Yeah. Hello everyone and welcome to our series of the Fireside chats. My name is Anna Roosky co-founder and CEO at Women Tech Network. And it's my pleasure to introduce you today. Our special guest, Siri Shila, research fellow, women and public uh public policy program at Harvard University. Sir.

Life work is to advance gender equality in the workplace, research and research translations as a scholar, serious studies. What works to the level that the playing field and close gender gaps in organization as an advisor and speaker. She brings research insights to practitioners and organizations ranging from start ups to multinational corporations with speaking training and workshop, workshops and fun fact about Siri. In addition to being a full time gender researcher, she's also a fitness instructor. She's been in the fitness for 14 years and teaches various format from Pilates to cardio yoga to step aerobics and high intensity interval training. Hi, Siri and welcome. Hi,

Anna. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to

be here. It's our absolute pleasure to have. It's my pleasure. It's our, our, our participants pleasure to have you here today with us and maybe a small prehistory. How we met, we met with Siri for the first time in Vienna, this February uh when virtual events were, let's say, not that popular right now. And the, the, the, let's say the, the whole situation is pandemic uh was not a pandemic yet. And we had this pleasure to meet in Vienna Darwin and Marie conference, a great event where I impressed with a serious uh like the, the, the, the concept that she was sharing. I was like, this is a researcher. Wow, that's impressive. Like, you know, I was, I was really, really impressed with what you shared and like how easy you managed to translate uh some like some research concept into easy to perceive language. And that was super cool. She also was, she was also one of our uh amazing keynote speakers at Women Tech Network Global Conference 2020. And who was with us at the Women Tech Network Global Conference, please uh just leave in the comments plus. So I know that you joined us and maybe if you seen since the session, let us know. Hello, everyone. I see everyone is joining. Hello, Maya from Toi. Hello Gaby from Spain. Many, many cool people are here with us and watching us.

This is really, really cool and I'm super super excited. So sir, how did you join in, in the gender equality and diversity and inclusion research started? Did you always know that you want to pursue this field? That's

such a good question. You know, I was always very interested in feminism and always believed that of course, women and men should be equal. That's such an obvious thing. But I didn't realize in school and in university that it's something that you could actually do professionally.

So my first job at the university was actually in management consulting, uh which was a lovely job and a great place to learn a lot of important skills that I continue to use. But it was also the first time that I experienced firsthand, some of the gender inequalities that we otherwise read about in articles. So things like um not getting paid equivalently to a male counterparts. So looking up in the organization and seeing that only 10% of the senior leaders are women um or seeing that women make up a big portion of the workforce at the entry level. But then when you start looking up sort of mid to top levels, all of a sudden, every step you go up, there's just fewer and fewer and fewer women. And so that was the first time it hit me on a personal level, you know, not just intellectually, but I looked around and I said, wow, this is actually what's going on in the world and this doesn't strike me as being right? And so then when I went back to graduate school, at that point, I decided, ok, this is truly what I wanna advance in gender equality when I want to focus the rest of my life's work on.

Um And so now I do that through a combination of doing research. But also, as you were saying, trying to make sure that the research, insights and the knowledge that we generate in academia don't just stay within the four walls of academia, but that they actually make it out into the world, into the hands of real people in real organizations who can use that knowledge to make a difference on the ground.

Because I do want to see the world change very fundamentally when it comes to gender

equality. Yes. And that's what I really love about your job that you actually bring that research masses by doing uh doing presentations, doing talks, doing um doing different kinds of events, workshops and educating and sharing. Because I think that many people who are not, for example, part of human tech network, let's say we are not uh in, in this uh part of this on networks that are working towards advance in gender equality are not really aware of what's happening, right.

Totally. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a huge piece of it. Uh I actually recently did a research study on advancing gender equality and venture capital. And as part of one of the things that we did as part of that study is we interviewed a lot of venture capitalists here in the United States, one on one and one of the things that really shocked me that we discovered in the interviews is how little the venture capitalists knew about the state of gender and racial inequality in their own industry.

Um And so it really impressed upon me the importance of, as you were saying, communicating the knowledge uh and raising people's awareness because there's still a lot of work to do on that front.

All right, that's correct. What are some of the examples of unconscious bias when it comes to, let's say women in tech, women entrepreneurship. And um what are some of the repetitive unconscious biases that you are observing based on the research that you have conducted in the workplaces and maybe let's talk a little bit of the solution. How do you think we can tackle them?

Yeah. So this makes me think of another study that I did with a couple of colleagues several years ago in a very large fortune 50 tech firm. And we were looking at um the experiences of women and men at the most senior levels. Um even the women who were up there, right, on par with the men and the men in the Executive suite had reported in surveys, lesser sort of less satisfactory experiences than the men. Um And so we started digging there. But then as we kind of talked to all these women and men, we actually realized that the biases, as you were saying, some of the roots of the inequality start way earlier. So I'm going to give you an example. Women were much less likely to be hired via their own network via internal referrals. Um They were more likely to come through the formal hr process where they submit their resume and go through all the interviews. Whereas men were more likely to already know someone in this company before they joined. And the reason this was important is because on day one, when the new women and men employees first walked in the door, the men not only had a network, right? Because they knew people inside the organization, but those people were giving them a lot of informal knowledge and advice about how to best navigate their career.

They were saying, you know, in your first week, do XY and and within the first month, make sure that you set one on one meetings up with these three leaders. And oh, by the way, here's how we really get things done in this organization. So they had access to all of this wisdom about how to navigate your career that the women who didn't know people in that company did not. And so from day one, they were already on an unlevel unequal playing field where the men had kind of a leg up over the women. Then of course, there's well documented biases in things like performance evaluation. We know that women tend to get less feedback than men overall on their performance. We know that when women get feedback. It tends to be more based on subjective assessments about their personality rather than men. Um When they get feedback, it tends to be more based on objective assessments of their competence and their business performance. Um And again, that just creates an unlevel playing field because getting accurate feedback about what you're doing well and where you need to improve is critical to be able to actually advance your career. Um And then of course, there are outright biases and things like promotion and pay.

So the gender pay gap around the world is well documented that women get paid less for the same work than men. Um And in a lot of organizations, we also find that women get promoted less frequently than men. So if a woman and a man both have the same performance evaluation score, let's say the best and highest performance evaluation score, it's more likely to translate into a promotion for the man than for the woman.

This is a sad but so true and what you, what you're sharing about the importance of the network? And do you think that women should uh build the network or kind of not perceive it as a negative thing rather as positive thing or should the workplaces change to make sure that women and men have equal opportunity when they, for example, enter any job, be it like entry job or like at later stage?

Yeah. So and I think on something really important and really fundamental, which is the tension between the individual and the organization, right? So the reason these unequal opportunities exist, it's not the fault of the individuals, it's the fault of the system. It's the way we've chosen to design our organizations and our processes around who we hire, how we hire them, how we evaluate their performance, how we manage the promotion cycle. Uh And I believe, and the evidence suggests that fundamentally to um create a level playing field and to create equal opportunity for all, it's the systems that have to change. So I put, you know, 99% of the responsibility on the organization. But then that said that change takes some time. And so people always ask me, OK, Siri, this is great. We want to do the systems change. But I work in this tech company today, I'm just trying to advance my career and do my best work. So how do I navigate this playing field that hopefully in 10 years will be more fair? But today is still unfair. And I think that's where things like building a network as women in tech comes in. It's a strategy to help overcome the fact that the environment is not completely fair and objective today.

What are some reasons that women are underpaid? How do we close the, the wage gap? Mm

So the wage gap, there's two different things going on. Um When you see an economy wide number like in the United States, women on average earn about 81 or 82 cents to a man's dollar. That just describes the fact overall in a, in a country at large that women get paid less than men. But that large number doesn't take into account the fact that, you know, if you're working part time, for example, then of course, you only get paid 50 or 60%

are more part time. Right.

Exactly. Women are about twice as like as men to work part time. It also doesn't take into account the fact that women are disproportionately represented in some of the lowest paid occupations in the economy. Um, nursing, teaching, cleaning, whereas men tend to be overrepresented in the most lucrative, the most highest paid jobs in the economy and leadership positions. So then we come to a different number which we call the adjusted gender wage gap, which takes into all of these factors and said, what if we actually have an identical woman and a man? They both work full time. They have exactly the same job, they have exactly the same education, they have exactly the same experience and performance evaluation scores and everything else you can imagine. Then what's the wage gap? Right. And the answer is that even in that sort of controlled condition where we make the woman and the man identical, there is still a little bit of a wage gap. It's fortunately smaller than the 1819 20 cents that it otherwise would be in some studies. It's 6% in some studies, it's seven or 9% in some studies. It's as low as 3%. Um, so when you're thinking about, you know, am I underpaid relative to that man who's sitting next to me in the office or cubicle next door?

That number is probably gonna be more likely to be in the 1 to 10% range as opposed to the 20% range that it is economy wide. And the only way to really fix that is for an organization to do a full statistical analysis of what they pay every single employee and factoring those things around, you know, geography which offers you

do this research or do they do the stats or, or not really? Or like how do some,

some companies do? Most are very secretive about it, whether they do or don't, they don't want to publish that information

information. So the stats are set, they're like, ok, better, not nothing to show. But yeah, we, we observe, for example, different companies that we are working with, they, they come to us and they, they like, they don't know how to communicate well, that they let's say are looking to attract more female engineers because they, they don't just know they kind of just publish, hey, for, for like female, apply to join, for our jobs, like whatever to join our, our company.

So and, and what we observe organizations do need help. And some of them like also like being at like earlier stage, like be like, for example, a start up, which is a growth stage. And they are, they understand that they don't understand that they need to build a diverse and inclusive companies. They understand the values, they understand that it's not only uh let's say a good thing to do, but it also brings uh good, good, good profits and like, and everyone wins, right? Because uh like excluding women or not having, for example, in tax, there is also a gap uh and uh not having women is, is a big disadvantage for many companies. It's like you build your product for everyone, but then you have, for example, more, more men or for more men coming from one, I don't know race or whatever. That's, that's also not contributing well towards your the product, especially being a global company. Yeah.

And you, you raised a really good point about start ups because it's so much easier to build the divers team, diverse team and an inclusive company culture from the get go when you start with two people or five people or 20 people, it's much harder to turn around a company that now has 1000 or 10,000 employees and you have massive gender gaps and massive racial gaps.

And then you're trying to change the culture, right? It's not impossible, but it's much harder to do later on. It's easier to build it into the way you work from the very beginning.

Yeah. Christine, let's talk a little bit about hiring. So when it, when it comes to hiring, uh, what about, what do you think about the quotas that companies have? And do you think that it contributes positively or negatively towards uh attracting, uh let's say more women, let's say you have, we have, we want to hire 50% female, 50% male. So how do you think? And also maybe from the pers from the research perspective, if you have any, any.

Yeah. So I'd make a distinction between quotas and goals or targets. And the main distinction difference is that quotas are mandatory. So they're often used in countries. It's a law that says, oh, you have to have 40% women on your corporate boards or you have to have half women on your uh you know, electoral lists for elections, for example, for parliament in companies, we don't really see quotas. What we more often see is voluntary targets, right? So they'll say, oh, we want to hire 50% women at the entry level. But in practice, it's, there's no consequences if you don't. Whereas with a quota, if the, if there's a law of the land that says you have 40% women on your board, you know, if you don't, there's going to be fines, penalties, um sort of legal consequences. Goals and targets are, are actually one of the most evidence based and best ways to accomplish what you set out to accomplish. The research is just overwhelmingly clear that when we set a goal, we're more likely to follow through and to accomplish what we actually want to achieve.

So if any company is serious about increasing their diversity in hiring, I would 100% recommend setting a goal and setting a goal that's challenging yet realistic. There's also been some unfortunate examples in the media of organizations that set out a very ambitious goal. Only to realize later, you know about, let's say women in leadership, they wanted to reach X percentage of women in leadership in some number of years. Only to realize after they had announced the goal that it wasn't logistically feasible, they would have needed to promote, you know, 100 and 50% women to actually reach that number, which of course is not possible. And so it starts with running the current numbers, understanding your current data of how many people you have in the organization. What are your current hiring rates? Where are you sourcing the applicants from and where are you getting most of your diverse applicants in the door and then setting a goal or a target that's um stretching and challenging but also logistically achievable.

Interesting when it comes to hiring how employers and hiring specialists can avoid being biased during the interviews.

Mm Interviews are tough, you know, interviews are interesting because people love them, organizations, love them. I don't know, a single company in the world that doesn't do interviews as part of the hiring process. And yet based on around 30 to 40 years of research, we show, we know that um the typical type of interview where you and I just start chatting and talk about, kind of whatever we have to talk about is actually the least predictive method of hiring, meaning that my evaluation of you after that interview basically has no correlation with how well you actually do the job if you're hired.

And so that's interesting. So you mean you, you just will like me, my personality and that's why you will hire me. Right.

Exactly. Exactly. My evaluation of you is based on a lot of 11 of them is, oh, we might share something in common, you know, and, and I were both passionate about women in tech. I,

I want to work with you, right? I hired people like me even uh even subconsciously or unconsciously, right? That, that, that, that I like, I don't think like I'm going to hire this person because I like this person. I just feel that I like this person and I feel good with this person and that's why I want to have her or him as my employee of them.

Exactly. Or the other thing that happens is you unconsciously compare me to all the other people that you already work with, right? The other people that are already in the organization. And you say, well, does this person look like all the people who have been successful before?

In other words, all the other people that have already been hired in the past and if I look different, if I act different, if I have a very different background, then I don't quite fit the part. Right? I don't see the

pattern. That's why it's very hard for people from the diverse background to actually get hired at a company if they kind of don't fit at first glance or like. So, so what is the solution in this case? How, how let's say do we need to hire people to be to like hiring specialist from diverse backgrounds? So like uh organi so these people could relate to the people that they want to hire to bring more diversity or what is the solution could be?

Yeah. So a couple of solutions, the best actually would be to do work sample test instead of interviews and a work sample test is basically an exercise that's designed to mimic the actual job as closely as possible. So if you're hiring someone for a software engineering role where they'll do a lot of coding instead of interviewing them about their

coding experience, just give them tasks to do, just give,

give them a task and have them something and then evaluate the quality of that code

or if it makes sense.

But it's like pretty

like, just, just, just give these people to try what they're good at or if they're good at this or not. And then you understand, ok, they do their job, everything works and yeah,

exactly. It turns out that seeing them do what you want them to do is the best predictor of how well they'll do it, you know. Um, so, so that would be actually my first recommendation is deemphasize interviews and emphasize work sample tests. But if you still say, OK, OK, this is great, but I have to conduct interviews, we just can't let them go. Then the best way to do interviews, the most unbiased way is to make them as structured as you can. So that means every candidate you interview gets asked the same set of questions in the same order and there's a standardized grading rubric or some metrics, you know, like a scale that says, what does a good answer look like? What does a bad answer look like? And each of the interviewers as they're interviewing different candidates. So using that same scale and grading the candidates throughout the interview as they go along because one of the other unconscious biases that we all share is one that causes us to overweight the most recent experiences.

So, you know, if we have an interview and it takes 45 minutes and I ask you five questions and you do so. So kind of OK, on the first two questions but then you do a really amazing job on the last two questions. If I wait all the way until the end of the interview to grade you, my brain is now unconsciously kind of overweight your good answers to the last few questions because I've kind of already forgotten the mediocre answers that you gave to the first two questions. And so my evaluation of you after the fact is actually skewed to the positive. It's no longer exactly representative or reflective of what happened.

That sounds interesting. It's like the last impression is the lasting impression. Right.

Yes. Yes, exactly. I'm gonna steal that line. That's a very good one.

Yeah. No, it's

not hard. Right. It's not rocket science. It actually, in some ways makes the job of all the people who are involved in recruiting much easier because now I just have my standard list of questions every time I meet a candidate. I know that's exactly what I'm gonna ask them. I have the grading criteria that I'm very familiar with. It starts to make the whole interview process a lot easier for the interview war.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. I think that hiring specialists who are listening to us can really, um, take that in if, if allowed. I don't know if there are some rules in the company, but it totally makes sense to me to be more objective

uh you mentioned and I, one of the important thing that I wanted to pick up on which was um the diversity of the people who are involved in hiring. So the the interviewers and the hiring sort of specialists, I think from a cultural perspective and from a signaling perspective, that can be incredibly valuable because when candidates see a lot of diversity in the people that they interact with as part of the recruitment process, you know, it communicates a message to them that says, oh, this company really values diversity.

They have a lot of different types of people there and I can see myself in these people who are successful. So from that standpoint, it's very beneficial. But the one caution I would provide is that studies consistently show that we all share the same types of unconscious biases regardless of our own identity. So women and men are equally gender biased, white people and people of color are equally racially biased. It's very sad, but it's true. It's what matters more is what we see, right? Because that's how we internalize stereotypes and biases rather than who we ourselves are. So merely putting a lot of diversity into the recruitment process into the people who are involved, that's not going to de bias your process, that in itself is not going to ensure that the process is fair.

So what should be done to help? Except for what we have talked like? Is there some kind, what for example, like hiring a diversity inclusion specialist uh to help. Do you think that this, this can really help to advance gender equality in the workplace?

I think it can help to the extent that that type of person, the diverse and inclusion specialist um has high visibility in the organization, right, that they report to, you know, that they have power and influence to do what they need to do, that they're powered with a budget that allows them to do what they do and that they actually have power in the process.

So one thing that could happen, for example, is that a company has, let's say 10 recruiters and one of those recruiters is designated as the diversity recruiter. What can happen is that person sources tons of diverse candidates and does their best. But the nine others now think, oh, I don't have to worry about diversity because I've got my diversity recruiter colleague who's got.

So I think the source

and it's one out of 10, actually, it ends up being counterproductive in the end. So it, you have to be careful with how you roll these things out because really, I think the message we want to be communicating is that it's every person's job to make sure that the organization is diverse.

And it's not just, it's not just a job of hiring specialist, it's a job of everyone who is part of the organization or company.

Right. Exactly.

How can uh females maximize their chances to be recruited in tech firms? What are some strengths that uh they can leverage?

That's a really good question. So one thing I would say, and, and this applies really to recruiting in any industry is going back to our conversation about networks because especially when hiring volumes are very large, when companies are hiring thousands of people, you can imagine that they're getting tens of thousands of resumes that people are trying to review.

The way you stand out from that pile, from this pile of 10,000 resumes is if you know someone in the organization who can maybe flag your application and say, hey, you know, I know this person would be awesome, give them some extra consideration. It doesn't mean that you'll get hired. You still have to impress everyone throughout the hiring process, but it might help with that initial step where your resume gets lifted out of a pile of 10,000 resumes. So I think that's really important. Uh the networking and kind of trying to find personal connections in the companies that you are trying to get hired at. The second piece is um being as well prepared as you can for the hiring process. So a lot of companies actually, for example, in tech are doing some version of coding interviews. Well, there's a lot of resources, there's online platforms where you can do practice coding interviews. There's networks of women in tech where you can get kind of advice and tips advice exactly where you can practice these interviews so, doing everything that you can to know what you're getting into and practice and be really prepared so that you can put your best foot forward when you actually do go into that interview.

Um, that's something that I think all job applicants should be doing regardless of industry, but it's especially important in tech.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that, uh, it's, uh, shouldn't underestimate the power of networking, uh, regardless of the industry. I think that it's always good to know. Maybe someone knows someone that could say a good word about you and like, it's nothing is wrong about it. I think that very often women perceive it is like, it's not, yeah, I, I want to earn that, uh, chance myself or I can do it, I can make it. And, uh, I mean, I can also share my personal experience, like, in the beginning of, of my career, I actually wanted, like, I will find the job myself. Like, if someone will help me, it's like I didn't do it myself. And if I didn't, it's like, I don't know, it's kind of like it undermines my value a little bit or something like that. You know what I mean? And I think that this is like, this is what we are talking about. The power of network in that time. I knew what I know now, maybe I would, you know, do different things or like my, my, my first job would be different or not the first job. But like anyway, it's like, it's, it's uh it's definitely super important and that's why we actually created women tech network so we can network and support each other. And um the way we can will be the feedback, be it.

Like, um I don't know, inspiration or something you heard right now that resonated with your help. I think we are sharing totally, it's totally helpful and uh people should take notes and incorporate that. And when they are looking for a job or like the, they're looking for any opportunity, be it starting a company, whatever it is, like, networking is, is crucial here.

It really, it really resonates with me. And what you were saying about how you at the beginning of your career just expected that it's all about hard work, hard work because I was exactly the same. And I just thought, you know, I'm, I'm new, I'm the youngest person. I put my head down. I do the very best and that work will get recognized. And I worked at a company actually where you had to apply for promotion. So you wouldn't automatically get promoted after a certain time or when your manager thought you was ready, you were ready. You actually had to make a case, you know, put together powerpoint slides, explain why you're ready for the next level. And I would have never thought to do that because I was just waiting until a male manager of mine actually was kind of a mentor said periods time you're ready. Like you need to apply for this promotion this next year. I'm like, oh my God, what are you talking about? Are you sure it's so early? He's like, no, no, no, you've got this go do it. Here's what you need to do. Boom, boom, boom. He laid out all the steps and that experience made me read. Oh, wow. You know, this is not just about doing your best work silently.

So

unexpected that someone will think, hey, Siri probably needs a promotion, right?

Yes, you need to be asking for the opportunities. You need to be driving your career

like it's so true. I can totally relate in so many situations, not like just in work but whatever it is like business related start up related here is also another question is like uh how actually men can be more, more involved so to help female empowerment and what you just share that a male colleague of yours actually empowered you and encouraged you to apply for promotion.

So what are other steps? What are other things that men can do to support women? And uh yeah, how they can. Yeah.

Well, if men are in positions of organizational leadership where they can actually make some of these changes like setting goals and de biasing the hiring process, then they should hands down 100% do that. Um but I think on a daily kind of level for any man at any level, the biggest thing is to be a mentor and a sponsor. Um would it be helpful? And I if I explain that mentorship and sponsorship, so mentorship is sort of informal advice, right? Anyone can be your mentor, you can invite them out for a cup of coffee and talk to them and they'll give you advice that's very helpful and, and often very useful sponsorship is when a person who actually has power over your career advancement uses their power to give you opportunities.

So a sponsor is often someone more senior in your own organization. If it's a start up situation, it could be someone outside your organization. But in most larger companies, you know, someone from outside the organization can help you get promoted. So it has to be someone in your company, someone more senior who's in the room when you are not when you are being discussed. And people are saying, oh, we have this new project. Is Siri ready for it? Oh, I'm not quite sure. And your sponsor is in that room and they can say I know sir is ready. Give her this chance. I'm familiar with her work and I can vouch that she's going to do a good job when they're talking about promotions. Um You know, and again, there's some group of people around the table who are saying, ok, so we can promote three people this year, we've got the six candidates, which three should we promote? That? You have supporters in that room who are pounding the table on your behalf and saying Anna needs to get promoted that sponsorship. You can see how it's different from mentorship. And while both of those are very valuable sponsorship is the stuff that helps you tangibly advance your career because that's the stuff where you get a promotion where you get a chance to go to a conference on behalf of your company, right to speak on stage or they give you a high visibility project or stretch assignment that really allows you to take your skills to the next level.

So for the men, I would certainly encourage you to be a mentor, but I would even more so encourage you to find opportunities to sponsor and give them tangible opportunities. And you can do, you can be a sponsor without the other person even knowing, right? You can just decide when I'm in the room where decisions are made about who works on which project and you know, who gets to go to this conference. I make it a point to advocate for women, for people of color, for the nontraditional people who might not otherwise be on the short list for this opportunity.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I'm thinking that right now what you are sharing that many, many partners of ours, they had male representatives who came to us and say, hey, we want to support you. And that's what they are sharing actually brings to the point that these people were kind of sponsors and that they, and actually they were doing, they were doing not just like, you know, talking that you want to do something. And like, what I think that um when it comes to sponsors that they have this kind of influence, like, as you said, they could be senior or they could be like, like senior than you or someone who has influence in the company. And they can, and probably some doesn't even cost them that much. It's just like one word and say, hey, and maybe it is like a little bit uh unconscious happening because they know you, they like you, they think you are cool and they think that you are ready and they don't know that people that much, that's the power of networking again, right?

This kind of uh connections, important, valuable connections that we are making different events or different um organizations that are um supporting also.

But you know, I'll say it's also a testament to the power of networking in the context where people see your work, right? So Anna, I could walk up to you at a conference and just introduce myself and give you my business card and say, oh let's stay t it's so nice to meet you, but you don't really know anything about me, right? When you and I sat on a panel together or we did an interview together and I observed you talking about your work so powerfully and eloquently. Now I've seen you in action, so to speak. And I'm like this woman knows her stuff. She's amazing. She's doing a million different things. Now. I actually want to support you and amplify your work because I've seen that you're worth it, so to speak, right? And so in addition to just networking and saying hi to people, it becomes even more powerful when you can show your work in front of more other people. So one way you can do that in an organization is of course, you're doing your daily work and you have a couple of people on your team and your manager.

But if you can get involved, for example, in other internal projects where you're working with different people so that more people can get exposed to you in action that they can actually see the quality of your work that makes it easier for them to vouch for you later on because they've actually seen you and, and they know that you do a good job.

Yeah. Yeah. So do some extra work and talk what you're doing that probably you're interested in like that you can make really outstanding, bring some outstanding results and make a positive impression. Exactly. Yeah. Um I'd like to talk a little bit more about your research, advancing gender equality and venture capital and move to uh women uh female founders and the UC funding. So what actually provoked you to start working on this topic? And were there some unexpected findings that you, you know, would like to share with us?

Yeah. So the venture capital industry and the, the venture funding landscape for entrepreneurs is one of the worst when it comes to gender inequality. The gaps are absolutely enormous. So in the US, only about 9% of venture backed entrepreneurs are women. There's a lot of 90

percent. Yeah, they got the money from VCM.

Exactly that get money from VC specifically. And only less than 3% of the more than $130 billion every year that's given out in VC. Funding goes to female founders. So I mean, the gaps are just absolutely enormous and only about 11% of venture capitalists themselves are women.

So if you stack venture capital next to other industries, this is overall one of the most male dominated industries in the entire economy. And so when the opportunity came up to study this industry and my colleagues, Iris Bennett and Anisha Cindy and I were really motivated because we thought if we can figure out some insights that work to increase gender equality in VC, which is pretty much the toughest environment that you can imagine, then if we can do it there, you know that we can do it

everywhere,

right? Uh And the other reason why I was really motivated to do. This project is venture capital, has a huge role in shaping the Society of Tomorrow because by deciding which ideas get funding and which ideas get basically an opportunity to um come to fruition, they are literally shaping what our world, world looks like in five or 10 or 15 years from now.

I mean, think of companies like Google and Facebook and Uber, they were all venture funded and they have really, really massively changed how our whole society. And if women's vision and women's ideas and solutions get excluded from consideration, which basically they do today, then we have no say in how this world gets shaped. So it's super, super, super critical to make sure that female entrepreneurs have an equal shot compared to men in gaining

funding. Yeah, where is there some unexpected findings that you would like to share with us? Like you thought that this is 100% for example, is like this and they like, wow, but actually it's totally different, but probably the Romani and I'd like to dive deeper in it, but maybe something that yeah, you didn't expect. And um

so I didn't, I think the biggest surprise for me unfortunately was I was expecting there to be a much higher level of awareness of the numbers and the challenges. Um And in fact, especially among the men who are still in power, who run the most well established successful VC funds that awareness is close to zero. And that, perhaps in part explains why nothing has happened is because the people who still run that ecosystem who run that world, um, are just not in tune with these diversity related challenges at all. They are going about their work exactly as they were before. Um, the other thing that the challenge in venture capital and it wasn't, uh, too much of a surprise for us, but it's important to mention is that those firms are really small. The typical venture capital firm has 3 to 5 investments

that more they think. Right.

Right. And so the types of solutions that work for huge companies like Google that hire, you know, tens of thousands of people a year and employ more than 100,000 people. Um You have to adapt some of those solutions when you only have 10 people in a company and there's no one who even is in charge of hr there's no person who's in charge of things like hiring and performance evaluation

reporting.

Exactly. Um But fortunately, you know, those those solutions still exist and a lot of the principles that we were talking about in the context of interviews, making them more structured and more formalized and standardized, those principles still apply even if you're working with very small companies.

Um You know, recently I encountered one article where one famous VC announced a $2 million fund for women and minorities and there was a comment from a man who said like, wow, it's less than my seed around. So my question is like, is it a trend that we pretend like they do good by allocating unequal amounts of money to women and men or where women actually receive significantly less? Hm.

Yeah. So the research tells us that female founders on average tend to receive about a quarter of the amount of funding that they seek, whereas male founders get about half. So there's a huge gap there. Um I think I agree with you that it's a bit of a trend now to have VC funds that specialize in funding female entrepreneurs or other traditionally underrepresented entrepreneurs like entrepreneurs of color. Um I think that's great and for the entrepreneurs that get money through these channels through these channels, right? I mean, it's invaluable if they wouldn't have gotten funding otherwise, but it's exactly as you point out the money in these funds, the amount of funding that they have available is so small compared to the total amount of funding in VC that goes to entrepreneurs. So it's a little bit like the example with the one hiring manager out of 10 who charge for diversity, right? Is my concern is that when there's these diversity specific funds out there, then all the other 99.9% of funds can sit back and say, well, we don't need to worry about it because those guys are worrying about diversity over there.

Whereas in order to really make any kind of difference, every single fund has to be focused on making sure that they are really uh giving all entrepreneurs an equal shot at success. So those women focused funds alone, just because they're so small, I'm not really gonna make a dent in the numbers in the short term.

Do you think that, oh, maybe from the perspective of the research perspective, is it again unconscious bias that women actually get much less money than, than men?

Yeah, it is. That's still the biggest driving force. So we have studies to show that, for example, investors ask women founders and male founders different types of questions. Uh And this data comes from a pitch competition. Uh The techcrunch disrupt competition in New York and they found that male founders raised about five times as much money as women founders on average. And they traced that gap in funding back to the fact that the men, the male entrepreneurs tended to be asked promotion oriented questions which were questions about the potential upside and future opportunities and positive, you know, how big can your revenues grow? How quickly are you going to grow? Whereas the female entrepreneurs tended to be asked prevention oriented questions which were all about threats and losses and how to safeguard against potential negative things. You know, how are you going to protect your market share? What's your backup plan for?

So and so and such eventuality? Um and our common human tendencies, we tend to ask answer, pardon me? A question in the same orientation that it's asked. So if you ask me about all this upside, I'm just going to answer by talking to you about all this wonderful upside potential, which is what invest I hear about. But if you ask me about all these threats, well, now I'm going to answer about all these threats and now we're talking about, you know, these negative eventualities and the investors weren't doing this on purpose, they weren't doing it consciously, it was purely an unconscious bias effect.

And it's uh another type of situation where there's quite a simple solution, which is like in interviews, if you have a standard set of questions that you ask all your founders, then by definition, you're putting the women and the men on a on a level playing field because they're all asked the same questions.

So what I I'm wondering uh what, what are they thinking for this? Like you talk to some wishes and did they like, well, I didn't realize that or like from now on, we are going to do this and we are going to, how did they react in general?

Yeah, so they were very surprised. So this was definitely new information to them. So, so we did that awareness raising that I was hoping to do and I think people are always hesitant and concerned when the solution represents a change to the way they currently do business, right?

So if I have said

the solution,

so if I had said, you know, the solution is to send everyone to a two hour unconscious buying training, course they would have been like, ok, great done. That's easy because it is easy. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that those trainings do nothing to actually shift people's behavior and actually improve diversity when the solution that I present this, oh, you have to actually change how you do your work. You have to make a real structural change or process change.

That's when people get much more hesitant and they're like, oh, we have to think

about it. It is complicated. It's like every time I do something connected to that field, I need to control myself, right? I need to change the patterns. I need to change my behavior. I need to uh to maybe read some questions. So I am objective. It's like, why would I do that? Right? What would it change? Like it would bring me more money or like, like I'm just thinking from the perspective of V CS, like how they might be thinking and that it really takes takes time to um to raise awareness.

Well, actually going back to your earlier question about what was the most surprising, this was in fact, very surprising. I talked to a bunch of white male, senior venture capitalists who without me asking, started talking about how much they value diversity. And they said, oh, you know, I was a phd scientist and I worked in a lab with so many women and it really was better for the team dynamic and we had better conversations and better problem solving. I'm a firm believer in diversity. And then I would gently ask them and say, OK, well, interesting. So you say on the one hand, you really believe that diversity creates better performance and better decision making, but your firm has only men as investment decision makers. So there's a contradiction there. How do you make sense of that? And then the answer you'd get is, oh, well, you know, it's a long term process, the pipeline we're working on it, we need to keep working on it. Maybe all these excuses, right? And so there's just such enormous dissonance in what people say they believe and perhaps even what they actually believe. I I'll give this gentleman the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he actually did believe in the importance of diversity and what they do, the actions and the thoughts and the beliefs are just pointing in opposite directions.

It's like my, our mind is playing some tricks with us. We think that uh we may look like this or we behave like this, but in fact, we don't do not behave like this or like do and same what you are saying with a gentleman. Um Here's a question and everyone who's listening to us, we've got 10 minutes for questions, please feel free to ask them. And here's the question as a female interested in VC I realized that career progression is limited. If I enter VC as an entry level analyst, do you think it's better for females to first become founders and then exit into V CS or what's the solution? What would be the best?

That's an excellent question. So being an entrepreneur yourself and then pivoting into investing is certainly one of the established paths. So a lot of people do that. That's one of the most common kind of entry mechanisms into VC that of course, presumes that you're somewhat successful as an entrepreneur. Um And so it's hard to judge, you know, whether that would be the best and fastest route to get to where you ultimately want to be. If that's being a VC investor, I got that advice a similar advice years ago when I was considering um some roles in uh diverse and inclusion in companies, uh being kind of like a diverse and inclusion director. This was years ago before I went into research and some people said, you know, if you want to work on diversity and inclusion first, just go into the main business and do some business kind of profit and loss management role after five years. And then when you built your credibility and build your reputation in the company, then you can start focusing on DN and I respectfully ignored that advice because I think life is too short. If you know what you want to do and you have a vision, go get it, go execute on that vision. Don't get sidetracked by doing something else and sitting around in a holding pattern for five years.

First, maybe five years, we'll get 10 years, maybe 20 years. And then,

exactly, then all of a sudden you wake up and you say, oh

my God. Yeah. And like probably it's too late already to become, you know, a specialist in this field and work on the D I. So, yeah, do not wait. And

so if this is what you want to go for, then go

for that. Yeah, absolutely. Um I know in your research you also shared about some industrywide organizational and inter personal barriers to gender equality and inclusion and venture capital. Maybe we can touch them a little bit because I think it's, it's super important because what you share that mostly we are trying to fix individuals, right? But rather than on focusing on the change on the other levels, but maybe you can share more about that.

Yeah. So a great example of that is all these stories about harassment and sexual harassment in DC, which are sadly all true. Um But that's an example of individual level unconscious bias and behavior. Um And we focused completely on that, we say, oh, it's just these bad apples, these men who are harassing women. It's so terrible and it is terrible. But what we don't talk about is why that's possible. And it's possible because organizations VC firms don't have any policies around harassment. Right. Because it's all men, those organizations so that breeds a culture where that type of behavior is tolerated. It's because V CS don't publicly call each other out and refuse to do business with those bad apples. So I guess the point I'm trying to make is there's always going to be individuals who are bad apples, just like all of us, humans are always gonna be unconscious bias. That's just the fact of how our brains work. But if we're put into a different context, if the environment around us is changed or if the organizational policies and processes around us are changed, we actually start to behave differently as humans.

And that's why the evidence suggests that if we want to change people's behavior, the more effective approach to change their behavior, for example, to stop harassment is not to target the individual necessarily, but to target the system, the system around them.

Yeah. Uh When we are talking about, you know, human mind, what about artificial intelligence? Do you think that what, what is the role of artificial intelligence in the context of preventing actually biases? So

it can be a very powerful force for good and a very powerful force for bad? Um So a great example is anonyms resumes. That's one of the evidence based solutions that works to decrease bias and evaluation. So if we take the person's name off, right. We don't know who we're evaluating, we're just looking at their resume or in the case of orchestras. If you put a curtain so that you can hear, you are the person who's auditioning, you can hear the music they're playing, but you can't actually see them and who they are, that reduces bias A I allows that to do on a scale that would have never been possible before, right? Because for someone to manually go through and take the names off of 100,000 resumes, I mean, it's right. And a machine can do that in two seconds. So A I has a tremendous potential to help us be bias processes. But where we have to be really careful is that we don't bake our unconscious biases into the A I that we create. So there's good examples, you know, when Google and Amazon trained some of their algorithms right, on existing data sets. Um And these data sets, for example, consisted of pictures of women at home, cooking, cleaning, and pictures of men in suits with a suitcase in the office. The algorithm learned that men are associated with the workplace and women are associated with the home.

So what we did is we encoded our own present stereotypes and biases into the algorithm which then amplified them even further. So that's the big caution with A I is uh And by the way, it's like any other tool, right? To hammer. If you're building a house and you use it properly, it's a wonderful tool. If you use it to beat up other humans, it's a horrible and destructive tool. So the tools I would say inherently are not good or bad, it's how we humans choose to use them. That's what makes the difference. The

only thing that is clear that we need to involve more female engineers into building those algorithms otherwise they could really end up what you're like, you're sharing and um not doing good at all. And then people will believe OK, this is an algorithm and this is the algorithm is not biased because it's not a human, but actually humans fed it with the information and with certain uh with certain, you know, images uh different uh different other stuff that um can actually contribute towards um towards negative future and impact.

Yeah, exactly. Everyone we have five minutes and please feel free to share your questions. Don't be shy. Um Yeah, maybe something uh questions that I wanted to ask at the very beginning because uh many times these terms, I, you know, being confused or maybe are unclear. So what is the main difference? What is the difference between diversity, equity and inclusion?

Oh And that's a great question. I love answering this question. And so there's a very popular analogy that's being used to explain this, which I find really helpful. So, diversity is like being invited to a party. It's who are the people who are actually in the room. Um So diversity is purely just the number of different kinds of people. And of course, diversity is visible dimensions like ethnicity and gender. But it's also all the indivisible invisible dimensions under the surface. It's your working style, it's your religion, it's your political beliefs, uh your socio-economic status, the type of childhood family you grew up in, right? All of those are dimensions of diversity. Inclusion then is once you've been invited to the party and you are in the dance hall.

Are you actually invited to dance on the dance floor? Because I might walk into the party and I see that only people with red hair are on the dance floor and everyone else is standing on the sidelines. Well, if I'm a person who doesn't have red hair, I might not feel like it's my place to actually go dance because all the people who look like me are not dancing. And so that's inclusion is once we have people in the door, in the party, in your company, are we actively asking them and encouraging them to contribute their talents, their perspectives, their viewpoints. And then the third part of the analogy equity is if people actually are dancing, what type of dance floor are they dancing on? So maybe we invite everyone to the dance floor, but we put some people on the hardwood part, which is really easy to dance on. And other people have to dance on the carpeted part where their feet are constantly getting stuck on the carpet, right? Or maybe we ask some people to put on dancing shoes when they get on the dance floor and then we ask other people to put on rain boots which are very clunky and difficult to dance in.

So equity is the question of once you have people in your organization, once they're in the party and they're on the dance floor, do they have the same opportunity to show off their dance moves to show off their talents and perspectives as everyone else? Or are we doing something that puts them in a more compromised position? Right? Where somehow impeding their ability to bring their full selves to the situation?

That, that, that's a beautiful analogy. I think it, it was really clear for everyone and even even a child can understand it. So it's really, really clear and I think that everyone who wasn't sure could, um, could learn more about what is the difference between diversity, equity and inclusion. Um, here's another question. I am a 36 year old undergraduate studying computer science. I will be touching 40 when I graduate.

Would this affect my chances of being hired once I graduate? Hm.

I sincerely hope not. And congratulations on pursuing your degree. That's absolutely wonderful news. Um, one of the dimensions along which bias, sadly has been shown to exist in the workplace is age, um, and older applicants have been shown to be sometimes discriminated against in hiring, um, very unfairly.

Right. And it's not at all kind of appropriate or right, because I would argue that you probably with, I'm sure you've done a lot of other things in your career up until now, you probably bring much more ability and perspective and interesting skills and talents to the job than someone else who gets your, the same degree as you are and graduates at 22 0 work experience and very little life

experience, right?

Um And so I, if I were in your shoes, the only piece of advice that I could give is try to emphasize in addition to your education, which is amazing. All the other special things that you bring uh the skills, the talents, the perspective, the things that you know, how to do because I think that will actually make you much more valuable to the employer as some of the people that you might be competing against for jobs.

Good point. I think that uh people need to bring up this point that you're sharing that, hey, I have these skills developed, I have these experiences and I think that's why I'm going to be better that other people who are applying just to know your, your, uh basically your value and your skills that you have and the, the things that you can do in addition to basically your passion, which is computer science or engineering.

Yeah.

And it's the same for women who are looking to return to the workplace after having taken some time off. You know, maybe you took care of kids or a family member or something and you had a gap in your employment history and now you want to go back, your background is what it is. Don't try to change it. Don't sort of feel like you have to explain it or make excuses for it, own it and use that difference to your advantage and say, hey, because I took the gap and here's what I did or because I had this whole other career before and now I transitioned into computer science. Here's the unique value that I can bring as a result

of that. It's beautiful. I love that one final message. If there is something that you would like to see changing in the world, what would that be? And how do you think that we can contribute towards change?

I think the biggest thing based on the research is that we stop trying to change the human brain because we're just banging our head against the wall and it's never gonna happen. Our brains are very powerful beasts and instead focus on what is within our control, which is changing some of the structures and systems of organizations and of society to um create the level playing field. So we mentioned a number of those today, right? And as you can see, it's often not structural change sounds very scary, but it had a have to be, it can be something as simple as developing a list of five questions that you ask of all entrepreneurs that you encounter or all people that you're hiring for your company or setting goals, right?

Um And then making those goals public so that there's an accountability mechanism and that you actually follow through on what you're trying to achieve. Those are examples of structural changes. Another examples uh example, going to back to the issue of role models and instead of seeing women, right?

Networking, how important it is to see people like you is looking at the pictures on the walls of your office or the walls of your home, uh or the names of conference rooms in your office, you know, are they representative of the diversity that you're trying to create and that you want to see or have you inadvertently just put up all pictures of white men on the walls and your conference rooms are named after J Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

You know what I mean? Let's name one after Grace Hopper. Let's name one after Marie

um

very straightforward, but that's a system change and that's what's gonna help to make a big difference um in terms of general.

Thank you very much, sir for this eye opening and interesting conversation. We received lots of questions on different uh in in here and hopping. And um people were super involved. And I think that what you shared is very valuable in different directions for hiring specialists for people who, who working in the field of diversity inclusion for V CS who are listen and I will listen to us female founders. Thank you very much from for bringing this different diverse perspective to the table for doing what you are doing. I think it's super important needed and I see I can feel and everyone can feel how passionate you are. Thanks a lot for your time and I'm looking forward to having another amazing fireside chat or having you at any of our events. I think it would be super helpful. Absolute pleasure. And thanks a lot for joining us and if you have some time you can stay for networking and everyone who is uh joining us here on hoping you can uh actually go to the networking area and do some networking and don't be shy. Say hi. Thank you very much, Siri and having you have a great day, Joanna. Bye.

You too. Thanks everybody for joining.

Bye. So thanks everyone for joining us. And you can, as I mentioned, everyone who is on hopping can do some network and also be serious between each other. More fireside chats are coming. Stay tuned. Follow us on Facebook, linkedin, Instagram, Twitter. We are super active on all social media. We also have a blog, check out some useful tips, we share different inspired interviews and let us know in the comments if you're joining us elsewhere, let us know um who you would like to hear and why maybe tag also these people, tag women, tag network and social media and say, hey, you should invite this person or you should invite uh another person.

And thank you very much for joining us. I'm wishing you a great day, a great evening and or great good morning wherever you are and uh, see you online. Bye bye.