from Houston Texas extracting the signal from the noise it's the cute coverage Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing now your host John furrier and Jeff fridge okay welcome back everyone we are here live in Houston Texas for the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing this is SiliconANGLE media's the cube our flagship program we go out to the events and extract the simla noise i'm john ferry the founder of SiliconANGLE join with Jeff Frick general manager of the cube our next guest is Lisa Dougal who's the chief diversity officer pwc consulting welcome to the cube thank you very much great to see you great to chat with you before we came on we talked about you were at Carnegie Mellon back in the 80s and we just had Eileen big enough for it to it another 80s throwback like me in sheb back to the 80s hot tub time machine whatever you want to call it it's a lot of fun so thanks for spending some time with us oh my pleasure so first what are you working on so that's the first point we've learned that's a good question to ask what are you working on what am i working on so for me personally I do a number of different things right as my role is chief diversity officer I am creating and evolving and implementing programs that help all kinds of diversity in the workplace which ranges from women to minorities to men as well which is one of our big focus areas right as a partner in the practice i'm also a retail consumer partner so I work with retail and consumer clients on transforming their businesses from strategy to execution digital transformations hot right now Adam everything is being automated I mean everything's addressable now Internet of Things creates absolutely % data acquisition it does but I think at the same time it's created such a wealth of I will call it information old school or data its recent project right I think companies are struggling with how do you parse through how do you tell the story how do you figure out a what the data is telling you if you take the consumer industry for one right they've got huge amounts of consumer data now the question is how do you use it how you turn it into innovation one of the things you were mentioning before you came on was that you did a thesis at Carnegie Mellon back in the eighties where you ready to say a computer science major but everyone had the code which great paid back in the 80s and maybe we should reinstitute that across the university I agree I think everything went should coach likes math and sciences to me I think a requisite skill for everybody but you say that these are supposed decision-making using computers now fast forward to today where we were just chatting about for the first time in modern in business history you can actually measure everything so no more excuses if you could actually measure everything right so the question becomes what do you want to measure right yeah so what does that do with a business how does that change and I think it's a combination of measurement which just looks historical and that's important right with predictive and right where the world is going it's predictive analytics behavioral analytics right because that enables us to figure out how we want to change we're only ever looking backwards we had a static point in time yeah and that's informative and you need that and as we talked before you need to be able to parse through the data and decide which is relevant and which is really the lever you want to pull but I think more and more we're seeing companies doing data modeling and data predictive analytics on just about everything right right and Merv Adrian loves to talk about data in motion from gartner and you know it's no longer good enough to have it look at it then decide what you're going to do now really was spark and some of the new technologies you actually have an opportunity to look at the data in motion in a transaction in a retail environment and change change the transaction midstream to hopefully get to a better out absolutely so what you seeing kind of out in the in the world of some of these more advanced retailers and some of the things I think that's happening i think the ability to drop coupons as people walk by the aisle is more and more prevalent right not just any coupon but we know you buy a lot of milk right i think you're going to see more and more price changing based on the consumer i know you you've been into my store you're a loyal customer I'll pop you the milk at this price where somebody else might pay a higher price I think the world is open in terms of how these companies are using not just the data they collect on the product and the technologies but also on you as the individual least I want to get your thoughts on a concept that we've been kind of gleaming out of the data here at Grace Hopper and other events we've been to around women in computing but more importantly also computer science and that there's a lot of different semantics people argue about women versus ladies this versus that there's so many different you know biases mean I'm biased whatever all that stuff's happening but one constant in all this is that these two debt variables transparency and always learning and that seems to be a driver of a lot of change here and you mentioned digital transformation what are you seeing out there that's really driving the opportunities around transparency you can save data access you have data then things are transparent always be learning this new opportunities so those seems to be a big pivot points here at this event here where there's a lot of opportunities there's a subtle conversation of not just the pay thing and the gender equality on pay but opportunities is the big theme we're seeing here absolutely I am really energized by being here right first of all to see so many young women all passionate about technology and computing and really being inserted in the right ways you know I've had women come up to me even on the escalator shake my hand as a hello you're from pricewaterhousecoopers let me ask you what you do during your day right I think in my day a there was no place to go and even if you did you were trying to navigate a very different world and you were trying to perhaps not be you but be somebody else right how do you fit into the man's world I used to watch all sports all weekend so I can make sure I could participate in office conversation when I got in on Monday mornings right I think to hear the conversations that the women are having that are very technology driven but also very much authentic to who they are is where we're going see if you were a young lady in tech now you actually program the fantasy games so that you'd win the game everywhere that's right you could write the code this is but there's a lot of coding a lot of developers here phenomenal growth in develops we just had a young girl just graduated she's phenomenal Natalia and she got into it she started in journalism major and second year in she switched into computer science because she was tinkering with wearables which is terrific right one of the conversations I like to have with our young women about PwC in particular but a lot of parts of the industry the ability to combine industry or sector knowledge with the technology right so I was talking to one women who said well you know I just switched out of pre-med I really like medicine but I got into coding and I simply have you thought about you know the whole arena of the health care industry is dramatically changing right we're moving to the point where we have you know patient information hospital information drug trial information we can integrate all that you could stay with healthcare and still do technology and coding and she's looking at me like she'd never thought about the revelation you said early undulation the old days you try to be someone else try to fit into a man's world but now you're saying you know just the app just follow your passion and this technology behind it interesting enough is also an effect on the men like I had a Facebook post on my flight down here at the Wi-Fi on the plane and i typed in my facebook friends hey real question is a politically incorrect to say I love women in tech I kind of put that out there is kind of a link bait but all sudden the arguments were weighed politically correct love is for versions of love's like argument and wedding Gary deep hey very deep but the one comment was just be yourself and I think I tell our women that all the time and all our people right but i think this the shift to the workplace openness where you can be authentic and i find often are young women in particular get guidance from mentors who are men and they try to emulate that and some of that is good but you have to emulate that while being authentic to who you are otherwise you run that risk of perhaps being perceived in authentic or you know it comes off a little bit too can write what's your best advice to men because one of the things that we seeing is a trend now and certainly is that men inclusion is also into the conversation absolutely big thing we are doing that as a firm both in the US and globally we're a ten-by-ten impact sponsor for he for she which is the UN's initiative with companies governments and not-for-profits to engage men in a conversation about raising awareness around women and for us it's women in the workplace right so there really a couple of things I think men can do one is listen and actively engage with the women and not just women at your level women who are Millennials as well if you can't of not comfortable having that conversation which I know many with women and men both aren't it's hard to put yourself in their shoes right the second is to really be an advocate right think about when you walk into meetings who's not in the room are the people looking all like you what do you do about that right and i think that the third is make it personal you know be involved and know what's going on and know how you could help it seems so simple right when you just lay it out there right those are not complicated concepts but but to put them in practices is you know it takes an active you know kind of thinking about it right to really make it happen to impact change it does and i think more it is natural for people to gravitate to people who are like them particularly in the workspace we get very comfortable in our own let's call them echo chambers and then you move with your echo chamber and your echo chamber might have a little diversity but likely it doesn't have a lot of generational diversity it may or may not have all kinds of racial ethnic gender diversity and so you might meet somebody on the outside who's a little different but you go back to your go tues who are still in your echo chamber so I think the goal is to get into multiple a few echo chambers right also I also comfort zone right i mean people like what's familiar to them and pushing the comfort zone barrier is one issue right now happy young come to be uncomfortable be comfortable and the uncomfortable how is that right what people should look for I mean and everyone has their own struggles and journeys what how did people cope it so I often to have this conversation with methanol how do I talk to women about being women I said well that's probably not the first conversation you should be having right talk to them about who they are and what's important to you and then the relationship you have to build what we call familiarity comfort and trust and once you've built that you can have a conversation perhaps about what a woman's plans are if she's pregnant but you can't just walk in and taught me the for that yeah you can't blurt it out right thank you thanks off at not a walk not a good icebreaker yeah yeah so Lisa you know there's a lot of talk about what's the right thing to do what is right meaning it's the right thing to do in terms of morally and as a human being to include people but really there's there's a bottom line positive impact to there's a better outcome impact and pwc you guys do a lot of analysis you work a lot of companies so there's some studies you can share some some facts or figures that you guys have discovered about how there's really great bottom line better decisions better products better profitability when you have a diverse point of view that you bring to a problem set absolutely there are number of different ways to look at that I think you're right it is the right thing to do the moral thing to do people want to feel good about it but at the end of the day we know that diversity is good for business performance right and there are a number of studies out there that talk about board composition and how you know now bored women on boards has been legislated in enough countries around the world for long enough now you can correlate long-term 10-15 year performance with the performance of those companies and we see that those companies perform better right you can look at just the diversity I mean another angle of looking at it is we do a lot of work with Millennials in the millennial studies right and people coming off a campus are more Geographic gender ethnic minority diverse than any generations we've seen at a very long time right there more women coming off of campus in general than men right now and they're doing very well right so there's also the zero-sum game that says if we don't figure out how to accommodate a track promote retain women then we're not going to be able to get the best of the best of the workforce and you become at a competitive disadvantage well it's quality that's the competitive advantage is the quality that you get with the diversity absolutely how do you manage that process because some would say diversity slows things down because you have different perspectives but the outputs higher quality high equality and more innovation right and one of the things we like to do is talk about diversity and a number of different angles so there's race gender sexual orientation there's also in our business diversity of degrees so we have coders working with mba is working with lawyers doctors strategist and part of that is the way you get the thinking and the most innovative solutions to your problems and I think when you begin to develop and to find it that way there are places for more people to get on the wheel so to speak right everybody is thinking about diversity not just you look different or you experience but you bring a different perspective to the problem because you have a different background where you grow up and what you studied it's just it's just funny that you know in being diverse you're actually leveraging people's biases to get to a better solution absolutely perfect all the way around that's right and i think that there's a movement now and we're really moving from thinking about being equal to thinking about being equitable right equal would say if you have three kids peering over a fence ones four foot ones five-foot 16 foot give them all in one foot box well that's not going to get the forefoot guy over the fence right what you really have to do is give them each a size box that they need right so the six-foot kid probably doesn't need a box at all if it's a five-foot fence right the 5-foot kid might need a little stepstool and the forfeit kid probably needs a large cube right right that's being equitable it's not necessary to me out well based on the outcome based on the album about the objective right versus some statistical equitable correct so I think in business we're moving more to looking at that outcome based heck with biddle equity being equitable across outcomes equitable thank you not just being equal because I think for a long term it was treat everybody the same and that's diversity it's really appreciate everybody for their just as differences and let them play to their strengths right and use the data science tools available Go Daddy put out the survey results of their salaries to you seeing the University of Virginia Professor Brian gave a keynote today about the software that they're building an open source for tooling but the date is going to be key but at the end of the day management drives the outcome objective so I'm Celeste someone at a senior level who's had a good journey from the 80 Eileen big and talk about the same thing you're now at the top of the pyramid the flywheels developing there's some good on in migration with women coming into the field house the balance how's that flywheel working for the mentoring the pipeline in the operational I'd say I give you one example right so we have a women in technology what started as a program it's now a part of our business right we started about two and a half years ago with 30 women who are trying to figure out in technology you give you a long term implementation projects for you know six months a year two years and only operate in the same echo chamber right so how do you network with other women how do you meet them it's now 1400 people strong and one of the pillars of it is a mentorship program we had and it doesn't sound like a lot but see from where you start right increase if we started with needing having about 50 50 women mentored right we're up to hundreds of women being mentored and last time we opened the program we had 150 leaders not just we had other people but leaders sign up within the first few days to mentor the women so in my mind that's success that success reason I didn't need to promise my job good job on your older thank you taking you for that network effect there's an app for that now the network effectors are dynamic now so coming back to the theory of socialization and social theory as you get a network effect going on there's a good social vibe going on talk about that dynamic it's kind of qualitative and then be might be some numbers so save it but talk about that the the network effect of that viral growth if you will I think you sort of have it's now a important and good and rewarded thing to do right but I also think there's a millennial factor there yeah right so what we've been able to see is as our tech women come in off a campus they're beginning to get opportunities that change the game around women in the community right so we brought a number of two-year three-year out women with us and have them help us in the planning of being here all the way from designing our website to putting together the booth to submitting and speaking at so they got speaker slots which gives them amazing exposure with then sentenced that social dynamic in a number of ways right you have them wanting to other people wanting to emulate it you have leaders reaching out to me and say wow we didn't know Emily you know Emily did that that is great right she spoke to 900 people yesterday and so that changes the social landscape acceptable it certainly does it's great amplification so as we wrap here at Lisa I think that's a great segue talk about the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing it's a very different kind of conference it's a very different kind of feel why is it important to pwc why do you guys invest in this show and you know the example you caves just a great lead into it I think it's for a number of reasons it's a great source of recruits right so so we want to be here we want to meet the young people coming off of campus so maybe we might not meet in our structured campus environment right I think the second is it's a great opportunity for our young women to promote and develop themselves and gain skills that we would never gain I think the third is just to empower our women just like being here and even the emails i'm getting from our women who are not here and our men who are not here the fact that we are here has sort of had a little bit of a viral offensive foam oh you're missing out you're missing out it's an amazing experience it's really helped put in some ways women in technology in a little different league right a lot of the alliances and a lot of the conference's we do are we do 15 major conferences now and we support leadership for women events at all of them but this is one of the few that's not alliance space it's not being at SI p with us AP or being an owl with Oracle which are great things for us to do but this is for the women about the women and the development of the women it's an exciting time and we're excited to document and thanks for spending the time sharing your insights and data and perspective here on the cube well thank you so much John and jeff bennett me having me whereas our pleasure was so inspired so really awesome and if you want to be part of the cube we are hiring looking for women digital scientists data analyst on-air host and we've been shamed a little bit for having an all-male team here I was just gonna ask ya we are looking for powerful strong smart women who want to join the cube we're hiring so contact us offline thanks for watching me right back with more live coverage here in Houston Texas at the Grace Hopper celebration be right back