Female leaders in technology

>> In talking to inaudible who preceded me I said you know what's with this? Why aren't there more women leaders in technology and how do we foster getting more of our girls and younger women into this? So that's specifically why I had my four distinguished panelists as well. So I thought I'd ask them a couple of questions because they're all female leaders in technology and I think we all kind of agree that's not the brand that we want to have necessarily but we do want to make sure that the gender difference, the gender divide is crossed cough. So maybe I could start, Jasmine you and I had a great conversation about the differences between technology ideas and getting men tend to starve the engineering ideas but the morphing tends to come when the women pick up on the product ideas. You want to talk about what you've seen and any key differences?

>> What's been interesting to me is that I think there's 2 ideas about innovation and leadership. I've begun to see especially because my background is more in product marketing and sales and so I tend to look a lot of companies are a little bit later stage and I have begun to see a lot more women in leadership positions as a company matures especially in the valley. We tend to have an over accentuation of products that are really tech versus a lot more consumer products that come out of the east coast, there's even like the east coast west coast divide and I think that what's interesting is that I've met lots of lots of technology founders who tend to be you know guys and I now think that's beginning to change I'm beginning to see a lot more women really huge critical mass of women engineers who are now in their early 30s really starting up companies and then also as the company is and especially you know with Google I think a lot of companies well I build this great technology they will come and I think that that is no longer the case for anything and so you basically have to really have people who are really smart and kind of getting to the market and learning where the market is and so women especially because I think there are a lot of women who've always been in leadership and marketing and sales and BD area, I've seen a lot more women innovating in that area and also coming into leadership to help kind of you know round out the leadership team of many organizations in the valley.

>> Ok Mercer you want to comment on what you see.

>> Ah well for me I would say people ask me a lot what it's like to be at Google and as a women and I have to say my experience there isn't really from that vantage point. Right for me, I'm a geek, I'm up late coding, trying to learn python last night, right it was killing me that I don't have an iPhone3GS yet I haven't had time to get to the store to get one but like I'm a technology person, I'm a geek and at Google I'm surrounded by people who are interested in those same things, who are fired up about the same ideas and I think that that really makes me very comfortable and I think that is made a great environment for women but not because it was about the gender divide or focus on those issues it's just something where likeminded people with likeminded interests really, really flourish because it's a great, comfortable environment.

>> And you teach at Stanford right the undergraduate class. Do you do anything special to try and encourage women or do you see more women coming up or do you think there's anything that's keeping them from coming up through this track?

>> I mean I think one of the things that definitely is concerning is actually in the engineering field is the % of women graduates has been rising in all engineering fields except for computer science where it's actually dipped since 2000 and that's concerning. I actually think that it's really important to you know foster and encourage women in those classes and I have done some of that. I actually think that my mentor here at Stanford Eric Roberts has been much better about that. He actually you know for me and some of my other classmates would you know scoop us up encourage us to become teaching assistants, gave us big opportunities in terms of research and lecturing and was really, really great at fostering us along and I think that that's important. So I do think good mentoring and a sense of community is important to keep that high but I think that that overall trend in computer science for women isn't well understood and it's something that we definitely need to turn around.

>> Right absolutely. Polly any comments? Through your career particularly because you'd had different types of jobs and seen women come up and down and up and down again right?

>> Yeah absolutely. So I think a couple of things that I would suggest, first of all I think it's really important to get on the revenue side of the business, and if you are looked at by your peers and by others, no matter whether your male or female, and you are responsible for driving growth then people listen a lot more about what you have to say than if you are and your ideas and the kinds of things that you think about so I think getting on the revenue side of the business is really important. Having a PNL, I think a lot of women manage and run their budgets at home so it's just kind of a natural thing but in the software industry it's very difficult to think about your business as a PNL and you typically have to come somewhere internationally or run the services business to have access to that. That was very different than it was in the hardware business. So this is kind of a transition over time. And the third thing that I've found is that you know I'm a big believer that no idea is a dumb idea, they change, they either grab their momentum or whatever so I've also found that you know it's kind of where I ended up a couple of times was because I didn't say no cough so somebody would create a really scary project that everybody else was afraid to do and I was too dumb to say no I guess and so I would go and just take a fresh look at the project and I would turn it around and it would all of a sudden come with roses and then people said oh well she can go do more. So I think in some ways its just that never being afraid of failure because you can't have innovation and you can't rise in a business and you can't grow your business unless you're willing to take a lot of risk, they kind of all go together, this sort of notion of innovation, disruption, risk, you know not being afraid, all of those things. And I think some ways we don't tell our kids that enough; male, female whatever gender. People are just kind of ok well maybe I'm just not gonna be disruptive. I'm gonna live in my little cocoon and you know run my life in its own way and that doesn't make change for the rest of the world.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====