Transcriber: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Almost one year ago - it was February, I believe, 2019 -
I was browsing in the Internet, and I saw this.
Women built the tech industry.
Then they were pushed out.
Pretty powerful headline, don't you think?
Actually, this is true.
Women were at the forefront of the tech industry
back when technologist jobs were considered menial, akin to typists.
In 1946, the US military selected a team of people
to work on the world's first computer.
Guess what.
More than 50 percent were women.
The lady in the picture is Margaret Hamilton.
She was the head of the coding team that charted Apollo 11's path to the moon.
Another most renown lady of those times was Grace Hopper.
Grace Hopper was a US Admiral who invented the first compiler.
It was actually her programming and coding skills
that enabled the United States to model the impact of the atomic bomb.
Let's look at some numbers.
Thirty-seven percent is the estimated, by the US federal government,
number of women, percentage of women,
that were taking computer studies between the '70s and the '90s.
This was actually the peak.
Thirty-seven percent, early '90s,
was the peak in the percentage of women who attended computer science fields.
At that time, the conditions of working in the tech industry
were not so glamorous,
but the women were known for their meticulous work ethic
and their attention to detail.
One of the great anecdotal stories of that time
was how Grace Hopper identified the first-ever computer bug.
She traced a glitch in the system to a moth trapped in a relay wire.
Today in the US, there's an annual conference every year named after her
to celebrate women in computing.
What happened afterwards
is that the computer industry became more lucrative.
The tech jobs were of a bit better status
and higher paid.
So the tech companies were looking to find the best profile
that would fit an engineering job.
But they didn't know, because the coding skill was really new.
So what they did is they developed a personality test,
a personality test that would help them identify
what a good computer engineer would look like.
That personality test was actually favoring people
who were not so social, who were not so extroverted.
It was the birth of the geeky profile.
(Laughter)
A computer engineer could only be nerdy and antisocial.
That was the industry demographic from then on, okay?
So what we know today as a stereotype,
of the male who's nerdy and anti-social as a programmer,
was actually part of this vicious circle that started at that time.
As the personality test favored more men,
then the industry got more representation of men,
then that fueled the public perception
that computer engineering is only suitable for men.
So where we are today.
In 2018, it was March, I think - March 8th, International Women's Day -
the European Commission announced a study.
The study was named "Women in the digital age,"
and, actually, it has a lot of concerning facts
about the representation of women in the European tech industry.
So today, there are four times more men
taking up computer-related fields or tech-related fields.
Based on the same study,
out of 1,000 female graduates of universities in Europe,
24 are studying in tech-related fields,
but then only six end up working in a digital job.
For every 1,000 of male graduates,
49 end up working in a digital job.
What's even more concerning
is that women are leaving the digital jobs more often than men.
Actually, in 2015, it was measured
that nine percent of women left the industry.
The same year, the percentage for men was 1.2 percent.
And this happened at the age between 30 and 44,
which is, of course, the primary working age.
At the same time, it is the age that most Europeans are having their first child.
So the gender gap is increasing.
If we talk about digital entrepreneurship,
the European Startup Monitor
measures the startups that have female founders to 14.8 percent.
Startups that have only female founders
got only five percent of the global venture capital investment.
And the average investment on the female-founded startups
is dropping every year of the last five years.
I graduated computer engineering in the early '90s.
It was the time that the gender gap was not so visible in the numbers,
but, of course, the unconscious and sometimes conscious bias was there.
I had to sign up for volunteering work at the computer center in the university
and, of course, miss a lot of parties outside of school to be taken seriously
by my professors and my classmates.
You see, I was not the geeky profile,
and femininity at that time was actually adversely related to brilliance.
When I got into the professional life, things seemed easier and better.
I was learning everyday, I was growing every day,
and I had respect from my colleagues.
And then I decided that it was about time to move up with my career,
to move on, to develop my career.
"You can't - you are a mother.
What would your husband say?
Who would take care of your kids?
How will you manage the long hours?"
Surprisingly, nobody asked me before how I managed the long hours
when I had to deliver a complex project with quality and on time.
(Applause)
My husband is in this room today, and I guess he's smiling.
(Applause)
Today, I am thankful for this painful moment of truth
because it made me stronger,
because it fueled my determination.
So I worked really hard to make it happen.
I worked really hard to make my dream come true.
And, of course, there was advancements,
and, of course, there were setbacks,
and, of course, I was faced with unconscious bias many times,
which was not only gender, I have to tell you.
In the years of the Greek crisis,
I had to to overcome the unconscious bias that the Greeks are incompetent, okay?
Very incompetent and lazy and corrupt, okay?
(Laughter)
But I made it.
And today, today I feel I need to share this story
because I want to empower young women to follow up on her dreams.
So this evolution that I have lived,
because technology has been growing exponentially over the past years,
was not an inclusive one.
More than 50 percent of the population has not been part of that.
But is it only gender that was left out?
It was not only gender,
because diversity doesn't have to do only with whether you are male or female.
It has to do with age.
It has to do with ethnicity.
It has to do with color.
It has to do with religion or culture.
Take for example the older people today.
Today, we are living in a time
that we are having for the first time
five generations at the same time in the workplace.
In the next five years, analysts expect
that 25 percent of the workforce will be over the age of 55.
How do we make sure these people are not excluded?
How do we drive cross-generational collaboration?
How do we give opportunities for them to thrive
and to leverage the benefits of digitization?
Why is this discussion happening right now?
It is happening first of all because there is a business case around it.
Based on McKinsey,
companies who have top female executives
and have good diversity rate in their executive boards
are 35 percent more likely to be more profitable.
The European Union has estimated the annual productivity costs
of this nine percent of women leaving the workplace
to be 16 billion euros.
But it's not only the country or the company financials.
Diversity is an action.
Inclusion is a culture.
Belonging is a feeling.
And the need for all three is deeply human.
When we empower people,
when we give them the opportunity
to bring their strengths and the best talents,
then we all win.
And today, it's even more than that.
With the advance of technology, such as AI,
a lot of things, a lot of activities - like, for example, recruiting -
have been outsourced.
So in 2018, there was a Reuters article
that revealed that one of the major e-commerce companies globally,
a machine-learning-fueled recruiting bot,
was disqualifying women over men.
Τhe machine-learning algorithm
used CVs that were gathered in the company for a period of more than 10 years
to learn and identify patterns
that would drive what would a good candidate be.
Of course, those CVs were coming mostly from men.
So the bot, when it was finding words like "women" in the CV -
like participation in a women's soccer club -
it would disqualify that CV.
Biases that exist in the data
in a world that is becoming more and more data-driven,
in a world the decisions are taken based on this data
can be reproduced, can be reinforced,
can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I am Greek; I was raised in Greece.
I was educated with the principles coming from the ancient Greek philosophers.
And as old-fashioned as this might look today,
it is actually some ethical values, some timeless values
that we need all to go back to.
We need a new ethical coach in technology today
that would earn trust,
that would help technology be trustworthy,
that would make us believe that it will be used in a fair way.
So when we talk about new technologies, like artificial intelligence,
we want them to be fair, to not have biases.
We want them to be transparent
for us to understand how data are used, how decisions are made.
We want them to work in a safe and reliable way.
We want them to respect our privacy.
We want them to make sure they include and they empower everyone.
So we know we need inclusive technology.
To do that, I would refer to Simon Sinek's talk "Start with why."
"Why" matters.
Why are we building technology?
Technology is here to enhance our capabilities,
to help us make smarter decisions faster,
to help us make less mistakes.
"Why" matters.
Then "who."
Who's involved in building the technology?
We need more diverse teams building the technology.
"Who" matters.
And then, finally, "how,"
how transparent we are about the way we are building technology.
How are we using the data?
How are the machines learning?
"How" matters.
In an evolving digital world,
as we welcome robots, holograms, artificial intelligence
and more and more automation,
people are getting more and more scared what the future will be.
What will be the future of jobs?
What will be the future of us as humans?
The future is as good as we make it.
Technology has always been here to enhance our capabilities.
If you ask me, what would be our future as humans?
I would tell you,
we need to get back to our core identity,
to the core of who we are,
and that's empathy.
Empathy is not a "nice to have."
Empathy is absolutely essential to us as humans into the future.
Empathy is about overcoming biases.
It's about respecting each other.
It's about understanding or trying to understand.
It's about listening.
It's about showing compassion.
It's about offering support.
The future will be good
if it only includes and embraces every talent on earth.
The future will be good if it only relies on empathy.
In a digital world that would respect every individual's talents,
that would empower everybody to get high, higher, highest,
these headlines will not be there anymore.
Today, I have one ask of you.
Let's make this decision collectively.
Inclusion starts with I.
It starts with each and every one of us.
Let's act, let's listen, let's understand, let's respect each other.
Let's empathize.
Let's make this evolving digital world a more inclusive place.
Thank you.
(Applause)