 Everyone, my name is Stephanie Morillo. I wanna talk to you about a thing that I did this past April that got me a lot of visibility for better or worse. And this is a thing that, I'm sorry, I'm trying to talk slow. I'm channeling my inner coronda. This thing was based off of conversations that I had been having with friends in the tech community and with friends in general. Things that I did not feel very comfortable talking about openly. And namely, it was diversity in tech and what I have problems with. I'll read you an excerpt from this blog post that was published this past April. I wrote a series of tweets about diversity in tech. It's a topic I've had in my mind for a while and haven't been able to voice for fear of being that angry person of color. But let me explain to you what my life currently looks like. When I go to work and assert what I believe in, I get called sassy. When I check the Guardian's website, Jessica Valente's face is featured prominently along some feature she's written about being women because heaven forbid another woman, a trans woman, a lesbian, bisexual, a gender queer person or a woman of color be given the opportunity to write about women's issues for the Guardian. Then there are the blissfully unaware like Patricia Arquette and Madonna who believe that minorities should fight for women's rights as if half of these members of these groups weren't women. When I check Twitter, I see white women dominate the conversation around diversity and also the term women. So the first thing I wanna say is I didn't go into tech seeking to be the person to talk about diversity. I went into tech to do what most of you do and it's to do your job and do it well. But the dearth of diversity has a way of finding you even when you're not looking for it. I first noticed that the peculiarity around diversity in tech was more leaning towards women when I started attending tech conferences. Most of the conferences that I've attended, I've attended on scholarship and usually the organizers or the attendees will celebrate at some point and I believe rightfully so how last year there were less women speakers or less women attendees than this year and we'd celebrate the lines to the bathroom and all of that stuff and everybody would think that was great and that's awesome but I felt like it was half a victory because I would glance across the room and I would see very few people of color and among these women that were celebrating very, very few women of color, very few as in I can count this on my hand and this is something that I've seen as a pattern across tech in general. I'll explain to you what I mean by that. So at work, I see this a lot in work. Earlier this year I interviewed for jobs in the tech industry, I'm from New York City so all of my interviews took place in New York and I decided to pop the diversity question which for me is what is your commitment to diversity and similar to what Liz said I mostly do it just to gauge what the reaction is gonna be but the interviewer told me we're very, very dedicated to diversity we're trying to get more women on the team and I was particularly annoyed by this answer because I had taken the time to look up the employees and look at the employee directory before going to the interview and I saw that the majority of the women at this company were white there were less than five women of color and about four of them appeared to be Asian so there were no non-Asian women of color working at this company. Now unfortunately, this seems to be the pattern in tech everywhere you would figure that in a place like New York City they would pay particular attention to diversity given that it is the most ethnically diverse city on the planet but tech startups in New York look and are reflective of the diversity situation elsewhere I'm sorry guys, I'm a little jittery right now. Thank you, thank you. I already worked at a company I already worked at a company where despite having a high percentage of women on staff the HR department wouldn't release numbers around diversity. So we were very keen and aware of saying yeah, we do have a lot of women working here but they didn't wanna go into numbers around race. So no one felt very comfortable about bringing this up. Case in point, I worked on an all-female marketing team and I was the only woman of color which I find to be astounding. The only other people that I felt a kingship to at my company were black women and we would frequently discuss in our back channels some of the microaggressions that we faced and I would say that the black women in my company faced far more than I did. I would get the sassy comment but I had one particular co-worker very, very hardworking person and she told me that her white male boss called her a boss bitch once. He's never used that language to any single other member of the team and she was the only black woman on her team. I recently met a friend of mine who we set up an initiative together and she told me that she had been called abrasive by people in the industry simply because she was a woman of color and because she had the courage to speak up about her experiences. So one thing that I think we tend to forget about diversity work is that it is both inner work it is both affecting interchange as well as outer change. It's very easy to say I'm not represented or this person isn't represented, we need to make change but one thing that I've become keenly aware about in my own journey in growth and self-actualization is that there's a lot of having to dismantle beliefs within yourself while also seeking to promote change on the outside. So for every single time I go out there and say you know what I want more underrepresented people in tech I want more women of color in tech because this is a group that I belong to I'm also keenly aware of the privileges that I exert over other marginalized people. I am a woman of color who comes from a disadvantaged background but I am young, I am able bodied, I am cisgendered and I'm heterosexual and these are privileges that I exert over people that are not very much like me. So it is my job and it is my duty to educate myself around the issues that affect these different groups. It is my job to sit down and listen. It is my job to amplify their voices and it is my job to get over whatever issues I have or things that I don't understand because we cannot take baby steps when we have so much to get done. So we can't wait until we figure out our own until we're able to reach this level of understanding in order to affect change. So I wanna talk about an initiative that got it right in my opinion. This past spring I participated in a conference for women software engineers called RightSpeak Code in New York City. One of the things that called out to me in the scholarship section for RightSpeak Code were the scholarships. They put them in different categories. They had a category for individuals who identified as LGBTQIA and they also had a category for people who identified as women of color which I was extremely excited about because for the first time in the almost three years that I've spent in the industry, I saw women of color spelled out differently and be included as a separate category. Now I think this is very important when you're calling out specific groups and it may feel uncomfortable and unnatural but there's something very reassuring about seeing you and the group that you belong to be given that special attention. It's very easy for us to erase numbers. Case in point, the Wall Street Journal this week wrote an article around Facebook's numbers, the number of tech workers currently in Facebook and the article remarked how last year Facebook's tech workforce was only 15% women and this year was 16% women but when you went into the racial breakdowns of all of these groups, Hispanics were only 3%, blacks were only 1% and other were only 2%. So non-Asian people of color were still less than 10% of the workforce at Facebook and imagine being a woman on top of that. It would be very, very, very small and that tends to be very isolating and very exhausting. You hate having to be the token person. You hate having to be the person to talk about these issues and bring them up. Sometimes all you wanna do is go in and do your work but you're not able to because you have to confront all of these issues that make their way into your life in some way, shape or form. So I decided that keeping all of these things in mind and holding myself accountable to try to create a safe space for people that weren't like me but also celebrate people that I felt were getting left out of the equation. I decided to co-found a Twitter chat. The hashtag is WOC in tech which I started with Christina Morillo, no relation, even though we're sisters in tech. And we decided that we wanted to know who the other women in color in tech were. We were sick and tired of being the only ones talking about being women of color in the industry that it was really hard to find people and in a place like New York. So I could only imagine what women of color in other parts of the United States who are part of an even much smaller community of people of color, how isolating it was for them. And the results were staggering. Our first chat we had anywhere between 25 to 40 active participants in the hour. The majority of the women that participated in the chat worked in technical roles even though we had women who were non-technical but working in tech companies. And we decided to call out groups specifically. So we made sure to include language that was that called out LGBTQ members of the people of color community. Trans women especially. We also called out black women, Latinas and native women, particularly since they are extremely underrepresented in women of color in tech. And a beautiful thing and a learning opportunity for me was when non-binary people of color in the community told me they wanted to participate in the chat and I asked them, okay, great, I want you to participate too. Can you give us some language? And they said, non-binary people of color is fine. So we've added call outs in recent weeks to say, hey, we're welcoming non-binary people of color. And to make sure that this was a space that was safe for women of color, we also included language that encouraged allies to observe and to amplify, but to please not participate in the space. One thing that gets, thank you. I think that it's very easy for us to get excited when we want to learn from other people and when we want to show people encouragement, but it's very, very important for us not to be complicit in the erasure of any other groups and to just sit back and see what's going on. And the wonderful thing is that we decided to let companies, we've asked companies to reach out to us if they're looking for diverse talent and we would include mentions in the chat. Last count for the last chat, we had 12 companies from all around the US who were looking for engineers, designers, UX people in a variety of roles, say, yes, we do want more women of color in our ranks and we think that you would be a great fit for us. So the last point that I want to make is around employers in tech. So until now, I think that diversity efforts have still taken the path of least resistance in which we say, okay, we need diversity. Well, do you know someone? Do you know someone? Do you know someone? And it's still very much focusing on, it's still very much depending on referrals, on networking and on back channels to be able to find this talent, which I think is a reason why a lot of the women that are represented in tech companies today tend to be overwhelmingly white because if you're a white dude and you're looking for another woman to work there, chances are she's a white woman. There's nothing wrong with that. That's just the way, that's the state of where things are right now. And one interesting point that I saw, yes, actually this morning that I'd love to bring up, Shanley Cain of Model View Culture recently suggested implementing quotas to ensure that the hiring of underrepresented people is measurable. And I agree with this for a few reasons. For one, it forces recruiters and hiring managers to go beyond the usual networks for tapping into candidates and will widen the pool, which means having to recognize the unconscious bias of, okay, are we hiring people that go to certain schools, right, for example? And are these schools representative of the demographics of the wider society, for example? And two, it forces companies to have open discussions about diversity as it affects different underrepresented groups, which I think is a huge, huge thing. A lot of us were not having sufficient conversations around race in particular, certainly gender diversity beyond binary definitions of gender, sexual orientation. On a number of axes, we're not having sufficient conversation. And we don't know the vocabulary. We're not developing a vocabulary for this. So to that end, I definitely suggest that employers hire diversity consultants to help them basically facilitate these conversations with the employees. Give your employees a framework to work off of when it comes to talking about these issues. Give them a space to ask questions. Give them a space to learn more. And furthermore, diversity consultants are experts in their field and they're able to help you implement initiatives and solutions that'll maximize your inclusion efforts. Diversity is really, really hard work. It's more than just affecting change on the outside to make you feel good. There's a lot of it that doesn't make you feel good. There's a lot of it that's tiring. There's a lot of it that you're like, well, I don't understand what the big deal is, but it is a big deal to somebody. And that big deal to somebody can mean the difference between them not being able to get a job that's gonna help them get them out of poverty or help move them up the social ladder. So it's absolutely imperative that whatever we do with diversity that we take the time to speak and take a time to sit back and listen. Thank you.