Meet Alaina Percival – Tech.Strong.Women EP 11

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of tech strong women where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in Tech. I'm Jody Ashley executive producer here at Tech strong.

And I'm joined by my co-host Tracy Reagan today very excited to be here. But before I introduce today's guests I want to give you a quick update about what's going on here at Tech trying TV coming up on December 16th. You won't want to miss devops experience virtual event.

And yes, it's almost 2023. So be sure to mark your calendars for our annual predict virtual event on January 12th. tv every day for great shows and interviews.

Hey, Tracy, what are you thinking about today? What do you want to talk about? Jody always do such a good job of that.

I want to talk about heroines today, especially with our our guests. I feel like she's a heroine but have you noticed that I don't know Jody if you're into fantasy movies. I've he watched House of dragons.

My husband is Just I figured so have you noticed that the the series that are coming out that are highlighting women as heroin? Oh, yeah, and we have we have House of dragon. We have breakfast Ramirez and her aunt put their princes.

I think it's reneus and then we have yeah, and then we have in the Lord of the Rings. We have our elf. I think her name is Galadriel.

Yeah, which and she's super super powerful and then on the totally office side of the spectrum we have the Great. Which were learning about in a very hilarious show Catherine the Great. I even gotten to watch that.

Yeah, he's gonna have to you're gonna have to yeah, so I'm kind of excited that both the house or I know this is nothing to do with technology. But it I'm still excited that both of those two big time, you know fantasy series are highlighting women as the central characters and even and House of dragon. We have Alison Hightower now she has to you know be the she's not really the bad woman.

She just is not a supported, you know, maybe maybe some of the fans of what her to win the battle but she is still a very strong woman who started out kind of innocent now, I don't know I first started really getting into learning about l from I can't think of it's the stranger things. Oh, yes and Elvis such an amazing female character. You know, she had that innocence but she was super super powerful and she had to find her voice and in all of these shows.

It's taking you it's taking us through that that journey of women learning to find their voice right? Like I think is so important especially in technology. I mean, we can't I can't even emphasize how many times I've been in meetings where it's a couple of women who really have the knowledge and they said back and they don't say anything because they're in a room full of men and I always tell people women we have to find our voice and I think those programs have really taught us or is teaching us and it's teaching the younger women and younger girls who are watching that to find your voice.

So I kind of like to keep that as the theme here because Our Guest today and I'll let you go ahead you're there well Elena it has it I will let Elena do the do the work of introducing yourself but she is certainly a heroine when it comes to women and teaching women to code and women not just in the United States but across the planet so Elena wanted to introduce yourself and tell us about finding your voice. Hi, I'm Elena personal and CEO and co-founder of women who code which as you mentioned, it's the largest and most active community of diverse women technologists in the world. So when I say that we're serving over 300,000 members across 147 countries and when I say we're the most active come visit our website, we've got an average of five free technical events every single day throughout the year.

So we we have whatever technology area that that you're interested in and Tracy you're you're kind of speaking to to Heron's really hit me today because I've personally been in mourning over the past week or so because my absolute favorite show when I was a child was Murder She Wrote and I know you Oh, you know and actually watching it this weekend. I'm so proud of my like my youthful self that I chose this like smart, you know woman forward. Yeah heroin to be my like my favorite show.

wow, I know so sad to lose those, you know those older women who kind of Chartered a course for us and on a personal note. Today's a very interesting day. It is it's being this is being recorded on 10 19 22, which happens to be my mother's birthday.

Oh literally 100 years ago today. No that it's sort. Of inspiration to me.

She you know, I I wanted to go to school and study history and she was like now you're not doing that you're going into some kind of stem or engineer. You're not gonna say that's Terr ace at the side I know that's like they wouldn't pay for college if I was what I wanted to do. Yeah, they were me I have the same situation, but she was My Heroine.

So yeah, it is it is sad to see those people leave the planet it is in my mom grown up. My mom. My parents adopted me when they were in there late 40s.

And so she was much older by the time I was a teenager. She was people thought she they were my grandparents but she always Murder She Wrote and all the all the Perry Mason I grew up watching all that stuff with her. So I had the same reaction.

You did Elena. It just made me think of my mom and how much I missed her and watching all that stuff growing up and drives my family crazy out because I can I'm such a mystery buff. I can figure everything out like before it happens and my husband I'll just look at me and go freak.

Good, so that was a huge huge loss this week for sure. So later, why don't you give us a little bit about your background? Tell us how you you know, where where did the Young Elena look like?

Yes, I I wound my my way to my current path just like I really think most people do in their lives. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm actually living here now and when I graduated from University, I wanted to challenge myself.

I wanted to live abroad I wanted to learn a foreign language and it's very difficult to get a job and a foreign country. If you don't already know the language, so I got a congressional scholarship to go and spend a year in Germany. And so I was learning the language and building my network making connections and I ended up getting a job at Puma the performance where company and so one of the things that I would do when I was there because you know, I didn't immediately get my my dream job.

I would go over to different teams at the end of my day and say hey, what are you doing? You know, can I help you a thing? And so I ended up getting promoted onto a team that I had kind of gotten really interested in pretty quickly.

And so my next role in the organization was overseeing or product manager for our Niche products, which is all the non-core competency products. Like Puma's selling a folded bike for a while and you know, the stores don't know how to do that Greece, you know, it's a it's a vehicle and so, you know, we needed to work with the legal team. And so it did a couple of things it Had me managing up which is really a learning experience and very much correlates to having a volunteer-led organization because you can't tell the CEO the CFO.

You can't tell the head of retail you have to you have to do it. Now same with volunteers. You have to take people on the journey.

You have to really get them to understand why and find what they're motivators are and and build the path. And so that was a real learning experience for me, you know in the early part of my my career after that. I I did an MBA so I had been living in Germany for four years.

I went back and did a dual degree in ba that took me to four continent. So I was very globally focused in the early part of my career and in my education path, and so when I finished that it was 2008 I was so lucky to A job but I found a job a really small women's Performance Footwear company that was launching the first ever women's specific volleyball and basketball shoes. I'm at this tiny company social media is like picking up as like a way of doing business and You know Nike and Mizuno are are immediate competitors.

So I have to think outside of the box for how to like launch these products into the market. And so it was really a learning experience transitioning from you know, a traditional product company that I did have some unique experiences with to a small company that was run more like a startup using more kind of different ways of building this traditional Product Company and then I had the opportunity to move to the Bay Area and it was one of those things where it was on my list. It was like of five cities, you know, I'm gonna move get a chance to move to San Francisco.

Let's do it and I got out there and I had a wall to be honest. I had a really strong career in kind of traditional product up until that point and people looked at me and they're like Oh, you mean the shoe company? That's not Google.

That's not micro. That's not Facebook. I'm so I started learning to code and had side projects in this living the San Francisco kind of Life of really upscaling myself to be able to.

Speak the technology language and build my tech credibility. So I eventually went to a startup that God got Acquired and so I earned my my tech credibility, but I was throughout that time, you know, getting involved in the tech community and women who code was starting as a meetup group at the time and I found that my background and organizational management and Community Building actually led to like Driving this this movement and growing and creating sustainability around this organization. And so I took a job at after the company was acquired at a top like executive recruiting firm and they were allowing me to be the head of developer Outreach.

I was talking to ctOS and vice presidents of engineering and directors of engineering and like seriously funded Founders constantly, and I realized that fewer than 5% of the people getting these game-changing, you know, like the series a CTO of LinkedIn, you know, like these like life-changing roles for women fewer than 5% And so I started learning from the people that I was connecting with every day about what they were doing inside their career what they were doing outside of their career, you know, what they were doing to navigate and and find success and how that was translating differently for for women and I started bringing that into women who code as part of our programming and that's when our mission around really empowering women to Excel and Technology careers came about and not just You know teaching women to code or teaching girls to code because what was happening at the time is the world started talking about like the media was saying we need to teach girls to code. We need to teach women to code but we were a community of women in the industry and already coming up against these barriers of bias. And one of those was constantly being needing to prove yourself and being viewed as more Junior than you actually were so if Someone or women who code didn't Elevate the conversation to include women in the tech industry and their needs we've actually ran a risk of having this amazing conversation of you know, teach women to code teach girls to code actually harming the women in the industry.

And so that's when I realized hey, this is important women all over the world deserve to have this and we need to start elevating our voice and the needs of women in the industry alongside teaching girls to code and teaching them to code because the easiest and fastest way to create greater equality among women and girls in the tech industry is by supporting the incredible talent in the market already today. So we have such a gap right now. Yeah, I mean in the area that I'm you know.

Devops, which has been my career for the last 20 some odd years. It's you can't even find people to do the work. You literally can't find people to do the work.

They're just is a huge gap and I hear to discussion about more Automation and AI, you know, like co-pilot, you know, Microsoft's building copilot. It's gonna make coding much easier because it's gonna be a lot of kind of like Snippets that you can use to build things. So we're changing from coding to being able to put together puzzle basically with existing pieces and I feel like that this is an opportune time for women to step in because there is such a gap but you know, I and community building is essential like I love that you brought that up, but I want an open source Community open source project called rotilius and I every day and looking for women.

I like literally stock women on LinkedIn. Just you know look to see if they'd be interested in joining the open source community and I still need ladies. I just don't I can't get them to to stick around and I and the guys know that you know that there'll be a meeting and they'll just be one female coder in there and then she disappears so it's been a challenge and it continues to be a challenge any suggestions on how we fix that.

You should give a talk at women who code to I would love to your message out to the over 300,000 members in our community, but I think something that you said really strikes and or really resonates with with what we see in what we're really working to fight against and that's that they disappear they're there but right now About 50% of women technical women and their careers drop out at around the 10 year mark, right when they're poised when they should be accelerating in their their career path, and that's because they're coming up against, you know, biases and their career throughout their career you get on a bad project, you know, maybe it's there's about team member or bed team leader or you know, you see your peers who have less experience less qualifications getting the promotions and and you're not getting the one getting the promotions. And so what we see and hear women doing is caring messages like oh, you know, you're you're So good at really working and bringing people on to your projects. Have you talked about recruiting instead of saying oh we should promote this person.

You know, we're oh you're you're so good about talking about the product. Have you thought about marketing? Like I literally had someone with a master's in CS from Stanford encouraged.

To take a marketing path at a technology company and their male counterparts would absolutely never hear that message and it feels encouraging at the time because it's like, oh you're so good at this you should do that. But the message that needs to be heard is you're actually exhibiting leadership skills, and we should be harnessing those and promoting you. Well, don't you find that just by virtue of some of our personality traits as women that it's taken as a negative?

but as an example, my daughter is an actor and she's a director and she's become an intimacy director, which is this brand new emerging field in the industry of film and theater and stage and Opera and she's been she's busting her butt all through the pandemic to learn this to get this new skill so that she can work because she couldn't work at all and she she did a debrief the other day with one of the theater companies which I won't name in Minnesota and the two women that she work with the female directors feedback to her. Through another person not even one-on-one was that she was too bubbly and I was like, she's 27 years old and her whole job is to make people comfortable on the set of production with the intimate parts of being in a theater opera. Not just the sexual parts, but just some people don't want to be touched on their arm or their shoulder and you need to think about these things before you do them.

And she was told in a job where making people comfortable that she was too Bubbly by a female director and I was like a man would never be told he was too bubbly. Yeah. I was like what is wrong here?

Because it's women doing it to other women and she was just like She's a great cohort of people that support this job. She's doing because it's new and she went to them and they're all like I'm We do it to our each other too. Yeah, you brought up an important point.

This isn't saying, you know, when we're talking about this this is ingrained in our culture and something that we need to overcome culturally. It isn't all men. It isn't all women.

It's the way women are kind of Viewed the way there nudged the way they're told to succeed or not succeed. One of the big things that we do at women who code is trying to overcome the social barrier to women talking about their successes. So if a woman's about you know, hey, I was on text wrong women and you know, I'm on here with all of these other great talented people.

I deserve to be there. I sound like I'm bragging whereas on the the male counterpart can can talk about the successes that he had just a part of, you know, I got mentioned on like strong women usually acceptable to to Really drive forward your career successes. And so that's a bit of a comical example, but what it It really hit me when I was speaking with a director of engineering at a company and I said hey, you know, it's a little bit more difficult for women to talk about their career successes.

It's a little more difficult for society to hear us do it and she was like, oh Elena, you're right. I'm actually senior director of engineering now, and I've been embarrassed. to update my LinkedIn profile Oh, that's a saddest thing ever.

No, it is really so sad and she has the legitimacy of a title a pay increase probably a company-wide announcement. Whereas if you've just like written Stellar code or done like contributed to a project in a significant way the barrier to you championing the role that you had actually holds you back in your career because in her circumstance where she had all of these external factors saying that she deserved to have this I don't know to invite her to join my board because you know, she's so senior or to invite her to be a keynote at my conference or you know, you don't know to have her come in and speak on your on your show. And so when you think about the thing today things that you're you're not championing though the week by week the month by month, it adds up significantly and so women who code has a thing called a plot her and we're trying to create social change around talking about your career successes and I'll just give you one more example of how difficult it is.

We had one of our leaders email it out to their whole area mailing list, so probably a couple thousand people. Hey celebrate your career successes crickets. Nobody nobody submitted something the next email said, hey celebrate the Career Success of a woman who is around you 200 immediately within a day responsive because oh, wow, it was so difficult all of those 200 people, you know had had career successes, but didn't Elevate them didn't feel comfortable to share them out didn't feel because it goes back to what I'm saying.

We struggle to find our voice. Yeah, we really do we struggle to find our voice and to you know, open our mouths and say hey look what I just did. Yeah.

Social and culturally conditioned that it's it's not not okay to do so, so we have trouble doing it and we just have trouble hearing it whether we're a man or a woman that is an amazing example and it is but it's it's definitely a real thing, you know something I wanted to ask you about this the globalness of what you're doing. We I've seen a lot in the news lately where women in some of the countries where they're you know being repressed that they're like secretly learning how to code right these women and girls are doing this in all sorts of countries around the world where how far is your reach. Can you give us some examples of where where this is happening other than you know things we would think about normally yeah.

We're not 147 countries. So we have members all over the world. We we don't discriminate I can some members based on on their government.

But you know, we have extremely active community and the Ukraine and so it's been very difficult, you know over. Far too long the beginning of this year. And so when they they've managed to stay active and and still updating us and you know, we we know that some of them are involved in cybersecurity operations to to support the Ukraine and you know, we also have members that are in Iran right now.

So we recently ran out announced a statement and support of our members and the women of Iran who are are you know, continuously protesting it against the oppression we have found their voice. Yeah, they have found their voice I Heroes these women are amazing. Yeah, absolutely.

That's that's what I was wondering and you know, we saw when they we pulled out of Afghanistan and all these Afghani women and girls who are allowed to be in school that suddenly got shoved back in but so many of them are still Finding ways to get past the barriers that the governments are creating and this is a field that they can do that in. It's there's not a lot of those out there. I would I would think that women to like if I can get access to the internet I can learn to code I can create a place for myself and just it's so amazing and I think I love I love hearing about it.

It's great that you guys are having that kind of global reach. And it represents a tremendous opportunity as well because you can use a VPN you you can be behind the protections of the internet and you can work remotely so, you know, where in in areas where you know, women are oppressed or prevented from from working in an offices technology presents. a tremendous opportunity for career paths So, how can we?

Hire your women. So women who could have a job board. So if you're posting jobs on any job board to highly Niche Community should your your company should absolutely be doing it.

But really it's important to actually be supporting the work that women who code does so we don't charge membership but it costs us $27 to provide a year of free programming to each of our members and we heavily rely on Partners who we you know, create partnership agreements for them to to support the work that we do and it it's important to be authentically supporting the community not just taking from the community or showing up and and heading out and so Becoming a partner to him to women who code supporting our events and the program that we're doing in providing to build a sense of belonging increase knowledge and develop leadership skills among women in the tech industry is critical. We we could not do it without our our partners and donors. That's amazing.

That's that's amazing. Well, I'm definitely going to reach out to you about getting some of your women to join our open source Community. They will I hope so too.

We did have a few women from Africa join for a while. They ended up getting jobs and then they got so focused on their jobs, they were contributing anymore, but it was great we to have supported them. We did a lot of Education around, you know, Google Cloud build and getting them to be more kind of devopsy Engineers and they both went off and got jobs in the area.

That's an utter utter success story. Even if contributing to the open source project like it's the absolute best outcome and people don't know that about open source people think open sources really smart people getting together to code in reality. It is a training platform.

It's an education platform. I'm a real project to work on and we use it that way we use it as much as we can. In fact now we're doing Some work around blockchain and we got a grant for it.

So we get to pay people who are working on that part of the project. So it encouraged them to to learn more and I'd love to have more women doing that. Yeah.

Well, we have a blockchain track at women who code so we should definitely we should apply that opportunity to the community. That would be great. What are you age groups for women who code like what kind of We don't discriminate based on age.

But the average age is about 30. Okay? Okay.

So do you use any of the girls who code organizations to as a do you Outreach to those as well? Because I know those are becoming super popular to my my granddaughter. Is learning to code she's 12 and she thinks it's a lot of fun her brother was trying it and he was 14 and she's like well, I'm gonna she's one of those I want to do it if he can do it I can do it.

So yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, I I applaud your granddaughter.

We've certainly had younger people join in, you know, we don't don't check ages or but we've also sent mentors of course to technovation girls who code black girls code all over the world because it is a part of the pipeline and you know, I'm teaching at I'm teaching women leading technology at Georgia State University this semester and you know, I tell my students, you know, go to these industry events because you're just going to connect with people who can tell you. You know what the good companies are to work for they can introduce you they can help you and you can get to know what technical information like what you get to know the technologies that industry is is using and so it's such a great Gateway for for younger people to be able to network even though you know, they are going to be a little bit further along in their career path. Typically a woman who code is a is a great place for people who are still early in their careers or looking for inspiration.

That's amazing. Well, everybody's early in their career in my opinion when it comes to technology I know it involves so much it evolves so much for all learning and I usually tell women that because sometimes I think women feel like they have to have all the answers before they go into field and I tell them you will never have all the answers and it's okay to ask questions. No one ever looks dumb and in software by asking a question.

Yeah. Yeah, it's I try I I try and emphasize that as well that it's it's continuous learning and the exciting thing about it is, you know, like the the programming language that you're using is probably only a few years old. And so you're only going to be a couple years behind the most senior people and you know it it's probably gonna change in Another Year too and you will be right at the beginning with with everyone else and so there's really not a bad time to to get involved get started and in a technology.

Career path, and I think that ability to Pivot is super critical in this industry, but it sounds like you're pretty good at pivoting yourself in your story. It sounds like you pivoted quite a few times. Yeah, and that's another area that I think women really have to learn is to it's okay to let go of something you've worked on for a while and maybe pivot a little bit because you'll find a different answer when you do so yeah.

Yeah. Well, it feels like this organization really represents that right women, who are figuring out thought they knew what they wanted to do and now they're finding something new and they're like, wow this this looks like something I can do and I have I have a couple friends who started learning it again during the pandemic because they couldn't work at their jobs and they want to be able to have more access to being a mom and it's like this great way for them to work from home their hours are flexible and they can do that and still, you know, Not have to be in an office all the time. Yeah, and our our community is typically already technical.

So they're typically already in technology careers, but kind of speaking to always needing to learn, you know, there's hey I want to get a bit deeper into data science. Oh, I want to get get a bit deeper into devops. and cybersecurity awareness month, you know, that's a that's a huge tremendous area that people should be focused on in another area where we need to see more women pursuing because when I think about Who's going to be leading companies in the future?

It's going to be people who have an understanding of data security of cybersecurity the same way that people historically have had an understanding of laws and and accounting because it's going to be such a critical area of success that companies need to have. That's awesome. Yes, especially right now.

I'm on the board of the open source security foundation and the conversations there boy. There's so many things to fix right now. We do have we have we in terms of our infrastructure.

It's pretty leaky. Yeah. Well, we're getting getting to the end of our time together here and and Elena.

I want you to give us a good wrap-up of how how women can reach out what give us some websites. We can add those to the posting when we air this this amazing conversation. We've had and give you guys some some people some access to what you're doing through our site.

com we have a tremendous data base on YouTube of content where women who could on Twitter Instagram LinkedIn connect with us, and I'm at Elena on Twitter. Great. Well, thank you so much for being with us.

We're yes, what a great conversation. It's so exciting to see what's going on. Yeah Trace.

Oh my goodness. Yes. I really enjoyed this.

You know, we don't necessarily always talk about women on text on women. We, you know, we want to have these kinds of sessions, but this one I think was particularly important and relevant for today and getting women into an industry that needs you. We need you.

We need the Manpower and we can now call it woman power the human power. We need to you whatever we're calling it, so they power. Thanks for everybody.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of tech strong women. We'll look for you guys back on texturing TV soon. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.