 that's that's that's assuming a lot Matthew hey everybody good morning man it was late night last night's I'm so glad you're all here so anyway I know we're running a little bit late the keynote I'm gonna try to be on time as much as possible even if we're having a bit of a light start I was gonna stand at podium but apparently you can't see me if I'm behind the laptop so I'm gonna but peeking in and out so I can cheat and look at my notes so anyway I'm here to talk to you about framing DEI globally it's a conversation that people have been having I think for a while for a variety of reasons and I wanted to provide some frameworks through which to view DEI as well as relate some of my personal experiences around it because I think it's super important to have storytelling as a part of furthering DEI efforts so a little bit who I am I think I know most people in the room but so I've been working in open source for nearly nine years and before working in the tech industry I was working in higher education administration nonprofits and arts organizations so I've got quite a bit of experience across the board in very different industries I'm someone who's got an international background I've lived in numerous places including a broad in the Philippines and France and in different regions of the United States including Hawaii California Virginia North Carolina Rhode Island and so I was born Hawaii I was in the Bay Area for a little bit Bebop River to Virginia meets Virginia and in Province Rhode Island and now I am in Durham North Carolina which is 30 minutes north of Red Hat Tower if people know where that is and so as part of my job I travel pretty extensively I've been to pretty much every region and I get to interact with a lot of different people which is honestly one of the best parts of this role like it actually really satisfies my desire to learn new things and meet new people because I just have a natural curiosity about the world and back in the day I also did graduate work around issues of diversity and equity and inclusion and so DEI has evolved a lot in the time I did that kind of work and so I did a certificate in women's studies it's actually not called women's studies anymore it's called gender sexuality and feminist studies and that was from Duke University in Durham which is where I still live and then I also co-founded the Red Hat Asian Network and I currently serve as a chair but even though I'm chair the Asian Network I am deeply interested in intersectionality because we don't just have one thing about us we have lots of different things about us right all of us are very multifaceted and that includes myself so before we get started I wanted to talk about the definitions over diversity equity inclusion and I also threw in justice in there and part of the reason I put this up is that I thought this was a really cool framing because it asks the series of questions and that's the way that I want people to approach DEI there are no absolutes there's a lot of questioning there's a lot of conversation it is not a linear process right and I thought this was a really really nice framing and then you know most people probably have not seen the justice part right I feel like the justice part provides additional nuance to the diversity equity and inclusion piece right because you know people think of diversity like okay we just need a lot of different people in the room and it's solved but then you know you have to ask well who's not in the room and then when you're in the room are you allowed to be heard like are your ideas allowed to be heard and then if your idea is heard is it going to be taken as seriously like are people actually going to think that you have any credibility even if you choose to speak up so so there's a series of steps in it and you know part of what I want to say about this journey because it is a journey is all of us are learning together so maybe you're learning but you know what I'm learning just as much as you are so I would never ever style myself as an expert I can only say that here are my experiences here's the research let's have a conversation and evaluate everything together because I was trained to be a researcher and a questioner and you know I want to make sure that I have an understanding of where you are and I hope that I can express an understanding of where I'm at so I want to talk a little bit about diversity because people are like well what does diversity entail and actually there was some research done by a person named Amy Edmondson out of Harvard and she actually is one of the very first people to write about something called psychological safety has everyone heard of psychological safety raise your hand if you've heard of psychological safety like it like we've been talking a lot about it I'm going to talk a bit about what that means but before we go into psychological safety I want to talk about team diversity and so she identified four different types of team diversity along with another research there Catherine roll off and a bunch of people are working in this field now so we're going to go through the different parts and then I want people to raise their hand if they think it applies to them so the first one is demographic diversity so it means you've got a variety of people in your team maybe there's some disparity so maybe you've got a bunch of identity groups you know maybe they're from another country another part of the country another race another culture different sexual orientation stuff you know stuff that maybe this is your typical definition of diversity so does anyone belong to a team like that where you have people who kind of fit that definition all right so so a lot of you the second type of diversity is expertise so you've got a bunch of different skill sets you've got some people who may be senior you may have people who are junior you may have people who are really great at this one thing and other people are great at this another thing so who has been in a group or is in a group where there are different levels of expertise where you have junior and senior members or have been a part of team like that okay great all right so the third one I think this may actually apply to a lot of people geographically dispersed team members who has to work with teams in other regions that are not where you live okay a bunch of you all right and then the fourth one is disparity and so at Red Hat we like to think that we have a flat reporting line but I work in marketing and so we're more of a traditional corporate structure where there are social norms of deference to authority so you know basically usually in open source we say titles don't matter but you know sometimes they do and so if you've got some sort of reporting structure where you've got a manager and people under them that would be basically that kind of framework so who is on a team where you've got someone above you and maybe people below you in terms of hierarchy okay all right so it looks like the majority of you fit into one of these categories of diversity when it relates to your team or maybe all four I actually have all four so so yeah all sorts of diversity and so I think it's really important to frame what we mean by diversity and how it can apply in different situations so I have been doing this work diversity equity and inclusion and justice and other subsets within this world for a very very long time I don't want to tell you how long because it'll give away my age but I've been doing this for decades and there's something that comes up in every situation that I've been in and I think this is universal and one of the things that I want people to take away is that DEI is not separate from your everyday experiences it's a part of how we experience the world even if you don't think you're experiencing the world in a way that involves that but some of my observations is that people have a very deep need to belong people are always asking what's what's my place in the world and can others understand my experience and another thing that I've noticed is people need to be seen invalidated you know people need to feel their contributions matter and not only do they matter but I'd like to be recognized for the contributions that I make the other thing that's come up is can I bring my whole self into situations without fear or self-consciousness you know so an example would be like if people knew something about me you know that I'm different in some way you're automatically operating from a place of fear and hypervigilance and that is not a fun place to be and so I think it's very very important for people to be able to be in an environment where they can be their whole self without judgment and without fear and then another really fundamental thing that comes up time and time again and it doesn't matter where your opinion is around dea is that people are really concerned about fairness people really focus on what's fair and how do we get to fairness right and to me at the way that I define fairness is you know I want the same access to resources and support you know like if there's one group getting access to support and resources I'd like to think that I too would have the same access to those resources and support and then I also want access to opportunities I want an opportunity to grow and to evolve into something better than what I know or evolve into circumstances better than what I know so let's go back to psychological safety right so I talked about bringing the whole self to work right even to your everyday life maybe the grocery store you know maybe while you're walking around your neighborhood so psychological safety you know maybe you think of it in terms of being an individual but it relates to a setting or role where people can express themselves right they can and in this particular instance work relevant thoughts and feelings right and psychological safety also includes in its definition permission to make mistakes if you've made a mistake can you raise your hand who's ever made a mistake if you haven't I want to know who you are I'd like I'd like to know who you are if you've never made a mistake right and so not only is there permission to make mistakes but there's permission to learn from those mistakes you know back in the day we used to have this sticker at Red Hat that said failed better that does anyone remember that I don't know if anyone ever saw that sticker I actually had that on my laptop I loved it because that was like such a mind-blowing thing to see something like that in the workplace and I took it away because people were misinterpreting it and saying okay yeah that people are not understanding what it means but for me I was like this is great you know why because it means I'm allowed to make mistakes and learn from them and be better afterwards that's how I interpreted it and so I think everyone should have permission to fail better I give you permission to fail better you know so don't be self conscious if you make mistakes I think the key to is if you make a mistake what do you learn from it how can you grow from it but you know what we can't define psychological safety without talking about teams because really psychological safety is related and dependent on teams and why is that why would teams be important in psychological safety hmm you know part of it is a setting right like think about maybe a past work experience or a past school experience think about a teacher or a leader think about the ones that made you feel afraid and judged and then think about the places where you felt safe or you could laugh or you could share things that were uncomfortable and know that you would be supported have people been in both those environments have you been in an environment where it's like you know I'm afraid to speak up because I'm not sure what that means for me and have you been in an environment where it's hey this is great and with people that I really trust and I know that I can rely on them to have my back and actually that's how I feel like when I met flock so thank you community I always feel super supported in this community in the fedora communities one of my favorite communities for that reason like I can nerd out and be my weird self without judgment and I know that Jack Hammer sounds like it has judgment but it's okay all right another thing I want to talk about right if you is if we talk about diversity by itself you know people assume falsely that if you create a diverse team everything solved yay hey all of our issues are shot because we put a bunch of different people together and they're gonna work at a team and they're gonna solve everything because they're all different well studies have shown that diverse teams often underperform relative to homogenous teams what you mean that putting a bunch of different people together actually doesn't work to create an environment that's more productive why is that part of the reason why it doesn't work is that there is no framework for communication you have to reimagine the world when you are working with people that are different from you so just think about if you have a bunch of senior members on your team that have been doing open source for ten fifteen years and you have a newbie that comes in that doesn't know the terminology that knows how to access command line but they're not sure where to start or where to go you have to interact with that person differently you can't interact with that person like they have ten or fifteen years of experience and if you did what does that bring out right it brings out a lot of fear and smallness because this person doesn't want to ask questions because they know that they are soon to have a certain knowledge and skill set that they don't possess so we have to set expectations we have to set frameworks for when we deal with team members that come in and as I cited there are different forms of diversity right so there are different things that you may have to do to address those types of diversity but the key thing is creating a communication framework into which all groups can work and understand right so here are some things that you can do to ensure that your diverse team excels right so framing is super super important we have to be able to frame things as a way to provide opportunities for information sharing so if you've got that junior person on your team that's never been an open source but they want to be an open source you have to create a framing with meetings where it's opportunity to share information you know information sharing is really really key right and then we want to frame differences as a source of value right you know one of the things I loved when I came to Red Hat is the idea that the best idea wins and it doesn't matter where it comes from doesn't matter if it comes from your intern or the CEO the best idea wins right and that's part of you know like I think about like even in terms of my height because I'm really short and there are things I don't think about because I'm short so for instance when I'm on the airplane and I stand up on my seat I don't hit this part like I just stand there versus like someone like Adam probably can't do that but it's not part of my everyday experience so I don't think about stuff like that and then another thing that I think about is that like my refrigerator is very high at home and my husband likes put things on the top shelf and I don't ever see them I can only see eye level right and so we have to consider what are people experiencing right and you have to frame those differences right so one of the things I've asked my husband ideas that can you put stuff that I actually use on the lower shelf so that I can reach it and actually see it and not by like five other items that are identical because I didn't realize that all that stuff was in on the top shelf so anyway so that says very important you know you want to you want to have conversations that frame those differences and then increase like I told people I have a natural curiosity about the world and I ask a lot of questions I ask a lot open-ended questions and sometimes listening is really really hard you know especially if we're already attached to an outcome or attached to a certain expectation or attached to a belief system you know you know I may be at the mindset because I don't ever hit my head when I stand up on a plane that like I don't know what the big deal is why are people complain about not having enough space come on suck it up I can stand perfectly fine you know I've got clearance too you know but you know what I know that's not the experience of other people you know I'm sure that folks who are vertically challenged this way have their own sets of issues you know maybe you can't be in a hotel room without having your feet hang over the bed you know and it's impossible for you not to ever have your knees hit the seat in front of you which is probably pretty excruciating on a long flight right and so I want to ask questions like hey Adam what's that light do you find that comfortable or do you wish that on other people yeah he wishes on other people okay that's good to know all right but part of these questions right is you also are trying to find like shared ownership and causality and what do we mean by shared ownership and causality part of it is we're trying to establish understanding of different things right so we're we're putting things in the pilots I call it like recipe making so like if you're trying to create something as a group if you're in a project of some sort I always like to use the recipe analogy where like if you're wanting to bake a cake you can't bake a cake just without would just flour or with just eggs or would just butter or with just sugar you need all those things to come together with a certain magic so that you can have a baked good at the end and I love baked goods so who doesn't like it baked goods right and then we have to talk about bridging boundaries right so people have a natural threshold for comfort because of their experiences you know they may be only comfortable with you know this much space like personal space is another thing that I think is always really intriguing when I travel I think in the United States we like to have an arms length as comfortable personal space but I've been in cultures where people are right on top of me and almost touching me and it's kind of like whoa okay there's something I have to understand here because this is their norm it's not my norm and so I need to figure out where people's boundaries are right and so part of how you bridge boundaries again is without open-ended questions like if we're working in a project everyone's got hopes and goals for that project right so if we're in a work setting a lot of those are assigned things that we're needing to do and accomplish and it may be that the various people on your team have very different hopes and goals and you know what that's actually very important to know that so your senior person may have very different goals from your junior person and you need to have a recognition of what they are so those gaps can be bridged right and then you want to do an inventory of resources and skills right so one thing like with a newer person is they may see things that you won't see because you're so used to doing things a certain way you may not see something that actually needs to be seen and someone less experienced or less familiar can see those things because they're still learning and so those are the things you want to think about is that you know what just because this person does not have the same experience as you do they're still bringing something and then this part about concerns and obstacles I think is super super important particularly if you are leading a team but this is a conversation that you also want to have as a team so people have an understanding of what's going on like what are people up against what are you worried about you know sometimes these are one-on-one conversations and sometimes these are conversations that you want to have as a team but it's very very important what people's obstacles are like an actuality maybe would process but also you know psychologically you know maybe people are held back by fear they don't want to make a mistake because if they make a mistake then oh no the world ends right but does the world really end so part of it is you have to put people's fears and perspectives and maybe you have to put your own fears and perspectives because usually the world won't end maybe your servers will go down for two months and that's terrible but you know the world's not really ending or for some people might so I want to talk a little bit about inclusion and how you evaluate teams so this is I'm not going to read through all these questions but I found this article by Chelsea Troy about how you evaluate team members contributions for our inclusive culture and I've already kind of gone through a version of this with my last slide but I thought this was really great you know so part of what you want to look at in your team there are they able to moderate their meetings are they able to make sure that people are expressing their opinions and then if they're not you know find a way to solicit them I mean there are people who are both extroverts introverts there's some people that like to give verbal feedback or written feedback and so it's really important to provide different forms to to do meetings for feedback so same with soliciting opinions attribution attribution super important so one thing that I think that I already spoke about was the need for people to feel recognized right and in another really common experience is people expressing an ID and then someone taking credit for it right so one thing that I think that's really really important to realize is that it's important to recognize a contribution given by someone and not appropriating it and if you're appropriating it you know ask yourself why you're doing that usually it's related to wanting to have power over someone and you know that actually doesn't really create a great team dynamic and what it does is it shuts people down so you know let's go ahead and get recognition to people because you know what it lifts you up to because you're seen as someone who is a supporter as someone who is here to uplift and make people's lives better and honestly you will get so much in return by doing that instead of being small and taking credit for something that you didn't do so all right I'm just going to go through that so because I want to be mindful of time so I want to talk about the power of the individual so we talk a lot about individuals particularly within American culture and I was talking to somebody about this yesterday you know because people always ask about like what can my company do what can my organization do but sometimes it's up to the individual it's up to an individual exercising their own power even when they're fearful so one of my favorite quotes is speak to truth even if your voice shakes and my voice shakes on many occasions because I'm not a person that is naturally comfortable with putting myself out there this is something that I've cultivated over many years this is not something that's comfortable for me in fact I was conditioned not to speak up my dad was always saying don't rock the boat you don't want to draw attention to yourself but there are times we do have to to speak up and I'll talk a little bit about my work and creating the Asian Network at Red Hat in just a bit but what's important to realize that sometimes the greatest changes don't come from organizations themselves it comes from individuals within organizations or maybe outside organizations they're willing to put themselves out there to do the work without an expectation of compensation and then it also involves relationship building because allies are such an important part of making change happen like I can't make change happen by myself I have to make sure that other people have buy-in to making things change and so individuals can start those processes and then they can catalyze things happening but then we also have to talk about leadership because leadership does matter one thing about individuals creating great things is that if that individual leaves your organization there's usually a void and so your leadership it's necessary to implement structural changes so as an example within the United States we had to do a voting rights act for people to have equal access to voting and that's actually being challenged right now but in theory everyone always had the right to vote but in order to ensure legislation had to be enacted in other words structures had to be changed because if you're looking to individuals or existing structures to make change happen it's not going to happen you're going to have to enact change on a structural level and in this case you would do it through legislation also you need leadership because remember when I was talking about when you have diverse teams you need to have a structure for communication it's your leaders are going to make sure that infrastructure gets created and so even to individuals are greatly important if you want lasting change in your organization you are going to have to have the buy-in of your leadership to make those things happen so let's talk about creating inclusive leaders right you know so again I'm a fan of the Harvard Business Review so you'll see that I get a lot of citations from articles and if you want a copy of my slide deck I'm glad to give it to you because I have all these links embedded but when they quizzed leaders about being inclusive inclusive leaders and we'll go through what makes it inclusively or just a bit they're 17 percent more likely to report that they're high performing 20 percent more likely to say they make high quality decisions and 29 percent more likely to report behaving collaboratively and then it also increases work attendance so basically you know if you're really hyper focused on a productivity aspect of DEI maybe not so much the human element there is a correlation that if you practice inclusion inclusivity that you will thrive so what are some examples of strong inclusive leadership so when they surveyed people when they defined a strong inclusive leader they said that strong inclusive leader is not afraid to share their personal weakness and an example personal weakness may be you know I know I'm good at this but I am not good at this and I need your help I need your help in making sure that I'm understanding things because this is not my area of strength so that would be an example of sharing a personal weakness the others just learning about cultural differences realizing that there are different styles and so like I said cultural could even extend as someone being introvert or extrovert as well as people being from different regions different cultures or different countries but understanding okay here's a preferred way to communicate here's something that needs to be highlighted you know and so that's super important that this leader leans into learning about those things and doesn't assume things they actually want to learn about those different things and then also acknowledging team members as individuals so you know one of my favorite stories I like to to tell about when I came to red hat was the afternoon of the first day of new hire orientation we had a reception where your teams could come and welcome you and I remember there is this gentleman with blue jeans a belt and a white button down shirt I'm like who is that person why is this person here and he was he's like hey I'm here because I want to welcome you to red hat and it was Jim Whitehurst our CEO and I'll tell you I was like what kind of place am I working at where the CEO comes to shake my hand and to welcome me and tell me that he's looking forward to me helping me the organization better I mean I still remember that story and I also remember the times that he would come to the booth completely uninvited because he wanted to say hi to Hatters and he would take selfies with all of us man those were really great days so Jim Whitehurst wherever you are we love you um and then least inclusive behaviors uh overpowering others you know like getting your way like my way or the highway displaying favoritism like I you know I think this person can do it best I don't care about the rest of you and then discounting alternative views like my view is the only one that matters because it's the right one you're like sure that there's nothing else that can be introduced to change your viewpoint and one thing also that's really important to know is that you know we're a lot organizations or fans of surveys you know feedback forms um but it's really important that feedback are distributed results rather than averaged results what do you think that is because if you average it out you hide where the differences and disparities are in terms of perception it hides your problems and so be very suspicious it's like hey 80 percent of people are really happy you know you need to kind of dig down a little bit deeper is it is it really 80 percent or is it you know how is this calculated data can be manipulated anyway you want so how can you be an inclusive leader so it says inclusive leadership shadow I don't know if anyone is familiar with the psychologist young but he talks about the shadow side and all of us have that shadow side all of us are really convinced that we're really good at what we do but sometimes we're not and we have to ask people for their feedback and we have to be visible and vocal about all those things so one thing to remember is that inclusive leadership needs to be cultivated and conscious and when it exists everyone does benefit from that and I know that we're running out of time so I'm going to just blow through these last slides really quickly um one thing I want to talk about is contact theory and this goes back to you know when people think oh if I have a diverse team everything's solved if I put a bunch of different people together it's solved like my DEI problems you know are gone and it's not true so one thing um about like putting people together in a room there's this thing called contact theory and this one is specific to racial prejudice but racial prejudice can only diminish when you're in a group with people is if you're under certain conditions and I think this also relates to psychological safety that I talked about earlier which is where everyone is sharing roughly equal status and belonging and working in a common purpose so if people are very different in there in the same room just because they're together does not mean that things will change the conditions have to be equitable the conditions have to be fair feel fair to the people who are in that room together and they also need to feel like they're part of a larger purpose so one of the things that I have to do on a regular basis is work with people with very different personalities different backgrounds for myself different philosophies of how to get things done but one thing I always remind folks when I'm doing a work project with them is like you know what in the end we want the same thing we want to accomplish something together and make it great what do you think needs to happen for that to be the end result and that's sometimes hard but finding that larger purpose that you can agree on makes a huge difference so I'm going to come back to this slide and so hopefully maybe you understand the justice part a little bit better you know the question that needs to happen for all of these things to be a reality in your organization and then I'm going to just talk really quickly about Red Hat Asia Network and then I'm going to let everyone go to their next session but as I said I was a co-founder for Red Hat Asia Network and we were actually primarily concerned with Asian Americans I just wanted to shout out to our founding committee two of these folks are no longer at Red Hat one was laid off he was a chairman's award winner was working in the office of CTO and then another just left to go to another organization so there's me and there's Robin Chan my co-chair and in Tesh Patel they're the only ones that are left Joe Tessai and Laura Fu are no longer at Red Hat and actually our executive sponsor just left three weeks ago so it's just a few of us are left who have done this effort so I just want to talk a little bit about why I did this organization because I never talked about DEI at work it's been a very long time and now I'm talking about it a lot but there are different things that happened one was COVID-19 and the racism that it brought out and not only the racism but it also brought up a lot of old societal wounds for a lot of Asian Americans about being othered and now to be blamed for something was pretty painful um and then another thing was that there were a lot of associates who are not being promoted into management Asian Americans are the least likely group in the US to be promoted to management within tech and then within tech it's Asian American women oh that's me who are least likely to be promoted into management roles so one of the things that was really important to me was to challenge people's assumptions about belonging to a group so within the United States we have something called the model minority myth which is that Asians are super successful and they don't need anybody's help um and that's not true for a variety of reasons first of all the term Asian American is a socio-political term that evolved in the 1960s it's an umbrella term for a wide variety of folks and the reason why it was created was to create a way to ally together to help each other to find a more equitable place to find opportunities for equal access like other groups so I just want to leave you with people being intersectional beings so as I said I'm intersectional um I identify as a woman of Filipino descent um I am also neurodiverse I have ADHD um and I've lived in particular places that inform the way that I am so um anyway hopefully this is helpful like I said this conversation's not over and if you want to talk about a little bit more I'm happy uh to talk with you but hopefully this provides some additional lenses and other things for you to consider that maybe you haven't considered before so thank you for coming to my TED talk karaoke later hi everybody oh yeah and stay in touch find me on uh mass done art or twitter or x or whatever it's called and then there's my linkedin as well as my email okay I'm really done now thank you I think we can go to break now by the way f.i. or session