 Thank you. Come on up, Dennis. Chips just totally ruined my first line. Like, you shouldn't tell lies about me being nice. OK, my staff are over there. They know the truth. So I'd like to thank the Cloud Foundry Foundation for inviting me up here to speak. And I'd particularly like to thank Swarna for giving me the push and the support that I needed to be up here giving this talk to you today. I'm here to share some experiences that I've had that have helped shape how I think about trying to create an inclusive environment at work. One of those experiences is punching women in the face. This is a self-defense course that I was on a couple of years ago. I'm on the floor on the left with a massive bruise on the back of my leg. The one that I was training with is called Maja. She teaches an Israeli military martial art called Krav Maga. I don't get to go on these courses very often anymore. I have a business to run. I have children. But I did spend the best part of 10 years training at and going on to teach the London South Bank University Jiu Jitsu Club. South Bank University has a really high proportion of international students and mature students, which means there's a really diverse mix of people coming through the university and also coming through my club. As well as students, we had everything from unemployed people to investment bankers turning up at the clubs. We had people from every religion you could think of and people from all around the world, every continent except Antarctica. We had people suffering from mental illness. We had people who were deaf, partially sighted, dyspraxic. We had refugees from war-torn countries. And we had members of the military who had invaded those war-torn countries. So I was very lucky to be part of such a diverse melting pot of different people. One of the things I loved most about the organization, the Jitsu Foundation, that my club was a part of, was that everybody was treated equally. And nowhere was this tip demonstrated more than in gradings. This isn't a grading. The gradings weren't filmed, and they looked a hell of a lot more messy than this. But when you wanted your next belt, you went to a grading and there was a quality bar that was set. And it was lowered for no one. It didn't matter whether you were big or small, whether you were male or female, whether you had been fasting all day, or whether you had swine flu, that happened to a friend of mine, you got attacked just as hard as everybody else did. Sometimes I had been in the dojo when men decided that they needed to attack women less hard, thinking that they needed to give them an easy ride somehow. When that happened, those men were threatened with being thrown out of the dojo. Because it's not okay to make assumptions based on what someone looks like about what they can handle and how proficient they are. And it is downright disrespectful to deny people the opportunity to prove themselves by giving them an easy ride. But that was the gradings, okay? And we didn't spend most of our time in gradings, we spent most of our time training. And in a training session, over the course of a couple of hours, an instructor would show you a particular attack and a defense against that attack. And throughout the course of a couple of hours, you would work with different partners, changing partners regularly, to drill just that attack and defense in isolation. Now, if when you worked with a new partner, the first thing you did was punch them as hard as you possibly could, like you would in a grading, then the chances are that they're probably not gonna learn very much. Additionally, you're gonna make yourself quite unpopular. And the last thing you want to be is unpopular when at the end of the session, the weapons come out and people get the chance to swing a baseball bat at your head. So instead, when you were working with someone new, you had to treat them as an individual and be responsive to what they needed. That meant that you had to listen to what they were saying to you. Sometimes, these sessions would get tough, so you'd have to motivate each other. It was hard knowing what you were doing wrong. Sometimes, you needed somebody to spot that for you. And most of all, you had to change what you were doing so that the other person could get as much out of the session as possible. So fast forward a few years, and I had to move for work, became a parent, didn't have time to teach anymore, which is a shame, and I miss it greatly. But I did become a Cloud Foundry Consultant, and after going to a few diversity lunches at CF Summits, I ended up reading a really awesome book called Delusions of Gender by Professor Cordelia Fine. Now, this book collates a whole bunch of research that dispels common misconceptions about gender-based performance differences. For example, you may have heard the stereotype that men are better at maths and women are better at communication. And it seems like a lot of people have heard this stereotype because one study found that if you ask people in a survey to rate their ability in different areas, then men will say that they're better at maths and women will say they're better at communication, but only if you ask for their gender at the top of the survey. If you don't ask for their gender, then men don't rate themselves as highly at maths and women don't rate themselves as highly at communication. That first case is an example of something called stereotype boost. When you're reminded that you're part of a group about whom there's a positive stereotype, you live up to that stereotype. But this doesn't just affect people's self-perception. It can affect their performance as well. You may have heard of the stereotype that men are bad at empathising. Researchers looked into this and gave men a social sensitivity test. This is one you have to guess who this woman is speaking to on the phone. When researchers gave men a social sensitivity test and told them it's about understanding people's thoughts and feelings and that historically, men aren't very good at social sensitivity tests, you know what? The men performed worse than the women did on these tests. But when researchers gave the same social sensitivity test, the exact same test, to a different group of men and told them it was about complex information processing, and they neglected to mention that men historically have been bad at this, the men performed just as well as the women did. That first case is something called stereotype threat. When you're reminded that you're part of a group about whom there are negative stereotypes, it can negatively impact your performance. If you think you're bad at something and you think that everyone else thinks you're going to be bad at something, it's going to be very hard to apply yourself fully to the task at hand. Now, it also seems like motivation has an effect here as well. This is a mental image rotation task. I've not highlighted the right answer because I want to drive you all crazy. Men are supposed to be better at this than women. However, a study found that if you quite rightly tell men that being good at these tasks will make them good at a career in flower arranging, then they score 20% less well than if you tell them it will make them a good fighter pilot. So what's going on here? It's a complicated picture. We've got stereotype boost, stereotype threat. There are these cultural motivational issues going on as well. What it's telling us is although there is a body of evidence showing these gender performance differences, dating back decades, that evidence doesn't tell us the cause of these differences. More recent studies have shown us clearly that the way that we treat people has such a big effect that it can cancel out these performance differences all together. So reading that book was one experience. The next one was talking to my friend Therese Stowell at Pivotal who put me onto the work of Karen Holtzblatt. Karen is a user researcher who has turned her professional skills to try to find out why women leave tech jobs. You may have seen her speak at the diversity lunch last year. Now, Karen's findings were typical of most people, I think. She found that in order to stay in tech jobs, women needed to be part of high-performing, tight-knit teams. They needed to be doing meaningful, cutting-edge technical work. She also found that most like... Like most people, women needed to be given a push and encouragement to take more responsibility and to take more risks. And that once they're being pushed into the limelight, they need to be given support. Having just read Delusion's agenda, it seemed clear to me that if women needed more of a push, that's not because women are somehow intrinsically lacking in confidence. We've got enough female UFC cage fighters and prime ministers to disprove that. Maybe it's because they're women in tech. Being part of a conspicuous minority is a really great way of reminding you every day that you're part of a group about whom there might be negative stereotypes. Now, I told you about Karen being at the diversity lunch. This bit's unscripted, right? So I'm gonna go a little bit over. Steve told you yesterday that he was part of the problem because he didn't go to the diversity lunches. He didn't partake in the conversation. I used to, and I stopped going. I stopped attending diversity events because I was frustrated at problem statements. I would go along to events. I would hear that there are not enough of different types of people in tech, but no one told me what I could do better. No one told me what I was doing wrong. So I stopped turning up. I saw Karen's research in a podcast instead in a webinar. But lucky me! I get to leave the conversation when it suits me. I get to ignore the diversity topic when it frustrates me. Not everyone has that luxury. This talk came about because I wanted to find out what I could do better. I wanted some action, some actionable advice. And that's how I ended up here. So what can we do? When we're trying to make the world a better place, should we be highlighting particular groups that we're aware of and giving them special treatment? Well, whether we like it or not, if we start highlighting people's differences, we could act just like that gender tick box at the top of the survey. We could trigger stereotype threats by making our differences more clear. Not to mention minority spotlight effects, where people are made to feel more anxious and less welcome as a result of having their minority status highlighted. Sometimes some people just want to get on with their job. They don't want to be the representative minority, speaking on behalf of a whole demographic of people despite being just one individual. These are the words of Sarah Novotny from Google at the last year's diversity luncheon used with her permission. It's a good one, Dan! You've come up here! You've told us a load of stuff that's not gonna work. Great! That's really helping move the conversation forward, isn't it? So really, what can we do? The good news is, when it comes to stereotype threat, just telling people about it is enough to start mitigating its effects. In a U.S. college study, students were given a maths exam. Some of the female students were told, if you feel nervous about this exam, it could be because you've heard the stereotype that men are better at maths. It's just a stereotype. Those women reported higher levels of anxiety during the exam. But importantly, they performed just as well as the men did, unlike those who hadn't been told about stereotype threats. Now, I've talked a lot about gender so far, but clearly there are all sorts of underrepresented groups in tech. There are some minorities that are obvious. There are some people that will have lived their whole lives as a minority in their culture and probably show the signs of chronic minority stress, where they've got observably lower health as a result of a lifetime of being marginalised. But there are lots of minority groups that we can't see, people whose sexuality isn't overt, people struggling with mental illness, the parent whose child is terminally ill, maybe even the distant programmer, struggling with the scars of horrific childhood trauma that they don't even want you to know about. If we focus our attention on the groups that we can see, then we're going to miss all of these people, all of the people that find themselves at the intersection of different groups. So how can we help everyone? Well, we can treat people as individuals and be responsive to their needs. We can listen to what they have to say to us. We can encourage each other when the going gets tough. We can help each other identify our blind spots. And most importantly, we can change what we're doing in order to allow other people to fulfil their potential. Now, I'm not saying that this is going... I'm not saying we should be blind to the systemic injustices that people are faced getting here and will continue to face. I'm not saying that treating people as individuals is going to fix all of these systems, but it's something that we can all do every day to help make a positive difference. Now, yesterday, Steve Greenberg was exactly right to tell people that everybody is welcome. Not just because it's true, but because it makes a difference. In another US college study, minority students, before they started their academic career, were given a 15-minute intervention, a 15-minute chat in which they were told, if you feel like you don't belong here, you feel like you're the odd one out, don't worry about it. Everyone feels like the odd one out when they first start. Everyone's welcome, everyone belongs. Look at the people that have been here for a year, they've all fit in just fine and made friends. Two years later, they had significantly better grades. Better academic performance after two years from just a 15-minute chat. Imagine what we can do if people feel welcome all of the time. Now, if you've ever been the new kid in class, there is no amount of effort that you can take to make you feel welcome. There's no amount of will and things that you can do to make you feel like you belong. The only people that can do that are the people that are already here. Any of these faces look familiar? If you're in this audience, the chances are you work in the tech industry. Only you can make other people feel welcome. You are the culture and the context in which other people have to do their jobs. You can help people fulfill their potential by making them know that they belong. Only you can do that. Now, if you're looking for the research that's gone into this talk, don't go driving traffic to my company's website. Go and pay for Cordelia Fine's book. Go and look up Karen Holtzblatt's work and collaborate with her. Thank you for listening and staying out for this talk and have an awesome conference and go and make sure that everybody else feels welcome to be here. Thank you.