Name: Women who Qlik
Uploaded: 2025-05-14T15:30:00.000Z
Duration: 16 min 52 s

Clips
More from Qlik Connect 2025

Stephanie Robinson

BI Manager, Qlik Platforms

JBS USA Pilgrims

Sadie St. Lawrence

Founder & CEO

Human Machine Collaboration Institute

Miranda Foster

VP of Communications

Qlik

play_circle_outline Women in Data movement and empowerment

play_circle_outline Importance of mentorship and diversity in the industry

play_circle_outline Qlik's role in empowering women in data

play_circle_outline Challenges and opportunities for women in tech and data

Info
Transcript

Women who Qlik

Stephanie Robinson

BI Manager, Qlik Platforms JBS USA Pilgrims

Sadie St. Lawrence

Founder & CEO Human Machine Collaboration Institute

Miranda Foster

VP of Communications Qlik

Sadie St. Lawrence, founder and chief executive officer of the Human Machine Collaboration Institute; Stephanie Robinson, IT business intelligence manager of Qlik platforms at JBS USA Pilgrims; and Miranda Foster, vice president for worldwide communications at Qlik, join theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Qlik Connect to discuss community, inclusion and the future of women in data. Their conversation centers on the Women Who Qlik initiative, showcasing how mentorship and grassroots networks are shifting the landscape for women in tech.

St. Law... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What is the current state of women in data? add

What is one important factor in encouraging women to enter male-dominated fields? add

What advice would you give to individuals looking to branch out into new skills, such as AI, while still leveraging their existing background? add

What is the agenda for the Women Who Qlik session? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Women who Qlik

>> Welcome back and everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Qlik Connect 2025. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Bob Laliberte here. Kristen Nicole Martin out doing the roving report, getting all the action, all the data and all the insights. Of course, all the actions happening on theCUBE and here on the show floor. Of course, the keynote kicked off today. We've got a great Women in Data panel, Miranda Foster, VP of communications at Qlik. Steph Robinson, BI Manager, Qlik Platforms at JBS. Welcome back. And Sadie St. Lawrence, founder and CEO of HMCI, also the founder of Women in Data. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> Happy to be here.

>> So first question is, there's a panel coming up in this afternoon, five to six, I want to get into that, but the Women in Data movement is key and stories power movements. Give us an update, Steph, on what's going on, the motivation, the vibe, what's the current state of women in data?

Stephanie Robinson

>> Sure. So if you look at women in data, you find that you have a lot of young girls and women who when they're in school they love data, they're good at mathematics. But when they actually start to graduate, they don't go into STEM or IT. And this is one of the things we found, I think there's like 24% of girls out of school are going into IT type careers to study. And of that, there's less than 15% actually to kind of move up and then end up in management positions. And we kind of started Women Who Qlik as the luminary group. So it was myself, it was Gwen and Priscilla. And we were in London this one day in one of our meetings and we noticed there was 3 women and about 30 men in the room. And it was nothing to do with, oh wow, there's so many men. It was just why so few women? So we kind of came up with this, we need to do something about it, and it's become now quite a movement. So it's become very grassroots with a lot of sponsorship from Qlik. We have thousands of women now reaching out to us from all walks of life really interested into how do they get more empowered and have a voice in the industry.

>> Share a story that illustrates that because I think data is not a computer science thing or IT thing. Data is data. I mean data opens the aperture for all kinds of different skills in business tech. I mean it's huge.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Exactly.

>> Give a story of where this impact around Women in Data.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Well, one really interesting story, and I'm not going to name a name, but there was one girl who reached out to me on LinkedIn. Young mom, had no IT background whatsoever and not even a Qlik person, just kind of heard about it and reached out. I started talking to her. So she said, well, how do I learn IT? She can't really go to college, she's got children. It's not kind easy for her. So I said, start to learn Qlik. So she actually now has moved from learning Qlik to learning how to code in Qlik to working in a company that has Qlik and now she's gotten herself into an IT field. And that's the power of just giving a voice and giving kind of a space where people can realize you don't have to be computer science trained or anything you can make that happen.

>> And what's interesting, Steph, is that here at Qlik, one of the things that I'm really proud of is to be a part of an all-female marketing leadership team.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Amazing.

>> So under Chris Powell, our chief marketing officer, he has an all-female leadership team. So even this conference is a great example of women coming together to put on amazing things and we couldn't do it without each other. So it's like a cross-collaboration and I think that that's really a good example of a group of women who have come together to build something fantastic and we all work together.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Yes, that's amazing. I love that. I so love that.

>> I do too.

>> Talk about the community setting. This is the Women in Data, it's a community-building network that's growing. Talk about some successes, you've had examples, kind of where's the community forming? Is it horizontal? Is it narrowing? Talk about the community.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> Yeah, so the broader Women in Data community is about 70,000 strong and we partner with Qlik on a lot of initiatives. They actually sponsored for Ada Lovelace Day last year, 10 scholarships that provided mentorship, learning pathways in data engineering, data science, data analytics. As you mentioned, it's different than just computer science. You can pretty much put data in front of any word now and it's a new job that's forming and evolving. So what's happening that we're seeing is, not only are people coming in for new career changes that are happening, but there's new pathways being evolved. So we first started with data analytics and data engineering and now expanding into a lot of the AI work that's happening as well. And we heard that today with some of the announcements in the keynotes. It was really excited to see Qlik Answers. Last week I actually built a RAG model with Qlik Answers and so excited to see what more things we can do and how data really is now evolving into the AI world and what careers it enables for women I think is really the story that we want to share.

>> Miranda, we use the word democratization over and over again. Now with AI, the Answers meets the analytical cloud that Qlik has. You essentially, if you know how to ask the question, you're going to get an answer. Okay, zoom out. The human in the loop isn't a man in the loop or a woman in the loop, it's a human. So human in the loop drives all the performance, that's the theme we heard from Adam on the cycling team that you guys sponsor. The data supports everything. So you got a new phenomenon. It's not new to the world, but humans are driving it. So that's everybody. This is a huge advantage.

>> Well, Sadie talked about new pathways and I was actually going to chime in and say with the explosion of AI, it's going to open so many new doors, not just for women, but young women, women out of college. You talked a little bit about that and one of the things that Ritu said on stage today because I think Mike asked her directly, are people going to lose their jobs? No. It's quite the opposite. It's going to create new opportunities and new pathways and new opportunities for these young women, women like the woman who reached out to you on LinkedIn to come in and potentially have new career opportunities. So I think it's actually a wonderful evolution and will open a lot of doors.

Stephanie Robinson

>> I think it's really important too, so I think one of the things that's vital, vital is to let women know that they can go into these fields because they do tend to be male dominated. I don't know why, they just do tend to be male dominated. And I think women tend to feel like they can't speak or reach into these areas. And I don't have any statistics as to why that is, but one of the things I do know that's very, very, strongly is that mentorship, whether it's a mentorship from a man or a woman, around women really can help bring them up. So one of the things that we also do with Women Who Qlik is really promote mentorship to kind of help bring people into these fields and change those statistics that I was talking about.

>> Yeah, mentorship, also sponsoring and identifying value that because the theme here at Qlik Connect is unlocking the value of the data, right?

Stephanie Robinson

>> Yes.

>> So when you look at the old school, just some trends we're covering on SiliconANGLE, theCUBE is the world was databases, SQL queries. So those are nerdy tech things now that's being abstracted away to business logic, which there's no discussion of queries. They're just, hey, I want an answer. You can voice prompt this. So prompting the AI wave is huge change. How do you guys see the GenAI impact? Because are there strategies for people to learn? How do people approach this? How do other women share their stories? Because now with AI, it's a level setter. You don't have to go to some Ivy League school or have a pedigree or whatever, you can come in and level up.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Right. And I think that's one of the things about Qlik. So I got into IT because of Qlik. So I had a art background, actually, not a data background. But it was because of Qlik that I learned how to code and I learned everything and ended into an IT field. And I think now with AI and with everything that's coming out and what the future holds, I think that's going to be personified probably 1,000 times because there's so much opportunity and it's about women reaching out for that opportunity.

>> You know what I find, Miranda, we talked about sports last night, I know you're a huge sports fan, and Qlik by the way is huge sports culture in the DNA, which I love. But sports and music seem to be two themes. Art, sports, so crafts and not nerdy stuff, although there's a lot of great nerd action going on with all the tech. But when you start getting into solutions, it's teamwork, it's creativity, it's performance like sports or art or music. The keynote had one person playing a guitar, but other people playing with him. So doing it differently is the theme here. That's a game changer. So how do people get to a comfort level, women, other women to say, okay, I can dominate. Is there strategies that you guys see? Are there workflows?

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> Yeah. I mean I think, like you mentioned, AI is a great democratizer because it allows more pathways for people to come in. The tools are there, the education, the mentorship is there, the support. What really we want is people bringing their diverse backgrounds in. So if you have a background in music, you're going to have a different perspective, a background in sports. If you're coming from a marketing background and want to add in new AI skills or add in generative AI skills to imagine things differently. So I think the main message is, take whatever your background is, don't throw that out because useful and just add on these new skills, add on learning a new tool like Qlik. I mean I was so impressed last week with Qlik Answers and what I was able to build in literally a matter of minutes. 10 years ago I got into this space and I remember learning R and having to take forever learning to code. And I'm like, this is such a game changer. I wish I was starting over now because it would have been so much easier. So if anything, I just encourage more people to explore this area and bring in their diverse background, whatever that may be because we need that unique perspective to create new solutions.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Stephanie Robinson

>> And don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't be afraid to tap a colleague on the shoulder and say, hey, can I get some advice? Or would you like to be my mentor? Because I mentor a lot of women in our company and I've had the great fortune of being mentored and I just think that is so important because, like you said, we all have such a diverse skillset. We can certainly learn from each other.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Yes, absolutely.

>> So you guys got a lot going on. There's a big event here in the venue. If you're watching on site, if you're not here then you can go figure it out what's going on later. Probably online, maybe a blog post. What's happening? What's this event? It's five to six.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Five to six, yes.

>> Women Who Qlik five to is the session. What's the agenda?

Stephanie Robinson

>> I think it's five of us on stage and it will really be just a discussion around women in tech and women in data and just really kind of all the different challenges. What is a different challenge that a woman has? A mom with a 2-year-old and a newborn and having to juggle being on an IT help desk. How do you kind of work with that? I gave that example because my daughter. But, there's challenges there. So how do women move into tech? How do women move into data? How do they juggle all the challenges of being a woman, which is different to being a man and wonderful. So we're going to have a lot of discussion around that, a lot of different stories, how we all kind of ended up where we came, how Women Who Qlik came about, what the future's going to hold for Women Who Qlik and Women in Data and where that's going to go and how we can just empower more women and inform more men to help mentor more women. So it's going to be very encompassing and very fun and there will be a happy hour.

>> Of course, that's always the best part. How do people get involved in the community? Is there any kind of coordinates you can share? You got some great stuff going on. So Miranda, what do you got going on?

Stephanie Robinson

>> On the Qlik website, there is a Women Who Qlik page and there will be sending more out about that. We do a lot of LinkedIn Lives. We were on Data, I forgot the last name of it, on LinkedIn. So we do a lot of different stuff and then we're always inviting other women to come in and speak, but we're going to be looking at doing some women training, getting people into doing some of the exams, the Qlik exams. We've got a whole bunch of ideas coming up. So we'll talk about some of those tonight. And we have really cool swag.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> and I'd encourage everybody, womenindata.org, we have 55 chapters in 70 countries.

Stephanie Robinson

>> That's amazing.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> So there's somewhere that you can connect with pretty close to you. And if it's not close to you, you're welcome to start a new chapter. So always welcome to bring more people into the community that way.

>> Yeah, really appreciate that. What a great community you have there. Congratulations. Final lightning round ending question is breakthroughs are all about AI, humans making breakthroughs with data. Share a breakthrough story that you each of you might have had over the past year that came from data. Doesn't have to be Qlik, it could be whatever, a breakthrough, what happened that was compelling.

Stephanie Robinson

>> So a breakthrough in data?

>> Could be anything. Could be a better commute home or some innovation, some breakthrough that you leveraged data with that either surprised you or made the company successful or anything.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> I can go first one. I got one.

Stephanie Robinson

>> let me think. Thank you.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> At HMCI we did a study on how AI could be used at work. And what we did was we took job descriptions, pulled out every task from a job description and then paired that with data on AI use cases. And it was really insightful because what we found was that AI cannot do your full job just as we talk about, but we have data to back it. But what it could do, it could help with about 35% of tasks. And we were able to pinpoint down where I could use AI really specifically for what task in my life and for the rest of our team, which was fantastic. So, that's my favorite AI use case.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Mine is similar. So I run communications for the company. So obviously I do a lot of writing. I do a lot of writing on behalf of our executives and it's fascinating to me. First of all, the AI tool gets smarter the more you use it and it will get you 80% of the way there. So my efficiency, my productivity has increased astronomically because if I'm writing, let's just say, an email to the board or on behalf of the CEO or something like that, I can talk to my AI tool and it will write whatever I tell it to write. You have to humanize it and that's where the human factor comes into it. But my efficiency and productivity has increased significantly. My boss calls ChatGPT our junior copywriter.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> I love that.

>> That's a great assistant too.

>> It's a great assistant.

>> It gives you feedback. Too much jargon, way too much jargon.

Stephanie Robinson

>> So I did think of one, which is actually really interesting. At JBS, so we have a lot of developers. We have about 140 people developing in the Qlik space and we have a chat. And so people were on this chat and it goes 24/7. Like people say, hey, can you help me with this? It's a lot of collaboration. So we are using a chatbot to kind of look at all the things that are being talked about and then pick out the key things that people are having trouble with. And so then we are about to start doing specific training on the reoccurring questions. So there's a lot more to come on that, but it's actually quite exciting and it's helping take my team from having to answer everything as well. So it's going to be very good.

>> There's a lot of these little breakthroughs that lead to other things, what's great about the data world right now, it's such a great environment. Thank you so much for sharing and good luck with your panel.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Thank you.

>> Five to six and happy hour, of course. We'll do a fly by.

Stephanie Robinson

>> Yeah. It's going to be fun.

>> Thanks for coming on.

Sadie St. Lawrence

>> Thanks for having us.

>> I'm John Furrier, bringing all the data here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.