OK. Um I hope that you can all see now have the chat open here. So the Q and A. Um so very briefly, I'll quickly introduce myself. My name is Elena Manley. Um I'm the co-founder and CEO of Meta Space.Um And I'm gonna go into a little bit about what we do. Um Interestingly, I don't have a all kind of the classic technical journey. In fact, I was far more within the humanity space before having done a bachelors in, in a relations and worked for political think tanks. But then afterwards I did a master's in data science and now I'm pretty much pretty deep into artificial intelligence as well as my role of CEO of mesh space. Um The, the work that I do within A I is mostly towards the prevention of written harassment. Um And I've had the immense opportunity to present my work at NATO at Bosch as well as being a textiles portfolio company. Um So today we wanted to talk about kind of why harassment is the silent killer of women in tech and a couple of stats for you all today.

So obviously, women make up around 50% of the workforce, but only make up 27% of um the tech workforce, which is obviously quite low. And interestingly though that more than half are likely to leave before they are 35 years old. So it's not just about an attraction, there's always a special attention um around how can we get more women into tech. And today I would like to talk to you and open your eyes to the fact that we actually need to get more women staying in tech roles. Um Because yeah, as you can see more than half leaving by 35 this is a huge trend and, you know, one of our hypothesis is that harassment, discrimination and bias within these roles has a huge role to play in it. Um So, you know, 40% of women in today experience harassment remotely um is the new reality of um you know, working um remotely and working from wherever you want in the, in the world. Like we're very fortunate that today, you know, there's people calling from the U si still Kentucky and I'm calling from Ibiza or the UK and it comes with some amazing perk. But also so the way that harassment and discrimination is actually perpetrated has also changed. Um So, you know, being harassed remotely can be anything from over text or, you know, over zoom. And really, it's because the boundaries between life and work have blurred more and more. Um you know, I'm calling you from my living room.

Uh So, you know, these things seem to be happening more and more and, you know, negative bias is very real. I want to show you some quotes that I received. Um, when I started my company. Um, so, you know, we were told that we should hire a male CTO although me, my founder and our first employee are all technical and we're all women. So, you know, it make more sense for us to hire maybe someone in marketing or sales, but definitely not, we didn't need someone else who was technical. I was asked if I was mentally stable enough to set up my company, um that, you know, this is a woman's problem, um that sex harassment doesn't exist and if I was actually technical, so, you know, negative bias in um in the workplace and tech is very, very real and I'm really excited later on the presentation to, to actually present the work that we're doing with West Space.

Um And you know, why, why we built it. Um So, you know, this isn't just a negative for employees. Obviously, we, we, we just discussed kind of the huge repercussion that we're seeing on women when it comes to their role in tech. But we're also seeing that companies are suffering too. You know, this is uh starts from the US. So we've seen the cost of employment lawsuits have risen by 26% in the last three years. Um And you know, the cost of that is also reflected. So the average cost for an escalated case, meaning a case has gone to court, a discrimination case has risen to 200 K for small to medium sized businesses. So this isn't just a problem for large enterprises which lots of people assume, but in fact, it is also a problem for every single organization. Um However, we know that 99.8% of all misconduct cases go unreported. So what tends to happen is that women are more likely to leave their jobs as we saw from those statistics, you know, 50% leave for the 35 in tech than to actually report um misconduct in the workplace. And a big reason for that is because retaliation is very real, around 60% of individuals who report misconduct, you know, from across all of the spectrum.

Um experience a form of retaliation, be it from being actually sacked um to not being promoted when they should have or, you know, just having their peers kind of ostracize them. So, um this is why we built massive space. Um So mess space helps organizations prevent report and resolve and we're trying to go against the norm where, you know, a lot of organizations might have like a whistleblowing hotline which you can report from, but we know that people don't use those things. Um So that's why we built Metas space Um And you know, my co-founder and I were witness um to a sexual harassment case that affected half the women around us whilst we were in tech. So as I mentioned, I'm a machine learning engineer, having specialized in data science and my fantastic co-founder Helena, who you can see there is a cybersecurity analyst and it, yeah, it affected around 10 women um uh at the time and it took five months of investigation and ultimately, the case was buried and went unresolved.

And the actual process of going through the case was more traumatic uh than the actual harassment itself. So we really wanted to see how we can streamline and help organizations um actually improve their processes when it came to that. Um So, you know, we really spent eight months using our, our kind of technical knowledge. So, um N LP is natural language processing. So it's how a computer understands tech, if you've kind of seen the kind of whirlwind journey that we're on at the moment in the A I and chat GP T and natural language processing is what is powering chat G BT. Um And obviously software development and cybersecurity to really analyze the problem to create this data driven solution that tackles the whole misconduct pipeline. Um I'm just before I like dive into um the kind of our solution, I would love to see if anyone has any questions.

Um So I saw that Zara, you were saying that you're working on a start up project. That's amazing to hear. I love to hear other entrepreneurs um going into the space and it's a prompt management system. Um But I mean, I've, I've raised with investors, Zara, so I'm really happy as well to discuss with you a bit more how we went about uh raising funds because it is very different raising funds as a woman uh than it is as a man. Uh We know that less than 2% of all um investment goes to women. Uh So it's really a systemic problem and you know, if we throw in women of color, of different sexualities, um really, that number just goes down, you know, really plummets. Um But there, I'm just gonna, uh you know, ask if anyone has any questions to do more about the problem before I deep dive into what we're doing at meta space. And if not, that's totally fine as well. I can just keep on, keep on going. Um So, you know, what we, we decided to build out was obviously first a better system of reporting. So we built out a reporting system that allows employees to report anonymously if they choose all types of workplace misconduct directly from their phones. So this means that you can put what you want, where you want and where, when you want in a secure manner. Um Obviously, it's really, we find that individuals are two times more likely to report through us than they are any kind of whis legacy whistleblowing um system.

But obviously, that's not really enough. You know, once the cases are submitted, our goal is to streamline the resolution of cases. A really interesting fact is it takes about three months for hr to even start an investigation process properly and it can take up to 318 days on average to resolve a misconduct case. So, you know, the numbers that are present at the start of how women are leaving their tech roles and misconduct plays a big part on that is actually also to do not only from the harassment case itself but how it's responded to and how poorly it's responded to. So we developed, you know, this resolution center which basically helps hr and guides them through the best ethical and legal practices in the form of a checklist. Um And our goal is really to reduce the resolution time by 80% because, you know, more than a year um trying to resolve a case. It sometimes it's, it's just absolutely crazy to us. Um And what's really, really exciting is um our natural language processing algorithm that can add to detect written harassment in real time. This is very much in regards to the prevention and education um of individuals when it comes to workplace misconduct.

And the reason why that we built this is because zero tolerance does not work. So I'm sure a lot of you have had the time. Zero tolerance. Um, it's actually became the norm. Um, kind of post me Black Lives Matters companies felt like they needed to make a statement to say we do not tolerate harassment. And it's a great phrase. Zero tolerance. I think we can all agree. But unfortunately, when companies put zero tolerance policies in the workplace, it actually makes equity worse and equity is worse today than it was free me to Black Lives Matter because we went down the zero tolerance route. And the, the reason being is that women and anyone who experience harassment are less likely to report when zero tolerance is put into place. Um most likely because most individuals don't necessarily want it to become a big legal case. Um And some people just want their harassment to be acknowledged. Um Kind of, we always ask individuals why they're reporting and some of the responses we get is I just don't want to have to interact with this person. I, you know, you want them to be moved teams loads of different ways, but we've never ever received anything that says, oh, I want this person to be fired. Um And zero tolerance really goes down, goes down that route.

Um And so obviously what we believe in is that prevention education is really the only way forward for us. So, um I'm gonna stop because, and see if there's any questions in the Q and A here. Um Before we keep going. I can't see any questions but please feel free to interact in the chat. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have zero tolerance um policies within your workplace, how you feel about them. Um I'd be really interested in knowing. Um But so a little bit more about like what our process actually looks like, so hr can proactively identify evidence. Um but also employees can still securely submit any reports. But we also highly encourage a collaborative resolution between employees and hr through an integrated chat function, which basically means that even if you're anonymous, you can still communicate what, how you want a case resolved with your. Hr. Um And as as mentioned, you know, currently hr deals with things on a case by case basis, there's never any learning, any progression. So we provide them with data insights for them to actually have an intelligent investigation process. Um so that it basically kind of brings to light things that have cut, you know, usually been quite occult and really hidden um with like the signing of NDAS or brushing harassment cases under under rugs that people don't know about it. Um This, we're gonna skip our tax.

It's not really important, but one of the really interesting applications is we're actually looking to work with military organizations. Um You know, for example, Lune, um Lieutenant Colonel Lena um is uh works for the Norwegian government and, you know, really is pushing that uh mesh spaces to be used by the, the Norwegians um because we obviously help them and provide data insights for them to create a safe workplace.

Um I'm happy to go more into them, into our, into what we do, but I just wanted to stop and, you know, thank you all so much, firstly for listening and if there's any questions at all, um feel free to put it in the chat. Um because yeah, I get bored of hearing myself speak for too long.