 A couple months ago, this picture became my favorite picture in the whole world. And it shows Piotr and his colleague, Tomas, two white programmers holding a sign that says, the world will be better when IT becomes less boring than this. And they shared this picture on Twitter under the hashtag donate because to animate people, to donate to red customer of code, and to support our crowdfunding campaign. And in the next minutes, I'm going to tell you why this picture is so wonderful, why they are so right, and how we can make a community that actually looks like this into a community that looks like that. Magic. Hi. I'm Annika. I'm Lanziar on Twitter. I'm really happy to be invited on this stage to talk to you. And I'm going to share with you the magic trick on how to fix your community in one day. I'm going to talk to you about what diversity is, what use it is to us, why we need it, and how we can achieve it because diversity is achievable. And to understand what's going on, we need to take a look at the field of technology and engineering in general to understand the issues and the problems and the roots of the problems that we are faced with in our communities. So our world is as diverse as some tech companies and conferences can only wish for. We are surrounded by different age groups and genders, cultural and religious backgrounds, ethnicity, job level, bodies, abilities, sexual preferences, et cetera. In this talk, I'm mostly going to focus on gender, and I'm mostly going to talk about women since that's my expertise. But for a second, let's actually look like what diversity would actually look like. It's not one pink bubble and a lot of blue ones or the other way around, it's when you can't see what the dominating group is anymore since there is none. And also, not everybody just belongs to one category, but to many. And did you know that only 10% of the world's population are white and male? But most of the people creating the software which we use all over the world every day are white and male. So if we have non-diverse teams developing software, it's because of a social imbalance. We solve the problems that we see. And people from the same background in a team will come up with the same ideas and solution. On the other hand, diverse teams, so teams with people from different backgrounds and experiences are more creative, innovative, and more productive than non-diverse teams which has been shown by a huge number of studies. So this means that diversity is a key ingredient to building a strong community and a business that is built to last. And even financially, it shows that companies that include many women in senior positions show better financial results than companies that include few or actually no women in senior positions. A diverse team can also capture a greater share of the consumer market because it has been proven that teams with people from different backgrounds can of course more effectively market to consumers from different backgrounds. A good example for a diverse team is actually the closed captioning feature of YouTube videos, which was a huge win for Google and had a big impact on their consumer market. So the story is that when the internet was invented, it was awesome for deaf people because it was all in writing and they could understand everything. But then videos kept turning up which they couldn't understand anymore so that they were left out. So the deaf engineer, Ken Heronstein, developed and pushed forward the release of the closed captioning feature of YouTube videos. This little sign, the CC sign that you can click, you can turn on and off the subtitles or the captioning for the videos. And this feature, it had a huge business impact beyond the community of the deaf and well beyond what was anticipated. So now people from all over the world can make their videos accessible for a super huge audience and users can understand videos that are not in their mother tongue thanks to this feature. So the world including the deaf community can now connect even further and Google has proved its importance on the market once more. And at this point, I had prepared a sad example for this talk, but spoiler alert, it now has a kind of a happy ending. I'm talking about Apple's health kit which is also included in the Apple Watch. So when they released the Apple Watch, they said in the health kit, you can monitor all the metrics that you're most interested in. Oh well, you can monitor everything up to your sodium intake, but just not your period. Something that women have been tracking for centuries and that is the health related issue women are concerned with every day. But I'm happy to report that only two weeks after I gave this talk in May, Apple announced that with iOS 9, it will finally include a period tracker. So they do listen. Yeah, jokes aside, but I'm really happy that they came to their senses. The Apple Watch is still a kind of bad, sad, great example for this because there's also the news that people with dark skin or tattoos on their wrist may have problems with the watch. The light sensors that the watch uses to measure pulse, et cetera, may not work correctly for these people, which is crazy, I don't know. There's no other word for it. And we can just hope that this actually gets a happy ending as well as the period tracker feature got. So it could have been a great product with even more satisfied customers from the beginning. And these fails happen because the teams that are developing the software are not diverse. And they're not diverse because of social injustice. How Lena Reinhard said, diversity is the default. If it's not diverse, it's broken. So if a community is not diverse, it's broken. But let me show you actually what that means and introduce you to Gary and means a programmer who quit her job after 15 years of being a programmer. I didn't know how to move forward. Things fall down over the years. There was a lot I had to put up with in the culture of tech. It just didn't seem worth it anymore. So after 15 years of being a programmer, she just quit. So what's happening? The thing is, she is not the only one. Women are leaving the industry. So let's look at this a little bit closer. If we look at the path, people usually take an entering tech and we can imagine a kind of pipeline. Ideally people get in and get around. They enter universities, study, get a job, get promoted, et cetera. A study from last year found that half the women entering the field will at some point leave. 50%. So we have holes in our pipeline, which means that at this point, we are filling a damaged pipeline, which is super frustrating. So why does it leak? Why do women leave? They leave because of hostile work environment. They're feeling isolated. There's a lack of career paths for them. They're actually often overlooked in promotions and we have a lack of role models. The other thing is that we don't even have many women in the field of technology. So women hold, of all the jobs all over the world, they hold 48% so that basically half, half of the jobs there are. So it's quite equal, but they only hold 20% of jobs in tech and in open source, it's much worse. We only have 11% of women. So this is our problem. Out of the few women that are making it into tech, half of them are leaving. And one of the barriers that keeps women from entering the field easily or making it to the top is that the bar is set so much higher for women and minorities. Research has found in blind studies that women's work has to 2.5 times as good as men's to be considered equal. So this is because of unconscious bias and stereotypes we have. So let's quickly talk about that, stereotypes. We love the idea that we can perceive something objectively by just looking at it and seeing the truth. But our truth is actually shaped by biases and stereotypes. There's this Harvard experiment, it's called implicit. It's a test on bias, which you can do online and you can find the link with my slides on speaker deck. So this test, they found that everybody has bias. For example, 70% to 80% have bias against women in tech. Even women in tech have these biases or they're preferring white to African American or preferring young people. But almost nobody reports those biases. This means everybody has them but nobody thinks they do, stereotypes. We learn them through culture messages, portrayals in the media, comments from friends and family. And my favorite story about this that I really liked driving a car and I think two years ago I got into driving again, I had to kind of relearn it and it was of course a little bit slower to react and there was a situation with me and another car and whatever, I didn't move as fast as I could have. And then this other driver shouts at me at this German thing, which is like Frau am Steuerungo, which means in English like women at the wheel, monsters. And the fun thing about it was that the other driver was also a woman. Which is I think twisted in so many ways but it chose perfectly how engraved these stereotypes we are. As stereotypes are we have and it's really not easy to get rid of them but we can do it. And one step is for example how we treat our kids. So this is my little brother and me, we are fixing a little table thingy with school drivers and I think we're doing an awesome job. And I can't stress enough how important we are as role models for our kids and what opportunities we give them. And we should let kids discover the world without constraining them to role specific behavior or treating them differently just because of their gender. They are natural adventurers and we should just let them live in our wonderful world without constraining them to these behaviors that actually changes every other century. So we should let them be kids, not girls or either boys. So to summarize, a diverse team is not only a representation of our world and socially fair, it makes our team more productive, come up with more creative and innovative solution, creates an atmosphere where everybody feels more welcome, it makes people stay longer in their jobs, gets you better financial results and a greater market share. So in three words, diversity is awesome and achievable. So great, let's see what we can do to get it. So when we look at some open source projects, I think we all will agree that we will see that at some projects we have a commenting culture that is just unhealthy. It's either dismissive maintainers or we have hostile comments from users who are feeling entitled to bug fixes or features and both sides do have a problem. If we as a maintainer are dismissive about the contributions we get and especially from newcomers, we set the tone with that and create with that an unwelcoming exclusive culture around our project. Or if we as users don't acknowledge that the maintainer usually just does the project in his or her own free time and that there's no big company behind it, that this can result into draining all the fun and energy out of the maintainer who then more often or not has to abandon the project because they're just freaking burned out. But there are ways to start improving our communication culture. And one step is of course to put a code of conduct on your side or you read me so that everybody knows that abusive, racist, sexist, discriminating comments are just not welcome and that there will be consequences. And broken down to one sentence, I think it's about having empathy for each other. It's about learning how to give feedback and how to receive it, creating a good documentation around our project and treating others with respect. And we have to remember that there's always a human being behind the code. And this all this applies for our online lives as well as our offline ones. It's important to address diversity and inclusiveness on each and every level on our work lives and daily lives. If it's for example at a work meeting or dinner with your family or conference after party. And here are three steps that I think are important. And first one, it's always good to start with yourself. I really recommend taking the Harvard test and educate yourself and accept that you do have bias and make your bias, your unconscious bias conscious, which means that then you can counteract them. That also means to question traditional beliefs and always ask why are we doing it this way? This helps to dismantle hidden biases in procedures that may produce barriers for women. We can fix some leak in our broken pipeline by recognizing women's work. This means make sure women's voices are being heard and push them forward, show that you believe in them and be a mentor for somebody and share your expertise. There's actually a great example is the Eurocamp guides. You should all just go there and sign up. I think this is an awesome idea. It means that you can sign up to be a mentor for a newcomer and answer all the questions a newcomer could have for a conference and show them around a little bit and make this whole being the first time at a tech conference thing a little bit easier and more inclusive, just as a really great example. But as key as it is of course for men to support women, it's important for women to do the same and to connect to others and reach out. Make yourself visible. I can get off my couch more often and go to more user groups, meetups, conferences. I can actually make myself visible in attending. So we should try to be the role model we wish we'd had. And I'm not saying it's super easy. It is hard and sometimes it's really horrible but if others are supportive, it's much easier. And if you should just take a friend if you don't want to go alone, that's what I always do. And support others. If it's just with a tiny email saying, hey, I really love what you're doing, keep on doing or if it's backing someone in a meeting or inviting her to give a talk, we can reach for the stars but we need each other for that, we can do it alone. We need support from our family, our colleagues and friends. We can be each other's support. So let's all, people of all gender, let's cause disruption and break stereotypes. And research shows that we perform worse if we hear that we're not good at what we do just before we do it. So we should stop telling women they can't do math and stop telling men they can't take care of their kids. We have to break those stereotypes that are holding us back and words are powerful. We should use ours wisely. And to show you a case study that implemented all these things, I will show you how we've built Rails customer of code. Who has heard about it? Okay, let's just end this talk. It's awesome. It's a three month scholarship program that enables women to work on open source project in every language, not just Ruby. And it started out as a kind of dream from Rails Girls Coaches and organizers and they wanted to basically give Rails Girls student as perspective because after attending the beginner workshop and falling in love with programming, the students are encouraged to start their own study groups and keep on learning. And now they could keep on learning towards this goal, the sum of code. And the sum of code took the whole Rails Girls movement to the next level in connecting all the good things that are happening in the Rails Girls community and keeping the momentum going and the companies involved in open source. The concept is that always two students pair up, they will find local coaches, they will choose an open source project. I think this year we had 36 projects from which the student could pick from and they will coordinate with the mentor and then apply for a scholarship which is full-time three months and sponsored. And last year, 162 women applied from all over the world and they came from all different backgrounds. We had, I think, movie directors, photographers, women that studied human computer interaction and Frenchology or work in marketing. But they all shared the same summer. They were all coding on open source projects. And we are supported by wonderful companies such as Github and Tracei, who are partners, and together with them and all the other cool sponsors and many, many awesome human beings, remember Piotr and Thomas, they actually helped us fund more money with this. And there are many amazing people out there who donated out of their own pocket and spread the word. And in the last two years, we could usually sponsor 10 teams each year. And they said the third year, so 2015, it's gonna be your hardest year. It's gonna be super, super, anstrengend to get the money. But this year, we raised even more money, 120,000 US dollars, which means that for the first time ever, this year, we could actually fund 16 teams, which is super crazy awesome by the way. But in the program, we not only have sponsored teams, but also volunteering ones who didn't get the sponsored seat, but said they wanted to contribute to open source no matter what and just kept on coding, which is super inspiring. And all in all, in the last two years, we had 32 teams, so 20 sponsors, 14 volunteering. That's 64 women in two years who worked on many different projects. For example, these are some of the projects we've had in the last two years, three years. We've had Speakerinnen, Houdi, Rubinius, Bundler, Rails, Diaspora, but my favorite one I have to say is Speakerinnen because it's a hands-on fix to the problem of few women speaking at conferences or meetups. It's a database where women can sign up with their biography and the topics they can talk about. And then organizers can find future speakers for the conferences or events who has heard about it. So a couple of people, it's still a small project, but we already have over 700 women. So I think we could fill this room seven times with women who are saying, here, I'm here, I'm visible. I can talk about these things. And my favorite part is that this has been built by Rails Girls Study Group in Berlin. And yes, I see a coach and there are maybe some other students here. So this group is meeting on Monday. And because of that, they call themselves Ruby Monday Study Group, which, if you shorten it, becomes Ruby Monsters. And Sven Fuchs, a colleague of mine, started the group in 2012. And the group kept on learning after the first Rails Girls workshop and they built speaker in and while learning how to code. And two of them, two of the Monsters, Anya and Karla, who were directing movies and working in journalism before, they actually made it into the first edition of Rails Girls Summer of Code. And they contributed to Sinatra and spoke about their summer at a conference in Kiev as many other teams did all over the world. And with this, they helped spread the word and the spark of Rails Girls Summer of Code. And Anya and Karla are now both working at Travis CI as developers and they submitted speaker in and as one of the open source project for this year. Again, and they are mentoring the students during the summer, which is where their summer and their story took on speed. So this is such a dream story that I will never tire of telling it. It shows what Rails Girls and the Summer of Code actually made possible. But wait for it, it gets even better. Because when Karla came up to me one day and she was writing a blog post about Summer of Code, she was asking me, yeah, so what actually are the alumni doing right now? Do you have any statistics, which we hadn't? So we did go out and ask all the alumni from 2013 and 14 what they are doing now. And we found this. Over 90% of our alumni are now working in tech. And 8% of them founded their own startups even, which is huge. And it shows even more how important initiatives like Rails Girls Summer of Code are and how big of an impact we are having. So Anya and Karla are two of all those alumni that are now giving back to the program that changed their lives. And they are highly visible role models for others to follow suit. So to summarize, with Rails Girls Summer of Code, we are introducing newcomers from different backgrounds to open source. We're increasing the newcomer friendliness around the communication and the culture of the projects. And we're helping to fix the leaks in the pipeline by creating supportive environments for women and boosting their careers. We even get more women into the pipeline and help diversify open source projects and companies, for example, like Travis CI. So all in all, we created a hands-on solution for the lack of women problem we have in tech communities and motivate women to start or continue their careers in tech. So three years ago, I joined the Rails Girls Workshop to learn about programming. And I was blown away because the workshop was buzzing with, I think, 70 enthusiastic women falling in love with Ruby on Rails. And afterwards, I started Rails Girls Berlin with a friend and that community grew like crazy. And Sven started to study groups and others followed in Berlin and all over the world. And now we have this international movement that is Rails Girls and the Summer of Code, which is changing the future of open source. And it all comes down to one thing, the magic trick. The magic trick is you because initiatives like Rails Girls Summer of Code are only possible because so many people are putting in hours of their lives and coaching, organizing, mentoring, supervising, and it needs people like you who are giving their time and also it shows what can happen when they do. So let's remove all the barriers for minorities in open source and tech that's built thriving communities, put in our love and support to make some change because this is our community, this is our responsibility. And the end is really not because of facts and statistics and diversity as a selling factor. In the end, we are talking about social justice and building the world we want to live in and we want our kids to live in. And the good news is that change is possible and it only takes us one day, a couple of hours, a study group, a workshop, a change of mind and heart, one first step and everybody can do it. We are all in this together. So let's not waste another second and start with it today. Thank you.