The Tipping Point of Strategic IT; Women in STEM: from a conversation with Lori Rodriguez

Before becoming Chief Data Officer of Women in Tech, Lori Rodriguez was VP of Strategy, Innovation, and Operations: Executive Programs for Gartner. Shortly before this transition, Rob Collie spoke with her on the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Here are some excerpts from that conversation. She spoke about strategic IT, and her book, We Want You to Stay: the Hidden Lives of Twenty Women in STEM. Transcript not reviewed by participants, and for the full context listen to the podcast.

Lori Rodriguez: …I've interviewed over 1,000 CIOs. I've actually been Jane Goodall, took my notepad, and followed them around all day long, writing down who they're talking to, what devices they're using, things like that. I've done some of that work, day in a life work. Then I understand: what are they trying to do, how are they getting that done today, and where does Gartner fit into that model— not just Gartner but anything that has to do with information sources what are they using today, and what are the opportunities for Gartner to improve their products and services, or if we have a gap in those, what else can we do to fulfill those needs so that our customers are happy, successful, and keep coming back and buying our products year after year.

Rob Collie: … How many people on the planet have had a similar experience, to interview over 1,000 CIOs? I bet it's single digits, single digit human population that has had that kind of experience. That's fascinating.

One of the things that I've really appreciated in the last 11 years since leaving Microsoft, the nature of our business is so up tempo, so fast, our whole ethos is to burn through projects as fast as we can on behalf of our clients— no padding, no overhead, nothing— right. And one of the side-effects of that is that we do get such a broad sampling of the world. If you're doing projects quickly, in order to stay in business, we have to do a lot of projects. … We're just like drinking from the river of everything.

Microsoft, they would send me on a field trip, every six months to visit a customer, and I'd come back all full of customer energy: I know what we should do now. That one customer— that one day spent with one customer—

Lori Rodriguez: data point of one!

Rob Collie: yeah, you end up with some very lopsided opinions about the world. But when I hear someone who has that breadth of sample, especially given our experience, I take note (Lori: Cool!) You really know what's going on, in a way that most people don't get an opportunity to. That must be really fascinating.

Lori Rodriguez: Yeah, it's why I love Gartner, why I love what I do, and it's a very unique perspective because I intentionally mentioned where I sit within Gartner because my audience are CIOs, they run IT departments, but I build products, and I need my IT department to help me build that product. It's very interesting.

It's getting better, thank God, but for so long, CIOs tended to be far too functional and not businesslike. I would always hear from them as the market research person: we need to get a seat at the table; the big bad business is beating us up. Blah blah blah blah. I'm the business, and I'm listening to them talking in tech terms, going like, no kidding. Listen to you… So, on the one hand, internally, I'm going yeah you really need to understand the business value of IT and speak in business terms because you're not speaking to me in those terms. And if you use those terms with your business, I can see where you're having those issues.

On my side of it, I'm the business working with IT, so I understand those problems from the business side as well. It's a very unique perspective. I thought coming into things that I'm building these products for people and I'm using those products as well in IT, and I could see this huge disconnect. So I would go back to our research organization and I'd say, look, we can keep telling CIOs to talk in business terms, and to move from being a functional CIO to more of a business strategist— you still have to maintain and manage your IT department, but if you want that seat at the table, you need to take it. And to take it, and to lead there, you need to speak as the business, in the business, to lead the business. We would always say this in our research, but we need to do more because we're not moving the needle. I keep hearing this year after year after year.

There's been a significant shift in the last three years in the conversations that I have with CIOs and senior IT leaders, which has been very positive in that business direction. And they had to, they had to because of digital business. You have to have your IT organization to be at a certain level of maturity before you can take on digitalization, for example. So that was happening, and then COVID, and now we've seen all sorts of stuff, all these things that couldn't get done before: telemedicine, remote work, all that just got thrown on the table very quickly. Some people were prepared, others weren't. We've accelerated where we are in the maturity of IT organizations considerably. I don't know the numbers, but I would imagine that a lot of CIOs maybe lost their job or will be losing their job because they weren't up to speed. They weren't prepared.

Rob Collie: On a previous show, I mentioned that the famous physicist Max Planck said that the whole notion that science moves forward through a meritocracy of ideas and the best ideas float to the top, he basically said that it was all bullshit—

Lori Rodriguez: Beta vs VHS!

Rob Collie: Right, right. He said, no, here's what happens. The better ideas come around and they're rejected, they're locked out. But then the old guard dies off. Then there is a little meritocracy of ideas, but it doesn't really have a chance to get a foothold… Entrenched professionals don't change, I think is what he was saying. Keeping in mind you're speaking for yourself, you're not speaking on behalf of Gartner, I'm just dying to ask you: the progress we've seen in the past few years, do you think that it's more along the lines of Planck, reflects a change over different people in those roles, or do you think it's people actually finally getting it?

Lori Rodriguez: I think it's a combination of both. … it was in 2019 early spring or fall. I did a set of interviews, and I forget what the question was I was asking, but I kept hearing over and over again: CEO change, CEO change. So, Chief Executive Officer had changed in the organization, and I was like, wow, random sample, so I wanted to go check that, so I did some research. It was true … It was something like in the course of 2 years… give or take 10%, …maybe 40% of the CEOs were changing over in the course of two years. Huge. And the board was bringing in CEOs who had more technology savviness about them. Whether it was a tech background, or they just were more savvy, right? Changing of the guard like you said. The old guard was changing.

The board understood that to survive they needed to become — I hate to say the phrase 'a technology company'— but they had to leverage technology in a way that hadn't thought of before. To that point, there was this recognition: we have to change. We changed the CEO, and they're coming in to do, they're mandated to change and use technology. It puts a lot of pressure on CIOs. The downstream effect is gee, CIO, if you're still over here and haven't matured your IT organization, you're probably in some big trouble in the next couple of years. And then COVID hit, so that just accelerated everything. I haven't looked at it so I don't know whether companies kept the CIO that they had because they had to, because things were changing so quickly. Or if they were like dump them and let's go with somebody else quickly. I don't know what that fallout was. You'll see that change from those CEO shifts hitting the IT organization and then really making that cultural shift. To answer your question where does that fall in terms of what side of the coin was that.

Rob Collie: Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's both. Good ideas are one thing. Things that you can nod your head to and say yes, what you're telling me sounds correct, that's one thing. It's different when it has that visceral power of reality behind it. You're watching your friends and peers lose their jobs, lose their positions because they weren't flexible enough. That will wake you up in the morning. So, yeah, the world doesn't really move until it has to. I guess in the world of physics there weren't CEOs being changed over that told the physicists what to think. So Planck's rule maybe it only halfway holds for IT.

Lori Rodriguez: But the thing is, change is slow or fast depending on where your horizon is.

Lori Rodriguez: If your arc was pretty far out there, you saw this coming. … I've been talking about this for years. Digitalization is going to change everything: industry by industry. You could see that coming. You had decades. And I'll talk about my journey. I come from marketing where everything was Bainbridge board and markers. We did everything by hand, and then they put a Mac 2CX on my desk in 1989 and everything changed. In 12-18 months, it was really, really fast. These industries that were 100+ years old were gone— GONE! There's a really complicated apprenticeship role called a stripper, of all things, and you had to practice for decades to do that, but once you had attained that level of expertise, it was a high paying job, and you were kind of set. That was GONE. Strippers weren't needed anymore once you had access to Adobe— it was called Aldus at the time— and other software that was coming out at that time.

Everything, and I was like this is amazing, fell in love with technology. I could see then this was just marketing… but you could see with this technology what it could do if you looked hard enough. You could see what it could do what it would do for government…, healthcare, education, buying a car, boating. You could look at any industry and see how digitalization was going to change that industry, and that's where I fell in love with technology, and where I eventually found that Gartner was doing that, and I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be part of accelerating that digital change so that we could take advantage of what I saw when I was working in a creative studio in marketing.

Rob Collie: I love that journey. … To me, the future of most valuable things is at that junction between IT and business, between the subject matter expertise and the technology expertise. The closer you can get the two together, the more effective you're going to be… The people who can speak both, the ambassadors, I think of that in some sense as that's my tribe. That's who I belong to. I just love looking around and saying, ah, my tribe, our day has come. We're really important these days.

I was fascinated by your marketing background and the beginning, and the path that you've taken. In Mad Men, there's an episode when they bring the giant computer into the office in the early 70s or late 60s and they're like, this is going to change everything. And you know watching it, it doesn't— for a long time.

Lori Rodriguez: a long time, a long time. 1989 to maybe 5 years ago. And we're still not there yet in a lot of industries. But the tipping point is happening. There's no going back. How often in a lifetime do you get to go check the box on your mission? …That day that that box appeared on my desk became the day that my mission became clear to me. And here we are. That's so cool: to have a front-row seat, and even be able to make some small measure of progress that I could do, that's been fantastic.

…

We Want You to Stay

Rob Collie: Let's get to the book. First of all, what's the title of the book? 

Lori Rodriguez: It's called We Want You to Stay: the Hidden Lives of 20 Women in STEM. STEM, being most— of your audience knows— science, technology, engineering and math.

Rob Collie: … Is the book out yet?

Lori Rodriguez: Not yet, I'm hoping to get it out late spring 2021 [Fall 2021!]. We're getting close, down to the wire.

Rob Collie: … if you're listening to this and you're like, I want to read this book someday, you can sign up, right? There's an email list.

Lori Rodriguez: Go to StayInSTEM.com. …

I took this on like a product. I'm building it with the audience, so that's why there's 20 women in STEM. The bulk of the book is their autobiographies, and they're helping me decide where we focus, and what we talk about, and what's important, what's not. I'm interviewing dozens and dozens of young fathers, so men, women, women across all STEM, across the world, in addition to the 20 women to understand what are they up against, what are they running into, and co-creating the book with this incredible audience of people. And now that the first chapter is in beta form, I want to know. Is it boring, is it, what did you find exciting about it? More of this, less of this, would you read another chapter? I'm building it like I would do a product, or any problem solving, using the frameworks that I've used to build products. I'm supplying that to the book. 

Rob Collie: bringing that process discipline that we tallked about earlier.

Lori Rodriguez: Yes, exactly.

Rob Collie: Unlike me, sits down and says alright, this isn't real until I start writing.

Lori Rodriguez: Well, I did a lot of that too.

Rob Collie: Stay in STEM. It's primarily 20 stories of women in STEM, their career stories—

Lori Rodriguez: not just career, it is their stories— everything— it's the conversations they had with their husbands, it's the death of a child, a parent, the suicide of a partner, all of that. Because that's what's we bring, we bring all of that to the table. And we're human beings. … Whether you're men or women, you're human beings and part of this is we need to understand that.

Lori Rodriguez: There's three acts. The first act is why does this even matter? What is the current state? It's pretty dismal, I'll throw some numbers out, but why does it even matter? We started to touch on that a little bit, and I'll give you a couple examples. I'll give you one right now. Scooting around, looking for stats— I love data actually. I suck at match, but actually I was really good at math as a young kid and I was like, I'm done. I didn't see the need for it. Now, I wish I had spent a lot more time, because I love math actually.

Lori Rodriguez: …I love stats, and numbers and studies and digging into that. I have 800 rows of studies in this spreadsheet somewhere that I use. There's the current state. Why does it matter? There's three reasons why. The first one is pretty shocking. There's a whole book out there that I ran into that I just love. I had already seen a couple of these numbers, but there's a whole book somebody did called Invisible Women. If you are in data you have to read it. If you're a woman and you're reading that grab a bottle of wine, or tea, or whatever, and you're going to get so mad, but you need to just chill. Just calm down. So there's a lot of stats in that book like this one. Consumer Reports did a study, or was part of a study, or that's where I read it. In a car crash, they take all the other variables away: how many drivers, the level. In a car crash, women are 17% more likely to die in that car crash, and 73% more likely to have serious injury in that car crash. Why? Crash test dummies are set for the average male body, that includes size and anatomy. Who made that decision? Who was in the room? Who wasn't in the room. It's expensive. Doing a car crash test is expensive. So, you're going to do one or however many the government tells you you have to do. To do one for men and one for women, you've doubled your cost. So who chose? Guess what they chose. There are more women drivers in this world than there are men. Driving is about equal, and whether you're a driving or a passenger, it doesn't matter, the injuries are higher. There are stats all over for that. It gets worse for women of color.

Lori Rodriguez: I'll give you a stat. Related but separate. And when you think about artificial intelligence, and you're building AI systems, think about autonomous vehicles and the choices an autonomous vehicle has to make. This camera does a real crap job of recognizing dark skin, particularly if you have a dark skin and a light skin in the same photo. Guess who it optimizes for. That's terrible. But that's hey I got crappy pictures. Now you take that same technology and system on an autonomous vehicle, you're going to end up with a lot of dead black and brown people before somebody recognizes it and does a report on it and uproar and then we change that. Why don't we make those decisions up front? And the best way to do that is to have diversity of visible minorities as well as diversity of thought in those rooms where decisions are being made, at every level. Certainly at the top, but all the way down to the coders as well. Somebody has to go: wait a minute, are you recognizing the color of skin, it's disabilities too. I don't know if people are into game theory, nerdy thing that I like. There's one about a train going down the tracks, the trolley problem. It's going to hit someone, so you divert it. Let's say there's a bunch of people walking across… If the car keeps going it's going to run somebody over, well it's going to divert probably to a non-human being. It's going to crash someplace else so you avoid the human being. Does it recognize somebody in a wheelchair as a human being?

Rob Collie: have you trained it?

Lori Rodriguez: Yeah. It is going to get increasingly more important that we have people from diverse perspectives in the room where decisions are being made. That's the first thing, really important.

Lori Rodriguez: The second one is role models. Women make up 50% of the overall labor force. Used to be less, but we are at parity in the labor force. But we're only 26% in STEM. We gotta do better on those numbers, in some things like computer science it's actually going backwards. We used to make up in the 60s women were— you know Hidden Figures— we were doing a lot. There was data entry kind of stuff. In … 1984 maybe … we were in the 37% range. We're at the 15% range now, so we're actually going backwards in computer sciences, pretty bad. When you don't have role models, you don't think you have a career path in that organization, so that's a problem. There's a lot of problems too around— I won't get into toxic environments because there's all that kind of stuff too— but you need role models. You need to see, oh there's a path for me here. And you need to have that. You need women in the decision making levels, so up in the operating committee, on the boards. They need to be visible, and you need more of them so people enter those fields in the first place, so it's cyclical. It gets even worse: 26% of women in stem, 53% of the 26% leave. So after 10 years, you're down to 13% of the people. We leave. It sucks to be a woman in STEM. It's just really really freaking hard.

Rob Collie: so that 26% number, if you striate it by cohort and you go number of years into career, that's the total of all human beings working in STEM. If you filter the audience to say with 10+ years in field, then the numbers skew even further?

Lori Rodriguez: mm huh.

Rob Collie: Wow, that I didn't absorb initially. That's amazing.

Lori Rodriguez: Yep. More than half of women 10+ years in leave.

Rob Collie: You said something earlier that just spoke to me. I like to say that the line between personal and professional is an illusion. It's a fiction invented to serve, I don't know, managers? It wasn't invented to serve humanity, that's for sure. So, when I said career stories, you said no it's their life stories. I just got corrected on my own principle. Damnit, that's not supposed to happen!

Rob Collie: So when you said why is important, for me the second reason, the one about if this is something that speaks to you, and STEM is something that is interesting and seems like your calling, then what a shame to be one way or another discouraged from it. Coming back to that line between personal and professional, we're talking about human happiness here, rewarding work, valuable work. Everyone should have the equal opportunity to that.

…

Lori Rodriguez: There's been a fair amount of people looking into women in STEM, girls in STEM, girls who code, which is awesome, I love it! But there wasn't anybody who was looking at why, really focused on this huge problem of women leaving. If you think of a bucket with holes in it, it doesn't matter how much water you're putting in, those holes are big. And when girls don't see women in STEM fields, whether that's on television, in books, magazines, newspapers, or in the companies that they're applying for, or the programs at colleges that are trying to introduce them, or the professors, they're like oh, this is a guy thing. It's not for me. It's going to be hard.

Lori Rodriguez: It's the CIO of NASA that you had pointed out. There's not girls in my class. It wasn't just in the class. This is another aha. When I go talk to my friends, they're not in STEM classes, they're not in science and engineering, or math classes. I don't have as much to talk to them about. And they're talking about whatever they're taking in humanities or something, and I become less relevant even in my own circles. So, when the CIO of NASA tested high for engineering, she's like no way— I know that that means. I'm going to be alone again. She became an economics major instead. Turns out that passion for technology and math and science is hard to get rid of. And her career kept circling around that and eventually she became CIO of NASA. You can read about in the book and you can download that chapter when you signup at stayinstem.com. 

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These are a few excerpts from the conversation between Lori Rodriguez, Rob Collie, and Thomas LaRock. Listen to the full podcast for context. Transcript has not been reviewed by participants, and emphasis has been added. P3 Adaptive is a Gold Microsoft Partner. Contact us to turn your data into action in weeks not months.

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