 Hi everyone. Thanks for being here today. I feel really happy and grateful that I've been able to be part of some great conversations this week on diversity inclusion and I feel like there's a whole community of us. These are my people and so I'm really happy to be able to share in a more formal way kind of what's in my head on the topic of speaker diversity and in particular the story that we have of how in one year we went from 14% to 50% women speakers at our own local word camp and how we got three times as many women speakers to apply. So first before I start, I just kind of want to get a sense of the folks in the room. So by show of hands, how many have done public speaking about anything Drupal related? Okay, a few of us, great. How many haven't yet but have thought about it? Nice. How many here are organizers of Drupal events or on Drupal committees? Wonderful. How many wish more women and people who identify as women and other underrepresented groups applied to speak at their events? Not just hands but like enthusiastic hands, lovely. And lastly, how many have no idea what they're doing in this room? All right, everybody is intentionally here or too shy to admit it. Nice. Either way, you're all welcome. So I want to tell you a story, a story time. Once upon a time, I land far, far away in 2013 in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was my first time being one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Vancouver. And so WordCamp is the same thing as your Drupal camps. It's a locally organized conference about our technology. And there were three of us. It was our first time for all three of us to be co-organizing. And we were sitting there in one of our apartments with 40 speaker applications spread out before us. We actually had 52 applications and 50 of them were applicable. And so here we are with this daunting task, choose talks. We had 14 spots available. We had two tracks and seven women applied out of the 52. Six of them were a fit. And one of the co-organizers said, well, we're going to take all these. And I'm the one who didn't know that this is an issue. I'm the one who said, shouldn't we be like checking that the pitches are great? Oh, by the way, all the pitches were great. So that was already a non-issue. Shouldn't we be checking, you know, how they fit in with the rest of the conference and their talks and their speaker experience and all these things? And he said, well, their talks are great. They do fit in with our conference. And frankly, if we don't take as many as we can, we are going to get called out for it. This was back in 2013 when there was less conversation happening about it. And so this is the kind of viewpoint that we had. And so then two things happened. One is we added a third track and this increased our number of speaker spots to 28. And the reason we did this is we just had so many amazing presentations presented to us. And we were a bit greedy. We were like, we just want them all. And we were first-time organizers. That was a lesson learned. When one is doing their very first conference, don't have three tracks. Word to the wise, my WordPress community organizer folk here are agreeing with this. The other thing that happened, so then it became 6 out of 28 instead of 6 out of 14. And the other thing that happened is two women dropped out for family obligations. So then suddenly it was 4 out of 28. Before I go on, side note, who can guess how many men dropped out for family obligations? All right, so for the video, I'll tell you people have raised a zero sign. See if you're right, zero men dropped out for family obligations. Not that it never happens, but that was our case in that particular one. So this was our ugly percentage, 14% women speakers. This cat is not happy about that. I'll keep talking while you take a picture. So as you can imagine, we did get called out for it. We even had blog posts written about it, as we should. And so this is kind of what started the seed on my journey. And the next thing that added to the seed is finding out it wasn't just us. In that same year, I went to WordCamp San Francisco, and it was basically, at the time, our version of DrupalCon, they've now grown it to something else, WordCamp US, but this was the word press folk or reminiscing of the old days that before our giant WordCamps have become what they are. But this was basically at headquarters, what I called it, the WordCamp of all WordCamps at the time. And there was a WordCamp organizers brunch that I went to, and I brought up this topic, and I asked people what their experiences were, and they were amazed. They said, you had seven speak. Women and people who identify as women apply to speak. We had none at all. Tell us your magic that you got some. And they all said, we want more diverse speakers. We want more women and people who identify as women, and we'll get to that definition in a moment. But we wanted to accept more, but they're just not applying. So if they're not applying, then we can't bring them in. Before I continue in my story, I do have a little disclaimer. And my disclaimer is I'm going to talk for the rest of my talk about gender, like it is a binary, and like there are two blobs, like all women are exactly the same on the spectrum over here, and all men are the same at the spectrum over here, but I do want to address that that is not the case. There is a wide spectrum in between, and even the typical women and men experiences, often they actually have the same experiences and they overlap. And I also want to address that I kind of use women as a shortcut, and I know I shouldn't, but in the meantime until I figure out a better way to say it, I do mean, and this was something that Sage helped me with earlier this week, the terminology, possible terminology to use, cis and trans women, trans men, gender queer folk. Frankly, I mean not having only young white men be the speakers. I'll just say it. So I want to address that. I'll be saying women and men and addressing the blobs. I also want to mention that the last time I gave this talk, one of the men came up to me afterwards and thanked me for the slide in particular, and he said, you know, a lot of the issues that the women were facing, he was facing himself because he was a childminder of his family and things like that. So he said, you know, he would have been very put off had I not had the slide, and he thanked me for it. Okay, so moving on, why does it matter and who cares? Who this person is at the front of the room? Shouldn't it just be the best speaker? Which kind of the best speaker kind of means the person with the most speaking experience because there are a lot of really great speakers who haven't had much experience yet, and we just need to help them do that. So why does it matter? Well, I'm not sure the situation in Drupal, but speaking for WordPress, our audiences typically are about 50, 50 men and women. If the person at the front of the room isn't representing them, then they kind of feel like they don't belong there. There's also our users and our developers, the people working with the tools and who are using the tools. We also in WordPress are really lucky that it's, because there's kind of a low barrier of entry to start using it as opposed to things like Drupal that are a little bit more challenging to start with, and we have a really, really wide kind of people who start it, because they don't necessarily have to have degrees to start, and I'm going to stop before I say something stupid, but I think you get the point that we have a very diverse set of people who are using it, and if the people at the front of the stage are not representative of them, then that is off-putting as well. And also, our speakers help shape our technology, and specifically, when people are speaking about the technology and people are getting ideas from that, we want to have diverse ideas, both in making sure that different kinds of people's needs are met. Let's say it was only young white men who were shaping the technology, well, they wouldn't be necessarily accounting for older folk who can't read smell print and need to see contrast in the screen. They might not be thinking about the mother or father who is multitasking, feeding a baby and taking care of a toddler and trying to use a website at the same time and all kinds of issues that we might not even think of if it weren't for people speaking about them, as well as different kinds of people have different kinds of ideas, and so if we bring in more voices and more perspectives, it benefits everybody. And they also sometimes not only have unique perspectives, but might be doing multi-rolls. There could be power users who use it in interesting ways, front-end developers, business people who are using plugins or modules to make specific kinds of sites, typographers who use WordPress or Drupal to do crazy things with typography, how developers can communicate with designers, different things that you can do with websites, et cetera. All right, so here's a big question. What was stopping them from applying? First thing I want to say is society is a funny thing. There's a lot of things in society that I see as the obstacles in the way. And as much as I would love to change all of society, I am only one person, so I want to address that there are more reasons than I can address today, but I figured out one tiny thing that we could do something about, and that is what my laser focus has become. That was when we would ask women, hey, would you like to speak at my conference? We would get almost always one of two answers. Any ideas, what do you think those could be? I don't have anything to say. I wouldn't be any good. Hand at the back. I'm not an expert. You guys are really already well educated on this topic. I don't even need to be talking about this. This is great. So the two answers, the way I phrase them is, what would I talk about? And I don't know enough about whatever topic to give a talk about it. Same thing as I'm not an expert. And so that became my starting place. And so one day I was given an idea. This happened... Of all places, this happened at a feminist blanket fort slumber party. As one would imagine, what we do at feminist blanket fort slumber parties is we talk about feminist issues. And so at some point I brought up the topic of this issue that we're facing with our word camp and said, hey, they're not even applying in the first place. These are the two answers that we're getting. And one of them looked at me and said, why don't you just get them in a room and get them to brainstorm ideas? That was the thing that started me on my several year path since then. It was get them to brainstorm, show them that they literally have a hundred ideas, which is how many we generate in one of the exercises. And then the biggest problem becomes picking one, which is very empowering for people to walk in thinking they have nothing to talk about. And then in the first quarter go, they're all good topics. I don't know what to do. It's wonderful. And I also suggest to them pick something for the rest of the day. You don't have to stick with it. The next thing that happened is somebody let word camp central know that I was doing this workshop because they knew that this was something that they're interested in. And so then they and I started chatting and they started helping me shape what was going to be in this workshop. And one of the items in particular was talk formats. They told me about how at the time a lot of tech talks were kind of a brain dump how to session. This is how to build a module here are the steps and people would walk away, not necessarily remembering what they had learned. And so they wanted to promote more story based talks because then people might not remember the details, but they're kind of learn how to learn, be inspired to try things, et cetera. And so we talked about the different talk formats. So there's how to the standard way that tech talks happen, leading a discussion, you're the facilitator on a topic and the audience discusses it together, running a panel where multiple people answer questions on the same topic, story based like I'm doing right now. And this could be how you learn something mistakes you made or any other narrative format, case study, the story of how you created one thing in particular, and also workshop hands on learning experience where people bring their laptops and create a thing as you go. I just want to mention that there was a few years where I didn't really feel like I was able to do public speaking for a bit when I had some health stuff going on, but I did feel like I could stand in front of a room or sit with people and do workshops and kind of feel like I'm just chatting with friends one on one. I'm leading them through something and for me that was a lot easier than standing up in front of a room. I also would like to talk about myths. So the brainstorm idea was to tackle one of those questions which is I wouldn't know what to talk about and I also just want to cover a little bit of how we would help them through the question of I don't know enough to talk about anything. And so we cover the myths of who is the person standing in front of the room. Are they an expert? So myth one, I am not an expert. So the person in the front of the room may not be the expert. It may just be the person who said yes to speaking, especially at the meetup level. There's a little thing that the educated people in this room, which is everybody here, may have heard of before called imposter syndrome, which is that the person in front of the room is thinking that you don't really have the knowledge or skills to be here, but you've somehow managed to fool everyone and soon they are going to find out. Now it's an interesting phenomenon that women and other underrepresented groups tend to feel this a little bit more. Not saying that the standard speakers don't also feel it, but the men and other represented groups kind of feel like if they only know a little bit about a topic, they don't know enough to speak on it, whereas typically the typical blob man feels like if they know a little bit then they can get up and talk about it. And also I would like to argue that you're always an expert because you are an expert in your own experiences. Myths two through five. People ask questions I can't answer and I'll look like a fool. In this workshop that we've created we have given template answers for like the smarty pants in the audience, people asking questions that are too hard, people asking questions that are completely off topic, etc. I'm too nervous to speak. I can pretty much guarantee that just about every public speaker is probably extremely nervous about being up there. I have panic right now, but I haven't died. You have no idea how much I'm panicking inside, but that's part of public speaking. And it's also okay if you actually are visibly showing it. It's okay to tell the audience what you're going through and then you kind of get them on board with you and often they become your supporters as well. I have failed if everyone in the audience isn't totally engaged. So there's a thing called resting face where people are just kind of absorbing the information. Also they might be tweeting about how amazing you are. I forgot to mention at the start my Twitter is Jill Binder. So if you want to talk about amazing things about this talk on Twitter, that's how to tag me. And also people can be taking notes or thinking about what you've said. And lastly a talk followed by Q&A is the only format that I can use to share my knowledge. So we talked about different talk formats, and so it doesn't have to be that format. Besides this workshop that we created, which I'm going to circle back to, what are other things did we do to get more women? And this is one of the things that I've talked a lot about in discussions earlier this week. So this might be review for some of you, but this is kind of a lot of things that I know about it. So basically, first of all, in the year following 2013, we not only wanted to get 50% women speakers, we wanted to do it at a developer edition. And even in WordPress there are fewer women developers than there are men, even now. That's something that other groups are working on, like Ladies Learning Code, other... That's a big thing in Canada, I'm not sure what groups you have here, I'm like, people are tackling that problem, I can tackle problems that people aren't tackling so much. So I spent the year networking with more women in WordPress. Whenever I'd go places, I would try to meet them and get their contact. So I met people online, in forums, in person. There's women of WordPress groups that have started since that year, and so those are people networking with now as well. Also, our team sent out personal invitations to apply to WordPress women of our Tri-City region, and our region is Vancouver, BC, Seattle, and Portland. And personal invitations is one of the most powerful things, by the way, for getting people to do things they wouldn't normally do, like public speaking. Other things that we did, we encouraged them to speak at small meet-ups first before getting up on a big word camp stage. So for our WordPress meet-up, and our WordPress meet-up is really well attended. We typically get max capacity, which in our room is 50. And so if people didn't feel comfortable with that, we encouraged them to speak at other meet-ups that are smaller in front of family and friends. And also in BC, it's pretty easy to move around and get to other meet-ups as well. So encouraging them to go to some of those small towns around and speak there. We also made sure that we had good language, languaging in our meet-up word camp and workshop descriptions. So we don't use words that encourage people to self-identify as an expert because of that imposter syndrome thing. So we don't use words like superhero, ninja, rock star. And for our workshop in particular, we made sure to word it to bring out the people who have imposter syndrome. We also, our meet-ups were happening in a venue with three flights of stairs. And so I wanted to make sure that our workshop was not at this venue. I made sure it was at a spot that had elevators and ramps. And I mentioned it to our meet-up, and they immediately changed to that venue for our meet-ups, which I'm very proud of. And we also requested that it be a sent-free zone because there are quite a few people who are allergic. So these accessibility issues, it's good in general as well as we wanted to make sure that we brought out all women, not just a select subsection of women and people who identify as women and trans and et cetera. And then there's also a couple things I wanted to mention that we added to the workshop itself. We let them know that they can get up and move around because some people have some physical issues where they get antsy in their bodies. And the way we were running our workshop was four hours, so we wanted to make sure people could get up. We don't promote that for everybody. There's versions that you can do one, one and a half hours as well. We'd also ask for the pronoun both in the introductions as well as the third time that we ran this workshop this year. We also did kind of a quick and dirty, different color name tags. And so you can see my quick. This is how we're doing it. Green is she, her, red he, him, they, them, mix, et cetera, for other pronouns. There's probably better ways of doing it, but I just wanted to make sure that it was covered. Other things, when we would ask people if they would like to apply, if there wasn't workshop that they could get to or they didn't, or they, either there wasn't one happening or they couldn't get to it, what we would do is mentor them on the spot. And so we'd suggest things that we know that they could talk about. We would explain that we didn't want how-to sessions so much as stories, and we would ask if they have a good story to tell about something that they've learned. I also learned this week in one of the conversations I was part of, not just suggesting things that we know they could talk about, but telling them, you are going to apply with this topic, maybe not quite that forcefully, instead of just making a suggestion, making it like, this is what's happening. And also, duo talks, which is a great format in general, especially for somebody who's newer, as well as lightning talks, the shorter talks. But the thing I learned about duo talks was pairing up somebody who might be newer to public speaking with somebody who's already inexperienced and a comfortable public speaker. So, how did we do after this effort? After all that, we still didn't have many women applicants. And so the night before, in a desperate last-minute attempt to do something about this, I put up a tweet. It is my not-so-secret goal to get more women speakers at WordCamp YVR Dev know anyone great. That tweet got the most retweets I have ever had. Eight. But something, it worked. We got a handful more people apply to speak. I'm going to go over what our results were after I cover a little bit of, I've learned a lot, there's a lot of things I would have, more things I would have loved to have done that year, as well as things that I would love to do in general. And I've built up a wish list of, if I could wave a magic wand and have my ideal situation where I have all the time and money in the world to make everything happen, I would make sure that we have mentorship for our speakers, offering to help them with their talks, their slides, et cetera. And I'm so happy to see that more and more events are doing that. Drupalcon offered all of this when I spoke in Seattle's last year. They offered this. They offered child care, which I pushed for really hard in one year and it was too complicated for a lot of reasons we couldn't actually do it. But magic wand scenario, it happens. Meeting at different times that work for women with families, so not holding events always at 9 o'clock at night. We had our workshop Saturday afternoons. Seattle started a group for women in WordPress that they hold every or every other Saturday afternoon that's really well attended. And there's also other groups that are doing women of WordPress as well which may or may not be at those kinds of time slots, but kind of a side note on that I want to mention, if you do start running a women of Drupal group or any kind of specific underrepresented group, make sure it doesn't become a silo where they just kind of meet together and don't participate in the bigger group. What these groups have done is make sure to encourage people to use that as a launching point to participate in the bigger group. And also what I'd love to do is reach out to specific communities out there and form relationships with people of those communities and send out invites. So for example, we haven't started working on getting more people of color out and so I would try to find out where the... Oh, diversity is so hard to speak about. I would try to find out where black coders were in our community and if there was such a community that existed and reached out to them or even if there wasn't specific coders, just finding out the community in general because I'm sure there might be coders who are hidden in there or people who might not be coders yet and who want to learn all kinds of things we could do. Also giving people a chance to opt out of photos. People in general and particularly often the women blob might have reasons that they don't want their photo online, particularly often for safety reasons. And also taking care of... Is washrooms the right term in the US? I'm Canadian. I think that's right, the toilets place. I think this bathroom is that gets confusing to you guys, people, friends. I'm not sure. Anyway, making sure that single stalls are available for the people who don't want to identify with the gender blob toilet places and also making sure that the general ones are trans-friendly and making sure that they're big enough to be power wheelchair accessible as well. Offering clothes captioning would be amazing and having sign language interpreters which is a thing that I'm seeing more and more even at the local level word camps. And also something that we talked about earlier this week, having a volunteer to make sure that new faces feel seen and heard because one of the people was talking about how she was the only woman who came out to this event and nobody even noticed that she was there and she didn't feel supported or seen and she just left and never came back. And lastly, something that I know we've talked about a lot this week and something that we're putting a lot of focus on right now, which is having a code of conduct. So, WordCamp Vancouver 2014, our developer edition, how do we do? We got 60 applications in total. We had 18 spots because we were not going to run three tracks again. 20 women applied. That was almost three times more women applicants in one year from 7 to 20. Pretty proud of that. And I'd like to remind you it was the developer edition as well. So, I pushed for us to select fully 50%, 9. So, if there are two talks that were similar, I'm like, let's take the lady. And then for a brief shining moment in time, we had exactly 50%, 9 out of 18. And then last minute, one woman and one man dropped out and of course our other co-organizers were men. They were networked better with the developers in our city or who are coming from the nearby cities and so the backup speakers that they had were men. And so then we had 8 out of 17, almost 50%. I'm counting it as 50%. I want this one. So, if you take a look at this, we went from 14% to 47% in only one year. This cat is happy about that. And I want to talk a little bit about what has happened since then. So, other cities, before we made our workshop public, just saw our meetup description about the workshop and were inspired to create their own versions. And so Seattle, Portland, Montreal, and then Montreal also ran it in New York. So they created similar work. And then Workshop WordCamp Central asked us to create a workshop script for not just women but all diversity so you can run it for any particular group and asked us to gather all the best content from the cities who had created their own. So we created a big version with the best of everything, of everyone. And this is the agenda that we created in the end. So we talk about things like why do we want more of this particular group to be speaking at our events, the myths of being a speaker, which I mentioned, my favorite one finding a topic, and we also go through some exercises to further refine that topic. And then some things that we added on in our first year, we did this and tips on being a better speaker. And we found people walked out, they didn't necessarily have great pitches, and so they weren't being selected. So we added in how to write a great pitch and everybody's favorite, writing their bio. And also they left it feeling a little bit like, so now I have a great title, but where do I go from there? And so we added in creating an outline. And then we also have tips on being a better speaker and also one of the contributions from one of the other groups was creating great slides. And another thing that we do kind of throughout is leveling up their confidence with public speaking. So we start off having people introduce either themselves or their neighbor, and after each section we go around the circle and anybody who would like to do a little bit of public speaking, saying their talk or their pitch can do that. We also let anybody say pass at any time. And anybody who wants to, at the end, can stand up, we reset the room into audience format and have them stand in front of everybody so they get that experience of wall of faces. So no matter how comfortable people have become with their new chummy friends for the afternoon, they get that experience of what it's like to be standing in front of everybody. And it's great to feel that initial, whoa, with a comfortable group before they start speaking at events. So I'd like to report on how that has gone. So in 2017, in the Vancouver World Camp we typically have 50% women speakers. Montreal for several years in a row got 50%. Pretty sure Portland had 50% as well. I'm looking at the person who was... No, okay. I'm pretty sure I talked with them and I'm pretty sure that's true. Brighton confirmed that they did. And also this year, for the first time, we had a record breaking in Seattle, 60% women speakers. This cat is extra happy about that. And so I want to talk about where we're at now in 2018. Now we have a new challenge. And our new challenge is at... World Camp Central came back to me and said, okay, we know this is proven, this workshop works, but nobody knows about it. This is the next thing that we want to work on. And so somehow by the end of that conversation I found myself creating and leading a team called the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Team in WordPress, and we created a goal. We felt it was an achievable but slightly stretched goal to try to get 27 meetups to run this workshop material and that's 5% at the time. When we said it, it was 5% of our meetups worldwide. We've had quite an increase since then, I'm not officially raising that number at this point until there's a reason to. And also, we're kind of promoting it about women, but we're also encouraging people to run it for other groups as well. So we're making sure that there's also resources for people of color, queer folk, people of different physical abilities, different mental health, older folk. There's underrepresented groups that I've never even heard of. I never even thought about older folk until I gave this talk a few months ago and two people came up to me and said, hey, what about us? And so I'm learning about new groups all the time. So I'd like to report on how our team is doing with that. So far in 2018, the groups that have run it have been Vancouver, Canada, a few cities in Brazil, a few cities in Italy, and internally at a few private companies. And we have a form, where we have people sign up who would like to run it, countries who have expressed interest in running it. More places in Canada and the US, Greece, Spain, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa, India, UK, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Netherlands, Lebanon, Liberia, Philippines, Venezuela. So far, that's in the first two months since we've launched this form. I feel like this shows that the world is hungry for this work. And I also like to mention that that's just listing the countries. It's not even listing individual cities. We have 30 signed up as either having run it or wanting to run it this year. So we might even exceed our goal, and we might even do that early in the year. That's amazing. We've had some amazing changes back to Vancouver for a moment. We've had some amazing changes in our community in particular. First of all, the workshop that we had brought out not just women, but brought out diversity in other ways. There were people of color, people with different physical abilities, people with different pronouns. I cannot speak to if there were queer folk, but I'd like to think maybe there were, but that's of course not something that we would find out in any visible way. Also, several of the people who went through and started speaking at our meetups and our work camps, stepped up and became leaders in our community. They created things that we didn't have before that benefited everyone, such as a couple of the ladies created a user track in our meetup. It also benefits local businesses. I have one story in particular where there was an agency who attended our work camp, loved one of the women speakers and hinted her down to hire her, and she became the first woman web developer that they had at their agency, and now she's actually leading the team. The thing that's really exciting to me that I really want to underline is creating more diverse organizers and leaders. This is the thing that is really exciting to me about this work. There's all kinds of reasons to have diverse public speakers, but the one that really gets me going is seeing more organizers and leaders of this work. Seeing more diverse organizers and leaders shaping and leading our technology, and depending on how far I can go with this work, maybe even shaping the rest of the world as well. Personally, I would love to see a world that was led by more diverse people. And so, thank you. I'm almost done the talking portion, but I would like to talk for a moment. Basically, I would love to see this kind of work happen in Drupal, and this is something that I've spoken about a bunch of times in conversations this week, so some of you are hearing this again. I would love to see this workshop and some of the other action items for getting more diverse speakers happen, and this is something that we have the materials to support you doing it if you don't want to be reinventing the wheel. As a starting place you might change a bunch of things, but our workshop is available up online at diversespeakers.info and it's something that I created in the first place as being really easy to swap any kind of technology for it, so all you need to do is replace a few words, change plugins to modules, a few little things like that and you're good to go. Even within WordPress, sometimes the language isn't quite right. Like in Italy they ran it for WordPress marketers and she said, oh these questions are too technical and I'm like, you can change it write your own questions and we also in addition to the workshop the other thing that we did is we created a place where people could read about it, learn about it and sign up to get more information from us and if they want also get training from us. So whoever I wind up speaking to about doing this work this is something that I can offer as a starting place suggestion as well depending on how Drupal works but that's something that I'm sure we can figure out. If you wanted to see ours it's at tiny.cc slash wpwomenspeak and so I just wanted to oh yeah, so I am looking for someone to champion this work in Drupal and I also wanted to mention that this isn't just about getting more speakers of different types, it's about what happens when you give different voices a voice and I'd like to challenge you to think what would be the positive changes in Drupal if you led the charge and you helped people around the world do this workshop. End of my talking session section. Oh do I only have, no I still have 20 minutes, okay great. Thank you thank you. So before I take questions, comments, discussion I did want to kind of address what kinds of things you could ask about so anything I've talked about women, diversity men, not all men which is a hot topic what you could possibly talk about if you wanted to start public speaking our workshop, our community answering your questions about public speaking me, anything else related etc. So we have a microphone at the front. Good afternoon and thank you for coming Jill. Frankly, notice I'm a white guy. And thank you for being here. You're welcome. As the white guy and business leader how specifically can I better promote talking about diversity given that in some of my meetings frankly I've got 13 white guys they're all business owners how do I start in a way raising the stick we've got to be more diverse more diverse. So the question is when you and your entire team are all white guys and this might not be a topic the thing that they've ever thought of how to approach how to even start approaching bringing it up and having them see that this would be a good thing. In this particular case there's 13 of us that are different from the agency owners or leaders within the agencies and frankly there are times in which I'm not able to get women or other diverse groups of people to be able to come in because they feel uncomfortable being around all the white guys. Wow, okay. So diverse folk aren't comfortable coming in because it's a group of white guys. Excuse me for a second. We're asking that question. That is a fantastic question and that's not a question that I've ever been asked or thought of before. So I'm going to think and while I think if other people have answers please come up to the mic I'm sure I'll think of something. I know for our workshop itself one of the things we encourage we have quite a few white men allies who would like to help us with it and one of the things that we say is can you help with it and if possible please don't be the one leading it please ask a diverse person to lead it. If you're going to say something can you get back to the mic? So I just recently kind of shifted in a way to that model frankly I'm just going after it's like I find people that of basically non-white males that I consider that would be a good champion to work with and frankly I just go for supporting them making introductions to other people and allowing them to be speaking on the diversity topics and things like that to try to encourage. Great, so you're doing the reaching out and you are getting more diverse folk to start speaking sort of. It's like within the business community it feels weird I'm specifically targeting targeting female business owners it's like hey I really would like to try to make this be a more comfortable environment for you. However as the white guy I cannot champion this because it looks like the white guy is just going hey I want to do more business and I just want to I want to be able to support champions actually to encourage others to come in. I have a couple thoughts and then it looks like Mark and some other people are lining up in the queue so I can speak to you know for meetups if the meetup is all white guys how to comfortably bring people in and speaking about that might give some ideas one is extending invitations to people to come and then when we're when they're there making sure that they feel seen and heard making sure that there's I like I would love to have say a volunteer or a couple volunteers be the people who make sure that the new folk who come in especially diverse folk get greeted welcomed ask how they're doing I've participated in some groups where I've been the only woman and they've come up to me afterwards and said you know how how are you finding it being the only woman are you comfortable if anything ever comes up please tell me as well as there's a thing that tends to happen in a group of guys that the the woman or other non cis born male might not they might express some idea and might not get heard often what happens is they'll say an idea and then a while and nobody pays attention and a while later somebody else says the idea and everybody goes that's a great idea and so one of the things they can do is hear people give them credit for their ideas things like that lineup of people who either have answers for this or other questions if they have answers for this let's start with that mark sure I don't have definitive answers but I think you know one of the things I think about is you know I have this unearned privilege right so how can you at least try to you know not give that privilege but like make use of that in a way that's positive and helps others and so I mean I think all the things that Jill just said there are fantastic I think I think you know lifting up others voices is great I think you can speak out I mean first I think it's important like to do the work of learning you know for white guys to do the work of like learning and trying to understand everything before speaking I think is important but then when you you know I think be judicious but like you talk about racism talk about sexism and say it's bad and you know like and like if in your room with other guys I mean maybe this never happens but I mean comments get said sometimes that are inappropriate right so raising your voice if that happens it can be really uncomfortable but like if you do it there might be somebody else there's like I wanted to say something but I didn't know if I could or not and if you raise your voice other people will too so but I like the model of being supportive and not trying to be the one in charge and but being there and doing the work I think is important so yeah I finding ways to get involved in a way where you're lending your voices in your time in ways that are positive and help you know not just thinking about like mentorship is great but like sponsorship is like is this term that gets used that's even better where you're like not just saying hey I'm going to be your mentor now and help you out but like you know trying to like hey I'm going to help suggest you know you as a speaker as for hiring for working to help people get promoted like and especially like I'm if you're in a group of a bunch of business owners you have a huge opportunity to make a huge impact and like if you can speak up and talk to business owners like it's honestly about you know putting you know changing who's in power but also like get in the people who are at the top and are in power like on board with all of this stuff so you have a huge opportunity to help do that so awesome that you're here and are thinking about ways to do more stuff so yeah great thank you yeah so I don't know how to answer your question exactly but you know my wife is black and we work together and we started the company together and sometimes I'll just wear a t-shirt with her face on it two events and that I find that really helps I'm actually joking that's not I would not recommend doing that I was unsure how to react to that thank you for telling me how to react to that it was a terrible joke but but I do think I don't know that I would lead with talking about sexism or racism at any you know event or thing that you're trying to do with people but I would maybe start small and just try you know following or you know listening to people on social media you know kind of I empathizing or seeing things from somebody else's perspective isn't something that we do is like humans by default like it's hard you know it's hard work to think from somebody else's point of view so you know I would probably start there I found that that's pretty helpful to just see what you know other people think of you know that are in a minority group are struggling with and having to deal with and just you know being being available and there for them when those situations arise you know maybe not trying to just like tackle it as like you know let's solve this and let's you know let's just start bringing people into you know to our group but you know just be a little bit more patient I think. Great so paying attention to their different perspectives and bringing them in probably a lot more than that as well yes. Thank you for this discussion I just I've been living in this country for about five years now I have a particular question and the question is when you have this kind of discussions and you invite say the ladies to submit some topics and they are selected do they sometimes get a sense that they have been selected simply because they are women and not based on their content because I get that a lot sometimes I would prefer that I'm selected based on the quality of my content rather than how I appear and when I'm filling in job application forms or forms of government and where you have to specify your race whether you're black or white or whatever but I feel that by selecting that maybe they are trying to meet some quota and just select me for but not necessarily based on what I know of based on my resume or based on the content of my work do you sometimes get sent to get that from some of the people you tend to work with yeah this is a great question so the question is in your experience you sometimes feel like you're filling a quota rather than being hired for your skills and experiences and you're wondering do we have the same issue when we have women speakers I have heard a lot of different opinions about this women have come to me saying I hate being selected because I'm a woman and I've had women saying I love being selected because I'm a woman and my argument for that is it's not just about filling a quota it's also about hearing diverse voices and getting more unique ideas and so for me it's more than just ticking off a box of we have women speakers it's actually having more unique perspectives voices and all the things about chipping technology all the things I mentioned earlier so basically we get mixed reviews and this is my answer to them thank you you mentioned for bringing new people into group is someone showing up not necessarily feeling welcomed and included and then potentially never coming back and especially if that's their experience in the past they're probably going to be really apprehensive about a new group as well or coming in again and I think that's a big burden to ask on them like hey we would really like to include you because you're different than our current group but that really presents them very directly with that fear of I'm going to be the odd one out I think one way maybe to address that is to leverage that to say well I'm not going to ask someone to come into this group but say I know a couple people if they don't know each other can I connect them, can I get them to come together as a group to this larger event so that they're not odd one out and at least they can feel I have someone to talk to even if it's not as inclusive as the larger group right so what you're bringing up is a great suggestion of not just asking individuals to come back but actually asking multiple people two or three and so they don't feel alone and not wanting to come back again did I get that right? and preparing people so they know preparing people so that they know in advance that there's going to be somebody else of their diverse group there as well so they won't be feeling complete especially if they've had this experience before and don't want to come back again knowing that it's not going to be the same as last time thanks for that so I wanted to specifically address you I'm also a business person whenever someone asks me would you like to join this group I would like to hear your perspective as a business person I always have to ask myself what's the ROI on that what am I going to get out of this meeting because a lot of times people ask diverse people to come in to improve their group but what am I getting out of it so maybe also turning that into how can we help you what does your business need that might be useful the other thing as well is that some local businesses improve diversity by allowing those diverse groups to have space so a lot of meetups need a space they need especially accessible spaces that we talked about so if your business or business owners can host some of those diverse groups they get used to your company and you're more recognized as maybe trusted so thoughts lovely so that was looking at what's in it for them and not just what's in it for your group so what's the ROI for them and also what am I getting out on because I'm tired diverse meetup space so with accessibility and all the other things that we talked about physical accessibility as well as those things we have two minutes so depending on how one maybe two more depending on how long it is I'll try to be quick I was just thinking about your comment and I wanted to mention too that we are seeing a person from an underrepresented group and for example a cis white male because the person from the underrepresented group may have been passed over before that sort of compounds upon itself and they are less likely to have their resume actually reflect their abilities so bringing in people from underrepresented groups might give them the thing they can put on their resume to sort of pat it a little bit and help them be seen in the future so I think it's important to remember that your resume doesn't say a whole story right yeah thank you for that it's kind of a self perpetuating circle but it would be great to have some place that helps people break out of that cycle so they can put their experience on their resumes totally thank you thank you so we are calling it a day you can reach me on twitter and also for the next hour I'll be having a lunch you are welcome to join me to have more discussion ask me things I'm particularly interested in the people who haven't spoken and who would like to start speaking as well as as I mentioned getting a champion from the group to start doing this work so that is where I'll be for the next bit and thanks everybody thank you so much for spending the hour and finding this topic worth your hour and finding it important okay bye