Cyber909: Episode 6 with Dinah Davis

Transcript

Narator:

Welcome to Cyber 9 0 9, your source for wit and wisdom in cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and Cyber Aficionado Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions, and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for Cyber 9 0 9, episode six with Dina Davis.

Den:

Hey folks, welcome to another episode of Cyber 9 0 9 podcast where we try not to really dig into breaches and incidents. I think there's a lot of great content out there in that what we'd rather try and do is share lessons, experiences in the form of leadership and life and how we survive the wacky world of cyber. It's not easy sometimes, and burnout's a huge thing. So I've got great guests that come on the show and I'm really privileged this show. We've got Diana Davis, the founder of Code Like a Girl. She's a keynote speaker, she's a podcaster. She's just a badass in tech and cyber. Hey, welcome to the show. Why don't you actually do a better introduction?

Dinah:

Oh, okay. All right, thanks. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. I think this is going to be fun. I love talking about cybersecurity, about tech and women in tech. Yeah, so I thought I was going to be a math teacher because that's what my grade 12 counselor who happened to be a man told me to be because I was good at math and I enjoy math. That's what I went in. I was like, I like math, what should I do? And he's like, oh, you should be a math teacher. And I'm like, as if you told that to all the guys that came into that room and said, I love math, you probably told them to be engineers. So I went to school to become a math teacher, and I very quickly learned that I loved mathematics more than I loved other people's children.

And so I very quickly decided that I was not going to become a math teacher at all actually. And in my third year, I took my first computing course and I fell in love with it. I just thought, this is just another way for how I think it's expressing how I already think as a mathematician, as a problem solver. And now here's this really great real world application of what I love. And through various different things that happened to me, I stumbled upon cryptography, which led me to a master's degree in cybersecurity at the University of Waterloo. And from there I met some of the guys who were working at Blackberry back in the early two thousands. And through that networking, I was able to get a job. Thereafter, I finished my master's, so I got to live, eat, breathe, the leading edge of mobile cybersecurity, which I just loved. I just loved. Then I ended up in leadership after about five or six years of being a software developer because I was that weird software developer that would look forward to the meetings,

Dinah:

What's wrong with me?

Dinah:

What's wrong with me?

Den:

And I have a sneaky feeling. I have a sneaky feeling that back in those days, Blackberry were the kings of secure phones, right? I mean, shit, people would always like, if you want to get a secure phone, get a Blackberry. And I had a number of them over the years and I thought they were the best ever. I mean, they were just really good tech. So were you doing a lot of cryptography as part of that first gig?

Dinah:

Yeah, actually, some of my favorite patents are around crypto algorithms that we built for over the air transport of a private key. It was one of the first things I got to work on. And I remember there's this algorithm that we had, and the way Blackberries worked is you had your device and they went through a backend server called a bez, and that's where we were connecting them through or well through the relay. And then they would send messages to your computer. And so what happened was there was this government agency, we'll leave it nameless, but you can probably guess which ones might've been interested, where the users were using their Blackberry, but inside their buildings, they were not allowed to have wifi at all. Hold on. That's too long ago. There was no wifi. They weren't allowed cell service, they blocked cell service in those buildings. There was no such thing as wifi

Den:

Yet. Wait a minute, wifi did not exist in the 18 hundreds.

Dinah:

It didn't in the early two thousands. I mean how much wire was in our houses. But anyway, what they wanted was they wanted to be able to plug their blackberries in, but still get messages to the blackberry inside the building where they were not allowed to have any radio frequency. And to do that, we had to figure out a way to send those messages. And anyway, we created an algorithm on the backend and I found a hole in it. I found a way you could actually attack it, and I think I figured it out while I was in the shower. Those moments, that's how they come, isn't it?

Den:

When

Dinah:

You're really

Den:

Sleep at night or you're in the shower, you're

Dinah:

Just, yeah. And then I was like, holy shit, I think you could hack that. I'm like, what? So yeah, so it was a very simple fix to it, and that's how I got my first patent with them. But yeah, we really got to work. I got to work on crypto, but more so even just protocols and how you put that together safely, crypto is great, but if you don't put it together

Dinah:

In

Dinah:

A secure way, it's crap. If you can guess somebody's password, obviously it doesn't matter how good the crypto is.

Den:

Yeah, it's funny, you don't need to guess people's passwords these days. You just go in the dark web and download it because they've probably breached. They've been breached at some point.

Dinah:

That's right.

Den:

Yeah. I'm curious to know, how did you get from, you're doing the early career in Blackberry and then roll through to found code like a girl. I mean, what was that journey and then what was the inspiration to even start code

Dinah:

Like a girl? So in the Blackberry days, I was like heads down trying to just be one of the guys, because at that time, early two thousands, maybe 10% of all software developers were women. If

Den:

You're lucky.

Dinah:

If we were lucky, and I was just so early in my career, I'm like, I don't want to cause any waves. I don't want to be the feminist. I just want to be one of them. And fortunately, I was actually on an amazing team with amazing guys, and I never felt less than my immediate team, never ever made me feel less than. Were there other issues in Blackberry as a whole? Yeah, so were there in every other IT company you have, and we even built out our team to be almost 30% female At that stage. That was kind of crazy. But what happened was in 2011, you could kind of see if you were inside Blackberry in certain areas, especially in the crypto team, you could kind of see the writing on the wall where there was a lot of infighting happening. People were more concerned about holding their empire than what was maybe good for Blackberry in the company as a whole.

And I got headhunted out and I kind of went, alright, well Blackberry's the first real non co-op job I ever had, and I was there for eight years. And so you don't really even expect there to be a different kind of environment than the one you were in. So I took the job, they promoted me from team lead to manager. It was a jump and it was horrible. It was a horrible, horrible experience where my boss was a bully and a misogynist, and within 10 months, I think my whole self-esteem and just everything was broken down. Everything I did, he questioned. And so when I decided to leave there, and it wasn't very long, it was about 10 months, I was like, I can't stay here. This is just a really not good place for me to be. I also realized that I didn't want this to ever happen to anyone else. At that time, I think my daughter was four or five years old, and it really hit home to me this could happen to her. I don't want this to happen to her,

Dinah:

So

Dinah:

Why am I going to be quiet about what it can be like sometimes as a woman in technology or women in cybersecurity. And so I decided, and I have now a bit of a place of power with my resume with having Blackberry on it in Waterloo region. That's a big stamp. It's like today having some of the other big guys

Companies on your resume, you're more sought after. I was like, I'm not going to a company that doesn't care about this anymore or isn't going to be okay with me talking about it. So that's when I started blogging online about that experience. And I went to another company and it was better, it was better. It wasn't perfect, I mean no places, but it was better. And in around May of 2015, I went to this really amazing event and it's called Think About Math. And it's something that the University of Waterloo runs every single year for grade nine and grade 10 girls. They bring women who have graduated from Waterloo, from either an undergraduate or a master's degree in mathematics, and they get us to talk about what our careers are like. So what can you do with a math degree? And so they kind of do this panel and then you sit down with them with kind of a poster behind you says who you are, and you do this kind of speed dating thing with grade nine girls, which is actually quite intimidating.

I will tell you now that my daughter is in grade 11, it's less intimidating, but it was still kind intimidating then. And I thought, okay, well what can I give them for them to take away the message that they could be in tech? And it was kind of like when Nike was doing the whole run a girl, throw a girl kind of taking that name back like a girl. That's a powerful thing, not a weak thing. And so I thought, well, what about Code A Girl? That'd be so cool. And so I made stickers, I created these little stickers and I called them code, said, just code like a girl. And it kind of got something moving in my

Dinah:

Head. Wow.

Dinah:

So that's how they got created. And then about six months later, I created the code, like a girl publication on Medium because it just kept building on there. And the reason I created the publication on Medium was because I was writing stuff about being a woman in tech in 2015 and 2016, and if you could get your work into a publication on Medium, it would get more views. And I thought, well, that's better. I want to change people's perceptions of what a woman in tech is. I want it to have more voice. So I tried submitting my work to one or two publications and it didn't really work and there wasn't really a lot out there. So I thought, okay, well how hard is it to create a publication? And it turns out a couple clicks, clicks, and then you're in it, then you're in it. It's like you're, how hard is it to create a podcast? And then

Den:

The

Dinah:

First one's super easy and then you're like, oh my God, now I'm doing it.

Den:

Now I'm a podcaster. Perfection.

Dinah:

Now I run a publication and because I thought, what's stronger than my voice? But hundreds and thousands of voices. And recently we just have over a thousand published writers with Code Like a Girl.

Dinah:

Wow.

Dinah:

We have over 3000 articles lifetime published. I would not be shocked if we're crossing the 4,000. We have 47,000 subscribers. So yeah, it's huge. It's cool. It's grown into this thing. I never knew it would because, and I think it's always just because when you do something you care about and you care about it a lot, it ends up growing.

Den:

So for people who don't know what code like a Girl is, how would you describe it?

Dinah:

Yeah, so it's a publication on the Medium platform. So if people are familiar with Medium, it's a blogging platform basically. And we accept articles from women mostly we're targeting articles around their experiences, a women in tech writing about tech, writing about leadership. And we do accept some articles from those who identify as male, but only if they're about allyship, only if they're about fixing the problem. Because sometimes I get guys applying to write for code, like a girl to just write technical articles. And my opinion is kind of like, there's a lot of places on the internet you can do that. You don't need my publication,

Den:

You can put that shit somewhere else. And I kind of look at it, there's a great opportunity, and by the way, we'll put the links in our show notes so that people can easily, easily find the platform and all this great content. And actually when we were doing a prep talk, you've provided a whole bunch of stuff and I was reading some of the articles

Dinah:

And

Den:

There's some excellent work in there. So I think whether you're an aspiring female in tech and you want to learn and participate or you might be a male in tech and actually want to educate yourself, there's some great content there. So I would highly recommend it for anybody. One of the things I found interesting on your journey is, and a lot of females in tech that I speak to, there's always somewhere in their journey where just someone treated them like a second class citizen

Dinah:

And

Den:

It's almost like a call to action internally that something needs to change in our industry. And I know myself, look, I remember my leadership style back in the nineties. I was a lead of two people and I was shit at it. I mean, I was just the worst leader ever.

Dinah:

But aren't we all when we start really?

Den:

Yeah. And you're holding your path if you have to

Dinah:

Learn.

Den:

Yeah. So you, what advice would you give a female leader in her first leadership job? What would be the one thing you'd say,

Dinah:

Oh man, that's like a really good question.

Den:

I have one or two good questions. Took me months to come up with that shit.

Dinah:

I think one of the biggest things I would say is first to believe in themselves, right? Because you deserve to be there. I hate that we talk about imposter syndrome a lot because I think a lot of stuff just gets kind of swept under the rug of imposter syndrome.

Dinah:

But

Dinah:

I mean it's real. And I know it's there for men too, but I think it's really there. Tech,

Den:

I was just about to ask that. Do you think imposter syndrome is worse for females than males? Because I think so based on the people I've worked with over the years,

Dinah:

I think there's one thing that we talk about a lot that for years we've talked about is how women apply to jobs versus men. And they've done lots of studies. I don't have them off the top of my head. They've done lots of studies where a man only needs to see 50% on a resume or on a job posting. They're like 50% of the job they feel like they could do great, they're going to apply. But intrinsically women, it's like they need to see 95% of that job description describes what they could do and they won't apply unless that's true. And so a lot of times when I'm coaching people, I'm coaching them to think bigger, dream bigger, except that they are capable of these things that they don't even have to know how to do half of this stuff because a job description is a wishlist. They're looking for a unicorn that usually doesn't even exist at all.

Den:

I'll give you a unicorn. It's in the logo. So that's a huge thing though. And I don't want to underplay that because Adobe, I was there for 20 years and a lot of my leadership career and mentoring that I received and mentoring, I gave played out as I would say I went from a child to a professional at Adobe, one of the things that they do fantastically well is they do a woman's executive shadow program. And that's for aspiring women who want to be leaders and they can shadow executives all the way to the CEO O who participates in this. I had a female leader in my team actually. She got to shadow the CEO and that was fantastic. Yeah, I mean, shit, I never got that. So I'm like, oh, that's brilliant.

Dinah:

No, you've had all the other advantages.

Den:

Yeah, I wasn't sure I would ever want to shadow the CEO anyway. I'd probably be too intimidated. But she wasn't. I mean, she was brilliant. And ultimately for me as an executive in that program, the thing I'd done differently than everybody else was I wouldn't make it. About one day I would basically speak to the woman, I'd speak to her manager, and beforehand I would prep and say, what are you trying to get in your career? What would you try and get from this experience? So from a mentorship for me, I was like, screw that one day thing. I want to know what would benefit you the best in this journey and in the journey. You might want to learn about hard conversations and you might want to learn about strategic planning. You might, these five things you want to take away from the experience. They don't all happen in one day.

Dinah:

No, they don't. What do you think was the most common thing they wanted or needed to learn?

Den:

I think there was a couple of things. One that you mentioned I think is about confidence and the difference between how guys operate and girls operate, which is like you say, they're not applying for the job because they don't see themselves matching everything. Where guys would be like, ah, screw it. Fake it till you make it. Right? And I think when they were coming with me, a lot of it was they wanted to learn more about conversations and conflict.

Dinah:

They

Den:

Wanted to learn more about guiding a team to come up with a vision, a mission, and a strategy.

Dinah:

So

Den:

How do you go through that process? And I think the other thing was a lot of it more was just really about how different teams and organizations run so that they could get a better understanding of different teams in the business. And they didn't get to pick their poor executive, the HR team

Dinah:

Matched

Den:

Them with executives. Now I think you could request with Shaline in our case, she's like, I want hannu. And I'm like, okay, let me speak to my friends at HR and we'll try and make that happen. And we luckily did, but ultimately, I remember one of the years, they even done round table sessions at lunch the month before and you'd have one exec and maybe 10 females and they would just pop questions at you. It would just be like a whole queue. It's

Dinah:

The best, isn't it?

Den:

And I participated in that I think for five years maybe from where they considered me an executive, I guess all the way to the left Adobe. But for me, it was one of the things I looked forward to because I learned from these women that were shadowing. So it's not like you'd sit there and you'd have lunch or we'd done a team happy hour a few weeks later, and I'm like, oh, why don't you join the team? Happy hour. So I'm trying to remain friends and try and help in the careers,

Dinah:

But that's actually what we need from men in the industry because there's all these paths already where men just get invited to things.

Dinah:

They just

Dinah:

Tag along and creates that club that creates the old boys club. But if you start expanding the lines of that and blurring the lines of that and inviting women into those spaces, then that's how they also get to make those networking connections.

And a lot of organizations are out there trying to help create that for women as well. There's lots of great things for that too, but I think there's a lot of times when men ask me, well, how can I help? And that's a big part of a girl too, is we're trying to, we know there are so many guys out there that want to support women that they're not sexist, they're not trying to be, they want to be allies and they just don't know how. And so my biggest tips for those are talk about the women when they're not in the room, support them and promote them to your peers and your leaders when they're not in the room. That's a huge, huge thing. And then the other thing is in meetings, there's so much you can do in meetings because, and even the Obama administration, the women in the group of the Obama administration would often in politics get talked over in the meetings and they came up with this strategy that I also had also been kind of building, but then heard they were doing. And I'm like, oh, cool, this is good. Which is when women are interrupted, interrupt back for them. So it's not that person. If we have June in the room and June says something and all of a sudden she's interrupted by John, then I can be like, oh, hey John, think June was done June. What else do you have to say?

They might not be bold enough to say, oh, excuse me, I was talking and things of that nature.

Den:

That's great because this is the one thing is if you don't create an environment that's collaborative, we're all voices are heard regardless of gender or ethnicity or whatever, then you're not creating the right environment.

Dinah:

That's right.

Den:

I would like to say that sometimes in my career I do interrupt people. I get so excited and I don't want to forget my thing. And I'm like, I used to have a sign on my office door and it said something like about pardon the interruption. I got excited about my thought or something. But it was acknowledging for me, that's something I was working on consciously working on my brand, my communication style. And I think as you go through your leadership journey for all of us, it's a continual, I look at leadership, it's a continual journey of learning. I'm not done yet and I'm still trying to be a better leader.

Dinah:

What's funny though is also an interrupter, and I know that and my husband's not, so we're completely opposite that way. I've learned so long. Sometimes I have to pause and allow him to come in. But that was also really important for me, whether it was women or men on my teams, I led a lot of teams and a lot of people and some of the best people were more quiet, more introverted, and if I wanted to make sure that I knew what their opinions were, I had to make space for them in the meetings,

I would have to be like, okay, Dave, I can see behind your eyes. It's not what I'm saying, but I can see behind somebody's eyes they're thinking something, but they're never going to interrupt. So I'll be like, Hey, Dave, what do you think about this? You have experience in this area. And not that they always want to get called on, but you have to know your people a little bit too. But you have to create space for especially your senior devs and other people in the room to make sure that their voice is being heard because they've got important things to say. They just might not be comfortable saying them.

Den:

And the one thing for me talking is my medium, I guess people would say, or Dan talks a lot either way, I'm a conversationalist, I'm a storyteller. And ultimately for me, that translates on the flip side, which means I'm pretty uncomfortable with silence.

Dinah:

Yes.

Den:

I can't contain myself sometimes. And I tried, had a mentor years ago, career coach, and she told me probably 15 years ago, I need to meditate. She's like, Dan, you need to meditate the stress you're under at work. I was running all this stuff that was always on all your identity and servers and

Dinah:

Labs

Den:

And all sorts of shit over the course of my career. And I could never meditate because I couldn't sit for a minute and silence.

Dinah:

I can't

Den:

In either

Dinah:

Though.

Den:

Now I am practicing that. I also took on yoga and I love going for walks and hikes and stuff like that. So getting out in nature. So I'm trying to manage, I think as an executive and the stress you're under these days, you need to find methods and mechanisms to manage that stress. Do you feel, now, I was going to jump back on this. There was something you said earlier, when you think of females trying to survive this journey or not survive, that's a shitty word, thrive. Thrive, I think thrive, right? So you're trying to thrive and then some idiot pulls you down and stuff or cuts you off or whatever the thing is, or they're dismissive of you because you're a female. What coaching do you give from the emotional side? Do you tell people, Hey, think of it, don't see that as a sleigh on. You see that as a sleigh on them. How do you coach people through that?

Dinah:

Yeah, well, even that's something that I really struggled with myself because I seem very extroverted. I am very confident in the workplace. Apparently some people were sometimes afraid of me. I never knew this. But I also take everything personally because I care so much about wherever I'm working or whatever I'm doing, and the people I have, I always care so much about them. And so when you get cut off, when you get dismissed, I would take that probably too personally. And I had a great manager for a while and he just kept telling me, Diana, you got to be a duck. Sometimes you got to just be a duck and then wash off your back because it's not personal to them at all. And I think that was a hard lesson for me to learn. I think I learned it to a degree. I think I'll never fully learn that because it's just not who I am. But at the same time, you have to in some way separate yourself from those events because it's work and it's not about your personal life. And if you internalize everything that happens, you're going to have a really bad time.

Dinah:

There's

Dinah:

Just too much politics, there's too much of that other stuff that happens that makes it really hard, and you have to keep that separation there a little bit. But yes, it's learning how to be a duck and letting it flow off your back. That's my biggest piece of advice because you have to, people don't mean everything they say and they don't even realize they're doing it half the time. They're just focused on the task at hand. And you were just carnage sometimes.

Den:

And I think, so you've got different personality types and stuff, and if someone's an introvert, they're also not necessarily looking to call that person out

Dinah:

Or

Den:

Confront them later on because not everyone likes conflict.

Dinah:

You are an executive. I was a VP at my last company and the CEO says something that you maybe take personally the rest of the group, not the time to call out on it. And you have to evaluate whether or not it's even worth it for you to do later or if you just need to be a duck and move on and care about other things.

Den:

And there's couple of things come to mind. One is I learned a lot about emotional strength quite a few years ago, maybe about six years ago and stuff. I was going through some life shit as you do. And Tony Robbins had a really good podcast on emotional strength, and it was all about the ability to disconnect from taking it personally. Check your ego at the door, step back and imagine you're giving that person advice on how to handle that situation. So you're now looking down on yourself advising yourself as if it's not you. It's a really, really hard thing to do. I try to do it whenever I'm in conflict. I sometimes even try to do it when I'm not in conflict and I'm just trying to figure shit out for myself right now. The other

Dinah:

One thing I'll add though, one thing. So one, if anything is discriminatory, then that's different. You call that out if you feel comfortable, if somebody else sees it, call it out. I'm not talking about just ignoring completely discriminatory behavior. But second, and I think a lot of women do this, and I know some men do this too, is I always expected so much of myself. I expected myself to be better and better and better and better every single day. And for me, that manifested into bad things in two ways. One, it created an eating disorder because I focused that for many years on my body and my body had to be perfect

Because if it wasn't holy hell, the world might fall apart and no one will respect me. How could anyone respect me in a bigger body, which is complete bull crap. And then secondly, just taking in everything that was happening and everything, every time something bad happened, just internally beating myself up about it. And part of that energy is what sometimes makes amazing leaders and amazing people when we're self-aware about what we're doing. So we always want to make it better. The flip side is if you don't have some empathy for yourself, then you're going to end up in a world of hurt, which I have done a couple of times. And that was I think one of the harder therapy sessions that I went through a number of years ago was having the therapist, I telling her everything that was going on and how stressed I was and why wasn't I doing better and why wasn't I handling things better?

And she just looked at me and she said, now imagine your best friend sitting right across from you and they have just told you all of these things. What would you tell your best friend? Would you tell them to just buck up and move on and keep working harder or would you look at them and go, oh honey, I'm sorry, that's really hard. That is so hard. I'm sorry, you have to go through that. How can I help? And trying, and she literally made me do that whole exercise of putting myself in that other side of that chair and what would you say to yourself? And that was a big moment for me, a big aha moment of I am treating myself poorly. And I think that's really common in high achievers, extremely common in high achievers because I think we're almost all high achievers, and I have, this is just personal anecdote, but we all have some level of anxiety we're dealing with, which is what makes us amazingly good at our jobs because we're anticipating everything, but it's a fine line between that and our own mental health. I think that happens a lot.

Den:

So there's a couple of things in there. So that advice is brilliant. It is actually very similar to that whole Tony Robbins thing. Yeah, that's

Dinah:

What ticked me off on it,

Den:

And I think that's great advice and the problem. I mean, there's, God, we could talk for hours on this shit. There's a couple of things in there though. One of the nuggets is women contend with the whole visual aspect of themselves in business, whereas a lot of guys don't give a shit. Now, personally I do like I'm trying to be the handsome guy, the accent, the package six. And actually, yeah, even for me, my whole life, even as a kid, I've always had this kind of, I'm not going to say body dysmorphia, but I've always looked to myself in the mirror and being like, oh, I wish I was better. But that's never translated into that motivation for me to go at the gym. I'm like, I hate the gym

Dinah:

Or have any kind of disordered eating or Yeah,

Den:

Exactly. Yeah. So I think that there's a big difference. And these days with social media and everything else, I think it's worse for kids growing up. Even now, the abuse and the self-reflection and the I'm not good enough. And the reality is, I think regardless of gender and stuff, I think people have just got to peace out on their looks and their appearance. And the other thing is focus on things you're in control of, not things you're not in control of. And I know I've been in circumstances professionally and I've been in situations being in events that are seriously gnarly work events like outages or breaches and stuff. And the only thing I encourage my team to do is basically say, we're here now. Let's show people just how good we are

Dinah:

And

Den:

Dig our way out or fix the problem and don't get hung up on how we got here. So I look at that. Then the one thing, and we talked about the fake it till you make it business, but I look at it, there's a lot of women in their career that basically they're not just fighting against the man versus women and as a woman, as good as a man bullshit and as a pay equal and all that stuff as well. They're fighting their own internal demons and then they're also firing with the fact that they might be juggling five things. Like, Hey, I'm still raising children.

I'm doing my job. And my old music teacher, a big music nerd, my old music teacher, he told me this, I was probably about 15, 16 at the time, and he always said to me, then here's why women are better than guys. He went, we have one career our whole life. That's all we do. He went, I'm a plumber. I'm a plumber till I die. He went, A woman though usually went, she goes through going through college or university. So that's one movement. Might get a job, that's a movement, then might go and have kids and be a mother and bring kids up that might go back to work, may go back to the same career or even a different career. He went this ability to reinvent themselves without thinking about it. He went, that's just what their journey is. It went whereas we do one thing.

Dinah:

I think that's because society has forced us to do that. And I think it does us a disservice

Dinah:

Actually.

Dinah:

And I think a lot of people will ask me, how do you do everything? You do so much and how do you do that? My answer is, it takes a bloody village. My husband who is a software developer, probably about nine years ago when I was at the height of my job at Arctic Wolf and a VP and just really run off my feet, he started working 90% time instead of working a hundred percent time because we knew at that moment I had more on my plate and he who does that? My amazing husband does. But I literally mentioned that to my CEO and he just looked at me, why would he do that? My husband was crazy to care about his family

Dinah:

And

Dinah:

To care about that. And you know what? He still works 90% time even though I am now retired because now it's worked better for him. He gets just as much work if not more done, but then gets to spend time around the house and do things. I also have my parents live nearby for all the winters. They don't live nearby in the summer, but they really helped friends that helped. I don't think you achieve great things and be a mother and a daughter and all those things without people supporting you and making hard calls. I created code like a girl in 2016. I ran it, and you know what? I stepped down in 2018 because my life was too crazy. It was too much. And thankfully thank God there was somebody who was willing to take it over so it didn't die. And this wonderful lady, she took it over for two and a half years. I fully gave it to her. I was done and I was just helping advise her. And then her life blew up two and a half years later and it just so happened that mine kind of had calmed down a bit and she was like, do you want it back? And I was like, I absolutely want it back now I can spend more time in it. So last year and a half, I retired from corporate life, January 20, 23. Now I spend a lot of my day working on that and I'm so glad I have it,

Dinah:

But

Dinah:

It's hard choices you don't get to have. I think they really, those of us who grew up in the nineties, especially women who grew up in the nineties, there was this really big push for us to say, you can have it all now. This really amazing feminist movement that happened, but it also kind of expected you to just do it by yourself. You can have it all. But there was just no kind of concept of how hard that would be

Den:

And the support, I mean, this is the one thing for me. I don't see anybody being successful in life. And by the way, how you measure success is a very individual thing, right?

Dinah:

Yes.

Den:

I had that conversation last night with my best friend actually. We were just talking about that. And it's like, look, success might mean lots of money or it might mean that you love 50% of the time you're just walking trails. But no one reaches a level of success without having that support system around them. Because I look at it even in corporate life, we would never deliver the projects or the work we've done without having great network, great support structure, allies, and then also a strategy that we would collaborate and there'd be a group of people with different and diverse thinking and abilities to execute. I look at that the same in life as I do in professional situations. Now I know where

Dinah:

I think the difference is though. The difference is that everyone expects that for the men in the organization. So it is understood that your wife's going to take care of things for you, that if you are working late, your wife's got the kids, but it is not understood that that support isn't always there for the women in the organization. Not always as lucky as I am to have the husband that I have, and then they get penalized for it, right?

Den:

Yeah. And I think, I know we're way over time, but

Dinah:

I knew that would happen.

Den:

Yeah, I mean I think when Covid hit, I think as shitty a situation as it was, I think there's a couple of things that came out of it, which is people no longer want to be entrapped into this corporate life where they're busting their ass. They're not getting the thanks anyway.

And ultimately when you could work from home, you suddenly realize you're like, wait a minute. I quite like the freedom and flexibility that provides and the ability to manage your household. I totally agree. I actually had this conversation with someone a couple of months ago, one of my friends at SonicWall, and she was traveling a lot. She's always traveling for SonicWall, and we were just talking about the fact she's got two young daughters and I'm like, it's hard when she can't make the trip because of family stuff or when she does this. And then everyone's like, well, who's looking after your daughters? And so this whole thing of is expected that the mother does it, but not the father. It's like nonsense. But I think it's really

Dinah:

Interesting too.

Den:

We're still there.

Dinah:

I've seen the same backlash happened to men in the office that do the same thing. So I dunno if you're aware, but in Canada when you have a kid, the mom can take up to a year of maternity. Now part of that is 30 weeks is maternity leave, and then the other 30 or 20 weeks,

Den:

22 weeks

Dinah:

Is parenting parental leave, sorry, parental leave. So the man in the relationship cannot take maternity leave, but they can take parental leave and that parental leave can be split between the couple. And so in a few situations at work, what we're starting to see, and I love seeing this, it's amazing, is that the dad takes 30 or 20 weeks of parental leave because they can, because their right to do so, either to allow his wife to go back to work or just to support them at home, and they get looked down on in the same, it has a similar impact to their career. How could your family be more important than this job? How you just leave? Do you know the imposition you're putting us in? Who's going to work on that project?

Den:

Yeah, California had paid family leave act as well, and I can't remember how many, I mean, my daughter is 19, my son's 14, so it was a long time ago for me, but shit as, shit, I took that time. I'm like, I don't care.

And sometimes, and this is the thing for me was just from a career perspective and a work work-life balance perspective, I went from, I ran enterprise security at Adobe, then I ran enterprise security at Cisco and then I left both of them to join a little rinky dinky startup with a hundred people, one office. And I'm running security in it. And I was like on holiday. I mean, it was literally the best. And I love the team, I love the company, but I took a big hit pay cut wise for that, but emotionally much happier.

Dinah:

My

Den:

Time at Cisco, I was in 14 meetings a day from six in the morning to six, I'm killing me. And at the end of it, I'm like, and I didn't enjoy working with a lot of the people that I was working with. I mean, some of them were gems and some of them were just a pain in my ass and corporate bullshit. And I could do it. I could do it if I want to do it. But I think the big thing in life and parting as we wrap this up, parting wisdom for me is think about where you want to be when you're in your deathbed and you're looking back in your life,

That's when you have regrets. Everybody I know of that they talk about when somebody passes, right? Just before they die that last day or the final hours, they look back in their life and have regrets of the things that they did not do or wanted to have done or whatever. And I tell people this, I'm like, imagine you're there. What regrets do you have? Things that you didn't do in your life, spend more time with your kids, spend more time with your partner, travel, and then look now to say, what about my career and the jobs and my career? How do they enable that life to be good? So I don't have regrets? And we are so focused on this bullshit rat race

Narator:

That

Den:

We're not thinking about the fact we're here to live. This is meant to be an enjoyable life. So yeah, I'd love you to leave parting words for our audience. If you could give one piece of advice or one takeaway that I think helps improve the diversity of women in tech, what would that be?

Dinah:

Oh, be their ally. Be their ally in the room. And when they're not in the room, it has nothing to do with the number of diversity theater items and events that you put together. I could care less. You could do none of those things. You could have no women in tech events ever, but if you showed up for the women in your organization and you supported them in the room, and when they're not in the room every single day,

Dinah:

That

Dinah:

Is the biggest thing you can do. Women and men supporting each other, but it is supporting them when they're not in the room. Honestly, that is my biggest takeaway because being supportive of diversity when no one's looking, not when you're having the big, all the theater events that you do that does not make you diverse. If you have all these events and I look at your C level and it's only white men, I'm not going to believe a single thing you're saying.

Den:

Yeah, yeah. No, that is great. Excellent. Well, Dana, thank you very much. You're so welcome. Excellent. It's funny because I tried to have you on the last pod when I was at Banyan, and then we got acquired, so that all got put on pause because I had saw you in another podcast. I'm like, holy shit, I want to start chatting to this lady. She knows her shit. And literally for me, I was just like, wow, this will be great. So it took so long for us to spin up the new pod. So I'm grateful for your time, and yeah, I would love to check in again at some point in the future, get you back on and hear how things are moving on. I want to keep the topic fresh for people top of mind, and hopefully we can make a difference. But thank you for all your great work. We'll see each other again soon.

Dinah:

Yes, it was great. Thanks so much.

Den:

Take it easy. Thank

Narator:

You. Thanks for listening to Cyber 9 0 9. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and don't miss an episode of your Source for Wit and Wisdom in cybersecurity.

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