>>: When we think about the future of the economy of the United States, if we don't have more
computer science majors, we're in big trouble. And if half of our population, the female half, is
not going to measure in computer science, we're in big trouble. If we don't have women
participating and creating the solutions to technical problems, I can promise you that the
technical solutions will not be as good.
>>: We need to have diverse teams to create the world's greatest innovations. We need to build
the talent pipeline, and to do that requires us to excite young women in middle school and high
school to the future of computer science.
>>: It's really important to have a strong foundation at an earlier age with computer sciencerelated tools, like simple programming, or even things disguised as games.
>>: Giving them experiences to hands-on play with technology and computer science, to give
them passion.
>>: It's that initial spark that really keeps them engaged in the field, inspiring them to pursue
careers in science and technology.
>>: Another key ingredient to help keep girls in the computer science track is to help them be
aware of opportunities with great organizations like the Anita Borg Institute and the National
Center for Women in Technology.
>>: NCWIT does a lot of work in Washington, DC, because we're working very hard to make
sure that policymakers understand the importance of girls and women's participation in
computing. We're mobilizing in all kinds of ways. In 20 years, we're going to see what women
invent when they invent technology, because right now, we really don't know what women
would invent if they were at the technical design table.
>>: We have an executive team that's really ready to take the Anita Borg Institute to the next
level. Our signature program is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This
year, we have 3,600 people descending on Baltimore, MD -- 1,500 of these are students. For
them, it's often the first time they've come to a conference. It can be life changing.
>>: Grace Hopper is the most exciting event ever, pretty much, because being in a computer
science department that's so vibrant as the one at Brown's is great, but there just aren't enough
women.
>>: In my 125 lecture, there's like four girls, and you're here, and it's all the girls who had that
feeling in one place.
>>: It's just so inspiring to see how many girls have the same interests as me.
>>: You walk around knowing that every single girl here has something amazing that they've
done.
>>: It's really amazing how many technologies are out there and how many women from all
nationalities are in these fields.
>>: I have been very fortunate to have a lot of mentors throughout my career, and it's those
mentors who have helped shape me, and I hope, with that knowledge, I can be a good mentor to
other women that I work with, on a daily basis.
>> Katie Doran: Right now, at Microsoft Research, I'm working with Rane Johnson. I think it's
really important that women, early in their careers, just entering computer science, in college, or
even in high school, have a female mentor. I get to see how someone very similar to me,
someone with the same energy, with the same passions, how they live their life, and it lets me
know what my future could be like, and having Rane as a mentor lets me see that I can be
successful, exactly as the person I am. I have gone to Haiti twice now through an organization
that I partner with at STARS Alliance. We were able to start teaching introductory computer
science and programming skills to a group of young women who served as mentors in three of
the schools in rural northern Haiti. You can bring in food and solutions that will last a short
term, or you can bring in solutions that enable the people to really take control of their destiny.
>> Rane Johnson: One of the things that was really important when I met Katie is her passion to
make a difference in the world. We know one reason that we're losing a lot of young women in
computer science is the lack of awareness that computer science really does change the world.
Young women today want to make an impact, and that's why we also partner with NetHope.
>>: NetHope Women's TechConnect is a global community of practice and a professional
online mentoring program to support women in the developing world, to get into technology.
We put them through a training in technology that's relevant for their particular community, for
their particular country, and then place them in internships in nonprofits in those local areas, so
they can get actual real-world experience, and 90% of the time, those internships turn into jobs.
>>: Computer science is a very creative field. It's a field where you do a lot of problem-solving
and collaboration, and it's a field that is changing the world. It's helping make innovations in
healthcare, in the environment, all around us.
>> Katie Doran: Young women need to know that computer science is about people, whether
that person is your end user of a product or someone who you're teaching or someone who you're
inspiring to really pick up the reins and become the next great technologist. Computer science is
about people, not the technology.
>>: We will bridge the gap.
>>: Bridge the gap.
>>: Bridge the gap.
>>: To future innovation together.
>>: To future innovation together.
>>: Together.
>>: Together.
>>: Together.
>>: Through diversity.
>>: Through diversity.
>>: Through diversity and creativity.
>> Rane Johnson: So my name is Rane Johnson, and I'm the lead for Microsoft Research on
how we grow more women and underrepresented groups in computing, and I'd like to introduce
Katie Doran, which should be right beside me, and Ayna Agarwal. Is Ayna? All right, perfect.
These three ladies, and in addition, who's not here right now, Jenn Meyer [ph], have put in a lot
of time and energy and work to put today together for all of you, so I hope you enjoy. We're
going to spend just a little bit of time explaining what is Microsoft Research doing, and also
Microsoft as a corporation, in trying to grow more women computer scientists, and why do we
care. And then we're going to have an exciting show of a new documentary that has come out
earlier this year that's been led by Ayna, and she'll talk more about that, and then we have two
really exciting panels, where you'll hear from young interns who are doing amazing work to
really inspire the next generation and get more women to be computer scientists, and then some
senior leader women here at Microsoft, who are doing amazing work that hopefully will inspire
every woman in this room to continue with computer science and really helping us solve some of
these world-rate challenges. Next slide.
So we talked about it in the video, and everybody in this room probably knows that, by 2018,
there will be 1.4 million tech jobs open. Right now, there are several million open that we just
can't fill, and what's exciting is that young women are 52% of our college graduates, so they're
already there, and they're already excited, but somehow we're missing the boat, because less than
18% of them will graduate with a computer science degree. And we know that young women
want to change the world. We know that young women want to make impact. We know that
they want to do exciting jobs, and for the majority of the people who are in the room who are
Microsoft employees, we know that technology is the place where that excitement is and where
that impact is. And so inside of Microsoft Research, we're really trying to innovate for the next
10 years. It's not only the future of the company, but really trying to push the envelope in
computer science and where do we need to be 10 years from now and what new dimensions need
to be invented for us to really solve some of the world's greatest problems. And to do that, we
know we need to have diverse teams, and unfortunately today, our teams are not diverse enough.
And so with that, we want to make sure that we're doing the right thing so that we can anticipate
and respond to the needs of this changing world. We want to be aware of the best state-of-the-art
research that's happening in universities all over the world, and that they're collaborating and
working with us. And lastly, really want to work with more women and get them excited and
have them working with us. Next slide.
So when we do that, what we really think about is three major areas that we can make a
difference in, and so that first area is state-of-the-art research. There are top areas like machine
learning, human interactions, that are really making a difference in the future, and we want to
work with the top women researchers today because one of the challenges our top women
researchers have is not only are they the best researcher there is, but typically they're probably
the one, maybe two, of the only women in their department, so whenever there are interviews,
whenever there are speaking engagements, whenever there is an important person coming to a
university, they have additional duties that they need to take on. And a lot of the times, they're
the best-kept secret, and not everybody knows of their amazing research and their amazing work.
So at Microsoft Research, we want to sponsor research collaborations with those top institutions
and those rising stars and current stars in research. The second thing that we really want to do is
focus on tools that are going to excite the daughters that are in the room today.
Inside of Microsoft Research, we have a lot of researchers who make amazing software that
really help you learn computer science without you even knowing you're learning computer
science. They're games, they're rapid prototyping, they're puzzles. And they teach you the core
principles so you can be a great computer scientist, and hopefully excite you to want to become
one of us. And then the last part is really that inspiration. What are those key events, what are
those key organizations, what are the scholarships and awards we're sponsoring so that we help
all the young daughters in the room, and then all of the women that will be watching this video
online, to really want to pursue this field. Today, you saw in the previous statistics, there's a
very small amount of women getting PhDs, and to really develop all of this great technology and
these future developments, we need many more PhDs. And our hope is that by working at the
middle school, high school and university levels, we'll excite more and more women to get those
PhDs and hopefully come work for Microsoft Research. So I just want to take a little bit of time
to share one project in each one of those three areas, and then there's plenty of information on the
flyers that you have on your seats that you can read more. But I talked about research
collaborations and working with the top women researchers. One research that we're really
excited to be doing is with Constance Steinkuehler. She's one of the top gaming and education
researchers in the world. She is at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and together, her and I and
her team are working on creating Envision U. It is an online community for girls 10 years old
until 18, where we're really trying to get computer science core principles through game design
and teach you and have you build an online community. Since not all middle schools and high
schools in the world are teaching computer science, we want students to be able to work with
other women around the world. They'll have opportunities for challenges, to try real
technologies and build mobile applications and serious games, but at the same time learn, have
peers, and then also technical women mentors to help them with their skills. And then we're
working very closely with the National Center for Women in Technology's Academic Alliance,
which are the top computer science organizations around the world, to then say, "If you go
through all of this curriculum and you do these challenges, we want you to come to our
university." And so we're really excited to pilot this year, and then hopefully this time, next year,
many of you in the room can join our CSU Envision U University.
The next area I'd love to share with you is the tools. We know that tools are really important -next slide -- and there are several tools that our researchers have created, and these are all
available on our Microsoft Research Website. The one I'd love to highlight is .NET Gadgeteer.
So what's exciting about .NET Gadgeteer is it's a rapid prototyping technology, and so we're able
to build together media players, digital cameras and look at industrial design, hardware and
software programming, and so they're a fun and easy environment to work in. You could think
of it as Lego Robotics on steroids, and we've seen a lot of girls get really excited about the
opportunity, because it mixes in the design with also the engineering.
The last area I want to share with you is, next slide, what our women across Microsoft Research
are doing to really inspire the next generation of girls. And so we're very involved in the Grace
Hopper, which you saw earlier on the video, which is the largest women in technology
conference in the world, where it's a combination of university women and professional women,
and Microsoft is the largest technology company involved in Grace Hopper. We bring more than
100 Microsoft women to participate in this event. We also have on our Research website great
profiles of amazing researchers and their stories and the research that they're doing that you can
watch, and you can learn about their research and learn about the women, and also the different
jobs and opportunities that you can have by being a computer scientist. Because, many times,
students think that either you're a developer or a tester, but you don't realize that you could be a
program manager or a product manager, a producer. There are so many different roles that
people don't talk about that would be really, really interesting and exciting for you.
And then the last area is we do lots of national campaigns to excite women, and one of them is
called Sit With Me, which is bringing women to the table and making sure that women know
what important contributors they are, and so on our site, there are some great videos and also
great stories of different women and leaders across Microsoft who are standing up and saying,
"We need to excite more girls into computer science."
The next slide I'm not going to talk a lot about, but these are some of the key organizations that
we work with in Microsoft Research and across the company to really inspire and work with
young women to help them in computer science. Next slide. One of the things that I think is
really important, because not enough do we tell all Microsoft employees all of the things that we
do so that you know how we're really trying to make a difference globally, our US citizenship
and government affairs organizations also do a lot in growing women in computing. And if
you're not aware of the YouthSpark program, we launched this last year, and it aims to empower
300 million young people all over the world in the next three years, where DreamSpark and all of
our developer tools are free. There are a bunch of tools online. There are classes with IT
Academy. There's opportunities in Imagine Cup, and then there's a great program called
TEALS, where Microsoft employees are going into high school classrooms and teaching
computer science and AP computer science to really help bridge the gap between the lack of
resources that are happening in our high schools. And then when we think about the policy
front, there's great work that we're really doing to drive a national STEM fund. And so we have
a coalition of lots of different businesses and education groups that Microsoft is working really
hard with, where we're working with the reform of our nation's immigration system to really get
more funds for STEM education so we can train teachers, recruit and also get more women and
minorities into STEM education. That work also falls into each one of our states, and so the
teams working really hard to get computer science as a math or science graduation credit, so if
you take computer science, you can get your graduation credits.
Right now, we have 13 states, plus DC, that have agreed to this, and the team's working really
hard to make this happen. The next group inside of Microsoft that's doing more to grow women
in computing is our Global Diversity and Inclusion team -- next slide -- and in Global Diversity
and Inclusion, they focus in two major areas. One, I'm sure a lot of people in the room know
about DigiGirlz. Raise your hand if you have participated or know about DigiGirlz. Wow,
there's not enough people. So DigiGirlz is a program that started in 2000 by Microsoft to really
provide free technology education and interactive experiences with over 13,000 young women
around the world. Sometimes, it's a camp that's multiple days. Sometimes, it's a one-day
experience, and it's really to excite young girls, all the women in the room, to want to be
computer scientists and see the opportunities. In addition to that, Microsoft has what are called
employee research groups -- excuse me -- employee resource groups and employee networks,
and in those resource groups and networks, we have over 47 different organizations focused on
technical women and how do we help make them be successful, have an amazing experience
here at Microsoft and advance your careers. And so each one of these organizations do lots of
events and participate in outreach into the community.
So, with this, I now have the great pleasure, next slide, of introducing Ayna. And so Ayna is a
PM Intern in the Windows UEX team this summer, and she's also a rising senior at Stanford
University. She studies human-computer interaction, and last year, she saw the hole and the
need for really growing and inspiring more girls to computer science and started she++. And so
I'm not going to take all of the spotlight. I'll let Ayna talk about her organization, the work she's
done, but she's been featured and interviewed on TechCrunch, Bloomberg News, Forbes, Time
Magazine, CNN and to just be a young college student and have already made this big a
significant impact, we're excited to have her at Microsoft, and we hope that she comes back as a
full-time employee. So, with that, I'll hand it over to Ayna.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Thank you, Rane. I don't know if this is working. I don't think I need a mic.
I'm pretty loud, but thank you. I'm so honored to be in the pleasure of Rane's robot.
>> Rane Johnson: You need to use your mic because it's being recorded.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Oh, okay. Let me try to figure this out. Hello, can you hear me? Does this
work? Okay, great. Well, thank you all for coming here today. I really, really appreciate having
this group of young girls, parents and Microsoft employees. It just shows the importance of this
issue. I am the co-founder of an organization called she++, and Rane told you a little bit about it.
It started last year -- actually, a year and a half ago, when I was a sophomore at Stanford. So,
today, I'm going to tell you -- I'm going to take a little bit of time to tell you my story and share a
little bit about what we've been doing at she++, and then after that, we'll show a documentary
that we created and have been able to spread worldwide in this past -- I think it's only been about
four months.
So I entered Stanford as a pre-vet. I was going to help take over the world by kind of entering
this health field, and I was going to help save animals and humans worldwide. And I was really
actively involved in nonprofits, and I really just wanted to make a change in the world. But I
came to Stanford -- obviously, being in the heart of Silicon Valley. I grew up in New Jersey,
where it's the heart of all professionals, and I realized that perhaps the nonprofit world wasn't as
fast-paced and exciting as I wanted it to be. And I started taking my bio and chem classes, and I
thought that while I was in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are so many things going on, why
don't I -- I just couldn't stand being in my bio classes, which all my friends were taking across
the nation. So I actually read an article on Huffington Post about women in tech, and there was
this person, someone who you might know, Marissa Mayer, who had talked about her shift from
being a premed at Stanford, transferring to a major called Symbolic Systems, which is humancomputer interaction. And so I said, hey, why don't I do that? So at the beginning of my
sophomore year, I took my first computer science class, and I really started to enjoy it. I liked
the ability to not only practice creativity and logic but problem solve, and I didn't find that I was
able to do that in any of my other classes, whether they be humanity classes or the bio and chem
premed classes. And not only was I able to problem solve, but I was able to be creative with it.
So as someone who is striving to make change in the world, I can think about ways that I can
actually impact developing countries and I can actually impact girls and women, both issues that
I care about very, very deeply, with the innovation of technology. And so I started to have some
conversations with friends about why there wasn't more of a conversation on Stanford's campus
of the greater implications of technology, and incorporating your own interests. So someone
who is really interested in fashion, or someone who is really interested in social change, or
someone who is really interested in health, how they can all bring that in with their knowledge of
technology. That led into a greater conversation of why there are so few women in our computer
science classes.
And so we realized, well, no one else is going to do something about this, so why don't we do
something about this? Why don't we bring in the people who we look up to and we want to have
conversations with on our campus? So that, in about three months, we put together a conference
in April 2012, and that was our kickoff of she++. Little did we know, though, that was going to
expand to a bigger campaign and community, and I must say, that wasn't propelled by me. It
was propelled by the girls and the women in attendance of that event. So that led to a lot of
greater initiatives in terms of the coming year, and we decided that we had a great environment
and a great conversation going on in the Bay area, but there were so many people across the
world that really wanted to be part of this, so many people that wanted to see that same spirit, so
we had video recordings and we said, okay, well, we can either put together all this content on
YouTube, or we can cut it up, or we can make a documentary. So, naturally, having no
filmmaking background whatsoever, we decided to go with the documentary. So, that summer,
we decided to launch the documentary -- or launch the creation of the documentary, and we had
some really exciting people in that, and it's about 12 minutes, you'll see. It was finally released
in April 2013, and we just released it online, and so in about three weeks, we've had over 60,000
hits. It's been translated into 12 languages, and it's in the process of being translated into two
more, and it's been screened officially in over 200 places worldwide. So that's very, very
exciting, because we're building a community of women who are using these resources that we're
creating to create communities wherever they are in the world, and that's really the crux of what
we're doing. So we decided to run the conference again, to try to pull more people in, and we
really value that in-person communication, that ability to identify with the role models you look
up to. And then we also find that's really valuable for young girls, people like you, to look at
people who are five years down the line, saying, what are they doing in five years? What are -not all the Julie Larson-Greens or the Sheryl Sandbergs, who are like 20 years down in their
careers, or 30 years down in their career, but what are people doing five years down in their
career, and what can I be? And so something that we found was important was putting together
a connector program, allowing high school girls just to have informal chats with college girls, to
ask what's it like to be a computer science major? What does your day-to-day look like? And so
we're piloting a connector program this past year, and we launched it in May and have had 60
conversations already, and we have 30 college mentors from across the nation at different
universities.
So that's a little bit of a recap of where we're at right now. We have a very exciting community,
and we have some really exciting things coming ahead. So, moving forward, we're going to
build out that connector mentorship program a lot more, really, really capitalizing on the fact that
high school girls just want some college girls to be friends with and ask them questions and
really easily access that, so we're providing that access.
The second thing that we're doing is we know that there are really good people in here who know
that they love computer science, and they're in their high schools and their colleges, and we
know that you guys are the future change agents of this community, and you guys are going to be
the future leaders in the women-in-tech movement, so we're building out a she++ Fellows
Program this year, where we provide all the resources for high school girls or college girls to
really make change in their communities, whether it be talking to their principals so that they can
stay in an AP computer science program, or bringing in speakers to their college or high school,
or creating a club at their college.
And, at the end of that, we're having a competition, and we're going to fly all the winners out to
the Valley for a Women in Tech Summit, so we'll be inviting industry professionals, the college
students, high school girls, all to have a roundtable towards the end of the year. So that's the inperson summit. And then, lastly, we found that video content is very, very powerful, so these
quick, five-second, 10-second answers about what is computer science, what can you do with
computer science, what is Java, what's this, what's that, very basic questions, we're recording
industry professionals answering those questions, and we're creating a database online so anyone
and everyone in the world can have these basic questions answered.
So that's looking forward a little bit. I just wanted to personally thank you for all being here
today and supporting this movement, and I'm really inspired to hear your stories and excited to
hear your stories after the panel and the event today, so thank you very much.
>>: Women don't like the image of computer science. Women don't like feeling like they're a
woman in computer science.
>>: Nationally, we've seen the rates of women's participation fall, and that's very scary.
>>: In school, at Stanford, they do a reasonable job, but I was still the only girl in a couple of
my classes. We're not talking classes of 20. We're talking classes of 120.
>>: Everybody knows who those women are, which has got to be way too much pressure on
them.
>>: All the prejudices and the implicit notions that if you're a girl, you're going to do less well.
>>: And I think a lot of women, myself included, come to computer science afraid of it.
>>: It was just very intimidating to be around these people who could just hack out code really
fast, and I was just struggling to write my first "Hello, World," program.
>>: So I think a big thing that deters a lot of girls and a lot of women from pursuing CS is the
image that the computer scientist is this bad-hygiene person who has this pocket calculator.
>>: Who are very antisocial.
>>: Maybe just very sedentary and are going to spend their time coding alone at home.
>>: All the lights turned off, listening to music, drinking some kind of energy drink.
>>: Not a very appealing image for a lot of people.
>>: There's no reason it has to be that way. We do not need to go and conform to the stereotype.
>>: So Ayna and I never really intended to be where we are today. We didn't aspire to be nerds.
I came to Stanford two years ago as a psychology major.
>> Ayna Agarwal: And I entered Stanford as a pre-vet. I was going to be a human biology
major, and then we decided to take our first computer science class, and our fates were almost
decided for us from there.
>>: We were both kind of pushed to our majors by role models, by women who we felt that we
could be in five, 10, 15 years.
>> Ayna Agarwal: We looked around our computer science classes, and we sometimes couldn't
really see as many of those role models as there should have been.
>>: And it was important to me to give a lot of girls the opportunity to kind of fall in love with
what they did, the way I had.
>>: I do a lot of things that would maybe not be considered what a computer scientist would do.
For instance, I'm in a sorority at Stanford, and I love it.
>>: I was interested in psychology. I like to write. I'm very extroverted, and my greatest hobby
is travel.
>>: I love getting manicures. I love watching Gossip Girl -- don't judge me.
>>: This is a field that everybody can be in, and that everything that you do with computer
science makes you better at your other interests, and that your other interests also make you a
better computer scientist.
>> Kimber Lockhart: My name is Kimber Lockhart, and I work at a company called Box.
There, I'm a Director of Engineering, responsible for the web application development team. I'm
trying to hire great engineers right now, and I would hire twice as fast if I could find them.
>>: And, at this rate, literally the growth of the US tech industry is going to be throttled by the
fact that US universities and even the world's universities are not producing enough software
engineers.
>>: In the West, we cut our scientific population in half because we don't really encourage
women. We need everyone we can get in this field. If Stanford graduated all of its students in
computer science, the Valley would hire them all.
>>: I think this is actually really a Rosy the Riveter moment, and that is that women are the
great untapped bench. If you just look at the numbers, and they're super-simple -- let's say that
women are 60% of undergraduates, they're 20% of computer science majors -- imagine a
hypothetical computer science department with 100 students each year. At 20%, women are 20
of this, men are 80 of those. If we simply took women to their appropriate proportion of
undergraduates, which is 60%, for every 40 men, there would be 60 women. For those 80 men,
there would be 120 women. That would be 200 students, not 100. So if women were just
represented proportionally, we would double the number of software engineers this nation is
making every year, and that would be timely, because the number of jobs is tripling.
>> Tracy Chou: My name is Tracy Chou, and I am a software engineer at Pinterest.
>> Siobhan Alvare: My name is Siobhan Alvare [ph], and I work at Microsoft.
>> Jocelyn Goldfein: I'm Jocelyn Goldfein, and I'm a director of engineering at Facebook.
>> Tracy Chou: We're building a product for people to share the things that will inspire them
and hopefully get them out and doing things.
>> Siobhan Alvare: I work in social search, which is making search more social by
incorporating information from your social networks.
>> Jocelyn Goldfein: I run teams of software engineers who make features for the
Facebook.com site.
>> Privahini Bradoo: I'm Privahini Bradoo. I am the CEO and Co-Founder of a green mining
company called BlueOak Resources. The goal of BlueOak is to extract high-value precious
metals from end-of-life electronics, so your cell phones, your computers.
>> Sandy Jen: Hi. My name's Sandy Jen. I was the CTO and Co-Founder of a company called
Meebo. We got acquired at Google last year, and I currently work as a software engineer at
Google. People's lives revolve around tech, even if they don't even know it.
>>: I would maybe go on Facebook. I would browse around the Internet. It was just like
computer science.
>>: Over time, I discovered the pre-req class for almost everything I wanted to do was our
introductory computer science class.
>>: I took a CS class the spring of my sophomore year.
>>: And the part of me that loved to do logic puzzles and crossword puzzles just thrived on
programming.
>>: It keeps me intellectually stimulated every day, and I feel like I'm learning things on a dayto-day basis.
>> Siobhan Alvare: The most important things in computer science is logic and algorithmic
thinking, and I think when you have that mindset, that can be applied to a stream of different
disciplines, from science, engineering to business.
>>: The majority of jobs today have a technology component, so if you want to equip yourself
anything, you need to add computer science to that very basic toolkit.
>>: With computing, just a little bit of programming knowledge suddenly unlocks all of these
doors.
>>: You can go into any industry. You can go into fashion, you can go into science, you can go
into math.
>>: And the fun part about computing is it's just such a broad discipline, because what we define
as computer science is essentially finding problems that are worth solving them and then solving
them using computing.
>>: I was terrified to take the introductory computer science class.
>>: At least known by some as a weeder class, so it was a little bit more difficult.
>>: The expectation was, if you're studying computer science, you must have used this before.
>>: And there were some guys in the class who had just been programming all their lives, and I
had not even touched a computer until 1998.
>>: I thought I was failing that class the entire way through.
>>: I spent a lot of time thinking that I just wasn't qualified for this. I hadn't been coding since I
was 12, and my classmates, several of them, had.
>>: There are some very good statistics, some done here at Stanford, that show that when
women don't succeed at first, they blame themselves, and men blame the course or the test, that a
woman who gets a B+ thinks she's doing horribly, and a man who gets a B+ thinks they're doing
fine.
>>: If there's something you want to try, that you're excited about but you're afraid of, how do
you get over that? I tell a lot of people, men and women, to fake it until you make it. If you
project self-confidence, the people around you will believe in you, and someday you will look
around and realize you're not faking it anymore. That game face of confidence is how you
actually feel.
>>: You don't have to be the most genius person in the world to even get started. I think just
being able to be okay and persevere and say, I'm learning something.
>>: Just Google what you want to do, or Google what you might want to think about doing, and
then something will come up, and that will lead to something else, and that will lead to
something else.
>>: Don't let fear get in the way of what you can do, because you could change the world, if you
want to.
>>: I think, if you're in high school, just keep going, and get going with something small and
stair-step your way into it. Achieve something, build something useful, build yourself a small
software program or take an iPhone class and build a small application. Just get going and see it
through.
>>: So we decided to come up with an Android app, and Study Café is basically a virtual world
crossed with studying via flashcards and multiple-choice questions.
>>: So, in addition to making the app, we also had to pitch it to a panel of judges.
>>: I think that makes computer science really appealing, because you do have to talk to people,
and you do have to be convincing, as well. I think that's really cool.
>>: I'm usually a shy person, but when I got up to pitch, I actually really liked it.
>>: As high schoolers, our application was designed to help people with studying for AP
sciences. If it was a non-high schooler who had designed this app, would they have been able to
think of that problem? It's the same for women. We have our own personal issues, which are
different from men, and we need women computer scientists who can understand that issue and
be able to code it and make it a reality.
>>: If you're good at math, if you're good at science, take a look. Consider computer science.
>>: It's daunting. It's hard, but I would encourage you to take a risk, to give it a shot.
>>: Because, honestly, you can start at any age. You can start at any time.
>>: It's a very creative field, and it enables you to do so many different things.
>>: And I think making all the choices that make you happy every day is probably the thing that
will get you closest to eventually recognizing your full potential.
>>: We can affect the world very positively. We can build products that are used by millions of
people.
>>: And it's actually really dramatically changing the way the world functions.
>>: You can have an idea or a concept, and you, yourself, can build it and make it a reality.
>>: It really is about making something that you're proud of and making something that you
wanted to make and that was hard to make and that you did make. And I think that was my
proudest moment, because that was the first time I can really look back and be like, I did that.
>> Rane Johnson: So as Katie gets the intern panel started, I'd like to take the time to introduce
you to Katie. So Katie came to us last summer as my intern at Microsoft Research, and she was
absolutely brilliant and fantastic and helped us launch a lot of our Women in Microsoft Research
activities, that unfortunately the Xbox IEB team recruited her and she left graduate school and
came to Microsoft. I'm a little sad to have one less PhD researcher, but I am very excited to have
her here at Microsoft. And so with that, I'll let Katie take over and have you hear from these
inspiring young women.
>> Katie Doran: Thank you, Rane. So, as Rane mentioned, I'm Katie Doran, and I have the
pleasure of moderating our intern panel today. As a former intern here, as well as several other
organizations, always do internships. They're wonderful, inspiring opportunities, and we here at
Microsoft happen to end up with some really phenomenal interns, in case you haven't already
picked up on that. So the young ladies with me today, they are going to have the opportunity to
introduce themselves, answer some questions. I have some questions prepared, and then we'll
open it up to the audience to take your questions. So be thinking of things that you'd like to
know, especially given we have one high school intern, and then two who are still in their
undergraduate careers, so some of the younger girls out here today, that's very close. Maybe
college is near in your future, high school even nearer, so there might be some really great
questions you have in mind. Don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask them.
So, for my panelists, can you each introduce yourselves and share the story of how you got into
computer science and a bit about your current internship? I know everyone takes kind of diverse
paths into CS and probably have some really great internships going on this summer, so we'd
love to hear about them.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Sure. So I'll begin. You guys know a little bit about how I got excited by
computer science and technology, so I'll skip over that part, and I'll tell you about my internship
this summer. So, as you've heard, I'm a program management intern on the UEX, the Windows
UEX team. That's a really exciting space, because that's the heart of human-computer
interaction, I think, at Microsoft, and I've been working on some exciting projects. So I'll
explain a little bit about my project, what I've liked most about it and the challenges that I've
faced. So I'm working on something -- on text commanding. So, basically, when you tap and
highlight a word, what is the menu that appears? Typically, on a desktop, you would left click
and you would have that commanding menu appear, but how can that be redefined and
reinvented for touch surfaces? So I've been focusing really heavily on micro-interactions this
summer, and it's been a challenge for me, because in a lot of my human-computer interaction
classes, I've been thinking about larger-scale interaction problems, so how do you, from posture,
from ergonomics, but not really as much on a micro-interaction scale.
I've had the wonderful opportunity to work with developers and to work with designers and to
really drive some prototyping, some strong design discussions, and at the culmination of my
internship, which is next week, I will be submitting a final spec, and that final spec is going to be
taken over into the Windows 8.1+1 to be hopefully implemented into the next iteration of that,
and so I'm really excited to be able to very fruitfully be working with the team, because
everyone's invested in this being one day implemented.
>> Amy Lin: Hi, is this on? Sounds like it. Perfect. My name is Amy Lin. I'm currently a
rising senior at UCLA, and I guess I can just begin by saying how I got to computer science. So,
actually, in high school, my original plan was I was pretty 90% sure I was going to go into
history, and it was really kind of a last-minute decision. I wasn't really into science, and I wasn't
really into computer science, but all I have to really say is it was a complete out-of-the-box
decision for me. Then, for me, when I first took -- that really resounded for me, that video, about
that kind of imposter syndrome and kind of like walking to my first intro class and going like,
there's this guy sitting right in front of me and he's coding this complex game, and I'm just trying
to get Visual Studio running on my computer. But I think one of the biggest things that impacted
me was there was some scattered mentorship programs at my school, and I managed to get a
mentor, and she was amazing. It was just great to have someone, another undergraduate student,
who had already kind of gone through the process, she was into research, kind of get to talk to
me on that kind of level, versus having to approach a professor and go, I don't exactly know what
you're talking about at this point.
But I got really into mentorship and retention of engineering majors, so not just computer
scientists, but also, for instance, civil engineers or chemical engineers, as well. So that's kind of
a brief overview of what I got into, but to move onto kind of what I'm doing this summer, I'm
actually an SDE intern, so a development intern, in the Services Engineering team, and what I
really loved about this internship is that they kind of incorporated me as like an extra dev on the
team. Basically, I didn't have a side project. I was kind of basically doing what -- I was coding
right beside every other dev on my team. So it was a little daunting at first, because everyone on
my team is pretty much a senior dev, so it was kind of like, oh, I'm an intern. Yes, I was like,
here's my title, guys, but it was amazing. I learned a lot. I sat in the same office as a senior dev,
and it was a really great dynamic that went on with it. And we actually worked on a smallerscale project, so I got to talk to our PM, and then when I started deving stuff, I actually had to
consider certain UI perspectives -- things from the UI perspective, or I got to also think about the
impact of what I was doing and whether or not I should talk to our PM and discuss what I was
doing exactly with her. And besides that, my manager was really supportive of me going into
learning more about the Agile process, which I really found really fascinating, so I talked to
Arlo, who is an amazing Agile expert, and he kind of really gave me this opportunity to put on
this intern Agile immersion day over the summer. So we actually gathered the group across
organizational interns and we kind of put them in with a host Agile team, and then we ran
through an entire day with them, so it was a really great experience.
>> Priya Ganesan: Hi, everyone. I am Priya Ganesan. I just graduated from the International
Community School in Kirkland, and I'll be a freshman at Stanford in a couple of weeks. So for
as how I got into computer science, both my parents are software engineers, so I kind of had that
techie background from the beginning, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do. My mom
will attest to this, I changed my mind every week. I think at one point I think I said I wanted to
be the president, and then it was a doctor, and then -- it just kept changing, and then in 10th
grade, I decided to do a little two-week intro to Java programming class, which I really, really
enjoyed, and I wanted to learn more. But my school doesn't offer any computer science or
computing classes at all, so I decided I would take it into my own hands, and I decided to selfstudy AP Computer Science in my junior year of high school. That was definitely challenging at
first, but once I got into it, I really, really enjoyed it, and it kind of inspired me to pursue
computer science as a career.
So, right now, I am a high school intern, working in Microsoft Research on the Machine
Translation team, and I am on a team with two other high school interns, and we're working on a
Windows 8 app that we built from scratch, and what it does is it uses the Bing Translator API to
translate song lyrics into different languages, and there are a lot of other cool features that we
built associated with it, like you can upload your own songs, you can autotune yourself singing.
You can record yourself. You can autotune the little text-to-speech feature, which is really
entertaining to listen to. So that was a really fun and a great learning experience for me, because
I learned the whole process from start to finish of building an app in all aspects, like the UI, the
back-end coding, how to integrate different APIs, like web APIs, how to work with Azure, so
that was a lot of fun. And another little side project that we got to do in the last two weeks of our
internship was machine learning, just to get an introduction, since we were on the Machine
Translation team.
We got a data file with a bunch of movies and keywords associated with the movies and the
genre for the movie, and our goal was to guess the genre of different movies based on keywords,
using all the training data that we had, so we were testing different algorithms and seeing which
ones were most accurate, and that was a lot of fun.
>> Katie Doran: All awesome interns and internship projects. Very cool. So one of the things
that is fairly common is looking back on it or just moving into computer science, you'll have
experiences, maybe even completely unrelated to computer science or things you didn't think of
as computer science that you encountered earlier in life, like during childhood or middle school
or early in high school, that now serve you really well that you're into computer science as your
field. Do you have any experiences or hobbies or interests from childhood or early in school that
kind of are fantastic assets now that you're in computer science?
>> Priya Ganesan: I guess I'll start. So one thing that I did that I think has been really useful for
me is that, in third grade, I joined my school's math team, and I was really, really horrible at
math at the beginning. My math coach actually told me I was the worst member on the team,
which was not good for my self-confidence. Through a lot of hard practice and hard work, I was
able to, luckily, get better and compete in a lot of regional and state and national math
competitions, and that's helped me, because that math foundation has been really useful in terms
of improving my confidence and also helping me understand all the different concepts in
computer science better. And the cool thing about it is that a lot of my peers who are in math
club also are now transitioning into computer science, as well, so it's nice to have other people
my age who have the same background.
Other than that, I think one thing that's kind of different but is also useful is that my school
focuses a lot on the humanities, so we have a lot of art, history, English, and one thing is we have
every year a focus week, which is where we spend one week doing something really not school
related but that's still educational, and so through that I was able to travel a lot to places like
Greece and Costa Rica and see just like different cultures and life, and I think that's also an
important asset I think for someone who's going into computer science, is to have that wellrounded education and knowledge of different things that are going on, because now I can see
issues that other people who may not have traveled and had the same experiences as me may not
have seen, and I can work towards improving them now that I have computer science in my skill
set.
>> Ayna Agarwal: I have two things. The first is the fact that I was -- I'm a huge social
networker, so I was on MySpace really young, and MySpace had the opportunity where you
could kind of like code your own backgrounds and you could have little snowflakes coming
down from your profile, and actually, quite honestly, at the time, I didn't even know that I was
coding. I didn't even associate my past coding experience with the computer programming that I
do now, until about like two months ago. All I was doing at the time was looking up ways online
and lines online that I had to manipulate to make my computer screen do what I wanted it to do.
So just that ability and that knowledge to just really take hold of whatever you want to see
happen, and so that experience really, really at least made me feel a lot more comfortable moving
forward, saying that, hey, even as a young girl, I could have done this. As a young girl, I did do
this, and now I think there's a way to move forward.
The second thing I think was really, really valuable for me was the ability to collaborate, the
ability to empathize with people, to hear people out and collectively drive people in a certain
direction, and I think that can be gained from any experience, from any domain in high school or
in middle school. The ability to bring people together and to really influence them on a certain
that needs to be made was probably one of the most powerful things I learned as a young person.
Specifically, through my internship at Microsoft, I realized how valuable that is, when you're
trying to rapidly decide upon features and rapidly decide upon the way that you're going to be
implementing a certain type of feature, and you have to convince your entire team of people who
have years and years of experience under their belt, that's probably one of the most valuable
skills I think I've actually gained as a younger person, because a lot of the hard programming and
the hard kind of background of what it's like to understand computers I get through my classes.
But a lot of these soft skills that really help you be successful in that space I gained through
experience as a young girl.
>> Amy Lin: I would say it's actually something I learned when I just started college, because in
high school, I was kind of the person who sat in my own corner, and I didn't want to work with
anyone. But it was -- I would say one thing I do kind of wish I did that I started in college was to
really get involved with clubs or to really get involved with organizations. It really helps you
meet people. It doesn't have to be just computer scientists, but all of engineers or people outside
of engineering who are just really intense about whatever area you're really interested in, too, and
it really kind of helps you build connections.
I remember, so during my second year, at the very end of my second year, I actually got to
present, because we do a lot of company sponsorship, so we actually got to present in front of a
company. So it was kind of -- at least for my experiences, it kind of gives you the opportunity to
really go beyond what you're doing and do a lot of -- gain a lot of those skills as you go along,
and within a club you have a little bit more leeway than when you're working with practicing
those skills. So, I mean, I've messed up a lot of workshops before. I've messed up a lot of talks.
But it's going through that learning process and saying, "I messed up here, but next time it could
go a bit further." And, usually, if you're in a really great club or you know those people are
around and you have that great network, they can give you a lot of great feedback and you can
kind of build from that.
>> Ayna Agarwal: I actually want to add something to that. I will be quick. I promise. But I
want to add that, as a young girl -- I'm still a young girl. But as a younger girl -- as a younger
girl, I definitely pushed myself out of my comfort zone a lot, and I think as you're entering a tech
world, or as you're entering your classes where you are the minority, it's important to have that
thick skin. And so pushing yourself -- I had an older brother who loved to play video games. I
always had guys around in my house, and so I sometimes would sit down and be like, "Let me be
that video game. Let me do what you're doing," and they'd be like, "No, you're not good at it."
Several things like that, to be able to just be able to develop your tough skin, saying even if
someone says that you can't do it, that you can try to do it, and being able to push yourself, in
retrospect, I think that was really good.
>> Priya Ganesan: Actually, two. Yes, so all of the positions I took were external positions, so a
lot of reaching out to people, and I honestly had no experience and I was pretty bad at it, at first,
so I would say all positions, maybe try to really take positions that you haven't had any
experience in. That's sort of like those sort of soft skills, and then it really helps you build it up.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Yes, you're there to learn.
>> Katie Doran: So one of the things that tends to happen at events like this is you get some
people who are really, really passionate about computer science, because they've been in it for a
while and they love it. They're more comfortable with their skills, and it sounds like their whole
lives revolved around computer science. So if you're out there and your life doesn't revolve
around computer science, if you're like, well, no, I like all of these other things, and I just can't
imagine 100% of my time being dedicated to CS, so it would be great to hear what activities and
interests you have, hobbies outside of computer science. And if there is some way that it feeds
into your education and the work that you're doing, it would be great to know those connections,
as well.
>> Amy Lin: Well, I can start for this one. So I really love kind of pushing programs and
helping people out and building connections, so when I first started, I talked about the mentor I
got. So one of the things at our school is that we have a bunch of really great engineering clubs,
and everything's kind of -- all the programs are kind of spread out, so you have to hunt them
down and say, "Oh, I want to join your club." So one thing we started, that I got involved with,
was we conglomerated all those clubs together, and we had every entering freshmen, engineering
freshman and transfer student got their own mentor of the same major and they got access to the
database of mentors, and we connected all those clubs together, and we connected a lot of other
organizations together. So something that I love to do, which is probably not -- it's kind of like a
bit of a hobby of mine, I guess, is really kind of building those club connections and really kind
of organizing those events. So that pumps me up, actually, so I really love doing that.
>> Priya Ganesan: So one thing that I've been doing for the last several years since ninth grade,
so four years now, is I helped start a TEDx conference. For those of you who know what TED
is, it's basically an annual conference in Long Beach, California, which brings together a lot of
great thinkers to share their ideas and everything. And so they have independently organized
conferences that anyone can start, so a friend of mine actually got the opportunity to speak there,
at the TED conference. And she came back, and she was like, "Oh, it was a really amazing
conference, but there isn't anything like that for students." So we came up with the idea to start
TEDx Redmond, which is held annually in the Microsoft Conference Center, and it's all for
youth, by youth, so we have an organizing team, which is all made up of students. And all of the
speakers that we bring in are students who have accomplished really amazing things and just
want to share their stories, and most of our attendees are students, as well. So that's something
that I've really enjoyed doing for the last several years, is inspiring younger students to follow
their passions and try to make a difference in their communities.
And another thing that I would say that I'm really passionate about is community service,
especially in regards to education in third-world countries. So I've been a really active member
of a local youth group called Junior Asha, which fundraises for speech and hearing-impaired
orphans in India to help them get an education. And then another thing that I did, too, was I did
a service trip to Rwanda right before my junior year, and we taught English and helped empower
the girls there to continue with their education. So that's something that I'm really passionate
about, and I'm hoping that with computer science, I'll be able to make a difference in either
healthcare or education in third-world countries.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Yes, so dovetailing off of that, I'm so passionate about community service. I
thought I was going to be in the nonprofit world when I entered Stanford. I thought that that's
why I was training to be a vet, so that I could work in animal shelters my entire life, quite
honestly. And I told you a little bit about the fact that I really do believe that computer science
and knowledge of technology can help influence that space. So I volunteer regularly. I think it's
really important. I volunteer at animal shelters. I really like puppies. They are kind of my
lifeblood. Secondly, I like to be artistic. I like to really experience that side of life. I'm on a
dance team at school, and so I'm actively involved with that. I'm actively involved with my
cultural community groups. I really relate to my Indian identity. I grew up in a very Indian
town, and so I like to be active in those spaces. So, specifically, artistically and community
service wise, I definitely am able to find the time to do that, because I think that it just enhances
me as a person and me as someone who can be happy in my everyday life decisions, and it can
make me happy coming into work, and really having conversations with people. At the end of
the day, yes, you're working, yes, you're still there, you're behind your computer, but you're
interacting with people. And so being able to pursue my interests is at the top of my priority list.
The way that I hope it will be incorporated in the future is -- I mean, already, I've spoken to so
many foundations and nonprofits. Right now, I'm in communication with some nonprofits in
Africa, trying to advise them on innovation and technology development in their spaces, trying to
advise them on how we can build innovative proposals to apply for school award grants or
whatever it might be. And so having that knowledge in my toolkit can allow me to really expand
upon the possibilities and bring that to the spaces in which I'm really, really passionate.
>> Katie Doran: We have some rock-star interns doing awesome stuff, even in their down time.
I feel lazy. So onto the -- my last question, before I open it up to the audience, and it's also my
unhappy question. It was mentioned in the documentary and in both videos you saw, and some
of you have already hinted at it. Computer science can be really intimidating. Imposter
syndrome tends to infect a huge number of women in computer science. So what are some of the
challenges that you've faced or specific examples of some of the challenges that have already
been mentioned, how have you dealt with them, and what advice would you offer to any of the
girls who are here today if they encounter those challenges in the future?
>> Ayna Agarwal: Yes, so I'll begin with that. I've taken some computer science classes in
college, and I've hit so many roadblocks. I can't even tell you. I've hit so many just like mental
roadblocks, where I'm just like, "I just can't do this anymore. I'm done with this. This is not for
me. I can't do this, and I need help, but I don't know where to go for help, because all of the TAs
are guys." And when we go to office hours, when I sign up for my name on the list, the guys get
more time because they can be bro-y with the TA, and I sit there, and I'm like, "I have a question,
can you answer this?" And I don't know how to ask for extra time, and I don't know how to get
that extra 10 minutes out so they can help me solve that bug. And so I found that one of my
biggest struggles was going out and asking for help, basically. And then I realized that it's the
most valuable thing that you can do. You just have to push yourself, that when you have a
question and when you can't solve it and you have nowhere to go and there are some resources in
front of you, just really try to tap into that. And you'll realize that, yes, it might take a little bit
extra time. I mean, I talk to my mom about this all the time. She's like, "Yes, you might be
taking a little bit more time than everyone else, but that's okay. You're still doing it. You're still
completing the projects, and you're still learning." And so I've learned that through the
possibility of going to office hours and working with the TAs, I've also learned that going to the
professor is really valuable, because they'll sit down and actually explain things to you. Asking
your peers is very valuable, because your peers want you to succeed, as well, and also, they
benefit from kind of instructing someone else. They learn, too. And so finding the peers who
are willing to help you, and not being afraid to ask them for help, has been one of the strongest
ways that I've overcome a lot of my roadblocks in my computer science classes. And so just take
this nuggets with you, whenever you're sitting there, and you're like, oh, gosh, I can't solve this,
oh, gosh, what do I do, or oh, gosh, what are my next steps, just go and talk to someone and go
and ask someone a question, even if it's a broad question. Soon, by asking all those questions,
you'll learn how to target those questions a lot better and you'll learn how to get those extra 10
minutes of time that you really need.
>> Katie Doran: Do you want to go?
>> Amy Lin: Oh, okay. All right, sure. I guess two factors of it. Well, when I first started, I
actually had someone tell me that because I was a girl, it would be really easy for me and all the
guys would write my code for me. It kind of -- it actually kind of pissed me off a lot. It kind of
made me really angry, so it kind of drove me a little bit to do things, and it's also some of the
things I experienced was that -- not just girls. I had two friends, a girl and a guy, who both
switched out of computer science in my first and second quarters, because sometimes there's that
one class or that one professor who you can't seem to understand or is just that one class that
roadblocks you. And then everyone in that class, even the really experienced people, are
roadblocked in that class. So, for me, it was kind of building up networks and then having that
support group that you can kind of build off each other and then you can definitely ask for help
for them, especially with your peers, and also looking for tutoring programs, too, as well, and to
be able to tell yourself that for people to kind of understand that it's not like you're a bad student,
or it's not like you're completely dumb or stupid or you can't understand something, it's you're
learning this, and through that learning process, they're learning, too. They're tutoring.
Yes, I mean, the other thing is that you should definitely really talk to your TAs and professors
more, because one of the things that people kind of have that block issue with is that they don't
really want to talk to their professors, because they think they might have a good question, or
they're just like, "Oh, I don't have time," or something. But they're actually really great resources
to talk to, so definitely go to their office hours and do that.
>> Priya Ganesan: So it can definitely be intimidating at first, getting into computer science,
especially in high school. I know a lot of different computer science-related activities that I saw
in high school, like code days and hack-a-thons, and my school had just started a coding club,
almost every single person there was a guy, and so I would feel like an outsider. Sometimes,
which I feel bad about, I didn't go for things like code days because I knew that I was going to be
the only girl there, and I didn't want to be on the all-boys team. I felt like sometimes I would just
be left on the side. Kind of a short story about this was when I first got into Stanford, so we have
a Facebook group for this, and one guy posted saying that he had a startup idea, and he was
looking for other students who would be able to help him with the physics and the computer
science and stuff, and I really, really wanted to do it, but when I was looking at the other
comments people were making, they were like, yes, I've already -- listed 20 different
programming languages, and they were like, I can help you with this and this and this, and
sometimes I didn't even know the words that they were using.
So it made me feel very intimidated. I was talking about this with my mom, and she was
actually the one who convinced me to just try it out and see -- and that I would probably actually
be useful and be able to contribute, so I joined, and one of the guys sent me the code and said,
"Okay, I've already written all of the code, so you can just look at it if you want, and then let me
know if it looks fine." And when I looked at it, I saw it was in PHP, which is a programming
language. I had no idea what PHP was, so I went and did an online crash course tutorial in PHP
in an hour and then tried to read his code. And I actually realized that there were bugs in it and
issues and things that I could fix and help contribute to, and so I made a more streamlined
version and sent it back to him, and he was like, "Wow, you actually made it better, thanks. So
we can use this version instead." And we scrapped his original version. So I guess what this
taught me is two things. One, not to turn down any opportunities, because you feel like you're
not good enough or because you feel unconfident about your abilities. And then, two, one thing
that helped me personally was that, when I didn't know how to do something, I just tried to learn
it. And I would try to learn more programming languages, like Python, PHP, things like that,
because I felt like the more knowledge that I had and the more I was able to understand people
who were talking about computer science, the more confident I felt. So I guess those are like my
two pieces of advice. And another thing I would say is to definitely find other girls who are in
the same shoes as you, find a support network. So I'm part of the National Center for Women in
Information Technology, which was mentioned in the videos at the beginning. And so they have
a really great program for high school girls, where you can apply to get their Aspirations Award,
and if you get the award, then you join an online Facebook group where there are a bunch of
women in high school and college and also past college, who can give you advice on internships,
jobs, how to handle issues at school, advice, help you find jobs and internships. So for all of you
girls who are in high school right now, I definitely recommend applying for that program.
>> Amy Lin: I actually had two small things to add, that this came up. So one thing about the
issue of kind of working in this fairly male-dominated environment was that I was actually in the
lab where everyone else was a guy and we were doing partner projects, and at first it was kind of
like, "Oh, you're the girl" kind of thing. But it was kind of just taking it day by day and building,
"Hey, I can do this," and then kind of like learning from everyone else. And then, after a while,
everyone didn't really notice anymore, to a certain point. And the second thing is that sometimes
it's good -- like, I'm in the Society of Women Engineers, and sometimes we just do these trash
bag runway shows, or we make dresses out of trash bags, and then we do the runway walk, or
sometimes we just watch "Mean Girls" together. So it doesn't have to be anything big or
something, but it's kind of just a stress reliever kind of thing, and it just lets us laugh together and
talk fashion or go shopping together or something.
>> Katie Doran: So even if you do go into computer science and face some of these challenges,
there are always great resources, as long as you are proactive in seeking them out. Some of them
you can start seeking out now, things to get you -- you're already here. You clearly have the
support of your parents, so you can get ahead of the curve, even ahead of a lot of the guys you'll
meet in your college programs who think they've been programming for years longer than you.
You can already have way more knowledge and skill than them, because you're getting such a
great head start on people. So now I'm going to open it up to questions from you, so we can get
you on the mic. The easiest thing to do is I'm going to stand kind of in the middle, rather than
run around the room. And if you have a question, you can kind of line up and meet me here, and
we have about 15 minutes for audience questions. And introduce yourself, if you're asking a
question.
>> Rane Johnson: We'll have to reduce to 10 minutes.
>> Katie Doran: Ten minutes.
>> Alice Luu: Hi. My name is Alice Luu. I'm a PM on the Windows Phone team, and I just
want to say, I am so impressed by you guys as interns and as female representatives of your
school, and I think it's just great. My question to you is, what would you say to a girl who's in
high school who says she doesn't want to do math and she doesn't want to do sciences in
university, but you see her, and you see there's opportunity still for her contribution in the
computer or in the tech field? What would you tell her?
>> Amy Lin: Does she just hate computers?
>> Alice Luu: Let's say that academically it's been discouraging in terms of her performance of
science and math.
>> Amy Lin: So she liked it, but she just was discouraged.
>> Alice Luu: It's kind of like a chicken and egg problem. You do bad in it, therefore, you don't
like it. So what would you tell someone like that?
>> Ayna Agarwal: Well, I would say ease her into it. She doesn't have to go into a computer
science program in a university wit 200, 300 people in the first lecture. That's scary, and
computer programming is so democratized now that she can spend literally two weeks, or even
two days of her free time going with you or a peer or a friend or another parent, whomever it
might be, to learn a very simple programming language, so build up her confidence in that way.
Build up her confidence through these introductory programs, so that she has the ability and the
personal equipment to go into that big lecture, once college hits.
So I'd say there is usually just like the, okay, AP Computer Science, computer science in college,
but there's a lot in between, but especially at that age, there's a lot of legroom to experience it in
other ways. And so I would say definitely try to capitalize on those introductory programs in
your free time.
>> Amy Lin: I would say find something that she's interested in. If she's interested in arts or
something, and she uses lots of programs or something, talk to her about that, so it's not just like
algorithms, straight-out algorithms and it's not just like straight-out C++ or something or pointers
or something. So it's something that she can see like, hey, there's like this tool that you can
actually -- there's a lot of programs, a lot of tools that you can see the impact. For instance, if
you're into fashion or something, you can see there's blogs. A lot of people go into it via website
design or games, for instance, so I would try to see if there's anything that can bridge that sort of
gap.
>> Priya Ganesan: I definitely agree with the both of them. I think one thing that I've seen in
high schools is a lot of people don't like math and science, mostly because they think it's not
useful or doesn't have a practical application in real life. I know in my math class, every class,
someone would ask, are we ever going to use this? So I think something's that's useful is to
maybe show her a real-world application of math and science. Something like what Amy was
saying, if she likes fashion -- I was at a hack-a-thon recently and someone made a fashion app to
help you shop for clothes, so something like that that combines her interest in a simple way and
shows her that there is a practical application, and that you can use it not just like sit in your
room and do little math problems, but you can do it for something else.
>> Katie Doran: Cool, thank you.
>> Lisa Abdilova: My name's Lisa Abdilova. I'm a class of 2011 from Stanford, and it's
fantastic to serve you guys here. I'm a product marketing manager for Windows, and to tell you
guys the truth, this is actually the third time that I've watched your documentary for she++, and
each time that I watch it, I feel more and more inspired to potentially go and do a master's in CS
one day. There's just something about creativity and problem solving that you guys bring out in
those stories, so thank you for doing that.
>> Ayna Agarwal: I'm so glad.
>> Lisa Abdilova: I led this article the other day, and it was the unauthorized biography of
Marissa Mayer, also a Stanford grad, who talked about how she was called out in the Stanford
Daily, the newspaper that's published all over on campus, as an icon, because she was the only
girl in the upper-division classes in the CS Department at Stanford. So I'm curious, what have
you been seeing in your classes, and for you guys on your teams, how many women are you
seeing in your classes and in your teams now, compared to what you were seeing three years
ago?
>> Ayna Agarwal: I read that. She was called out as the blonde girl, because she was the only
one in her classes. That's really funny. So Stanford's been positive. It's been positively growing
in the past year, but Stanford is a unique case. It's not the rest of the world. We're in the Valley,
and I think you maybe -- actually, we're all from California, so we could probably portray a
strong picture, but I've seen a strong positive trend once the community -- I think she++ was very
influential in that, in building the conversation and really, really giving a platform to girls to be
like, "Hey, look, we're doing it." Like, "Hey, look, we can do it and we're really successful in it,"
and being like, "Hey, we're going to talk to the young girls so that more people can be in it, as
well." And so just really giving women that platform to be able to create the community and that
publicity, really, is necessary, I think. And so that's actually -- and I'm not trying to do a plug of,
oh, this is what we're doing, but that's why we're trying to lead into the she++ Fellows program,
because there are people like us at every single school, and at many high schools, who are
probably the one or two girls interested in computer science, but they do have the ability to
create that platform for other people and to really start propagating change within their respective
communities. And so I think that's the best way we can see more widespread change.
On my team, I'm really lucky. I have a female leadership team. My lead is a female. My
general manager is a female, and then we have Jenson [ph] on top of that, but then we had Julie,
and so it was just amazing. I can safely say that the questions that I've had about PMing, about
Microsoft, the struggles that I've faced, I feel like I've been able to be more open about them with
my managers and mentors. I feel like they've been nurturing about my growth, and that
opportunity to really openly discuss my challenges has been valuable in seeing my growth. And
so, once again, I'm seeing a little bit of a skewed perspective of the fact that I'm at Stanford and I
have a female leadership team, but I can at least say, from that perspective, it's been massively,
massively positive. But we know that there is obviously open gaps all over the world, but I
know it's possible. So it's just a matter of bringing that everywhere else.
>> Amy Lin: I think for us, for my focus, it was a lot of retention of engineering majors, so
usually I found that there was a lot of interest in computer science, both from females and males,
and then when they got there and they took their first college-level classes and they got into their
upper-division classes, and then they kind of felt themselves struggling, because all of these
students were A students, and then they got Bs or Cs, for instance -- and then so for me it was a
lot of having people you could talk to, especially upperclassmen, who had kind of gone through
the same issues and who can maybe talk to you about how you're doing on that kind of level.
Whether or not it's maybe that one class that's really getting you down or whether or not -- to tell
you, maybe, it's just that one class, versus I should just drop out of computer science as a whole.
So for me, yes, you need to inspire people, and I work in a lot of outreach events, too, as well,
and then you also need to have that support network for them and be able to kind of like tell them
-- also, to kind of give them a lot of opportunities to do -- for instance, talk to students who've
done internships, for instance, and ask them, "Oh, how did you get yours," or, "How did you get
into research?" And kind of have that information at work for them, as well.
>> Rane Johnson: So I'd like to thank our panel. Let's all give them a big, warm applause. And
we're now going to transition to our senior women, so if they could please come forward, and
then Ayna will be the moderator. We want to be very cognizant of your time and make sure we
get you out of here at 6:00, so you can go home and go to dinner, and so we'll have our last
panel, and then a few closing remarks, and then I know all of our panelists will be available, that
if you do want to ask them questions one on one when we end, they'll be there. So, Ayna, you
can take it from here.
>> Ayna Agarwal: So I have the big pleasure of talking to really, really amazing Microsoft
leaders. I am trying to be technologically savvy, so I have my notes on my phone, and we'll ask
some questions, start some conversations. We won't do any of this down-the-line thing. I would
love to hear you guys kind of go back and forth, share experiences, and really have that
collaborative discussion here today. So, first off, maybe now we can do a down-the-line thing,
but tell me a little bit about the synopsis of what brought you here today and what you love most
about your work.
>> Kathryn McKinley: I'm Kathryn McKinley, and I'm a principal researcher at Microsoft. I
was a professor at the University of Texas for 13 years, and before that at the University of
Massachusetts. Yes, go talk to your professors in their office hours. That's why they're there,
and they love it.
What I like about my job most is it's different every day. I get bored easily, and there's always
some new challenge. The kinds of things I'm working on right now is energy efficiency, trying
to make those data centers not suck up all the energy in the world and also give you answers and
great experiences, so I'm working on scheduling Bing queries so that they complete faster but
take less energy and designing both hardware systems and software systems for that.
>> Erin Chapple: I have maybe a nontraditional path here, and then I think I've had a traditional
path since I've been here. So my name is Erin Chapple. I'm a partner and program manager in
the Windows Server and System Center team, and in high school, I was actually probably one of
those rare women who loved math and science. I just gobbled it up. Those were my favorite
classes, and I was in band, as well, and I played in a band, I played the clarinet, I played the
piano. I did all that other stuff. But there was something about math and science that was just
predictable to me, and it appealed to me that there was a right and a wrong answer to it and I
could learn it and I could go after it.
So I actually went into engineering. I was an electrical engineering major in university, and I
went into it because I had a cousin who was an acoustical engineer, and I thought she was pretty
cool, and I liked math and science, and so what else was I going to do? I was going to be an
engineer. And it was interesting, because I went to school in Canada, actually, and we have a
coop program. So we would go to work for four months and then be in school for four months
and kind of go on and off. And I went and did a couple of internships in electrical engineering,
and if you think all those stereotypes about CS are kind of -- electrical engineering, I don't think I
talked to anybody. I was in my office, doing my own work, and I was like, "This is not for me."
And so I actually got to do an internship at Microsoft and fell in love with the fact that all the
stereotypes that I had about the software industry were kind of thrown out the window, because
to me it's really about people. At the end of the day, we're working with people to solve hard
problems that impact the world, and that's what has kind of kept me here. I was an intern. I
came as a program manager, then I was a lead program manager, and now I'm a group program
manager, and so I've kind of had a very traditional path since I've been here. But, at the end of
the day, what I love about my job are the people I get to work with. I work with awesome
people, and in some sense, the technology problem is the easy part. The issue is, how do we
figure out what we're going to build? How do we talk to our customers and really understand
what they need? Because you know what? They'll tell you, it's kind of like asking people, do
you like ice cream? They're like, "Yeah, I like ice cream." You go out and talk to them and
they're like, yeah, I need that, yeah, I need that, yeah, I need that. And so figuring it out what it
is that they actually really need, being able to set that strategy, and then get a huge team across
the world to actually produce what you say that they should produce, it's a massive challenge,
and it's not the technology. The technology's the easy part. It's really about getting the people to
work -- and I work on Windows Server. We have billions -- not billions -- millions of people
who use our product, and just impacting those people on a day-to-day basis is the thing that
keeps bringing me back every day.
>> Cordy Rierson: That was awesome. Now I just want ice cream. So my name's Cordy, and
I'm an executive producer here at Microsoft, and I came from the polar opposite place of all of
you fine people here today. So I did not like math, and I did not like science. I was a creator. I
wanted to be a filmmaker, and that is the path that I took, so I took a path of getting a film
degree. I went to UCF and then, later on, with Full Sail, and it wasn't until early on in my career
-- so everything that I learned was very analog. It's about lights and cameras and film and how
you spin the -- back then, we were still splicing things together. There was no such thing as
digital compositing. And so it was really early on in my career where I flipped the bit on
technology, and I was lucky enough to be working for a wonderful man who was an excellent
mentor, who had one of those photographic memories and really believed in the innovation of
filmmaking and what would be the future of filmmaking, and we ended up partnering early on
with Kodak, and they built the world's first digital compositing system for filmmaking. And it
just opened my eyes to all of the things that we could do as storytellers, like how do I create a
fantasy world? How does Lord of the Rings get made? How do we go and create these things
that aren't real that would take model makers years to create and just mere seconds to destroy,
how could we do that over and over and over again? And it was through technology that birthed
that ability to allow us to be incredible storytellers and creative people. That's when I learned
technology within itself, very creative field, very innovative field. It is not just numbers and
facts. It's the person behind the numbers and facts that's learning those things and how they
partner that with their passion, and for mine happened to be filmmaking, and how they partner
those two things together to truly create something that can inspire themselves, inspire others.
You saw with your team, you guys went off, you're like, "We're not filmmakers, but we're going
to go make our own documentary," and that's awesome. I bet you used technology to do that.
So that is kind of -- if you would have told me early on in my career that I would have been
working for Microsoft, moving through the field of entertainment, I wouldn't have understood
what you were saying at the time. But Microsoft is truly leading a lot of wonderful
entertainment initiatives, and I have the honor of working in the same area that Katie does, where
we like to say that we work on turning science fiction into science fact. So it's just been an
amazing ride from working with wonderful people like Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg and
Jeffrey Katzenberg on into these other people that I now look at with the same eyes, who just
determine that these things will manifest themselves, and we're really not sure how they do. And
then just through a lot of really hard work and effort and smart people, with these types of
backgrounds, we're able to bring things to the forefront for people that can use them, eventually,
and that's been a pretty amazing achievement.
>> Shilpa Ranganathan: Hi. My name is Shilpa. I'm a test lead on the Skype team. I grew up
wanting to be an actress, actually, and so I did a lot of dramatics and debates and stuff in school,
and I have to say, it was -- I really liked this Indian actor, and so it was thanks to him that I got
into computer science, so I was like, "Okay, I want to build this website and I want to have his
pictures in there," and that's how it all started, literally. My mom was like, "Oh, my god, you
can't do this." I was starting home science at that point, so I built this website and it was all this
actor, and that just got me interested. I was like, "Oh, this works. I'm able to create this
website." I wrote a small program and I put my screensaver as his photograph and the whole
programming, and then I created another program to every one second change his photo on my
screensaver, so yes, that's how it started. And I was like, okay, fine, let's try this out.
I somehow got into chemical engineering with my bachelor's, because that's the only seat that I
got qualified for during my engineering exam, and then I liked it, so I continued. I did my
master's in chemical engineering, through which I was also like, okay, I have to do a lot of
programming here, and so I took a lot of programming classes there. I was like, hmm.
Whenever I used to write any programs, my friends would come to me and say, "Can you find
this bug for me," or something. I was always finding other people's bugs in their programs, and
so it just clicked to me that, oh, maybe I can try and find issues with code. That could be
something that I could make a career out of, because I was pretty good at it. It seems like most
of my fellow students were coming to me and saying, "Hey, this program of mine doesn't seem
to work. Do you want to help me fix this or do something with it?" And so I applied for a
position that opened up when Microsoft acquired this company called Live Meeting as a role of a
tester, and I qualified. I was like, "Really? Okay." And that's where my journey began as a
tester. I moved into a test lead role, and so what I have really liked about my work, and I agree
with Erin there, is definitely the people. I sincerely believe every problem is a people problem.
It's not about the technology. It's about the people. Technology, everybody can solve it, but the
interaction with the people, how do you get your point across? How do you get them to listen to
you? How do you get them to understand you? And not everybody's got the attention span or
not everybody's got the time to listen to you, so you have to make every minute count. And so I
would say that has been the biggest motivator for me, my team, the people I work with, my
managers, who have been supportive of me. They give me a reason every single day to show up
to work. The fact that I come to work and I feel valued completely increases my confidence in
myself and I can go, "Sure, I can do it. I don't care. I will make this decision." Many times, I
know I'm perhaps making the worst decision, but at least I'm confident enough to make it, is how
I go with it. Forget it, we'll see how it goes.
So, yes, I would definitely say it's the people that I love most about my work. Definitely the
technologies that we work with here at Microsoft have been very cutting edge. I have been
fortunate to be working with technologies that very few in the company have had to see, because
they're mostly bleeding edge, as we call it, and so the mystery, the adventure of figuring things
out that nobody has ever done before, stumbling through it and the fact that you're the only one
doing it or there are only very few in there gives you that adrenaline rush, so that's what I love.
>> Ayna Agarwal: That's amazing. I love the breadth that we have here today, and I love that
we have people from energy, electrical engineering, producing to Indian actors. It's amazing.
But now, here today, we have a panel of technologists, of programmers, of engineers, of people
who are very, very influential at Microsoft. So those couple of words, programmer, engineer,
computer scientist, technologist, I'm curious to know what you feel the connotation around those
words are today. And how has that changed in the past five to 10 years, and what do you think
that's going to look like moving forward? Anyone, take the floor?
>> Cordy Rierson: I think nerds are cool now, right? That's been one of the big transitions that
I've seen, is nerds are cool. That's a huge difference, and I think to just with programmers and
technology, when you think about those things, it's -- I think we're shedding the stereotype of the
bad hygiene, the sitting in the corner, the what have you, and we're seeing more people who are
actually extroverted entering the industry, and we also see a lot of people who are very socially
active in what they're doing, and they're very creative. So I don't associate those things with just
very specific like you sit in a corner and you solve this problem. There are people people, they
talk to other people, and they're very creative, because they work in groups and they solve
problems. So I think it's been a very positive trend, but I know we are here and we're talking
about women, and I think that that's really important. And one of the things that I do want to
share is, there was something that I read on the network, which was 85% of the women today
either directly purchase or heavily influence the purchase decision around all things purchased in
their household. And last year, women purchased over $90 billion in consumer electronics, so if
you don't have women participating in all of these wonderful roles, how do we know what the
women who are purchasing and influencing and making those decisions in their daily lives want?
And so I think it's really critical to have women at the table for that.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Yes, absolutely. Any other thoughts?
>> Erin Chapple: So I presented at one of the DigiGirlz conferences that we had or whatnot, and
my session title was, the Top 10 Reasons Why Working in Technology is Not Like Dilbert. And
Scott Adams, I think who writes Dilbert, and I really wish that that just had never got into the
lexicon of what we did, because I think it gives us such a bad reputation. And I agree, I think
that things have changed significantly, and I really look at just how the world is changing, right?
If you go back -- some of you might not remember, but go back as far as you can remember, like
five years, 10 years, 15, if you can get there. We seem to have a very young audience. That
might be before some of you were born. But you think about just the technology that you used in
your everyday life five years ago, and it's very different. I was recently out with my mom. She
needed to buy a new cellphone, and I swear hers was an antique. It was like one of those little
ones that had buttons on the front. I was like, what is this? Does it touch? Where are we going?
I've had a touch phone for -- but it really has changed. The technology has changed, and it's
integrated itself so heavily into how we just live our lives, right? And I agree, if women don't
have a seat at that table, then you're going to get solutions that work for half of the population,
and particularly, I will tell you, I do the grocery shopping in my household. It used to be that I
wrote a list and I gave it to my husband, and hopefully he came back with the things I wanted
him to come back with. But now, I sit down and I use Amazon Fresh and I build out my
shopping list and I get it delivered to my door, and it's changed the quality of my life, I would
say, the fact that I don't have to ->> Kathryn McKinley: Mediate between your husband and the grocery store.
>> Erin Chapple: Exactly. Tuesday night, I bought everything for what I was making -- oh,
darn, he forgot that. But it has changed the quality of my life, I would say, and I think there are
ways in which we design solutions now and technology permeates the way that we work in life.
So I really do think it's a people industry, and it's about improving the quality of life of whoever
your customer is, whether or not it be me as the customer, doing my home shopping, or whether
or not my team works on technology that powers the cloud, whether or not it be us providing the
IT administrators the best experience that they can have. It's changed dramatically.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Great. I'm so glad to see. Do you both have anything to add?
>> Shilpa Ranganathan: I wanted to add a quick thing. A little bit from a cultural background. I
grew up in India, and growing up, I think that I find that there is a different connotation in the
US, but growing up in India, engineer, the word engineer is very awe inspiring, and that's almost
always because of the difficulty associated with the curriculum, and so the fact that you have
gone through it and you've become an engineer means that you have so much focus, you have so
much dedication, you have so much talent. And so that automatically puts people into his highrespect category, and growing up, I was always surrounded by people who did very well in
society. Coming out at 20, your pay packages are so huge for an engineer that it was an amazing
to glean at that young age, with that amount of money and the perks associated with the job, that
you automatically gained the respect of others. And it was kind of a pipeline that you get into
once you're in that job. You are surrounded by people who do such things and who are aiming
for something much higher, and that elevates your level, as well, and so life continues is what -rather, all our parents would dream about for all of us. So that way to me, growing up, I was
always like, wow, wanted to be an engineer. Want to be an engineer, that is something I want to
be. And I honestly hope that -- I have two daughters, and I really wish and hope that they find it
in them to pursue it.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Yes, I think we can see in even the panelists we had today, a lot of the
programmers today, the nerds today, are very forward thinking. They are very, very excited
about the world, and they are really ready to make some big impact. So we talked about it a little
bit, and I heard from you why it's important to have girls in this field. So I want to expand upon
that a little bit more, really concretely asking why do you think it's important to have girls
entering technology and business in this day and age, and then on top of that, what do you think
are the female qualities that especially in higher-level executive levels and leadership roles, do
you think women or people are able to contribute to make leadership and teams very, very
successful.
>> Kathryn McKinley: So the world has changed a lot. If you look around this room, the
different cultures and points of view that just are -- you can just see from everybody's faces is
amazing, and having more diverse people at the table, like all the studies show that you get better
products, you sell more stuff, so it's good business for the get go, but as a young person trying to
find your way, like what do I want to do with my life? I like watching Glee, which my son is
currently addicted to -- it's about bringing to the table what your interests, your passions and
technologies touching all of it. So if you want to -- so, for us, as a culture, we -- in my lifetime,
we've gone from a pretty closed culture, not accepting of women or minorities in leadership
roles, in working outside the home -- I'm the sole wage earner. I have a stay-at-home husband
now. My mother did not anticipate that career for me -- or lifestyle -- and it's working out great.
I have three boys and a husband of 27 years, so the kinds of life you can live, and part of that's
been driven by technology, because we see more people. We don't just see the people in our
little town. We see everybody. We see the whole world. We see the whole world when bad
things happen and when good things happen, and those things can connect us as a society to
work together better, and as you move through your fields, try to think, oh, no, not everybody
has to look like me and I can work with them, that's kind of been one of the most exciting things
about this field to me. Especially as a professor, where I had millions of people in my classes,
none of whom look like me, every year they're turning over and they're younger and younger,
and that you're training the next leaders of the field. And what are you going to be inspired by
and what skills are you going to bring to the table, and that kind of collective "we," if we can
make it bigger and we can make society better by participating, and not thinking, "Oh, because
I'm a girl I shouldn't participate in computer science." No. That should be more of a reason to
participate, because you're good for -- whatever you're doing, you're good for it, because there
are not that many of you, and you're actually going to make a big difference. I know that one of
my PhD students who hasn't finished yet is here. Just having me as their mentor, and especially
even here at Microsoft, we don't have enough women, and I'm collaborating with several women.
And I'll have them say to me, "It's just so nice to work with you." It's like, okay, I'm nice, but
I'm not that nice. But it's because they haven't had these more diverse experiences, and when
you have them, it's better. Sorry for -- I'm very -- I love the part of the people part and just like
the arranged marriage, someone you wouldn't be friends with, but they're on your team and you
become really good friends with them, and you would never have chosen them. That's part of
the fun of it.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Yes. I've had that experience with my mentors and managers this summer.
It's been great.
>> Erin Chapple: I'm apprehensive to go because it will be like going down the line, but I think
building on what you were saying, to me, it's not women or men, it's diversity. I had the
experience of I did my master's degree, but I did it in applied behavioral science, so kind of more
organizational psychology. And one of the things I was doing there was I got to work with an
all-female nonprofit organization. And I have to tell you, being a woman who's grown up in a
man's environment, going into a group that was all women, it was like foreign to me. I was like,
"I don't know how to get anything done here." And it really highlighted to me that neither
extreme is what you want. They had equally as many problems as we do when we have all-male
teams. They were just different. And, quite frankly, as a woman who tends to be more
engineering minded, logic and whatnot, I actually would take the all-male team problems over
the all-female team problems.
>> Kathryn McKinley: It's just because you're used to it.
>> Erin Chapple: But I think that there is this thing, it's about that balance, and it's about
bringing together diverse perspectives, whether or not it be cultural, whether or not it be of
thought process, whether or not it be gender based. It's about creating that environment, and you
say what capabilities of women do kind of help in senior leadership positions? I think women,
more stereotypically, bring listening and empathy and kind of some of those softer skills that are
often missing when you have an all-male team. And that's a great addition that, when you don't
have it, you miss things. You miss hearing, really truly listening to what the person's point of
view is and bringing that together and being kind of the melting pot in some sense, or the
catalyst. And so, again, I want to say I really firmly don't believe it's about male or female. I
believe it's about diversity, and women are an important part of that that we need to bring into
that mix.
>> Cordy Rierson: So I totally agree with Erin on that. I think it is. It's the balance, but she did
bring up, it's not just the blending, the balance of it. We talked about cultural and gender
balance, but one of the things I want to bring up, especially due to the age of the audience and
the group is age. If you look at awesome companies that are coming out of the woodworks today
that have just shot to stardom, these are young people. These are young people out of high
school. These are young people out of college. You guys, there's a group out there, my daughter
included, who's of a generation who uses technology in a completely different way than I do, and
these are your consumers 10 years down the road. These are your people who are investing in
everything that you're trying to think of and create today, so having that balance too in age, and
listening. Just because you're young doesn't mean that you don't have important things to say, so
keep that in mind.
>> Shilpa Ranganathan: I completely agree. It is about diversity, and just one thing that came to
mind. One of my friends, she works out of the New York Office for Microsoft, and so she went
to this Apple Store. It was just beautiful aesthetic, completely made of glass, and so she enters it
and it's like a two-floor building. She's like, okay, let me walk up. There was another lady who
was trying to get up to the first floor itself, and she looked at the other one and said, "Thank god
I'm not wearing a skirt." It was a transparent glass stairway. And so that's one of the things that
I can say is, architecture cannot be male, kind of. So things like that, and I was going through
some research and found that one of the initial airbag companies, when they validated their
airbags, they validated only against a male audience, so that pretty much killed and injured a lot
of women and children. Voice recognition software, early on, voice recognition software,
validated only against male voices. Completely missed with the women audiences there.
So things like that. There is software, there is hardware. Every part of our life, there are aspects
that women bring to the table that need to be considered in order to make a product viable to the
audience that is there, and that's critical, and that comes from diversity, having people there. So
in my mind, that's most important. And to answer your question, at least one point in addition to
empathy that I find that women leaders may have -- again, I don't believe that this is women or
male, but I believe, at least, true leadership should have it, is the concept of awareness, is being
aware of what your team needs, what they want. Leadership is about different folks -- different
strokes for different folks. You cannot have one style and say, "Okay, this is what everybody is
going to be graded against," or this is one thing that's applicable to everybody. I find that the
more aware you are with the person on your team, the more social connection you have with that
person, the better it is, the more in sync you are and more respect that you gain about it, and at
least I feel that women are better equipped -- I won't say that's the quality, but I find women to be
more equipped with that. So that would be one of the things that I find senior leaders can.
>> Ayna Agarwal: So before we close up for today, I don't know if any of you guys have
questions, but I'd like to open the floor to any questions that we have in the audience. Does
anyone -- raise your hand if you would like to ask these women. Yes, totally. Okay, so what I'm
going to do is, I'll come back here. There's a mic here? Okay.
>>: I'm going to stay sitting.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Thank you. Yes, completely.
>>: Okay, so there's [indiscernible], and that's great. But I guess what advice do you have for
someone who's farther down in their career, who would want to make a transition, whether it's
from project management to coding or user experience or testing or somewhere that's more CS
focused, where you're already a higher performer now, but if you make that transition -- it's great
to say, like, "It's okay to learn as you go," but when your job's on the line, it's not necessarily that
great to learn as you go. So what advice do you have to someone who's farther along to be able
to make that transition and still be successful and still, I guess, keep that high bar, besides, "Just
work really hard." What advice would you have?
>> Kathryn McKinley: You have to be willing to take a dip, because to learn new skills, you
have to take a dip. So if you can't take that risk, because you're too used to that nice raise that
comes to a higher performer -- that's what I did when I came to Microsoft. I was a highperforming professor. That's why I got hired, but now I'm learning all new skills and how to
interact with product teams and totally new evaluation criteria on me which impact the products.
But I don't even know anybody and any products yet. I just know researchers, and I'm just
meeting researchers, because I'm in the Research building. So there's all these new challenges
I'm facing, so I didn't get my top performer ratings that I used to get at the university. So I'm
taking the dip, but I'm learning new skills, and I'm telling myself that eventually I get to come
back up, because my general work ethic and my ability to learn and the fact it's fun and exciting
and I am meeting product teams and I am trying to impact the data center, that's my top priority,
so hopefully that will happen next year. And so I'll take in a two-year dip, but not too bad, and
then I'll be back up. But you have to say, I've got to go down to go up.
>> Cordy Rierson: I think the other thing with that, too, if you are considering something, use
your network and talk to people who are already in those fields and who are doing those jobs.
Set up your lunches, set up your coffee times. Everybody likes to do coffee here, and you go and
you have your coffee and you go and you have your lunch, just from the groups and the different
departments and try and figure out what the day in the life is. Is there opportunity for expansion,
is there opportunity for growth? Just even talking to that person and listening to their day in a
life, and what type of groups they deal with, is that something that's going to be pleasing to you?
Because I think at the end, the dips, the dips will be there, but the dips are worth it if you have
the passion for the transition or the passion for the thing that you're going into.
>> Kathryn McKinley: Take some classes ahead of time in the things that you're rusty on or that
you need to know for your new job that you don't know, online class.
>> Erin Chapple: So building on that, I had a very creative individual in my team this year. And
I was talking to somebody in a different discipline who wanted to move into program
management, and I said, "Oh, well, let me connect you with a guy on my team who I think is
good at this. He can kind of help mentor you or whatnot."
Well, we were a little under-resourced, and so he actually farmed out a piece of work to that
individual, who wrote a little spec for our project and sat in on our team meetings, and that was
the basis of him then making a transition to program management, because he found out he liked
it, and he got a sense of what it real was, and he got some feedback on what it was he was doing.
So if your current management is supportive of the environment, and you can carve off some of
that and find someone who can help you by giving you something tangible, so that you can
actually -- because it's different, right? What you think on the outside something is versus when
you get in and start doing it, it is different, which is why I love internships, because you really
get to taste that. But try to figure out how to create a little mini-internship or something for
yourself.
>> Shilpa Ranganathan: Completely agree. Plus two on that.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Do we have any other questions on the floor? Yes, we can go back. Thank
you.
>>: Hi. I'm Anna. I'm an intern in Windows this summer, and what got me excited about
technology was hearing about those robots that went to Mars and there were computers out there,
discovering things. So I wanted to ask all of you, what is the most awesome thing of technology
or computers or engineering that you've heard about recently or you think is really cool and
would want to tell everybody about, like, "Oh, this is why technology is super-cool."
>> Cordy Rierson: So I think it's really cool that you brought that up. Did you know that Katie
used to work ->> Rane Johnson: Can you repeat the question?
>> Cordy Rierson: So Anna was asking about what's super-awesome in technology right now?
She's talking about how when she got into it, she's thinking about the robots that they sent to
Mars. And that kind of reminded me of Katie's background. She spent some time at NASA, so
she might have some experience with Robots and Mars. But one of the things that we did with
the Kinect program here at Microsoft is we actually created an application with the landing of the
Mars robot, so we got to go. We had a whole team, and we spent a lot of time with the JPL
organization in Pasadena, and I think I just geeked out on staring at a tire for like 15 minutes,
because how do you create a tire that can navigate terrain on Mars? And what is that like and
dealing with the weather elements and how it unfolds and how it lands and building that
application? So I think there's a lot of really, really cool stuff like that. But some of the things
I've gotten really excited about, and I'll just Kinect, since we can't talk about a whole bunch of
stuff happening currently, but I think Kinect really was a launching platform for innovators and
hackers. And just alike, researchers and colleges from around the world who built sign language
programs and enabled parents to learn sign language, to speak with their children. We got to
work with all kinds of people from around the world who were looking to get into that
technology, where you could use your body, and talk about human-user interface, you really
don't get more human in a user interface than using your entire body to work and teach
something somewhere, whether you're remote and distance is a factor or whether you're in the
same room, just having some kind of technology like that, where you have depth centers and the
RGB, where you can really create something and take it to a place for education. Another article
that came out of that was the whole -- I think they were doing in the operation room, where
you're cutting down on Staph infections and people getting sick while they're having surgery
because it enables surgeons to review stuff on the fly while they're operating without having to
deglove and rewash their hands and put back on gloves, where you introduce those types of risks.
So those types of things, even though it was created in the blanket of entertainment, the fact that
it went so far beyond that, to solve things medically and scientifically and educationally I think is
amazing.
>> Kathryn McKinley: So I want to say just a personal work relationship that I have. I work
with a guy named Steve Blackburn, who was a postdoc in my group, but now he's in Australia. I
Skype him all the time, and it's like he's in the room with me. And yesterday, we were trying to
solve a research problem, and we're sending the link for this paper that's related to this idea, so
we don't have to go to the library anymore. I know you probably don't even realize this was an
issue, but it's like the information that's sitting at my desk, I can be working with someone in
Australia who just got up and his kids are running around behind him while he works early in the
morning with me, and all the tools we need, we can almost get at all of them to make this
decision about what technology -- how best to solve this problem we're having, and that we can
talk back and forth and it's just like he's in the room with me. And so we've had a collaboration
since 1999 until now, so for 14 years. So it's been Skype this whole time, or it was the phone
technology before, but now that we have Skype, the relationship is so much better, and it lets you
do things. Like you could have never have done something like this before, 15 years of
collaboration, in this way.
>> Ayna Agarwal: Great. So I think that's all we have time for today in terms of questions, but
I'm sure the panelists can safely say that we'll be here to answer any questions. I really think
some very, very important points were made today, whether it be from different backgrounds to
skills and diversity to what up-and-coming technology is. I want to thank you all for coming out
here today. I hope that, moving forward, you'll take action somehow, so whether that be through
the Microsoft Research platforms of learning how to code really easily or the programs that
they're building to encourage support or taking the documentary and showing it to your friend,
you can do it. You can help out. And I think Rane has some closing words.
>> Rane Johnson: Well, thank you very much. Let's give a hand to these great women. Before I
have my closing words, I do have one question for each of the panelists for the room, because as
I speak with young women all over the world and then also a lot of Microsoft employees who
come to me for advice and coaching, one of the questions they always ask, to be a senior woman
and the amazing work that each one of you do, how do you balance work and life? And do you
feel you have good balance, and could you give some words of advice to the people in the room?
>> Kathryn McKinley: Okay, let's go the other way this time.
>> Shilpa Ranganathan: Okay. I would say the first thing is, I'm very fortunate that my husband
is very supportive of this, so literally two days a week he picks up the kids, two days a week I
pick up the kids, and one day I pick up the kids. Yes, I wish. But yes, tapping into that support
system is important. I sincerely feel, with your significant other, to say, "Hey, help me through
this." I find that really important. The other thing that really helps me get through my day,
because I have the context which between my life and work is Post-Its prioritization. Literally, I
go through and say what is my goal? What is it that I need to accomplish? Clarity in that mind
is important. I do that every single day, say, "Okay, what is it that I'm trying to get at? Because,
believe me, 10,000 things come at you every single day, and you lose track of it. Once I have
that, I really create a set of Post-Its for myself, say, "Okay, these are these that I need to do." I
keep track of it and roll it over if things don't get done. That's how at least I have tried to balance
my work and life right now.
>> Cordy Rierson: So for me, it's very important -- we talk about technology and we're all very
big in technology. This to me was a little bit -- I think I was saying this to Rane. I had this
irony, because my daughter, who is here with us today, she's very into technology. So now we
set -- we have guidelines and rules that we need to set in our house, where we are not using
technology, that we are using our human time together. And human time and physical time is
just as important as our time with our work, our time with our technology. So it's about
establishing those rules and sticking to them and not just not doing the do as I say and not as I
do, but hey, everybody does, so we all unplug. Don't we?
>>: Can we erase those guidelines for school? Because I don't want to deal with those during
school?
>> Cordy Rierson: So we have a time where we set rules where we unplug, and we do the oldfashioned traditional thing, where we look at each other and we talk to each other and we have
maybe awkward silences, or maybe we read together or play board games or whatever it is. But
I think that's just really critical, and oddly, businesses are spinning up around this, right? They
now have what they call I believe it's Fantasy Vacations, which sounds odd, but it is just this. It's
a vacation where you go and you unplug now, so I think that's just very critical. And it's about
just making sure that you have that time dedicated, that you are spending physically aware and
physically present with those important in your life.
>> Erin Chapple: So, earlier, I talked about how I wish I could have erased Dilbert. I really
wish I could erase the word work-life balance, because to me, it's life balance, and I think about
my life and I think about my stickies in the sense of what priorities I want, and I figure out how
I'm going to fill up my time. And some of that, sometimes, it's more weighted to work, and
sometimes it's more weighted to stuff outside of work, depending upon what I go through. So I
really wish we could -- if there was one thing I want you to do going out of here, never use the
word work-life balance again. It's life balance. And there are two tactical things that I will
encourage you do around that. One, I work from home every Monday. I'm not in the office. I
sit at my kitchen table and I work from home every Monday. What that allows me to do is it
allows me to take the things that require deep thinking and lots of busywork and have a
dedicated time to work on it, so I'm not stressed out the rest of the time that I'm not getting those
things done.
And so really kind of figuring out what works for you in terms of how you get your work done,
how you can be the most effective, that would be one. And the other is, don't be afraid to set
boundaries and set expectations. I am a huge hockey fanatic. My husband and are Canadian.
We split season's tickets up in Vancouver to the Vancouver Canucks, and I tell people that it's
October, hockey season's starting. Which means randomly -- not randomly, because it's on my
calendar, but at least once every two weeks, at 2:00, I'm leaving the office in the afternoon and
I'm driving to Vancouver and I'm going to go to the game and I'm going to come back, and I will
be a happier person because of it. And you check the score, because you might want to see if
they won or lost for the next day, to see if I'm in a good mood or not.
But you know what? People on my team are like how do you even do that? You have a
recurring meeting on Tuesdays at 3:00. I'm like, "I'm not going to it." People will figure out
how to work around, right? And sometimes, I think you don't ask, and you don't set those
expectations upfront, and you kind of are opaque in what you're doing. So you can figure it out,
and people will be accommodating.
>> Kathryn McKinley: So I'm going to give two sets of advice. I'm going to give advice for
before you're married and have kids and then I'm going to give advice for when you're married
and you have kids. Before you're married and you have kids, your time is your most important
decision. What you spend your time on is preparing you for your whole life, so who you choose
for your friends, when you hang out with them, how much you drink or don't drink, how much
time you spend on work, how healthy you eat and if you get regular exercise. When I was a
young person, without responsibilities, it was really important to exercise. Really helps my
mental health, and that's something I've done my whole life, other than like right after my
children were born and I could barely walk. I always took some time, some weeks more than
others -- right now, I'm being pretty good, so I'm always going to the gym four times a week.
That does a couple of things. It makes you feel better, because exercising is good for you and
helps your mental health. It's time that's only for me. It's not really helping anybody else except
that I'm not mad at them because I'm in a better mood because I exercised. So there is some
external effect, but it is not because I have a paper due in my class. It's not to make my mother
happy. It's the thing that I do for me, and you always have to have something every week,
several times a week, that you're just doing for you so that you don't resent all the people around
you, and you make better choices.
Now, once you have a very complicated life, the major decision you make is who you pick for
your husband or your wife, and that will determine huge amounts of your life quality or you'll
get divorced from them and that will be a horrible experience. So make that choice as wisely as
you can. Ask your parents' advice, even though you don't care what they think, because they
know you and love you better. And say, "What do you think will help me? What kind of person
should I be with?" And listen to them as you go out looking for that person. And then, negotiate
with your husband or your wife when you're making these huge transitions. When you have a
kid, you have to renegotiate everything. When you have that second kid, you have to renegotiate
everything. We have three boys who play hockey, and we had to renegotiate every time, even
though I have a marriage probably many of you won't have, with a stay-at-home husband. I
married an artist. So those, and how I spend my time now, is even more important, so there are a
bunch of things that I just don't ever do, because even though other people enjoy them a lot, I
don't enjoy them enough to spend my time on them anymore. Maybe once my kids are all out of
the house and I have more time that I get to choose how I spend it, not in the hockey rink,
watching my kids play hockey -- but you would like my life a lot. I find it challenging. I find it
more challenging some days. And then you have to -- sometimes it's about you. Sometimes it's
about your husband. Sometimes it's about your kids.
>> Rane Johnson: Well, thank you very much, ladies. And so, Katie, can you move it to the
next slide? So, in closing, I have a call to action for everyone in the room. So, number one is
Erin's request, which I think is fantastic. We will no longer call it work-life balance but life
balance. Number two, for all the students, it was brought up earlier about the Aspirations
Award, and so one of the things that I do want to tell all of the high school students is apply.
Microsoft Research, we sponsor the Aspirations in Computing Award, and it ends up you'll
receive a plaque for not only yourself, but then it's also in your school, and may times you'll get
recognized by the School Board of Education, and it goes into the big wall of big sporting
trophies, and then your awesome computer science trophy.
Secondly, this is an ask for the student and then also the parents and all the Microsoft employees
and interns, is on our research.microsoft.com/diversity, we have a whole bunch of free tools, a
whole bunch of amazing lectures and profiles and women in computing, some TED Talk like
researcher talks from our top women in research, that we'd love for you to share and utilize and
learn, and I think it's really important that a lot of the great work that we do, it's all free, and we
would love for lots of people to know about it and for people to take advantage of it. Another
important thing is for the women in the room who may be undergraduate or graduate students, or
parents in the room who have a daughter who is in undergraduate or graduate school, we do offer
a Microsoft Research graduate scholarship to help for that first year their computer science
study, because the research we've found is that first and second year is the most difficult. You
haven't gotten your research figured out yet, so you may not have the dollars, the grant funding
that covers your tuition, and so we cover that and we also serve as mentors.
And, lastly, there are amazing internships, postdocs and visiting researcher opportunities in
Microsoft Research, and we're looking for more and more women all the time. So, with that, I
want to thank everybody for coming today. I want to thank all of our amazing panelists, and if
we can give Ayna and Katie a big hand, because they're the ones who did the most work.