>> From Palo Alto, California,
it's The Cube covering
VMware Women Transforming Technology 2019
brought to you by VMware.
Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at VMware,
for the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology event,
WT squared one of my favorite events.
Excited to welcome to The Cube,
the CEO and founder of MotherCoders, Tina Lee.
Tina it's great to have you on the program.
>> It's nice to be invited, thank you.
>> So this event one of my favorites
because when you literally walk in,
up outside where the registration is you just feel,
it's very natural authentic sense of community of women
wanting to engage with each other, share stories.
And of course, this morning's keynote kicked off with a bang
with Joy Buolamwini talking and sharing about
this massive bias in facial recognition technology.
Like wow, there's a lot of technology for good
but there's some real issues we've got
to identify and fix.
Tell me about your involvement in WT squared.
What makes it worthy of your time?
>> Well, anytime I can come and hang out
with like minded women,
who want to create change, I am all about it.
And having that space to be together physically,
I think is really important.
Because to build authentic relationships, to build trust,
to create, you know, a space where I can tell you stories
I normally don't bring up at work right,
it requires us to have a dedicated time and space
to be together to do that.
So I am just so honored to be a part
of this conference today.
>> So tell me a little bit about your career journey
and the impetus for MotherCoders.
>> Yeah, so I started MotherCoders
after my second child was born.
And I had started my career
as a management consultant at Accenture.
I went on to become a technical recruiter
and then went back to grad school and got a master's degree
in learning design and technology
from Sanford School of Education.
So I was ready to find a way to use technology
to change the world, to teach, you know,
people how to engage politically and civically.
And then once my second daughter was born,
it just became increasingly difficult
to keep up with my technical skills.
I had been going to the meetups,
I had been going to the hackathons,
I had been going to these evening workshops.
But after the second child came along,
I was a mom with a two year old and an infant.
So the only thing left to me was online learning.
And it works for some people, not for me,
not for many people.
And what I was lacking was a community
that was there to support me and just be there with me
struggling through this.
Someone, you know, people who would understand
what I was going through.
And I did not find that in most spaces
that I was trying to get these technical skills from.
So I thought,
why don't we have our own meetup for moms, you know.
And my grandmother had raised me so I had envisioned,
Mom's over here with the laptops,
grandma's over here with the kids,
and it would just be this fun community building experience.
I put up a Google form and within less than a week,
I had nearly a hundred women saying,
I want to come to this meet up.
>> Wow!
>> Some weren't even located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
So I knew I had tapped into something.
And to this day, I still get emails, tweets, you know,
DMs from women from all over the world
saying when is when MotherCoders coming to our community.
So I started MotherCoders really as a way to help moms,
women who have become moms,
gain technical skills so that they can get jobs,
that would enable them to contribute,
to shaping your future and then also make a living
that would enable them to take care of their families.
>> One of the things that I was looking at
when I was doing some research on you is some of the stats.
So let's talk numbers for a second.
Why this is so imperative and critical,
that betting on moms is smart.
Women reinvest 90% of their income back into their families
and communities.
Women drive 85% of business and consumer purchasing
with $2.1 trillion of spending attributable to moms alone.
So you think of the Amazons of the world or online
or brick and mortar retailers.
This is an important community that needs to be involved
in the design of technologies and products and services,
because it's going to have the impact is probably
not even quantifiable at this point.
So it seems like a this is so obvious yet,
to your point, you were saying,
I found myself in a situation where I didn't have other,
I couldn't find what I was looking for
so I had to create it.
And then suddenly there's this groundswell not suddenly,
almost instantaneously of wow, this is really,
there's really a need here.
Talk to me about getting women back in the workforce,
cause I mentioned as you were saying,
Oh my gosh suddenly I have two kids under two
I don't have the time and technology changes so quickly.
How are you able to help women re-enter the workforce?
>> Well, you know, what's really astonishing
is even women who had been technical before becoming moms
have a tremendous amount of trepidation about going back in.
It's like, you already learned it,
you used to be a software engineer,
it shouldn't be that hard getting back in.
But I think motherhood has a way of just
wearing down your confidence
and because the workplace is not friendly towards mothers,
the mothers penalty marks you
as someone who's less committed to your career
and less competent.
When that's the furthest from the truth
because you have all these motivations to go in there
least of which is taking care of your family, right?
So what we do is, a lot of it is just confidence building
and giving these moms a space to be with each other
and reassuring each other and knowing
that they're not alone, right.
The technical skills will come, it's just time and effort.
But the friendships that are forged, the sense of community
and belonging that these moms create with each other
is what sustains them.
And when they get hit with those rejections
because there's a gap in your resume or because, you know,
someone spoke to you disrespectfully,
because you're a mom, it's you have someone to go back to
and talk about what happened with,
so that you know, you're not alone.
So that component is actually really, really important.
We just don't do technical skills,
we bring in women from the field
to teach the specific topics.
So our moms get context around why data science,
why AI is suddenly hot, what are the issues, right.
And then the community part,
all those three things come together.
And at the end of our nine week program,
the moms walk away with a greater sense of purpose
and more clarity about their career path.
But then they also leave knowing they have a crew
behind them that they can access anytime
because they had spent a fair amount of time and effort
developing these relationships
that are going to be strengthened over time.
>> And to say strength in numbers,
we can say that to imply to anything in life,
but this is so true.
Finding your tribe, if you will of this isn't just me,
this is a pandemic.
And sharing those stories and helping build confidence
I think is so critical.
You led a workshop here at WT squared today.
Talk to me about some of the stories that were shared
along the lines of kind of helping
some women maybe re-find that confidence
that used to be there.
What were some of the things that came up today?
>> Well you know, the workplace hasn't really evolved.
And you know, even Melinda Gates is talking about this.
It was built for an era, that it's gone, right?
The reality is that now more than half of families
comprise of dual income earners,
who are leading these families and they need income
to lead these families
into a place of economic security, right?
So you talk about the workplace
and what women endure naturally
because our society isn't set up to support them.
All this pain and suffering is going to to come out.
And in spite of the setting that we have here,
we don't know each other, we're just a bunch of strangers
who came to talk to each other.
They were very generous in revealing their pain
and revealing stories.
So something that consistently came up
with a lot of the participants
is that there's this unspoken understanding
that you don't talk about your kids.
That if you're a mom, and you talk about your kids,
you kind of shoot yourself in the foot.
In fact, sometimes it's not even tested, it's explicit.
Someone talked about how her manager would say things like,
don't talk about your kids cause you're stressing out
the rest of the team cause if they don't understand
and it doesn't matter, it's not relevant here.
When that is such a huge part of your identity.
Everyone comes back to work on Monday morning
to talk about what they did for the weekend.
>> We're humans.
>> Yeah, and if you are constantly in a position
where you have to perform and hide yourself,
you can just imagine how that would impact
the way your creativity would come out
or ideas you would share
or how you show up for your colleague.
>> It's incredibly damaging.
>> Yes, yes.
And we are just not enabling all this innovation
and source of power that are locked up in moms.
Both in and outside of the workforce,
because we're not letting them back in
once they get kicked out and coming back so hard, right.
So a lot of the stories that were shared
has to do with these every day,
not even like earth shattering events,
it's just normal everyday interactions
at like the water cooler or Monday morning chatter
that already makes moms feel even more isolated
than they already are.
>> So what are some of the things that you're going to take away
from the workshop that will help influence the direction
of MotherCoders throughout the rest of 2019 and into 2020?
>> Well you know, one of the stats
that I always keep in my head,
is that 86% of women become mothers in the US.
And for the large part,
they're not doing it by themselves, right?
So when we talk about moms -- >> That's is true.
>> we're talking about families, right?
And I have this hunch that men don't want to be at work
all the time either, right?
They don't want to be this bread winning person
who has to do all these things to appear masculine.
So it's damaging for everyone.
And if we were to create some ways to release some pressure,
off of caregivers in general, right,
not just mothers, fathers, people caring for elderly,
even pet owners.
Everyone will feel better, everyone would benefit.
So my main takeaway leaving this conference
is that the pain that the moms are feeling at work,
the ones that are employed, are very similar to the ones
that are trying to get back in, right?
The pain, the biases, it runs across our culture
to be honest.
And when you're trying to hack culture,
it's all about storytelling, it's all about figuring out
how do I make this resonate to people?
How do I turn their stories into actionable steps
that can be taken?
And that was what their last question was is,
what is the next step that you're going to take
when you leave this room?
And not surprisingly, everyone had an action step.
>> I love that.
Well Tina, thank you so much for sharing your story.
And excited to hear about great things that come
from MotherCoders.
Thanks for spending some time with me on The Cube today.
>> Thank you.
>> My pleasure.
We want to thank you for watching The Cube,
Lisa Martin at Women Transforming Technology fourth annual
thanks for watching.
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