Hello everybody. How are you doing today? I am Bridget Fry and I'm the Chief technology officer at Redfin. So there's this part of tech that I love. It's how tech is this industry that's driving progress and innovation in our society.You can teach yourself to hack before you finish high school or learn to build a computer out of cheap parts. But there's this other part of tech that I haven't loved. It's how tech hasn't always been welcoming to all kinds of people and how tech is also responsible for making some major problems in our society, worse things like deepening class divisions and, and social divides and you know, this divide that we have is at an all time high right now.

You have people over here who are complaining and outraged about the discrimination and all these other problems in tech. And then you have engineers over here with their heads down writing code. But what if we could harness everything that we know about how to solve hard problems as engineers and we applied it to ourselves to make the tech industry better for everyone. When I was growing up, I only knew about the good parts of tech. My dad is an appliance sales and repairman, someone who grew up working with machines. And when I was five, he brought home this big box and he put it in the middle of our kitchen and inside was an Apple two e this early Apple computer. And to him it was just like a dishwasher where you get the manual and you figure out how it works. And so that's how I learned to code with my dad just reading the manual and trying to work together on it. And so we moved that apple toy all over the country. You know, I lived in five different states in seven different houses before I turned 18. And I went to as many schools, um, all, all while I was growing up. And every time I moved, it was almost like I parachuted into this new place where everyone talked differently and I had the wrong clothes and I didn't know how to fit in or I'd moved from a school where it seemed like nobody was dating to a school where it seemed like everyone was.

And I remember spending an entire year, it seemed like in middle school studying this game of jump rope that seemed essential to forming female friendships. It wasn't just the intricacies of jumping a rope. You almost had to be an anthropologist studying every detail. Like I realized that some, that everyone was wearing these all white shoes and these colorful socks that cost $10 a pair, which was two hours of babysitting and there was no manual to figure this out. You just had to kind of do that on your own. There was nobody who was willing to explain it to me. And the hard truth about this, I realized at some point was that none of these people needed me as a friend. I mean, they already had friends And so loneliness motivated me to really put myself out there because I was the one who was feeling that way. I was the one who had to make these friendships. And so I think it made me maybe a little more extroverted than I otherwise might have been. And in the strangest way, I think this experience really prepared me for the tech industry where I've had a lot of those experiences that I'm a little bit different. I'm not just naturally walking into a room and being like everybody else and I couldn't sit around and wait for the tech industry to re invent itself to reflect the diversity of America.

You know, maybe it's not fair that this was harder for me, but it also wasn't fair that I had to move to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And when I was eight, you know that it's just you end up where you end up and you try to figure it out. But all of that stretching, I think it made me almost hyper aware of all of those differences between people, you know, did that happen because I'm a woman. Um, you know, all these little things that might seem just a little bit off. You know, I was at this conference a couple of years ago and I, I walked into the room and I started introducing myself to people as the Chief technology officer at Redfin. And this person I introduced myself to looked at me and said, oh, well, you know, did you, did you come up on the business side? And then about half an hour later, another person said basically the exact same thing. And you know, there are plenty of great technology leaders that do come up on the business side. But the thing is that, you know, I started going when I was five, I have a degree in computer science. I'm a chief technology officer at a public company.

And still people will look at me and make this assumption that I couldn't possibly be technical. And maybe this is no surprise when you think about the fact that, you know, fewer than one in five chief information officers and chief technology officers at the largest companies in the United States are women and it gets even, it gets even lower when you look only at, at tech companies in that cohort, just one in 10 of the chief technology executives at tech companies are women.

And so this sort of unconscious bias, you know, it's, it's everywhere and it can be overwhelming. It's just this sort of unknown X factor, you know, you know, that these things are happening to you all this unconscious bias and everything else, but there's often no way to pinpoint it. And so you can say, you know, well, this is, this is broken and the tech industry is broken. And sadly, we know that many women leave as a result and many people of color, many folks from underrepresented backgrounds, they leave the tech industry. And so sometimes people will ask me, you know, how did you, how did you do it? How have you survived in an industry that's so broken for so long. And I think there's a lot of different reasons, you know, I think one thing that's going on is, you know, maybe I've been, maybe been lucky. Um I've mostly been able to work with people who are pretty supportive of me. Uh Maybe it's because I started coding so young that I was willing to put up with a lot along the way. But I think one of the central things is that the way that I approach something that's broken is to try to fix it.

You know, my dad, he can get the most jinky refrigerator running again if he just has the right tools, if he just diagnoses the right problem. And so I think it's made me this diversity mechanic, you know, I, I rejoice when I hear that satisfying click that we solve just one little problem. We make one little thing better about diversity in the tech industry. You know, we're living through this sea change right now.

It's, it's punctuated by the Me too movement, racial justice movements. More people are stepping forward and telling their stories. You know, what, what is it like for Tim Gebre at Google or the Black Tesla employees who brought their concerns to management or Francis Hagen at Facebook who blew the whistle there. You know, we're in this watershed moment where more people are telling their stories and recognizing that we have a problem, but we don't know how to solve this problem. We don't know how to solve it for ourselves at a personal level. We don't know how to fix these problems for our companies. We don't know how to solve them for our industry, but this is what engineers do. You know, other people talk about problems, we solve problems. We don't give up until the cups and plates in the dishwasher come out clean on the other side. And we know that in order to solve these problems, we have to mix and match our ideas until we find the best ones. And so I want to share some of the tools and techniques that I've learned along the way that have helped to make the industry just a little bit more diverse.

So the first thing that any good mechanic knows is that you have to have the right tools for the job. I can't tell you how many times I made these special trips to the hardware store with my dad to get just the right tool that we needed. And I think in the tech industry you'll have, you'll hear people getting these wild debates about the purity of a particular programming language or these sort of esoteric debates. But I've really never had any patience for that. I want to keep that essential pragmatism that we have problems that we're trying to solve and that we're really trying to stay focused on those things and, and find the right tools to solve them. And I think about this a lot, even when I'm talking to other people, you know, I remember years ago I was, I was in this dreadful meeting. I had a heavy workload and I just didn't have time to be in that particular meeting. And if I'd had time to think about it, you know, I'd realize my goal in that situation was just to try to find a way to wrap up that meeting and politely leave, but that's not what I did. Instead, I kind of got out my watch. I looked at my watch and I just made this heavy sigh like, and it felt good for maybe two seconds. But then I realized just how rude I had been to the other people that were in the room and I had to apologize.

And the worst part of it was that at that point, there was just no way for me to leave the meeting gracefully. I think you see this a lot in our age of social media where it's so easy to express outrage and get into that echo chamber where it can feel good to have other people playing off of those emotions that you're feeling. But often that outrage doesn't lead to any solution. You know, nothing happens. Just like when I was in that meeting, it didn't serve any purpose for me to express that I didn't want to be in that meeting. And so now when I'm talking to other people, I almost feel like I have these massively parallel calculations going on in my mind. You know, what is my goal in this particular conversation? Am I trying to make someone laugh? Do I need to look someone straight in the eye? Maybe slow down my voice to really make a point? How can I predict the reaction that someone is going to have? And I find that, you know, I don't know if this is, I, I kind of drive towards solutions that are built to find consensus. So I'm often finding myself in a role where I have people in the room and I'm trying to get them to agree.

And I don't know if that's because I'm, you know, I'm a woman and society often gives those messages just to women that we should try to drive to consensus. But in my career, I've also had to learn to become comfortable with confrontation because confrontation is essential to business.

That's how you debate ideas. That's how you figure out the right way to move forward. So ultimately, you really have to be able to use all the tools in the toolbox when you're communicating with other people. Another thing that's worked for me is believing in continuous improvement and the perfectibility of flawed human beings and even of myself, this is important in an industry that believes in continuous improvement for some people but not others. You know, somehow if you're a hoodie wearing college dropout, the tech industry has this eternal optimism that you're going to be able to figure it out. Uh But if you're, you know, a 30 year old graduate of a developer academy, people say, you know, oh it's, it's just too late to join the tech industry like you couldn't possibly learn. So, you know, this is, this just isn't fair, it's not fair that the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world get that endless faith and other people don't, you know, most things can be learned, they can be learned throughout your life. I think Silicon Valley makes this worse with this sort of Steve jobs. You're either born with it or you're not ethos. This idea that talent is king. You know, it's not just about people who are coming out of boot camps or early in their career.

There's also this so called glass ceiling that you can hit later on in my early thirties, I was, I was moving through the ranks. I had taken on some more responsibility as a director and I was pulled aside and told that I just wasn't that strategic, that I was, you know, great at managing engineers, but I just wasn't able to provide that strategic thinking. And it really stung, you know, I was someone who was ambitious and wanting to really take on bigger roles over time. And so it stung to be told that there was some kind of gap in what I knew and I didn't understand what that meant. Like what is strategic thinking really? But, you know, I was unstoppable. I started breaking that down into little problems. I thought about, you know, who do I admire? Who's strategic? Who is somebody that I can use as a role model? What are all the pieces of this? How do I learn to get comfortable using data to make arguments? What are all the things that go into strategic thinking? And eventually I figured it out and I broke through and then I developed a program and, and an opportunity to coach other people at Redfin and um have also published on this topic and this has maybe helped other people, some of them from diverse backgrounds to get through the same kind of career barrier.

So it's just that change in mindset that things can be learned that made all the difference. And I think it's important to remember this along the way. Like you should ask for help, you should identify what skills you want to build and then ask for help in building those skills. You know, there are mentoring programs, there are different career ladders and career that are out there. You know, go ahead and select something and then tell all the people around you that that's something that you're working on. And this doesn't stop when you get to the C SUITE. A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to get better at public speaking. And so I got a public speaking coach and it's helped me to be able to come to events like this and spend time with all of you. I also a couple of years ago decided that I wanted to try to get on a board and that's something that I really had to ask for, help from people in my network to um help figure out, you know, how can I be a great board member? What are the types of boards that I would be most useful on? And that helped me to eventually be able to join the board of Premera Blue Cross. So this is something that you want to continue to develop all throughout your career.

So at some point when I became the Chief Technology Officer at Redfin, I realized you know, hold on. I'm, I'm actually responsible now for this whole organization and if there are diversity and inclusion problems, you know, those are happening on my watch, those are now things that I'm responsible for fixing. And it kind of put me in this role as the diversity mechanic for the whole company. And I started taking that approach, you know, if something doesn't work, try something else. And early computers kind of took this approach where they keep trying the same thing over and over.

So it was this wash r repeat, you'd tell the computer exactly what to do and it would keep doing that. But now we've seen of course, this machine learning revolution where your code can actually learn from its mistakes and keep changing it and modifying it and trying new things over time. And I think this is the same with a lot of diversity initiatives that you hear about in the industry where a lot of companies are read, they're running the same old subroutine over and over. It's, you know, let's go talk to the boot camps, let's give people unconscious bias training and all the rest. But the thing is you ultimately have to judge the Googles and apples and yes, red fins of the world on their results. And if you look at the results, you can only conclude that our present efforts are inadequate. We can't keep doing the same things. When I joined Redfin, I was the only woman on our Seattle tech team. And today, I'm proud to report that we have 37% women. We've also made a lot of progress on our racial diversity. So we have about 10% of our tech staff are black or Latino and these numbers are ticking up a little every year. You know, they don't yet reflect the diversity of America.

We still have plenty of work to do, but we see that gradual progress where every year it just gets a little bit better. And so actually a couple of years ago, we de prioritized our work on gender diversity, not that we wanted to step backwards, but we wanted to make more space to really figure out how can we drive our racial and ethnic diversity. And we had to try a lot of different things. We couldn't just keep doing the same thing over and over. So, you know, we started going, going to code academies and we'd find that sometimes there were almost more companies recruiting than there were students. And so we brought in that to look at historically black colleges and universities and large land grant colleges that are known for their diversity. We then looked at investing in our career development programs. So we wanted to make sure that we checked in with every engineer that we hired to see if they had any gaps, if they needed coaching or support to get to the next level because we wanted all these folks that we hired to be able to progress in those careers. Another thing that worked for us is diversifying our recruiting team. So now about half of our headquarters recruiting team are people of color.

And that has helped by bringing in their personal networks and their own experiences and helping us to be able to access pools of talent that we may not have known about. We've also embraced remote hiring. So that's been another way that we've been able to diversify our workforce, especially since the pandemic. And so over the last couple of years, we've tripled our share of Black technical employees and our Latino employees um have has grown by about a third. So again, plenty of more work to do. But this is something that you've got to keep at. And so I, I think that one thing to remember here too is you also have to invest in an inclusive culture. You really have to think about how do all the people on your team interact with each other? Everyone has their own way to throw errors, their own almost service oriented architecture for how you interact. And so that's something that we've always that we've invested in as well is just saying, you know, how do we make sure that we're able to handle conflict that, you know, we let more junior people speak first. We encourage people to talk in person instead of staying on slack. There's a lot of micro skills that you need to teach when you bring in people from different backgrounds. Why does any of this matter?

I mean, it seems like many of the most successful and admired companies in the industry aren't particularly diverse. But we have seen at Redfin that there's a real competitive advantage when you have a diverse team. And I want to tell you about one of those stories where we proved that a more diverse team was actually able to generate millions of dollars in revenue. And it's this project that we worked on for years called Tour Automation. So Redfin is a technology powered real estate company and one of the things we've invested in is automatically scheduling tours. So this is a very complex care science problem because you have somebody who wants to go on tour, you have to get a real estate agent to meet them there. Maybe they want to see more than one house. There's someone who lives in that house who has to clear out it's very complex. And the first time we built this feature, we were not able to get our real estate agents to actually adopt it. And the team kept going back and saying like, you know, oh, there must be a bug. We've got to tweak this, we've got to tweak that and they just couldn't break through. People were not using the software and we couldn't figure out why we changed up.

The makeup of the team and the new team that we put on the project happened to be a gender diverse one. It wasn't something we did deliberately, but it was just the way that it worked out. And that team took a remarkably different approach. They said we're gonna stop coding. They put down their keyboards and they went out into the field and started spending time with our real estate agents. They started spending time with the people who were scheduling tours and they figured out like that there were some major problems.

It wasn't just a lot of little tweaks that needed to happen to the software. They needed to take a fully different approach. That was more empathetic of that experience. After they made these changes, people started adopting the software and it drove millions of dollars in revenue for our company because when customers were able to come in and automatically schedule a tour, more tours happened, I think you could say, you know, why is it that a more diverse team is able to generate these results?

There's a lot that's been written about that. But I'll tell you my theory, which is that a team that is more diverse just naturally has to stretch a little more to understand each other. They have to, that team has to take that approach from day one of trying to figure out what it's like to be someone else and to empathize with others on their team. And then that extends when they go out into the world. And so start solving software problems. So I think as tech diversifies, we're going to see that the tech industry is able to tackle these bigger real world problems that are outside of our own direct experience. So this idea that we can all become diversity mechanics who are tinkering with ourselves and our companies and making things better for everyone. It makes me so hopeful that there's still an opportunity to make the tech industry better. But the last that I want to leave you with is that you also have to know what isn't broken. You know, maybe because I started coding when I was five. You know, I was, I was willing to put up a lot in this industry, but it doesn't mean that it hasn't been hard along the way. You know, it was hard to be the only girl on my high school computer coding competition team.

It was hard to be the only woman on the floor of 100 and 50 engineers at my first internship. It was hard when I decided that I wanted to have kids and people had all these opinions that I should leave the tech industry because it wasn't kind to mothers or that I shouldn't take any time off at all because you couldn't step out of tech even for a couple of months. And then when I decided I wanted to work from home for a couple of years to be closer to my kids when they were young. I mean, people had all kinds of opinions about that as well. But, you know, ultimately, I didn't want to have to choose between being a mom and a software developer. I wanted to do both. Well. And so ultimately, I realize it's not broken to be a software developer and a happy go lucky young woman and mother of two kids and someone who likes to go dancing and ac suite executive all at the same time. What's broken is that this is unusual at all. We have to make that room for all women to be imperfect or fun loving or feminine or goofy to be mothers and wives and sisters and friends without being crushed by that excruciating pressure to fit into a box that someone else made.

We have to start by first making that room inside just one woman inside ourselves. Thank you. Have a great day.