 Hi, I'm Sarah Brumfield. I'm one of the volunteers here, and I was the person in the back of the room yesterday who was stressing my opinion on how you can get more women to come in and to like this. And it actually generated a lot of interest in sign conversations, so I thought I might do a lightning talk on it. In addition to having a degree in computer science, my undergrad work, I had a second major in the study of women in gender. So this is actually something that's very near and near in my heart for reasons beyond just being a woman, but the naval gazing line might be the only woman here in part of it as well. So I've done a lot of research and the theory behind it. And what I wanted to do is give you two terms that are useful, because I find when you start naming things, it kind of gives them power, and you can think about things in different ways. The first one is called imposter syndrome. And so one of the theories on why you don't have a lot of women in other countries like this is that they feel like imposters. And so you can kind of get this if you've ever like raised your hand and somebody asked a question, oh, how many of you have that X and you raise your hand and you're like, well, maybe you sort of have an X or I try to do X or, yeah, that last three slides I totally got lost on, you don't feel like, you know, you're there, but you're sort of begging it. And that feeling is something that a lot of people who are underrepresented in groups can feel. And they don't realize that everyone else in the group, particularly people who don't really feel the same way. They assume it's because they are imposters and they don't belong. So in a story on this, when I was in undergrad, the first couple of programming classes, we took, there was always that one guy in the front row who asked the really obnoxious, hard questions. And I was lucky enough to have friends and to be able to identify that as this really obnoxious thing that people do. We actually, Ben in the back room, I ended up marrying, gave it a name, voice of unquestionable authority, which once you named it, you could be like, yeah, he's just V-O-U-A-ing. And even better, the biggest culprit in my classes, I ended up ladding and grading two years later for a class he was taking, and yeah, he didn't have any clue what he was talking about. So that was really useful to find out, just took me two years. And you have to kind of stick with it. And one thing that was suggested is, oh, what can you do about it, or is it your fault? I don't think it's your fault once you're putting bikini clad women on slides, and I'm assuming most of you aren't doing that. But one thing that you, the sort of things that you can do about it are things that kind of cut down on that imposter syndrome feeling. So we at LSRC always have women's t-shirts, and I love that, and I suspect that I'm part of the reason we do that because I've always been here, but it's something that makes you feel very welcome. It's a token, but it's a nice token that kind of gets you a step beyond the, yeah, some of the law here. If you find yourself using things like the VOUA, try not to. Instead, try bringing up problems that you're trying to solve to the table to discussions because problems show humility, but they also, it's cool because you bring your humility in and you actually might get answered. So it's kind of a, if you can take that and become comfortable enough to bring your problems in, it's a cool way to work on the imposter problem. Also just be welcoming, be nice, try to explain things that people don't get, that you get all that. Now the problem with that is, in order for you to do that, people have to show up and there's not that many of us here, right? And so this brings me to my second concept, which we call the pipeline problem. And the idea with the pipeline problem is, to get to a place like LSRC, there's a series of decisions that got you here. And you start out with 50% of the population and at age 12, you decide you don't like math. Boom, you're down to 10% of the population. And then in high school, you decide not to take calculus. Boom, you're down to like five percent of the population. You get in that first programming class because maybe you're interested in it and you drop out after a week because it's really hard and you feel like you're an imposter. And so every stage of this game is if this pipeline gets narrower and narrower and narrower and that just means you get here and there's only 12% of you, which is actually really high. That's about, to end the 10% of what I was saying, like under other computer science programs and other like-minded. We've been working on the pipeline problem for years. Like me personally, about 16, you know, you go, you mentor, you give presentations, you encourage girls, you tell them how cool it is, all of that stuff, it's not working. So I don't know, I can tell you, I can define this term and tell you that's what we've been trying to do, but it doesn't work. So what do you do about that? I don't know, I have a couple of ideas. One of them is to look at what you call a second pipeline, which is grownups, people who are figuring out who they are because members are big component of figuring out who you are. At the same time, they're making career decisions. So if you can go find women, so I have a lot of acquaintances who are librarians. A lot of librarians these days are picking out programming, some of them even Ruby. They're doing it because they have a lot of data that they want to deal with, a lot of textual analysis that they want to do because their work is very much online. Time up in one minute. Okay, I also, I work for a very, very large corporation. There's tons of women around. They're not in developer roles, they're in testing roles, they're in support roles. They are technical women. They probably are smart enough, technical enough to pick out programming. You just have to figure out how to transfer them there. And I think they're old enough that they've gotten their work themselves into this. They've learned everything they did on their own. You can combine that with some classes, interactory stuff that, hey, yeah, you could do this if you wanted to. I think you might actually be able to expand that pipeline some more. If you were in Dana's presentation yesterday, she actually came to Ruby after being an AA who munged a lot of data from reports. And this is a good part of the pipeline I haven't even thought about, but she's like, yeah, there's tons of women out there who are dealing with data and coming up with ways to write scripts in Excel. They have the right mindset, they have the right skill set. If you could just take them under your wing somehow and convince them that, yes, they could do this. And I'll leave you with my final point, just the point I made at the back of the room the other day, which is the people you have the most influence on are your daughters and perhaps your wives. Because there's a lot of us here who maybe started out as programmers and then got married to somebody who happens to also be here. But there's a lot of us here I've noticed who are here because their husbands have brought them along and taught them and convinced them that, yes, they could do this. So, that's it.