00:00:04

So where do all the women go? How do we grow diversity? And it, my name's Rosalind Radcliffe, and I'm a distinguished engineer in IBM, which means I've actually done pretty well with my career. I'm one of the top, I don't know, one or 2% in IBM technical career. So that's pretty good. I started in 1987 with a degree in computer science, in a field in which it was well male dominated, but it was better than it was today. If I look at this picture, this picture does not have who the women are because they weren't seen as important. They were programming the machine, but they weren't seen as important in history. So they were left out. If we look at COBOL, the most used language to run business, Grace Hopper, who invented it was not necessarily looked on as a very positive person back then. And if we look at the computers that we all learned about in hidden figures, they were the ones doing all the programming, but nobody really acknowledged them.

00:01:17

So if we look at history, women did most of the programming and then the 1980s happen. And these game machines came out and all the boys played and it became a boys game and it became the boys working on the machines. And if we look at the statistics today in 19 85, 30 7% of graduates were women in 2014. It was 17%. If we look at the statistics at girls in the field, it goes down. If we look at women quitting, it's higher than men by a long shot, they leave. Why do they leave? Because it's a very male dominated field. Do they leave? Because they're pushed out of doing the job. If you look at technical fields, men, women are more often pushed into project management or other leadership roles because we're really good at it, but we're also good at technology. So we have to change this trend.

00:02:26

We have to change the trend by starting early, we have to encourage people all along the way. We have to provide the visible role models. We have to allow people to learn. We start with things like first for inspiration and recognition of science and technology. It's a great program that starts in elementary school to help everyone of any type female male learn. We've got girls that code that help show girls that they're just as capable at coding starting early so they can learn. They can experience this. They can understand they can be in the field and be able to take advantage of this. We need to recognize everyone and what they're doing in the industry. We reward people. When we look at teams, recognize all of the people that are doing the work and recognize the females for what they're doing. One of the things that you'll notice is many females have different career paths because we get to be more flexible.

00:03:32

We have to be more flexible because we have more challenges. We also have different career paths. Everybody doesn't do it the same way. And we need to recognize that diversity is valuable in the career path. It's good to recognize that everybody's going to learn things different ways. We have to grow and mature. We have to let people go and learn in the fields. We have to let them learn to experiment and play. And honestly, this doesn't actually matter whether or not you're female or not, but we have to have proper mentoring. We have to have proper support, making sure that we support each other in this process and provide the visibility that it's possible to stay in technology. We need to provide networks, events like this worldwide networks of people learning to work together, to show visible road and old models to working in the field. We need to celebrate this diversity. Everyone has skill. Everyone can contribute. And when you have a team that is diverse, you're going to do better. You're going to have more innovation. It's up to all of us to make a difference. What are you going to do? I work with first, I work with a number of different things. We all need to do this to help grow diversity in our industry. Thank you.