>> Narrator: Live from Orlando Florida it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeferick. We are joined by Monica Bailey and August Goldman. Monica is the Chief People Officer at GoDaddy and August is the Senior Vice President of Customer Care. Thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you, it's great to be here >> So let's start out with the numbers because you're a big number crunching company and you are collecting data and you're also sharing some data, so talk a little about what you have found. >> Yeah, well for the last few years we've been tracking how we pay men versus women because we really care about making sure we're paying all of our employees really fairly, and so we're happy this year to be able to say that for every dollar a man makes in the company a woman in a similar job also makes a dollar. And so that's great, that's the goal. The goal is fairness for all of our folks, so we're really excited about that. >> So how long did it take you to get there? >> So we started it three years ago with our CEO Blake Kirby onstage here at the Grace Hopper Conference which was in Houston at the time in front of 12,000 folks, and we showed the numbers. We showed pay parity and it wasn't parity at that point. >> Was it close? What are we talking about here? >> It was $0.96 cents, $0.96 per dollar, so it was close but it wasn't parity. And here's what's interesting, we've always said we need to be comfortable with uncomfortable data. I think we've talked about that before on this stage, and even if the data is not what you want it to be expose it, dig into it. What we've done together is we've found out what's wrong. >> Okay so how did you go about finding out what was wrong, and then also fixing it? >> Yeah well we looked at a few things, so first of all, we looked at different populations so we'd look at how are our technical employees paid, how are our non-technical employees paid, how are our leaders paid? And so we definitely see things when we look into those groups of employees, But we also just took, let's take the slice of our biggest set of jobs, our engineers, pretty applicable for this audience here today. So, we took a look at our engineers and said How are our entry level developers paid, men versus women? And we're also this year looking at our minorities as well. It's really important to not just stop at gender and look at how all your employees are paid. So, yeah, we definitely have made great progress on that. I don't know if you want to speak to it. >> So here's what's interesting, when we dug into this data that Monica is talking about we actually found that software development engineers one, and two, women were paid more. More. In those roles. So we said 'Oh, well that's fantastic' Well, guess what? The population size by percent of three, four, five, and six, the women dropped off. Fell off. And then we said well wait a second, what might be happening here, and all of a sudden, something came up in the data that we were just, we wouldn't have known unless we dug into it. Women stayed longer in those roles. They didn't ask for promotion. >> They stayed longer in the ones and twos. >> The ones and twos and guess what? If you stay longer in a role every year you get a little merit increase, every year you make more, eventually you'll make more, versus someone who is clipping through the levels at a good pace. So because of that, Monica put it something, You want to talk about promotion flagging? >> Yeah, we tried an experiment two summers ago and we took a look at this phenomenon of women and also some introverts, not just women, right? But it tends to be women aren't pounding their fists on the table for a promotion. So as a result their promotion rates are lower. So we went in and said let's try a little experiment called promotion flagging, let's just say hey, a good performing SDE, Software Dev Engineer, They're normally in role about 12 months or 18 months, a good one, before they get promoted, sometimes longer, good ones, too, but that's just on average When does the first time a good performing person would get promoted, and we said that will be our flag to managers, just to say hey, you're going through review, don't forget, all these folks have been in level a certain amount of time. Because some folks aren't begging you and demanding a promotion so let's consider everyone equally. And the goal wasn't really to promote more people, the goal was, let's just not forget anyone in the process, because that happens, unconsciously people just, they're forgetting folks across the industry. So they did that and it was amazing. The result was amazing. Also I should say, though, our goal was to make sure everybody got really actionable feedback to grow their skills and their impact at the company and their likelihood of a promotion down the road, which is exactly what we're going for because that makes your company better, so we love that. But the cool news is, because we've been following this data really closely because we're very nervous, because I also don't want to suddenly treat one of my populations not as well as they were being treated before. So we are really excited that men's promotion rates stayed unchanged. Women's promotion rates were jumped by a third. So just by merely saying don't forget all your folks please and give them good feedback, we saw that women got promoted 30% higher rate than they had in years prior, and so that's pretty cool for us. >> So I have two very specific questions: One, is there low-hanging fruit that somebody else watching this can see where there was the big disparity that was the easiest to fix? And two, you keep talking about reviews. There's a whole lot of conversation about the annual review process and how broken it is. You mentioned 18 months. Have you changed your, or maybe you changed it before, but has this forced you to look at the typical annual review process and reevaluate? >> Alright so I'll take the first if you want to grab the second Because the first one's easier so I'm just trying to get the first one she can do the hard one. That's why she's the head of HR now. She took my job by the way (laughs). >> I wasn't going to ask that. >> You weren't going to ask that, how can you not ask that? >> Stay with the easy question though. >> Okay, the first one is exactly what Monica was just talking about and that is actually flag folks in role after a period of time, and say you know what, both men and women, flag them and say, review them for promotion. Review for promotion. It's very simple, it's very easy. After a year of level one, maybe 18 months of level two, just say hey, have a look, is this person ready? And if they're not ready, what should they do to get ready. >> And that's the actionable feedback >> And here's what's interesting, here are the stats, which is really cool. So, two years ago we had 6% of our software development two were women. Last year was 15%. This year, 31%. 31% of software development two are women, and our software development one is now up to 41%. So you see we're building our pipeline so we're getting them in. Now the question is, once they're within the company how do we develop and grow them and promote over time? >> It begs the question, what are the threes? >> Oh, it's 13%. So you can see it's dropped off. So no, give us a year or two, we'll be back on the stage. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And the goal is then 30, 40%, so, you know give us a few years. >> That's a great little actionable item though, just to make sure that you're paying attention to the people that aren't paying attention for themselves. >> And they did it as an experiment and are you going to now scale that to the rest of the company? >> We have scaled it to level twos and level threes and this year we'll probably scale it to a level four so each time we add another level we look at the data and see how it works. At some point folks are allowed to do an awesome job in the jobs they're in so we're not an up or out kind of company, some places are like that, so at some point we'll probably stop saying, 'should you promote this person to be leader of the universe?' because they're pretty great. But Jeff, you asked a great question about performance reviews, and I'm super passionate about this topic, so we were selected by Stanford's Clayman Institute as their partner a few years ago to basically conduct experiments with. They choose one company a year to say hey, are you open-minded enough to try some crazy stuff with us and see if there might be a result that we can share with the industry afterwards. And so we just felt so happy they chose us, and we shared tons of our data with them, they saw our employee survey, they saw redacted performance reviews, they got to sit in on our most senior talent review which is a calibration session to hear how are we talking about all of our employees. And the Clayman Institute, they care about the advancement of women in leadership, but my first meeting with them, I'm like, look, I super care about the women in my company, but I kind of care about all my employees in my company, so like, I need to make sure we're being really fair to everybody, and they're like, 'that's what we care about, too' and I'm like, okay, phew, first hurdle we passed. Anyway they're stunning foot partners and what they, after doing tons of this analysis, what they said was, tackle what almost no company has tackled. Tackle unconscious bias that lives within the people, processes, specifically around career advancement. So again, that's promotion that we talked about, that's also performance review. So we're like, that's us at GoDaddy, we're like let's try it, who knows what's going to happen, let's just see, so we jumped right in and basically what the found is at GoDaddy we care about what you do and how you do it, so those are, so what is sort of career ladder levels you hear companies talk about, and here's a general expectation, and how do you do against your goals. Great. And how you do it is how we collectively work together to get good stuff done at our company, right? And it sort of lives within our values. Our values don't live within a big poster that are shiny, and people kind of walk by and go ha, that's not what it's like here. We literally pay people to live our values, and to demonstrate that because we think it makes us better as a company and more impactful. So we took a look at these values, and I'll be honest I had created with the best of intentions basically some competencies, too many, that lived under these values, and when you have way too many things for people to keep track of, it's almost like having nothing at all. Which a lot of companies have also done, blow it up, put it in the hands of managers, let's assume they'll all do the right thing consistently, which doesn't happen. So what we did with the Clayman Institute is we interviewed about 20 of our leaders and we did some focus groups, and we said, look, these are the six behaviors that line up against three of our values central to performance. These behaviors are critical for all of us. It's stuff like, do you share information with other teams, or do you look for ways to integrate your work across your team or across multiple teams, depending on the scope of your job. Do you work fearlessly? Do you include others in conversations so you're driving innovative solutions and working fearlessly for your folks. >> And you know what it's not? Your style, how do you approach others, are you bossy, nothing about that, nothing about approach. You could be an introvert, an extrovert, all different styles. These are actionable behaviors around how we're going to get stuff done and be distinctive in our company. >> So, what is your advice to other tech companies when they are writing their values and thinking about how they want their employees to live out these values? >> Well it's interesting, number one, it has to result in business results, right? So, it's really easy to have a really fun time writing these but they have to make a difference in your company and mean something, otherwise why would you want to reward them? Right, they're just nice otherwise. Two, they really collectively should drive the culture of your company. So when you look at it en masse, if you see, if I get everyone doing these things, is that the culture that drives my company? Is that going to attract and retain people, and drive again the business result we want? So to me those are super, super important. But the Clayman team will take you to camp and help you with all this stuff but really also, is your language equally accessible to men and women? To introverts and extroverts? To all of your employees, to minorities, to different employee populations, because some things like, 'aggressive drivers get things done.' Now, I know a lot of women by the way, who are very aggressive drivers and get a lot of things done but certain language is sort of unconsciously attributed to men more than women, and so if you have one role model for what success looks like and it happens to be subconsciously a man that you think about, women are disadvantaged. So they really, we went so deep with them. So my main advice is, if you can, frankly I'd just become a member of the Clayman Institute fan club and try to get some consulting help from them, but there are great folks out there that do this kind of work for a living who are really helpful, because it's really hard to take a look at yourself objectively. >> Well actually I was just going to mention that, so when Monica mentioned we had monitors sitting in our most senior review of the top 150 people. When we calibrated them together a group of 30, of the next 150, we actually had two monitors sitting and writing, when are we talking about style. When are we being inconsistent between one VP and another VP And we actually, the first year, we didn't get an A. The first year we did not get an A, by any shot of the imagination. >> It makes me feel better to say probably most companies wouldn't, right? But we did not and we were brave. >> If you don't measure it you can't make a change. We've had Lori a couple times on theCUBE but the Cayman Institute does fantastic work. >> Lori was the one who guided us, and they're amazing. And I think what's interesting, we're all well-intended, wonderful executives, I mean we are well-intended, wonderful people. You look around the room, I'm going, 'we don't have bias, we're great, we're going to get an A, bring monitors in, bring them all in, this is going to be great.' At the first year they're like, mm, no, look how many inconsistencies you did over the day. And they showed us the data and we just sat there and went >> Did they record it 'cause tape don't lie >> They did not record it but I can tell you they typed faster than I could >> Lot of data, lot of data >> They came in the next year. So we did a hard look at ourselves, we talked about doing it differently, they came in, the same two people, the next year, real different. And by the way, we will continue to have them every single year. >> Well you need the reflection back. Well August, Monica, thank you so much for being on this show. It's always so much fun to have GoDaddy here on the Cube. >> Thank you >> Great. We will have more from Grace Hopper in Orlando, Florida just after this (techno music)