16. Women Who Code and Record Podcasts

And that's a great thing about technology. You feel alone until you're able to see that you're not alone. And technology has been able to bridge that gap through these organizations like Wonderful Code. Hey, and welcome to Metacast, the podcast about podcasting, where we invite podcasters and podcast tech developers and talk about all things related to podcasting.

Today, we have people who produce the podcast for the organization called Women Who Code, JL and Kimberly. JL, Kimberly, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thank you. Why don't you introduce yourself? I'm Kimberly Jacobs, Senior Communications Manager at Women Who Code. I'm JL Lewitt, Senior Producer of Press and Digital Content at Women Who Code. Cool.

So maybe let's start with a bit of your background and how you got into podcasting. So we're always curious how people get into podcasting. There is no degree for podcasting. So people somehow end their, you know, different paths. Kimberly, you want to start? Actually, I think JL should start because...

He has a little bit more history. We both got started, though, at Women Who Code. I've done some producing. I have a journalism background, storytelling, communications, all that. A little bit of PR, too. It was just a matter of an opportunity and a space and time for us to use that to become podcast producers. I've loved podcasts since they started coming out.

I used to love audiobooks as a kid and podcasts are sort of like that. The Women Who Code podcast started in 2016 and it was started by Tara Hernandez, a woman who's the board vice chair for Women Who Code now, but at the time she was just an amateur.

Well, not an amateur. She was a volunteer, you know, doing it in her spare time whenever she could. A few episodes came out. They were amazing because the content is just naturally amazing, which is sort of why this exists. But again, she was a busy person. an engineer, a senior engineer, so after a while it dropped off.

Meanwhile, Women Who Code was doing this thing where we were working with companies to interview these amazing women in technology who were doing these awesome things. We're video recording them and taking those video recordings and we were transcribing them. we're turning them into blogs, and then we're throwing out the video.

That's because we had a very traditional in-person way of doing business and way of supporting people. And also it was a very small team. So we didn't have video editors and audio designers, all the graphic work that goes into that. and that's what we used to do but then the team started growing and started growing really when kimberly came on in 2021 and like knocked things up to the next level like super charged everything at that point you know kimberly came on and then we had sarah

and Shanita and Natalia, the team grew amazingly. And as it did, we had this capacity to look at what we were doing and be like, we have amazing content here that's multimedia, but it goes across audio, across video, and we don't just have to throw it up on a blog.

can produce it into a show. We can make these people stars. We can shine a spotlight on them and do this whole thing. And it was amazing that we had this content and we could start producing the show just like that. It was already there. And then we started doing it and I instantly just got crazy about how cool it all was. And Kimberly was such a support and was building it and producing things. And I was like, okay, well, obviously we're going to expand now, right? Why not?

And so I looked around and we all looked around and we're like, oh, wait, Women Who Code used to produce five events a week in person for about six, seven years at the beginning. And then 2020 happened and couldn't go in person anymore. Company pivoted immediately within two months. Bam, all digital. Since 2020, like whenever the quarantine started, we have 1,600 videos on YouTube now.

1,600 videos of these brilliant, diverse women popping in and saying these mind-blowing technical things and things that they're working on. They're teaching masterclasses and they're giving these amazing lectures that are delving into the depths of technology. We're not producing that into a show.

And so we started doing that. And before we knew it, we had three shows. It was the Women Who Code Talks Tech for highly technical stuff, Women Who Code Career Nav for the career navigation, obviously. And then Women Who Code Conversations, as the name implies, two or more awesome women in tech. talking about their lives and professional stuff so so our

Sorry. This is Arnav, by the way, for listeners, co-host of the show. I think last episode we had a joke about this. We'll get back to it in our meta-zone. Was my intro too long? I'm so sorry. Yeah. I get passionate about this stuff. Kimberly knows. I'm bad about that. Oh, no, no. That was awesome. I actually had a follow-up question to you about that. But the joke that Ilya and I were laughing about was that the last episode, I did the intro and I did not.

introduce ilia so i introduced myself this time but anyway so the thing that i was going to ask about was are most of the content that you're doing right now youtube or video focus and then you also take that and put it into a podcast or how does that work and when we were looking at your podcast there are like three four different types of episodes that you have and you mix it in all like how do you decide to go about when to release which one and all that.

Everything is member focused. So when coming up with the podcast idea, it was like how we can incorporate the members. So it started with having them interview these awesome women from other companies and giving them the opportunity. to connect with them and build relationships with them after the podcast process. And then our members wanted to create individual podcasts for their networks. Our networks are equivalent to like chapters, but networks is more techie.

And in an effort to kind of streamline things and make it where... People can participate without taking on the burden. Not that it's a burden, but when you're a volunteer, eventually, you know, life happens and the motivation weans away. And so the solve for that was to just incorporate them. into the Women Who Code podcast. I don't want to get too ahead of ourselves, but we have three to four different ways that members can be involved in the podcast.

So interviewing someone, being a host as well, they can also apply to be on the podcast and talk about their technical topics. And then as mentioned, us using some of the content from digital events as podcast episodes to highlight the. awesome expertise that they've already distributed and like shared with the community. So yeah, it's like member focus, but also what they like and what they're interested in, which is tech and they want to know.

how to navigate their career but then with the conversations it's really about highlighting their experiences and other women's experiences in tech and especially women that are high level in their career but we don't only have women who are in executive level positions. We do also like to interview the everyday engineer that's working at a really cool company and doing great things and have about two to five years of experience as well.

So yeah, the members were the forefront and also just like all the great content they were already helping us create naturally for the YouTube channel.

I just had one more quick thing. We heard JL told us that you started in 2021. What do you do at Women Who Code podcast? Is the podcast your primary focus? What else do you do there? I am responsible for creating strategy around getting content and creating content and kind of leading on that. especially from a member experience side of things. We do have lead generation as well, but I kind of more so focus right now on user experience. And then the podcast and the blog also play a part.

in that, in the strategy and implementation. And then we just come together as a team. And then I more so produce the Women Who Code conversation episodes and then JL produces more so the tech. talks and career nav conversations. And we discussed together these awesome women who have sent in their applications to be on the podcast and like how to make it work and fit it into our content strategy.

I wanted to go back a little bit to talk about the organization itself. As the name implies, it's a community of women who code, which sounds like it's a technical community of primary engineers. Can you give us some background on what's the size of the organization, how many countries it's present in, and just generally how it operates so our listeners can get the perspective of what the organization is?

Yeah, so it's a community of women, diverse technologists. So we do include non-binary and we do have men also apart. But so the name is Women Who Code, but it really is diverse. who code and just like providing a space to empower them to stay in the tech industry and not drop off in the pipeline. We have 340. three thousand three hundred and forty three yes thousand members i'm like a hundred goes in there somewhere but the hundred is inside

And we're in 147 countries and we have 70 networks. We've been digital since the pandemic, but in March, we started back in-person events for our networks that are in... So when did it start? Give us a bit of the history. Okay. So Women Co. started as a meetup group for women in San Francisco. Our CEO and co-founder, Elena Percival, was one of them, one of the co-founders, along with three other women. And it eventually grew.

from san francisco to another city and another city and partnering with technology companies that can host these events and it just kind of like exploded worldwide and we've been in business Well, it started in 2011 and then it was turned into a nonprofit around 2012, 2013. So we're roughly 10 years old. Wow. And are you folks actually employees or are you volunteers? So we're employees right now.

I want to say we're like between 30 and 50 employees, but we have all these members all over and the volunteers who drive the networks and put on the events and we support them through the staff. Also, we have like...

scholarship opportunities. And we have a job board that was created specifically for our members so that it addresses the things that women specifically want to see in a job board and will be more open and feel comfortable.

applying to because women are more likely not to apply for a job if they don't have all the skill sets in the application I guess job posting but men they will have like 30 percent of the things on there and apply Anyway, so we figured a way to combat that and increase that is to have our job or customers focus on the things that are really important to our members and also have them take out the things that.

they really don't need in the job posting. You don't need a full stack per se. You just need Python. So why do you have all these other stacks, including your job listing? So things of that nature. So we just provide a lot of different resources to help them become thought leaders, to help them grow their technical skills, of course, and to just feel more confident and have community around their experiences and not feel alone.

own as women and non-binary people who are, you know, not a part of the quote unquote bro culture and empower them to just like speak up, ask for the raise, ask for the promotion. This is how you go about getting a promotion. So yeah, it's just like really empowering and fun and exciting because these women are really, really brilliant. Yeah. One thing I wanted to mention as we were talking before we started recording.

In the organization where both Arunab and I worked at Amazon, we had a VP who was a woman. And then when she took over, I think almost overnight, we started to get a lot more interest from other women. And we ended up, I think, having two or three women. leadership positions and then a few women kind of in the IC engineer roles. For our team specifically, we hired somebody who came out of a boot camp for women. She was a former teacher.

And she retrained to be an engineer and Amazon hired her, but then we hired her into our team. And I just remember how it was, how that just changes the dynamic. when you have a woman and not necessarily like a fresh college grad, but actually somebody who has a lot of experience also like teaching kids. You have somebody who has a lot of life experience and also a different perspective in life, but who is also an engineer.

Whereas like you were saying, like bro culture, you know, I wouldn't say we had the bro culture in our team, but I get the sentiment. I had the same, actually same thing at Google in the team that I work right now. Basically our leadership is half women and we have lots of women in all different roles.

Whereas if you look at some of the other organizations where all of the head is men, it tends to attract other men and almost like repel women away because women, I forgot who exactly I was talking to, but it was one of the people who joined our team at Amazon. She was choosing between our team and some other team, and she chose ours because she's like, oh, you have this person, that person, and your VP is a woman. So like all else equal, I choose your team.

And then she attracted more people. It's just like a flywheel. So that's kind of speaking about the gender gap, right? The diversity gap. I think planting that seed is what really makes a lot of difference. I don't know. What's your perspective on this? Do you think about that at all?

Just adding a little bit more because Ilya ditched our team in like 2020 summer and went off to Google or something. But I think this thing that you talked about planting the seed and accelerating that, that kept on growing. Last year, I also left Amazon, but the point that I had left like last summer, there was more women than men in our team across like different senior engineers, junior engineers at all levels. And that was amazing.

There are not many teams, I think, in big tech that can say that. Yeah. Let's get back to Ilya, your question. Sorry, more context in there. Yeah.

Um, so there's about 25, 26% of women in tech and we want to increase that. And not only that, but keep that number going because the research shows that between the start and the 10-year mark, at the 10-year mark, women typically leave tech. So we want women to keep going and get to that 20 years, get to that 30 years. But it's important for the industry itself to create space for them. So it is important for women to see other women in the industry and on these.

teams and excelling and even being in C-suite and executive positions. And then it's also important for them to feel empowered in those positions to speak up for their ideas to be validated and for them to have guidance and mentorship. And that's kind of where Women Who Code comes into play. If a woman doesn't experience that, they have a community to experience that and also to feel empowered to move to a company that will empower them also to keep going in their career. It also gives them...

space to learn and try different things in their tech career. We have hackathons. We have 100 Days of Code. We have a lot of different programming. We even have our Connect conferences. And we have our dev summits where a lot of them can talk about their experience from a technical point of view and become thought leaders and showcase their expertise.

So it's just a matter of giving more diverse technologists from around the world, not even just in the U.S., experience to showcase how awesome they are and to talk about the things that they're experiencing together. but to still go forth and feel empowered to be innovative and add their expertise, their perspective to the things that tech needs. Because we know with AI.

and data science and all this evolving technology, we need more diverse people, especially diverse women. And we also know that it's great for companies' business models. Oh, it's interesting, actually, when it comes to analyzing data and getting insights and recommendations based on data. So you do want to have that perspective of the analyst or this data science engineer who isn't just focused on the narrow view of the world, but has a, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

While we are on the topic of data, you mentioned it's about 20 to 25 percent right now. What was it, say, 10 years back, five years back? What is the year on year?

increase hopefully that you're seeing i don't have those numbers but i do believe it grew from like 23 to 24 over the last couple of years but For more perspective and context, in the 80s and 90s, there were a lot more women joining tech and computer science, and then there was a drop-off towards the end of the 90s up until about the mid-2000s.

So that's where there was a need for a women who code and other organizations that have been sprouting up over time. So like around 2010, 2011. And that's a great thing about technology. You feel alone until you're able to see that you're not alone and technology has been able to bridge that gap through these organizations like Women Who Code.

I'm sure pretty much everybody who's listening to our podcast already knows what Women Who Code is. But let's say somebody is starting out fresh. They don't know about it. Then they're a person, like you said, not necessarily just restricting to women, but a person. who is interested in joining this, right? How do they sign up for these meetups? What do they get out of it? Or if they wanna do it online, how do they find that?

Simply go to womenwhocode.com. On the top left-hand corner, you'll see join. You click that button, enter your email address, and you are officially a member. All of our programming is free. Also, we have our YouTube channel for resources, but you can find a lot of resources on the website as well. If you click the network button, you can find a network and join the network. We have Slack groups. So once you join a specific network, you can join the Slack group.

that we have. And then we have volunteer positions. If you want to be more involved and become a director, a lead evangelist, if you want to become a speaker, if you want to become a track fellow, we have a fellowship program. for six different tracks, a cohort every year. Our new cohort applications are coming up soon. Actually, it's for Python, cloud, data science, front-end, mobile. Am I missing one? JL. Cloud. Yeah, I think he got him.

Yeah, so there's a lot of opportunities to be a part of Women Who Code as much as you want to or as little as you want to. And I think that's where the podcast also comes into play where you may not want to join an event. but you have time to listen to a podcast. So. You do that or you may want to continuously study a specific tech stack. And so you go to our YouTube channel and you just watch all the videos. And then you can also have discussions.

meet more people. We also do a lot of events through Meetup as well. So once you go to our website and find events, it'll take you to the Meetup to actually sign up.

Talking about the podcast, one thing that I really liked is I found it very inspiring to hear so many different voices. Almost every episode that I'm like going reverse chronologically. So the latest first and like listening to a few over the last week as we prepared for this today's recording. Right. And there are so many different voices, different topics that you're discussing.

How do you go about selecting or are these also volunteers who are coming in to say, like, I want to host an episode? How does it work? The voice you hear at the very beginning of every single podcast is Kimberly's right there. Welcome to the Women of Code podcast.

So that's the beginning. How do we pick people for the podcast? We do follow a pretty strict content strategy where we do try to match what we're talking about on the podcast at any given time with what the rest of the organization is talking about in our newsletters, on social media.

media and stuff. The people we pick are pretty much volunteers, either volunteers or, you know, someone from the team who's an employee will host or interview. But we want to highlight these people. We want to make them stars. We want to shine the spotlight them. We want them to go to Hollywood and walk the red carpet because they're that good.

That's the whole point of what we do. And the rotating hosts, it allows us to show all the different voices that make up women who code and women in technology. It's awesome. Are some of the hosts volunteers too? Or is that from your team usually? Most of the hosts are volunteers. Yeah. So that seems like a great opportunity too. Yeah. For people who want to like jump into this. Yeah. Okay. It's all about elevating.

I'm curious logistically how you source them. Is there like a forum or like an email? So if somebody, one of those 343,000 people wants to be in the podcast, how do they get on it? We have a podcast guest application. Again, we have a 343,000 member community that's constantly talking to each other on Slack and on social media and through our newsletter. We're the communications team for Women Who Code. We're communicating with these people.

all the time. And the volunteers step up to be hosts or they volunteer to be guests on the podcast. We have a volunteer podcast guest form. We have a volunteer podcast host form and a team of people from NuCode evaluate them. every couple of weeks to make sure that they're actually someone who is awesome and has a background that's correct and will be able to inform the audience. Yeah, then we choose them and they come on.

I think they're just amazing. It's just there. It's already there, really. And I do want to add, we do collaborate with our programs team on getting members as well to find who's interested for specific interviews that we might already have scheduled. and that align with what they're interested in in tech. And that just makes the interview a lot more interesting because they get to geek out and be like, oh, can you tell us about this data science, machine learning, this and the other.

I could never come up with that question as much of a journalist as I'm, you know, am. I don't know tech as well as our members do. So knowing that they can come forward and ask these questions and really ask the questions that the listeners want to hear also is the focus.

But I do help them like if they have trouble with the questions or like have the questions put in a way where it flows in the conversation. So that's where like the communications aspect comes into play. But they come up with the questions. I may rearrange them into a way that it tells a story throughout the whole interview. And, you know, it just comes together great. And the women are always so excited to like talk to each other and ask these questions and learn.

how they went about things. I do want to add too, it's very important for us also to highlight things that interest. the technologists as well outside of just work and show them as human beings, show them as technologists who are also mothers, who are also world travelers and hikers and bikers and bakers and gardeners.

and all of these other different things as well to just like continue to redefine what a technologist looks like. Because technically, like I could be a technologist and you never would know. I mean, I'm not, but the... Thought process is just that anybody that you walk by can be a technologist. There's no specific look or face or... person that is a technologist. And we think it's important to just continue to highlight that through all the different hosts and guests and interviewers and stuff.

Did I hear you correctly that you said that your hosts prepare interview questions in advance and then you review them and help them make the story better, et cetera. So basically there is a fixed set of questions that gets asked in those interviews. Yeah, it's not a fixed number, but we do want to make sure that we keep it within a certain time frame because with anything that you're passionate about, you can talk about it all day and all night. And also you might ask questions that.

maybe redundant or maybe like not so open-ended questions. So it's just a matter of helping them frame the questions in a way to get the most out of the person answering the questions and get the answers that they want and a little bit more. So, you know, those are things that are more taught as a communication specialist in that arena. We want them to focus on the tech part and we help them and guide them on the communications part.

Kimberly is so much more structured than me. It's amazing. My podcast episodes are chaos. They're just, you know, it's a storm and you ride it in and amazing things come out and she's much better at it than me. Yeah. In our podcast, we also, we do prepare, we do have a list of topics, but we almost never follow it. Follow the way we, you know, we never really tried to follow it. We're like, okay, we just ask the seeding questions and then just see how it goes.

Like today we're like jumping all over, like some of these things are naturally coming up that we were going to talk about anyway. So we're going in there, but yeah, we're jumping all over the space, which is great. I love the natural conversational flow. Absolutely. I will say the questions do help them to feel more at ease because a lot of times people are nervous, especially if they're just doing it one time. Whereas like the two of you, you're doing these interviews often.

have a rhythm and a flow and the nervousness is easing, I'm sure, more and more as time goes. Right. But for someone who's just like doing a one-off interview or, you know, doing it every so often, that nervousness kicks in. having a little bit of structure helps ease it. But JL does a great job of producing. He's not as chaotic as he's trying to make it seem.

I think it makes sense, especially for somebody who's doing it for the first time. I think this is something that Ilya and I have talked about. Our guests have also said is over-prepare a little bit more. Because what also tends to happen is you get confidence that way, but also sometimes the conversation is just not flowing between you and your interviewee. And that's when it helps to have a lot of topics to cover.

and discuss so that you can bring in. Because sometimes you would ask something and they would say, yeah, no, I didn't do that. And just move along to the next thing, right? So it's good to have that repository of things to talk about. Yeah. So I'm curious, JL, what's your process like? I'm a firm believer in that humans know how to speak to humans and that good things will come of it.

I do an outline, of course. Search, you got to look into it and you got to look them up and figure out what you're going to talk, talking points and all that and provide it for the host and the guests. And then I say, here's the document, erase everything I wrote, write whatever you want.

Make a mess all over it. And then when you come to the interview or to the episode, talk like human beings. You're both technologists. You're both in this field. You've got a million things to talk about. And if not, we'll figure something out. I have a lot of faith in good things happening and we'll see when that blows up. Yeah. No, I love that. Yeah.

It allows a lot of, I think, creativity and I think bolsters the confidence of the, especially the new interviewees to be given, like, just go figure it out. And people seem to thrive in that.

I also want to go back to the topic of content strategy, because you said you want to stick to the content strategy that the organization has on all the communication that happens. How far ahead do you plan the topics and newsletters and podcasts? I'm just curious what your time horizon is. So when I first started, we had no strategy. It was just like, this works, let's do it. We were a very small company back then.

Yeah. And I am a little more structured, or I try to be. So to answer your question, the 2023 editorial calendar was completed by December 2022. Whoa! For the whole year? Wow. A little more structured, yes. Yeah, we do try to think about things that are coming up tech-wise and DEI-wise because we're really big on advocacy as well, just as much as tech. So we can get ahead of them and plan properly and as a team.

talk through things for creative purposes. And then we break down each month as they come along and kind of dig deeper into it, maybe like a month or two in advance. So yeah. I'm curious, how do you handle, let's say like recently, last couple of months, I mean, everything is abuzz with chat GPT and now Bing and Bird and all that. And how do you plan this into your or how do you mold your strategy to adapt for these new kind of topics that come in?

That's the beauty of having a plan because we know where to fit these things that come up into our workflow because we already know what we're working on ahead of time when things like mass shootings come up. or chat GTP come up, we're able to pivot and incorporate that into our workflow a lot easier versus, you know, we already didn't have a plan and now we're trying to incorporate these things into the plan.

a lot of moving pieces too. You know, we have a design team. We have a social media team. We have an email team. And then you have me, JL, and then our director, Natalia. We need to be on one accord and make our lives a little easier by knowing what's coming up the pipeline to be able to pivot for the things that may surprise us. And just for an idea of how quick that Women Who Code can pivot. Speaking of chat GPT, I'm entirely AI generated. So just so you know. Yeah, deep fake. Yeah. Coco.

I mean, you're kidding, but we're not too far from that. Am I kidding? I looked at some videos where like Will Smith eating spaghetti or something. that looked pretty horrible. So I think we are still ways out in terms of like the video generation. I think pictures are pretty good, but the video is still pretty, like you can tell if it's not a real person. I think not just video voice also.

We are at the cusp of it where some voices that we have a lot of data set on, we're able to generate pretty natural sounding audio for any text that you give it. But for most things, it doesn't sound as appealing. But I feel like... the day when you say, oh, I want a movie about a bank robbery and I want this actor and that actor and just generate this for me. I don't think that's too far off. I think I sound very natural.

Also curious to talk about the logistics of the podcast. So you have all these different people. Not all of them have proper equipment like microphones or rooms that are treated for recording. Can you talk to us a bit about... How do you prepare your guests for recording and getting the max audio quality out of the process?

I think it's very similar to what you told us to do to come on this podcast. I mean, just be in a quiet room, make sure your mic works, make sure your cameras work. If you have a phone, turn it on silent, all that stuff. I think one of the benefits of our podcast really is the fact that it's...

so many different people. It could be someone in India or someone in Tokyo or someone in Chicago, and you get to see how they're living. And yeah, maybe their internet isn't the best, but that's real life. That's what their real life lived experience is. That comes across, I think, on the show. Yeah. What tool do you use to record the podcast? We use Zoom. Do you then process the recordings separately, the isolated tracks, or you just take the whole thing that Zoom produces and just publish it?

How much post-production happens on top of what's recorded? We take separate tracks. We do extensive video editing on it. If you look at our YouTube versions of the podcast, I mean, they're not like Hollywood blockbuster level, but they're made.

CNN level because we do the graphics, the intro, the music, the title cards, the whole documentary thing. We try to give it a polished touch that it deserves. Do you have like audio and video editors that are part of your team or you folks do it yourself?

It's in-team and out-team. We've all done a little bit of it, and as we're developing, some expertise is starting to emerge either within the team or externally, and we're bringing people in, but it's sort of both. So when you use external parties, Can you share how expensive is it to produce an episode? So we don't really deal with the financial part of that. We leave that to HR.

But yeah, we find great video editors and transcriptionists because we do, for accessibility reasons, turn the podcast episode into a blog as well. So if you want to read it, you can read it. If you want to watch it, you can watch it. If you want to listen to it, you can listen to it.

Yeah, I mean, it helps to be at an organization like Women Who Code because we don't have to worry about those things. We just ask them and they say, yes, we can have a video editor or no, we can't have a video editor. You know, we let them handle that stuff. And we get to stay creative. Oh, that's cool. So you publish audio and you publish video.

Is the content one for one or maybe there is like a different process for editing audio? Maybe audio typically would end up shorter because you cut more silence, which you wouldn't cut in video. So I'm curious how you approach that. Yeah, I mean, audio is a different medium. So when people take awkward pauses like I'm doing right now, you can cut that out in audio. But in video, it would look a little awkward to have somebody being over here and saying, um, and just snapped over.

there it's a little bit of a different process but they're pretty close because at the end of the day the content is what matters and the core that we get to is really the content and the speaker right So, and how long does it take to produce an episode? So from the moment it's recorded to the moment it's ready to be published. I'm curious about your workflow and how long it takes. Can you say six to eight weeks, Kimberly? Four to six.

Well, yeah, four to six weeks. Sometimes it might take longer if we need to get approvals on certain things, but for the most part, four to six weeks. And then publishing sometimes takes a little longer. Yeah. And of those four to six weeks, how many like hours of human work is going into that editing and all that?

It's a team effort. That's hard to tell. I mean, there's, you know, the production, the producer side where you're emailing back and forth with these people and trying to figure out if they're good. There's the team side where we're as a committee deciding on whether you should be on the podcast, whether you should be a host.

side, the volunteer host has to come up with those questions, and that's that side, and then we have to come back and help them refine those questions, and there's a speaker preparing, and then the recording happens, and then the rest happens. And after that, there's an editor. Oh, okay. No, no. About the rest, the sound editing, video editing, approximately, do you know how many hours you're putting into per episode? Again, it's different teams. I know.

When I do audio, it's a few hours. It's not a huge lift, but video is more. And there's social media that gets graphed and graphics that get put up. And there's a transcriptionist writing and there's blog that has to be posted and formatted. Like there's so many moving. parts that how many hours does it take x number of hours too many hours x squared

Yeah, our last guests, when we asked them how long it takes them to produce an episode, they just like in unison said it's too damn long. Yeah, both of them immediately, the first thing they said, yes.

Yeah, it's kind of a common problem for people who produce everything themselves. It's just a lot of technical work that goes in there. So one quick thing, if you were to say, like, this is the mission of Women Who Code.

in like a few words what is that and how does the podcast connect with that the mission is very clear women who code we are empowering diverse technologists to excel in their tech careers And the podcast allows them to come on and gain experience, talk about their experience, learn as a listener. as people on the podcast, they become thought leaders or they become recognized as thought leaders because they already are brilliant.

They just get to showcase that more. It builds up their confidence, which empowers them to go after those jobs and get those promotions and raises that they deserve. Am I leaving anything out, JL? We want to make them all into Hollywood stars because they deserve it. I have this real weird red carpet thing, and Kimberly can attest to it. Since the podcast started, I want to take over Disney and Netflix and just do Women Who Code content.

and I think next year is the year. We move for God bless. Subscription-based. Absolutely. Join us on the tail carpet. I just want to ask, are you able to share any numbers in terms of how a podcast performs, how many downloads you get? A lot. I don't know exactly what numbers we can share, so I would be more comfortable not necessarily getting exact numbers, but it's a lot and growing.

I can certainly tell you that. You mentioned approvals before, so I was curious if you have to run every episode by legal, PR, how much overhead you had there. Well, JL is PR, but we do have a consent form that we have them signed, just giving us permission to share on social media and being able to share multiple times if we want to. As far as approvals, it's... Just more so with branding and yeah, making sure branding is on par and everyone is happy about it.

especially when we're kind of incorporating more of those high level executive guests on the show, they may be a little more particular about. how they're represented in the copy that we might write or maybe even how their logo may appear or title may appear, those types of things. But it's very minimal. We have a lot of freedom. The great thing about...

our members is that they trust us because of how we run our organization. They know we're not going to do anything to compromise them or what they said. We're here to amplify them and make them look. and sound the best as possible on top of how great they already do sound. So I think it's important for people to know that we're here to do great things with you, not gossip blogging and all that weird online stuff.

So if you have somebody on the show who works for, let's say, a big company and it's an executive, did you ever have to deal with the PR of those companies who want to make sure that certain things get said or certain things don't get said? I don't know. Have we ever had to deal with that? We have. Well, just before you start, I think as soon as Ilya started talking about it, you both started smiling. So I'm waiting to hear some stories now.

I don't want to tell too many stories, but on a serious note, for the most part, our partners are really great. What we do to mitigate those things is we encourage them, their PR team, to join the recording. We go over the questions beforehand so they know what's kind of going to be asked. And also, I do make a note to say after the recording, but before we leave the Zoom call, like, is there anything proprietary in this?

that we should note and edit out. So we try to get ahead of those things so that it doesn't slow us down in that four to six week process of post-production. Cool. And you mentioned consent. What does it look like? Is it like a document, like an e-document or something? It's a DocuSign. Yeah, PDF DocuSign. Cool. Yeah, I just realized actually it's the first time we have guests who are running a podcast for an organization.

Because previously we were only talking to indie producers, right? Right. It feels it's different. Right. We're so corporate and fancy. No, but it's just like the scale makes it different, right? With great power comes great responsibility. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So going back, I had one more thing to ask you about the mission of amplifying the voice of these women, right? I think that's great. What are some of the main challenges you've seen people? all go through in that. Especially from the perspective of the women and not necessarily just about the podcast, but let's say somebody is aspiring or is on their way to the C-suite or becoming like a senior technology staff engineer. What are some of the main challenges that you see?

yeah i would just uh add a little bit to that you mentioned that women are less likely to apply to jobs where they don't meet most of the qualifications so i think kind of piggybacking on our apps question just like for me as a man it would be actually really interesting to understand

to better empathize what are those challenges where women may not be necessarily behaving the same way as men just because of you know how they're designed right something that we should be paying attention to and helping them I would just note that it's more socialization than it is like by design. But yeah, I think JL can speak more to some of the things that come up when people join the podcast.

Yeah. Am I accurate in that? I mean, you know, the biggest thing we hear about is probably imposter syndrome, right? That's a huge topic that comes up when you're talking about applying for the job. The interesting thing is that.

Everybody has a different way of writing, and men and women have a slightly different way of writing. And so if you're writing a job post, men will be like, we're looking for a super rock star who's willing to put the grind to the bottom. And women will be like, we're looking for someone who could help grow our team and nurture things and build. things out and make it better for and so like

They won't apply because the language is not conducive to that. It doesn't speak to them. And so the more women we can get into positions of leadership, the more we can elevate women, the more they'll be writing those job descriptions, the more they'll be making those tiring decisions, the more that we can ensure.

sure a certain amount of equality there because they'll be the ones making those decisions for the future and that'll just open the pipeline up more and more exponentially as it goes. I thought chat GPT is writing all the job descriptions now. They are, but someone has to interview these people, right? And we got a trained chat GPT to be right.

What are some of these advantages that we don't usually recognize that women have? Talking about like some of the challenges, we just talked about it on the flip side of it. What are some of those advantages that are not very commonly known? Creativity, innovative, collaborative. They offered a different perspective that is needed, especially for products that are going forward to customers that are also diverse. The list can go on and on.

Did I say empathy already? I think just in general, being able to just take charge and get things done. I think that's like the biggest thing is just like we can get things done and we're motivated to. in the midst of whatever we're going through in life. And we want to do great things and show the world all the great things that we can do and not feel stifled in that. So that's what I can speak to as a woman who may not necessarily be a technologist, but is in tech.

and what I hear them talk about as well. And I think the other great thing about having women on your team is just the level of camaraderie and support as well. It's always just like, you need help with this? I'm here to help. I think that's also at the basis of our community, too, where it's like they may not know something, but they know that they can rely on the community to help guide them, answer their questions.

and even provide additional resources that they may have. The more diverse your team, the more perspective your team will have, the better it will perform. That's all. Just a bit of a personal, I think, reflection on this. When I was at Amazon, we used to have these monthly reviews of how the team is doing. It's kind of like anonymous employees like submit their, every day there's a question and then you submit an answer to it. And at the end of it, there are some metrics and we talk.

And very frequently, our team, which I said at the end was like more 60% women or so at that point, the thing that overwhelmingly every month came up was that everybody is so helpful, especially.

from people who had come from other teams within Amazon, where it was basically anybody can come in. They don't feel like this is a stupid question or anything like that. Anybody can ask anything and people empathize and respond to it. And I think a big part... of that is because, well, not the big part, maybe the reason for that is having that kind of a diverse mix of people and so many women in the team.

It completely changes the dynamic. And I think, Ilya, you and I can go back to our first team, first small team together, where there were, I think, four or five men only. And that was a very different dynamic. And I think the entire leadership chain was also meant. Yes. Yeah. It is a different dynamic for sure. Yeah. So I think we'll start to wrap up. Yeah.

So for companies who want to get more women on board, how do they engage with women who code? What can they get out of the collaboration there? Well, we have a partnerships team who can tell them that. But we do have a lot of opportunities for collaboration with companies. And then, of course, our job board. You can always post jobs on our job board. And we have someone, a part of our customer service, happiness, and partnership.

that can also assist with that as well. How do these companies reach out the partnership team? Partnerships at womenwhocode.com. Or they can go on womenwhocode.com and find the page. I'm sorry, I don't know it off the top of my head, but I'm sure it's probably backslash partnerships, right, JL? And then there's more information. You can also donate.

You may not be a big company or you may be a big company. You can donate. That supports us a lot. And $27 allows us to provide free memberships to women for a year. But of course, you know, you want to help more than one woman. So donate more. One of our models is join, volunteer, donate.

So, yeah. And if you want to get a better idea of how diverse our organization and our members are, we did also just announce our 100 Technologists to Watch winners. And we have the Applaud Her Awards coming up towards the end of May.

Also subscribe to the podcast, womenofcode.com backslash podcast. Speaking about the podcast, do you know which app do you get the most listens on? This is Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. We get the most on Apple with Spotify being pretty close behind. Yeah, cool. All right. Where can people find YouTube? Are you on social media at all? Do you post? Where can people subscribe?

You can find me on LinkedIn, Kimberly Jacobs, and someone hacked my Twitter. So yeah, Twitter, I'm trying to figure out what the next steps are with that. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best. Might not be a bad idea to stay away from Twitter anyway. And what about JL? Yeah, I'm just on LinkedIn too. LinkedIn backslash Joseph Lewitton. That's JL. That's where it comes from. And that's the best way to find me. Yeah, and we will have all of those links in our show notes.

And to all of you who are listening, please don't forget to give us a five-star rating or any rating. Subscribe to our podcast and subscribe to our newsletter at newsletter.metacastpodcast.com. And also, we are always happy to hear back from people. send us a note at hello at metacastpodcast.com. And before we close, what are your favorite podcasts, Kimberly and JL? Women Who Code podcast, of course. Is there any other podcast? That's what I listen to on repeat all day.

This is the second past I've ever heard of. I think there's one called Metacast. I've heard it's really good. I might check that one out. That's my favorite. Yeah. Second favorite. Cool. All right. Cool. Well, thank you, Kimberly. Thank you, JL. Thank you. This was a lot of fun. That was awesome. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for having us. This was great.