 I should warn that there are a couple of short videos in this with some squeaking noises if that is a problem. I'll let you know. And also another warning is that there's graphs. So. OK. So my name is Sing Wei. On Twitter, I go by so many Hs. And usually when one gives talks at conferences, people give, like, short bio. And I've never been very good about this. So instead, I'm going to tell you a few short stories. When I was in second grade, I had a run-in with another kid in my class who decided it'd be endlessly entertaining to follow me around and pick on me for my racial background. I went to public school on the East Coast in Maryland. And while it was still a predominantly Caucasian community, I was lucky enough that there was a robust Asian-American community as well. So I never thought of myself as being some kind of rare unicorn where I grew up. There was actually a fair amount of diversity. And by all accounts, I was a pretty well-adjusted elementary schooler, had friends, fit in in school, or at least I thought so. So the fact that this other kid in my class suddenly started to pick on me for this thing that allegedly made me different was jarring. And at first, I ignored it. After all, like any seven-year-old, I just wanted to fit in. And I didn't want to give my personal tormentor any more power by reacting to his taunting. But he kept following me around, insidiously whispering nonsense syllables that were meant to be Chinese whenever he could. It got under my skin. And I tried to tell myself it didn't mean anything, but it did. Finally, one day while I was waiting to go into line for our social studies class, the would-be bully once again picked on me and I snapped. Back then, we used to carry around our pencils and things in these big plastic pencil boxes. So I took my hot pink pencil box and with my mighty seven-year-old strength, I whacked the fender across the head with it and then promptly ran off to cry in the bathroom. A little later, I was called into the principal's office and I was convinced I was in big, big trouble. But fortunately, and much to my surprise, the principal made the other kid apologize to me. So fast forward a few decades and I'm living in Beijing, China. I had gone there in hopes of improving my Chinese and finding my roots, which was a pretty common theme among my Asian-American friends. I had been living there for a few years and felt pretty good about where my Chinese was and was planning on going back to the US pretty soon. A good friend of mine, a Beijinger, invited me over for a goodbye dinner with her family. We were chatting and having a good time, reminiscing over the memories of the past few years when my friend's father turned to me and said, why are you leaving China so soon when your Chinese still isn't very good? Her mom chimed in and was like, yeah, you still can't speak Chinese properly, so how can you possibly understand what it means to be Chinese? So my friend's parents weren't trying to be jerks. In many ways, this was a classic example of how Beijingers insult you to show they actually like you. But to me, it struck a nerve. It was especially demoralizing, given that many of my Caucasian expat friends would be made much over just for being able to say a few words in Mandarin, whereas I could have an entire conversation with a local and then be told I ought to be ashamed that my Chinese wasn't fluent. It felt just as cruel as the kid who had bullied me in second grade, and while I didn't whack my friend's parents over the head with anything, I still felt pretty crappy. Now, my point with bringing up these two stories is not to highlight perhaps the most obvious problems, the ones that we tend to hear about most in the context of social justice issues. I imagine that if you're here at this conference, you don't need to be told how to recognize things like racism and the like. My point with bringing up these stories is to talk about something a lot more subtle, about the phenomenon of being caught in the middle. I wanna talk about the fuzzy, ambiguous, gray area of feelings that are the result of things not really falling into any one category and that are just as powerful in creating feelings of ostracization and alienation that occur around us every day in our workplaces, our conferences, and in our social groups. So how many of you have dealt with some kind of crappy behavior in the tech world? This could be sexist comments, racist comments, homophobic, a lot of hands, right? And how many of you were kind of not surprised by it? I mean, we're usually kind of shocked when it happens to us initially, but in the aftermath, how many of you have said to yourself, well, this is just the standard for the industry, or convince yourself that this kind of thing was normal? So I did a little informal research to collect some data about how often this sort of thing happens. And the survey I used was intentionally open-ended and allowed people to describe their experiences in their own words. For starters, the overwhelming majority of responders were women who had experienced some kind of sexist behavior. And you might be thinking, well, that's not so surprising. You didn't need to conduct your own survey to get information on that. And it's true. I've read, and I'm guessing many of you have also read dozens of articles, case studies, graduate theses written by people with advanced degrees and gender studies and so forth. And everyone agrees that women tend to have a way harder time in tech than men do. But even as a relative newcomer to tech, the stories I have heard are oftentimes not so easily categorizable. Let me clarify. It is superficially easy to talk to a given sample size of women and jump to the conclusion that being a woman means you'll have a bad time, or even that it's normal for women to have a bad time. And this is due in large part to the amazing and terrible ability humans have to generalize. Laura Schultz, a cognitive science researcher at MIT, gave a talk at this year's TED conference about people's ability to infer things from a very small sample size. She quotes Mark Twain saying, there's something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. She describes an experiment in which a baby is presented with a box full of colored toys, yellow and blue. A researcher draws three blue toys from a box in succession, full of mostly blue toys and squeaks them, and then draws a yellow toy from the box and hands it to the baby. You can see what the baby does here. Wow. We can go ahead and play. As you can see, the babies involved in the study overwhelmingly assumed that the yellow toy also could squeak based on the fact that the other toys that she had seen, from which, to their perception, seemed like a plausibly random sample, since blue toys make up the majority of the box, also squeaks. A different group was shown exactly the same situation, except this time, the box is conspicuously full of mostly yellow toys. When the three blue toys are drawn successfully from the box of mostly yellow toys, the children were much less likely to assume that the yellow toy that they were then handed also squeaked, because in this situation, drawing three blue toys in a row did not seem plausibly random. Here again is the baby's reaction. See this toy? Oh, see? Now this one's for you to play. You can go ahead and play, baby. Three blue toys seem to be a plausibly random sampling of the box. The babies were far more likely to assume that the yellow toy was just like all the others, whereas in the case where drawing the three blue toys seemed like a selected sampling, the babies did not assume that the yellow toys could speak. Squeak, not speak. That would be really weird. However, when only one blue toy was drawn from a box of mostly yellow toys, as in the second case, and the child was handed the yellow toy, the assumption here is that any toy randomly sampled from the box would squeak, unless the child in the vast majority of cases also assumed that the yellow toy squeaked. So the study then went on to talk about causal reasoning. A second experiment had two researchers attempt to make another toy play music by pressing a button. In one case, the first researcher tries to make the toy work twice and succeeds both times, whereas the other researcher tries twice and fails both times. Presented with this piece of evidence, babies who were then given a toy that didn't work would turn to their mothers to make the toy work, even though another functional toy had been placed within their reach. In other words, they had the option of either switching out the faulty toy or getting help from someone else. And in the majority of these cases, they assumed that they were doing something wrong rather than the toy was broken. Conversely, when the situation presented to the baby was that the two researchers each failed once and succeeded once in any order, the baby would be much, much more likely to reach for the other toy rather than turn to their mothers. That is, here they would assume that it was something wrong with the toy and not with themselves. And in both cases, it only took a tiny piece of statistical evidence to decide between two fundamentally different strategies for acting in the world. Here's a graphical summary of the children's causal reasoning. On the left, again, is the case where success and failure were suggested to be aligned with the agent, and as a result, the children asked for help. Whereas in the second case, it shows more children reaching for a different toy when success and failure seemed arbitrary for the same agent. Translating this to what happens to us, the reason we are shocked when we are treated differently from our peers is because most of us believe that for the most part, we are like our peers and that we are part of the community that we find ourselves in. As far as we can tell, our experience is a plausibly random sampling of how those around us must experience things. And because we assume this, when something goes wrong, something happens that makes us feel ostracized, in lack of any other evidence, we assume that the problem lies with us. I've dealt with this. You've dealt with this. We've all had that moment of self-doubting alienation where we felt like we must be the only imposter in the room. But then, if you're lucky, you meet others like you. As I was entering the tech industry, I was lucky enough as a member of Aida Developers Academy to have an entire group of women to compare notes with. Conferences are another great place where people can broaden their social circles and find others who have had similar experiences. And it can be empowering or even a relief just to be able to say, thank goodness it wasn't just me. And that's a big reason why conferences and meetups and the like are an important part of being in any industry because they build networks and create bonds. But there's something else I was noticing. While I felt lucky to have a community of other women from the get-go, I also started to notice that we almost always ended up talking about the negative things that had happened to us at meetups and at conferences and work. There would inevitably be some point in the conversation where the topic would turn to why it sucks to be a woman in tech. It was like every meetup or conference would be failing some like twisted version of the Bechdel test, where instead of being able to talk about the cool things we were doing and learning, we had to talk about that one asshole guy we all had to deal with. The other thing was, it became clear that even though these groups were usually all women, not everyone could always relate to everyone else in that there was a tendency to clump everyone's experiences under the same umbrella. I mentioned earlier that it was easy to categorize things, but it isn't actually easy, and Stephanie had a much more powerful testament to this yesterday in her talk. Much like I never expected my peers in second grade or my friends in China to make me feel like an outsider, many people who shared stories about their experiences in tech described how the people who made them feel alienated were not who they expected them to be, oftentimes because they assumed they were their friends or allies. At best, it was a simple confusion of empathy with sympathy. While empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection. Brené Brown, the author of Daring Greatly, describes it really well here. And to me, I always think of empathy as this kind of sacred space when someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck, it's dark, I'm overwhelmed. And then we look and we say, hey, I'm down, I know what it's like down here and you're not alone. Sympathy is, ooh, it's bad, uh-huh. Uh, no, you want a sandwich? Um, empathy is a choice and it's a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. Rarely, if ever, does an empathic response begin with at least. I had a, yeah. And we do it all the time because you know what? Someone just shared something with us that's incredibly painful and we're trying to silver lining it. I don't think that's a verb but I'm using it as one. We're trying to put the silver lining around it so I had a miscarriage. Oh, at least you know you can get pregnant. I think my marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage. John's getting kicked out of school. At least Sarah is an A student. At worse, it seemed like individuals trying to find a common bond and connect with others in their community would have their experiences derailed or dismissed. For example, last year I was having a pretty tough time in my internship for various reasons, not the least of which was the fact that my internship company had very few women. I spoke about some of these experiences with a colleague at a conference but afterward, another female software engineer suggested that I didn't really have that many problems because I didn't present as feminine. Which, to be fair, is a problem I had since childhood as my older sister notes here in this photo of us from when we were young. But regardless, this is someone I looked up to in many ways and while I absolutely recognize that there are some women who experience things that I don't and actually agree with the point that she was trying to make. For me, there was immediate sense of disconnect because my experiences seemed to have been invalidated and I was being judged based on superficial assumptions. The problem is that it's easy to take a one-dimensional view of privilege even though in reality, again, as Stephanie mentioned in her talk yesterday, people experience privilege on multiple axes. And because of this, disconnection can occur when the interplay of those multiple facets of an individual are lumped together in an overly broad category. So far, I mostly use gender as my primary example and will continue to do so later in the talk but this can apply to other categories as well. Situations like these, as trivial as they may seem, can add up quickly and make it easy to want to doubt yourself. To doubt your place in the tech community and lead to a sense of disconnection. For many, it forces them out of the industry entirely. When these people are asked about why they left the tech industry, they usually can't pinpoint any single incident that spurred them to leave but attribute their departure rather to the accumulation of many small moments of friction. These are the moments in which you once again find yourself feeling, well, maybe I'm the only one who feels this way but now it's compounded with a sense of guilt, the sense of, well, should I feel this way? And we become paralyzed or as we heard in Jacob's talk yesterday, become convinced it's better to just quit. The famous soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet in which Hamlet is questioning whether it's worth it to do something about his shitty situation, seems pretty applicable in our modern world. In the play, Hamlet's waffling between passively dealing with the situation or suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing end them. He questions this because action was risky, like really risky because everyone in the play ends up dying, spoil alert. And so he's paralyzed, he spends four out of five acts in the play not doing anything. Everywhere he turns, he realizes he can't fully trust the people he thought he could. So what can we do when we find ourselves feeling paralyzed and stretched thin mentally and emotionally? Because the risks of speaking up as a marginalized person in tech are not insignificant and the evidence is sobering. Of the people who responded to my survey, those who spoke up about an unjust or bad situation usually didn't fare well. Everything from being overlooked or not being taken seriously by their peers and bosses to being doxxed and fired from their jobs. There are some who will speak up and there are many admirable people in the field who do so. Some of these people, people like Ash Dryden, Anita Sarkeesian, Shanley Kane, and Ida Levine-Bobey are the activists, the spearheaders for worthy causes and as a result they have been harassed, doxxed, arrested and received death threats and have been forced from online spaces and even their homes. These are people you hear about who do things that are incredibly inspiring while at the same time provoke consequences that are incredibly demoralizing. And here's where it gets complicated because while many of us align our values with people like Anita Sarkeesian or can sympathize with Kathy Sierra, not everyone is or can be an activist. For most of us it's a matter of the mundane bullshit we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis that exacts an emotional tax. And these small taxes levied and paid in a multitude of seemingly inconsequential ways add up to the point that for many of us it's all we can do to keep ourselves afloat. And you know what, that's okay. Because the truth is it's already really hard to do our jobs and manage our lives without feeling guilty about not speaking on behalf of the entire corpus of your minority group, especially so if you're introverted like many of us tend to be. So it becomes important to figure out survival skills in a world that seems to demand that we have an enormous bandwidth for feelings. But feelings are and should be treated as a finite resource. And this means we have to recognize when situations demand those resources from us and decide whether or not it would be wise to make an investment. And also when we may be demanding those resources from others. Because again, sometimes the most tacting situations come from places where we think we're safe or from people who we considered friends. Something I noticed in preparing for this talk is that many women who speak about the issue of women in tech tend to preemptively take the defensive. The Guardian published an article on Sheryl Sandberg, author of the book Lean In, in which she gives tips on how to succeed as a woman in tech. The article notes that Sandberg's approach to the issue as a whole is emollient, carefully inoffensive. She is always first to jump in with what she isn't saying, always first to articulate what might be a criticism against her. I know that some believe that by focusing on what women can do to change themselves, pressing them to lean in, it seems like I am letting our institutions off the hook. Or even worse, they accuse me of blaming the victim. In a different article written as a response to the Lean In philosophy, the author states her position on a known issue in tech and then immediately admits to being afraid to do so. She says, the idea that tech has a pipeline problem, one that can be solved by teaching five-year-old girls to code, infuriates me. It's awkward to say so. I need to try carefully here lest I be accused of bad feminism. I can see the headline now, lady boss against STEM education for girls also secretly hates puppies. As a final example, there was a panel at a Salesforce conference recently that featured YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki. Rather than being asked about her many accomplishments in the industry, the host, Gail King, asked Wojcicki about her family life and whether all her children were by the same father. Lauren Hawkinson writes, is alienating in no uncertain terms to have to sit through a panel designed to be about women in technology instead have it derailed by the seemingly interminable myth that when we wanna talk about being a woman in tech, what we're saying, what we're really saying is that we wanna talk about being wives and mothers with day jobs in the technology industry. All this to say that there is this enormous expenditure of emotional energy, sometimes to preemptively counter phantom forces that makes expressing any kind of opinion seem like an enormous investment. The good news is as we talk more about these issues, awareness of the burden involved reduces it for those who come after us. I spoke to Sarah May, a long-term Rubyist and founder of Railsbridge, who said that she noticed that the current zeitgeist of social justice in the Ruby community at least began around six or seven years ago. And since then, there have already been enormous strides. While we are far from being perfect, I'd like to think of the current trend as following a sort of Moore's law with awareness doubling every 18 months. But the tech industry is really like this. All girls are like onions. They stink? No. Oh, they make you cry? No. Oh, you leave them out in the sun, they get all brown, start sprouting little white hairs. No. Layers. So the tech community is like onions and ogres. They may be stink, it maybe makes you cry, but it has layers. We each sit at some non-quantum layer within that community in which some people in however way you wish to define it have it better than you and some have it worse. We talk a lot about being empathetic to this latter group and that is a given and there has already been a lot of work that a lot has been said and done towards this by those who are far more well-spoken than me. Some of them are even at this conference. But equally important is to make sure you don't invalidate the feelings of those in the former group because again, these layers are non-discreet. The goal is to make space for those around you and equally importantly, to remember to make space for yourself because in the micro economy of feelings, bi-directional empathy is essential for the end goal which is for those at every single layer that makes up this onion of a community to survive and be a healthy part of the whole. Thank you.