Osi Imeokparia (Kode with Klossy) - Training Tech’s Next Gen [Entire Talk]

Good afternoon. Welcome to Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, the Stanford Seminar for Aspiring Entrepreneurs. ETL is presented by STVP, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and by BASES. The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Mike LeBbeck, I'm a faculty member in engineering and in the School of Sustainability. And I am the current faculty director for STVP. So don't feel shy at all about coming over and visiting us across the hall if you're not familiar with STVP. So today, We are thrilled to welcome a couple of wonderful speakers. Osi Imiopari.

Yes, you nailed it.

Nailed it. And Danny Lucas. Mm-hm. Nailed that one too. The first thing I'll say is they are both Stanford alums. Woo!

Get excited, people.

And so when it comes to questions, about you, about what you're doing, and what you're thinking about. They totally want to interact on that. So Ossi has spent her career working to support for-profit, nonprofit, philanthropic, and political organizations. Despite these very different paths, the North Star of her career has always been transformative power of technology. In every role she's held, creative problem solving has been the primary objective, whether by building technology, applying it, or shaping the role it plays. In the world that we live in today. She is CEO of Code with Klossy, a nonprofit talent retention solution focused on closing the gender gap in tech by providing ongoing technical learning experiences and curated opportunities. KwK supports a community of almost 11,000 young women and gender-expansive youth across their education and career milestones from ages 13 to 26. Before that, she held leadership positions at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Hillary for America presidential campaign after serving as a product leader in startup, midsize, and large organizations with experience across both enterprise and consumer technology. As I mentioned, she has a BS and an MS in engineering from Stanford and was a Mayfield Fellow at STVP just a few years ago. It was just a few years ago.

25 years ago.

I didn't say that. Dani Lucas is an engagement manager at McKinsey Company in their technology practice. In addition to her current role at McKinsey, she has worked closely with many startups in the Bay Area and beyond, including Recora Health and Genapsys, as well as design firms such as VMD Architects and Knoll. Her journey with entrepreneurship does not— includes not only the work she's done with these companies, but her independent work as well. While at Stanford, she created an individually designed major. We still totally have those, and they're still awesome, called Behavior Design, which culminated in the co-creation of an introductory seminar called Dare to Care: Compassionate Design, which focused on the design of assistive technologies for people with disabilities. After graduating, she spent time as an engineer in residence at the Mahathai Technical College for People with Disabilities in Thailand. In that role, she partnered with her software engineering peers from Stanford to develop a pilot program to teach blind students basic algorithmic and software concepts, as well as developing a series of design workshops for mobility-impaired students to build fundamental skills in creating assistive technology. She has a BS in engineering from Stanford and an MBA from Columbia Business School in New York. Without further ado, please help me in welcoming Osi and Danny.

Hi.

Hi friends, how is your afternoon going? Well? I got thumbs up, I like the interactivity already. So as Mike said, my name is Osi. I graduated from Stanford in 2000, so literally 25 years ago. To the year. So it's really awesome to be back on campus. I came to this class, and so it really is sort of a lot of full circles happening in this room at this moment. What I want to share with you is about my current work at Code With Klossy and the work that we're doing there that really talks about how we can increase the number of women who are in technology. This has been an age-old problem that we have been trying to solve for many, many years. And so our work is to think entrepreneurially about how we can try to solve it in new ways. Clearly what we're doing isn't working, and so how can we think about it differently? And so in partnership with some of the research from McKinsey, we're really thinking about the next stage of the organization. But first I'm gonna take you back to the origins. So Code With Klossy was founded in 2015 by Karlie Kloss. Carly's last name is where we derive the Clossy in our Code with Clossy. In 2015, Carly had taken a coding bootcamp herself. As a supermodel, she was many years into her successful career and had this curiosity that she wanted to discover how many people in her world were building companies successfully. What is the secret that they know that I don't know? And so she went to a coding bootcamp for 16 weeks and learned to code. She learned about front-end technology and back-end technology, and at the end of that experience, there were two things that she had discovered. One is that she now felt like she had a new language and superpower to understand how the world was being shaped. And number two, she realized that she had looked around the room as to others who were taking the class with her and she was the only woman in the room. And so as somebody who was both generous, entrepreneurial, and takes action, she posted on her Instagram that she would be willing to pay for 21 scholarships for young women to take the same exact boot camp that she had just taken. And in response to that offer of 21 scholarships, she got thousands of applications, and the light bulb went off that there really was an opportunity here to serve a need that was clearly not being served. When you get thousands of replies to an offer for 20 scholarships, you know that there's something in that mix. And so that is the origin story of Code With Klossy, as we began 10 years ago on this journey with our purpose to close the gender gap in technology. It started with an Instagram post and 21 scholarships. So if you fast forward to today, we are now a global community of 11,000 young people who have been through our programming from across 100 countries. We offer virtual and in-person programming all across the US, in London, and again, over the internet. And so that allows us to have people from many, many walks of life in our program. About 40% of the folks in our program qualify for free and reduced lunch. Which is an indicator of socioeconomic need. We have folks that speak 25 different languages at home. We have folks from all across the gender spectrum. And also, 80% of our young people identify as people of color. And so with a global community with that many diverse lived experiences, the uniting mission is that all of those young people want to find their place of belonging in tech, and we are the organization that they lean on to help them understand that. And so every year, we are able to, through the generosity of donors to our organization, award 3,000 scholarships to our programming. So everybody who attends Code With Klossy is attending free of charge, and so really we have a level playing field as much as possible. We provide the laptops that they learn on, We provide lunch and snacks if you are doing an in-person program. We provide transportation subsidies. Our mission is to reduce every barrier that might prevent you from taking this program so that all you have to do is show up with the courage, the courage and the curiosity to try a thing that you're interested in, which is coding. And so fast forward, we are making sure that we are also a constant presence in these young people's lives. For us, success is not taking one program and then we never see you again. We want to see you come back year after year after year. So our commitment from a programmatic perspective is that we are going to support these young people from the age of 13 when they join us to the time that they're 26. And I'll explain why 26 is a magic number in a moment. But that decade-plus of investment in programming is really an important part of how we see our role in retaining talent in this industry. We want to support you across your career and your educational milestones so that we can again hopefully close this gender gap. We've seen results that we're really, really proud of. Over these last 10 years, we have seen that in our community, Over 70% of the young people who go through our program go on to major and minor in computer science. And just to sort of frame how remarkable that is, in the nation, just about 4% of women pursue majors or minors in computer science. And so when we see numbers like this from our community, obviously there's some self-selection of awesomeness. But we also believe that our supportive programs are part of the reason these young people find a place of belonging and want to stay and persist to pursue their dreams and their passions. In addition, because of that persistence, we are now seeing that 70% of the folks that are still active in our community are over 18. So if you imagine that these folks joined us when they were 13 to 18, For us, it reads as a great success that many, many years later they're still with us and wanting to participate in the support and the programs that we offer. And so as we think about this contingent of our community, these 18-plus-year-olds who are like you in university, ready to face the world in the workforce, we think, how are we going to support them to make sure that they have an optimal chance of success knowing the hurdles and headwinds that face them. So I'm just gonna show you, I'm gonna sort of fact overwhelm you for a second and share some quick stats about where we are. We're very, very proud of our work, but I think we need to ground ourselves in the reality of the gender gap today. So first and foremost, how many folks in here are familiar with the org Code.org? Yeah, it's pretty incredible. So Code.org is an incredible organization. They are focused on making sure that computer science, foundational computer science, is available to all young people in K-12 education. They have done incredible work to make progress and make it a requirement sometimes for graduation for young people to take computer science. Despite these incredible efforts, both on the policy side and accessibility side, we are still seeing that even when the same class is available in a high school, young women are not taking it at the same rate as their male peers. Why is that? When access is available and the same, what is it that's causing that particular gap in behavior? The next stat that I'll overwhelm you with is that right now, 22% of degrees for computer science are earned by women. And women to this day make up 22, 22.6% of the high-tech workforce according to the Equal Opportunity Commission. What does that mean? Well, in relative terms, in 2025, can you guess what that number was? In 2025, women made up 22% of the high-tech workforce. We've made an overwhelming Overwhelming set of progress, 0.6% in that gap between 2015 and 2022. So again, when women are earning degrees, we're giving them access, we are still not seeing the numbers we'd like to see in the workforce to close that gap. What is causing that particular issue? The next question prompt is going to be, really how we're thinking about the new world. Who has gone today without talking about AI? It is impossible to escape this conversation today. And so again, when we think at Code with Clossie, how we're equipping our community for the future, AI is definitely part of that conversation. But there's already a worrying set of trends happening with AI and women in the workforce. Even when working with their male counterparts with the same set of policies, women are still 25% less likely to experiment with Gen AI in the workforce. And surprisingly, those stats are even worse for Gen Z women. What is happening? We are making as much effort with current interventions as possible to try to close this gap. And it seems like empirically from the data that we're not making a dent. So really when we think about this problem, we're thinking about a funnel. We're thinking about how young women are going from high school to college and into the workforce and really where they're getting caught up and making sure that that is both an anecdotally supported set of conversations but also data-driven. When we came across the McKinsey research, we were really compelled by the evidence that they had that supported some of the things we were hearing anecdotally. Specifically, there is a phenomenon that McKinsey has identified called the broken rung. And the broken rung is a phenomenon that women experience in the workforce such that for every 100 men who are promoted to their first managerial position, only 81 women are promoted. And sad to say, in tech it's even worse. For every 100 men promoted in a technical field, only 52 women are promoted. And so you have this giant chasm that is opening even early in career that is preventing women from really having the impact at senior levels. And so when we think about at Code With Klossy what we want to intervene, what is a creative idea for how we could think about supporting all the young people we're pouring at the top of that funnel, we think about the broken rung. Think about it this way. How does it make any sense for us to be minting all of these new college grads with CS degrees if we know that as soon as when they hit the workforce, they're not gonna feel supported enough to be able to make that leap to manager, to make that leap to senior director, and to make that leap to the C-suite. So for us, the broken rung phenomenon is a first step that we want to skate towards in order to make sure that we're doing our jobs correctly. And so I am so delighted to be joined here today by Dani, and she can share more about the broken rung research and all the foundational insights therein.

Thanks, Ossie. So quick background and introduction. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with McKinsey Company, but we're a global consulting firm. And so one of the biggest joys that we have is getting to partner with people like Ossie from Code With Klossie and our clients around the world to kind of understand what are some of the biggest trends in the workforce nowadays. So in the spirit of entrepreneurship, 3 of our senior partners, our first 3 consecutive Chief Diversity officers actually authored a book called The Broken Rung based on the observations that we've made over the last decade or so of women in the workplace research specifically. So when we look at women in the workplace as kind of a phenomenon, the first thing that kind of speaks to us is this notion of the broken rung. Because while I'm sure a lot of you have heard of the glass ceiling, as Osi mentioned, a lot of the kind of issues and gaps that we see in the talent pipeline happen a lot earlier on. So looking at this data in a little bit more detail, OC already referenced that there's kind of this for every 81 women promoted, 100 men are promoted. And so that's kind of the ratio that we're working with. But the reason that this really matters is because as you look at kind of representation across from the time people enter the workforce, we're seeing kind of rough parity between men and women. But as soon as you enter kind of the next level of promotion, that manager level, you're seeing almost a 10% drop-off right off the bat. So when we think about the broken rung, this is really the phenomenon we're referencing here. And there's even more to it than what's kind of shown on this screen. Women actually represent 59% of undergraduate degrees in North America, and that's roughly the same for master's and doctorate degrees as well. So you're not only seeing the drop-off between kind of that entry level and the manager, but even before that, where women are kind of entering the workforce with all of these phenomenal educational credentials, there's a pretty significant disparity once you actually step into the workforce. So this is again kind of the definition of the broken rung as a concept. And this manifests differently for different populations, which we'll talk about in a second. But again, really focusing on this notion of, you know, as we enter the workforce, there's not as much opportunity for people to get promoted as the representation of women gets smaller as you move up the corporate pipeline. So this really matters, you know, once you hit the C-suite, you have kind of a smaller pool of people to select from. So when we look at this phenomenon, it also breaks down differently for women of different races. So for better or worse, there's, you know, again, that 81 to 100 ratio for women overall. This number breaks down actually for 99 Asian women for every 100 men. And that's not to say that Asian women don't face kind of their own unique set of struggles kind of escalating up that leadership pipeline down the line as well. Those are equally as valid despite that higher representation. It's 86 white women for every 100 men, but then there's a pretty steep drop-off to that 65 for Latinas and only 54 black women for every 100 men promoted. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to kind of support each other as allies and kind of partners in the workforce in getting that information out there, both to kind of support ourselves and also to make sure that we are escalating the full set of talent that the workforce has to offer. The last thing I'll mention kind of on the data side before we jump into kind of the solution of what, you know, some ideas of this could look like is that this is not a problem of ambition. A lot of people might point to, well, maybe women have different career aspirations than men. And that's categorically untrue. Women are just as ambitious as men, and that's actually only growing. So in the last 2 years, we've seen a significant increase in what promotion actually means to women specifically. And also amongst our younger women, this is even more important in kind of the new generation entering the workforce. So if we kind of have this problem of what is the broken rung and how are we kind of addressing it today, the solution is something that we call experience capital. And this is something that goes very deep in the book and a lot of the research that we've produced in the recent years. But when we think about experience capital, it is really this set set of skills that you build on the job. So if you're entering the workforce with, again, these phenomenal educational and entry-level skills, what are kind of the second piece of the puzzle that's actually allowing you to make that promotion down the line? So when we think about experience capital, there are a couple of ways that you can kind of frame it up for yourself. One of them is just thinking about how the value of experience capital ends up shaping your long-term lifetime earnings. So lifetime earnings really being over the collective course of your career, how much are you earning total? And that is not to say that lifetime earnings is kind of the be-all end-all of what a successful career means, but it is a pretty easy proxy to point to. And as consultants, we love data, so this is a pretty hard fact. And really, at the end of the day, about half of your lifetime earnings is coming from experienced capital on average, and the other half is coming from that entry level. Skill set that you are kind of entering the workforce with. So when we think about experience capital, when we're looking at kind of the differences between men and women, women are typically building this more slowly than men, and that can start to account for some of the differences that we see, for example, in the 27-cent pay gap for every dollar that a man earns in the U.S. So when we think about how to actually start taking actions and strategic actions on an individual basis, because right now, you know, societal change can only move so quickly, But there are still things that you can do as both women and men to set yourself up for that next round of success. So we divide those into 3 big buckets. The first one is really thinking about the experiences that matter. So when you think about building your experience capital up, what is the job that you're moving into? What company are you looking at? Is it allowing you opportunities for learning down the line? What industry are you moving into? Is it growing or shrinking? Are you setting yourself up to kind of have sharp elbows if you're not going to have as many job opportunities in that? Or is it going to be an environment where all of a sudden you get to thrive and there are new opportunities? And then also, what are kind of the skills that you are constantly growing and learning as you kind of progress through those different opportunities across industries, across jobs, across companies? The second piece of this is really thinking about the skill set that you want to bring to the table. And so these are things like when you think about what technology can and can't replace, what are the skills that you can build up that will set you apart in the ways that we work in the future? So thinking about the soft skills that you bring to the table is a huge one. Thinking about how to engage with technology, how are you using this to become more efficient down the line? It also applies to things like your network. How are you using your network to kind of both build yourself up and those around you? So that we're kind of all lifting each other up together. And then the last piece, which I'll circle back to in a minute, is entrepreneurship very specifically. And that's what we'll talk to you about for the rest of the time that I have with you all. So when we think about kind of that collective skill set, that's the second bucket of activities that you can really leverage. The third piece is really just for women specifically. There are kind of a collective set of experiences that generally speaking apply to women more than men. Confronting bias, thinking about a strategic plan around parenthood, and the foundations of your health. So thinking about your mental, physical, and financial health, because there are kind of a unique set of factors that women typically have to face. Again, these are applicable to everybody. It just kind of looks different depending on the population that you generally fall into. So moving into kind of that piece around entrepreneurship specifically. Entrepreneurship is one of those skills that cannot be replaced by technology. Human context. It requires the opportunity to take risks, to identify opportunities, to think about the different opportunities that you have to be resilient down the line, because entrepreneurship is not just a linear journey. It's something that you'll kind of face a lot of pushback on over the course of your career if you're kind of really moving into a novel space or idea. So when we think about a lot of these skills, there are some that are a little bit more intangible, like again, thinking about risk-taking and all of those. But then there are also very practical skills that you can take. Learning public speaking, understanding how to forecast opportunities, looking at financial statements. Really tactical things that can set you up when you do identify that opportunity down the line to then be ready to tackle it and move forward. So I always love to tell stories. I think they're a very easy way to bring skills and ideas to life. So with my last few minutes with you, I will tell you the story of Katerina Feig, who is the co-founder of Flickr. So when we're talking about these opportunity identifications, this curiosity, this resilience, Katerina's story really exemplifies a lot of those pieces along the way. She harbored a very entrepreneurial drive from the time she was a child. She would sell her parents her classroom artwork for 5, 10 cents apiece, because she recognized she had a very loyal market that was willing to pay for it. And so when you think about that kind of spirit, obviously it takes a lot to go from selling your childhood pictures to one of the first female tech founders in Silicon Valley. However, using kind of that as a guide and a persona, she was able to then take a lot of opportunities that she had through her life and apply them in novel ways. So Katerina, when she went into her undergraduate education, she actually focused on literature. She ended up carrying that through into her graduate education as well and started pursuing a master's degree in literature at Berkeley. So when she did that, she started and she was passionate about the space. She loved reading. She loved the things that it could kind of connect for her, the synthesis of ideas. But as soon as she stepped into the Bay Area, she realized there was an energy in kind of the late '90s, early 2000s, which while that degree would be there for a long time, that energy might be fleeting. And so she pivoted. If you're talking about risk-taking and kind of that resilience and identifying of opportunities early on, she was able to say, okay, this is an opportunity that I can't miss. And so she started working in any kind of tech that she could get her hands on. She worked in CD-ROMs, web design. She taught herself how to code, really took it upon herself to understand what are the skills I'm going to need to be able to walk the walk and talk the talk in this industry. So as she did that, there were a couple of other things that she did as well that kind of shaped her experience. She kept reading every day. She looked at different opportunities that were kind of out there or different trends that were floating around, such as, for example, the proliferation of camera phones. All of a sudden, people were taking pictures in ways that they had never done before. She saw people all of a sudden being willing to post pictures of themselves online with apps like Friendster, for example. And she also saw that there was an increasing speed in network options. People were no longer just reliant on dial-up. They were able to upload their pictures pretty quickly. And so with all of this information, she was able to kind of identify the opportunity for Flickr, a photo sharing website. And with that, she ended up being able to sell it to Yahoo in 2008 as one of, again, the largest opportunities that women had ever had in the startup space. In technology in Silicon Valley. But her story doesn't stop there. Not only did she follow kind of the conventional path, so to speak, of an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, she then was approached by people like Etsy, for example. The founders of Etsy wanted her to give opinions on their webpage, kind of what they were doing, how they were thinking about the problem. And when they did that, she realized this is a phenomenal opportunity and became an angel investor instead. So she wasn't just giving advice, she was giving cold hard cash in a way that ended up being able to launch a brand new company that we all know about today. So when we think about stories like Katerina's, she identified all of these opportunities. She still received the same degree of pushback, again, as a female founder in a time where this was really not the norm. But she was able to tap into a lot of that resilience and say, when people approached her about becoming a partner at some of these large Silicon Valley VC firms, She determined that she didn't want to be kind of another token female partner. She was going to go start something where from the ground up there was equal representation of women. So she ended up founding her own firm as kind of the culmination of her entrepreneurial journey to date. So looking at things like that, understanding where she was able to take risks, pivot out of kind of the norm of what she thought she was going to do, identify with curiosity along the way these opportunities that people hadn't seen before and then turn it into something real is what makes her story really powerful. And it reminds me a lot of what Carly was able to do with Code with Klossy. So with that, I will hand it back to Osi to take us home.

Taking you home, folks. So this is one of my favorite definitions of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources controlled. What is great about that definition is that obviously you can apply that in the traditional sense, and you, like Katarina, can start a company. But I think that this definition holds a powerful meaning for those of us who haven't started a company yet. You can apply an entrepreneurial mindset, the skills and the tools of entrepreneurship, to your life and career to make those as powerful as possible. And this is the core insight that the Broken Rung research is really bringing back to my thinking as the CEO of Code with Klossy. It almost feels essential for young women and young women in tech particularly to focus on honing an entrepreneurial skill set to navigate all of the hurdles systemic and structural that they might face in the workforce. And so as we think about how we can be best of service, that's what I want to think about. What I also love about this definition is that even if you're not Katarina selling pictures to your parents and you have that early instinct for entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial skills can be learned. They can be practiced. They can be studied. And so that sense of agency around all of our capability to build these muscles is really exciting and energizing. It brings a growth mindset to what otherwise can feel daunting. You can practice being an entrepreneur in your everyday life. I want to see more folks like Mira Murati coming out of Code with Klossy and starting their own AI companies. I want to see more Dr. Fei-Fei Li's coming out of Code With Klossy and making a huge impact, not only on the science and research of AI, but then also beginning her entrepreneurial journey. I want to see more people like May Habib starting startups like Ryder. May doesn't have a technical background, but she took lessons from Broken Rung, become a technologist. You don't have to have a technical degree to be a technologist. She looked at the market circumstances and knows that technology is really shaping the world around us, and she created a company out of a unique insight and understanding of the opportunities and a willingness to take risk. I want to see Mays and Feifeis and Miras coming out of the Code With Classy community. So that's really what fuels us. It fuels us to think about how we can instill entrepreneurial skills in the young women in our community. But I have to sort of be a little circumspect, which is to say that it's awesome that we are going to help these young people build their skills. But ultimately, there are still structural issues that are preventing women from getting where they need to be. Those things are policies around parental leave. Those are processes in terms of how we think about bias in the promotion process. And those are practices, everyday practices about how you engage with your manager in the workforce. And so until we address what I call corporate culture, the process, the practice, and the policy, we're not doing enough of the job. So we both need to equip the young people with entrepreneurial skills and technology skills, but we also need to work with our corporate partners who are so supportive of our work to think about how their cultures are creating the context for those young women to be successful once they arrive. And so when we think about the next 10 years of Code With Klossy work, that's where we're really focused. At 10 years old this year, we're very proud of where we have come. We're proud of all the results, and we're proud that young people were brave enough to raise their hand to want to learn new technology skills. But these are the things and these are the questions around the broken rung, around skilling around entrepreneurship and around how we can work with our corporate partners that are part of our future ahead. So with that, I want to thank you all and open it up for questions. All right.

So we always like to leave time for questions for you all. To be able to interact with the speaker. So I'd like you to kind of get up. We'll have some microphones that go around. When you have a question, specifically if there's a question for— raise your hand if you have a question. We'll get you a microphone. And when you ask your question, please let us know your name, your year, and your major, or what your major might be if you have one. We've got a question with a hand going up. And if it's for one of our two speakers, either Ossie or Fanny, let them know which one. Please stand up. Yeah. Hold the microphone up close.

Hi, my name is Sherry, and I'm a senior studying computer science. I have a question specifically for Ossie. So I know like you had a long career in product management, kind of in corporate, before you work with a nonprofit and now work with Code With Klossie. So I was wondering what's your logic behind that, and then what kind of advice would you give to, I guess, new grads from Stanford on which path they should choose?

Logic.

So I didn't have a lot of logic to my career, and I think that's not necessarily needed, right? So for me, the way I think about making career decisions is I make a decision based on the next best opportunity in front of me at the moment. With a sense of where my ambition wants to go. So I didn't know that I would end up running this organization. It wasn't even in the bingo cards at all. But I took the next best opportunities. And so right out of undergrad, I worked at a startup because I was in that '99, 2000 dot-com frenzy. And I knew that that was where the energy and the learning was going to happen. And so that was the next best opportunity for me. So that's what I did. And so that's just sort of how I've popped around. When I think about what is best, I think there is no best. I think there's an answer for any season of your life. Sometimes you're in a learning season and sometimes you're in an earning season. So I had school loans that I needed to pay, so eventually it was very helpful to go work at Google. There are different times in your life when the choices and the choice set look different based on what you're trying to optimize for. So I don't ever like to say there's a best anything. Career paths are not linear, they're sort of winding, and if you're always thinking about next best, I think you'll get where you want to go. Thank you so much.

Of course. Hi, I'm— can you hear me? Hi, I'm Andre. I'm a junior studying computer science. So I wanted to ask about metrics that define gender inequality. So there are metrics like boardroom diversity, etc., and these give part of a picture, but I think something that speaks more to gender inequality or like how it's, how it's being solved is like confidence, belonging, and voice. So I would like to ask you, how do you define it within Code with Klossy?

How do we define gender inequality within Code with Klossy?

Yeah, and what are some signs that show you that change is happening?

Okay, great. I love this question. It's very philosophical. So I think I really love part of your answer, part of your answer around this idea of belonging, which was a word I used to shy away from. It feels very warm and fuzzy. I'm not a warm and fuzzy, so I was like belonging. But when you talk to the young women in our community, you will see young women who are part of and are taking AP CS courses in their high school. So then you ask them, well, why are you at Code With Klossy? We're teaching you really sort of fundamental CS skills. Why are you here if you're already taking AP Computer Science in your high school? And the answer is always, I want to come to a space where I feel like I belong. And so I think that when we think about what is a metric of success, I would like for it not to be necessary for a young woman who already knows what she wants to do to have to seek outside support because the spaces where she's entering don't make her feel like she should be there. That is like a really fuzzy answer. But again, I think we look to the metrics that I showed around how we think about it quantitatively. But honestly, the sort of sole answer is that it's heartbreaking to hear some of these stories where they just feel like it's not safe to be nerdy and ambitious, even though they're just as skilled as their neighbor, they're being told that they don't belong there. And so ultimately, that's the sort of heart fuel for the work, even though there's tons of other quantitative metrics behind that.

I want to also redirect that question to Dan because the employment numbers are a bit of a lagging indicator. Are there leading indicators that might also be really important early on that we can start to track as it relates to metrics?

Yeah, so again, consultants love data. And so I think that a couple of the things that stuck out to me as you were asking that question is actually around that notion of confidence and belonging. A lot of our research shows that women do actually believe they are just as capable of doing jobs as men. And so while men will apply for jobs where there are maybe 60% of a skills match and they don't think that they have the extra 40, If women feel that way, they won't apply, not because they don't believe that they are going to be just as good, but because they don't want to waste people's time. There's a certain sensitivity around that. And so when you think about the motivations or the reasons why people aren't necessarily willing to step into a field or able to make that move, a lot of it, again, 10% of it is confidence. There is a confidence element in that belonging there. But when you're talking about leading and lagging indicators and getting people into those roles, that really resonates with me. I will also say that there is a certain degree of maintaining of biases that we see in the research. So if you look at an MBA class, for example, there are some studies that have shown that 70% of men will rank themselves as above their peers, and 70% of women will rank themselves, again, on average, with their peers. And so there is a perspective of understanding, okay, are there ways to, you know, quantify your own skill sets and kind of present them in such a way that you actually see, okay, objectively, I am just as qualified, so I should be going for this. And I think that those statistics are starting to move in the right direction, which hopefully will kind of continue to reflect itself in the workforce. But there definitely is still kind of a lag there.

Thank you.

Questions coming up. Yeah.

Hi, I have a question. So what policies—

name, year, and major.

Perfect.

I'm Neha. I'm a senior and I'm studying CS.

And my question is, what policies— is anybody here not a senior and studying CS? Jokes, jokes. I was wondering what policies you would see that could be implemented in the workplace that would help women kind of bridge that gap between kind of going into more managerial roles and higher positions. And what do you see kind of lacking currently? Yeah. So my favorite, also because I run an organization, my favorite have to do with how we think about promotion processes. And the policies we have for promotion. So some organizations will have a policy where in order to be promoted, you need to have demonstrated the sort of competencies of the level ahead of you for some sustained period of time before you can be promoted. Others don't have that policy. I think it is then much easier for a manager's subjective viewpoint to influence a promotion if it can sort of be like, I'm feeling like you should be promoted, right? If there is a rubric of competencies and the policy is that you can't be promoted until there's demonstrated, you know, demonstrated like showing that you can accomplish those competencies, I think that that should be a policy across the board in terms of how you think about promotion. Now, the thing I will say as somebody who has been through lots of promo processes, has promoted lots of people, is that no matter what you do, there's always going to be a subjective part of the promotion process and a subjective part of the evaluation process. That is a truism that will never be eliminated. So our job as policymakers in corporate is to think about how do we minimize as much as we can, get to that asymptote, how do we minimize as much as possible the variance that is possible outside of just sort of humans have to make decisions about who is doing what. Even the assessment of competency, right? That's still subjective, but at least you're trying to drive out as much as possible other factors that aren't written down clearly in the matrix. That managers or others might insert into that decision-making. So that's an example. That's my favorite example.

Yeah, and I would actually add on to that. So while a lot of the Broken Rung research is focused on kind of individual actions you can take, our entire Women in the Workplace research focuses on exactly that problem. It's what can companies do to kind of support their women in the workplace. And so rubrics is a huge one for sure, not just for promotions but also for hiring. So I'm sure you've all heard the studies around identical resumes. Replace John with Jane Doe, and all of a sudden the likelihood of hiring or a callback for an interview goes down 30%. Replace it with a traditionally Black-sounding name, it goes down 50%. And a traditionally Muslim name, it goes down 4x. So those are pretty striking. So if there are ways that at kind of that evaluation point, you can end up being more objective and saying, OK, these really are the same qualifications. That's a huge one right off the bat. I would also say that to the point on rubrics and promotion, there are also a lot of pieces of work that women do that are not recognized in those, even where there are rubrics in place. So thinking about things like managing workload for teams and team happiness, understanding particularly at the COVID time if there are opportunities for you to support your team on not just, again, a work structure perspective, but also outside of work and understanding them as a whole person. Managed teams by women typically have much higher performance and happiness or satisfaction rates than teams managed by men, but they're not actually recognized for that work. So things like mentorship, sponsorship, et cetera, can also be factored in.

All right, thank you for all the questions, and we are gonna give our speakers another round of applause. Thank you so much, Danny and Osi.