#024: Women in Digital Analytics with Krista Seiden

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:00.03 [Michael Helbling]: Hi folks, this episode is an interesting one. We conceived of the idea and tackled it in a typical manner, with lots of booze and bad jokes. But as we began to assemble this for production, we started to reflect a bit on the seriousness of this issue. We are very committed to our industry and analytics community being a place for every practitioner. As you listen, you’ll probably hear plenty of times where we get it wrong or are ignorant or don’t have a good understanding of all the issues. And it will be very clear that we are not super comfortable. But instead of shy away from the topic and maybe not even release this episode, we want to press in and in our own faltering way participate in this discussion. It’s too important not to. So in our own imperfect way, we present this episode of the Digital Analytics

00:00:52.20 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:01:17.47 [Michael Helbling]: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 24. Have you ever listened to this podcast and wondered if anyone else listening was a woman? No? Well, that’s very sexist of you. And you should feel terrible. Unless, of course, you are a woman, and then I’m sexist for asking the question. The one thing we can all agree on is that our industry needs more representation by women. They’re awesome, and we need more of them. So we needed somebody to help us because obviously I’m joined tonight by my co-host Tim Wilson, senior partner at Analytics Demystified. Good day. And of course, Jim Cain, CEO of Babbage Systems and Napkyn. Hello. And everyone’s used to me by now. I’m Michael Helbling from Search Discovery. But of course, we’re all dudes. And so we need help with this topic. Who better to be our guide for this discussion than the Digital Analytics Association Rising Star in 2014 and the Practitioner of the Year in 2015, Google’s very own, Krista Seiden. Welcome, Krista.

00:02:29.50 [Krista Seiden]: Thanks for having me.

00:02:30.99 [Michael Helbling]: Krista, first I’d love to hear how you started into digital analytics. You’ve been in the industry for quite some time. You’ve had many roles, but everybody’s story is unique. I’d love, maybe our listeners would probably love to hear yours.

00:02:45.76 [Tim Wilson]: And have you always been a woman in the industry or? Sorry.

00:02:50.20 [Krista Seiden]: So do you think I’ve always been a woman in the industry? But I don’t know. Maybe it’s important in the past life that was different. So I got started when I was working at Adobe systems several years back and I was there actually pre-omniture acquisition. So for Adobe proper and one day I was I was responsible for making dashboards for Sean to do the CEO. And I realized that I was getting a lot of the metrics from Omniture, but I was going to several different people to pull those metrics for me. And so as somebody curious about the tool, I went ahead and went to that team and asked them to teach me what they were doing. And that kind of spiraled into an interest for digital analytics or at the time web analytics. And then Adobe acquired Omniture and I was blessed to be able to take pretty much every training course that I wanted from them, which was great. I took several courses. I learned everything about all of those products and it really became a career for me. So I did that for a few years at Adobe. Then I moved on to the Apollo group where I ran mobile analytics and social analytics for an internal social app for them. And that was great. I did that for about a year. And then came over to Google. And at Google, my first two years, I ran an analytics and optimization program for the Google for Work team as an internal practitioner. Built out a AB testing program scaling from one test all the way up to 50 tests a quarter. Built a solid platform of Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager. And I really enjoyed that. And then just about a year ago, I moved over to the actual Google Analytics team as an analytics advocate. So today, I represent the brand out in the industry, do a lot of conference speaking. I’ve met a lot of you guys. It’s been awesome. And I also run a premium training program. So education all around. It’s very fun. And it’s been quite the journey.

00:04:45.53 [Tim Wilson]: Have you gotten or are you close to getting Adobe to adopt Google Analytics as their web analytics platform of choice?

00:04:52.07 [Krista Seiden]: You know, I’m working pretty hard on it.

00:04:53.33 [Tim Wilson]: Okay. Or vice versa, I guess I could ask with my tongue in the other cheek.

00:04:58.52 [Michael Helbling]: And, you know, if you could name one person at Adobe who’s made you feel the most marginalized, no, I’m just kidding. But actually, so to kick off sort of just the discussion, you know, it’s not sort of a question of how is it for a woman in this industry, but it is a perspective that we lack, right? And I wonder, help us see through your eyes when you’re going through your professional career. Are there things that are happening that we could be better aware of? How do we, you know, kind of promote? I don’t know, this question is going nowhere fast, but I hope like, does that make any sense?

00:05:36.29 [Krista Seiden]: What’s it like to be a woman?

00:05:38.00 [Michael Helbling]: Yes, but necessarily that asking it. It’s just are there. I mean, I don’t know. Are there differences or they’re not differences?

00:05:46.82 [Tim Wilson]: This is the fumbling that is going to happen from three wise ass guys all all night long. We’ll try to not completely torture ourselves by acknowledging which we haven’t really yet. And we’ve acknowledged it many times leading up to this episode, but we asked Chris to come on to talk about the state of women in analytics and immediately felt horrible about asking her to come on because she was a woman to talk about the state of women. in analytics. I feel like we should kind of throw that out and should probably also acknowledge that Krista has sort of set herself up for that because she’s written pretty thoughtfully about the subject. So Krista will likely, if we don’t completely alienate her on this show, we’ll have her back to talk about something completely non-gender related. But tonight, we’ve said we’re gonna bite the bullet and embrace her gender. Wait, that, see? There, now that question goes nowhere. You’re the best.

00:06:41.26 [Krista Seiden]: Thank you for embracing me.

00:06:42.29 [Jim Cain]: You just made Helbling look awesome.

00:06:44.71 [Michael Helbling]: No, I feel such a slap. I’m like, how do you?

00:06:50.80 [Tim Wilson]: But so can we, I mean, can we like start off maybe? Like, do you, you’ve got to, because you’ve been asked about it so many times, but how well can you sort of recap the competing internal debates you had that you tried to work out in the LinkedIn post that will definitely link to. Like, is that a fair place to ask you to start?

00:07:12.30 [Krista Seiden]: Yeah, sure. So I mean, that post, it was really sparked by a couple of events. So in one case, I was presenting at a conference and was actually asked during the Q&A part of the keynote session if I was married. That’s a question that you would never get to a male presenter. My fellow male presenters did not get those questions. And it was just, it was very offensive as a woman. And, you know, one of the other things that I pointed out was that I don’t want to necessarily be known as a woman in analytics, which I know is kind of what we’re talking about here tonight is being a woman in analytics. So maybe I’m the wrong person there, but I want to be known as being a strong person, a strong speaker, a strong practitioner, somebody who’s just really good in my field rather than being known by my gender. So a couple of the things that I call out in that post are really that as a woman, I hope that you don’t be intimidated by what is traditionally a male-dominated industry. You know, I think that we’re a pretty good representation here in this podcast at 75-25 for what the industry is like. But don’t feel held back based on your gender, I guess. You know, attend events, get involved, get out there, speak, teach, do everything that you can and should do, and don’t let gender hold you back. And then I think the other thing that I really hope to get across in that post was that society as a whole needs to move past that gender role bias and that we need to really recognize people based on, you know, what they bring to the table and not just because of their gender.

00:08:47.59 [Tim Wilson]: So let me ask, there were two kind of mental exercises I went through with leading up to this. And one was realizing that my first two managers in analytics were women. So I actually came into the field reporting to women. And then the second exercise was of kind of my client base sort of counting the genders of the analysts Is it still 75-25? Is there more parody? Because I kind of landed about 50-50 and I didn’t want to think about it too much because then I’d have to say, why are we having this episode at all? But I don’t think it’s necessarily just about the numbers. I don’t think there necessarily is stats. I mean, I guess you can look at who’s speaking at conferences, but I don’t know that that’s a fair representation of the industry. I mean, do you feel like not in your role as a woman, in your role at Google, I mean, you’re bouncing around to a lot of companies. And is that, do you feel like it’s about 75, 25 still?

00:09:46.73 [Krista Seiden]: Maybe not 75, 25, maybe 70, 30, or even 60, 40.

00:09:52.63 [Tim Wilson]: I don’t think there’s hard data on it. So it’s more of a too late already tweeted.

00:09:58.79 [Krista Seiden]: I don’t see it being equal yet. I think that there’s still quite a difference in terms of the balance there. Somebody at one of these conferences actually said something interesting to me when we were talking about this, about how the conference was about 70, 30 in attendees. We were talking about how that’s better than it has been over the past few years. And the thought this person had was, well, it’s probably because Marketing and sales are moving closer to analytics and marketing and sales are becoming more data driven. And that’s probably why we see more women because they’re coming from marketing and sales. And I mean I think that’s maybe fair and maybe true but at the same time I also find it a little offensive.

00:10:40.21 [Michael Helbling]: Well, that’s kind of not how you want to solve the problem, right? Exactly. And yeah, that’s interesting. And Tim, I like that you brought up that your first two bosses were, because actually my best manager I ever had in analytics was also a woman. And I learned so much from her as like a lot of my leadership style came from her. And so, like, I don’t know, recently I was at a conference where I was on a panel talking to college students. And so I’m trying to get all of these college kids interested in careers in analytics. And the predominant number of people in the room were women. And I was like, how can I convince These women this is such a great industry you need to be in this industry we need you in analytics and i don’t know like from your perspective chris to are there barriers do you talk to people and they say i don’t know if i want to get into analytics do people view it a certain way because it is. Very skewed towards men historically but how can we break down the barriers and make it attractive to everybody.

00:11:46.79 [Krista Seiden]: Yeah, I think that’s a great question and I think that it’s amazing that both of you have had really strong female bosses in leadership in the past in analytics. I’ve had some really great managers, none of whom have been women. And so, you know, perhaps my viewpoint is a little skewed there. I don’t know too many women managers in the analytics field, at least within my sphere of of influence and friends and networks. So I think that’s really cool. But in terms of getting more women interested into analytics, I think that part of it might be that analytics is seen to be kind of a technical field and that is scary maybe to some younger women. who are coming in and they’re like well I don’t know if I want to you know go into engineering if they’re trying to figure out what they’re doing in college if they want to go into computer science or go down that path of a more technical route and I think that maybe that’s an education thing maybe we need to help the industry understand a little bit more that there’s different types of analysts and there’s different roles that you can play in the industry and that you know anybody can fill any of these roles but if you’re less comfortable on the technical side there’s more of the business analysis side and if you’re more comfortable on the technical side then that’s definitely the way to go.

00:13:09.22 [Tim Wilson]: that’s interesting if you think of like stem right there’s all the concerted effort for the stem world to get better gender balance what i was kind of hearing you say was well if there’s some young girl there’s my daughter and she’s saying i don’t really want to do science and technology that’s not really what I want to do. Analytics falls in this kind of weird tweener space where it’s got technical and it’s got business and there’s a risk that they’ll so shy away from technical that they’ll not not because they’re women just because they just fundamentally aren’t interested in technical that it’s a little bit more nuanced to say this is this really rich space where you have to have this broad set of skills and need to be able to be right brain and left brain and It’s just a tougher thing to sell in to anyone. I guess I don’t know that I’m as bothered by if it’s marketers who are drifting towards it because nobody started in this career. Nobody who’s over 30 started out in analytics. So everybody came from somewhere. And I came from technical writing, Jim came from sales. So you have to come from somewhere. So if you’re getting better representation somewhere and there’s enough analytics there for somebody to be drawn to it, you just want to make sure that door is open. If they say, yep, I want to step in that direction. It’s not, I’m going to show up at a conference and have scantily clad women, you know, dancing in alcoves at a, at an after party. That, that was a shock to me.

00:14:45.15 [Krista Seiden]: Kind of conferences. Do you guys do that?

00:14:47.31 [Tim Wilson]: That was absolutely a very prominent conference where one of the parties had, oh, people who were there were either incredibly uncomfortable, which was me, or were incredibly into it, in which case my opinion of those people plummeted. But I don’t know, Jim, you have anything to say?

00:15:05.70 [Jim Cain]: I have a hard time having good perspective on this one because, A, I’m a dude. B, 75% of napkins analysts are girls and it’s always kind of been that ratio. And I just hire the best people for the job. I don’t have a whole lot to say. The one thing I would be curious about is that coming from a background of enterprise sales, There was both a lack of representation and a respectful culture for female salespeople to really be able to develop their own skills and not have to kind of align with a bunch of douchey bro sales guy stuff. And that’s changing a little bit now. But again, big sales teams tend to be female unfriendly. even if they’re very talented at their work. And what I would wonder is, there’s definitely to some extent a lack of representation, especially at the more senior level in our industry for female artists, but I’ve never really felt the same level of cultural misalignment. And frankly, I didn’t fit in in big sales teams either. You know, I’m a skinny guy who likes to make dick jokes. Like I just didn’t fit in with the big hardware sales guys. So the easiest way to put it is this came out of an E-metrics conference, this whole concept. I don’t go to a single trade show or conference other than E-metrics where people are sharing best practices, trying to hook each other up. It’s like a very

00:16:29.39 [Tim Wilson]: kind of forgiving and respectful community hook each other up in a professional.

00:16:33.84 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, like here’s some crystal meth. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. No, like if when I’m at a retail conference, if someone did something that worked, they’re going to sell that idea to get a job somewhere else. They’re not going to take you out for a beer and take you through how to be a better, you know, retail paid search guy or whatever it is. I just find our industry is particularly respectful to all comers. It’s global. But again, I’m a boy. I don’t know whether it’s culturally respectful to female analysts in the same way. That’s kind of what I’m curious about.

00:17:04.86 [Tim Wilson]: Chris, how many anecdotes do you have? I mean, that’s the thing where Chris is like the one that’s like, yeah, you’d think that. But my God, the number of douchey guys she’s managed to cross paths with is staggering.

00:17:17.59 [Krista Seiden]: Yeah, Tim and I were in Australia, and I had a guy walk up to me after my presentation who basically said, you’re hot, and I’m going to marry you someday. Which I responded, excuse me, this is a professional conference. And then he just followed it up with the act he didn’t care. I was hot, and he walked away.

00:17:38.73 [Jim Cain]: You should have told him to integrate his API up his own back end. That’s what I would have said.

00:17:43.69 [Krista Seiden]: That would have been good. I was so shocked at the time though, I didn’t have a good comeback.

00:17:47.40 [Tim Wilson]: But I mean, can you imagine if, Chris, to your credit, you’ve now, you’ve been in the industry for a while, you’re comfortable on stage, you’re comfortable in a crowd. I can’t even imagine if that was some analyst who had been in the job for six months or nine months, and they got sent to a conference, so probably wasn’t speaking. and some guy walks up and says that like just represent because that was my reaction when that happened I said are you kidding like what rock did that guy crawl out from under on the one hand like oh that would never happen and of course that was like well yeah that’s kind of what happened in Amsterdam and that’s kind of what’s happened you know so there’s probably starting to march down the feminism writ large path, but like, what moron would actually think in any setting, any time after 1992 that could be that oblivious to appropriate behavior?

00:18:47.36 [Michael Helbling]: Before 92, that was okay, Tim. I mean, come on.

00:18:51.63 [Tim Wilson]: I’m trying to think to the last time that I was- Oh, last time it happened to you. Yeah.

00:18:55.82 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Lee Eisensee proposed to me right after I got off stage one time, but that’s the only person, and I knew he was joking.

00:19:06.83 [Krista Seiden]: To Jim’s point earlier, I do think and agree that our industry is very welcoming on a whole. And that people who are new to conferences, especially something like e-metrics, everybody is there to network, to share ideas and best practices. And they’re all very open to all of the new people who are coming. And I think that’s amazing. I don’t think that that necessarily means that people have moved past some of the kind of gender roles that I’ve felt more recently in Amsterdam, in Australia. You know, another one that happened to me also in Australia was somebody saying, you know, I knew I recognized you, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I Googled your name and I figured out you were the GTM course instructor. you know it’s it’s nice to see that you’re more than just a talking head you know it’s just to think that somebody on camera you know teaching a course is probably just a paid talking head yeah that was that was pretty offensive to me as well but yeah i don’t know it’s it’s kind of hard for me to tie the two worlds together because I do think that our industry is so welcoming and at the same time I’ve unfortunately felt some non-welcoming comments.

00:20:24.48 [Tim Wilson]: I’m trying to think of a company in the analytic space that kind of tends to do highly produced videos with professional actors and actresses. If only I could think of, wait a minute, you really do hate Adobe now, don’t you?

00:20:42.68 [Krista Seiden]: Oh, I had my roots there. I can’t eat them.

00:20:45.67 [Tim Wilson]: So I guess there’s, I mean, there’s the conferences, but then there’s also what’s really happening in companies. And I guess that’s another one where I, my personal, you know, when I was client side, it seemed like I was at fantastic companies or specifically one fantastic company and it seemed like completely and on issue. And it was a company that was very, very engineering heavy. Not that there wasn’t some degree of misogyny and some degree of whatever sexism occurring here and there, but overall as a company, it seemed fairly progressive and enlightened on that front. And I guess I don’t know if any of us have great insight into the state of pick your after your typical large company. And as analysts, we have to struggle so hard to build relationships with the business as it is. I could see take the stereotypical take feminine qualities of being listeners relationship, whatever, when probably I’m being sexist right now. No, I think there’s been plenty of literature. That could be an asset of saying, yes, I can establish relationships. I can listen a little better. I can be responsive, but at the same time is that potentially also that battle of, oh, I’m stuck with not having credibility because there’s latent sexism in the groups that I’m trying to build credibility and rapport and relationships with.

00:22:20.81 [Krista Seiden]: So I mean, I think made a couple of good points. I’ve worked in companies as an analyst where it’s been a fairly even split, men and women. And I’ve also worked on teams where it was five guys and me. So I’ve seen both sides. I do think that at the lower levels, there is a much more even split. But I think as you move your way up the ladder, you see a lot fewer women in leadership positions in analytics and tech and business in general. But I have actually been on the side of things where I’ve been told, hey, in a meeting with engineers, don’t say something like this because they will think that you’re stupid. And, you know, I don’t think that any of the guys in those meetings were told the same thing.

00:23:04.84 [Tim Wilson]: Would have been helpfully coached in that way. Somebody who sort of had the good intention.

00:23:11.17 [Krista Seiden]: But yeah, I mean, it is totally a good intention. And I’m sure that it, you know, helped me in that situation to take that advice. But why do we have to be in situations like that in the first place? Can’t we all be credible just because we’re smart enough to work at these companies and smart enough to be on these teams and these projects already?

00:23:33.26 [Jim Cain]: That’s why it’s called casual racism and casual sexism and not on purpose asshole, right? Someone just spins something because they think it’s appropriate to you when it’s not really particularly appropriate. I was actually wondering if we could go back to the statement you made earlier about, because I would guess that as a senior practitioner, you have all kinds of people asking for your advice. And as a prominent female analyst, you probably have a lot of girls starting their careers asking you questions. You touched earlier on the fact that the engineering or the technical piece of being an analyst can be a turnoff to female practitioners. Is that a thing?

00:24:12.51 [Krista Seiden]: So I don’t know if it’s a thing in particular. I think that the idea of being technical can be scary because generally who you are in meetings with are a bunch of male engineers. And I think for some women, that can be intimidating. It’s never really been too intimidating for me, but I don’t think that I’m necessarily the norm there. I’ve met and talked with a lot of women who do get intimidated in those situations. how we get past that, it’s hard. It’s people taking it on themselves, companies, teams, managers taking it on themselves to try to make and encourage a really inclusive environment. And how you do that without seeming sexist in the first place. Well, I think that we’ve noticed here during this podcast that that’s pretty difficult.

00:25:01.90 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. You know what else is difficult is figuring out what beverage to drink on the podcast. What’s your beverage of choice, Krista?

00:25:12.31 [Krista Seiden]: You know, that’s a great question. So I’d say in the past two years or so, I’ve really taken like a liking to Scotch. And that is actually… Isn’t that a man’s drink? Well, I’ve got a story.

00:25:26.49 [Tim Wilson]: You probably drink it with a lot of ice in it though, right?

00:25:28.84 [Michael Helbling]: Just like a little lady?

00:25:31.28 [Krista Seiden]: No, I drink my scotch neat. So I actually decided a while back that I wanted to drink scotch at an e-metrics in Berlin and I was out with Jim Stern and a few other people and they were drinking scotch and they were having, you know, great conversations about this scotch and it seemed to be like a conversation starter and kind of like a boys club. I was the only girl there and I was drinking a Mandarin vodka soda. So I didn’t really fit in so well. So I decided kind of then that this is something that I wanted to explore. It took me another year or two before I was ready to try it out. Used to kind of make me crazy even the smell of it. And then I happened to be at a after party for a conference and it was a sponsored open bar and I had told a couple of my friends that I really wanted to try to learn to like scotch and so we did a scotch tasting right there and I walked away with at least being able to stand Lagavulin. and from there I really developed a taste for it. But I do think that it is absolutely seen as an in-drink and that one of the biggest reasons that I wanted to drink it was so that I could have conversations and be part of the boys club.

00:26:50.51 [Tim Wilson]: you don’t have to drink scotch to be part of the man’s club to be in analytics, but since Matt Garshoff, who a lot of people know in the industry, and his wife, not defining her as his wife and being sexist, but I’m just drawing the chain to Heather Green, the author of Whiskey Distilled, A Populous Guide to the Water of Life. It’s interesting when you start thinking about women and traditionally male-dominated things. I got that book right after it came out. So if you’re at all interested in Scotch and Whiskies and when it has an E and when it doesn’t, and the history and the background and how to even set up a tasting, it’s a fantastic book. But she actually talks about that early on in the book about, hey, I was in Scotland. I knew Scotch had this thing that it’s a man’s dream. And she’s like, honestly, that it’s got such a perception as that, that women don’t even give it a shot. And plus, if they do give it a shot, then they’re looked at kind of funny. And one of her many missions, I think, is to kind of change that. So there’s a book plug.

00:27:57.97 [Krista Seiden]: I’ll have to check it out.

00:27:59.33 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, you’re getting the copy for subjecting yourself to this.

00:28:02.19 [Michael Helbling]: Also a Lagavulin fan. And it is, that is a stout beverage. So you got into drinking scotch just because of Jim Stern, basically.

00:28:12.72 [Krista Seiden]: Yep. And now almost every time I see Jim Stern, we have some scotch together.

00:28:16.60 [Tim Wilson]: That’s awesome. That does remind me. There’s other little parallels to this. I’ll throw it out. So Annie Duke, I’m not a big follower of poker. I don’t really play. So I’m only vaguely aware when it’s on. But she’s kind of a little bit of a, well, she’s a lot of a legend, I think, in the professional poker world. And it was like, I remember hearing the story years ago, how she kind of got into it because of her brother. And she actually got into it very much because she has an analytical mind. But there was a recent podcast episode new podcast from NPR from Shankar Pranatham the hidden brain where he talked to her and it’s interesting listening to you talk Krista he talked about the stereotype effect and so he was talking about a little broader than just. sexism but another case where she was sitting at the world championship of poker tournament of champions final table you know she was the only female at the table with eight or nine guys and how on the one hand intimidating on how there was a certain level of sexism at play and how it both threw her like she got rattled and talked about at a break being a complete train wreck based on how she was being treated but at the same time kind of turned it around and said oh I can play against that stereotype and kind of use it as a as a motivator which I don’t know that I’d put you at the Annie Duke level from that skewed of an industry or necessarily that major of a stage. But it does seem like there are more and more sort of pockets of examples out there. And it does sort of feel like in analytics, the bar’s not that high. Like I feel like we need to be aware of it, cognizant of it, watching out and aggressively correcting people who don’t seem to be. I mean, honestly, if you’d pointed out that guy, I would have gone and said something to him. Which, oh wow, that sounds bad too. See, it doesn’t need you to be her knight in shining armor.

00:30:14.91 [Tim Wilson]: And it’s more, I want to go and like, really? Like you’re a fucking idiot. Like what?

00:30:19.98 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I cannot fathom the mind boggles. And maybe it’s because that’s just not an experience that any of us has ever had coming off a stage at a conference and then getting a remark or a comment like that, you know.

00:30:32.62 [Krista Seiden]: Yeah, I mean it kind of calls into question like do we need at conferences do we need some kind of like a code of conduct and is that sad that we have to have a code of conduct for because of these types of instances. I was actually talking with my boss about this and he mentioned that he’s never even realized that this could be an issue because he himself has never faced it despite how many stages he’s been on.

00:30:55.48 [Jim Cain]: I’m just again, if you go to a conference and you say no one’s allowed to say anything uncomfortable in douchey, you know, I’m gonna allow you to leave.

00:31:02.53 [Krista Seiden]: None of the three of you would be allowed.

00:31:05.05 [Jim Cain]: I wouldn’t be allowed out of my house. I wouldn’t be allowed to talk, that’s for sure. But, you know, there’s going to be someone like that at every single show, right? I think the interesting thing just comes back to, you know, we project forward 10 years, there will be certain disciplines. And actually, I would be, I was kind of wondering if data science would come up as kind of the companion discipline to digital analytics. And there seems to be a different vibe and a different level of representation to female data scientists in that particular industry as there is in ours. We go forward 15 years. What’s the ratio going to be? What’s the culture going to be like? Where was the glass ceiling placed? Was there one? And I think that in our particular discipline, some people’s minds need to change. But as I mentioned earlier, I think it’s a It’s a more forgiving industry than some of the other ones. But if we go forward 50 years, there’s still going to be a dick at a conference asking if you’re married. Sorry about that one.

00:32:03.54 [Tim Wilson]: It’s true. But even beyond the conferences, I mean, I guess it’s probably fair to say this is episode 24. Along about episode 12 or 13 as we were recording, we reached out to somebody prominent in the industry. He was like, hey, can you come on? And at some point we’ll get him on. And he kind of threw out, you haven’t had any women on. And I would say that one comment has pretty much now constantly hung over our, I mean, since then we’ve had, we’ve had women on not to talk about women in analytics. We’ve got multiple women who have agreed to come on and we haven’t managed to make it scheduling just because they’re solid people in the industry.

00:32:43.59 [Krista Seiden]: But you’re saying I’m helping to fill your quota.

00:32:46.29 [Tim Wilson]: You’re right. It is you’re not hurting that it is sure no crazy the level of I mean this this probably gets to the entire affirmative action I mean it definitely gets into a large large large issue but it was a fair point that we’re saying hey we want to talk about data governance like well you know John love it’s out there talking about data governance let’s get John love it on we want to talk to someone in Europe about analytics in Europe. Well, Matthias Betag is available. So I think there’s a fair outside of conferences and not to say that there were not topics we have not covered where the first name that came to mind wasn’t a male, but it’s kind of a legitimate where I feel like we’ve done a little bit of hand wringing saying, what the fuck? Why is that happening to us? Now, I’ve got a little bit of a theory that the industry is rapidly growing and we are sometimes saying the industry 10 or 15 years ago a lot of times the people we’re trying to bring on are more the middle-aged people who have wound up in consulting or agencies where they’re a little more free to talk. So it may be more of kind of an asynchronous time issue, but I probably spent more brain cycles beating my liberal self up about why, what is going on there? So I think it goes beyond conferences. If that’s happening in companies where they’re saying, well, we happily would have promoted a woman into the leadership position, but gee, we honestly looked at the candidate pool and there were eight men and one woman. And as it turned out, one of the men turned out to be the best candidates. Is there a level of Well, some of this is a time thing. In five years, we’d listen back to this and say it’s laughable. You guys didn’t realize that that hurdle had already been crossed or not.

00:34:49.76 [Krista Seiden]: Yeah, I don’t know. I think that there are significantly fewer women who are well known for their specialties in the industry. And that’s probably because they haven’t necessarily been given as much respect or of a global stage in the past. And that’s why those names still don’t come to mind. But I also think that there’s just a lot fewer women overall. So you’re naturally going to have more men come to mind when you’re talking about a variety of topics.

00:35:17.82 [Tim Wilson]: But once you said you were saying earlier that you sort of felt like at the more at the more junior levels if we don’t say it’s the junior levels because they can’t progress if it’s at the more junior levels there’s a little bit more parody because the gender mix of those entering the industry is getting to a more balanced spot than it will come. I don’t know. I’m not claiming that’s going to happen.

00:35:46.28 [Michael Helbling]: I just want to go and I think what it is just what it’s driven for for me anyway is just some heightened awareness of just trying to be more cognizant of the fact that, hey, yeah, you know, like say for our podcast specifically, yeah, it is interesting. We have not had as many women guests as men guests, and it was sort of eye-opening. And now we do think about it and we try to be more aware, but I don’t know. I mean, Krista, you’re kind of carrying a heavy load in this conversation because you’re representing all women to our audience. At the same time is a heavy load. Well, I think there are a lot of awesome analysts out there who are women who are up and coming who are going to be leaders in our industry and all that we can do to help them along their way and get them to those places of leadership and industry visibility that we can I think that’s that’s kind of what our job is and I’m excited about it. Those women are out there. And we just got to get them, you know, we just got to bring them up and get more exposure and visibility to let other women know this is a great industry for you, not just for guys.

00:37:00.38 [Tim Wilson]: The other kind of data point I have is my is the web analytics Wednesdays in Columbus. And we are getting pretty damn close to 50 50 with the gender mix at those events. And a lot of that I actually see is because we’ve got some of the connections into universities. So a lot of times they’re students who are kind of interested in the space and luckily we have professors who are supporting it saying if you’re interested you should go there. So that’s another one of those where I look at it and say man it’s it’s coming.

00:37:26.90 [Michael Helbling]: Well, listen, we have run up on our time limit, but let’s go around the horn and maybe just share thoughts and impressions. Not necessarily, hey, what did you learn? Chris, what have you learned to see? No, it’s not really that kind of podcast, but I think there’s some interesting takeaways I think for all, for at least us from the show, but let’s go run around and see what people are thinking.

00:37:49.29 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll say for me, this continues to be the murkiest topic. I feel like we got to less resolution. This is one where I have more than ever before would love to have people. Oh, let me be honest. I’d love to have some women chime in on the Facebook page or privately and say your way off base, your perception of it’s heading in the right direction, still a little bit of an issue, we need to be aware. That’s kind of where I feel like we landed. If there are people out there saying, holy cow, specifically as a female analyst, what Krista, her conference experiences happened to me once a quarter in my job, which hopefully is a get the hell out of that job. Like that’s just not good and right, but I’m I now feel like we’ve definitely put Chris in an unfair spot of being, you know, taking the responsibility of representing all women in analytics. I don’t know. I don’t know where we are and how much we should continue to wring our hands about it.

00:38:52.36 [Krista Seiden]: Yeah, you know, I. I think that to your point, the future is bright. I think that there’s a lot more gender equality coming into the industry. And that is definitely led by university and just that younger generation entering the workforce. But I do think we still have a long way to go. And I think that this past hour, we’ve realized that there’s no one answer to this problem or I don’t know if we would consider it a problem or what we even call it because in some ways it seems like there are issues that need to be tackled and in others it seems like equality is right on the horizon. I think the biggest takeaway for me here is really that we need a lot of people, a lot of women, a lot of men to kind of stand up and be those spokesperson for equality and for just making sure that the best person is getting recognition and getting the jobs and the promotions and the events and don’t bring gender into that equation.

00:39:49.02 [Jim Cain]: I was quieter than usual today. I struggled with this one. Again, it’s a difficult one for me because I’m a boy. I’m also a CEO. I get to do whatever I want. I don’t have to go through stuff, but When I think about the Canadian analytics community, some of the most visible members of the community are women. You know, we’ve got June Lee in Toronto. We’ve got Kelly Kubrick here in Ottawa. Moest of the organizers of the metrics in Canada are a female analyst. So the thing I thought was the most interesting about today is that regardless of how not tolerant just kind of accepting our industry is, businesses in general are still a little bit Don Draper, you know? And no matter how progressive I personally think our industry is, people need to wrap their heads a little bit around the fact that it is a gender agnostic business environment, not just an analytics one, you know?

00:40:46.53 [Michael Helbling]: I think for me, I think there’s a couple things I learned tonight that I didn’t know before. One is that I did not realize that our industry could walk up to someone after speaking at a conference and say some of the things that you’ve experienced, Krista, which is just appalling. and that that’s going on just that troubles me and then the other thing is is like I think to what you said it’s sometimes we’re close and sometimes we’re far away but there’s a lot of good things happening and And I think it’s really on all of us to be aware and to drive more of that. And it’s not a, hey, Krista, yeah, you keep working on this whole women and analytics thing. It’s not your job to do. It’s all of our jobs. As somebody who leads a practice of analysts, that’s something I think about all the time. How do I get the best talent? And that best talent is men and women. And how do I make an attractive place for them to work? How do I get them to really be their best professionally? And it doesn’t really matter their gender. Anyway, so these are the kinds of things I’m taking away. And I think, you know, as hard and frankly as awkward as we made the discussion tonight, Krista, thank you so much for Taking the time it’s certainly not something that’s like easy to talk about at all and You yourself being a pretty amazing analyst in your own right Thank you for shouldering that load and kind of helping us see some of that other perspective and helping us learn from it. And obviously, if you’re listening today and you want to talk a little more about this, we’d really encourage you to get to us on Facebook or Twitter or in the measure slack. I think this is a conversation that is certainly not over because we’re not done solving this problem. It’s certainly not something we can do in the space of a podcast. But, you know, our industry is a place for everyone. And the more inclusive and the more equal that we can be, I think the better outcomes we can provide for our clients and our customers and our companies. So we’d love to hear from you. Of course, as always, Krista, thank you so much for coming on the show. Next time we’re at a conference together, Lagavulin’s on us. Well, but only up to the 16 year, because we, you know, we’re not, well, maybe Tim could buy you. Do they do a 21? No. Anyways, the 16-year lagaboo is outstanding, in my opinion. That’s like the quality of average to me. Anyways, so hopefully next time we can share a scotch. But for my co-hosts, Tim Wilson and Jim Cain, keep measuring.

00:43:29.84 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions, facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

00:43:43.80 [Jim Cain]: So smart guys want to fit in. So they made up a term called analytic. Analytics don’t work.

00:43:52.93 [Michael Helbling]: Give me a chance, Tim. OK. Let me wind it all up.

00:44:00.34 [Krista Seiden]: Oh, I love that one. But you’re sitting in with ice. I’m taking you.

00:44:04.59 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, yeah. High five, yeah. You are more of a man than I am. Oh my god. OK, are we going to start this one?

00:44:14.73 [Jim Cain]: I didn’t spend nine months growing a Grade 8 mustache, so I couldn’t have to do stuff like that. That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever said on the show, mother.

00:44:25.45 [Michael Helbling]: That is unprecedented. I’ve never gotten a gift for appearing on this podcast. See, Tim has his podcasts. I have my Netflix documentaries. That is how we maintain equilibrium. When I get Windows 10 installed, you’re all going to be sorry.

00:44:44.20 [Michael Helbling]: Because I bet my camels said no one ever.

00:44:50.69 [Michael Helbling]: Quick, Jim. Say something.

00:44:53.08 [Jim Cain]: So you want me to just say half a word so Tim can just pick the ball and run with it and again?

00:44:57.80 [Tim Wilson]: I know I talk a ton and I feel like I’ve mounted like seven soap boxes more than even normal.

00:45:06.25 [Michael Helbling]: No, you’re just carrying that white liberal guilt, so… It’s definitely… I wasn’t at… I need a woman’s opinion tip about this gym.

00:45:21.43 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, 30 seconds with him is like a day spa.

00:45:27.06 [Tim Wilson]: And you just caught how much gym is held in check for the last hour and 20 minutes.

00:45:34.94 [Jim Cain]: I’m gonna guess that Rhymes never fucking sold anything.

00:45:40.24 [Tim Wilson]: Rock, flag, and women.

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