Rochelle Newton's "Diversity Chat" with Helen Norris [video]

Rochelle Newton
Assistant Divisional Chief Operating Officer
Duke Health Technology Solutions

Helen Norris
Vice President & Chief Information Officer
Chapman University

Rochelle Newton: Good afternoon.

Helen Norris: Good afternoon, Rochelle.

Newton: How are you today?

Norris: I'm doing well. Thank you. How about yourself?

Newton: I'm okay. Thank you for agreeing to chat with me. I appreciate this very much. So may I start by asking you to tell us your name, and share anything you feel comfortable sharing?

Norris: Sure. Yeah. My name is Helen Norris. I'm the chief information officer at Chapman university in Orange County, California. I've been at Chapman for about six years. I've worked in technology, my whole life and in higher ed, and, since about 1997, I've been at two other universities, UC Berkeley, and also at the California State University system, at one, at the campus in Sacramento. One thing that people don't always gather about me is I actually was born and raised in Ireland. I know I don't sound like it, I've been in America for a long time, but, you know, so I, I feel like I have an interesting journey as an immigrant, and working, as a woman working in technology.

Newton: Yeah. Very, very important to share that, I think because for people that are coming behind you it's good to know your past. So could you share your past how, so from Ireland, how did you get to America? What was your interest in IT? How did that all come to be?

Norris: So I grew up, as I mentioned in Ireland. I grew up in the seventies and the early eighties, and I often joke with Americans that when Americans graduate from college, if they wanna move away from home, they go to another city. Well, in Ireland, I mean, there's more than one city, but I was from the big city. And so when I graduated from college, I actually moved to Frankfurt in West Germany or in, in, it was West Germany at the time, it's Germany now. And I, my, interesting choice to move to Germany 'cause my German was not very good, so I actually ended up working for the United States army as a computer programmer. I met my first husband there when he was, he was in the army when he was restationed back in the US, I moved with him, and I, I think I kinda stumbled into computer programming. My degree is actually in mathematics and I didn't, you know, I was the first of my family to go to college, so I thought that the path that was open to me was to be a teacher, so I kind of assumed I'd be a teacher. And so I was lucky that I stumbled into a field that was really a great fit for me. So a lot of luck in success, I think. And I, and I've been lucky, I think a lot through my life.

Newton: Yeah. So you come to, you work for the US army, you're a programmer, so now today you are a CIO. That's not an easy path to get there.

Norris: Yeah.

Newton: So can you share a little bit more about from being a programmer to who you are today?

Norris: Yeah, yeah. It's, my title when I was working for the army was a computer programmer, but it was an interesting place to work 'cause it was a small organization. And so you kinda got, this was in the eighties, so you kinda got your hands in a lot of different things. I worked on technology, people in my age group might remember this, Wang technology, and so when I worked at the... Yeah I see some recognition. When I moved to the US first, I actually got a job working at Wang labs and worked on the customer service side. But over my career, I've been fortunate in being able to do a lot of different types of jobs. I've been a systems administrator, a network administrator, and I think that that has helped me in preparation for becoming a CIO. I've worked, mostly when I moved to the US first, I've worked mostly on the corporate side, but I moved into higher ed in 1997, I wanted to, for personal reasons, I wanted to move. We, when we moved to the US first, we lived in st. Louis, Missouri, but for personal reasons, we wanted to move to California. And I was hired at UC Berkeley in, and I know you're at Duke, so this will resonate with you. That a lot of the big or ones have highly decentralized IT. I was hired as an IT manager for a local IT organization. One of the things that's great about being in a big organization or a big or one university, is you can move around and get lots of different experiences. So I actually was able to make a couple of different moves. I moved from the local IT group, the first one I managed, to another one. And then the second group that I was in, it was actually managing IT for the budget and finance division, I guess. And, so that was really pretty high profile. And I got the opportunity to work on central campus systems, things like PeopleSoft and so forth. And then, and I kind of say, I sorta went over to the dark side, I went to work in the central IT group as my final stop at Berkeley. So I was at Berkeley for a total of 12 years. One of the things, and I think my experience is that this happens to women maybe a little bit more than men. When you're in an organization, especially like a university where it can be really pretty political, when you're in an organization for a long time, sometimes you, it's hard, it gets to the point where you sort of have some baggage, if you've had to do unpopular things, and I did, 'cause you, you go through budget cuts and, and so forth. I think I got to the point where I knew I couldn't advance because I had too much of that baggage from some of the things that I had done. So I took a lateral move to move to the California State University system, CSU Sacramento. And one of the things I say to people is I think a lot of times people think their careers are gonna go like that, and I, in my experience, that's not the case. 'Cause you go up, you'll go over, you might even take a little dip and, and it's all good. So for me taking that lateral move was probably the best thing that could've happened to my career. One of the great things, I know you've been in higher ed for a long time, you move to a new campus, you know a lot of things, right? I had mentioned that I had worked on PeopleSoft, I go to a new campus, so you walk in and you're, you're sort of an automatic expert and you know all the lingo, but yet my experience has been that different universities operate differently. So you, you still have the opportunity to learn. So that's, was great for me when I worked, moved to the Cal State system. And now that I'm at Chapman, which is a private university, again, you come in with a great deal of knowledge, but a lot to learn about different things that we do.

Newton: Yeah. Very very interesting, thank you for that. So as a CIO, how many other women, regardless of their ethnicity, do you see in that same role across the higher ed? I mean, is that something where women are entrenched or is it, we're still trying to find our way in?

Norris: I think we're still trying to find our way in. I know when they, EDUCAUSE and other organizations do some surveys and so forth, I think we see about 18%, if I'm remembering correctly, of women in the CIO role. And it's even much much less for women of color. It's much, it's just much much harder. The other, I'm very active locally and in Southern California and a lot of IT networking organizations and professional organizations. And I, I spend a lot of time, well, when we could network in person, I went to a lot of events and it's, I would say even worse outside of higher ed. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but I do know that I go to meetings all the time where I'm the only woman in the room, right? Or there might be one other woman in the room. So I think we still have a long long way to go, and I think also that there are still, it, it goes to, it comes from very early in our careers. I, you do see, I think women coming into technology and then kind of not staying. And you also see the sort of funnel effect where as you go higher and higher in the organization, you'll see fewer and fewer women and definitely fewer and fewer people of color. So it's kind of like we funnel out as we go through the organization. So I think we have a lot that we have to do to, there's still a lot though that we, there's still a lot of ground to make up for women, and particularly I think for black women and black men. I just don't think that the same opportunities are, have been there for people like us.

Newton: Yeah. I agree with you completely. If I were to parallel my career to yours, I should be in charge of the CIO, that's how much I've gotten, but I'm still down in the trenches.

Norris: Yeah.

Newton: And I think that... I was on a panel earlier in the summer, I think July, I don't remember when it was, but I was on a panel for Clack liberal arts college, and I was really surprised to see how little diversity was there, there were a few black men,

Norris: Yeah.

Newton: A few women, but it wasn't really as diverse as you would think, especially considering liberal arts has a higher uptake of people of color and-

Norris: Right.

Newton: Whereas STEM has been the exact opposite, people start off with a STEM career and end up in the humanities or something-

Norris: Yeah. And, it's interesting, I'm glad you raised that. I just want to make two points. First of all, I've been passionate about women in technology for, for a long time, but no matter, I know it's hard for women in technology. I am, I am aware that I bring so much privilege to, to the workplace on a daily basis because of how I look, because of the color of my skin, but also, and I mentioned that I'm an immigrant, also because of how I speak. So I look and I sound, I think the way people expect a CIO to look and sound, right? And it's, I, in some ways I feel like I'm, I've been told I'm kind of the right sort of immigrant, 'cause I don't bring an accent and I look like I've assimilated into American life. The other thing that's interesting, is you mentioned that women start in the STEM fields and then they, women and people of color start in the STEM fields, and then, we end up in different fields, but actually I think we're discouraged a lot from being, from going into STEM. And I will tell you a story about when I grew up, and I grew up in Ireland and it was the seventies and the eighties, it's a very different place now. I it's, it really is, when I grew up, we saw the, the traditional, what we think of as the traditional models, right? My mother stayed home with us and my dad went to work, and everybody in my community, everybody that I went to school with, that was the same experience. And we have a very different educational system to the US. And so we do, I think, I mean, that's what we did when I was girl. I, it may be different now, but you kind of go through the equivalent of high school, and at the end you do this exam called a Leaving Cert and everything counts on that exam, right? If, how you get into college, they look at your grades in the exam and they calculate it and then you get accepted or not. And I happen to be very good at maths. And I wanted, in the leaving cert, you can do higher level or honors, or lower level math, And I wanted to do higher level honors math. I went to an all girl Catholic school and they didn't offer that. And so I talked to the, the nun, the head nun about it, and she just kinda told me, well, girls don't need honors maths. And it was like, Oh, well... so what I actually did is there were a lot of, there were places you could go to get tutoring, but the intent was really for people who were studying it at school and, and to give them an extra help, but I, I that's what I did, I did that, and I studied honors maths to go through that. Now, another interesting anecdote. So that was like the seventies in Ireland. So I, we have a student at Chapman, a young woman actually, and she is a young black woman who I've done some work with. And she went to school in Los Angeles in, obviously in the last five years, 'cause she's still in the last few years, she's still a student, and she went to some kind of fancy magnet school, and she was in a technology program. She's actually studying computer science at Chapman. And she actually had a teacher tell her he was going to assign her some of the more kind of administrative work, not the network and 'cause, and what he told her is, girls don't like to crawl around under desks. And so, it's the same thing that happened to me in Ireland in the seventies, happened to this young, young black woman in Los Angeles in the, in the 21st century. And it's just, and you just, so when you start from there, you're, when you're hearing that in high school, it just, it just makes it harder.

Newton: Yeah, absolutely. And I will tell you, that's not unique for that black woman.

Norris: Yeah.

Newton: A lot of us are still told that, the opportunities for advancement or even to get to the place where you are, as I was looking at your LinkedIn bio, I was just so impressed.

Norris: Thank you.

Newton: You sit on this board, you do this, you do that, you do the other, and so those opportunities to spread out and to grow and to network and to build your opportunities. Right? So, I mean, you said earlier it was luck, but I mean, like, as you said, you look like what we want in America, right? This, you're not going to be overly assertive, not going to be aggressive, and they're not these labels that they can easily stick on the bottom of you and say, hey, this is who you are. Whereas a black woman, I think that the injustices that have happened to black and brown people over the years, we are more, I guess, vulnerable to opportunities because we are, whatever it is that they believe about black people, whatever they believe about brown people that we're there. So coming in as a white woman, you have a lot on your plate, but I will say this, it's not so broad, I mean, because as you said, you go to meetings and you're the only person that looks like you, or one of one or two people. Right? So that's my experience too.

Norris: Yeah.

Newton: And I think I may have shared this at some other time, but you know, one of the CISOs in, in higher education came and did a talk at Duke and she told us this word, "hippy", right? So you can be in a room and say something and no one responds to it.

Norris: Right.

Newton: And then a man takes what you've said and rephrases it,

Norris: Yeah.

Newton: And it becomes a thing. So you say today is Sunday, it's three o'clock or 3:30, whatever it is, no, nobody says anything, but if a man comes and says, "Hey, today might be Sunday." All of a sudden it becomes a thing-

Norris: It's gospel. Yeah.

Newton: Yeah. You know? And so I think that that is true even for white women, that there's still a little bit of finding your voice. And one of the things that I am a proponent of is advocacy. Like people talk about mentors, and mentors are great to have, it's good to have a mentor, because a mentor is that person you share, you express what's happening to you in your job, and they kind of give you some advice because they've been there and done that, so they're great mentors. But advocacy is when you're willing to put some skin in the game.

Norris: Right.

Newton: You're willing to put your name, your credentials, your cash, capital, whatever it is into the game and have other people respond to what you want. So if you Helen Norris were to pick up the phone and call somebody and say, "Hey, I have this person who I think can make a great fit for your company." That's getting the whole traction, than if I did the same thing, even with more experience and more opportunities, we could still get the same thing. So I think that's really a tough road to hope for people of color and some white women as well.

Norris: Well, you know, a couple of things I'd like to say about that, the first piece you talked about are voices. That we're in meetings and, and I've had it happen where a man has taken credit for my idea, and sometimes you just kinda go with it, but I've, I know that there's research that shows as there are more of us in the room, if there are and in fact, the kind of the tipping point is sort of three, if there are three women in the room, in the meeting, you can amplify each other's voices. So I do think that one part of advocacy is, especially for me at this stage of my career and, to be in the room with other women to amplify what they're saying and to make sure that they get credit for it is something that I, I can take on as a form of advocacy. The other thing you mentioned is, whether it's kinda putting in a call or something for someone, and you mentioned that I serve on a lot of boards and I feel really, again, I feel very fortunate about that, and one of the things that happened for me is a former boss of mine recommended me and, to be on a board to, he was leaving the board and he was asked to nominate someone and he nominated me, and I really appreciate that for him. So one of the things that we can do as women, women like me, when I have the opportunity to nominate someone or for a position on a board or for an award or something like that, it's important for me, and one of the things I've done for years, is to nominate women. And that's not to say I don't nominate men, I do. But every time there are plenty of deserving women out there who aren't getting noticed, and that's something that I can do to do that, and I've done that. But one of the things I realize I haven't done and that I really want to work on, is to make sure that I especially do the same for black women or other women of color or men of color, because I have that, the person who nominated me to be on the board was a man, he was a Hispanic man. And I really appreciate him lifting me up like that. And I think it's important for me to, how is it people say? Pay it forward? To do the same thing for other people who don't look like me. And, and that's something that I think I can do better at.

Newton: Absolutely. And so in your organization, when you go to hire or have a vacancy in your organization, how, how do you deal with that? What are your steps that you take to make sure you have a diverse pool, you're picking the best person, and you're really getting some buy-in from your leadership about that? So can you talk about that a little bit?

Norris: Yeah, yeah. And so there over the years, I think I've done, it is hard. I think you can only do that with the supportive leadership and frankly, with the support of the HR organization, because you've gotta know even how to find the right candidates. I know when I look at my organization, I, I've, I've actually had the situation where I've thought I'm doing great, our IT organization looks good, I have six direct reports, four of them are women, and I have people of color and we implemented a new kind of a dashboard in our data warehouse, and I was shocked when I really looked at the numbers and saw how much work I had to do. So it's easy to kind of think that you're doing, doing really well, but it it's, it's hard. I think you have to continue to do networking and reach out to people explicitly to try to bring them into your organization. You can't just put something on LinkedIn or on a job site and expect to get a diverse pool. So if you're working with recruiters, you've gotta seek the right people. But I do think it's the networking, the networking, that's how people get jobs. It's, it's who you know, and it's, as you pointed out earlier, having somebody make that call for you to say, you should look at this person, it's, it's something I think we can, we can all do better with. I recall when I was early in my career, I wasn't in higher ed at the time. I mentioned that when I moved to the US first, I lived in St. Louis and I worked, I was like an IT manager, I guess, for a good size law firm, but it would be a small IT organization, and we needed to hire someone. So in those days we didn't have the internet. We put it in the newspaper at the St. Louis post dispatch, and an organization called me and asked me, there was a newspaper in St. Louis, the St. Louis American, who marketed to the African-American community, and they would literally go through the job ads in the post dispatch, call the recruiting people and say, "Can we put, run your ad in the st. Louis American?" And to me, that was a real eye opening moment for me because it, and I was very young, I just didn't, and I hadn't been in the country very long, I didn't know anything. but it was eye opening for me to understand that you have to explicitly look and in those days, that was the way, that one way that you could look was to, to go to meet people where they are, don't expect everyone to always come to you.

Newton: Yeah, exactly. And I think that one interesting thing about what you just said really hits home. It's like, someone came to you and asked you, could you put that ad in their paper? But like, one of the key parts of that is finding historically black schools, colleges and universities where there are candidates that are in these areas. It is looking beyond the typical answer of diversity. So there's, there are these stereotypes about people, so there's this thing, all Asian people are smarter than anyone else, they do really well in math, and so you have an organization that has a tremendous number of Asian people. You may have one or two blacks, one or two Hispanics or Latinos, but it's not like it's a diverse pool, so it is-

Norris: Right

Newton: We're hired leadership dock, because every aspect of IT specifically, all ethnicities are represented. There is no, if you're starting at the bottom, there's lots of diversity at the bottom, it's at the top where the diversity doesn't exist.

Norris: Yeah, yeah.

Newton: It's really hard to try to make sure that that's the place it is. So, I mean, just like you were talking about the gentleman who nominated you for a board, when you look in your Rolodex and see all those people that, you know ,how many of those people are you thinking about that opportunity-

Norris: You gotta do that.

Newton: When you transition off that board, or if there's a board vacancy, where's that happening? And so I think that it's very important that we think about this in ways that are really inclusive because, I tell this story often and I have two, I'll tell you, my first one is Google. So in 2015, Google released facial recognition software.

Norris: Right.

Newton: All white male team did the development event. And so whenever this facial recognition software popped up, when you saw a person who was not particularly of certain skin tone, it will put up a picture of a gorilla, and there's no way in the world Google did that intentionally. That's not, it would be bad business for them. But the problem is when you have homogeneous groups, you're going to get a homogeneous output. So the old term is garbage in, garbage out, first in, first out, there's that piece right there. But I think in a lot of ways that this is one of the problems. And then the other part of that, for me is, we assign stereotypes to people. So women are considered the most emotional, we're extremely passive, we have all the things that, that people stick on us to say, this is what we are, whereas men, if you were, as your role to go in and be extremely assertive, not even aggressive, it's extreme, you would be labeled by that.

Norris: Yes, you are.

Newton: Whereas a man who goes So it's one of those things where we live in a world where there's so much complexity and labeling of people that it's hard to understand why we aren't making any progress, but it's also very simple to understand.

Norris: Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that we have to do. So a couple of things as individuals, I think it's, it's important for us to understand, to acknowledge that stereotypes exist and to recognize them. You're right on the Google thing, they didn't go in and say, let's do, you know, but recognize that you're, if you don't think about it explicitly, you're gonna unconsciously use your bias in decision-making or in producing a product. And so, so it's important to keep that in your mind at all times. And the other point you made about when you look at organizations, you have pointed out again, then I wanna ask you a question. You do see diversity in IT, at the, kind of at the entry level positions, but not as, as I said, it kind of funnels off. So gets back to that advocacy thing. There is some mentoring involved or sponsorship. It's important for the leaders in the organization to develop that, to, to develop that talent, and to bring it, bring it up in the organization because you're hiring great people and, and you give people opportunities in the organizations that they are. But I have a question for you that I related kind of to the pandemic. I think one thing in certain areas and a little bit where, where I am, even though it's in California, sometimes it's, it's difficult to get the diversity because you don't live in a diverse area, right? You live in an area where it's predominantly whatever. With the pandemic, we've kind of proven that we can work remotely. So does it open up for us the opportunity to hire people from a more geographically, from different geographies and can that help us to diversify the workforce?

Newton: You know, that's a very interesting question. I think the fact that we have shown that we can work remotely, like many companies are going to remote work only, or going to some form of it. I know a lot of the companies in Silicon Valley have talked about-

Norris: Yeah, yeah

Newton: For a year or two, they've said that people don't have to come into the office. I think that's a change of mindset, right? Because one of the problems that working remotely introduced is measuring the productivity of your people when you don't, when you're not right there with you. And I think when, when you, you kind of juxtapose that to in-person work, so the person has basically an hour for lunch, two 15 minute breaks, and because of the social nature of being in person... So measuring productivity remotely has to be put against measuring productivity in place.

Norris: Right.

Newton: Because when you measure those two things, it's kinda hard to say that the person is more productive in the office than they are at home, because at home you feel more, you feel driven to do more because you just feel like, I'm at home, I'm, I can get in my pajamas. I don't have to, whatever it is, so there's that. And I think specifics for black people where that rubber hits the road is, is that we aren't giving the benefit of the doubt in the office, so when we go home, you're kind of-

Norris: You really don't get it.

Newton: Right. Because you're assuming that we're lazy, we're gonna be late, we're gonna do whatever it is that we're going to do. And, and there's these, again, it goes back to those stereotypes. I think that it is possible for it to be a better thing, but we really have to change our mindsets. Really. If you think about slavery and I don't know how familiar you are with American history, but first people come to America from Europe and they colonized indigenous people. And then eventually slaughter as many of them as they could, then they go to Africa and they bring over another group of people and they colonize them as well. So when you think about things like that, it's kind of one of those things that you have to get buy-in from white people to be willing to make this change, because we didn't and black people, didn't, not end slavery. We didn't, we didn't just, woke up, walk out one day and say, we're done with this. It took white people being in the, in the fight with them to get us there. This is another one of those examples where it takes white people being in the fight with us. If you, if in your organization, you look across your IT staff and you've got Asians, you got Hispanics, you've got black people and whatever else that you've got, do you sit down and assess how valuable they are to the organization and what they bring? And I think, I've said this in several of my chats, when you're getting ready to hire someone, typically, especially for a senior role or a leadership role, typically what you do is you bring the people in that are just like that, right? People who are already CIOs or CSOs or whatever senior directors or whatever it is. And the problem with that, is group think, it's the same. So everybody in that space has the exact same experiences where if you take that person that you just hired, he is, first day in your organization, he's desktop support or feels the board or whatever you wanna call him, and you bring him into the meeting, he has things to tell you that you've gone long forgotten. What it was like when you first started in IT, what are the struggles that you have, some of the issues that you experienced. If you bring people from other parts of the organization, into your interviewing or hiring process, you get a diverse pool of people.

Norris: Right.

Newton: If you only bringing in CIOs, you're going to hire someone just like you, or CTOs or CISOs, whatever they are, they're gonna look... And that's what you see. And I think that working from home introduces a whole bunch of other pieces to that that are not necessarily accurate, but they allow us to feel comfortable that we did our due diligence.

Norris: Right.

Newton: So if you were hiring a CTO and you hire a search agency to fire, find you a CTO, that search agency is probably gonna be predominantly white and male or white somehow or another. It's not, the candidates they're gonna do, they're going to start excluding people immediately that don't fit this model. So you create a job description that says, you want this, this and this and this and you want somebody who's had 10 years experience in this, people who've done all these things. They then start looking for that person. And that person almost inevitably is a white person, most likely a white male. So hope my question wasn't too long, answer wasn't too long, but that-

Norris: No, it's, and I just want to kind of, it's not even just at the leadership levels, it's in these highly technical jobs, right? That we go out and we say, we want you to have five years experience with Oracle or, or whatever, that naturally excludes people, and it's not even necessary. And so what, what I've observed through my years in IT is often the route to the CIO is through some of these really highly visible, highly technical parts of the organization. So women in particular are often on the customer service side and you won't necessarily see people move from, from that part of the organization up to the CIO level, which is one of the reasons it was important for me to do some lateral moves to kind of fill in some of those gaps. So it's, I think it's even important to change our thinking on roles that aren't at the leadership level, but that are highly visible technical roles in IT. And I want to also comment on one other thing you said, it's, I think I probably saw this on a meme or something on social media. White people, we need to see the race issue as a problem for white people. As long as we look at it and go, well, we want to help black, we wanna make it better for black people. It's our problem too. The Google example's a great example, the, the exclusion didn't just impact the people who were excluded, although it impacted them the most, but it impacted the team that was working 'cause they did, they produced a less, an inferior product. And so, so I think that's the thing, and it's, it's something that we hear a lot these days. We have to, as white people, own the race issue as our issue.

Newton: Right. And that's very important that you say there, because I think that the problem with where we are in our society as a whole, so we've got all this law enforcement violence portrayed on black people. The first question you ask is, do you see me as human? I have two children, I have a black son, a black daughter, and a black husband, all of us. And every time they leave me, my fear is returned to me.

Norris: Yeah.

Newton: So I think that law enforcement to some degree has this stereotype that's so embedded into what we are. So we are drug users, and I'll give you an example. So if you take the crack epidemic, I don't know if you really were-

Norris: Yeah, let's hear it.

Newton: Then you take the, the oxycodone, these, these opioids and methamphetamines, these are described, and white people are in these epidemics, as mental health issues, but crack was a criminal issue.

Norris: It's a... Yeah, yeah.

Newton: So when police apply the logic that someone has come up with and say, this is who we are, then you're gonna have the outcomes that we have. I think the point is so valid that we need white people to join us in the trenches. My relationship with you're, fairly new, we haven't known each other for a long time, but I want it to be a part of what you're doing because I find it so impressive when I, like I said, when I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I think even Chapman has a biology, a biography of you there, it's just, I mean, it's impressive as all, get out! I know a lot of CIOs, I know a lot of people who have done some great things, but none of them compare to what you are doing and what you have done is impressive. And so I think that you have the power to bring change. And I hope that you and people that think like you and have the same opportunities you, you have, that you think about, how can I make my organization different? How do I make this world a better place? Because it's one thing to go to work and do your job, right? So you're the CIO, you make sure the organization has supplies, its need to it's customers and all that, but do you make an impact on the world? Do you change society? And what's in these roles, emerging technologies are coming fast and furious. So think about who's going to be hit by that. I'll give you another example. So I love Sam's club. I go to Sam's club-

Norris: Aha, okay.

Newton: About a year ago, they introduced an app. You put on your phone Sam's club, right? And you go in, you open your phone, they say, yes, you're right And you scan, and when you scan every item you've bought, you could just walk out the door because... So who's going to be displaced? Because I don't know what part of California you are in, but all these things that are coming-

Norris: Yeah, they are.

Newton: You have to be purposeful and intentional about what we're doing. And if we are not, then we are really doing a disservice to all, because I think that black and brown people bring a unique perspective to all the technology, all of STEM, are very unique, right? So All of these things. So I just think that people like you really hold the chance for there to be better for all of us.

Norris: Well, that's what I really want to do. And that's one of the reasons that I'm so happy to be connected with you 'cause I do feel like for the last several years, I have focused so much on the issues of women and gender issues in technology to the exclusion of other issues. And it's hard in some way, it's, it is hard, it's I had, it's, I have to put myself out there to talk about race. And, and so that's why I so appreciate that you're having this conversation with me and, and willing to listen to what I have to say and to share your knowledge with me. But that's, I think the thing that, that I really want to challenge myself to do better as I, I'm, I'm in my late fifties, I don't have, I don't know how much time I have left, but that's where I want to focus in the next few years

Newton: You have a lot of time left.

Norris: I have a lot of time left.

Newton: You have a lot of time left.

Norris: I hope so.

Newton: You will be here for a while.

Norris: I hope so. But it is, I feel for you, I, I'm obviously, but my children, I think I've mentioned this to you before, are African-American so I have a slight sense of what you feel. And I think as white people though, we can't, it's so much harder for us to internalize it or to, to understand, and what you said about, it's the, the interactions with, with the police force, that there's so much implicit bias built and, and it's not just the police, cause we've seen a rash, of things happen over the last couple of years with women who look like me calling the police because a black person's having a barbecue and how do we kinda turn ourselves around? All I'm sure they're all really nice women who really just have this in, on an implicit kind of bias that they didn't even realize they had. And so how do we kinda work on that? I think the first part is to say, I need to work on it, and I need to work on it. So, so thank you for being there for me.

Newton: Oh, absolutely. And I, and as I said to you before, if you need anything from me, I am right here. And you don't even have to, just call a text or email or something, I am right there. I think the thing that's really interesting about you, like so, younger people use a word called woke, like you are a awake, or awoke. I still haven't mastered what that means. But I think that maybe it translates to intentional, being, paying attention, to be intentional in your actions, in your thoughts, in your, where, where you go, it is necessary for you. It is necessary for Helen Norris to be in the fight with everybody else, it's necessary for Helen Norris... When you're, when you're thinking, when a job opening comes up or a board opening comes up or something comes up, you don't automatically think about the people that you're most comfortable with. Right? This word I learned when I was getting my doctorate degree, which as old as I am, you think I would have known this, but it has a translation to homeless social reproduction. We prefer to be with those people who look like us, right? That in the old days, was called the old boys club, That kind of thing. But the problem with preferring to be with the people like us, is we don't grow as a society. We don't grow and mature as human beings, right? Because if I'm only with black people, my experience is only going to be what their expressions are, the lens they see the world through. Whereas I don't want to be stuck in a space that that's I know. I lived in Miami during the Muriel boat when, when the Cubans came in and there was a lot of talking, it was a lot of racism associated with that, because they were told that these were the people who Castro led out of his jail, these were criminals-

Norris: Oh my God, yeah.

Newton: So all of that kind of stuff. And the problem with that though, is that when we make these assumptions with people, by some physical characteristic, that means absolutely nothing, that you have blue eyes and blonde hair, that you're six foot tall or that you're thin or whatever it is, these are physical characteristics that change over time. And if you look at any person when they die, they turn darker. So why in the world would we care about physical characteristics of a person? Is the person a decent person? Is the person willing to help? Is the person contributing to the society as a whole? And I've been asked a lot about these diversity chats. So when Mr. Fuller was killed in May, it hit me so hard to see that. And I think, again, going back to technology, technology makes these things visible now, 'cause they were happening a long time ago-

Norris: Yes, they were.

Newton: We can watch it on TV, we've seen them on the news, in our social media feeds, these things are happening, what are we doing? What are we as a society doing? To think about justice, race, opportunity, education, all of these places. I had a chat yesterday with a young man, he is in Pakistan. He was going to a predominantly white school here in America, and when the virus hit, he went home to be with his family and to help his family. And the story he told was, so some of the immigration policies that are, are driven by politics, how he's seeing all of these things and he'll be in Pakistan. We just had 911 a couple of days ago. So all of these things kind of fluctuate. And so this young man is brilliant. I mean, he's got great skills and he, he will be a great contributor to America's as all go. And he wants to work in America, he wants to have help his family and his community in Pakistan, which to me is an example of a true human being. I know I can contribute something to this society, but I also want to help my family, which is what we all want. We all want contribute to society, actually let's say we all, because there's probably some people who don't.

Norris: Most people don't.

Newton: Yeah, right. I think that there's just too much in the environment about race and gender. And I applaud you for doing what you're doing for women, but I ask that you think about the entire spectrum of what a society is like. So I asked this question at a panel I was doing a while ago, Mae Jemison came to my university in and I so asked how many native Americans or indigenous people does this university have? How many native Americans or indigenous people are CIO's who are where, where is that? And it was almost like crickets, no one said a word to my question. I still don't know the answer to that question. So if we think just simply about that. So when you talk about true Americans, if there such a thing, that's the true Americans, all the rest of the same, but then come to here where we are now, we don't even consider them, we don't even think about them. We won't make a concerted effort to hire them and bring them into our organization. So we consider the Indians from India or Asia, that's our new substitute for diversity. And you look at both colleges, there's a huge Asian population, faculty, all of those things, but no other group. And that, that's something I think that we should change.

Norris: Yeah. I agree. I agree. And we, we have to do it all. We all have to do it together and it's true. It has been a very hard time with the, there's the pandemic. And then, and it doesn't feel like when you watch the murder of George Floyd, which we get to see, and it's just, and then you see another and another, it's it's, yeah if it, I'm not always hopeful, it makes me sometimes feel, even for me, I'm just like, how, how can this be? And it makes me worry for the next generation, the next generation of black boys who are going to, who could experience this.

Newton: I would even say for your daughters, I mean, you have whether you wanted or not, an obligation, to pave a path for them, because though you identify as white, society isn't gonna identify them as white. I don't care how-

Norris: You're right about that.

Newton: What kind of hair they have, society is not going to-

Norris: No, it's true.

Newton: So your role as a parent should translate into making sure opportunities are available for people-

Norris: For them.

Newton: Specifically based on the fact that you have two daughters, society is going to paint their own lens, right? So they're gonna see them in this way, which may not even be true, may not even factual, but is automatically assumed. And so, I don't know if you've seen the movie, "The blind side", but it's about-

Norris: Yes, yeah.

Newton: About that, when you think about that perspective, it takes a white person to save a black person. It takes a white person to make opportunities available. And I think there's a little bit of truth to that, but I think the problem is, is that we already assume that this is not possible in our society, for black people to get up. And I heard this , pull yourself up by your bootstraps. What happens if you don't have boots? What happens if you don't have the strings to pull yourself up and there are these assumptions, and so for black women, your daughters, my daughters, me and all the black women that you know, we're depending upon you to think about this. Engage people in uncomfortable conversations, and they really need to be very uncomfortable. Because if they're not uncomfortable, you're just going to be able to walk that and say, Oh, well.

Norris: Yeah. No I, that makes sense to me. That that makes sense to me. And it is, it is, it makes, that's the thing is, we white people, we have to be willing to be uncomfortable 'cause we, we're pretty comfortable. And so, that's the, the, that's what, what we have to do.

Newton: And I would just add this one thing you said earlier about privilege, you have privilege. You are visible in your IT community, probably in the overall IT community, throughout the world, you're visible. So when your children come, if they decide they wanna be in IT, or they wanna be a doctor, or they want to do something in engineering or whatever it is, will they get that same opportunity and have the same luck that you had to get where you are if you do not put things in place to make that happen for them?

Norris: Yeah, yeah. It's true. And it's interesting, the word privilege, a lot of people are kind of offended or insulted to think that they have privilege. It doesn't mean you would. I mean, I've worked hard. It didn't mean, I didn't work hard, but I have privilege, I, it's, it's just, it doesn't make me a bad person. I just need to understand that for a person like you, who didn't come into the world with the same level of privilege that I did, it's so much harder, and what can I do to change that and to, to make, to make that better?

Newton: Absolutely.

Norris: How can I use my privilege? One of my daughters sent me a video one time of, it was after a police shooting and the young man, the victim's brother was, went to the city council meeting or something and she literally, he was really upset, naturally his brother had just been killed by the police. And she literally, a white woman literally put her body between this young man and the police. And that's, to me that was an example of how to use your privilege. And that's a pretty gutsy way, and that's the kind of thing that we have to do as white people, is put our bodies, put our beings in the way of danger.

Newton: I think that's absolutely correct. We're running out of time. I wanna ask you a quick question first. I wanna ask you, have you gone back to Ireland since you left, as a little girl?

Norris: Yeah. Yeah. I go, my, my entire family, most of my family is there. So we go every couple of years or every, lately I've gone more often because my father has been sick, and it has changed so much. When, as I said, when I was young, it was very, the, the role of women, we were really in a different place, we were not treated equally, and I, I see change, I see change at lots of different levels. Some of that is because it is a little Island then when I grew up, we weren't like off completely isolated or something, but people didn't travel the way that they do now. I, I didn't get on a plane until I was like 15. And so I think that that has helped us bring in some outside influences. We also, when I was a girl, we had a really difficult economy. And so we didn't have immigration, we had emigration. we used to kind of joke that our biggest export was our children. We'd send our children all, you know everybody in America claims to be Irish, right? And in the eighties and early nineties, we began to have immigration because our economy improved and the Soviet union collapsed. And so you, first you started to see a lot of Eastern European immigrants and then immigrants from African nations. And so it is a more diverse, when I was a girl, everybody looked like me, it was really homogenous. And now we see more diversity because we have immigration, and it's changing the country, we have a booming, well, we did have, it's not booming like it was, but we went through an economic boom as we went through this. We also, I think the role of the Catholic church has really changed. When I was a girl, the Catholic church was really powerful. That's not true anymore, I mean, people in Ireland, I think, still identify as Catholic and they go to mass. But actually, I would say, the Catholic church reinforced a lot of those gender stereotypes. I mean, they literally told, because of the influence, women couldn't, they, we couldn't have contraception, it was actually illegal, let alone divorce. And so in the last couple of years, we have actually had a referendum and voted gay marriage. So we have our in fact, our last prime minister was a gay man. And so to me, that would never have happened. I'm shocked to see that a turned around at a single generation, but I think the church had a lot of influence that it's recently lost.

Newton: Yeah. I went to a Catholic school early on, and I remember the rigidity of the Catholic religion, and I think that a lot of what we know about the world, people use religion to condemn, analyze, destroy, whatever it is that suits their agenda regardless. And I think that's very unfortunate for us if that is indeed the case that we are, we, I am not, I don't subscribe to any religion. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. And that's, that's as far as I can get, I can't get any further than that, because the fact that you can use religion to, like so black people, for example, there's a quote that the Klan and white supremacists use, is about the story of Ham. So Ham supposedly went into a tent and had relations with his daughter and so from that God put a stamp on people and anybody that comes out black is because of Ham's transgression. So that's Christian religion, right? So, and there's so many pieces and parts of that, you have Catholic, with the children being molested by priests and all that. And all these things that happen, that people wrap themselves up in religion and become so absorbed in it. They don't, you can't see, your lenses are clouded. You can't see what's really happening. I'm glad that Ireland has made that choice, and it's always been one of those places I wanted to go, I've been to Germany a couple of times and I, my daughter went to Finland. And I traveled a lot when I was younger, but I've always wanted to go to Ireland, but I've always been afraid because like, I think what would a black person do in a whole white country? What would happen to me when I make it out? And so...

Norris: Yeah, it's, I think, well now it's way more diverse. I brought my children there when they were little and they were, and they were, and it was, it was fine, but they were, you didn't see many other kids who looked like them at the time. So it's, it's changed quite a bit since then.

Newton: Well, thanks for chatting with me.

Norris: Thank you.

Newton: We have a couple of minutes left, so if you have anything you wanna add, please, please. And as soon as the video converts, I'll send you a link and you can review it, and let me know if I may upload it.

Norris: That sounds great. You know, we've covered so much. I don't know that I really have anything to add other than, I, one of the things, as I said, I want to kind of rededicate myself in some ways to making IT particularly in higher ed, a more welcoming place for people of color as I've done for women for many years. So I know you have quite a following, and I just want to encourage people to reach out to me, the way I'm sure people reach out to you, the way you've reached out to me and, 'cause I'd love to have a conversation, and, and I'd love to get advice. And I, I, I don't know. I'll just say my email address, it's [email protected] and I encourage, I'd love to hear from any of your, your connections. So thank you again, Rochelle. I've really enjoyed this.

Newton: Thank you very much. Stay well. And you have my contact information.

Norris: I do.

Newton: Please reach out and I'm sorry, I normally don't use my phone over the weekends, so I turn it off and put it somewhere, but I'm happy to able to do this today. So have a great rest of your day. Let me ask you one question before we go. Are you not susceptible and vulnerable to the fires that are in California?

Norris: Well, we're a little bit away from the fires. We, so actually I'm looking out the window now and it looks pretty nice, but the last few days it's just been really smoky. And so actually I was telling my husband, I felt it in my throat and my nose, so to me, so I'm again very fortunate that I'm not somewhere where my home is in danger. Even my, one of my daughters lives in the Bay area and saying, much smoker up there, so that's the worst that we felt. So, and hopefully it stays that way, but man, it was smoky and it made you, I was like, I don't , do I have the coronavirus or is it just the smoke? Hopefully it was just the smoke.

Newton: Thank you so much again for chatting and I'm glad you are safe and your children are safe.

Norris: Thank you.

Newton: Thank you. And stay in touch please.

Norris: Okay.

Newton: Thank you. Bye

Norris: Bye.