>> Commentator: Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology held at VMware. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Joining me today is Cornelia Davis. She is the Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal which is the Palo Alto-based company that provides Agile development services on an open source platform. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling, you started telling me a little bit about your personal story. You're a woman in tech who loves the tech, but you said for the past three years, you've also become an activist and an evangelist for getting more women into this business. Tell us about that transformation. >> Yes, I'll tell you a little bit about that story. I have the gray hair to prove it. I've been doing this for some time. I actually was a woman studying computer science back in the day where we were getting close to equity. >> Rebecca: There was a time when it was-- >> Yeah, there was so back in the '80s, I was majoring in computer science and I think that we were close to 40% at the time, although I have to say even before I was in college, I was always the girl who was out playing soccer with the boys at lunch time. Gender never really seemed to make much of a difference to me but anyway, I got a degree in computer science and then I spent 25 years in the industry and sure, there were times where I would notice that I was the only woman in the room. Actually I would say maybe three or four years ago, I went to a customer opening where they were catering to the developer community and in the room there were 250 developers, I was the only woman. I mean seriously, I was the only woman of 250 and I was like wow. But other than notice it and chuckle about it and even have some of those experiences where maybe somebody assumed that I was the HR person and not the technologist, those types of things, I never really did anything about it. And then about three years ago, I had the great fortune of meeting Robin Hauser Reynolds and Stacy Hartmann who are the two women behind the movie Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, you've seen it? >> Rebecca: Yes, yes. >> A fantastic film, a fantastic piece and had this opportunity to meet them and got involved in the film and Pivotal became a sponsor. They did some of the filming. They did some interviewing of people at Pivotal and it was through that experience and then I got to go to some of the screenings and participate in panels and so on and it was through that experience that I started to understand that it wasn't just curiosity, that it was actually declining, the numbers were declining and that it was a real serious problem. And so after being in the industry for 25 years and not really doing anything about it, I've become an activist and so I spend a lot of time jabbing on about this. I'll give you another example. Last year in January, Pivotal brought most of the company together here in the Bay Area. We brought about 1,200 people into the Bay Area for worldwide kickoff. And the very first talk that they had after our CEO spoke was a talk on diversity and they actually invited me to come up and speak about gender diversity or lack thereof in technology and talked about the Girls Who Code and some of those great programs out there. >> I want to get back to Girls Who Code because I know that you're passionate about it, but I want to also just get back to the moment that you described where you went from chuckling about being the only woman in the room and saying, "Oh it's not silly," to really feeling, "Hey this isn't right. "I want things to be different." What was that moment? Are you trying to recreate that moment for other women as a wake up call? How would you describe your activism? >> I don't know that it was a moment, but the thing that catalyzes me, the thing that makes me really passionate about doing this is that I have this tremendous opportunity. The way that I came into computing personally was at the end of my sophomore year in high school when we were signing up for classes the following year, I was looking at what might I sign up for and I signed up for a computer programming class and then I went off and I joked around that I went off and had a bitchin' summer. That's the stuff we said in the '80s. I went off and had a bitchin' summer. >> We should bring that word back. Let's do it, Cornelia. >> It's a good word. And I came back and had this computer class on my schedule and I was like, "Uh no, no, no, no. "There is no way I'm doing this." And I skipped class for the first two or three days and then I finally went and curiosity got the better of me. I tried it out and I was hooked. Literally that was the moment, not for my activism, but that was the moment where I had like, "Oh my gosh, this is going to change everything. "This is what want to I do." And that's what brought me to computing and that's what makes me an activist now because I didn't realize for those 25 years that other people didn't have those opportunities, that they were actually systemically being discouraged from having those opportunities and so I think that's at the core of my activism is I want people to have the opportunity because I love what I do so much and I think I was mentioning before before we started rolling the cameras that I've been a technologist my whole career. Occasionally I've branched off and tried to do maybe a little bit more leadership or a little bit more of that, but I love the tech so much and it's such a great wonderful career to be in, self-sustaining and all of those things, I want other people to have that opportunity. That's what gets me going. >> I was reading a bio where you're a self-described propeller head and you can find her knee deep in the code and now you want to inspire the next generation and so you've gotten involved with Girls Who Code. Tell us more. >> Yes so it wasn't actually through the film. I think it was just simply, it was serendipitous, right around the time that I was starting to awaken to what was going on in the industry. Working for Pivotal, Pivotal in our San Francisco office, it's a very cool office. It's very different from what I saw in most of my career which was cube farms. It's a very open floor plan, very hip, just a cool place to be. >> What the rest of us East Coasters envisions Silicon Valley to be. >> Yeah, it's really pretty cool. And so the Girls Who Code, for those of you who might be watching that don't know about the Girls Who Code, it's an organization that really targets high school girls and their flagship program is in the summer they have a seven-week immersion program where they bring girls in and they basically code, they learn to code from nine to five every day for seven weeks. It's a pretty intensive program. Well about three years ago, we weren't sponsoring at that level, but we would be a field trip location. One of our close partners, investors, customers, is General Electric. They hosted a group of these 20 girls in their San Ramon office. They came to us for a couple of summers as a field trip location and of course the girls loved it. They walk off the elevator there's snacks, there's drinks. We parent programmed with them. It's a really cool experience. And then last summer, we actually took the next step and hosted our own groups so we had a group of 20 young women who were here in our Palo Alto office for seven weeks learning to code and I had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with them several times throughout the summer and I actually commute to the Bay Area, not everyday but I commute to the Bay Area and the days that I was coming up here in part to see the girls, I'd wake up at four in the morning for my flight and I'd be like, "I get to spend time with the girls today," and I saw it. I saw the girls who in the first week were clearly there because their parents made them be there and they're sitting there like this and they've got the same attitude that I had when I was in high school the first three days like I am not doing this and the same people are standing up at the graduation ceremony at the end of the seven weeks saying, "This changed my life." And one of those young women I'm spending a little bit more time with is now a computer science major at Northwestern, early decision. It's just fantastic to see that light up. That's what gets me going. >> Now why high school? I get high school in the sense that they're old enough to take on a summer job like internship, but what is it about that age do you think that is so critical? >> Yeah so that age, I'll be honest with you, I think is almost too late for a lot of girls because we are able to reach, I just mentioned, that there were girls in there whose parents forced them into that. They had already self-selected out. Just like I had when I was in high school. I had self-selected out. I was way too cool to be in computing and so in some ways high school is a little bit too late. However, I think you nailed it, is that there's an opportunity there that they're mature enough that you can do something as immersive as a seven-week program and these girls are tremendous. These girls after a seven-week program are going back to their high schools and being the president of their Girls Who Code after school clubs and teaching them and I was just spending some time, we had a hangout with them recently where they said when their friends are asking, "What are you going to do this summer?" And the girls said, "I have no idea, "but you know what you should do "is you should do Girls Who Code." She said, "That's all I want to do. "I just want to do Girls Who Code all over again." And so I think you're right, I think it's opportunistic in that they're ready, but unfortunately I think it, like I said, it self-selects a lot of people out. I think fundamentally the thing that we need to do to reach the younger grades, the younger students, is it needs to be part of the curriculum. It absolutely 100% needs to be part of primary school curriculum so that they can get hooked and understand what it is before they self-select out because they're self-selecting out based on a perception and the image that they have of what it is, the Silicon Valley show, that's a perception. Sure it's satyr but young people see that and they don't see it as that. It just looks like something where there's a whole bunch of misbehaving men treating women poorly. >> So on that actually Cornelia, what do you make of the really distressing news that we're hearing that's not necessarily new, there has been the Uber bombshell of last week, but what we know about the culture here and maybe why there were so many women and it was almost 50/50 and then we started to see a drastic change and lower numbers of women in computer science and a lot of women just saying, "Ew, I don't want to be part of that. "I don't want that for my career." What do you say to them and what do you say to the men who are not even knowingly discouraging them from that kind of career? >> Oh, I love what you just said, not even knowingly. One of the things that I spend a lot of time talking with folks about every chance I get is implicit bias. I think that there's definitely overt sexism and in the last week we've seen that big in the news and that is a huge problem. I think I've heard statistics of whatever 60% of women have some level of relatively overt sexism, 100% of us get the implicit, the non-overt, and people who are well-meaning saying things, when they say for example, I was just chatting with a young lady a couple of weeks ago. She's a sophomore in college and she was telling me that last summer during her internship, within the first week or two, her boss was talking to her about her career plans moving forward and was already encouraging her to go more into management than into technology. This person was not evil, wasn't trying to keep women out of technology or keep women out of the most technical parts of a technology career, but he really genuinely believed that, "Maybe women are better at that and not so good at this," and it's really just our implicit biases. So I think that's a big part of it. And for the last year or two, I've been talking about implicit bias and I've been talking about the compensating mechanisms so first of all recognizing your implicit biases and then being conscious about them and then consciously combating them. I've become in the last several months, I would say six months, I've become more and more interested in the idea of how do we actually change those implicit biases. >> And this is men and women. It's not just the men here. >> No question because when I've had conversations where I've spoken for example on implicit bias, I've had women come up to me afterward and say, "I signed my son up for a coding camp. "I never even thought about signing up my daughter." >> Rebecca: Oh, that hurts. >> And I was like, "So you're signing her up now, right?" She's like, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah." And so I think it's really interesting to start thinking about how do we actually get rid of them? It's one thing to recognize them and then fight them, but it's another thing to get rid of them. I think the only way we can get rid of them goes back to the statistics that we talked about early on which is I am surprised when I see a woman technologist. That's just the way our brains work. We categorize things. >> We have an idea in our head of what that person looks like. >> We put things in buckets. We wouldn't be able to function in this world with so many different inputs unless we put things into buckets and we just put things into buckets largely based on statistics. And so I'm becoming increasingly interested in really amplifying the voice of women in technology because when we hear women's voices in technology, women who are up there not talking about what we're talking about today which is the gender imbalance, but talking about the tech itself, then we start to normalize, then we start to re-categorize things in our brains so that we're not surprised when we hear a woman talking about something deeply technical or somebody who's doing particle physics or something like that, we're not surprised anymore and say, "Wow she's a rocket scientist," it's normal. That's what I'm interested in doing is getting that to be the norm, not the exception. I think the first step what I would say to people, what I do say to men and women across the industry is first of all recognize it and then let's see what we can do to change it. >> Cornelia Davis, thank you so much. That's good advice, that's good advice. And we'll be right back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here at VMware. (modern techno music)