live from Stanford University in Palo Alto California it's the cube covering women in data science conference 2018 brought to you by Stanford welcome to the cube we are alive at Stanford University I'm Lisa Martin and we are at the 3rd annual women in data science conference or woods whiz if you're not familiar is a one-day technical conference that has keynote speakers technical vision talks as well as a career panel and we are fortunate to have guests from all three today it's also an environment it's really a movement that's aimed at inspiring and educating data scientists globally and supporting women in the field this event is remarkable in its third year they are expecting to reach sit down for this 100,000 people today we were here at Stanford this is the main event in person but there's over 150 plus regional events around the globe in 50 plus countries and I think those numbers will shift up during the day and I'll be sure to brief you on that we're excited to be joined by one of the speakers featured on mainstage this morning not only a cube alum not returning to us but also the first ever female president of Harvey Mudd College dr. Maria Klawe a maria welcome back to the cube thank you it's great to be here it's so exciting to have you here I love you representing with your t-shirt there I mentioned you are the first-ever female president of Harvey Mudd you've been in this role for about 12 years and you've made some pretty remarkable changes there supporting women in technology you gave some stats this morning in your talk a few minutes ago share with us what you've done to improve the percentages of females in faculty positions as well as in this student body well the first thing I should say is as president I do nothing nothing it's like a good job the whole thing that makes it work at Harvey Mudd is we are community that's committed to diversity and inclusion and so everything we do we try to figure out ways that we will attract people who are underrepresented so that's women in areas like computer science and engineering physics it's people of color in all areas of science and engineering and it's also LGTB q+ i mean it's you know it's it's muslims it's it's just like all kinds of things and our whole goal is to show that it doesn't matter what race you are doesn't matter what gender or anything else if you bring hard work and persistence and curiosity you can succeed i love that especially the curiosity part one of the things that you mentioned this morning was that for people don't worry about the things that you you might think you're not good at i thought that was a very important message as well as something that I heard you say previously on the cube as well and that is the best time that you found to reach women young women and to get them interested in stem as even a field of study is the first semester in college and I should with you off camera that was when I found stem in biology tell me a little bit more about that and how what are some of the key elements that you find about that time in a university career that are so I guess right for inspire inspiration so I think the thing is that when you're starting in college if somebody can introduce you to something you find fun engaging and if you can really discover that you can solve major issues in the world by using these ideas these concepts the skills you're probably going to stay in that and graduate in that field whereas if somebody does that to when you're in middle school there's still lots of time to get put off and so our whole idea is that we emphasize creativity teamwork and problem-solving and we do that whether it's in math or an engineering or computer science or biology we just in all of our fields and when we get young women and young men excited about these possibilities they stick with it and I love that you mentioned the word fun and curiosity I can remember exactly where I was and bio 101 and I was suddenly I'd like to biology but never occurred to me that I would ever have the ability to study it and it was a teacher that showed me this is fun and also and I think you probably do this too showed that you believe in someone you've got talent here and I think that that inspiration coming from a mentor whether you know it's a mentor or not is a key element there that is one that I hope all of the the viewers today and the women that are participating in which have the chance to find so one of the things every single one of us can do in our lives is encourage others and you know it's amazing how much impact you can have I met somebody who's now a faculty person at Stanford she did her PhD in mechanical engineering her name is Allison Marsden I hadn't seen her for I don't know probably almost 12 years and she said she came up to me and she said I met you just as I was finishing my PhD and you gave me a much-needed pep talk and you know that is so easy to do believing in people encouraging them and it makes so much difference it does I love that so wins is as I mentioned in the third annual and the growth that they have seen is unbelievable I've not seen anything quite like it in in tech in terms of events it's aimed at inspiring not just women and data science but but data science in general what is it about wizz that attracted you and what are some of the key things that you shared this morning in your opening remarks well so the thing that attracts me about weeds is the following data science is growing exponentially in terms of the job opportunities in terms of the impact on the world and what I love about withes is that they had the insight this flash of genius I think that they would do a conference where all the speakers would be women and just that they would show that there are women all over the world who are contributing to data science who are loving it who are being successful and it's it's the crazy thing because in some ways it's really easy to do but nobody had done it right and it's so clear that there's a need for this when you think about all of the different locations around the world that are are doing a width version in Nigeria in Mumbai in London in you know just all across the world there are people doing this yeah so the things I shared are number one oh my goodness this is a great time to get into data science it's just there's so many opportunities in terms of career opportunities but there's so many opportunities to make a difference in the world and that's really important number two I shared that it's you never too old to learn math and CS and you know my example is my younger sister who's 63 and who's learning math and computer science at the northern Alberta Institute of Technology Nate all the other students are 18 to 24 she suffers from fibromyalgia she's walked with a walker she's quite disabled she's getting A's and a-pluses it's so cool and you know I think for every single person in the world there's an opportunity to learn something new and the most important thing is hard work and perseverance that it's so much more important than absolutely anything else I agree with that so much it's it's such an inspiring time but I think that you said there was clearly a demand for this what Wits has done in such a short time period demonstrates massive demand the stats that I was reading the last couple of days that show that women with stem degrees only 26% of them are actually working in STEM fields that's very low and and even can start from things like how how companies are recruiting talent and the messages that they're sending may be the right ones maybe not so much so I have a great example for you about companies recruiting talent so about three years ago I was no actually almost four years ago now I was talking in a conference called HR 50 and it's a conference that's aimed at the chief human resource officers of 50 multinationals and my talk I was talking for 25 minutes on how to recruit and retain women in tech careers and afterwards the chief HR officer from Accenture came up to me and she said you know we hire 17,000 software engineers a year Justin India 17,000 and she said we've been coming in at 30 percent female and I want to get that up to 45 she said you told me some really good things I could use she she said you told me how to change the way we advertise jobs change the way we interview for jobs four months later her name is Ellen Chowk Ellen comes up to me at another conference this has happens to be the most powerful women's summit that's run by Fortune magazine every year and she comes up and she says Maria I implemented different job descriptions we changed the way we interview and I also we started actually recruiting at Women's College engineering colleges in India as well as co-ed once she said we came in at 42% Wow from 30 to 42 just making those changes crying I went Ellen you owe me you're joining my more my board and she did right and you know they have Accenture has now set a goal of being at 50/50 in technical roles by 2025 Wow they even continued to come in all around the world they're coming in over 40% and then they've started really looking at how many women are being promoted to partners and they've moved that number up to 30% in the most recent year so you know it's a such a great example of a company that just decided we're gonna think about how we advertise we're going to think about how we interview we're gonna think about how we do promotions and we're going to make it equitable and from a marketing perspective those aren't massive massive changes so whether it expects quite simple exactly yeah these are so the thing I think about so when I look at what's happening at Harvey Mudd and how we've gotten more women into computer science engineering physics into every discipline it's really all about encouragement and support it's about believing in people it's about having faculty who when they start teaching a class the perhaps is technically very rigorous they might say this is a really challenging course every student in this course who works hard is going to succeed it's setting that expectation that everyone can succeed it's so important I think back to physics and college and how the baseline was probably 60% in terms of of grades scoring and you went in with intimidation I don't know if I can do this and it sounds like again a such a simple yet revolutionary approach that you're taking let's make things simple let's be supportive and encouraging yet hopefully these people will get enough confidence that they'll be able to sustain that even within themselves as they graduate and go into careers whether they stay in academia or go in industry and I know you've got great experiences in both I have I so I've been very lucky and I've been able to work both in academia and in industry I will say so I worked for IBM Research for eight years early in my career and you know I tribute a lot of my success as a leader since then to the kind of professional development that I got as a manager at IBM Research and you know what I think is that I there's not that much difference between creating a great learning environment and a great work environment and one of the interesting results that came out of a study at Google sometime in the last few months is they looked at what made senior engineering managers successful and the least important thing was their knowledge of engineering of course they all have good knowledge of engineering but it was empathy ability to mentor communication skills ability to encourage all of these kinds of things that we think of as quote unquote soft skills but to actually change the world and and on those sasuke's you know we hear a lot about the hard skills if we're thinking about data scientists from a role perspective statistical analysis etcetera but those soft skills empathy and also the ability to kind of bring in different perspectives for analyzing data can really have a major impact on every sector and socially in the world today and that's why we need women and people of color and people who are not well represented in these fields because data science is changing everything in the world absolutely is and if we want those changes to be for the better we really need diverse perspectives and experiences influencing things that get made because you know algorithms are not algorithms can be hostile and negative as well as positive and you know good for the world and you need people who actually will raise the questions about the ethics of algorithms and how it gets used there's a great book about how math can be used for the bad of humanity as well as the good of humanity and until we get enough people with different perspectives into these roles nobody's going to be asking those questions right right well I think with the momentum that we're feeling in this movement today and it sounds like what you're being able to influence greatly at Mudd for the last twelve years plus there is there are our foundations that are being put in place with not just on the education perspective but on the personal perspective and in inspiring the next generation giving them helping them I should say achieve the confidence that they need to sustain them throughout their career summary I thank you so much for finding the time to join us this morning on the cube it's great to have you back and we can't wait to talk to you next year and hear what great things do you influence and well next twelve months well it's wonderful to have a chance to talk with you as well thank you so much excellent you've been watching the cube we're live at Stanford University for the third annual women in data science wins conference join the conversation hashtag wins 2018 I'm Lisa Martin stick around I'll be right back with my next guest after a short break