 Welcome! I'm going to share my screen here shortly. Thank you everybody for coming today to this training. I think it's a very important one here at GitLab and really any company. We always start off with GitLab that everybody can contribute but we can really go a step further to make sure that we are making sure that everybody's included and that we're ensuring that we appreciate, respect and validate ideas from all different perspectives from people regardless of their background. So for today, the goal of discussion today is to really set a baseline of why we're focusing on diversity, explore some of what we've done so far and it'd be great to get some participation in this in terms of what you may have all done so far on your teams, discuss what might get in our way and that's when we really get to implicit bias and then broaden our efforts for inclusion and generate ideas about what we might do differently as a team. So the great news is here at GitLab diversity is already a value and inclusion is already very important so you can read more about that in our values but I'm pretty sure and hopeful you are all aware of this. So why is diversity important? I hope that you have seen stats similar to this in your careers or in your past but there is evidence that diverse teams actually are more effective, lead to better morale, greater commitment, teamwork, collaboration, better innovation and ideas and better capturing in markets and market share. So there's really not a downside in it in terms of business health. Now these are numbers and these are stats but I think that diversity is important for a lot more reasons that are a little less measurable and that really is that we are all human beings on this earth and we all deserve to be treated with respect and we all deserve to have our ideas be heard regardless of our backgrounds. Let me try something here. If I go out of screen sharing mode can someone comment on whether or not you still see it large or if it's small? I personally can see it still. Okay I just want to check because when I'm in screen sharing mode I can't see any comments or anything so I wanted to get smaller. Okay so this is where I open this up to more of you and I know that we're typically typing in comments but feel free to unmute as well and share your experiences that you've had here with GitLab. What have you tried thus far for diversity and inclusion on your teams? What tips might you have and what didn't work and why do you think it didn't work? If you have tried something that you didn't find to get you the results that you wanted. Anyone willing to share and open up here? No? Does that mean we haven't had any efforts today in terms of I know that we've done sponsorships of events for women in tech. We've done sponsorships in different categories there around diversity. Is there maybe you draw out opinions of people who are quiet on your team and aren't usually the ones who speak up but if probed maybe they would. Is there any thoughts there? So Barbie you're asking about diversity and inclusion or just diversity? Diversity and inclusion both are both are important. You can't have diversity without inclusion. Okay so somehow in my head always when I hear diversity it kind of relates to you know color of your skin whether you're male or female and so on. So I'm having a lot of trouble getting that tied to my team. We tried doing hiring like posting jobs to the job boards that cater specifically to women in tech. We got I think total of five applicants over a period of a year. It could be just because this specific job is well it's actually very specific. We don't we didn't have that many applicants anyway but that's basically where we stopped with trying you know increasing that sort of diversity. But when it comes to diversity of opinions or inclusion of the team that I currently have I've been trying to put people on the spot which is not the nicest thing but it actually gets them to out of their comfort zone and for the past I would say like six months doing that has helped me get more out of everyone on the team. And now I have a situation where a junior can speak up and everyone else will really appreciate their opinions. Also the contribution that everyone is making is not valued with their job title. It's actually valued with the contribution. How much does that actually get get love some value I guess. But that's basically as much as as I did when it comes to this. It is still to me completely unclear how to increase well both diversity and inclusion in my case. Okay great and we'll go into some tips and suggestions that I might have later in the presentation or just some things to be aware of. But it is interesting for me to hear what has been on your mind up until now and things that you might have been doing to try to be actually thoughtful about this instead of just letting it play out however it plays out without actually putting effort and thought into it. This is one of those things that we'll get until later in the presentation too but we all do have biases and we can try to ignore that or we can acknowledge that and then get better at combating those to make sure we're making the right decision for the right reasons but we'll get further into that as we move here. So I have a few slides in here on our current stats for diversity however I also want to be clear to me that this discussion is not just about numbers and about trying to change numbers it actually I want to change the way we think about these things and I want to ensure that we are thoughtful when we're just talking with people. We're a very very global company and we have people from a lot of different countries and diversity means something different depending on where you live and where you're from and interactions and what is perceived as normal or standard is different in different countries and so we really do have a lot of emphasis here not on just underrepresented minorities that are typically discussed in the US but also just in making sure that we are equally respectful of opinions regardless of what accent they're being communicated in regardless of if the grammar is perfect and are typing in English regardless of what country we're from and that we're putting thought into those things so I'm sharing the numbers but I don't want you to think that that's all I am focused on and all that I think they get loud should be focused on however with that being said I would love to see better numbers here too we are a global company we can hire from anywhere so to me we should be completely free to not be bound by some of the traditional things they get in the way of companies hiring really diverse work courses so we including including women so a lot of the stats that you'll see quoted tend to revolve around females and versus males with diversity that's one reason for that is is there's a lot of good use cases for that and we're in the tech industry in the tech world and when you consider that women are over half the population you do have to question why they're so low in tech and and open source in those areas and you do have to it does give you pause to just why is that and it's a group that because they are over half the population it's easy to use as examples of there could be a problem right so when I if when I later in this presentation focus on some stats around that it's not just because I am a woman but it is because it's a very glaring obvious problem in the tech world that we do have low numbers of females entering the tech world and we have a high number of females exiting the tech world compared to their male counterparts so just some more stats here I'm just kind of leaving these up for now and to have you guys take a quick look at them so I have one thought on the on the diversity and and the hiring side of things one of the things I noticed githlab has a lot of very specialty job descriptions and this means that the the pool of diversity candidates that could do a job is shrunk even more and I feel like you know looking at the places that I've worked before the the more general the job description and the less specific the more likely you're going to get diversity applicants into those job pools and and also that just even and even me personally I found that I don't want to hire for my team somebody that is so super specialized that can't learn anything new where I want to just I just want to hire a good person and and get them in my team and and get them to perform on my team without having to like uh have a specialty ahead of time like if I'd gone into my last job with the job requirement was I was a MySQL database engineer I would have never gotten hired because I was not a MySQL database engineer when I started but I became that as part of the job and I've you know on on the list of reasons that that you know I've when when I was working at the you know listening to the the reasons for for diversity candidates not applying is that they see a job requirement and they don't apply at all so I think if we made our if we if we cut down the number of job descriptions and just said we have software engineers or instead of specialty specialty software engineer we would get a better pool of candidates and once we hire them then we can figure out what team they can go on and where they can actually perform okay that's it that's a very interesting perspective and that's one that we can talk about as a recruiting team and talk about with you and we're helping you hire for your teams and and something we can probably experiment with here so Abby's taking notes for me so um hopefully we got that one taken I do have I agree with Ben absolutely there is one thing to keep in mind though if you cast a very wide net you have to account for the time of ramp up right and we do not have that time for most cases I did exactly Ben what you said I hired a couple of just engineers with some experience in the in the fields but not too much and compared to people who had experience they take significantly more time to get into into into the line of what we need so that needs to be kept in mind I think yeah there's definitely some downsides to that it also increases the time to recruit because you end up having a whole lot of people you have to bleed through given the lack of specificity and the people applying who aren't qualified so there is there's downsides but it doesn't mean that it's not something we could experiment and try with in certain roles and it doesn't mean there's not certain opportunities for us to bring in people with less experience that we can train it's kind of like the concept around the internship it's not about less experience it's about less specific experience yeah yeah that that the not not we want to like we want to hire smart people we want to hire good quality uh people and it's not it's not it's it's about removing the checkbox barrier not the not the bar for for hiring good good um and I I agree with you that there can be very experienced people that don't have a specific experience um in a certain area but there would be some training involved in that and to getting that experience that they need but if they're smart and they're quick that shouldn't be a problem uh and so I think it's a great suggestion for years and years yeah yeah so I think by giving them interesting problems yeah I think it's an interesting I think it's an interesting idea um so if we are if we if we lead through GitLab's value won't that ensure that we're diverse and inclusive so you would like to think so but unfortunately each of us in this world and on this call come with baggage and and come with our own experiences um and so implicit bias does affect our perceptions and our behaviors whether we want it to or not and the reason it's called implicit is because it's not something we're consciously making a decision about very few people when they engage in um selective behavior that disadvantages a certain group of people are doing that purposely there might be some of those people out there I hope I don't know any of them but most of us are doing it um subconsciously if we're doing it and that's really where implicit bias comes from some bias is necessary we have a million pieces of information coming to us all at once our brains can only deal with 40 at a time so we do have pre-established filters and lenses and perceptions and interpretations and preferences that help us to keep ourselves safe you know if you're driving in a car there's only so much you can process with all the the cars around you so how are you going to make the decisions when you see someone skid off you have some instinct right and those instincts um have been ingrained in every living being on this planet not just humans um since we've been on this planet and it's normal and it's not something we should be ashamed of uh but biases can be harmful and there are some different types of biases that um we do need to work on and I've listed a few here performance and attribution confidence and likability versus likability attractiveness and figures physical stature stereotype threat and groupthink or some examples of this and we'll go through some of these in more detail and then if you have questions at the end about what I mean by some of these I can address those but some of those questions will be answered as we go through I know that these are kind of probably terminologies for this that you're not necessarily used to hearing um so you guys did some pre-work to take some tests and uh we won't discuss those in detail because I want to make sure we leave lots of time for questions and things but I would be interesting and learning did anyone was anybody surprised at all in some of the tests they took and some of the results they got and might be willing to talk about that I was okay so I took a religion test I took a test for recognition of Asian Americans versus foreign and then what was the other one I took three um but the I was actually really surprised at the religion one um because it came up that I'm slightly biased or I show a slight preference for Judaism over Christianity but I'm an atheist so I thought that was really interesting yeah yeah um not to discuss religion but I mean it was the test that I took yeah well yeah it isn't that interesting yeah it's only a little scary to get to this topic right because no one wants to admit when they've got a bias the important thing to understand here is though is that the test said you had a bias it doesn't mean you're discriminating against anybody you could very much be overcoming these biases right and it just it just helps us understand that we do have them and so we actually might need to be thoughtful about overcoming them but admitting that you have a bias isn't admitting that you have a problem with the way you treat people um you may it may mean that but it also may mean that you're completely overcoming that and um if you're already being aware of it then you know to be more thoughtful about it I have some biases that I don't always want to admit and um I'll admit one here that I'm uncomfortable because I don't want to offend anyone but we all feel that way uh I have um a strong bias toward um non-smoking a strong preference towards non-smoking versus smoking and I have to make sure when I meet someone who smokes that I'm not judging them on that I'm not judging their intelligence on that I'm not judging their ability to do work and so I have to really hold myself responsible for not um not treating people differently or assuming things about them if they're smoking a cigarette and that that's one of my things and I have to do that very consciously um and I don't know why that is I might because I was raised in the first county in America to make it illegal to smoke in public or in indoors and so from a very very young age that's been really bred into me and so I have to overcome that and a lot of us have biases that have been bred into us at a very young age depending on the way our parents thought about things or the way that our communities thought about things and so it's it's good when we can recognize that and try to overcome it I thought that biases often am I right in that biases are often things that you don't know biases are often things you don't know that you have right yeah that's why the chapter you have a bias against smokers well how did I figure it out yeah did you take a test and they did I did part of it with that's an easy one for me because it's a strong one usually give a very very very strong bias you can start to you start to be um consciously aware of it um the subconscious ones can be more dangerous because you're not aware of it and uh I've got some of those biases as well I I did one of the tests on um accents and now that I've been made aware of it it feels obvious to me but before I took the test I didn't realize that I give more credibility to an English accent than I do an American one um and and so that was something that I had to be like okay just because you're speaking with an English accent I can't just assume you're the expert and and and it seems obvious to me now but when I took the test I was like what um so there are there are things that are they're more more unconscious and then I also will admit that when I took the test on the Asian Americans versus non I did have a preference towards Asian Americans for math and science and engineering and that's not one that I was conscious of either and that's not one that I'm necessarily proud to admit but it is one that according to the test I have it was a slight preference it wasn't extreme that's probably why it wasn't as noticeable to me about it um but again it has it means that I have to be really careful if I'm interviewing candidates to make sure that I'm not assuming someone isn't just as able in those areas or that I give um the wrong attribution for um skills I was on the airplane back from Crete and I was sitting next to a man from India who worked for UC Berkeley and he was telling me that when he tells people that he works for UC Berkeley everybody asks him the first question oh are you in IT and they just assume that he must be in the tech area and he's not he's in finance um but people make the assumption about him because he's an Indian American that he's in IT it doesn't upset him but it's a bias that people have uh in in great masses so and uh and so yeah it's so it can be you know some of these things are are really hard to admit but at least admit them to yourself if you can't admit them to a broad group or a broad audience that's okay but at least admit them to yourself so you can hold yourself accountable for trying not to do it and for overcoming it um if you can't if you want to sit there and tell yourself that you have no biases you can do that but I really fundamentally believe you're lying to yourself I I really do think we all have these things and we can either accept it and do better or we can put our head in the sand and never get better and I rather have us all get better um so moving on uh this was generally in the stats that of people who take these tests and I pulled these stats a while ago so some of these percentages may have changed if we pulled them again today I pulled them probably almost a year ago but uh I'm guessing they stayed pretty consistent so you can read here that you know 76 percent more readily associate males with career and females with family um I know a lot of women who've taken this test and the women do this too this isn't just men who do this women also attribute women more to family and men to career and and so you can you can take a look at some of the other stats here before I switch do any of these stats surprise anybody? I um my wife is a surgeon and I am not a surgeon and when we go to these surgical parties in there or whatever it is when they don't know that she's a surgeon everybody always assumes that I am the doctor and that she's is never ever ever happened that they have assumed that she is the doctor ever. Yeah it's sad isn't it? Yeah and people always for some for some reason I always get asked if I'm a doctor elsewhere too I don't know and and when she's in the hospital everybody always assumes she's a nurse because she's 4 foot 11 and uh you know she's a tiny person um so everybody always says to her excuse me nurse and they also always address the doctor the male doctors with doctor and they always address her as Tiffany so this is like a big thing. Yeah yeah yeah and I when I was on international assignment in Europe um 10 years ago and people would say oh you're Americans living in Germany um your husband must have got transferred your husband must be an expat it never could possibly be that I was given the expat opportunity which is exactly what the case was everyone assumed it was I was following my husband um and uh and so these things are these things are real and it it's it's you know it's the rally that we're living in so selection bias um there's some interesting experiments tests changes that people tried to make and measured the impact of those so a study showed that the women's odds of being selected for a US orchestra increased by 50% when they did blind auditions so that means there was a screen up the evaluators um all they could hear was the music and not see the person and suddenly they selected 50% more women uh that's pretty dramatic to me that that's an area that you can pretty clearly it's pretty black and white in terms of there's not a lot of factors you know in a resume you could say you had PTA on there you had Boy Scouts on there and so even though you didn't see the name you could still assume a gender. At SoundCloud we went to because a couple of because SoundCloud is a music company uh several of the people in the diversity group including my partner uh were musicians and knew about this so we convinced the recruiters at SoundCloud to do blind resume screens and this was super super great to to have them go through the little extra effort to to to have all the resumes screen which is especially hard in Europe because they include photos and other family history so they had to go and scrub that stuff as well. Yeah it is hard to do we've talked about doing it on our team and it is hard it's not it is hard but it it was extremely successful at SoundCloud. Oh good that's good so maybe we'll reach out to you offline and talk about how we might be able to try something like that here we're we're in a little bit of a how would we do this space um so it could be interesting to get your input on that and that gets to the next one identical resumes one with the man's name the other with the woman's name 70% of applicants with man's names versus 49% with female names were considered a worthy hire exact same resumes uh so it's it's interesting to me that you know that these biases still exist. I I like to tell myself with the focus on diversity now in tech it could be an advantage to have a female's name um because people are trying to increase diversity so when I see that it's still a problem even though it feels to me when I talk to the industry everyone's trying to get better at this and yet we still have this problem um so it's it's it's a little deflating for me but I I believe that if we work really hard we can do better um they also found that um names that are traditionally in America Caucasian sounding names got more calls for interviews than those with black sounding names I know personally I've been told at least five times in my life that I got the interview because of my name and they it it was just as sexist really but they wanted to see what Barbie looked like and so when they saw Barbie on the resume they decided to bring me in so um probably a different reason than the the what race it sounded like but not any better really uh so um performance attribution so a study showed that when men and women working on tasks together women were given less credit for a successful outcome and blamed for more failure um they also when a female raises an idea they get interrupted or ignored more when just a few minutes later a man can have the exact same idea and everyone says oh that's a great idea uh and they also found that um success in groups were often attributed to um potentials and smarts so by in groups means the majority group um and versus the out group was luck or hard work versus actually deserving it um which the in group got I need to go back and put the source of this in there I'm sorry that that's missing um so and then the confidence versus likeability and the maternal bias so this is this is really an issue and it really is kind of a catch 22 which is what we mean by a double buying so there was a harvest business review case um Heidi and Howard were equally competent uh Howard is likable Heidi not so much women are expected to be nice communal warm men are expected to be assertive action-oriented and decisive when a woman displays more of those traits we tend to use words like abrasive pushy demanding self-promoting selfish uh and and um and then if resumes have things like pta on them then you're less likely to get hired or promoted and uh and and less salary however if a woman is who is a mother is not seen at warm and nurturing then they're even more disliked because they're supposed to be for their families women also research have shown to get judged more if they don't have kids and they and society feel they should it's kind of like a what you're not nurturing you're not kind you don't want to start a family that's you know and and and they'll get they'll get judged for having the kids and then they'll get judged for not having the kids and they're in this kind of like catch 22 can I do anything right um and uh it can it can be very frustrating we had an incident at a previous company where uh we had a female engineer she was an amazing engineer one of the best that we had and she had a child and she went on maternity leave and while she was on leave her manager changed so she came back to a new manager so she comes to work uh after returning from maternity leave at this company maternity leave is very rich and so she came back kind of in a part-time basis um to integrate for the first month and then she came back full time after that so it was her intent to be part-time she came in the manager sat her down and said I've really heard a lot of great things about your work so she was happy she's like oh great he likes me he thinks I'm great uh and then he said however I'm really disappointed to hear that you decided to start a family I purposely have not had kids because I wanted to build my career and you really could have been something here if you had just taken that same route and she kept her mouth shut and she didn't say anything but she went home and told her husband I can't return part-time I need to return full time I need to see that I need my manager to see I'm still committed to my career I need to see I'm still focused and prioritized on that so she did that and then she started working later hours and again she told nobody about what I think it's a very inappropriate comment and uh and she showed up to work and and she stayed later than usual and so it was after five or six and and the other engineers were who were all male were in a bullpen and they were all working hard on their work and she walks in and they're all wow you know you're still here um we'll call her Susan Susan you're still here and uh she said yeah one one interruption just to confirm that the acronym pta in here is parent teacher yes parent teacher association yeah yeah yeah um I have a lot of male friends who are the presidents of their pta groups but uh it still seems to be more associated with women uh so um he said what are you doing here so late and she said we're working like the rest of you and he said well after five o'clock we get a little bit raunchy so if you can't hang with the boys you should go home so what's upsetting to me about this is not just that the manager said really inappropriate things but that none of the guys in that bullpen spoke up and said whoa hold on mr manager she has every right to be here and we shouldn't be saying things that aren't appropriate and we want her to stay no they all put their heads down and kept quiet and that's what I don't want to see happening here at git lab if you see something say something you are leaders you're managers it was your it's your responsibility but I would like every employee to do that even if they're not a manager because when these things happen sometimes the person in the out group the person who doesn't feel welcome the person who feels like the major minority doesn't feel powerful enough to speak up for themselves and so it comes to a point where when we see wrongs happening we need to be the ones who stick up for those wrongs not because we need to defend the poor weakless weak creature but because it's the right thing to do and we need to show that we're all empowered to do so and and we need to get everyone going in the right direction on the right step so sorry I'm I'm kind of passionate about that so we we get into attractiveness and physical stature you probably have seen the shows where they put someone in a suit that makes them look like looks look less attractive than they really are and suddenly they get worse service and and and people ignore them more well in in the US less than 15 percent of American men are over six feet tall but nearly 60 percent of all corporate CEOs over six feet tall less than four percent of Americans are over six two and yet 36 percent of CEOs are over six two so there clearly is some bias towards the way people look and how tall they are at least for men as well that could exist for women I don't have the stats for it but you mentioned your wife Jacob being 411 um I don't know if that's true for women as well but it certainly is for for men and there are also changes in salary and things too so uh it's it's interesting to me that I'm sure that no one knows that presidential candidates now are put on podiums so they're all equal height during the debate because they found also during presidential debates if one was higher or shorter than we tended to vote for the tall president and so they ended up trying to make them all look the same to take away that bias uh so where does implicit bias show up at work it can show up in the resume stage the interviewing stage it can show up in work assignments it can show up in promotions um and that gut instinct feeling I will tell you it can also show up in pay um and not just in the way you're thinking about it shows up in pay because we're perpetrating the crimes of the past let's put it that way so if you interview someone who has been discriminated against in their entire career so their pay isn't as good and their opportunities aren't as good and then you pay them based off what they're currently making or their current opportunity instead of their potential and their market value um then you continue to perpetuate that discrimination you you you you you dot you're not the one making the change we saw that a lot at netflix we hired a lot of lawyer entertainment lawyers and it tended to be that the the people of color who were applying for these roles were being paid a lot less than everybody else who was applying for the roles so we could have done the thing that a lot of companies do have just okay you're making this well pay you that um or we could say you're making this but I just hired five other people doing the exact same job at this rate so I'm moving you up there too and and that's the kind of thing that you start you have to be careful about that you're not just going off of someone's um opportunities and privileges in the past instead of their potential and aptitude in the future um let's go on so some things that we hear at work that uh can be damaging and can show bias um does not join meetings in a certain tie I've seen this in in both ways I've seen people show up to an interview too dressed up so they don't want to hire them because they think they're too fancy and I've seen people come in with flip flops and cargo shorts and they say oh they're not respectful uh we shouldn't hire them I've seen it I've seen it go in in both directions too polished or not too polished I've seen this a lot and I've seen this already here at GitLab we interviewed someone for my team who had a lot of experience she was very skilled they didn't use too polished they used she sounded too corporate so she was very polished she was very articulate and that came across as sounding too corporate and then thus maybe not a good fit for GitLab uh her her um experience was both startup and corporate but she was very very polished in the way she spoke my old boss had this problem no one thought she was genuine because she was too polished and it felt it's better to rehearse and so when she spoke no one actually saw the truth in the and the passion behind it because they thought it was just all rehearsed act uh so 20 more has has too much experience so they're overqualified and that can be discriminatory as well just because I have a lot of experience doesn't mean I'm not willing to get my hands dirty and do the hard work but sometimes we look at people we make that assumption about them has has or has not attended certain schools I love that this isn't a problem at GitLab I have been at companies that will only recruit from 20 universities across the world and they have to be the top ones and if you're not there you don't get tired um so I love that that GitLab doesn't have that problem so much there might still be people here who do who see a certain school and think wow you went to MIT I gotta get you um but I think generally we actually look at people's abilities here um the strong or wrong accent talks too much or doesn't talk enough um won't be able to push back I hear a lot um does or doesn't have children and then not a culture fit so I think being a culture fit is super super important but if you're evaluating people on culture fit you have to evaluate them on each of our values and you have to be able to articulate why they don't match our values I don't ever want to hear you interview feedback where I just hear not a culture fit I want to know why I want to know based on what uh and if you hear that from anyone on your interview team if you're a hiring manager and you hit if you get feedback that's just not a culture fit you need to probe to why not what did you ask and what was the answer that made you feel that way um you really really need to dig into that to to fight against that generality that really is is not helpful probably can I ask you about one specific sure can you go back slide please yeah we'll not be able to push back why is that listed as um I'm not a good thing I don't understand why is it listed as not a good thing so yeah you don't understand why people would want people who push back no the other way why why would why not reject people who are not able to uh fight for their cause if I if I can put it that way so yeah so I think that that's another very culturally dangerous one so depending on where you are from or your past experiences you will be more comfortable um demonstrably pushing back than others and also in an interview setting it can be really difficult to feel really comfortable doing that and their people are just going to have different comfort levels I know a lot of people that are perceived as not pushing back that absolutely do push back but they do it in a more private setting or a private way or a gentler way perhaps uh and not in a way that they're really going to get credit for pushing back but a way that is still just as effective and so I think it's just a matter especially a global company like we are here at GitLab not everybody is going to push back in the same way you know direct looks different in Amsterdam than it does in Japan and I said this at the summit right and so we just have to be careful that we're not over evaluating overvaluing that uh and it's different for different roles and and and things I think when you get to um leadership levels you would expect even in an interview for people to you know have some strong opinions around things but um we just have to be careful that we're not making that as a judgment based off of culture or background but we're actually being thoughtful about whether or not they really will push back in their way that's effective for them and effective for the company and uh I'll add to what Barbie said in addition to the cultural differences here this is very common when English is spoken as a second language regardless of culture so it's something we have to be careful of as well yeah yeah and that was one of the things that we found we were talking about the live stream video and how to make it better we also found that for a lot of people who weren't native English speakers they were much less comfortable participating in that than people who felt comfortable speaking English and that's those are just not things we want to have affecting our our employees experiences here our teammates experiences here thanks so um I pretty much have said all this already but it's on a slide so you can refer back to it and so discussion so how do we feel I might actually skip this I think discussion is good but we haven't gotten to some of the other slides in here so I will go back to this slide if we have time because we only have 20 minutes left so I apologize for that so diversity looks more like this you've got all the different colors in the in the cradle a crayon box but inclusion is when you can actually draw a beautiful picture with those things it doesn't help to hire in people from different backgrounds different races different genders if when we get here when they get here we don't use everyone we have to paint the beautiful picture right and if we put them in our corner and we leave them in the box that doesn't that that's not inclusive that doesn't actually help and not only will you not get their great ideas and perspectives but you also won't get them referring their friends if I think it's terrible to be a woman at GitLab then you better believe that I'm not going to tell my other female friends that they should work here and so it also is also important for the pipeline in the future so inclusion means access respect and value so regardless of where you're from regardless of your background you have the equal access to information projects ideas teams functions as everybody else when you participate in those things you'll be respected just as much as anybody else and you will be valued on the same dimensions that we're we're placing and valuing and determining the value of others it will be on your work it'll be on your contributions you will be just as able to contribute and work and it won't be on how you look or how you sound and there's some more notes in there I'm kind of going fast now there is a power dynamic so I mentioned this a little bit earlier but I'm in the minority I don't feel represented and I'm uncomfortable speaking up I'm the only one who seems to think or feel this way so maybe I'm wrong I feel uncomfortable confronting the leader there's been a lot of times in my career that I should have spoken up about things that were being done to me and I kept my mouth shut and moved forward because I didn't want to be the problem causer I didn't want to rock the boat I didn't want to be that over-emotional woman those were all just services to my colleagues who could have learned from my perspective in my opinion and my experiences it was a disservice to every other woman who was going to be in the workplace after me and I've had to really push myself to be someone who will speak up and will be quote annoying when I when I I try to help other people see when their their behavior is not inclusive and maybe not making people feel welcome and I would hope that all of you would feel the same freedom to do so what can we do as leaders before during after these situations where you're seeing it so this is this is advice to you we're going to be rolling out the harassment prevention training that's legally required in the US but we're going to roll it out globally because it's good for us all to have an equal understanding of that given that we're one company but this is a quick maybe advising that you might hear much of the same in that training so again recognize that you have biases identify yours try to become conscious of them so they don't rule you question your gut instincts and notice what's influencing your decisions regarding people so if you get for example on an interview with someone and you immediately have a reaction whether it be positive or negative really check why am I having that reaction is it based off of the facts or is it based off of some bias and I have note your first impressions and this is something we can do just as we're walking around right so not just taking a test but if you're walking around town one night and you you walk by lots of people try to just make a note in your mind about how you react when you see people that look different dress different sound different and see if see if there might be some biases there that might exist do you do you have a pattern when you see when you see people and then consider talking about what factors might be contributing to a less inclusive environment on your team so you can all go back to your teams and have a discussion with them about what's working what's not working into the all feel valued we have the results of the employee survey coming out soon so you'll get some information from those two but it's it's good to just kind of foster the discussion and make the whole team understand that we can actually talk about these things we don't have to pretend they don't exist we can actually make them better and we can actually do something about it so counteract expect and encourage full team participation in meetings don't be afraid to call on people but don't try to embarrass them interrupt the interrupters interrupting is okay to a certain perspective but when you find that those interruptions are targeting in certain populations or maybe the out groups and are being perpetuated by the in groups it is time to put a stop to it it is a time to interrupt it and and just say hey Eric can you stop for a minute I think Abby was still finishing right you don't have to be rude about it but you can just kind of call it out and then assign credit accurately and thoughtfully don't um you know if you find that if there was a situation where um yeah Abby came up with a great idea it was ignored and people just kept talking and then Eric repeated it a minute later be the person who says when everyone in the room says oh great idea Eric then be the person who said that is a great idea Eric and Abby right I mean acknowledge that Abby had that idea too right it's it's minor it's small it doesn't take much time but it does take thoughtfulness review your cycles for what bias might exist right it hiring and promotions and assigning projects and feedback and determinate and terminations do you find that when you're giving written feedback to women you're using more words like too aggressive or too emotional and and when you write reviews for your male teammates your writing feedback or reviews that are much more focused on tasks and abilities so be be aware of those and and be careful and try not to do that and it's interesting to me even just to go back and look at feedback you've written over the last couple years and see if there is a trend for you that you that you need to be correcting try to get exposure to the groups that you might have bias against and get some positive examples to counter the stereotypes you might be hearing I grew up in a very backward small town and my parents were very slow to accept marriage equality and we used to get in some fights because I lived in the Bay Area and I accepted it at 100% and I didn't understand why they were voting against it don't mean to get political here but then the world opened up before them they got more exposure I introduced them to a lot of my wonderful friends and then those stereotypes and embedded for them got dispelled and it didn't take long for them completely to change their thought process once they got some of that exposure and so join the LGBTQ group on Slack if you feel like you might have biases against that group reach out to more women and maybe go to some women's meetings that are appropriate if you feel like you have bias there ask to be involved if you think those exposures help you and get that exposure and and to this next point be an ally right you don't have to be part of a group to be an ally for that group and so don't don't be afraid to be an ally when the first person one of the first people to join the Slack channel for women when I set it up was Ernst which was awesome right he wants to be an ally for that group and so he immediately joined and and that's great prioritize ways you can commit to increasing diversity and building a more inclusive environment we will be doing that as a company but you can do it on your teams as well and then set an expectation for all employees that you will be creating an environment where employees can surface concerns right we don't have to pretend we don't see it we don't have to pretend it doesn't exist it's a safe place to raise your hand and say I am worried about this I see this happening should we do something about it and and make sure they know that they can absolutely feel comfortable coming to you or the people ops team with any concerns they have they should be able to come to anyone in leadership or anyone in people ops to voice those concerns and have that be a safe environment to do so so questions and ideas I was going to ask a quick question can we for the channels that it applies to not for like f underscore portfolio management but for the channels like um like the inclusive channel can we announce those on the general channel because a lot of them I don't hear about and I feel like the people who do hear about it are other people who it applies to or you know somehow it just like it goes over my head or something like that I miss a lot of these groups somehow I think we could does anyone have any objections to that we document those in the handbook yeah we we are documenting the handbook yes um when we create them we put them in the handbook but uh but um I'm not opposed to the general channel I'm kind of I am biased towards trying to keep the general channel as clean as possible on on relevant announcements for the whole company but if if there's not concerns around that it's certainly something we can do and the other question I had um is do you think it's crazy to document some of the hiring uh or the people who are applying to see what our biases actually are because I feel like right now I mean we could take the test and everything could we see like who's applying and who we're hiring to see if we act like what are what are we doing so so tracking the the the profiles of the candidate applying and seeing if there could if we're not interviewing people of a certain group and that or we're not hiring people of a certain group then we probably aren't being that we might have biases we're not aware of yeah or to at least like get insight into our potential biases yeah I think we could I think um I have to see I have to check and lever and see what is Martin there I know that when what when I look at a candidate and lever I can see their name but otherwise I would have no clue um what their background is unless I looked up their picture in LinkedIn or something um so um we'll look into that because I know that you could you can ask for that information at application but there's pros and cons to those things too but it's an idea so we'll think about it cool I'm trying to figure out how I go back in and stop sharing my screen sorry um I can't see any comments so people are writing comments I don't I'm not seeing those okay we've got them now I figured out okay a lot of people come up to me after my talk one is doing a screen call he did say that his English worried him he spoke very well okay okay any questions okay all right any other questions um I just have a question um wow is it a question that's more of a comment I suppose but something that I'm interested in is because we have our we have our git lab culture and our handbook and the way that we do things and we document that how do we really embrace the diversity of people's ideas in conjunction with the git lab workflow and how we do things can you can you repeat that Abby how do we I guess I I guess it's a difficult one I guess I'm just thinking about how we we have the git lab workflow and we're very clear on how we want people to use git lab and how they should communicate and we have the handbook etc how does how do we then interject or add to that people's different ideas and opinions into that when our culture is very well defined and you know we have our general guidelines and things like that how do we do that I don't know Sid you have a comment on this I find it usually happens more in issues because then people the discussion happens in the issue and there's a lot of good comments in there but I don't know I don't think I'm the biggest expert in the git lab workflow at this point I'm trying sorry because this was a repetition of what we did during the executive meeting I was kind of zoned out what was the question um anyone can answer they heard it's it's it's how do we make sure that when we're merging something into the handbook or into the site and correctly if I'm characterized it's wrong Abby how do we make sure that we're hearing the ideas and different opinions when we do that instead of it just instead of it just going out by one person and one person's thoughts yeah that's really hard because because you can't have the whole company see everything because the whole company would get bored with it I try to the important thing is to find people that are interested I try to put things in the CEO channel if I have things so people can comment on it you tend to like mention people that have have commented about this before but of course that's a self-reinforcing behavior so you're not getting a diverse viewpoint so it's a good question I don't have a have a good answer to it we could we could have like a handbook um slack channel where it's easier to kind of propose things what do people think about that yes yeah we'll talk about it too and I think that issues are good and I think feeding off of it said give me an idea there when there are issues I find in when I post them it seems to be some of the same people commenting so if you're one of those people why don't you try to just tag a colleague to say interested in your opinion and and why don't we try to start really farming for more opinions and farming for dissent and farming for other perspectives and we might have strong ones ourselves but doesn't mean we can't really reach out to others to try to get theirs as well makes sense to tag a tag a random colleague our team member I also created the handbook um slack channel and I'll announce so in general so people can join it if they if you want to be involved okay great well we're out of time everybody thank you for participating and feel free to reach out to me or anyone on the team if you have any comment suggestions concerns thank you