We'll go ahead and get started. Hi, I'm Woody Walker. So nice to meet all of you. I work at Accenture and I run the digital sales team for North America.And what that means is I have about uh 25 employees so far that are under the age of 30 that will become sales professionals at our company long term. Uh We're growing that 1090 in the next year. And then we're hoping to have about 250 in the next five years. So I work very closely uh with junior professionals and have learned to help them grow um and teach them how to have grit and how to sponsor them. So today is really all about sponsoring women in STEM and teaching grit. I found my purpose in this area about five years ago and please jump in and ask me questions as I'm talking. So this will be very informal about five years ago where I decided to um go all in sponsoring women in stem, whether it was at a college and speaking at colleges or whether it was in my company, ensuring they all had mentors, making sure they had uh support so they could continue to grow.

Um Some of the statistics on women in STEM are pretty harsh. I think you might have seen them in my little bio but the quit rate of women. Technology is twice as high as that of men. Um And in the STEM sector, it's 41%. Men only quitted, about 17%. This is out, you know, outside of the great resignation where everybody is quitting right now and getting a new job. But uh the female quit rate in the tech sector is even higher, which is 56% of women. So these young ladies major in tech, they go to college, they get their degree, they come and they work in a tech company and they realize that they just don't have a voice. There's nobody supporting them and it gets really frustrating and they end up leaving. So um I really feel like my role is to ensure they have mentorship sponsorship, they gain confidence, they mentor others because that also gives you confidence. They have a growth mindset ownership and they have grit. So I'll just see if there's any questions so far. Ok, great.

I'll just keep going. Um So one of the first things I think is uh most important for success in a STEM industry is to get a mentor. And hopefully that has been a topic where everybody is now comfortable asking for someone to mentor them. I recommend both female and male mentors, they both can provide you different uh types of mentors. So I find my male mentors are a lot more business results focused. And then my ma female mentors remind me to have a purpose and empathy um and build trust. And so both of those different mentors are very important to me as I grow. And so I teach my team the same thing. So everyone has a female and male mentor. Um And as my team comes in and gets hired within the first six months, they become uh first they start off by being a mentee and then they become a mentor after six months to somebody else on the team. So everyone is mentoring someone and being a mentee and growing and helping each other. Uh That really provides all the females on my team a lot of support from um more uh senior leaders. I also encourage our sales leader leaders across the company to also mentor my team members. Um So I've got uh generation X and baby boomers, mentoring millennials and uh generation Z and reverse mentoring also happens, they're learning from each other. So I think that's extremely beneficial.

So, mentoring for me is the most important thing. Uh The second thing is sponsorship, sponsorship is different than mentorship. It's more of a relationship between a leader and a protege uh focused on advocacy. And it's all about ensuring that your um sponsor is your pr machine, that person will represent you in meetings with other executives. They will encourage others to give you a promotion. They'll, they'll speak on your behalf um when they're presenting to others on um what you should be doing next with your career. So it's a little bit different than a mentor that really kind of taking you under their wing and growing you. So I encourage all female leaders in tech or uh new females in tech starting up to ensure they have a sponsor and ask someone to be their sponsor. Again. It's very rare that somebody will turn you down really easy to do. Just say, look, I'm looking for a sponsor. I want to stay with this company long term. I wanna grow. Will you be my sponsor? Will you help represent me in this company? Will you teach me what you've done to get to where you're at? Um And it's, it's a different person than your mentor. It could be both, but I recommend you have a mentor and a sponsor. Um Any questions about the difference between mentorship and sponsorship so far? And I'm looking in the chat so. Ok, great. We'll keep going.

Um The next thing that's really important for staying long term and stem and being um successful is confidence. And between the ages of eight and 14 girls, confidence in themselves dropped by 30% before the age of eight. It's the same um level as boys in their class and they end up falling from 71% to 38% or 46% drop in confidence at that um age around, you know, 910, which is a shame they start to doubt their skills starting in their teenage years. And that kind of stays um throughout their career, we find that women will tend to not apply for a position unless they have 90% of all the requirements in that job description where men will look at it. There's 20% of the job description that they can meet and you know, they're applying for it and getting it. So try to encourage all of my um women sales and tech employees to encourage positions that they don't think they are ready for um to help them kind of build up their confidence. And again, having a sponsor and a mentor really looking out for you also helps you with that confidence.

Uh The next piece is of course a growth mindset um being kind to yourself, your mind hears what you say, uh embracing challenges and believing in your abilities, I ensure they're always working on certifications so that they're learning and growing. And every time they get a cert they get a little bonus. So I'm encouraging them to take that time to invest in themselves. I encourage them to network with other stem students and professionals and grow their circle circle. Sorry. And also I encourage them to confront uncertainties head on. We do a lot of self sabotage training that you can actually find for free. Um under uh everyone, sorry, just gonna answer that chat um under uh positive intelligence and self sabotage just helps you understand when you're self sabotaging. Are you a hyper achiever? Are you hyper vigilant? Are you a pleaser? Are you a stickler? You know, what are you doing to really kind of man, your confidence and not self sabotage yourself? Um It's hard enough to uh get feedback from others. And if you add negative feedback to yourself as well as others are adding it to you, that gets really hard. So we work on self sabotage and ensuring you have high self-confidence. And then finally that uh continuous learning, never stop learning about your industry yourself, your job. Um Of course, I really encourage that. Um And then grit through adversity.

So I think this is another very important thing having the uh grit and the support system to get through adversity at your company. If there's somebody sitting next to you in a board meeting and they're speaking over you or repeating your ideas and taking that credit, really having that grit to say, hey, I appreciate you repeating, you know what I just said in the meeting. Um Thank you very much. Uh I do want to expand on that idea that I brought up earlier. So you kind of take that power back. So we do a lot of training on how do you take your power back in meetings and how do you have grit and continue to um deal with adverse situations at work? I think we have come a long way in the last 10 years with diversity and inclusion and women have AAA much better seat at the table. But I've been in the industry for about 25 years and I could tell you about, you know, 1520 years ago, it was much more difficult.

So, um that purpose that I I um attached to, to really grow women and, and minorities and stuff has been uh very uh rewarding for me. And then I wanna speak about a couple of women that um I found to be extremely inspiring. One of them is Nicole Miliski. I saw her present at Gartner and she presented about grit through adversity. She's a retired United States Air Force officer and was the first female pilot ever selected to fly as part of the US um air demonstration squadron known as the Thunderbirds.

So she is now a speaker and advocate on behalf of suffered from tick borne illnesses. Unfortunately, um she was not able to stay uh as a thunderbird uh squadron leader. However, when she mentioned how she got there, you know, she was told no multiple times from uh her bosses and then a skip leader, two bosses above her, pulled her aside and said you can do this. You know, I have your back I will sponsor you. And that really made um all the difference for her. And then she became the fir first Thunder Thunderbird uh flight squadron um female leader. And now she helps women who have Lyme disease and she's just wonderful and inspirational. You can find her on linkedin. Um And Katie had the question, what resources used to help folks build those talking points for addressing moments head on in meetings. Um Some of the resources we use are uh strength finders which allows you to focus on what are your strengths and how do you build them? Others are the self sabotage classes? I was talking about um Others are making sure that you have um someone in the meeting that is kind of backing you up. Maybe you plan about that ahead of time. If, if you're always in a specific meeting with these specific people who talk over you or who take your ideas and then they can kind of say, oh, hey, Woody, wasn't that your idea that you mentioned a couple, you know, minutes ago?

Um You know, Michael, thank you for kind of reiterating her idea and just help each other with that. Um So multiple resources, whether it's teaching people how to be confident in themselves or speak up or finding someone um that will help support them in that meeting Katie. Was that what you were looking for? Um And so I was about to get to Oprah, so of course, Oprah is my other one. I don't know if you guys know Oprah's story. But at 19, she became Nashville's youngest and first black female television news anchor. Um And then at 22 she was recruited to co anchor the 6 p.m. news. But then they decided she was too dull and stiff and they demoted her, they demoted her to a show. Um, called People Are talking and she was heartbroken and you can read about this anywhere on the internet and really felt like she had failed. And then she decided she's just gonna be herself. She's not gonna try to be the news anchor, they want her to be. Um And as she became herself her true authentic self, she started blossoming and of course, you guys now know what at first appeared to be doma demotion turned out to be the best thing that could have ever happened to her. And she found her real calling and became a huge hit. So Oprah was number two. Um Natalie. So, um any other questions I can answer for you guys otherwise I'll jump a little bit into my background.

Um My background is I was born in Lebanon and immigrated here a long time ago. And so I had to deal with learning English um and went through a lot of um adversity myself and that's kind of how I learned how to have grit. And as I moved through some of the things we all moved through as immigrants and started to grow and got my first job. That was the first time I had a mentor and she was my cio and she was uh a female and really started changing the way I looked at career progression and how much I really needed her to support me and to have someone to ask questions to. Um So then I started understanding why mentors were so important. I also added a male mentor who was the CEO of my company at that point in time and continued to grow in my career. Um Then I added a sponsor who was the CEO of my company who then looked out for me in executive meetings and backed me up when my idea was not heard or someone spoke over me. And so all of these things that I share with you kind of built up over my career. And now I mentor about 25 young ladies at no cost and I help them understand how they can also progress their career over the things we talked about.

So uh to summarize um mentorship sponsorship, grit confidence, all of those are very important. And if you guys have any other questions, I'll be happy to take them at this time. Otherwise, thank you very much for attending.