Closing remarks at Women's Leadership Holiday Event in Dallas, Texas, 13 December 2016 -- Peter Coffee, VP for Strategic Research, Salesforce

1. #PaveItForward 2016 – Women’s Leadership Event – Dallas, Texas
Closing Remarks by Peter Coffee, VP for Strategic Research, Salesforce
There’s a fragment of dialog in the movie, “The Rock,” that often comes to mind when
I’m speaking to an audience that has heard me before. A woman asks a man, “You
didn’t mean what you just said, did you?” He says, “I meant it at the time,” and she
replies “‘At the time’? You said it seven and a half seconds ago!” He says, quite
sincerely, “Well…gosh, kind of a lot’s happened since then.”
If you’re going to have me here for a second time, there should be something new to
share, and I hope you’ll join me in considering some recent developments and some
new data that bear on our reasons for being here tonight.
I’d like to start with some observations on bias. It’s common to associate bias with
malice, as if people choose to be unfair, and we credit people with good will—as John
and Nellie both observed during the panel—when they confront the possibility that
they have biases. I was struck, though, by a CIA analyst who made a great point by
comparison with optical illusions. You can be told, over and over again, that those lines
are actually the same length, or the two squares are actually the same color, but you
can’t make your brain not see what it thinks it sees. We don’t yell at people, “Start
seeing those lines as the same!” We give them a ruler. We can introduce technology into
the workplace with measures, peer assessments, the constant creation and exchange of
“Thanks” badges that defines our environment at Salesforce, and we can overwhelm
biases—with tools and with new behavioral norms—instead of thinking we can
eliminate them.
That only goes so far, though, when people insist they’re not biased, and much of the
time they’re probably sincere that they’re trying to avoid it – but we see it in some
unexpected places.
For example, you might think there’s no more pure marketplace of ideas than a high
school debate competition, but one 16-year-old female debater wrote a piece that has
gone somewhat viral about the comments of competition judges. She wrote,
The female high school debaters I know have been belittled by male opponents and told to
shush. Judges and parents call these young women naggy, shrill and even bitchy. They’re
told to smile more and sometimes get more in-depth criticism of their hem length than
their argumentation. Isabelle Bavis, a junior at Evanston Township High School in
Illinois, who has been called “screechy” on ballots, puts it simply: “The language they
use to correct us is not the same language used when correcting the boys.”

2. Jeff Hannan, a fellow debate coach, noticed this, too, and began collecting ballots that
showed sexist double standards in judging. In one case, two male competitors had debated
two female ones. The judge’s comments for the men: “Very good, strong stance” and
“very good, strong, forceful.” For the women? “Monitor your emotions in response to
your opponent” and “make sure you are not too overly aggressive.”
If anyone thinks we’ve seen this kind of thing happening on a somewhat larger stage,
during the past election cycle, I would not disagree with that assessment. Regardless of
politics, people saw what their brains thought they saw – but this reminds me of what
someone once called the plain-English version of the laws of thermodynamics. Rather
than getting technical about energy and entropy, he said, it’s simpler to say that you
can’t win; you can’t break even; and you can’t get out of the game.
I’m prepared to deal with that in the domain of thermodynamics, but I don’t believe we
should agree that we can’t get out of this game. Tonight, I’d like to share some thoughts
on how we can change the rules or choose to compete on a different playing field.
To begin, I’d note that there are at least two kinds of problem. The first that I have in
mind is the kind that everyone agrees is real, and you’re respected and congratulated
for taking it on; the second is the kind that people are starting to think has been
substantially solved, and you’re regarded as shrill and whiny if you continue to insist
that people keep working on it. I’m concerned that gender in the workplace is getting
dangerously close to becoming the second kind of problem, and I’d like to share some
thoughts on how to keep that from happening – because in many ways, the problem
and especially the opportunity have never been greater.
When I was growing up in a household that had the Spring 1972 preview issue of Ms.
magazine on the coffee table, the challenge of re-thinking the role of women in the
workforce and the institutions of society was clear; six years later, when my then-fiancé
was the only female undergrad in her 49-person class of ’80 cohort in aerospace
engineering, that disparity was impossible to minimize or ignore. My concern is that
today, it’s becoming too easy to say that we got it done: when MIT undergraduates are
46% female, when the two longest-serving leaders of major world powers are named
Vladimir and Angela, when women are the CEOs at GM, HP, IBM, PepsiCo, Lockheed
Martin…are we still talking about this?
We’re still talking about it because women at MIT, despite being nearly half of all
undergrads, are still outnumbered more than 2:1 in departments including physics,
electrical engineering and aerospace engineering – overbalanced by their making up
roughly three quarters of undergrad enrollment in departments including cognitive

3. science and biology. More concerning, only 10% of practicing aerospace engineers today
are female, and the National Girls Collaborative Project reported this year that National
Science Foundation data show a figure of less than 8% for mechanical engineers: the
classroom is far ahead of the workplace in turning traditional men’s clubs into gender-
neutral collaborations.
We’re also talking about this with growing urgency in key fields where today’s
immediate trends point to critical near-term talent shortage. MIT statistics look better
than those we find in a larger sample: in 1984, 37% of US computer science undergrads
were female, but in 2015 that figure was half that – only 18%. We need to figure out
where the leaks in the talent pipeline are happening, because it’s clear that much of this
problem arises before we get a chance to address it in the workplace.
Research is showing some specific and deadly points of vulnerability in the progress of
young women into STEM careers. For example, this year, Colorado State University
looked at one such threshold: the first semester of college calculus. From K-12, girls and
young women show interest and ability in math and science comparable or superior to
male students, but female students are 50% more likely than males to switch to a non-
STEM major after Calculus I. In-depth studies have found the phenomenon that
Theresa talked about: that women were quicker to assess subject difficulty as personal
incompetence, and to conclude, from the greater confidence of the men around them,
“Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”
To look at the data another way, if women’s persistence in STEM majors after Calc I
could be raised to parity with men’s, the number of women at least beginning their
post-college career in a STEM field would increase by 75%. Math departments could
usefully look at classroom engagement, competitive environment, and the
communication of applications of the material, to make a step-function increase in
subject matter difficulty seem just as much worth it to the women in the room.
We should also wonder if the popularization of STEM’s hero culture has turned the
revenge of the nerds into the defection of the women. A movie like The Social Network
might seem to make uber-nerds cool, but it also popularizes an image of cutthroat
competition and winning by financial measures that research has shown does not
appeal equally to male and female students. Research by the Girl Scouts released last
year found that 88% of young women want to make a difference in the world, and 90%
want to help people: we heard that from Nellie, who said that wanting to help people
was a Nellie thing – but she encountered a stereotype that it’s a girl thing. A TV show
like “Silicon Valley,” though, does not portray either an environment or a community
with a focus on those goals.

4. When women try to figure out how to win in a man’s world, they’re framing the
challenge as a zero-sum game. That’s hard to win: Robert Townsend, when he was CEO
at Avis, wrote an appendix to his book Up The Organization entitled “Guerrilla Guide for
Working Women” that warned, “The one thing the Establishment is prepared for is
violent frontal attack. They may have pure lard inside, but they’ve got 24 inches of
armor plate in front.” If this gets framed as women winning to the exact extent of men
losing, it’s unrealistic to expect a gracious surrender.
Neither do I propose to tolerate the situation often characterized by a quotation from
Charlotte Whitton, the first woman to be mayor of a major city in Canada—that is to
say, of the national capital in Ottawa—who is often unknowingly paraphrased when
people say that “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought
half as good.” Less well known is the second half of her statement, back in 1969:
“Luckily, this is not difficult.” Well and good, but that situation prevents too much
talent from finding its best use. To build on something Lori said, we can’t settle for
inviting women to the dance: we have to ask them to dance even before they’re
obviously good at it.
Further, losing what women do better than men is a loss for everyone. The Conference
Board CEO Challenge this year identified key needs including Talent Attraction,
Leadership Development and Customer Engagement: I absolutely reject the idea that
men have shown they can do those things as well as, let alone better than, women. A
woman successfully fighting for a job that’s always been held by men is one thing; a
woman creating a job that no man had apparently realized needed to be done is, I
believe, a much more interesting thing, and Deepali made the point that this is about
asking and answering the question “How”? Among the answers, I believe, is not
waiting for someone to write a job description for something that clearly needs doing.
My point continues to be the one that I hope I made last year – that this is a positive-
sum game, and one that needs to be won without demonizing those who are simply not
seeing what we see (and what I would also assert the objective data clearly show). This
game needs to be won by men and women working together, and—as Christina said—
holding ourselves accountable for creating opportunities to own and exercise power.
We need to do this for pure self-interest, to address a critical shortage of talent – and to
reconsider the definition of success in a world where connection, cognition, and
collaboration are going to matter a lot more than what we might call conventional and
conflict-intensive competition. From the first things we heard tonight from Kim and

5. Angela, we have heard an emphasis on inclusion – which is pretty much the opposite of
contention.
That brings me to one last point: at various times this evening, we’ve heard words like
manager and leader, and we also encounter words in the workplace like supervisor. It
made me wonder if that’s just a difference in tone, and I just now looked up the roots of
each. Supervisor, super visor, obviously relates to oversight; manager comes most
directly from words meaning use of the hand, the mano, to control; and leader comes
from roots that all have to do with guidance and the setting of an example.
If you ever have trouble remembering the difference,
 You can supervise a robot.
 You can manage a horse.
 You can only lead those who choose to follow you.
On any given day, any of us can ask, what will I do today that makes me worth
following?
Thank you.
13 December 2016