UTSKRIFT 🔗
MELINDA EPLER: Today we are talking with somebody that I love talking with and always learn from you Danny. Danny Allen, VP of Tech Diversity & Inclusion at SAP Labs. Welcome.
DANNY ALLEN: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you. Pleasure to be here.
MELINDA EPLER: Danny, yeah, again, I really appreciate you and appreciate all of the wisdom and I have learned a lot in every conversation we have had so I am excited to have this conversation with you. Could we start by you just giving us a bit of your story? How you came to be doing what you are doing now.
DANNY ALLEN: So, it is probably not that thrilling but I have been in the tech industry for more than 30 years. I first came in and I was always the 1 of a 1,000 but I think overall since my background was security and cloud engineering, overall, it has been a passion of mine to be most inclusive. My teams were always known as the United Nations. I think there is a plus in that and maybe a minus as well. People recognizing the fact we were very different. Four and a half years ago it was April Fool's Day 2016 I started full time into this focus on underrepresented. Yeah, but the idea is that in the tech industry, if you think about the two income, or wealth creation groupings, you have wall street and then you have Silicon Valley or the tech industry. I was looking at it from the perspective of we have so few people who are engaged that are different. We have so many people making money. We have this need for society to be inclusive and bring everyone along but just the way things are working it wasn't happening. I decided to push forth, focus on this underrepresented and underrepresented for me was, especially with regard to the United States, Black or African-American, Latino, and north/central America and Caribbean and not just people who speak Spanish, Native American or Indigenous folks, and Pacific Islanders. Those are the ones I see underrepresented in the tech industry but realistically it was a matter of trying to bring inclusive equity to where I was career wise.
MELINDA EPLER: Do you mind talking a little bit about your experience as an engineer over the years in Silicon Valley as a Black engineer in particular and kind of what that was like? You have been doing this for quite awhile. I think that's interesting.
DANNY ALLEN: [Laughter] Yeah. So, I think going back, when I first came into the industry I really wanted to be a telecom engineer. I started on the low end as a filled telecom engineer/support person. Shortly after working at NRC on electronic cash registers and all this other kind of good stuff. After leaving Bank of America and I spent three plus years in Asia with Bank of America doing telecom. But in Silicon Valley, it was just, I guess, in a word it was lonely but it wasn't like I was the only person. I mean, we had people at Hewlett-Packard and silicon graphics and sun micro systems that were people of color and in positions of power. There were not a lot of people. There were very few women at all in leadership roles. In fact, that was probably as I started in that area, there were very few people of Indian descent. There were more people who would be considered sino Asian but ultimately it was challenging in the respect you didn't have a lot of people to engage in that were from your background but even though it was lonely, it was kind of better than what I am seeing right now, so... I don't think things have changed much is what I am really getting at. I don't think things have changed much. Early on in Silicon Valley you have to realize it was the Department of Defense and Department of Energy that provided the backbone for what we were doing and if you think of the internet in general, the defense advanced research project agency and DARPA were the front runner. You had people coming out of the military that were more diverse. The companies were maybe more defense-dependent even though when I first came to Silicon Valley I was working for the competitor of IBM at the time. Ultimately, as we saw the government pullback from really these investments in the tech industry to be more of a consumer of technology, even though a lot of the research in the institutions was being funded through the government. You saw the people come in with the adventure money and that's when things really changed. That's when the affinity became really obvious. If you were not from certain groups you were not going to be part of what was happening. Lonely then. Lonely now. There have been some improvements but we haven't changed much.
MELINDA EPLER: You decided then on April's Fools Day 2016 to work on that. To make a difference there.
DANNY ALLEN: In May of 2015 we started what was called SAP project propel. I went to SAP in 2009. At the end of 2012, we started the Black employee network because there were five of us on the campus of 2400. As we progressed through, starting the SAP project propel which is focused on HBCUs and other minority institutions to make the changes, we pushed toward education that would bring those scholars into the mainstream of the tech industry. So they could come in and have a better career and life outcome. In 2016, I basically had had enough. I wasn't seeing the progress. It really comes down to do you just keep doing what you are doing and working on your career or do you really try to make a difference? For me, impact is more important. I wouldn't say it is more important than income but it is very important. [Laughter] Yeah, you need the income to have the ability to do a number of things but for me it was really focusing on putting that foot forward and walking out and saying look, if there is going to be a change, it has to be somebody driving that change. That's really what it comes back to.
MELINDA EPLER: Tell us some of the things that you are working on. You are doing a lot. What are you doing to create change?
DANNY ALLEN: Right now, if you think about accountability, the tech
Load full transcript
industry is very data-driven. In fact, most industries are probably data driven. Looking at what that means in terms of hiring rate, share of workforce, promotion and progression rates, voluntary and involuntary terminations. You look at all those pieces, gender, ethnicity, we don't focus on the LGBTQ+ side of things because SAP is a German company so we are really into this GDPR. The data protection stuff. You would have to identify and then we would go through a bunch of legal stuff. Looking at veteran's status, though, and difference whether that's mobility, vision, hearing, or where you sit on the Autism Spectrum. SAP has a big autism at work program. The focus is to have the reporting so you can tell what's going on and hold people's feet to the fire and say there are things that need to be done. That's the diversity dashboard which I am the business owner of. That's one piece. Ultimately, it is about aligning the talent development with the needs of industry and that's where this push to SAP project propel exists. It is more of a community where we are sharing and trying to bring things along. How do we work with the institutions that are bringing that talent to the market -- generally untapped or underappreciated talent. Internal to SAP, it is more about the embrace and getting people to see each other for the value of their difference. Some of that is working with this inclusive cultural workstream and working to highlight the employee network groups as we call them. You might call them employee resource groups or business resource groups. It is essentially the same thing but with these groups, how do you bring people into the fold where they are actively engaging and advocating for their particular perspectives and how do you also look at the people who have gone in and become leaders of those groups so you can move them into management roles. That's a little bit more difficult but one of the pieces that's happened. That is inclusive cultural workstream in addition to what we do trying to identify who is an inclusive leader and how you pattern after that. It is kind of a pattern matching thing where you want people to immolate somebody who is doing something really good. Those are two pieces. The dashboard for accountability/the focus on embracing difference. Then what are we doing in terms of our initiatives? I lead an initiative called triple-double which is more of a metaphor for outstanding performance. In basketball, it is that excellent performer in three categories they have done something. It could be in rebounds, points scored and steals or whatever but it is outstanding performance. When you look at what's the benefit of having a diverse talent pipeline, it is having the ability to bring in the difference which makes you better based upon the research whether you talk about McKenzie or anybody else. The other piece of that is how do you find the people who are going to be decision makers, the executive leadership? Part of those
initiatives are identifying who could come in as executive leaders and try to get them on board. The third part is about building the ecosystem. The challenges we have had is we always go back to we need the pipeline. We don't have the pipeline. Pipeline is, you know, a convenient excuse. The truth is you need the people in your pipeline that aligned with your needs as a company. Back to the school piece, and then our specific initiatives looking at who fits in it. But how to you build such that it is self-fulfilling and that's where the ecosystem system comes in. The talent doesn't have to come to SAP -- you can go 40,000 plus customers and over 20,000 partners and some of the partners are household names like Google, Microsoft, Apple but they are also Accenture and other places. Expose venture founders and small companies or maybe companies that have been around for awhile and expose them to the greater ecosystem and in some cases accelerate those who are in the industry and get them moved along into the B2B space and the other piece is to contract with them. In short, there is a lot of stuff we are working on. I am responsible for the triple-double initiative and I have been responsible for the inclusive culture workstream and I am responsible for the diversity dashboard and I am looking to get rid of some responsibility.
MELINDA EPLER: [Laughter] It is a lot.
DANNY ALLEN: It is actually too much.
MELINDA EPLER: Yeah but I think it is -- I do think it is important. You say ecosystem and for one specific piece of what you are doing but I think all of that is addressing different pieces of the ecosystem. I think that is a really key piece of diversity, equity and inclusion work and really creating change and looking at all the different pieces that come together to make that change happen. You definitely see a lot of companies focused on the pipeline and it is bigger than that. You need to focus on the ecosystem level of multiple different pieces that all work together to create change.
DANNY ALLEN: Exactly. Change is really what we are after. When I started looking at numbers back in 2016 when I finally got some of the diversity reporting authorized and started looking at the numbers. What I have noticed the numbers generically stay about the same. I think that's true across the industry especially the tech industry. I don't know about Wall Street but when you consider the tech industry is making millionaires and wall street is making millionaires and even if you are not going to be a millionaire you can have a decent living, I think what we are missing out on is the growth. The reflection of society as we focus as kind of a 2030, 10-year goal, how do we reflect society? You see a lot of women coming out of college with an S.T.E.M. degree and hangout for a year or two and are like this is not the place to be. Or you see people come out, especially underrepresented folks, come out of school and they have S.T.E.M. degrees and they can't even
get a job in the field. How do we change those dynamics? Change is what we are after.
MELINDA EPLER: What does allyship look like for you? What is allyship to you?
DANNY ALLEN: I always say there is three components of the engagements in general. Allyship can be in the coaching side of things, it can be in the mentoring side of things, or it could be in the sponsorship side of things. Allyship has an umbrella to say these are people who go beyond empathy toward compassion. How do we make change? Sometimes it is about that coaching and helping you and assuming they are in a position to help, which most people are regardless of where they think they are, is it about pulling more out of you to highlight your value? Highlight your capabilities so that you, yourself can see them because typically people get beat down over time? Or is it more about helping you navigate which way you go and that's that mentorship piece. You know? You come off this way in the meetings and I understand you are not trying to do that but maybe if you do this and talk to so and so. You know, that kind of navigation stuff is part coach/part mentor. And on the sponsorship side, and I heard something one time that really stuck in my mind, you don't always know who your sponsors are. In fact, probably some of your best sponsors you have no clue about. You have no idea they spoke up for you. Used any of their capital to move you along. A tremendous ally is someone who has compassion for your displacement, lack of inclusion or lack of equity and they speak up and advocate for you whether or not you know it. It goes beyond helping you self-advocate to the point of someone advocating for you. Allyship as an umbrella concept means doing something for others that they need and can help in terms of their advocating.
MELINDA EPLER: Advocacy is a part of allyship, yeah. In the work you do around diversity, equity and inclusion, how does empathy play a role?
DANNY ALLEN: That's the table stakes. Without taking the time to consider someone's plight or consider looking around for a moment. Thing about oh, I guess, yeah, they probably will feel lonely if they are the only person in the world. It is tablestakes. The key to finding the problem to be solved is to at least gain empathy. Try to understand from the perspective of those who will be served will be the target audience. How do they view certain things? Just getting that piece, I think, helps tremendously in terms of understanding and getting a basic understanding. It is putting it into play and saying not only do I have a feel for what you are saying and I can't walk in your shoes but I have heard what you said and let me see if I can help. Empathy is a starting point.
MELINDA EPLER: Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about -- I think a lot of folks that listen to the podcast and that are on now are focused on diversity, equity and inclusion in their companies. Can you talk about the diversity dashboard and what's on that and how
that works? How that works to hold people accountable ultimately.
DANNY ALLEN: You can set as many goals as you want but if you don't track the data you can't manage it. The diversity dashboard, we set a goal of 30% women in management. We had one that was 25% and we reached it early so we upped to 30%. We have another goal of gender equity by 2030. When you look at the workforce, whether it is in the region, or looked at globally, you have to have a way to track what are you doing in terms of your trends. Trend lines, looking at specific groups within the company, looking at locales, trying to find if there is a hotspot where you may find that the leadership is not following along with the general plan. The reason it looks good, but there is one location, it was like something is wrong here. You know. It was like flashing lights but there are no flashing lights now. The geomap is good. The dashboard includes all of the details in general on a workforce share and that workforce share could be regional or global or you can brain it down many ways. It looks at progression and promotion rates. In the case of women, is the progression and promotion rate lower than for men? You are looking for items that pop up because bias is not always visable. You are looking for those underlying -- visible -- areas that need a little more exploration. Look at -- we don't have pay equity in there. Legal doesn't want to have everybody looking at this stuff so I don't think we would get that. You look at attrition. Why are these people leaving so early? You think about ageism is a big deal.
MELINDA EPLER: You cut out. Sorry to interrupt. You cut ought. You said you focus on attrition --
DANNY ALLEN: Can you hear me OK? Oh, my connection is unstable but can you hear me?
MELINDA EPLER: We can hear you now.
DANNY ALLEN: Attrition is a big thing. What you are looking for is you want to be able to drive towards some observations that you otherwise wouldn't get. Just finding the attrition and other aspects those are the things that are important. That's what the dashboard is used for. Oh, and you were asking more so about the accountability. If you have a group that is not performing well, the dashboard gives you the data to help them along. An incentive, let's call it. If we were at the point where those incentives were aligned with your pay, it would make it easy to say you need to make a change. The dashboard is not meant to blame or shame. It is meant to inform. That's the perspective.
MELINDA EPLER: And just kind of thinking about it practically, how do you engage leaders in that dashboard? How are you working with them to do that?
DANNY ALLEN: The easiest way is through the HR business partners. People who they have to depend on to do whatever it is in their interest for their particular group because it is always -- when you talk about people, and people management, it is HR. It is coaching the HR business partners to utilize the data to inform the leader to
help them see the bigger picture and to keep them aligned with what the corporation is setting as targets. We don't have quotas but we have targets. The HR business partners. Other times it might be diversity and inclusion lead whether it for a board area or the region. I am part of the global team. But it is -- I would say primarily it is about sharing enough of the data, especially when you see a negative trend, to help them be better informed and be more pore performant.
MELINDA EPLER: Kind of going around the ecosystem a little bit, you are also working with startups. Can you talk a little bit about that work and how that relates to all of this? How that relates to, you know, creating change?
DANNY ALLEN: There is one thing that's really unique about SAP and I think most corporations have some corporate venture capital group. SAP has SAP.iO. The SAP.iO operation has a funding arm so we call it the fund and an accelerator arm and they call that the foundry. It has an initiative called no boundaries and that no boundaries initiative is the focus on women and other underrepresented founders, helping them get into the ekes, the business to business ecosystem, which SAP is a big player in. And there is also the opportunity to generate funds, or give them funds to grow on but tying with those operations, especially when you have an underrepresented founder, bringing them further into the network or the ecosystem, tying them back to the contracting aspects of supply and diversity, those are the pieces that are most important. Beyond things like SAP.iO the emphasize -- emphasis is about giving another avenue as opposed to employment for a lot of these individuals. Giving them the avenue of their own entrepreneurship to bring something into the fore that we need industry-wise. There is quite a bit of work with venture capital firms and LPs and GPs just to understand what they are doing and try to see if there is a way we can work together to help support those operations.
MELINDA EPLER: I think a lot of people, you know, it is another level of working on that ecosystem and change because what happens, ab in -- a number of things. One is wealth generation and the ability for underrepresented people to grow the next wave of tech companies and we thrive there. I think also it is, you know, a lot of work in the tech industry and hiring comes from mergers and acquisitions. I assume that's a piece of it too. You know, that potentiality --
DANNY ALLEN: I wish I could cover --
MELINDA EPLER: I think but that startup ecosystem is a part of that as well, right?
DANNY ALLEN: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think if you step back for a second, so African-American women are the number one entrepreneurs in the United States. I think women in general are the others but African-American women and Latinas are the tops. They are also the least supported. And they are, at the same time, bringing into play aspects that we just had not seen before. Just different perspective on the businesses. So finding a way to support them, I think, is critical for society. I don't think it is just for the tech industry. I think for society. Some are those who are the providers for their families but regardless we are leaving way too much talent on the table. The other side of it is that underrepresented firms, startups, are focused on profitability, very early on profitability. And tell me, did that happen with Google? Did that happen with Twitter? Or Facebook? I mean, pretty much you name it. That's not the way things work. You get funded for growth. So the idea is how do we setup -- how do we advocate and network to help these firms get the funding they need to grow and to really fully blossom into whatever area that they came up with. Those are the pieces we think are really important. Yeah. It is a challenge. I will just put it that way. It is a challenge.
MELINDA EPLER: And important for us to solve.
DANNY ALLEN: Very.
MELINDA EPLER: I am going to go to questions in a few minutes. So if you y'all have questions, please, put them in the Q&A. I am seeing a lot come up. Before we go to the questions, so you have been working on diversity, equity and inclusion for about fives years. Is that right?
DANNY ALLEN: Five years April Fool's -- April Fools' Day. It is really April 1st.
MELINDA EPLER: I have been working on this for -- well, I mean in this capacity in diversity and inclusion in the tech industry for about six years. We have talked about how it is frustrating because it is not moving at the level that I certainly thought it would when I first started. It is a -- it takes a lot of work and all of us working together and it takes us really investigating what works and what doesn't work because I think a lot of times we grab on to something that's easy and not necessarily something that works. And something that other people have done which doesn't mean it necessarily works. My question to you is what do you think is really going to -- what do you believe is really going to move diversity, equity and inclusion forward?
DANNY ALLEN: I think it is the connection with business. It is where companies not only see the research but they see the reality for their operation that they are more profitable now that they brought these people in. I think there has been some recent information on female CEOs as an example. One of the things I like to do is if you find a stock and it looks like it is doing well, or at least holding its ground when everybody else is falling and you look at the leadership team and go oh, OK. It is that kind of realization. I think the tie to business and the profitability, to the relevance of a company, is where it comes in and I do not believe, and I may have to be careful how I say this -- or let me rephrase this. I believe it is important for businesses, the leaders of the businesses to recognize that being inclusive and equitable is to the best interest of the shareholders. Quite
honestly, most leaders are running companies, they are themselves also shareholders or their compensation is tied to share prices. You know, the market capitalization of a firm. If we can start really managing this thing and again back to this diversity dashboard and analytics, if we can start showing the connection between the companies standing, whether it is the top 6 brands or highest profitability in the particular area, or its growth overall. You know, the net promoter score or whatever they are using. If you can use those as measures to look at what have we changed and if that change is the inclusiveness of the company then you have something that ties back and it is like ah, that's a no-brainer. Then you start to change behavior because ultimately it is behavior we have to change. People do not change without incentive. When you have a lot of people brought in because you want to look good, you know, you are a company and you want to say that we are very progressive and we are the place to work, and so you bring in a lot of people, but they don't stay and they don't have a sense of belonging, that's also an indicator. Those are the things that you want to do. Bring it down to the bottom line. Go beyond research. Companies and individuals have always said that's the research but that's not us. Regardless of how closely it aligns with their particular operation. You need to make it real of them so it is about business.
MELINDA EPLER: Just jumping into some questions. There is a question from Jamaal around how you went from engineering to diversity. Did you have to -- he asks did you have to start in HR in order to go into the diversity or did you take a specific course? How did that you make that transition?
DANNY ALLEN: You know, it probably would have been a good idea to take a course. The thing I learned is in engineering it is all about solving the equation. First you figure out the equation, figure the constants and variables and plug everything in and get output. This should be straightforward. I know what we need to do to make these changes. That's not diversity. By the way, as D Blackman would say diversity is a practice, inclusion is the goal and equity is the -- I have never had a psychology class. I look at it based upon just human behavior. I went from my role running global DevOps, to this focus in Silicon Valley on tech diversity, staying in the development organization. It was only last year I switched to HR. The very first time I have been in HR. Look, I have ruined two companies and there is an HR component of it but HR at a major corporation is a whole different thing. I think it really comes down to, and I am reading into Jamaal's question, I think it comes down to what fits for you. How do you see your ability to have impact? Does that mean you have to be in HR or can you be in some specific line of business and get things moving? I think it is very important to be tied to the business regardless. HR is one aspect. But
tied to the business is the key. In my case, I switched into HR late. It was a good move. It was just late.
MELINDA EPLER: Yeah. We have a couple questions around the diversity dashboard. One is from mandy. When you set your hiring goals in the dashboard, what benchmarks do you look at to set the reasonable but national goals? As a B corp they are aware using census data may not be appropriate and they want to lead in the initiative.
DANNY ALLEN: I think there is two parts of this. If you say it reflects on society, yeah, you are looking at lagging indicators to give you an idea. You probably have to base that off of percentages of population. When you look at your hiring rates what you are looking for is equity. Am I hiring 75% men and 25% women? Am I hiring 90% white? You know, Silicon Valley I think our ratios are close to -- just in general for tech, 50-something percent whatever it is white males or white I will say. No offense to anybody. Just you know, Black, white, whatever. And then the rest is Asian. By the way, an Asian now is not Chinese or Vietnamese but India is everybody from Asia and then everybody else. Some single digit percentages of everybody else. I think what you are looking for, ultimately, and what I am looking for is equity. If you are hiring, you know, in one case you are trying to improve your numbers so you may have to skew more toward hiring women. In the other cases you are really just looking for fairness, you know? Do you hire women at the same rate you hire men? Do you hire people of different ethnicity as everyone else? The dashboard is about informing you and giving you an idea of what's happening. You are ultimately after information that's not so visible. I hope I answered the question.
MELINDA EPLER: Yeah. The second question from Steve. How did you go about getting buy-in from leadership around the dashboard? Anything happening around Black lives matter? Was there anything that happened over the few months that was different. -- Black Lives Matter.
DANNY ALLEN: I think senior leaders are more willing to make commitments. In my case, and what we are looking at, is equity across the board so a reflection of society. Not just Black and African-American but Latinx and Native and also pacific Islanders and others. To level set it a reflection of society. That's the focus. The efforts we have on the dashboard and everything else quite proceeded any of the non-sense that has further upset us. And again, you and I talked about this. The only thing that's really different and out of my lifetime the only thing that's really different about the past few months has been the excessive stress that comes from being sheltered in place and then seeing people like you or your family murdered on television over and over and over again. It is traumatizing. That doesn't mean it didn't happen before. It means now people use their cameras off their smartphones to expose some of this stuff. We very appreciative of that. Maybe not the cadence of seeing the same thing over and over again. It is heartbreaking. Really, the thing that's different, I think, is -- and let me put this into context but for me Black Lives Matter is a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement. We re-brand efforts from time to time. No offense to anybody but I see it as a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement and I don't see Black Lives Matter being only about Black people. I mean, what we are talking about is equitable treatment. That's all we are really talking about here. That is the same thing as the Civil Rights Movement. Equitable treatment. Realize even with Dr. King there were people from the Jewish communities and other communities that were part of that movement. You don't see it. History is always skewed in one way or another but the truth is what's different about this one, and I think the reason maybe more of our leaders have jumped in and made commitments, is because if you look at whose out there protesting? Those aren't just Black people. In general, it used to be if they were just Black people it was called a riot and they were put in jail and beat up and done one way or another. You have people from all groups out there. The country, the world, everybody has to pay attention. What we are talking about an equity here.
MELINDA EPLER: Yeah. Question from Andrew. To manage your diversity goals at SAP, apart from hiring goals, do you have annual or semi-annual secession planning? You talked a little bit about that. You know, what do you do there? Do you have meetings? Do you have goals/metrics around that so it is not just an HR initiative but something leadership team owns?
DANNY ALLEN: Yeah, so there is promotion and progression rates -- looking for equity there. And then, of course, as you look through the ethnicity side of thing then you can get some more intersectional points for that one. Succession planning -- interesting question. That was exposed as an area that we were not putting enough emphasis on. What we are trying to do is first, get a single source of truth across the board. There were multiple dashboards and ad hoc reporting and no. We want consistent, single source of truth to address all of this. You can't say my data is better than yours or whatever. Single source of truth. Promotion and progression rates and the organizations all the way from the first year off the board and all the way down, that's when now you can say on the secession plan, this is what it has been looking like to be equitable I need to make sure someone in my succession line is different than me. Those are the pieces we are moving towards. Really good question. I kind of chuckle because yeah, that was the observation. Again, with the data you can find a lot of stuff. You would be shocked. It is just like think about diversity. You can't always tell what somebody is by looking at them. You know, there is the visible and invisible aspects of difference but data you are shining the
spotlight on whatever that factor is. You have to find the right data to expose difference. What you keep doing is chipping away until you go I found the gold mine. That kind of deal. Secession planning and secession, you know, I say execution and I know that's a bad word, but activation is very important. It is very important. You have to look at that. Promotion and progression stuff has been looked at but we have a ways to go still.
MELINDA EPLER: Awesome. Yeah, there is always more to do. Yeah. [Laughter] Sin asked something, the next question around that in terms of difference is, you know, you mentioned you can only look at some variables, particularly because you have the European side where you can't measure some things. Her question specifically is how does SAP ensure data driven DEI strategies don't disregard unmeasurable variables? How do you make sure you are keeping those in mind?
DANNY ALLEN: First of all, it is always about finding a way around the data protection and privacy folks to define what can be captured. There is a lot of data that gets captured and may not be flagged for reporting or even if is flagged for reporting it may be restricted in who can see it because the way it law works is if there is something like this you have to have a focus on mitigating the issue whatever the issue is that you find. That's the law. I think that's true in most countries. In terms of things that you don't see, I mean -- we capture so much data. It is about not identifying the individual. I don't want to mistake what we are looking at. It is aggregated data. We are not trying to expose any individuals personal data. If your diversity is so small that it is easy to guess who that you can't report it. It is below reportable levels. If you are talking about religion, there are certain things. Religion, politics. From this particular political party or they are this particular religion, all sorts of things. You are not going to be able to report that. There is no legal way around that. Maybe if you were an organization specifically for politics but most cases not in corporations. You don't ask people about their political affiliation. I don't know if corporations are asking for people's identity -- how they identify themselves pan-gender or, you know, however, you know, whatever it is. I don't see them asking those questions. I think because there is a legal implication that you may use that data to discriminate against somebody. So it is within reason but if there is a suggestion for something that we are missing, please, let me know because I am all about the data.
MELINDA EPLER: Danny, if there was one thing that you could ask people to do as allies right now, what is that? What is that one thing?
DANNY ALLEN: It is a really simple thing. Again, I mentioned that not all difference is visible. It is so simple and that's just to communicate. Just to have a conversation. I used to always say when people came into the company the number one thing you need to do is network. Network with somebody who is thought part of your team that is just different than you. You know, they might have a different accent or tall or short or whatever. Just talk. Just talk to people and because, as we mentioned earlier on, empathy is the first step. You don't gain empathy without communication. It just doesn't happen. I mean to my knowledge. And again, I didn't study psychology so I am not a social psychologist or anything like that so I could easily be wrong but from my perspective, I have to start with communication. Gain empathy through conversation and potentially you can move toward compassion and help when it is coaching, mentoring, or sponsoring. A good ally is somebody who will first listen and then secondly act.
MELINDA EPLER: Love it. Thank you this. Thank you for sharing all of the knowledge you gained around this and doing all of the work that you do.
DANNY ALLEN: Thank you. Thank you. You know, I have always found that the work you are doing and exposing to a larger audience are the pieces that may not always seem so straightforward. There are a lot of organizations doing things but very few are truly informing and helping people move beyond just listening to action, so I do appreciate what you are doing so thank you.
MELINDA EPLER: Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah, thank you for joining. I want to dedicate this episode to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. RBG. And to John Lewis as well. Both of whom recently passed and have been important role models for me and people who have inspired me over the years. And to everyone, who has dedicated their lives and livelihood to make a difference for other people often pushing through significant barriers and taking personal risk to do that. Remember to keep taking action. Remember to keep moving forward to create as much needed change and vote.