BSidesWLG 2017 - Toni James - Take a Lesson from Snowboarding and Recruit Kickass Women

awesome so my name is Tony James and I just submitted a talk to take a lesson from snowboarding so you recruit kick-ass women because I come from the snowboard industry and just recently became a software engineer and I really wanted to I saw a lot of similarities between what was happening in the tech industry and more recently in security and what had previously happened in the snowboard industry where I come from so this is on how to recruit and keep kick-ass women because what's the point of recruiting them if you don't have policies in place to keep them and I will do my best to not talk too fast this is me both me both sides this is a

professional me you know the selfie in the bathroom and this is also me and I have anxiety and one of the 33% that Amanda talked about yesterday that has been diagnosed and anxiety and some days that's all I want to do is yes Thank You Ally Sheedy for doing exactly what I want to do right now um and this is also me so this is uh this is me on the top of mount hutt this is fourth of July a bunch of the American snowboarders went out similar than skiers to celebrate for the July and you know be awesome and ride down the hill with a flag but so I am American not Canadian that was close only a few hours away

from the border and I qualify as an international speaker so that's pretty cool and this was my life for a very long time pretty awesome and this is me at the top of remarkables I've held several positions in snowboarding I've been an instructor for most of my life but also was a coach I was a company director a camp director I definitely enjoyed it ended up traveling between Maine and Colorado finally to New Zealand back in 2003 in fact I met my husband in the lift line down at snow park and a lot of people think this is what I do all day when you're snow working the snowboard industry it just ride perfect chord all the time not

quite and this is pretty much what I would do all day this is me and this is my friend Emma who's we're really good friends now but she was really scared to do snowboarding because she took a lesson from her boyfriend and it was horrible so anybody who's ever well taking a lesson from their boyfriend understands that it's not the best thing to do for a relationship I don't recommend it um but there's one thing that we do in snowboarding that I think relates to a lot of life let in several things in life and we do something called teaching for transfer so if someone comes to me and they took a two-hour snowboard lesson I need to teach them to snowboard

in two hours it's pretty difficult right they are handing me their fear they're handing me their physical prowess they're they're handing me all of these things that I need to manage so that they have an enjoyable time and come back and do it again so one thing that we work on is teaching for transfer which means that say Emma came to me and she was an excellent horseback rider and that's what she really understood and I understood horseback riding so I was able to get her to get into her riding stance I was able to basically take the five things that you have to work on when you're learning to snowboard and reduce it down to two things because she

had the muscle memory to already understand how to do things with her body and I just needed to add to that and so it's a really good tool and a technique it's really hard technique you know I've had people come to me that have never done sports in their lives so I was like well what do you do and they're like well I play chess I'm like all right let's think about this what can we you know what can I use from chess that I can transfer into snowboarding and I definitely through through going back and forth between Colorado and New Zealand this was my office right and this is sorry for the low res photo this is my office and

notice the awesome tech that we had in snowboarding and it was when I came out of high school it was my choice to either go do a computer science degree because that's what I wanted to do or go snowboarding and I went snowboarding to me back in the day when in computer science degree the only thing I saw in computer science the time for jobs and for lifestyle were you know a bunch of old white people in the basements of like a company like GE wearing short button-up shirts you know and it just wasn't appealing snowboarding was way more appealing so I went and did that and really really really enjoyed traveling all over the world competing

and coaching and and doing all these things with snowboarding but it gets to a point where you either progressed into the management track or you kind of do the seasonal so it's every day every year's winter so you're going from winter winter which we did and my husband I enjoyed that we went back and forth for a while but then you missed your house and you missed your dogs and you missed your life for basically half the year depending on where you're at and so it became really hard and then I decided to have a family and it became even harder traveling with the little one is great right but we did travel we worked on it we tried it but when she

turned 2 and she basically cost me another plane ticket I decided not to do that anymore but in New Zealand where we decide to settle down and winter is like five months long maybe so my career my work was probably four months long and that's not sustainable right I had a mortgage I had family and my husband actually does have a sustainable a course or a sustainable career in the industry and the fact he still works at mount hutt and he's been there for 20 years which is fantastic but I didn't want all our eggs in one basket I don't want to rely on Mother Nature to take care of us and just take care of our mortgage so I

thought all right what can I do and basically I went back to the very beginning and said hey look remember when I made that choice between snowboarding or programming I'm gonna go back to programming and I thought the easiest easiest I thought the best way to do this was to do a full-time university degree and focus on software engineering yes that was not easy especially not easy as a mom not easy traveling and commuting to the University it was hard it was very very hard and in fact in the first year is when I was actually diagnosed with anxiety and it's something that I've had and had symptoms of almost all my life but it was it was

the second semester it was midterms my dog had just died I was juggling a three-year-old trying to go to University trying not to let anybody down and pretty much lost it during a midterm and went to the free clinic and had a talk with a professional and he's like yep you've got anxiety doesn't everybody it's fine but I got help and then made it through University graduated last year focused on software engineering and interned in software engineering and got a job in software engineering so whoohoo yay success and now this is what my desk looks like um notice the Reese's Peanut Butter so still still American but less about me and more about kick-ass women I

first want to talk about what a kick-ass woman is right because not many women will be like yeah I'm kick-ass hire me I will because I know I'm kick-ass but I know I am because I've had people my entire life tell me I am have had constant positive reinforcement from people telling me how kick-ass I am and how amazing I am and it's really hard to say that up in front of a roomful of people because it's intimidating but I guarantee every single person in this room knows a kick-ass woman I also guarantee there's not many nice people in this room that will put their hands up and say I am a kick-ass woman because

they haven't had enough positive reinforcement in their life so with Ben's talk yesterday about giving praise please tell people around you yes you know you are kick-ass and you are kick-ass because of this you are an amazing person because of this and the more that they hear that the more they'll internalize it and eventually they'll be able to stand up here and say yes I am a kick-ass woman so I'm gonna tell you a little story because you heard you know to to find out about snowboarding right there's this company called Burton and I ended up working with Burton for quite a quite a while working on some programs working on some women's programs and Jake and Donna are

the owners Jake is actually one of the event inventors of snowboarding a little bit of controversy there but he is one of them and started back in the late 70s and when in this is the company now so now it's around a thousand people it's House employees they have offices all over the world but there's still a privately owned company still owned by Jake and Donna which which is important because it means that they were able to do things that maybe other companies can't do because they have to answer to financial reports or things like that but when snowboarding started it was equally pioneered by both men and women it was a sport that had no gender it

wasn't a male-dominated it wasn't female dominated it was completely equal a lot of people don't know this because that wasn't you know big of the day that wasn't snowboarding was like this thing that surfers and skaters and punks and misfits kind of went and did and they were very welcoming community but then in 1998 and not gonna olympics happens and what that means to snowboarding is boom town all of a sudden snowboarding was global snowboarding was the coolest thing in fact there was a gold medalist in this first snowboard event who tested positive for marijuana so again made it like the the the read kind of thing to do is to go snowboarding and Burton as a company

just boom grew it grew massively and they started pulling from all these other industries because they needed people fast they needed people in their industry so they're pulling from ski and they're pulling from skate and they're pulling them surf and all of those cons all of those companies all those industries had we're quite male-dominated so all of a sudden boom Burton becomes pretty male-dominated in fact in 2003 Jake walked into a Board of Directors meeting and there were 25 people in the room there were three women and Jake said oh this is what we call the oh moment he realized that absolutely we've got a problem there is no way we can be innovative there's no way we can put it out new

products there's no way we can be a successful business if we've only got three people in there three women in the room so he went to Donna this is Donna she she's his wife but also his business partner she was away from the company for a little while raising raising the children and said look we've got a problem we need to fix this and you know I think you can do the best job of this so then she had a vision and she had a purpose and so she came back and she started the Women's Leadership Initiative like this is actually what it's called it's still called this WLI Women's Leadership Initiative and this initiative basically she went around the

company and pulled women from every department from every seniority level and created her own round table of all of these women and said what are the short-term opportunities we can do to increase women leadership in this company and what are the long-term ones we can work towards so she took action and she sat down and they created this list of goals and there this is still ongoing they the leaders initiative still going they're still creating new initiatives all the time and but I'm gonna talk about three kind of three categories because these are the ones that have the most impact because you want to see results right as a company you want to actually see growth so they

focused on family mentorship and recruitment as they family is when she talked to these women no one saw themselves in the company no females found themselves in the company beyond five years definitely no doubt 10 years in the company because as soon as they had a family they left the company as soon as they stopped to have kids there was no pathway to progression to get them back into the company into the industry so they said how can we fix this and they talked about it and in the u.s. they don't have paid maternity or paternity leave so it's up to the companies to have progressive maternity leave policies so that's what they did they're like alright this is the first

problem that we can solve we can actually give you some paid maternity leave and we can keep in touch with you so that you know what's going on so that you can actually step back into your position but then also when you step back into your position going from zero days a week to going to five full days of work a week it's really difficult for a mother from experience all of a sudden you have to think about before school care if your child is even in school yet do you have to think about after-school care and before that you need to think about child care so they offered flexible working days we could do four

day weeks or you could do limited hour days and then they also it sounds really good like they have paid child care it's not that simple but basically if you had a child under 18 months and you traveled within your job like many people dead for a global snowboard company then they would send a care taker with you to take care of your child so that you could still do your job into your business or they would provide childcare for any children under 18 months for children over 18 months they actually developed some partnerships forcement with some childcare organizations around the company and to offer subsidized childcare so taking care of family they also went with mentorship and they

decided to start to mentorship programs one was a grassroots one and one was the senior management one so the grassroots one was for everyone every single person in the company and it just matched you up with someone slightly more senior it was slightly slightly more experienced and it could be for a few months it could be four years it's whatever organically grew out of the mentorship and the other one was the senior management fixed term so for six months anyone and a director level because they go from director up to executive received a six month internship from an executive I'm sorry a six month mentorship I think that's what I said and what they saw was that from this

program in two years sixty-two percent of the women that participated in this program either were promoted or moved into a line of business that better suited their goals because they're able to talk about what they wanted to get out of the company it was so successful that everyone in the company all the men said hey wait a minute we want that too because that sounds awesome I want to progress I want those things so this is another example for things that they did for specifically to benefit women they ended up opening up to the entire company and also with mentorship they made it could they ended up making it co-ed so you for me in

mentorship I have had many male mentors in my life that they don't always have to be female and it is nice to have that perspective but it was whatever works for you and then recruitment they realize they were doing recruitment all wrong they had no photos they had a photo than a photo advertising snowboarding and it was a guy jumping off a 30-foot cliff and they realized that women look at that photo men look at that photo be like yeah I can do that and women look at that photo and be like nope That's not me snowboarding is not for me and I actually remember this time in snowboarding when I would look at those

photos to be like yeah that's not that's not gonna happen but then they started putting out marketing photos of women riding rails or doing wall rides or doing some really what to me was much more achievable once I saw those I was like yeah I want to try that I can do that they also worked on programs that I ended up working on which were the women's learned to ride programs which were specific programs just women only classes getting them on the mountain so that was what they did for the public and then for within the company they had women ride days and there's actually a there's a rule on the company it's a two-foot rule as soon as

they get two feet of snow the company actually closes shuts the store and goes riding it's pretty good right but they they initiated this women on the mountain for all of their employees and basically they just spent today and went riding and it's really empowering to go snowboarding with other women it's it's it's to me mountain biking and snowboarding is what I do and I love taking the time and just having a women-only group to do that with and I try new things and I feel comfortable and safe and also it actually had a dual purpose because the men saw what it was like to have a whole day without women in the office and it was pretty rough

they didn't get a lot done so it helps they also had the new hiring practices they realized at the time they're only getting about 30 percent of their applicants were women and they realized their entire hiring profit process was really quite biased I know in tech we have we have lots of issues with the hiring process so what they did is they proactively sought candidates within their company and better trained so so female candidates within a company and better trained male managers to actually do the hiring for females so they not only controlled the whole process they controlled what ended up happening for women as soon as they applied as soon as they walk through the

door now at Burton they're 50/50 all of their new hires there they have achieved for all of their new hires complete gender equity and this is a good quote from Donna back in 2012 is like let's be honest you know it can be frat boyish totally frat boyish but as soon as you add more women to the room you change the culture of the company and it has and they are extremely successful because of us the leadership team this is this goes back to the bullet point I had on the one woman policy which is a little fusing but the leadership team in 2004 was less than 10% female so the one woman policy means that any leadership

program application basically needs to have one woman in it at least that does not get its priority over anyone else that's applying for that position but needs to be one woman on the table at the moment today they have more than 40% female leadership within their team so you know I'm spinning through this kind of fast because I talk fast anyway sorry about that but I wanted to focus on on the end which is basically to recruit and keep kick-ass women you need to focus on families you need to motivate mentorship within your company and you need to revelon revolutionize recruitment and I hate seeing saying to anyone that they need to do something because people try to do the exact

opposite you tell them but these are facts and figures that show basically what snowboarding has achieved and I having been in the snowboard culture and having been in the tech culture as long as I have now I see so many similarities when I developed this talk I created three or four other talks on all of the similarities that can be had between snowboarding and snowboarding can't be the only one this is a fantastic success story of a company that has focused on implementing measures to make sure they can increase women's leadership and there's got to be more successful cases out there we keep looking to other companies to other tech companies to solve this problem it's not Google's

problem it's not Apple's problem it's not it's everyone's problem but there's other people that have done things out there so please take a lesson from snowboarding because when you become a better place for women to work you actually become a better place for everyone to work so thank you you

you