in the room. You recognize things you never would have recognized otherwise. And so the way in which you can best support another person is you show up and you be present. And when you see things that don't feel right, that don't sound right, that don't look right, you can speak up and you can speak up in private. You can speak up in person. You can speak up in the whatever way in which you're capable of in that moment. But it gives you the opportunity not only to recognize that something is off, but then take action against it. And for me, whether it's racial inequality, gender inequality, whatever the inequality is, the way to make everyone feel like their voice is heard and to be seen in the world is that you actually see them. And you can only see somebody when you're focused on them in that minute and present in that very moment in time, not thinking about the past, not obsessing about what's happening in the future, you're there. And that to me is the best way you can show up and support people because you'll begin to start to recognize things that you may not otherwise have seen. Finally, how can we all support one another? There are multiple ways. I spoke about it a little bit. Try to speak up for yourself. Let your work do the talking and make sure you take advantage of the opportunities. And for folks on the other side who can actually help make sure you pull up folks. Identify people who don't talk much, who are soft spoken, but still have the potential and try to pull them up. It could be as simple as asking folks to lead a meeting, take on more leadership position, ask for their opinions and reviews and design reviews or project reviews. Or it can also be something as simple as, not simple, but something as critical as hiring a diverse team, bringing more people from different vectors in the society, be it genders, be it different ethnicity background, roles and responsibilities. Build a diverse team that can work, grow and thrive together. That way you're actually giving more space for all other voices to be heard. And when you see something, say something. Support one another, make sure that we stand up for each other and I'm sure that will go a long way in building a great team, great product and a great company as well. Thank you for coming to this talk. I hope this question is inspiring to you, to me, and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for having us. I'm so honored to be a part of this panel and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your event. Thank you. Thanks a lot for hearing out what I have to say. We hope you enjoyed the talk that our speakers had and now we're going to reflect a little bit on what they had to say with their interactive activity. So I will share my screen. You can use a phone, your laptop. You can use a tablet, whatever device you have and go to slido.com and enter that code. I'll drop a link in our chat. You can also go there and it'll take you directly to our activity. So I'll give everyone a moment just to get there. All right. So where is everyone joining from? Go ahead and type in your answer and then hit submit. See Netherlands, Barcelona, Toronto, Munich, Sweden, Romania. Oh, we have some California in here too. Philippines, Buenos Aires, all right. And how did these stories make you all feel? Were they encouraging? Were they inspiring? Motivated? Ported? Hopeful? Itchy for the solution. I like that one. Remarkable. I'm glad to see it inspiring on the top of the list here. What words come to mind when you think of a leader? Operations, sporting, strong, mentor, confident, compassionate, supportive. That's been a trend so far. So if you're reflecting on that, let's break down some notions. When you thought of those words, when you thought of who you imagined as a leader and you started building that up in your head, did you think of someone who was a man, someone who was a woman, someone who was gendered non-binary, or did you not have a stereotype at all? I've done this activity before where a lot of the participants selected a man because typically when they thought of CEOs for companies or the way that they had been introduced to technology and leadership, most CEOs and high-rank executives were men. But the truth is that all of us in this room have the ability to be leaders, and these stories should inspire you and provide some insight on just different qualities that we can impart within ourselves and on others to be able to embody being a leader. Who is your biggest role model? It could be a specific person, someone who's a celebrity, someone in your life. Mine is my mom also. It seems like moms have been pretty inspirational here. And what have your experiences been like in the workplace? Do you feel like you've generally had challenges that you've had supportive experiences mixed, challenging and rewarding, struggling as women, sexism, respected, supported, included, mostly challenging and now supportive, had challenges as women? It seems like we've had a mixed level of experiences here. That means we have a lot of work to do still so that everyone can have a positive experience. And think of your own experiences in the workplace. Everything that you just mentioned, things that you were thinking of, what comes to mind when you think about what an ally should be? Should an ally be someone who gives you a seat at the table? Should they be someone who helped uplift you, someone who listens, an inclusive ally, a supportive ally, someone who lifts you up, respectful, interested in your story that's very important, gives feedback, creates a safe environment, someone you can talk to? These are all really important things that you should look for when you're trying to find an ally or be an ally to someone else. Now, what are some ways that you want to be supported? It can be specific, it can be something generic, it can be based on a real experience that you had recently, mentor support, clear pathways for growth, constructive feedback, mental health support, yes, included in decision-making, alignment. I encourage you, everything that you're saying here, to start advocating for yourself. Find an ally, find a mentor, find someone who will be a sponsor for you, and have them advocate for you in the different ways that you want to be supported. This is how we build allyship, this is how we support others and be allies for them. So this was our last question, and before we drop off, I know we are almost at time, but if anyone has a question, I'd like to give them a moment to ask. Well, if there are no questions, we really appreciate everyone taking the time to come today. We hope you enjoyed the session. Please use our hashtag, G-O-S-S empowered us, and tweet at the Google open source account, and we hope you enjoyed the session and the rest of QCon.