Gadgetory

welcome everyone to see net live at CES and our first annual women in tech panel which is also open to men I am Hollywood and I will be your moderator for the panel I'm looking forward to an amazing fascinating exciting conversation today we have an incredible panel of guests and we've tried to put together a special introduction to give them really there do so let's have a look Marissa Meyer started at Google in 1999 she was the company's 20th employee and its first woman engineer these days she's running location and local services and in her time at Google she's been responsible for the look and feel of Google News gmail google images even Google search itself she's one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley and she's a big fan of bejeweled blitz Padma Sri Warrior is the CTO of cisco systems and she was CTO of Motorola before that she joined Motorola as one of very few women in its Arizona facility and during her time as CTO motorola won the 2004 US National Medal of Technology she's been widely recognized for her creativity influence and her promotion of science and technology education especially for women her role at Cisco is to evangelize what is possible and she has a team of ten thousand engineers behind her as she rides into battle katarina fake is co-founder of Flickr and a highly successful serial entrepreneur her most recent startup hunch was just purchased by ebay for reported 80 million dollars at just 37 years old she was included on time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people she is a founder partner at the founder collective venture capital fund she sits on the board of directors of Creative Commons she's chairman of the board of Etsy and she really loves duct tape and whether we're all fascinated by the weather thing we're going to ask about that later joining for us a pot roast region Katarina on stage is cnet reviews editor in chief Lindsay Turrentine next year she's going to have her own video lindsay has been at cnet for 12 years she's seen just about every phase of consumer electronics development by which I mean she has been through all the pink gadgets and so if I as a matter of fact so that that may come up let's get right to it because I know that you're here to hear from our amazing panel you know I was reading an article there was an article that came out of November of 2011 in San Francisco magazine and it was called who's the next female Mark Zuckerberg and it really got me thinking about sort of the state of the industry there seems to be a lot of attention on this question of women in tech lately and so I just wanted to ask the panel generally where do you think we'll start with your Padma where do you think we are in the industry in terms of women in tech right now you know I think we've come a long way actually feel pretty good about where women are in technology I think if you kind of look at two of the largest tech companies today IBM and HP they have women CEOs and a lot of amazing founders or creating technology companies that have made a lot of difference in our lives and so I mean it's not that progress is ever you know Don right I mean there's more we can do and we should do to get more women actually I was thinking as I was walking the CES fleurs am I going to be on the panel just to see some women I would like to see more women and out out in on the floor as well and I think that is that is more we can do but I do feel like in the last 10 years we've made a lot of progress that magazine article that you mentioned San Francisco magazine ran an article about all of the new startup founders in the valley which was a wonderful thing to see there were dozens and dozens of companies companies and I hadn't heard of me and it was it was a think that was a landmark magazine article for the industry it just showed all of the all of the different businesses that are out there some of them are some of them are highly technical companies that are coming out of some of them are social media some of them are very consumer oriented but it was it was it was a big variety of companies it was founders of all different ages levels of experience and I was really happy to see that it made me feel a lot better yeah actually yeah whole thing we're doing fine yeah yeah I can't agree more i think it's just a great time to be a woman in technology via the founder being an executive i think it's incredibly exciting time and technology in general especially with the rise of mobile and i just think that it's a really fast moving industry but i think that's something that makes it possible for women to move fast catch up now you can actually come into computer science late like I didn't really get into computers and technology until I was in college but you know because it is a fast-moving industry it's an easy place for you to pick things up so that said the Arctic will also had a lot of very sobering statistics as well it said things such as there are only I think 4.3 of venture-backed companies are led by women now there's only less than seven percent of women our venture partners and venture capital firms and there's there's just as a long way for us to go still in the industry I mean yes we should always be celebrating our successes but we should never rest on our laurels there's still a long long way to go and I think that panels such as this one are great at I think it's really important for women to know that there are women I know that this is a career choice know that this is a path that you can follow and you know and then it's doable right absolutely I have a little bit of a media perspective and I think that one of the difficulties for women is that when we put ourselves out there in the media representing technology the response can be wildly varied there are a lot of and there are women in media and in the technology media like Molly who have really a lot of respect and huge following but i but i find it over and over and over again we publish about the industry about technology and we get public response it says we really wildly sexist comments and you know comments about appearance comments about whether or not we have any authority to say anything about technology and so I think there are a lot of successful women in business but on the way up you read there are a lot of barriers and there's a lot of questioning that happens on a at the public level that we really need to work on because i think if we represent then we keep doing this and we keep having this conversation that'll save i hope so i mean i think we are very lucky obviously none of us are disenfranchised women in the technology industry we are all smart successful you know we've gotten to a certain level and we're able to have this conversation with other smart successful women but you're right this I think represents a big chunk of the women who were at CES there is never aligned for the ladies room at the Consumer Electronics Show and we asked ourselves going into this panel whether whether one of our questions was do there need to be more women at the Consumer Electronics Show and what what would change about the industry if we had more women at all phases of consumer electronics and product development in general and by women you don't mean if I when I did not mean booth babes yeah and how much longer do we have to endure yeah I think one of the things that's happening in in the in the consumer industry but broadly in the technology industry which says product development and product design itself is changing right you know where is it previously when I started in the industry 20 years ago it was very bifurcated in the sense there was engineering that was done then there was product development that was done and then there was user experience user design and ease of use and you know how people and how people use the technology was a completely different feel and actually didn't exist about even a decade ago that's all changing very rapidly if you kind of look at how any of us develop technology develop products and what it takes to bring a successful product to market you really have to have skill sets that combine all this it's not just your engineering it's not just hardware it's not just software its user design user experience we actually have sociologists now that studying our products are used especially video and what video means and how we translate I think this is an opportunity for women who and I'm generalizing here and I think I have a better skill at integrating a lot of these different domains I think women are better at integrating across the domains and I think that's the skill that will be needed going forward in the future it's a great opportunity if you kind of look at it from that perspective I think there is a show like a consumer electronics show is absolutely a place where you would like to see more women not only just actually designing products actually even women that are consuming these products and what it means do you feel like women are better evangelist for tech products I feel like there are certain products that women can very quickly generate excitement about in the marketplace and of course again general I think it's really hard to have this conversation without generalizing I kind of started on that point in some way with yeah you know I think we're going to adapt to technology in a different way you know I think it's early adoption but we also look at different aspects of technology gee I think then men do right you know when I look at a product I look at both the artistic view of the product as well as the engineering view of it breaking an older man engineer and I'm trained as an engineer I think have a different bent in how I v.v products and how I review milestones and so forth then my male counterparts and I think that I don't know it's evangelism but we adapt to technology in a different way I think if you have a product that you want to be used by a diverse user group it really helps to actually have that diversity represented in the product design so one idea that I've been excited about for a while but I just saw realized when I walked on the floor is this is amazing three dimensional cameras that are available now and someone said to me a few months ago you know probably someone's going to figure out how to make a three-dimensional body you know a three-dimensional model of a body I figure out how to try on clothes on your television screen and it's here it's actually like 200 yards that way it's called bodymetrix and I was just talking about that idea I know it's like your field trip but it's but it's called bodymetrix it uses the primeSense technology and it's really amazing but just yesterday I was talking with someone about this concept and it turns out men's clothes and women's clothes are totally different guys were like why would you need three millimeter accuracy you know you just tell them the measurement of the neck length of the arm you get a shirt is perfect and I was like well for women like that it's got to fit in the ways to counterfeit here yeah I was like bidding a woman is completely different than fitting a man I can imagine I didn't actually get a chance to top and ask i can imagine the bodymetrix team hopefully has women on that team or at least as studying them really carefully yeah absolutely women are also very a big social media participants and if you look at the way that media is spread around and how people learn about it from one another it's often you see these communities that will will suddenly burst on the scene that will flourish suddenly I'm work with etsy and se is an example of that etsy etsy was was a company that was started by a bunch of guys young guys they're in their 20s and it was largely a company that appeal to women it was mostly handmade goods and you look at something like for example like that we're like Pinterest and women are incredibly good at spreading the word and telling each other about these things sort of the sort of word-of-mouth form of marketing is extremely effective with women's products and I think that that is very effective in some of the social software and media stories that you see out there that are directed towards women such as such as such as Pinterest and they really have an amazing growth pattern I actually wonder if the the sort of the current hot technology trends don't lend themselves perfectly to getting women more involved in tech and interested in right in the past we've faced somewhat of an interest barrier in terms of technology but you can talk to any woman on the street about using your cell phone and about using social to communicate and to consume products and is that sort of is that serendipity do you think that's just going to help or is it or is it just the you know it's sort of the tidal wave of women getting as technology just becomes part of life yeah I think that's what i was talking earlier i think more and more technologies become multidisciplinary right i think it is it's a combination of hard hardcore engineering with soft design and aesthetic appearance and artistic ability than it is multidisciplinary i'm even engineering itself is becoming multi-disciplinary and i think this is an area where we excel you know I think the ability to move from one domain to another somewhat comes naturally to them and I think that is an opportunity for us to really get into these fields which are traditionally more logic and you know analytics and hard hard domains and I that itself is changing so as domains change in the discipline becomes multiple disciplines coming together it's also marketing now right when you're building technology really are understanding or trying to understand how it's going to be used as you're designing which was not the case 20 years ago or 10 years ago and I think this is an opportunity for us to really bring diverse viewpoints into the product and in fact that's another question specifically that I think is really relevant to consumer electronics show and the marketers hear how the first part i guess is how do you market to women the second part of the question is do you need to market to women separately if it's not for example a very female-focused product i personally think making a good product is the best way to market to women and I think what why we're seeing more excitement about consumer technology from women now or maybe I'm just more excited but is that consumer technology is increasingly about communication and ten years ago it was about consumption which is consuming media consuming television or maybe creating something at a single point but not sharing that so broadly yeah I don't know if you specifically i agree i don't know if you specifically target a consumer product or technology to women i think it is if it's a great product women automatically will consume it and I think as I think Karina was saying I think we're better at vitally sharing information i think it's just something we do and i think that in a way adds to both positive and negative right if a product's not good then I think it gives you that feedback as a product manufacturer or designer quicker if you're if you're marketing to that population or that segment of the population but if you don't and you miss that out you don't get that feedbacks I think that's a benefit of perhaps making sure you're including women in the segment segment that you're targeting with the products right unlike my esteemed colleagues on the panel I I do I did not I was never a programmer I was never an engineer I did not study CS and my background is really in is in design and I came from a kind of web design and development background I taught myself a little bit of code I was never a very good coder in fact after after a certain amount of time people say like they look at my code they say please no stay out of here and and I think you know the influence of Apple cannot be underestimated in in the rise of the product designer I really think product design you know with all of the applicata so that you know we know all of us have in our pockets and and on our desktops all of them are very design oriented and so the role of women in terms of you know the designers and the sort of the role of the product designer has sort of risen within the company so it's no longer as much hardtack and the you know I think the industry has evolved in that direction in a very positive direction for products under i consider myself and hope to aspire to be a product designer and designing things that people love that people need that people want that people will use and that if you if you are able to hit that then you know men women doesn't matter you could be you know you it doesn't really matter it has this universal appeal absolutely one of the other interesting points in the San Francisco magazine article was that when it came to women in sports and women in soccer and particularly title nine was introduced in 1972 but women didn't get very excited about soccer until 1999 with the women's Olympic team that it takes heroes in some cases do you how are you on the panel how do you feel about taking that mantle in some cases you do how do you think you be a hero to women who are interested in technology and do you ever see it as a burden I am actually very passionate about it i don't know if i see myself as a hero maybe some of these guys are my heroes but i think it's so you should sign in your room is my dear because it is value in sharing your experiences and that is something i really believe it and I think I often talk to people i canna share my experiences and it's not that anybody can translate your experience to theirs and it's not something you can extrapolate and say okay this work this didn't work for me therefore it may or may not work for you but it's actually just relating a story of this is how I dealt with the situation and I think there's value in that and sometimes you know it it's also makes you vulnerable when you share your story and you're talking to people about when I was really depressed when this happened know and somebody criticized me I felt shitty about this and then you know I had to go you know absorb that internalize that and come back the next day to work to be better it does make you vulnerable as a leader but I think in a way it there's a lot of benefit in sharing that experiences with other women who may be in that point in that stage in their career where their doubting whether they can get to the next level or not and one thing that in the San Francisco magazine article that stood out for me when I read it was there was a pool quote that said it's very difficult for a 25 year old woman to call up a 45 year old man and invite him out for a beer and say you know I would love to get some advice on this it's just there's some kind of social barrier about that happening and so I think it's important as there are more and more women in technology to be available for those kinds of questions like you know to answer questions to to read their blogs and sort of share that experience because there are a lot of barriers around around younger women and you know industry you know kind of industry mentors who are email it's a slightly awkward social situation I agree with that I don't think it's about being heroes I think it's about being a resource for people who are getting started and also showing that there's not a stereotype one of the salaat of the studies show that women hesitate to get in technology or computer science because they think there's a certain culture right you know that you know you you know can't dress night you stay up all night you you know eat espresso you know means covered you where Sean 1 so you know I know and I think it's more about seeing there's all kinds of different women who can do this you can wear ruffles right you can be a jock and you can still be a great computer scientist or a great technologist or a great product designer and by seeing many different people who can all do it on their own terms you realize that you can do it on your own terms that you don't need to conform to that stereotype into that culture that you can bring what you have to offer the table yeah I'm thinking about you know the 80s era of women in business was there was a lot of I just remembered all those all those horrible suits that all girls are bad we are they love you and I I they're back to let's all boycott them together and there's all this research that was done that women women would wear really high heels and lower their voices as they were speaking in sort of business situations and in many ways sort of model themselves around the poster in which they were trying to fit in and I think more and more you can just sort you can be yourself you know we're overdressed very differently I bet on my cow maybe she's gone on Russell we're all really kind of individuals and we have our personalities not we're conforming to the 80s you know Sigourney Weaver shoulder pads suit their business right and is it an acknowledgement maybe that I think sometimes even now and very often right when you read about how to get ahead you still do sometimes see articles that say that women have to be more aggressive and that you have to make sure that your voice is being heard and I that sometimes to meet creates this sort of gray area in the conversation where I think well we don't have testosterone right so it might not be in our natures to be aggressive and do we have to act like men to get there is it really about having those mentors and if you could put women in some key areas in each of your industries or business what do you think they would be if you just make sure there was a woman and you know a few spots throughout the industry I'll be honest I think that what we're really playing is a numbers game right now is a great time do you want to attack but there's not enough women intact right but I worry that a lot of times the conversation gets really focused on what percentage of the pie is women right and the truth is the pie isn't big enough right we're not producing enough computer scientist we're not producing enough product designers we need a lot more people to keep up with all of these gadgets all of this technology all these possibilities the jobs of the future we really need a lot more people interested in mobile technology in computers right we need a lot more people and if we grow that number the number of women will by its very nature go up right the statistics are things like for the advanced placement exam 200,000 students a year take cut the calculus exam only 14,000 take the computer science exam so seven percent of kids who think they're good at math go take both the math exam and the computer science exam but if you talk to Google engineers they'd actually done studies only two percent of Google engineers weren't exposed to computer science in high school which means if you graduate from high school and you haven't been exposed to computer science the odds that you're going to end up being an engineer somewhere are incredibly low so we really just need to get that number up right imagine if we had 200,000 or 500,000 students graduating from high school every year that we're taking computer science as well as calculus as opposed to just seven percent so are we setting ourselves back even farther by falling behind in science and technology education across the board I think that that is probably true at a macro level but back to your question about what do we need to do specifically to get women into the tech industry whether it's as engineers or marketeers or whatever right and i would say we need to kind of have successful role models at every level and I don't mean just at the executive level or in a high level in the organization if you kind of look at you know Cisco for example one of the things we find it a lot of him and enter the workforce but we lose them after they work for three four years or five years and I think it is that point where they're trying to decide do they want to have a career at all it doesn't matter whether it in tech or not or do they want to give up the courier to to raise a family and I think that's so that seems to be a point of decision for women and I think it is at that critical juncture that they need to see that you can do both and you know and it isn't just one or the other and that's why don't like the word balance at all because to me it just seems like you're always striving for perfection you know you can never be perfected everything I think it is really at that point in telling the stories about how did I raise is you know my child that I was working through what challenges did I face how did I have to integrate all these things that's important and I think that's important in addition to what Marissa is saying how do you just keep women in the technology workforce and making sure that they're contributing at whatever level that is very critical so I would say we should we should have role models both men and women that talk to people share because every parent has this challenge right I think as parents when you're thinking about you I want to become a parent or do I want to just strictly focus on the career it's important for people to know you can have both you don't really need to compromise one idea that argues for role models for younger women both male and female yeah and I know that Sheryl Sandberg has talked a lot about how choosing not to get too soft here but choosing it the right partner is one of the best choices you can make for your career and I think you know I have a son and a daughter and I it's really important really important for me to model for my son that I can do both of these things and that he gets to see a partnership at work at home and that that model extends to our children and also maybe to our high schools and I really appreciate the comment about getting people involved in engineering at the high school level because I suspect that not many high schools have computer science programs at all and certainly in them I doubt there are many female computer science high school teachers yes that's probably true what does Sheryl Sandberg kind of quote that you mentioned earlier Lindsay it was from her famous now famous TED talk where she was she was saying and I think that the crucial thing that she said was don't don't leave before you leave and that women who were planning on having a family she found sometimes they would they would not take that promotion they would you know not move for their job they would not be as assertive and aggressive in pursuing their career path anticipating that they were going to be going on maternity leave and starting a family and that that being a kind of a crucial point at crucial juncture and any young woman's life and she's sort of studying her career path and I read another article which was which was really which is which influenced me a great deal and this was years ago when I was younger and it was an interview with a elder stateswoman in technology and she said that she had always sits at how is it possible that you raised four children by herself her husband had died when the children were very small and she was a single mother and so in addition to being a high executive she was also single-handedly raising four children so she she said I had always taken the promotion i had always striven for more I had always taken you know the sort of the the path that led me to a greater level of achievement and success and status within the industry because what ended up happening is once i was at that level i was significantly more free with my time I was an executive I could I could start work at I could start work at 4am i could leave it three i had more more flexibility in terms of making my own schedule because i was i was the person in charge and I could make these determinations and that that actually influenced me a great deal i thought that was a very significant thing that instead of you know sort of setting your sights lower you set your sights higher and that was a very it was a very influential article for me that's very powerful i love that that distracted me now i just want to go find it and read it uh up work-life balance can you do you have stories that you can share with us you know we've talked a lot about the stories and I think that that is obviously hugely influential a thawed Ian's would like to hear it how how do you accomplish it is it by setting your own schedules yeah how do you ask for help there for me I know I should have shared this story before and so kind of far you know read what I write about the integration you probably met seen this before I always tell the story of when when I had my son and he was really small I was running a factory a semiconductor factory and I had to travel a lot and I was managing a multiple shift operation so i would i would be at work at all odd hours and one of the things that I realized is it's actually not the decisions I made that caused stress but it was actually the guilt associated with whatever decision I made that caused me stress you know if my son was sick and I stayed home and I wasn't working I felt guilty I was a network and if I was working then i felt guilty I wasn't at home and if I I would bring my work home and stay with him and work from home then i felt guilty i wasn't looking like a supermodel because i wasn't at the gym working out and so I soon realized it actually doesn't matter what decision you make because you make whatever decision based on what is best that day you know maybe one customer meeting you miss because your kid is sick it's okay it's not the end of the world there's somebody else I can take that meeting and the customer will still be there and they'll understand and same thing if you leave your son that day care even though he's sick and you had to be at work it's okay it's not the end of the world and he'll still love you because he or his mom and I think I learned not to be guilty about the decisions that I was making I was a big learning for me and the other thing I would say is actually making your kids part of you your life right you know you work as part of my work is part of my life and actually said this to one of my bosses once and they said well how do you balance your work and your life i said earlier one life you knowing that i have my word and my battery no i don't have two lives and I realize this because I would travel a lot and whenever I was going on a business trip I'd be packing and my son at the time was like two and a half or something and he'd start crying to see for him the symbol of me bringing the suitcase was mom would be gone and it caused a lot of depression and then I would cry and then my husband would go running because he didn't want to see us both crying he'd be out of the house and there was a very dysfunctional preparation for a business trip and then I discovered this game back then called where in the world is Carmen Sandiego and I started playing this with him and you know I was sort of where in the world is mom going to be and you know we would go and search that country and learn that country so it's actually turning a painful experience into something that's fun I think that was the other learning for me is don't try to shut your family out of your work try to include them and I think that makes it easier and also talk about what goes on at work we have research so my my daughter was was very jealous of me going to meetings so she knew that reason whenever I was going to be meeting it was something that excluded her right so she would she started doing these I'm sorry it's going to be a little bit cute so she started doing these sort of meetings with her stuffed animals and things and as I said what do you guys talk about in your meetings and she says balloons and elephants and so I decided what we would do is we would we would start having our own meetings and we would kind of include her and this feeling of being involved in work and so we started having family meetings we have them every friday morning at 8am and we sit around the breakfast table and we have a family meeting we talk about what was good what was bad we talk about our work we very specifically talked about our work with each other and how our meat went and then you know what we want to learn in the coming week and so me now kind of meeting as a kind of I feels Roger that gets meetings now maybe actually I mean the really big thing about the meeting really is the is having a notepad and a really sharp pencil and I don't know that's not a good ended up renting it very well it sort of including members okay my philosophy and advice isn't gender specific it's find your rhythm when you look at really successful people you often hear stories of people who just worked 80 hundred hour weeks for decades on end like a look at people like Winston Churchill or Einstein right like a baby and you're like how did they do that but I really think that you know a lot of you think about burnout being related to not getting eight hours of sleep a night or not having time with the family or not getting three meals a day and I don't think has anything to do with those things does for some people but it really is is what causes resent and what causes burnout is resentment is that feeling of I worked 80 hours last week and I and I but had to blow off my friends or you know I worked 100 hours last week and I missed the soccer game right and then that feeling of resentment kind of builds on you and makes you feel like well i won't i won't do that this week and so i think that one of the exercise I've done with my team and for myself is what is it that you need in order to not be resentful and I've done this exercise a few times there was a young guy in my team where I was where he was working really hard and I said you know take a month really think about while you're working what is it that you need in order to not be resentful and it came back to me a month later and you said Tuesday night dinners surely you just graduate from school and the whole friendship group would kind of do this pot luck on Tuesday nights and he sounded like somebody who's a nativity said well no too late dinner as we all do this potluck and if I have to if I had to you know skip it when it says someone else's house and not see them or even worse by have to cancel it when is that my house because something comes up on Tuesday night I'm just resentful the whole rest of me I just feel like you know I did all this work and I couldn't even get to Tuesday night dinner I said okay then let's just never miss another Tuesday night dinner now it was my job to help make sure that doesn't happen I had Katie a soccer mom who was really worried about her her team on google finance was in bangalore she kept doing video conference calls at one in the morning i was like haiti you've got three kids two twin like two of them are twins like you know I'm really worried all these 1am conference calls she's on buddy Magnus oh don't worry about the ham conference calls they really don't bother me she's like what does bother me is missing the soccer game or being ten minutes late for the recital and walking in in the middle and I said okay well then my job is to make sure that you never missed something for your kids and it was actually really interesting to go through that process because 30 days when we be sitting there in that meeting at like three 35 and I know that Katie had to be out of there for that four o'clock game and he would be like well okay we get up to go and be like oh just just five more minutes just fine we're almost there like you know it's just this just finished lesser power through and I do have to say no Katie's to go like we can get this back together again tomorrow and I think that really matters and I think it also changes for people throughout their life I don't have kids right now for me it's travel right once ever you say four months six months I like to go somewhere I've never been and also have the benefit of being out of the office for an entire week missing every standing meeting once figured you know my team understands I'd like you know the world doesn't end when I'm not there I understand the world doesn't end when I'm not there and it's just really very it doesn't provides a lot of sanity and I think that that will change over time but it's really about thinking about what is it that you need so you don't hit that resentful point for a lot of people that is a good night's sleep no time with the family a few good meals a day but you know sometimes it's something that's just really personal and really basic and it's about really tapping into that beer I think that's a great point and I talked about this a lot you know for me it's integration and I think of it as like four things like you know yourself and I think what you're saying about how you how do you do things that actually energize you that is important yourself your work your family and your community and the community can be your your church for some people for some people it's their dance or it's their friends or whatever it is i think if we over rotate and don't spend right and i don't think we can we are we can have a goal that says every week I'm going to spend equal number of hours on each of those squadrons and that's never going to happen but if you overrated where you're not spending any time at all in one of those any one of those four then I think that resentment happens and that's very true I mean if you're just doing family and work and you're not doing anything that interests you then also that that guilt and resentment starts to build out so I think that's just something to be aware off in the back of your head other thing Marissa you raise them a really important point which is that you're saying that you as a manager are aware of those issues in your workplace and that seems to be something you know how do we sort of bubble up a lot of times we're feeling those resentments but we don't ask our managers because maybe it's some of this I feel like is a conversation about being a human in the world you know I everybody I think let's resentment bubble up and they don't ask what they say about it it's a pill that you take and you hope the other person will die you know you let it bubble up and you're afraid to ask your manager because you're afraid that you won't get that support how do we sort of institutionalize support for not balanced but the things that your employees need in order to keep themselves saying and keep doing a good job I think it is a conversation I think you know usually when somebody is resentful of something you know to sit in your team right because they're not fully there and I think it does affect and you notice it and as a manager you can choose to either pro or you know in a nice way or ignore it right you know I mean by the Secretary's Lee said okay fine moment it's just take five minutes to finish that and that would be the natural thing that a lot of us would do but and she didn't do that and I think it's just kind of noticing that in keeping that in front it's important because ultimately you're able to get more from that person can I think what that creates is in return a loyalty you know I think in the relationship there's a lot royalty now because as a manager you understood that and you know Katie now feels like no medicines more sensitive to that and I think that is really important what are the things little things that I do you know I travel a lot and my assistant schedules my trips all the time and she's always like Enya's of all the places I'm going to and I used to never register for me and I would take it for granted because i still think okay Donna is taking care of everything now wherever I go and bring her back something that's a small gift and and so she now feels like I appreciate the work that she does you know that's not just another thing and the reason I'm using that example is just being aware of things as you said the human things and letting that be shown as I think that's what that's how it's small but I think it makes a difference to you absolutely do you mind if we take a few minutes for questions from our audience I see some eager faces out there and they look like they're just dying to ask you a few things I think we have a microphone in the back that we can pass around a little bit we'll just three or four okay great so they're going to go grab us some microphone right now and while we're looking for that actually a one sort of question you know to life experience again you've all reached amazing plateaus and your curtain lat NHA plateaus amazing points in your careers and you will only continue to go up what was one of the what was one of the biggest challenges you face that was not related to being a woman and or have you ever framed those challenges that way I mean I think that sometimes women talk about women in tech and think well I've never thought about it right i'm just working but what was the biggest sort of barrier you face to getting where you are today i think the biggest barrier I don't know if it's a barrier but i think if i think back to my career over two decades in the tech industry what I would have if I could redo it I think sometimes we hesitate to take the next step right you know you're doing well you're comfortable you have a great you know great team great company you're working for an opportunity comes up and you you just don't want to move there right or not go there and I think earlier in my career I've let a lot of opportunities go by just because I was comfortable where I was and I think that in a way I don't think it was a barrier but I think it is something I would do differently I think it is okay to be uncomfortable in your life and in your crime alien life actually how it forces us to be uncomfortable right it's not our choice sometimes we put in uncomfortable situation whether you lose somebody in your life that's important to you I'll use something or you gain something and that causes a you know you to be uncomfortable too but where is it your work it's almost deliberate right you know and those things are out of things i would do differently i don't think i knew what i wanted to do and so what many people i think these days would consider very late i was i was almost 30 before I kind of happened into technology and I guess I guess that's not entirely true i had been a bit of a nerdy child however I I didn't have a particular career path I look out there now and I see these kids out there that are 19 20 years old and there they know what they want to do they know that they want to you know do a start-up they know they want to be a technology and I'm amazed by that because I I really did not start out in that in that frame of mind at all I act i spent a long time searching i was gonna backpacking around and traveling and doing odd jobs here and there and waiting tables and doing all kinds of ma job and I I do deficit I know I want to tell the 19 year olds to do that which actually don't know in the end I think really you know influenced me a lot and the work that I do and the things that I care about so you know I really think it's important to to have that time for yourself to figure out what it is that you want to do I mean I went down a lot of paths that were you know clearly the wrong path for me and then when I when I started working in in web design and development in you know the 90s I was you know def point had already kind of gone through three or four careers I haven't really thought about how to categorize challenges whether or not the related gender because I always like to say that you know I'm not a woman at Google and the geek at Google right that's what I mean I do think the biggest challenge I've been at Google now for 12 and a half years and the biggest challenge throughout has been scale scale of the service scale the company the scale of different processes and you know back to Padma's point about that moment where you're uncomfortable like just at the moment where you're like this is a great process and it's working perfectly and I really like it it breaks right i mean other that kind of scale you know watching search literally grow ten thousand times over rising there's 20 employees I mean Google now is you know grown like you know twenty-five hundred times over um I really do think that you know it really is about thinking about you know when do you say hey this was a great process or a great system for last year or this piece of architecture worked when we had millions of queries a day and isn't going to work when we have tens of millions of cruises they are hundreds of millions of crees a day and so that notion of trying to figure out when should you take a step back and rework the foundation the end of an internal process or actually as technology itself is something I just always a found really challenging anticipates yeah well I haven't I can't say that I reached the same career point perhaps that these wonderful women have but I will say that I wish that when I was much younger I had felt more self-confidence about networking with people who are going to matter to me later when i was in college i think it was so happy to be there but i didn't i didn't really take the steps that I needed to take to reach out to professors and make a relationship you know to really learn from them I kind of stood back and let them talk and wrote took notes and and then turned in my paper and I i wish i had just had the self-confidence at that time to say here's who i am and here's what I think and can i benefit from a personal conversation with you that's what i would do differently that's that still i think a hard thing to do as an adult all right we have our microphone out so we'll do a couple of questions and then we will free you because i know my butt's starting to go to sleep about you guys well firstly thank you so much this panel it's very refreshing to have this at CES so my question is around social media specifically we see in the tech world that women are driving so much of social media sharing posting fan pages is there a way to target women specifically on social media and if so I'd love to hear your opinions on that we can use that's weird I don't know why you're not sure I have the magic recipe for that there are you know it's some essentially made for week before we started talking Molly asked if oh no it was a recession Linda you asked if the majority of users on flickr were women at the outset that it was the case and women are frequently the family archivist so the people who take the photos they you know connect everybody and they tend to be very involved in the federal tax women still dominate in you know on Flickr or not but there are certain I mean there are certain certain places that women tend to congregate online there are certain products that they tend to tend to go to there's an environment that they are attracted to you know women have never really penetrated all-male environments there's some kind of classic examples like slashdot was not chick friendly they're like there's a kind of a common common principle in sort of social media design that you know if women are there men will come but it's not the same in the other direction interestingly it's a sort of as a sort of a pattern that you see repeatedly happening on social social media social networking sites it's hard to say it's hard to say what the magic thing is because a lot of this is really I would say are not clients it's not something that it can be formulated it sits in some ways it's kind of a knack it's sort of a feeling you get a sense for a product that has general and broad appeal it is something that women are drawn to and participate in they they I can't believe it's interesting it's interesting because this is the work that I do but I would not say that there is any sort of sort of set way of doing that well that's me I think from the from the perspective of designing the product for me I think what's appealing to me about online social spaces ISM the idea of a safe space that's what I like about Google circle and that's what I like about Google+ circles and Facebook I like the idea of creating sort of a place that I know it's okay to place to post you know I I would never advocate walling off the internet but I think there's something to be said for social experiences that are shared in a private way and I feel like that's one of the things that that I have embraced about using social networks and using a site like guilt where it's a sign up for you know it may not be about the comments there but it's sort of a it feels smaller I think the Lana is local a lot of that is actually how the site itself is developed and maintained and and how the administrators and moderators of those sites take care of them Lindsey mentioned in the beginning of this conversation that you will actually go on too many many texts sites and you will find women being being written about in the press and then the comments will be just like mad sexist comments just these horrible things that were written in there and what that means to me is that the site that site itself has not given very much consideration to developing a civilized conversation space that whoever is maintaining whoever is maintaining that product where all this sort of hostile and you know sexist comments are taking place is not doing a very good job in terms of cultivating a community of you know reasonable voices and people who are making positive contributions and not just you know not just your trolling and heating okay tough one though I have to admit with mercy ER because YouTube is where people are made us to me that's a tough one though because there's a difference there's a fine line between creating safe spaces and censoring speech online and I think it's you would definitely feel more comfortable if people are saying that stuff about us on you but it's but I think it's your all right it depends on what you're sharing anything certain things you're willing to share publicly and they are not and I think as long as you have an option to do that I think that makes sense i think what you're saying though is I like that and I think give that the person creating that needs to take the responsibility almost somewhat editorially looking at the comments that are being hosted in how what is being posted and I also look at things like Pinterest or even Google+ circles and I think what's interesting about it is it's changing the conversation it's changing why and how people connect to each other because it's actually based on interest it's not based on demographics and I think when you move the conversation from demographics to that type of interest based because even when you look at how people use Google+ Circles it'll be like you know your ski buddies you know your art bunnies or fashion buddies like whatever whatever however your categorizing them a lot of times those circles are actually based on interest and I think that kind of shift with a conversation actually makes women more comfortable yeah I have a cussing circle on Google+ a little known fact I swear like a trekker any other questions okay but only in my one cussing circle we have one weird I was wondering at CES specifically and you went into a little bit about the booth babes and the lack of woman attending but one of one of the things that I've noticed is in north hall every year there's not parenting tech but mommy tech yes so i was wondering if you had any comments maybe maybe part of the problem with with the making a choice between family and and and career is that once you have a family you're expected to be a mommy not just a mother another person who has children that they are rearing but buddy mommy well I think that's incredibly unfair to men yeah it is really like this drives my husband bananas I mean he will say wait a minute I take care of our children how come nobody wants to talk with me about this that's what I thought wasn't it mommy and daddy tuck right why isn't it a parenting thing I thinks you're finally got a great yeah it is sort of that it does seem to be sort of it's just sort of easy to say that once we're a mom that's all we become you know that we've that and and and we I think of all seen that happen we've all seen colleagues who decided that being mom was was going to be it and that so it's partly about identity and right it's partly about spreading the wealth in terms of the parenting responsibilities question there yeah will do will do years and then one more okay so i probably work for Padma and society oh you ever play and right next to me I have a fresh graduate new hire from Berkeley some background and experience design earlier you were talking about experience plus technology and how critical that is going forward so my question is what kind of advice would you have two new people into the workforce we're pushing experience because you know experience often gets run over by technology and product management and product deadlines and things you know how would you advise someone fresh in the workforce to go ahead and you know evangelize technology or experience you know amongst all of that yeah actually I think Marissa is probably better qualified to answer that then i am but i think it is that one of the things that i was talking about earlier and welcome by the way into the workforce but it's it's important not just to think of products as technology you know products are something that we use to make our lives cipal and if you kind of look at it from that point of view whatever the product is you know the value isn't making a life simple then I think you focus on how do I use it to make my life simple and that is all about experience and the technology really becomes the foundation almost behind the scenes of making that habit and you know what we touch and feel is really the experience how we experience that product so you have a great very important role to play yeah I mean I think experience is what makes technology compelling and interestingly it doesn't only do that on the user side but it actually done studies across the country of introductory computer science program and they have better enrollment across the board if the curriculum focuses more on problem solving as opposed to saying hey write a routine that does get bonacci numbers or just get the mechanics down the ones that say use this technology to solve a problem in chemistry or use this technology to solve a problem in organization right like when you actually think about how to problem-solve so it's interesting that not only is experience what makes technology compelling when you buy a new gadget but it's also what makes people compelled to learn about technology is the experience of being able to solve a problem I think a scattering I was saying she started off as a designer and you know she made it a point to say I'm not an engineer like beasts so I think this is a living proof here and what you can accomplish right and there are more and more companies that are started by designers or have design as a very strong focus and I really do believe that a well-designed product can overcome you know a lot of Technology flaws if the product itself is something that people want people love and people would use the technology to support it will come up to meet it our last question does somebody off the mic out there or did you get it back alright that's it great we're free thank you so much to our amazing panel you women are brilliant and beautiful and we're happy to have you and thank you all for coming out i hope you enjoyed it this will be posted online later as seen it so definitely check that out a full slate of programming for you it's starting again tomorrow we will have the best of CES awards presentation right here on the stage you don't want to miss that that is the ten absolute best products that we've seen it too yes plus of course the people's voice award and the best of CES overall title and then after that a few more podcasts and will be taping a CBS special so you can come and spy on that we'll see you guys later you