I hope you're all at home safe and healthy. To kick off the lecture this afternoon, I would like to pass it to Admiral Chatfield for her remarks. Ma'am. Hello, good afternoon. I am so excited to be able to resume the issues in national security lecture series. Thank you all for taking a chance and coming online this afternoon. I can't wait for our presenters to start. Professor Johnson-Freeze, Professor Smith, thank you so much for being here. And my husband, David, who will be joining me shortly, and I are just so excited and so pleased to start this event today. Oh, and here comes David now. All right, fantastic. We are all ears. Thank you very much, Admiral. David, good to see you. I'm Professor John Jackson, a series coordinator, and we're planning to offer a new lecture each Tuesday afternoon between now and the 2nd of June. I encourage you all to attend. You may notice a change in me. I am now competing in the Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest, but we'll let the hair grow for a while here yet. So what I'd like to do is introduce two of our most productive professors here at the Naval War College who are gonna give us a great discussion this afternoon. First and foremost, Dr. Jones Johnson-Freeze, who is a university professor teaching national security affairs here at the college. She currently holds the Charles F. Bolden Junior Chair of Science, Space, and Technology. She is the author of seven books on space security and testified before Congress on space policy topics on multiple occasions. She also teaches classes on women, peace, and security at Harvard University's summer and extension schools. And her latest book is Women, Peace, and Security, and Introduction, and on that topic. Our second presenter will be Dr. David Smith, an associate professor of sociology in our College of Leadership and Ethics here at Newport. He's a trained military sociologist and social psychology. His research focuses on gender, work, and family issues including gender bias and performance evaluations, dual career families, military families, women in the military, and retention of women. A former Navy pilot, Dr. Smith is co-author, author of the forthcoming book, Good Guys, How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace. He's also a co-author of Athena Rising, How and Why Men Should Mentor Women. During the presentation, you can use the chat feature on Zoom to submit your questions, which the speakers will entertain at the conclusion of their remarks. And following our presentation, there will also be about a 30 minute family discussion group meeting on topics unrelated to the lecture topic. So to lead off our discussion, I turn the digital podium over to Dr. Johnson-Free. Thank you, John, and thank you, Admiral, for allowing us to try this out. It's a fun experiment. It's my pleasure to talk to you this afternoon about women in national security. It's a topic I'm always interested in, but it's especially timely right now, in this being the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States and the 20th anniversary of the passage of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 known as the Women, Peace, and Security Act. And I'm gonna focus on the Women, Peace, and Security Act and lead it over to a discussion on mentorship that my colleague, Dr. Smith, take. I think we need to, it's important to begin by talking about the breadth of what we mean when we say women in national security. You often think first about more traditional security roles, women in the military, women in intelligence, women as diplomats, members of Congress and Parliament, but it's important that we recognize as well that human security issues, those which are important, not government to government, but to individuals come into play as well, health, education, food, economic prosperity, members of the press and editors also fall within the national security realm. I think we've been really the role that women play as in national security as healthcare workers has certainly been brought to our attention lately with COVID-19. And then there's the question of what exactly are we talking about when we say women's issues? And I'm always a little puzzled when people ask me that because I think Atifete Yayaga, the former president of Kosovo put it very well when she said the security of women is the security of the country. So there aren't very many issues that aren't women's issues. So women national security is a very broad encompassing topic. So I'm going to narrow it down and focus on what the Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325 tried to do. It really had two primary components. The first was to bring more women into conflict prevention, mitigation and peace building. And the idea was that they bring different information, different perspectives, different interests, styles and problem solving. In terms of different information, there's a great example that a woman named Valerie Hudson who works a lot in this field put in one of her books. She talked about peacekeeping, peace talks, peace negotiations in Sudan a few years ago and that the men around the table had been arguing for weeks about who would get possession of a riverbed. And a woman who was pouring water for the men, interrupted and said, it might be helpful for you to know that river dried up about two years ago. Women live in these conflict zones and they bring information that isn't always available to others. They bring perspectives. Valerie Hudson calls the relationship between men and women the first political order. And another researcher, Mary Capriotti, has taken that further and shown that relationships, gender equality relationships between men and women tie over international security that violence breeds violence. If there's inequality in gender relations including domestic violence and violence used as a weapon of war, gender violence used as a weapon of war, it carries over that violence becomes the default method of problem solving. So women bring different things to conflict prevention mitigation and peace building. That's the first part of 1325. The second is an acknowledgement that gender perspectives matter. The policies affect girls, women, boys and men differently. And the best example I can give you of that is the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization gathered statistics on the way food aid is given. Food aid is distributed. And in many countries, women are the primary agricultural workers. But in some of these same countries they are not allowed to own land. And if aid is given only to land owners, they might not use it in ways that maximize its utility as the worst way. They estimated that if aid were given to those working the land, rather than just land owners, output could be raised by 30% reducing world hunger by 17%. So there's this idea of bringing more women in and acknowledging these gendered perspectives. Their premises have been backed up by a growing body of evidence. Peace payments where women are involved have a 35% higher possibility of lasting at least 15 years or more because they do bring in these different perspectives. On average, countries that have gender quotas for elected officials spend more than 4% more on social welfare programs for families than those without. Countries with large gender gaps and fewer rates for women tend to have more corruption, more violence, more disease and a lower life expectancy. So there's lots of global evidence for the utility of bringing women into national security affairs very broadly defined. So what about here in the United States? In the United States, after 1325 was passed, it was up to individual countries to come up with national action plans. And to be honest, it took the United States quite a while, a decade, to write their national action plan, 2010, 2011. It was updated in 2016, but then the United States took a real leap forward in 2017 by being the first country to pass the Women, Peace and Security Act, making it the law of the land that the agenda be forwarded within all realms of government work. From there, a strategy was developed a national level strategy for implementation and Ivanka Trump presented it to Congress in 2019. Where we're at now is each agency is then left to develop an implementation plan of the strategy. The Defense Department was to have their strategy in in September, 2019. Unfortunately, we're still waiting for it, but there is again, a lot of movement in other agencies and within DOD at different component levels. The implementation issues with Women, Peace and Security, the things that have held it back are both structural and cultural. And the structural ones are luckily for us mostly found in developing countries. There are things that, for example, keeping women from voting, from owning land, but we've gotten for the most part done away with those structural barriers here in the United States and certainly allowing women in all areas of the military as an example of doing away with those structural barriers. The cultural barriers are sometimes harder to overcome. Sometimes they stem quite frankly from bias and prejudice and it's not just here, it's everywhere. I was recently in Japan giving lectures on this topic and it was at a time when it had just been revealed that the University of Tokyo Medical School had been deliberately changing the application scores of women, lowering the scores to keep them out with the rationale that they were just going to get married, have children and leaves, therefore why bother with their education. And those kind of things are still prevalent in many different areas. Cyber, for example, there are zero job vacancies in the cyber field. In fact, it's estimated that there will be 3.5 million unfilled cyber jobs by 2021, yet women still make up only between 11 and 20% of the cyber jobs, even though there are a high number of unemployed women in the field. It's been seen as a traditionally male dominated area. So it's getting over the idea that there are different areas for different men, for different genders. Sometimes too, it's just what we call blind fish. Blind fish being one fish says to another fish in an aquarium, so how do you like the water? And the other fish says, what's water? If you've never experienced a problem, you've never been in an environment where there's a problem, it's just not recognized. The Chicago Council on World Affairs and the New America Foundation did a study about two years ago and found that they did a study of security practitioners and found that under 20% had any knowledge of the Women, Peace and Security Act and even fewer really felt it was important to bring women into a national security affairs. So there's a lot of learning to be done. And personally, I think a first step in that is awareness. And one of the reasons I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak to this venue and other venues because I think awareness is a huge first step. So then that brings to the question of how do we get more women in positions? And there's a difference between having a role model and really someone in a leadership position. And research has basically found that there are three different traits that men rely on to get hired, promoted and for retention and those are competence, confidence and mentorship. That these three areas also apply to women but often very differently. Competence, for example, Michelle Flournay who of course we all know has held the highest position in the Pentagon up a woman has said that women need not just to be competent but hyper competent, but to be careful not to show it. If you show it too much, it can be seen as threatening and you pay what she calls a gender tax that comes with stereotypes in terms of what women can and can't do in terms of capabilities. So competence is required. The second is confidence. A lot of studies have shown that men in leadership positions say, well, women don't have the confidence that needed. And the difficulty in that is very much tied to competence. A few years ago, Professor Jackson mentioned that I work a lot in space security. A few years ago, I was at a meeting where there was a panel on women astronauts and they were from very different cultures. There was an American, a Canadian, a South Korean and a Chinese astronaut, all women astronauts. And when it got to the Q&A, someone asked, what's the hardest part of being an astronaut? And the Canadian astronaut raised her hand and she said, I wanna answer this, please let me answer it. And she said, the hardest part is having to prove my competence day after day after day to my male colleagues. And all the other women on the panel nodded vigorously. Now these are astronauts. You would assume that their competence was just acknowledged and recognized. But when it's not, it can eat into confidence. So competence, confidence and mentorship all come into play. And in the Navy, as I've been researching this, I found there's a term seed daddy. This acknowledgement, kind of this idea that you get mentored and as your mentor advances, you are brought along. That they recognize your merit, they recognize your competence, your confidence. But women don't mentor the same way men do. Don't have the same expectations and don't have the same opportunities for mentorship. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to David because this is his area of expertise. All right, well, thank you, Joan. And I really appreciate you setting that up very nicely. And really the big picture overview, I think of women in national security is so foundational to our broader security and what we need to be doing in terms of really integrating this into how we look and focus on national security. And these aren't just women's issues, right? These are leadership issues. And that's one of the challenges I think we have. So I'd like to bring this down to the organizational level for just a minute and then think about how, why this is important and what are some of the challenges we have in terms of moving this out of making gender inequities in particular, not so much a women's issue as it is a leadership issue. So if we look at organizations, we know the research shows us over and over again that the more gender diversity, and this applies to other aspects and demographics of diversity as well, more gender diversity you have at every level of leadership, not just at the lowest levels all the way through to the top, that the better decisions we make, right? If you measure your bottom line in terms of profits and losses like corporate America does, guess what, they make more money as well out there. You're more innovative, you're more creative, you're more effective in the national security world, we find higher mission completion rates, right? So the evidence continues to pile up in just about every industry out there on the effectiveness of having gender diversity to every level of leadership. Yet we still find that women are excluded in a number of ways, right? They're still under recruited, under retained, under advanced, and certainly underpaid because we know the gender pay gap is still one of the largest ones out there today. But it's interesting when you ask leaders and in particular men about why is this the case, men often will give you a host of reasons about why this might exist out there. And one of them is that, well, we've already spent all our time and energy on creating gender equity and integrating women and getting them at the highest levels. I mean, just look, look around, we have a woman on our C-suite, we have a woman in our senior leadership team and that seems to justify in their minds the fact that, well, we're beyond this. But the reality is that if you go out and you ask organizations like Harvard Business did recently where they asked 800 executives across industries out there, are you including women in the most important decisions your company makes on a daily basis? And when you ask the men that question, these senior men, 92% of them are gonna tell you that, yeah, absolutely we are. We're including women in all the important decisions our company makes. Yet when you ask women, 82% of the women will tell you that they still feel excluded in one way or another in their organization. So we have a gap, right? And we have this gap in terms of how we perceive the problem and how we see the problem. And that's one of the challenges in particular with gender inequity is that we don't see the problem in the same way. Yet there's other men out there who believe that, well, yeah, there is a problem out there but maybe it's not my role. It's not my place because it's a women's issue. Again, back to gender and it's being a women's issue that it's not my place to be involved in this. But that's why it's important that we make this a leadership issue. The really interesting thing is that Boston Consulting Group did some research a while back and it shows that when men are engaged in gender diversity initiatives in particular, that companies are so much better off in terms of accomplishing their diversity and inclusion goals. Yet when men are not, there's very little movement they see in the company in particular. So there's a lot of great evidence to support the fact that we need to engage men and show men that they have a role in doing this in particular. So mentoring was one place and I'm gonna use the term sponsorship probably off and on as well. When I say sponsorship, I'm not talking about the sponsorship that we often talk about in the military. I'm talking about the advocacy component about how we advocate for others out there and pushing them forward for opportunities and jobs and things like that. So if I use that term sponsorship, that's what I'm talking about. And it's interesting that we do mentoring and sponsoring a little bit different. And oh, by the way, sponsoring an advocacy is a sub function or a component of great mentorship. So Dr. Johnson Freese brought up the fact that in terms of how we look at in the military, we have this term in the Navy we call the Sea Daddies. And I'll just tell you that I love that term because I used it with one of my female mentors from grad school. I was introducing her to the concept of what it meant to be a mentor. And I said, yeah, in the Navy, we would call them Sea Daddies. So I guess that makes you my Sea Mama. And she just loved that kind of an endearing term and she still uses it to this day when we have conversations about this. But it's really important to think about in particular how we do mentoring just a little bit different. And we all know the advantages of mentoring, right? So we've all succeeded to certain levels of leadership in our organizations out there. And we've all probably had lots of mentors out there that have helped us along the way. And certainly organizations benefit from that from both an organizational commitment perspective, organizational identity perspective, retention and advancement, succession planning goes on and on. The great benefits of mentoring are well represented. What's interesting is that women, while in some cases are perceived to be receiving as much or more mentoring or sometimes even Sylvia and Hewlett said they are often over-mentored compared to men, they don't receive the same type of mentoring that men do. In particular, they're missing some of the psychosocial functions in terms of affirmation, feeling like you belong, the emotional support aspect. And they're also not getting a lot of the advocacy component, right? And this is important because these are the opportunities that help us to advance and move up into the senior leadership levels and show us the path to success out there. Yet what's interesting is when we did our research for Athena Rising, we found that women who had male mentors were more likely to have raises, more likely to have promotions, more likely to make more money, more career eminence, all the great things out there. So there is something fundamentally different about when men are mentoring women. The question of course is, well, is it that men are better mentors than women? Absolutely not. It's the fact that men tend to be more likely to be in positions of power and influence those stakeholder positions where they can open the doors. If they're using their social capital and expending it on their mentees, they're gonna go further and do those kinds of things out there. So the other question we often get from guys though is, well, wait a minute, why can't women just mentor other women? And that's a great question. And it really comes down to a numbers game and certainly in a lot of traditionally male dominated industries out there today, if you look at it, we're doing a great job of recruiting, the military included, recruiting diverse talent into our organizations today. So lots of women coming in the front door in particular, right? But there aren't as many senior women in the higher ranks. And it's not fair to, for example, ask the president of the War College to mentor all the junior women at the War College, right? She just doesn't have enough time in the day to do that, even if she wanted to do all of that. And she has a daytime job, oh, by the way, right? And so women leaders look at that and they're like, wow, that's just a lot to put on women to do that. And oh, by the way, mentoring and talent development is everybody's responsibility. All leaders are responsible for developing and the talent in their charge. So again, this is why again, we need to engage more men in terms of doing this. The interesting thing is that when men are doing the mentoring, we often have this notion of what a mentor looks like. And this is one where if we were doing a presentation, I would show you this picture of the guru and we call the guru model out there. In particular, we think we have this one wise sage guru mentor who's we're all gonna sit at their feet and they're gonna dispense great wisdom to us.  And of course, the reality is that that's not how mentoring works. And most of us recognize that, well, we probably have more than one mentor as well. And actually the research shows that the most successful people out there have what we would call a network or a constellation of mentors, right? So you have a lot of mentors in different parts of your life and different parts of your career and different times of your career that are most important to who you are and what you do out there. The question is, what do those mentors look like and how diverse is that network?   Which tends to be kind of how we tend to gravitate towards this if we allow it to happen very informally and kind of on a grassroots level. The last part I would leave you with is that great mentoring relationships are what we would call mutual or reciprocal in nature. And that means that there's this back and forth, there's this giving, there's a power down dynamics. You know, there's always kind of this notion that there's always a power dynamic and a mentoring relationship because the mentor is the senior person, but great mentors do a really nice job of eliminating that or lowering that power dynamic so that there's learning and there's a give and take and there's feedback going both directions. And this is what we call reciprocity or mutuality. And the best mentoring relationships where people get the most out of them have the most mutuality and reciprocity out there. And that'll come up again as we go through this today. What's interesting is when we were doing the first research for Athena Rising, this is prior to me too, was that we found we were talking to men, there were a lot of reasons why they didn't want to be involved in these mentoring relationships with women at work. And a lot of it had to do around, so it was perceptions or biases about who women were as leaders and as workers.  She's a flight risk in terms of she might go off and have babies and want to have a family and I just wasted my time or maybe she's not tough enough or she just can't cut it, right? These negative perceptions we have about from a gender perspective.  In some cases it was more around anxiety.  And, but, you know, I was never really given this kind of script of what's a close personal and developmental relationship look like with a woman at work. And so men got a little anxious about it. And what do you do when you're anxious? You avoid it, right? And that's what we get away from that uncomfortability. The other one that they talked about were perceptions of their colleagues and peers and concern that, wow, people might start talking if I'm mentoring a woman because there might be something else going on there. And, right, so we have to address some of these perception issues and why those actually might be out there in many cases. And then come about a year after the book came out, Me Too went widespread across the country and the world. And, you know, that really kind of changed a lot of the dynamics and men became even more anxious and more on the sidelines and avoiding these relationships with women in the workplace. And there were a lot of competing urban myths and these false narratives out there about that somehow women had caused Me Too. It's like, nope, sorry. That's a bunch of serial perpetrators and harassers and hopefully they're all going to jail right now. Or that somehow women suddenly are scary and dangerous and we shouldn't be, you know, we can't work with them. And it's like, no, no, they're really not all that scary and dangerous to work with out there. And then finally, the last one was that we see, we hear often is that somehow women are going to make these false claims around sexual harassment if you're spending time with them. And again, there's zero evidence to support that whatsoever. And it usually if you ask guys about that in particular, they'll start, it'll go on the lines of, well, I heard about a guy who, and then it goes on from there, right? And so we have, I think first as men, we have to push back on these narratives because they often happen in closed spaces where it's just men in the room and we're probably not doing this or saying these things around other women out there. And as guys, we have to begin to push back on that. And the last elephant in the room here, I'll just throw out there because we always like to have a little fun with the guys on this one in particular is that some guys are worried, it's like, well, if I get into this really kind of close personal mentoring relationship with a woman, what happens if I happen to find her attractive? That's like, oh my God, well, if you happen to mentor a lot of women and work with a lot of women, it would be kind of weird if some of them weren't maybe a little bit attractive. And I would say that would just be kind of odd and that from a heterosexual perspective for just a second, that I think you just have to acknowledge that as being somewhat normal. The question is, what do you do with it? And this is where I think there's some great science out there today. And in particular, we know that men, because we looked at all kinds of these functional magnetic resonance imaging, it's great technology out there. It turns out when you look at men's brains, they have a frontal lobe. Yes, you can laugh now. And we can use that to our executive decision-making to separate that when we feel something that's like, well, I don't have to actually react to it. I don't actually have to act upon that, that we can actually use some good judgment here as we think about this from a decision-making perspective. And the last part of this is that we always like to remind guys that there's some great social science, social psychology research out there on perceived mutual attraction. And when they go out and they do this research, they take groups of men and women and they ask them to rate everybody in the room in terms of how much they find the other person in the room attractive. And then they ask the women and ask you to rate how much you think that the other person finds you attractive. And as it turns out, there's one gender that radically overestimates how much they think the other gender finds them attractive. Yep, it's us guys. So the message to guys is, you know, hey, she's just thought that into you, you get over it. So real quick, I wanna give you a little bit of some best practices and some things that we came up with from our research at Athena Rising around mentoring relationships and what women told us worked really well, what they most appreciated and some cases what they would have liked more of. And then some of our new research around allyship. And allyship has two parts to it. This is the broader idea about how we as men in particular, we show up in the workplace and our supportive and collaborative relationships with women and how we're in there to support gender equity and fairness in the workplace and hold ourselves accountable for that work. And then the harder part of that is really doing the public piece of this. And it's when you see others and having to correct that and hold others accountable and when you see bias in a system and we're looking for that as well, is that we're working with the organization to change the practice or to fix the process so that there isn't that bias and inequity in the system out there. So there's two parts to allyship and we'll touch on those as we go through it. So this might seem like an odd place to start but I think Dr. Johnson-Fries hit it right, the nail right on the head today for me here on this one in particular. And then it is that, hey, you know what? The best place to start on solving gender equality issues whether you're doing it on a worldwide level or you're doing in your organization or you're doing in your workplace is to start at home. And no better time than right now to talk about this when we're all sheltered in place together in our homes and we're seeing how division of household responsibilities look right now. And it's an interesting concept because we tell men in particular that if you're going to be an all-in ally in the workplace you have to be a gender ally and gender partner at home first. You got to be a 50-50 partner, doing your fair share and start, you can start by doing the dishes, taking the kids to their practices although they're not doing a lot of practice right now, take care of childcare, do your 50%. If you're not sure if you're doing your half, guess what? You need to just go do a real quick audit with your spouse. And when she tells you that you need to be doing more, say thank you and get busy. And the flip side of this is that, this is great obviously working with your partner in particular in enabling her and if all men did this, right? We would be enabling women out there to be doing these things. But it destigmatizes a lot of the programs and things that are in place in the workplace. Say for example, parental leave. If guys are taking this and doing their half of that, it's not a women's or gender issue anymore, gender program out there. This is a parental program for men and women. Same thing in today's environment around telework. Oh, finally, you know, flex work, telework, everybody's really beginning to appreciate this. Used to be stigmatized. We'll see if it is after this is all over that this was a women's, right? A women's program. This is something for women because they need it to be able to take care of the kids. Guess not anymore, right? Guys are having to use it too. So really important we do this and we need to do this for our kids as well because guess what? We are, they're watching us and we're role modeling for them. So for dads in particular, when you're role modeling being an equal partner and you're doing, again, your half of the tasks in the household and childcare and everything else, your sons are watching that and they're getting a whole different perspective on what gender roles look like both at work and at home. And guess what? When they turn old enough to go out there into the workplace, they're gonna take these new enlightened perspectives of what gender roles look like into the workplace and make their own change. And really important for our daughters.  The research shows us that when you're an all in equal partner and your daughters see that when they're growing up, they're more likely to persist in their careers, attain their career goals and dreams and go into more less stereotypical professions in industry out there of the ones that are more male dominated as well and be successful at it. So really important for our kids out there. So how do we get started? Guys often ask us this question, it's like, oh, you know, how do I get started with this? It seems like we're asking a lie. It's like, hey, this isn't that big of an ask. JP Morgan Chase has a program where they've asked and challenged men in their company to do this 35 one pledge. And this is 36 minutes of your day, each week of your day of your week. Once you've spent 30 minutes just interacting with a woman having coffee, having a conversation, getting to know her, understand the challenges she's facing in the workplace. Just again, develop awareness as Dr. Johnson-Fries was telling us earlier. Begin to develop that awareness and understand that. Guess what? 30 minutes each week for that. Five minutes, recognizing and congratulating a woman on her accomplishments and her achievements. Five minutes each week, take note. It forces you to look and take note. And then one minute, talk into somebody else about her accomplishments. Hopefully one of your male peers out there, right? Just again, spread the same knowledge and open up that social capital and that network that you would for other guys. You do it for women as well. So 35 one, 36 minutes a week, you can start by doing this. The number one trait that women told us that they most appreciated in their male mentors. And we did the research for Athena Rising was humility. They talked about it in terms of gender or culture humility and that, well, he didn't just assume that he knew exactly what I wanted because I was a woman or that I must need this because I'm a woman, right? That he asked questions. He had this learning orientation towards understanding my experiences that just because I was a woman and he was a man, we weren't so different that we couldn't understand each other's career goals and career dreams, but really beginning to understand that. And it's really interesting that when we look at this learning orientation, you see more of that in the reciprocal mentoring relationships around the mutuality again, the lower power dynamics because there again, there's this inherent curiosity about learning about your mentee out there. And as it turns out, one of the takeaways we had from our research that was kind of a surprise was that we found that male mentors with female mentees and oh, by the way, this works the other direction too if you're a male with a female mentor that we find that they have a lot of benefits to this is for guys too. So there's a win for women, there's a win for your organization and a win for these mentors as well. And that is that again, they have increased access to information to parts of the organization they wouldn't otherwise have a broader network both internal and external to the organization. And really the one we love is that we find these increased and enhanced interpersonal skills. So higher EQ, higher empathy and who doesn't want more of that in a leader in your organization. And the wonderful thing about that is that at the end of the day you don't check that at the door when you go home you get to take that home with you. And so you find that they're better partners, better parents as well when they go back home. The number one skill that women told us that they most appreciated with men was listening. And we said, well, tell me more about this listening. What exactly are you talking about in terms of like, well, he didn't listen to try to fix a problem for me or to fix me in particular. Cause it turns out it sound like a lot of us as guys and it's not just as men, but I think a lot of us in senior leadership positions were socialized to be problem solvers. And we pride ourselves in being great problem solvers out there. And so mentoring can feel like that sometimes if we're not careful, right? That we're there as mentors to solve a problem. Nope, not really, right?  Sometimes you just want to feel like you belong, that somebody didn't make a mistake and I'm not a fraud. The imposter syndrome sets in. There's all of these things that we just need affirmation that this is the right place for me and there's a future for me in this organization as well. And I'm not crazy for wanting to try to achieve a career in this organization. So listening skills are really important out there. So one of the things in particular we found, I'll just share this one story with you around assumptions in listening. And so we had the great opportunity to interview Robert Lightfoot and Robert was the NASA administrator at the time. And we got to interview him because Janet Petro was one of his mentees and she was deputy at the Kennedy Space Center. And he told us that when, he kind of counted himself as one of those gender savvy dudes and really kind of got it and really kind of it was trying to set the example. And he was on this hiring committee at NASA and they were down to the last four candidates, very senior position there. And one was a woman and it was clear that she was the best candidate for the job. And before they were going to make the offer, he said, you know, I just felt like I had to chime in. And so he said, here this job requires a lot of travel and she just had a baby a few weeks ago. And I just, you know, I wonder if she's the right one for the job. And he said, fortunately for him, there was this woman on the committee who was sitting right across from him and she was just looking at him with like flames coming out of his eyes. And as he said, Robert, she's pretty smart person. She applied for the job and I'm pretty sure she understands that it requires a lot of travel. And I'm really sure that she knows that she had a baby a few weeks ago. So why don't we let her make that decision? He was like, ah, this light bulb moment, this epiphany. And it's like, wow, here I was thinking I was this really kind of gender aware, gender savvy guy and man, I was just stepping in it. But it really spoke to some of the humility, you know, that a lot of these male mentors shared a lot of the mistakes and the stories that along the way. I'm gonna share just a couple more things with you. And then we'll turn it over to some Q and A here. But I do want to hit on a couple of things that I think are really important. And one in particular is around challenge when it comes to mentoring in particular. And this comes around allyship as well and how we perceive our mentees as being able to, again, back to perceptions about up to the challenge, right? Of handling a difficult job or something that maybe it's a little outside their realm. And Dr. Johnson-Fries, I thought did a nice job of talking about this in terms of, you know, men, we get judged and we look at each other in terms of are we ready for the next job on potential? Whereas women, it's back to what we call the prove it again bias around performance and that it's over and over again that women have to prove themselves that they're ready for the next opportunity. And, you know, we see this in hiring. We see it in terms of next opportunities for jobs and there's a job opening. You've probably seen this research where if there's eight criteria and, you know, men will be applying for it if they meet two or three of the criteria. And there's a lot of women out there who probably meet seven or seven and a half parts of the criteria and they won't put their names in the hat because again, they've been socialized to feel like they have to prove themselves into it. And this is again, where mentors can be aware of these, again, it's kind of these socialized differences. And again, they're not for everybody, but be aware of it and that we're providing the same kinds of challenge out there that we are for men as we are for women. It's really interesting emotions play into this too. And male mentors talk to us a lot about this, about the concern about how sometimes they didn't want to stress out or challenge their mentee too much because, you know, it might make her cry or something like that. And that was another one that came up quite a bit and we had a lot of great stories about that that I can share some other later date if we have more time. The last thing I'll leave you with, and I think this is really important was we had the opportunity to interview Cheryl Sandberg who was a COO of Facebook and wrote the book Lean In. And, you know, Cheryl's been a great supporter of our work and she shared some really interesting stories. And one of the ones I'd like to share this last one with you is around advocacy and sponsorship in particular. And she said that, you know, when she graduated and went into her first job in the financial industry out there, she was personal assistant for the secretary of the treasury at the time. And everywhere they would go, when anytime they were meeting somebody new, went into a new audience, he would always introduce Cheryl and say, hey, I want you to meet Cheryl Sandberg. She just graduated number one in economics from Harvard and she is just a rock star. I couldn't do my job without her and he would go on and on for a couple of minutes about how important she was and enabling him to do the work that he's doing and how important she was. And after about the third or fourth time he'd done this, Cheryl pulled him aside and private said, said, you have to stop doing that. And he's like, what, Cheryl? And he's like, well, you're embarrassing me every time we go out there. And he said, no, no, no, this is how it works. I tell them, I open up my, again, my social capital and my network for you, right? And that's what I do for men. I do it for you just in the same because they need to know how much I value your work so that they're going to value it too. And it provides that opportunity, right? That is so important for opening doors out there.  I think it's really important that we think about the advocacy component because this is the part that often gets left off as we think about how we're advancing women and others in there. So with that, I'm gonna stop because I know there's probably been a lot of great questions coming at us and we would love to field as many as we can. Well, thank you very much, David and Joan. Very, very great discussion. And we do have a number of questions. So I'll start sending those up to you. First, since most bias, at least in the U.S., is unconscious bias, what is the best way to address this? Joan, you want me to take that? Sorry, I was unmuting. There you go. There's a great Harvard bias kind of self-test that you can do that's online and it's remarkable what you will find out about yourself. One of the findings that has come out is women are most often very biased against women. And that goes back to a competition between women that has been written about a lot. And I think it's a great place to start. It's called the... David, do you remember the exact name?  Yeah, it's the implicit association test, IAT. Yeah, and if you Google that, you'll come up with it. It's a lot of fun. It's really easy to do on your computer. And it can be quite enlightening in it. And they have it for, it's not just for gender, but they have it for just about all sorts of dimensions of demographics and things you could possibly think of. Some that I didn't even know. Do it along with your Myers-Briggs. Yeah, yeah. But you're right, unconscious bias is something. And there's been, what's interesting is that we've, broadly in both government and the corporate world, we've dumped billions of dollars into unconscious bias training that's been done mostly in isolation. And the interesting thing about that is that the results of that, what we find are that it is not improving or de-biasing anything or people in particular, because we find is that a one-time class setting does not change people's biases. It might help make them a little bit more aware. In some cases, it reinforces biases. We get a negative reaction to the results of it. However, if you integrate it with leader development training or you integrate it with mentoring and sponsoring development and training, this is where we find we really start to begin to move the needle when it comes to diversity, inclusion and kind of deep from a perspective of using that, of understanding what that bias is and how we use it, that's where we make the most gains. Great question. Thank you. Next question, how effective are affinity groups? Dave, I'll let you take that. Sure. So affinity groups and in the corporate world, we call these employer resource groups or business resource groups. They have a lot of different names out there. And originally they were set up to, again, provide a safe space for different underrepresented minorities out there. Oh, by the way, there are a lot of these today that are for military veterans out there. I've worked with a lot of them. And, but they're out there to provide a safe place to share experiences and best practices and help them provide resources and affirmation, all sorts of things, you know, mentoring and sponsoring is just part of it as well. So I think those are, they're really valuable. And I think we're seeing a proliferation of them across industries out there today. What we see though also is a movement away from doing them in isolation and trying to find different ways to connect them. So this is kind of a best practice over the last few years. In particular, if we talk about gender, we're finding over the last two years now more groups that are trying to integrate a kind of an adjunct group around male allies. And so men as allies, again, because it takes a little bit of a gender integration here is we're gonna move the dial on really reducing a lot of the inequities because we need to have men in the conversation as well. It's a leadership issue, not a women's issue. But at the same time, I think it's important that these different affinity groups have a place where they can, again, they can go in a safe space to share experiences and to talk about things that maybe they don't wanna share in front of their other colleagues out there. But I think more and more as we begin to understand the importance of integrating the conversation with others, a lot of these affinity groups are really connecting with each other and doing a lot of great work around allies in particular. If I could just add on to that, it's important, it's so important to have men working with women on gender equality. There's groups, he for she and others. I can't say men think they are more attractive than they really are. David can say that. There's a lot of things that we really need to expand the idea that women, peace and security, gender equality, that it's all women talking about it. Unfortunately, today what we often see is that when groups are set up to discuss these issues, it is all women. So the more men we can ally with, the more we can broaden the idea that these aren't women's issues. There's groups working on nuclear strategy, on space security, that to point out what women bring to the field and it's best done, as David said, when men say yes, they are very valuable, that often is where you can overcome the gender tax. The next one is a question that's very practical in nature and it basically says, if I'm going before a hiring panel, usually composed primarily of men, how do I prove that I'm competent without being seen as overly aggressive or braggadocious? That is the $64,000 question for every woman. It is, it's the heartline to walk. You know, there's no magic answer to that. You just have to, we have to be competent, confident. But I will tell you, if there's bias lurking, it will come out. I once supplied for a job and was told that the hiring committee thought I was by far the most qualified, but they just didn't like me. That's very often women find they can be competent or likable, but not both. So I think you just have to put your credentials forward. And a colleague of mine once put it, unfortunately, a lot of times women have to mommy, they're male colleagues in terms of a woman can say something and it will be ignored. And the person sitting, the man sitting next to her at a meeting will say the same thing. And it's suddenly a brilliant idea. And that requires, again, not being seen as too aggressive. You might say, Professor Jackson, have you thought of it this way? Or that's a great thought, Professor Jackson. How about if we look at it from another perspective? It's a skill that women learn. Unfortunately, we've had to learn to get your perspective considered, but not be seen as pushy. Can I offer a privileged answer as the middle-aged, white, straight, married male here in the group? Why would you wanna work for an organization like that? Because clearly they don't value diversity or gender diversity in particular. So, again, a very privileged response there to say that. And in particular, for people who need the job, that's easy for me to say at that point. But what I would say is that we have to back that up a couple of steps. And again, we're focusing this again on the person who is applying. And I go, well, the process is broken because one, was the applicant pool, was it balanced to begin with? Why is there only a group of men in the interview panel? There should be, again, a balance of people in the panel itself that are doing the interviewing and the process in particular. And so, and I think this is the question that a lot of organizations today are starting to wrestle with is how do we begin to de-bias, right? How do we look for the inequities within the system, right? That we're recreating? Because guess what? If you have a panel of just men, the odds are they're gonna pick somebody who looks just like them. Ducks pick ducks. Exactly. And so we have to take a step back. And I feel like this is kind of victim blaming almost, right? Because we're back to, well, women, how do you self pretzels so that you can get picked for the job? It's like, well, why should I, why do I wanna be in that job to begin with? Why do I wanna be in that organization to begin with? Why doesn't the organization fix their process? So anyway, that may not be the response you were looking for. Dave, there's another question here that says, do you say these same things to groups of men? Or is it only when you're asked about a women's issue that you get to say it? Or do you have opportunities to get men together and tell this story? Great question. And so the answer is that in all the speaking, that we get to do and addressing different organizations and groups out there, again, our messaging and our books and everything that we write about is targeted at men. And we don't get as many opportunities to get all male audiences, usually more mixed gender audiences. And then, of course, there's been a lot of female audiences as well. I could tell you that I can remember early on though, I had the opportunity to address every CO, every commanding officer of every aviation squadron in the United States. So, and which, oh, by the way, the first group of them, there was 150 and there were five women out of the 150 there. So it was all men out there. And so they got all the, they get the exact same messaging. We can have sometimes a little different conversation with the guys in particular. And we tend to, again, we'll target our particular audience out there with this, but yeah, our messaging is designed and the way we write, if you ever get a chance to read any of our books, you'll see the messaging there is directed specifically at men. There's a question about the danger of some sort of gender equality being forced on an organization and might potentially result in not the best quality candidate getting the job. Is that an issue that you've seen and is that something we should be careful about? I think that's basically talking about quotas and whether it's at a national level or an organizational level. Quotas are often adopted as basically an affirmative action to get enough women into an organization where they have, where there's inclusivity, where they have a voice and they feel free to speak up without fear of retribution. And that is usually 30%. So companies, countries have often adopted quotas to get enough women in and then they will pull back on the quota, but it's often the only way you can get women in more than a token level where they are free to go into a meeting and voice their opinion and basically sometimes play hardball without feeling that they will pay a price for it. So I think the idea of looking at it is forced gender equity, forced gender equality is basically arguing for getting over the cultural biases which may preclude women, getting women into positions naturally. Yeah, it's interesting. People have a lot of negative perceptions both men and women about quotas in particular. For again, those same reasons, the perception that we're going to end up with nobody wants to be that person who is the quota. And certainly there's the perception that we were lowering our standards out there. The reality is that the research shows that quotas do work, by the way. And they do help us to overcome some of the cultural and social biases and challenges that we have. And once you get over those, then you can remove the quotas and things tend to work just fine on their own. The reality is also is that targets or goals which are a softer way, if you think about it kind of a softened way to think about what quotas are, actually work a little bit better. And again, this is not just in the United States, they've actually been tested more often in other countries outside the US. California today is probably one of the few places that has approved a quota system in particular for the state. It was just in the news again the other day, we were talking about this, about how the effects of it around directors and board membership in particular. But it forces companies or organizations to begin to think about, all right, well, how can I, if I'm trying to increase my board membership, my diversity in there, what are the things that I can do to help do that? And you can get into start learning about the best practices of how this works. And that's I think where we begin to change the process and the system itself. Well, I think that's been a wonderful discussion. And I thank both of our speakers for being here this afternoon and sharing these thoughts with us and hopefully it generates more impact on the organization going forward. So my thanks to them. I will mention to the audience at large that next week on the 5th of May, we'll be hearing from Dr. Jim Holmes, we'll be talking about US naval power in the Pacific. So thank you very much.


Hi, everyone. Thank you. Oh my goodness. What an honor to be here and hello to those watching online So as you mentioned, I'm Sally Thun and you covered a couple of points in my presentation. So But I'm here to share my incredible journey with accessibility and wordpress over the past two years to help Hopefully inspire the same passion and purpose that you wordpress and accessibility people have Inspired in me little did I know when I started two years ago that I would be here speaking So please just bear with me. So I want to show you that it's never too late Or too early no matter how long you've been on this earth to start a new career or learn something new if I can do it So can you? I'm also going to be providing resources that I'll post later this week on my LinkedIn Or Twitter page of a lot of the resources you're going to see so don't feel like you have to take a lot of notes. So Before I begin I want to acknowledge that being here would not be possible Without the support and belief of Joe Simpson, Jr. And Summer Davenport who gave me so much guidance over the past two years and as of last night triple-a So as he mentioned I live in central, California where the four seasons but I grew up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and as you know Canadians were born with skates on our feet even though I'm a US citizen now and My dream as a little girl was to be the first female player in the NHL But men only own beat me to that in 1992 So and I come from an entrepreneurial family and even though I spent most of my career in broadcast entertainment with Warner Brothers and Disney My grandfather actually opened up the first movie cinema in Montreal in 1905, which is pretty cool So I have my own digital marketing agency and with COVID had a lot of extra time on my hands And I took a few digital marketing classes to enhance my skills and my teacher always talked about LDT Learn do and teach and at this point. I had not heard of a word camp. I had not heard of a wapu Or github and I heard of a meet-up and I heard of accessibility Whoops, sorry, but I wasn't sure exactly what they were all about And I don't want to assume that everyone here knows what digital accessibility is But it's really about removing digital barriers the global pandemic brought the importance of accessibility to the forefront when we had to pivot over line pretty much overnight and It really left a lot of people out that couldn't Access a lot of the websites and there's about one in five people worldwide with a disability of all various kinds and So we want to ensure that their assistive technology can help us use the websites So my learning journey began when I attended my first meet-up I've worked with WordPress developers, but I wanted to create my own website And I attended my first one in Bakersfield, California with mr. Mike Pilly and when we were allowed to ask questions I was like, can you please tell me about accessibility and he's like, well, funny you ask we have a special guest here tonight Mr. Joe Simpson jr. And he told me about the upcoming WordPress day camp for three of the northern Los Angeles meet-ups team together and That Saturday August 8th 2020 my accessibility journey began and I was beyond excited Halfway through I was hooked and even though I didn't understand everything that was said that day It made a lot more sense the more classes that I took so I dove deeper actually headfirst and learned all I could about accessibility, which if you don't know Is the abbreviation is a 11 y because there's 11 letters before a between the letters a and y So my learning continued with the courses with the edx Introduction to accessibility course that some may recommend it And I love this course because it really really gives you an overview and good foundation of how people living with disabilities use their assistive technology and why we really need to make websites accessible and I'm not going to have time because this is a lightning talk to take you through all of these but you can download all the resources and I do want to say that if you didn't know LinkedIn your local library offers a lot of LinkedIn classes for free so you can check with them and save some money there and Conferences are another great way to learn and Web accessibility in mind who does the million-dollar study of the accessibility of website homepages Had their first conference yesterday And they'll be posting those later in a couple of months and you can watch those if you're a designer There's ID 24 coming up if you're interested in the legal side of accessibility there is the digital accessibility legal summit and of course we've got WordPress accessibility day coming up in November and Word camps and kicking off 2023 is a season which is pretty large acts calm nobilities coming up in May and the University of Minnesota Duluth puts an incredible list of every website and conference And webinar story on accessibility on the lot on their website, so you can always check that there so and there are also podcasts and Facebook groups There's over a hundred and twenty five accessibility meet-ups and the newest addition is the accessible social website Which will teach you how to make all of your social media accessible So and then LinkedIn and Twitter have a lot of the conversations as well So now that I've been learning it was time to do and I asked Joe Simpson, Jr. Who I eventually called my guiding light How I could get involved and he introduced me to the organizers of word camp 2020 for LAX and That was I joined in late as a volunteer wrangler But everyone was just so welcoming and I just want to say to all of you in the WordPress community Thank you.  You don't judge. You share your knowledge I come from broadcast sales where it's very competitive and no one tells you anything and You just want to make us all better. So I really appreciate you sharing all of that and And you know volunteering gives you a great opportunity to meet new people, too So after that, I asked my guiding light Joe and I said Joe I really want to put my new accessibility skills to the test I've been taking a couple courses and what can I do so he introduced me to the organizers of WordPress accessibility day and they just put up all the The Sessions it was 24 hours of everything accessibility at WordPress accessibility day And I was introduced to Jill doleson who is a huge accessibility advocate and he's actually speaking tomorrow And I asked what I can do and they needed blogs written. I'd love to write content So I wrote all the sponsor blogs For the sponsors no pressure, but it actually worked out really well really really well and During this time I was still attending a lot of meet-ups and Sumner Davenport has one in the Valley with Ron Amick and Jennifer H and it's also now eligible for the International Association of Accessibility professional credits for a certification and it returns in the fall again, there's always the 125 to attend so I really so she told us about the internet rally which Mike mentioned and I really wanted to be on her team but it was full and I wanted to be I learned by doing so I want to be on a team to create a website for a nonprofit from start to finish and As her team was full I signed up as an individual and I was paired with these two lovely ladies from Texas for new and Carmina And we called ourselves a digital diversity divas well We're not really divas, but we just want to have fun And we had a great mentor from Australia who was just encouraging support of and really helped us cross the finish line Our nonprofit was uniformed meditation that does meditation for frontline workers and first responders And we really loved that idea which made it more fun to work on So there is a misconception that accessible websites are can be ugly or they're not pretty and That's just not true. So here's the website that we built now. I beg to differ I may be a little biased, but you can see that it evokes that calm that we were trying to Get across so on January 3rd 2021 nobility announced the winners and We won third place and we were all new to accessibility. We were shocked We were just there to have fun and learn our skills And it just really told me that I was on the right path and I was meant to continue doing this so volunteering is another great way to do and Enhance your skills or give back and I've met so many incredible people volunteering that I otherwise never would have met And nobility is always looking for volunteers. You can go to the nobility.org website And of course, there's 21 teams that make WordPress waiting for you guys to volunteer your skill sets And then I came across taproot which works with nonprofits and helps them do their websites Non-profits that don't have any money. So that's something you can look into and then all there's also your local nonprofits so Let me say so with everyone at home Volunteering really helped Kimi saying and you can see all on the screen all the amazing benefits of it And I just want to say to the accessibility advocates that have been doing this for a really long time Thank you Just like the WordPress community you guys are so selfless you share your knowledge You have poured in so much to all of us who are trying to learn so we can continue and build up the accessibility community So after air rally Joe invited me to be under an organizing team for Santa Clarita 2021 and it was a very different experience coming in at the end than at the beginning So now that I've learned and done it's time to teach and I had the opportunity to speak to the California CESA of California State University Bakersfield about accessibility and They wanted some help with their first Google ads campaign So I had them create an accessible landing page. I mean a landing page. It was not accessible So I made them create one with the theme 2021 and they did pretty well above average results but Universities aren't really teaching accessibility So if you can reach out to your local colleges or universities that would really help accelerate the process so Also, they're looking for someone to teach WordPress basic. So if you're interested, please see me So I'm going to so I just want to talk briefly because there was a woman this morning that talked about technology and websites and WordPress accessible websites It's all about a great user experience You have to have a strong foundation and not build it on quicksand to meaning build the code in from the beginning There's no shortcuts. No easy fixes. No band-aids and Disability colon in sums it up in 10 words. Don't buy or sell tech that disabled people can't use and There's a 3070 rule that it's 30% more time and money to start from the beginning Building your blueberries into your muffin is an analogy We use rather than trying to go back and kind of stuff it in and just put it on the top and WordPress has a 92 accessible themes. So to help you get started So then air rally 2021 came around and they want asked me to mentor But I still didn't feel comfortable so I asked if I could co-mentor and they allowed me to mentor with Sumner and She is just has a ton of experience and knowledge and really carried us through and When the announcements came we had we had team access hippos for best their brain injury survivor non-product non-profit sorry and she knows so much that she was affectionately called Ali Einstein and We won second place and as much fun as it was I realized how much I still have to learn Accessibility is a journey and as Merrill Evans says she's a huge accessibility advocate It's progress not perfection.  They're all from California and you know what our team name is I Wish they all could be Cali girls So we're gonna have a lot of fun So here are some my I just want to start warning down with my late aunt Lizzie She always said we're not here to see through each other But to see each other through and I love it because it really summarizes with the WordPress and accessibility community is all about Here are some advocates to follow in no particular order and you'll find your own as you continue again all these resources I'll be sharing the links and You know my next steps is to continue learning HTML the accessible code so excited when I wrote my first Code if you guys remember all that and then finish my accessible website actually with building blocks and Finish my DQ courses to become certified Continue learning WordPress and collect those pins. I want those. I just got my first one today So I'm I hope you've and here's just some unexpected highlights over the past two years and being named a Yoast care fund recipient was just Really incredible and of course being here at WordCamp US So it's never too late and I just want to say that we all have life's challenges But just go out there and learn and don't let anything stop you I'm a three-time cancer survivor and I was only I hit my Five-year mark in March and I was diagnosed early Thank you. It's only 15 percent of people of women are so that tells me that I'm still meant to be here and make a Difference and that's why I'm up here to do what I can with all of you to make the website and the world accessible one website at a time so Thank you, and here's my contact information and I'll be around if anyone has any questions