good afternoon i am amie sarnowski chief innovation officer at genesis 10. 

on behalf of genesis 10 welcome to today's roundtable discussion women in technology what can we do now 

to delve into this important topic that will affect our workplace for generations we have invited this distinguished panel 

to share their perspective please join me in welcoming mandy odell 

vice president head of hr tech for technology with northwestern mutual eric simonsen 

managing partner of research at everest group and terry hogan president and cto for 

the national center for women in information technology for the past several years 

diversity equity and inclusion have become a priority in organizations i do think it is fascinating how the 

mindset and focus has evolved from just five years ago the huffington post published an article back in 2017 

highlighting the importance of diversity and inclusion because it made sense for our businesses bottom line 

the article noted that a diverse workforce was important to drive innovation attract more talent and create more 

opportunities for growth so very much a business motivated reason 

fast forward the metoo movement black lives matter and even the passing of supreme court 

justice ruth bader ginsburg have moved us past the business motivation to social justice 

and to focus on equity not just in our workplace but also in our communities today's roundtable discussion is focused 

on raising awareness for women in technology and spurring conversation to move past barriers 

and more importantly to to equip each of us to help move our companies forward 

before we get started if anyone has any technical difficulties or any questions that they would like to ask the panelists 

please use the chat feature we will be taking questions at the end of today's discussion 

to start off i would like to ask terry hogan to provide context on the genesis of the gender gap 

how did we even get here terry thank you ami it is great to be here and 

thanks to genesis 10 for hosting this roundtable discussion i'm going to share my screen with you 

here so we can look through a few slides and talk about like you said how we got here my name as 

you know is terry hogan i'm the president and cto at nc wit and ncwit is a non-profit 

organization oops that was founded in 2004 with a grant from the national science 

foundation and our mission is to increase the meaningful and influential participation of all 

women at all intersections in the field of computing especially in terms of innovation and 

development so it's really about having women contributing to all faces of the phases 

of the innovation process within our technical companies and also within technical groups of 

other companies that may not consider themselves tech 

oftentimes we talk to organizations who want to understand more why diversity is 

so important and why it's such a hot topic these days and one of the reasons it's so important 

is that we know from research that groups with greater diversity solve problems faster 

and better than homogeneous groups there is a reference here that anyone who's 

interested can look at it's a book published by scott page that talks about the difference in homogeneous and diverse groups in 

terms of how they solve problems and it's quite interesting and the 

numbers are not so great today so the way that we are addressing technical problems in our 

culture is somewhat homogeneous you can see on this slide that women do comprise more than half of all 

professional occupations in the us today however these numbers decrease when you look at technical jobs 

and they look even more terrible when you look at women of color 

you can see in this slide that hispanic women only make up two percent of the entire computing workforce 

which is pretty dismal additionally for leadership positions within tech the 

numbers are quite bad only five percent of ctos in the fortune 1000 companies 

are women this impacts innovation in a variety of 

different ways but one of the ways that you can think about innovation and how we know what impact 

we're having is if you look at patenting data so this quite complicated slide is really 

showing you the way patenting data shows that our i.t patents are largely created by 

one group of people today this is approximately a 30-year time span and if you look at the very bottom right 

hand corner you'll see that the men only teams have created 87.4 

percent of all technology patent information technology patents now we would never stand for this in any 

other part of our society we would never stand for it if 87.4 percent of our music 

was created by women or if 87.4 of our art was created by men 

and we shouldn't stand for it in tech either so as you mentioned earlier we want to 

talk briefly about why this is happening and i'm not going to do this section justice because i only have a few 

minutes but nc wit is a research-based organization and we have a team of social scientists who study this very 

problem why it's happening and how we can make a difference and i am happy to follow up 

with anybody after this call to talk more about this in more detail 

and also i am not a social scientist i am a computer scientist so you're going to be getting the 

computer scientist read on a social science problem and again i'm happy to follow up and 

talk with people further about it later so why is this happening well at nc wit 

one of the ways we talk about this is that minority groups are not broken and majority groups are not the enemy 

the culprit is societal bias and it is shared by both women and men we are all biased when it comes to who 

does tech there's actually an online bias checker that you can take which is i can send a link to that later 

but you can take an online bias checker that looks at your own attitudes unconscious about women in 

tech and i have taken this bias checker i took it when i first started at nc wit 

and i came out as moderately biased against women in tech and i am a woman 

in tech and so this is something that we all share 

which means that we can all work on this together 

so what causes these biases just real quick we'll talk about this societal biases are actually caused by 

something called schemas and these schemas are shortcuts that we have in our minds that help us interpret our 

world but sometimes because they are shortcuts they make us misinterpret things 

and that is unconscious bias an example of a schema that i like to give is if you think about being in a car and 

driving down the highway and you see a collection of buildings and parking lots off to the side of the 

road on the highway you know just a glance that that is a mall for example 

because you have a schema in your head for what a mall looks like if you didn't have schemas every single 

time you drove by a mall you would be so surprised and your brain would be working really hard trying to figure out what that was 

because you would drive by and you'd say oh my goodness what is that collection of buildings and cars because you wouldn't have a schema and 

then five miles later you'd drive by another one and you'd say oh my goodness what is that collection of buildings and cars 

because you don't have a schema but again we might make mistakes so you might have in your head a schema 

for what a leader looks like or what a technical person looks like and that might accidentally make you miss something or 

make a mistake about someone who doesn't fit your schema but the good news is that schemas can be 

expanded so once a person adds another type of person into their schema 

or who might be a leader or who might be a technical person that schema has been expanded 

these biases get brought to work so our society our people we have biases we bring them 

to work and when we bring them to work we write business processes that have bias in them because we of course are 

biased human beings and that affects our organizat organizational cultures 

i'm going to give just one quick example of how this shows up this particular slide we have a couple 

that are similar to this but this particular slide is one that i pulled out there's a woman named heidi rosen who's 

a quite famous entrepreneur in california and they took her resume and they gave a class of mba 

students so young people her resume and they gave one version of it with her 

name on it as heidi and one version with her name on it as howard and they asked the students many 

questions three of the questions you see here how power hungry self-promoting or 

disingenuous were howard and or heidi and you can see here across the board that with the exact 

same resume just with a different name heidi was perceived as more power-hungry 

more self-promoting more disingenuous there's another slide that shows that people do not want to 

hire heidi but they do want to hire howard with an identical resume this is one of the impacts of the biases 

we have in our culture because we expect women to be one way and we expect men to be another way and 

sometimes women get punished for being more like the men 

it also shows up in other ways in our offices for another example here is something that you might hear in a 

meeting where someone says actually susan has a good idea like they're so surprised they can't believe 

susan has a good idea actually that's a good idea women are more commonly interrupted in 

meetings their ideas are more more commonly ignored in meetings 

they additionally are sometimes asked if they're they're even in the right meeting are you in the right meeting 

and they're required to produce credentials and proof of contribution more often than their male counterparts there's 

another phenomenon that's kind of an isolation problem where often women carry more of the burden 

of outside of work responsibilities in the home and when things happen at the friday 

night beer bash many times women are not invited or were invited but or unable to attend 

here's another example that i'm going to give real quick because i know i don't have a whole lot of time left 

and that is that women and other types of underrepresented populations often suffer from what's called 

stereotype threat you may have heard of stereotype threat but it is when essentially a group 

a person who is a part of a group has a fear that they're going to 

reinforce a negative stereotype about their group and that makes them behave more poorly 

so this the group that is least likely to suffer from stereotype threat in our culture at least is white males 

and so there was a study done by dr joshua aronson where he wanted to 

evoke stereotype threat in white males to see how he could do it and it turns out it's quite easy to 

evoke it in anyone and what he did in this particular example is he had white male engineering 

students from stanford come together into a room to take a math test 

and he divided the students into two different groups and one of the groups of students he 

told them that they were simply giving taking a math test in order to understand their 

math performance the second group they told them that they were being given a math test because they were trying to 

understand why asian students typically do better on math tests than white students all they did was plant 

that seed that those students were not as good as someone else and the performance of those students dropped by about 30 

percent all right so this shows up in workplaces 

as well in quite common ways it shows up as people being reluctant to defend their ideas people are nervous 

about speaking up and taking on a leadership position they're often overly 

harsh about their own work and they often discount their own performance they say things like well i had a 

lot of help on this i didn't do this myself or i only got 98 of these things correct 

not 100 of these things correct it's not really good enough so these are some of the ways that these show up 

in the pdf version of these slides that you'll receive later there are some tips about how people can 

make a difference in their own workplaces but for now i will step out of this presentation because my job here was to 

just set a little context for folks and we'll roll right in thank you so much terry 

eric mandy thoughts or additional roadblocks that you find um either eric you know as you're 

talking with clients um in terms of roadblocks that you see 

that are affecting others to close the gender gap eric do you want to start and then mandy 

do you want to follow sure um eric simonson um 

just quickly i work for a company called everest group that does research and consulting in um it and business process area 

and that includes things like services and sourcing models there's a part of that we cover a lot of 

talent topics um how do people actually get the work done and so that's kind of my um my kind 

of ticket into why we observe some of these these trends and topics um i think uh first of all i'm terry 

excellent excellent presentation i was taking a lot of notes and can't wait to to get the um the pdf um i think 

a lot of what um we see and this is just a they're sort of um what happens after 

someone joins the workforce but actually just getting them into the workforce the big thing a bunch of people at least 

initially struggle with is just getting people into the workforce which was um kind of first part of terry's terry's 

slides and um we're actually seeing um in addition to the innovation 

dimension that terry mentioned there is just general scarcity of talent at this point 

and there is and there's more openness to alternative backgrounds do we really need college grads 

can we um reskill up skilled people etc and so um we're seeing as there's digital 

transformation and organizations needing more um more um 

more capacity that they're uh they're willing to stretch the norms and try new things i think very few of them will have dealt 

with sort of what was the second part of terry's um context which is okay once you get people in the door how do you behave 

right and we'll come to that i think a bit later and there's tremendous things that are friction 

points on that and i'd say you know some of it's just how is work packaged 

and done how do decisions get made how are people engaged on that um and there's many subtle things that 

we all can accidentally do or constrain a role model that um 

on reflection are quite silly yeah i would just add on to that from a 

rewriting the rules perspective obviously in my role as head of hr for a technology organization i get very close 

to the talent processes and talent practices that our cyclical and most big companies 

will do for their talent in in thinking about how how some of those 

processes are done and have been historically done it almost 

requires well roadblock in the sense that things like the referral bonus you know 

many companies have used referral bonuses and considered a best practice 

um to get people to share um you know their network for for roles 

that are open in doing so though you end up with a lot of people who are like the people you 

already have so if you struggle with a diverse workplace and those people are bringing in more people that are just like them 

um it might actually hurt your efforts so yes you may get people in the door quickly but will they be the most diverse maybe 

not so i think it you know one roadblock could be just the tried and true talent practices of 

organizations um and and kind of rewriting those rules and rewriting those practices to create 

a more diverse workforce is something that we need to do those are great observations um it's 

interesting one of the things that we'll be talking about um during this conversation is how do 

you start to look outside of the norm and really start to tap into those diverse skill sets so we'll touch 

upon that in in the coming conversation mandy would you like to talk a little bit 

about how the pandemic has impacted working women how can employers prevent a setback and gender parity in 

the workplace absolutely so interestingly 

you know studies show statistics have show over over time that women in the workplace 

actually report higher levels of of anxiety and depressed depression than men um there have been 

many studies that have come out since since covet 19 and all of this started one of them i'd 

hone in on is by the university of southern california what they observed from their survey 

participants is that there was there was actually a huge spike um in those psychological 

um kind of responses from women versus men at the beginning of the pandemic at the 

beginning especially for women who have caregiving responsibilities there was a pretty dramatic spike um 

you know another kind of thing that i pull out of the study is that about 44 of women in early april reported being 

the only household member providing child care compared to 14 of men and then by early 

june 64 of of college-educated mothers reported that they had reduced their working hours at some point since march 

versus 36 percent of college-educated fathers um even college-educated mothers or i'm 

sorry college-educated women without young children had reduced their hours and you know in response to 

maybe that some of that psychological distress that that they were experiencing um so it's 

very real that there has been a greater impact on women in the workplace as a result of the 

pandemic um some thoughts for how employers can maybe prevent 

a setback would be considering policies and practices um considering 

that adjusting them so something that we've done is we took another look at our flexible work arrangement policy 

and we really made sure that all of our managers were up to date and understood that we do have a flexible work arrangement policy 

and to encourage them to allow more of those we also 

rolled out several work-life balance practices and and really got our executive leaders 

and kind of cascade on the organization to adopt those things like you know reserve your friday 

afternoons for just work time no scheduling meetings on friday afternoons 

no meetings after five um you know certain practices like that have really 

helped at least our workforce um kind of referring back to the talent 

processes and practices i mentioned earlier right now many of us are going through the year-end process you know the year 

in performance rating process and i would say you know make sure in all of those talent processes 

that you're really paying attention to the female you know ratings the female 

scores you know how many females are considered high potential um like pay attention to the data and 

try to dig in and see if there are any themes and if there's anything that can be done um and then you know 

the other thing i would mention is as you're looking at any hiring job movement promotion activity that's 

going on um you know once again pay attention to the data pay attention to 

um you know how women are faring through the pandemic is there as you 

know as many women being promoted and ask yourself why not be sensitive to the fact that 

women are experiencing more obligation outside of the workplace um and take a more you know 

individualized approach versus maybe the kind of the blanket process approach you might have applied in the past 

mandy do you find that sometimes people might be afraid to ask for a flexible working 

arrangement or to just even talk about some of the stress that they're having but you know because of the pandemic outside 

of the work environment absolutely yeah i mean as an as an hr 

leader i'll have people come to me that say you know i don't feel like i could talk to my manager about this and so 

hopefully that you know you have good hr partners in an hr organization that can help with some of that 

[Music] for the leaders on the line here i would say emulate the behaviors 

show people that it's okay um don't just tell them it's okay but really show them that you yourself 

are going to take your friday afternoons for no meetings um i think that goes a long way as well 

that's a really good point um eric i know in 

probably maybe four or six weeks ago you and i chatted about the future of work and the hybrid work model that is kind 

of evolving as a result of the pandemic thoughts on the role that how companies will be can 

be moving towards that hybrid work model and how that could actually help 

create a more balanced experience for the working woman 

okay so um what uh what a terry covered and then 

mandy um or two um um uncomfortable pictures of the 

reality of both what what what existed before covid and how things have even evolved since then um 

uh although i acknowledge that that's probably the reality um as an observer of kind of how things 

change um i like to think that this disruption we've been through actually gives us an opportunity to to create a more more change and so i'll 

have a little bit more of a bullish of what can we what can we really what can we really do 

um i kind of think about this along two two dimensions one is the sandbox of what's possible we 

have some chance to expand the edges of that sandbox and i'll go into some of that the second thing is i think just 

behaviorally there's some tactics that are good anyway but now is a particularly great time to 

to step back and think about them in terms of ways to expand the sandbox 

um i think the first is when you're thinking about how to address some of these challenges 

and in effect um as as uh i mean said the the work from home creates a degree of 

potential flexibility don't don't think about resolving the problem for women 

think about we're trying to use that in general so make it a broad a broad opportunity of lots of people 

have things where whether where their life pressures and their personal um professional 

expectations may come into conflict or may need to be mixed up into in new patterns um 

so so think broadly about that across life stages the second thing is you recognize that 

not only is it a unique time where we've been disrupted naturally because of the duration of 

this and how fundamental it is it is a time where we're able to deliver i'm sorry develop 

new habits and we still have time to continue to develop new habits so even though we may have gotten into 

some habits that aren't quite right as we start to come out of it more kids are back in school 

etc there's there's a lot of things that if we you know work on um thinking about what are the 

opportunities to really um take this time that's you know probably let's just call it at least four months 

probably nine months maybe 12 months more sort of coming out of this that we can be experimenting we can be 

um we can be trying to form new ways of doing things that in the past people would have said you were you're out of your gourd to suggest um 

third um think broadly about the the role models and and in particular um involve the 

males on this i think what we're what you're trying to do is you step back across all 

this is we're trying to both in some ways not only re-engineer roles which is maybe how this is often thought 

about we also have a chance to re-engineer how we get work done um and can you package it differently 

are there four day work weeks are there different shifts are there different ways you you create meetings um decision making 

et cetera so i think look at that in the in the role models um i think are 

an important thing to find out who can be a collaborator within this in terms of just kind of some tactical things um 

and a lot of these almost sound like the stuff that you potentially went through and um your first some of your first 

training out of college we're like meeting hygiene how should you run meetings how should you 

um take notes do you record it pre-reads etc it's a great chance to step back and think about that and is it working well 

and if you're trying to develop flexibility and create good behaviors you know are you really doing things in the way you 

should um um second is think about shaping the return to office 

approach um so there's going to be a period where most companies will end up in this hybrid model they're not going to be purely work from 

home or purely office bound so how does the return to office look um 

what are the hours that are expected is walking the hallways become important how do people 

how do people dress how do they do meetings you know how do you how do you use the return to office and the way you 

adjust a lot of subtle subtle things um and then i think it's finally i think 

it's important to not just role model but ask people who are dealing with certain situations and 

um across the organization to share their own best practices maybe capture it on a video maybe have a 

town hall but be specific you know this is an elderly parent that needs care this is a special needs child this is 

handling lots of children this is you know going through a release for a new product where things were crazy and sort of 

what did people do so trying to help give people life hacks and so people can kind of see the craziness rough and all managing 

behind the curtain that that often now kind of creeps in front of the curtain a little bit but just be more authentic about what 

those things are so those are great points eric and i think one of the things that you 

commented on early on is the unintended consequence right it's it's about managing equity in the 

workplace um obviously today we're talking about women but the unintended consequence is that hyper 

focus on one gender could create that inequity if you will so i think that's 

also um a really important point as as all of us really need to kind of broaden our 

mindset i would even go as far as to say you might be able to stimulate 

demand from say the male population why they want work to be more flexible for them 

like what would what would they like to be able to balance or handle differently assuming that they don't have some of the um 

some of the other demands so it's a it's a chance to maybe in general make work work better for everyone absolutely 

terry additional thoughts or observations that you'd like to share yeah i wanted to comment on a couple 

things one thing that was just said by eric that i think is great is that 

you don't improve the work culture for one group you improve the work culture for all groups and so this 

idea that we're making something better for women is really not right just like eric said 

we're making things better for all people by thinking about how we make things better for 

one group of people and that's a really important thing to remember sometimes we get into the habit of 

saying how can i make things better for someone else but really you're making it better for everyone and then the other thing i 

wanted to say is that i really appreciate the way that mandy and eric were both talking about the intentionality of all 

of this and the creativity of all of it so being very intentional about what we're doing as we work 

remotely as well as once we're coming back how we do that and being creative 

in how we attack the problems that we're facing today that we may not have had before 

i think those are both really important pieces to all of it nc what talks a lot about using a spirit 

of inquiry as we're looking at our cultures and as we're looking at our organizations 

let's use that sort of open-minded concept of asking questions what is it this person 

needs what is this what is it this person thinks when someone says something let's ask a fur further 

follow-up question to make sure we really understand where these things are coming from as we're moving forward 

thanks terry one of the things i'm going to take us back to the very beginning of the discussion 

when i think it was eric that mentioned that there was just an overall talent 

shortage um and that we really as as employers have to really start to think creatively 

and broaden how we approach the um how we approach talent in and of 

itself because there's just not enough supply if you will not enough resources 

i wanted to invite mackenzie peters into the conversation 

i had an opportunity to meet with mackenzie she is a genesis 10 dev 10 associate 

she has a pretty neat story and one that i think many of us can relate to either as 

parents i myself had my daughter graduated during the pandemic so one of the things i wanted to 

highlight around mackenzie is that she graduated during the pandemic as a graphics designer but realized very 

late in her college career that her passion was actually coding she wanted to get to the technology arena 

oddly enough the encouragement for mackenzie did not come from a mentor didn't come from her parents it didn't 

come from a college counselor but rather was because of a couple of required classes that she had to take 

that really sparked the interest for mackenzie to consider changing career paths and to pursue a career in 

coding early on we also someone had commented about you know emulate the behaviors 

and i also take that extended a little bit further not only as leaders but as mentors 

and so mackenzie i'd love to ask you what advice you would have for young professionals who might find 

themselves in similar shoes where they're charting down a path that is not best suited and they want to make 

that career change yeah i guess my biggest piece of advice 

that i would give is to really invest in yourself and you know investing in yourself it can mean 

different things to each individual whether it's investing time or money or resources 

that you have you have to you have to really invest in yourself 

for me this meant realizing that it was time to make a pivot in my career path as you mentioned i was 

in my junior year of my degree in graphic design when i had the opportunity to take some 

some web courses in web design it was through these courses that i realized i had an affinity for coding 

but being on years four and five of my degree it meant that i either had to 

commit to four more years of college or try to find an alternative pathway 

into the tech space so in looking for that pathway i discovered an internship at a 

local tech recruiting firm in milwaukee and i spent my senior year of college 

working at that firm and taking any opportunity i could to apply for tech positions and grow my 

knowledge base working and recruiting really gave me a unique position to understand the 

technical job market in milwaukee especially when it came to the gender gap that exists i was 

really surprised by how few women i interviewed especially when those that i did 

interview often stood out to me the most seeing this sort of gap and seeing that the women stood out to 

me more often than not actually ended up motivating me to continue down this path towards my goal 

of becoming a developer because i knew that my background was unique interesting and that i could 

bring something new to the table thankfully i found the dev 10 program at 

genesis 10 and i chose to invest three months of my time into this program 

to receive paid training in java development and i began working at one of the top 

employers in milwaukee the day after i graduated from the program so all this is to say that even even if 

i you know even me being in my last year of college it wasn't too late for me to pivot and it's really not too late for anyone 

no matter where they're at in their lives investing in yourself is always still an option 

thank you for sharing your story mckenzie when we spoke um you also talked about some ideas that 

you shared at the university can you comment on that a little yeah so um i when i was in college 

i brought to my advisor once i had realized that this was sort of the path i wanted to go to 

um that i wanted to go down this path and i noticed that the courses that they offered in the 

graphics design program were a bit outdated in the languages that they taught 

and that if they instead of teaching php taught javascript many people who graduated from my 

program would have had the option of going into a career in front-end development with the skills that they would have learned 

if they took those courses as well and the idea was sort of shot down and dismissed 

you know they had their curriculum set they didn't want to change it um and they instead offered me to you know 

reapply or or go back to school for uh computer science for another four years which wasn't the best option for 

me so i i was definitely disappointed in the university a little bit and on that matter 

i that i found really surprising is that there's not a broader discussion just even from an 

advisory standpoint it just seems to me that we need to be 

forging a tighter relationship both from a corporate corporate america 

standpoint but with the universities but also cascading that into the elementary schools and the 

middle schools and high schools as well i don't know terry if if you have any uh thoughts or comments about that 

yeah so there's several different ways to think about uh this idea of bringing out 

more computing opportunities for students across that entire pipeline one of the ways 

that we think about that is through professional school counselors and making sure that they are well equipped to talk to students 

about computing careers and options for them as they're moving through their educational 

choices we know that counselors play a very big role in helping students think 

about what classes they should take not only while they're in school in high school or middle school but also 

once they get to college they help them choose which schools to look at which majors to choose things like 

that so ncwit works hard to work with school counselors to help them understand 

computing as an option and make sure that they feel comfortable 

providing that as an option for different students so that's one piece and then there's another piece which is the computing 

curriculum itself in school and making sure that the curriculum itself is inclusive in the 

way it's being brought to students and taught and there are 

lots of different sort of frameworks out there about engaging curriculum and teaching students in an engaging 

inclusive way and all of those are really important the recent changes that have been made 

to the csap curriculum have made some pretty big improvements similar to the way that 

mackenzie was talking about you know learning php instead of javascript the csap 

principles class has had a quite good track rate of having underrepresented students 

taking that class across the country so they've seen pretty good improvement there but making sure we're thinking about 

curriculum and who we're inviting to take it is a really important part of this 

i know for myself as a parent i'm a huge proponent about exposure and just trying because 

that's the way that you realize it kind of goes back to mackenzie's story when she had she was forced in this case because she 

had a class she had to take but once she you know was had the opportunity to uh dabble if you will 

then she realized mandy um i know in milwaukee there is a 

tuck hub that you are a part of do you want to share a little bit about what um what you and northwestern mutual and 

the milwaukee tech hub are are leading the way sure you know what resonated with me and 

does connect to this is the you know the corporate ally ship piece that you mentioned nami um there's i i believe that it's 

it's it really is a major responsibility of corporations in their local markets 

basically wherever they're trying to acquire talent from um to forge a relationship with 

universities to forge a relationship with other corporations in the area and try to 

build those pipelines um so that's you know really is a big a big piece of what 

um our relationship northwestern mutual's relationship with mkt tech hub is all about um and actually i 

know laura is here on the line i don't know if laura um who happens to lead the tech hub 

i'm sorry the mke hub coalition would like to say anything 

oh you're muted no i think i'm on um yes no we we are so thankful for 

northwestern mutual to sort of lead the way um they started the tech up coalition as a collective impact 

framework in 2017 and then it was reorganized into a non-profit in 2019 

and at that time um we hired uh kathy heinrich as our first ceo so we were excited to have a woman 

in tech get hired for that position and then she asked me to join her in april so uh we're really excited about all the 

work we're doing we have 67 members and northwestern mutuals on our board and continues to provide unbelievable 

support and thought leadership so thank you for that and i i would be remiss if i did not 

reach out and say thank you to gen 10 and devton through um through the work that they're doing they're part of 

our preferred reskilling provider network for the coalition and so we're so excited to have them part of that 

process thanks laura i'm going to segue to take us down a 

different path in the discussion kind of pivot over to data so terry this is 

going to be a two-part question companies like apple facebook google and 

microsoft have started to publish annual diversity reports from your perspective 

what role does data disclosure play and then beyond data disclosure are 

there other levers that could create meaningful change yeah data disclosure is an important 

part of making sure that we're tracking how change is happening and i want to comment on data disclosure 

in a couple ways the first is that one thing that we need to keep in mind is that numbers of employees as a trailing 

indicator of change and so when we look at numbers of employees that's not the first thing 

that's going to change the first thing that's going to change is your culture in your organization and so our member 

organizations we work with them to look at ways of measuring change along the way while they're also 

looking to change the numbers of employees because the culture has to change first before 

your employees are going to be more likely to stay before they're going to be more likely to be hired 

and so we do think data disclosure is important and we have some resources 

about transparency and how you can look at evaluation data and how you can gather data 

and track it and report it but there's nuance to it and another piece of that nuance is also 

understanding what work the women are doing within your organization and what work the other underrepresented populations 

are doing in your organization it's important to look at sub-segregation of roles which is quite 

common in technology organizations where maybe the number pure number of women or 

other underrepresented populations in your organization is quite even but what are they doing 

let's make sure that it's not that all of the women are your project managers and your testers and that the men are the architects 

let's make sure that the women and men are both architects and they're both testers and they're both project managers it's a really 

important piece that's also quite nuanced and doesn't typically happen in a data 

transparency initiative by an organization but it's something that we encourage and see what does with our 

member organizations so that's one piece and then the second part of your question was about what 

other things do we think about and that for me is related to the beginning of the answer i gave about 

culture we need to not get into this place where all we do is think about the numbers 

um we can make bad decisions when the first thing we think about is what number of women do i have on my team 

that can drive the wrong kind of decision because it sometimes drives us to 

hire people that maybe we wouldn't have hired in another scenario right it's not about just get 

the number up it's not enough it's really about building an inclusive culture and setting the groundwork for making it 

so that women want to be there and that they want to stay i also think sometimes the numbers can 

also create a mask or a facade right around the issue and i think the point that you made 

around what what type of work are these women or the underrepresented 

doing because i think that's where you can create that facade and it's a play on numbers 

because if they are more performing at the mid or lower level but they're not represented at the leadership then it 

goes back to the earlier part of the conversation around emulating behavior 

mandy thoughts or additional comments yeah thank you for asking i was going to 

chime in you know i'm a big um a big fan of data i really use data to 

inform a lot of what we do from a talent culture perspective in my organization i would say 

where you go wrong with data when it comes to dni is keeping that macro view because to 

terry's point um you might say overall our you know our women picture looks pretty good but 

when you start clicking in is when things fall apart so we tend to track 

everything from you know how many you know actual promotions of a certain you know of 

software engineers at this level have we seen um across all demographics so really 

you're needing to kind of double and triple click down into the data in order to make it useful 

looking at those macro numbers that you might see in some of these diversity reports is often not very helpful no absolutely 

eric any additional thoughts before we go on it just would underscore that i think 

the data is very valuable from the standpoint of if you have enough of it it's rich enough it allows 

you to ask more questions yeah and so we've at this point just spoken largely about the employees but 

that obviously can extend up into the recruiting engine the interns a whole bunch of things that then can 

start to have people were we only looking in certain places and that the bias that was mentioned 

on the um you know referrals is that causing some of this or is are we constraining the role to certain 

requirements that somehow you know causes causes some skew and how we do things 

i think it's personal experiences if you don't try to look at the data 

then people don't set the problem up to be solved as rigorously as if they 

as if they said oh wow you know that's only ten percent why can't that be a third okay my third may not be the great 

final answer but a third is better than 10 you know let's let's go do that so you can use the data to 

create focus but then back to mandy's point you've got to peel the onion back and really get dig into the details 

otherwise the data can actually mask what the what the reality is so the final 

question because i do want to leave a few minutes for questions from the attendees from the 

audience and it goes back to a comment that terry made around the culture 

um so if a company has a diverse workforce does it necessarily mean that they have 

an inclusive workforce too how can we create a sense of belonging 

eric you want to share your thoughts first and then i'd like to pivot talk ask all of the panels yeah 

sure so i think the short answer is just having a mix of people doesn't mean 

what you're getting out of that mix of people is the benefit you wanted um and i think to get the value 

out of the diversity there's there's two two things i tend to think think about where you're really getting 

the best out of people one and we spoke about already which is kind of innovation and the opportunity to create 

to understand new needs to build new things et cetera the other is kind of to establish 

direction to shape where things are headed so decision making and i think um to get to these things 

there's many different little behaviors um that are critical into how you 

operate and there were six that i um thought of that i think 

people can really reflect back on to to think about are are the are we getting are they 

happening the way they should so how do we communicate how do we make decisions how do we what roles do people fall into 

in meetings how do we delegate how do we set project charters so how do we actually really 

structure how we go after work how do we do staffing and then um how helpful are we really in 

coaching and development of people dealing with some of these things so just hey you need to be more inclusive or is it really helping people crack the code 

um you know there's a lot of things where i think you can change up how you do some of those 

things in subtle ways that can help help you make it easier for people to not 

uh self-limit uh to create deeper roles for maybe people who aren't used to 

being expected to play that role but gives people a chance more data points etcetera 

those are a lot of great great suggestions and i think one that you know folks can 

really hang their hat on in terms of how do you start to create actionable 

change within your organization because you can talk about things very broadly but what i appreciate about the 

list is that it's very specific and it's action oriented and tactical right so they're easier to 

start to really stop cause yourself to think about what are we doing and how are we doing 

it that's really great eric thank you mandy would you like to build on that 

sure you know one uh maybe taking a little bit of a different angle one thing that we've been talking about 

um in my organization lately is is how do we know you know we can pretty easily measure diversity 

but how do we know we're inclusive how do we know we're moving the needle on inclusivity and we've you know we're 

we're looking at you know back to data we're looking at data from our you know our organizational health and engagement 

surveys um i think pulling in those pieces is really important to monitor as well 

um including includes you know inclusivity-related questions in those surveys having actual 

conversations with people not just relying on the surveys um is also really important so 

holding focus groups and and talking and understanding how people are feeling is important because you know to answer 

the original question it's not enough to just focus on diversity you also have to think about inclusion if you want to 

actually keep those people um you know we can hire all the diverse people that we like but if 

if we're not engaging and retaining them then what's you know what's the point 

and back to i think another comments that was made earlier which is is the work meaningful that they are 

working on because that's also going to go hand in glove into retention they need to feel a part of the organization they need to feel 

challenged um so thank you mandy those are great thoughts terry yeah ncwit actually has developed 

an online tool that is designed to help organizations answer this very question 

we have a change model that we have developed our social science team has developed that covers the eight 

areas within an organization that we need to look at when we're thinking about our cultures and whether or not they're inclusive and 

we have an online tool that walks organizations through that so leaders take it's not an 

organizational climate survey it's a survey that leaders take within an organization to 

assess how they do things what their practices are and the very central piece of that whole 

model is top leadership support culture is something that is set at the top of the organization and it's really 

important that our leaders believe in inclusion and believe in the importance of all this but 

we have a tool that actually guides organizations through this very thing what are the questions you ask and then 

depending on how you answer those questions what are the changes you need to make as an organization to improve improve the 

inclusive culture of your teams 

well said well said i first of all want to thank each of you 

terry eric and mandy for participating in today's session 

each of you really shed a lot of light and brought incredible perspective and insights into 

a very important topic like i said at the very beginning not only is it going to affect us in the 

workplace today but for generations to come as we learned and heard from mackenzie 

as well you know who is new to the workforce i am scanning the chat i don't see a specific question per 

se i do see some suggestions of information to share which we absolutely will capture 

and share both um i'm going to be capturing the key highlights from today's 

discussion in our blog so i'll incorporate that there as well as a link to the recording and to terry's 

presentation but if anyone has any follow-up questions don't hesitate to reach out 

and then we'll work directly with the panelists to get their perspective but other than that i just want to say 

thank you again this was incredibly insightful