 That was not the purpose of the research. In fact, I avoided it like the plague, because I knew that once I go down that rabbit hole, there is no way out. This is such a big thing that you can't not talk about this. It turned out that I couldn't run away from it. So as soon as I started to look at communities, as soon as I started to look at teams working together, as soon as I decided to study communication, gender and technology became inexplicably intertwined. And my third motivation is that when I was here this morning and I looked at the list of talks, it seemed that there should be a conversation happening about this at something like BarCamp. So since no one else put up a topic, I figured, OK, let's talk about this now. So that's why this is a conversation. This isn't a talk, because a talk would imply that I have answers for you about how to bring women into technology. I don't have those answers. It's also a half hour talk. So it's probably not going to happen that we will welcome, that we will find answers today. But I want to have this conversation anyway. I think it's important to continue to have this conversation. I think it's important to continue to talk about this issue, just like it's important to continue to run Rails Girls every month, regardless of how many people come. Because if you reach one person, that's already better than something else. So instead of a talk, I have questions for you guys. That's how I would like to talk about this issue. So I have a few general questions. First of all, my first question is, well, is this really an issue? Why is this a big deal? Why do we care that we have Rails Girls every month? Why do we care that we don't have an agreement with the technology? Do we not have enough women in science fields, in engineering fields, in maths, doing programming? Is that really a problem? What do you guys think? How many, okay, so the women here, what do you, how many of you are engineers or software engineers? One. What are the rest of you doing? You also, no. I mean. I mean. I mean. Science deals everything. So you're giving me a first issue, like they're really shy. Uh huh. We have our first stereotype. We have our first stereotype. We have our very shy. Okay, is that true? Well, you're not gonna get an answer, are you? If it's true. If it's true, that's true. So how do you talk about this issue is the second question. If this is an issue, how do you talk about this issue properly? So how do you talk about this issue without essentializing gender roles? And that's something I have a huge problem with, honestly, because whenever I look at research that does anything to do with gender roles that has anything to do with women and technology, we can't run away from pigeon-holing people into things. So one of my favorite pieces of research, and this is actually landmark research about Wikipedia, why women don't contribute to Wikipedia. There are very few women contributors to Wikipedia. I can share this link on the Facebook group that I'm interested in. Sorry? What was the first thing you said? It's something like, so there's 12% of women in open-source software communities. 12% of developers are women, which is much better than it used to be. It used to be single digits 10 years ago. So that's great. In Wikipedia, I think it's a little bit better. I think it's something like 20%. I need to double check that number. But so this research to me was really interesting because people were looking at, they did a massive survey. This was like tens of thousands of Wikipedia contributors. What do you value in Wikipedia? What do you contribute your time to? What are the things that prevent you from contributing? Why do you leave certain topics and start other topics? And so in this research, the researchers found that a lot of women were very shy about arguing their points. They were hard, they found it difficult to be able to articulate in an environment that was constantly critical. And so the conclusion that this research came to and the way that they framed the paper was that, hey, well, women tend to avoid conflict, they tend to avoid disagreements, they've been, and we should therefore create an environment that is very supportive and all of this. My problem with this research is that we start to use phrases like women are, so-and-so, insert blank here, right? And I think how we talk about the issue is really important because it frames what we do with the issue later on. So I want to ask you guys this question and for you guys to think about this question, like how do we talk about this issue in a way that doesn't essentialize the topic? How do you deal with this issue without making, without suggesting and designing already knowing in advance what it is that you're going to find? Those- I don't think of a whale problem. Sorry. I'm just kidding. Exactly. Precisely, right? If I tell you don't think of an elephant, that's what you're going to think about. Exactly. So that's absolutely right. So it's a chicken and egg situation, right? Like how do you solve this problem? I want to ask the men in this room, how many of you are doing something connected to the technical field? So engineering, software development, mathematics. All right, so that's why you're a bar camp. Okay, how many women are there on your team? My team lead is a lady, woman. There's one. My team lead, my manager, my team lead is woman. Also. She's the one that was leading me. Awesome. Yeah, we, yeah, she's the one. But she's the only one. We have a lot of lady staffs. That's awesome. She's a team lead. What kind of stuff do you guys do? Sorry? What kind of stuff do you guys do? What do you work on? Oh, we work back in development, and then we also mobile. Is your team unique in the organization, in that sense? Or is it normal to have women lead in the team? I think in our company, it's a concept to make sure we also get into the work, for example, they also get into the hierarchy That's great to hear. That's awesome. How, do you know when this started? Has this always been that way in your memory? The moments in the corporate. I think there's a lot of companies or corporates that have this sort of nature, because whenever they publish any statistic, they also tell how much person, oh my, in the company, how much person in higher ups. So they take this as an initiative, and also they do it. I thought, like, when I was very young, when it was software, you know, how I came into the software industry, so when you say software, the softness and the woman has some relationship. So I thought this was a little different, one day we lived by... Ah! As opposed to hardware? Actually, that is a perception in India. That is a perception in India. I do know of a mother who moved her daughter from hardware to software because of that thing. I was crushed to hear that. I know of a... That's really interesting. So in India it's like that, like softwares and leans. You should not say, like, women are women, right? They have their own features, and they are unique in their sense. So the software issue, I don't know why women are not ready to get into the software. Somehow they think it's so mathematical and stuff like that, but they have to really get the break and fill the code. Then you really... All right, so we have one story. What about the rest of the guys? What about five? You got five? Out of how many? 25? About 25. At least in my team. But then, my organization actively makes it a priority. So we've heard this twice already. So your organization makes this a priority. How do they do that? Well, in the German company, one of the things is, you know, in Germany, they have regulations about the number of CEOs which are women men. Okay. So it trickles down, yeah. So in Germany, they have to say that 40% of CEOs must be women and they make it regulation. And my company is not stock listed. It's a foundation, even though it's a very big company. So it's easy for us to adopt these things and put it down. So everywhere you go in a company, there's like silhouettes of men and women everywhere to actually put this out. And one of the hiring processes is to have this like, are you sure it's not women and women? All right. Interesting. That's what's here. But what happens if you don't have enough qualified candidates? Like women, yeah. So it could be a plus and minus point. In this case, you're saying, oh, just because they're women, you have to put it as a pick. It's not so much monotocracy, but you know, oh, because of quota reasons to take a person who may not be qualified. So that may not be such a good thing, right? So that's a minus point. We have seven engineers, one more particular class either way in our recruiting, very few applicants today. But I think it's so fitting. One of the things I've been hearing a lot from some of the companies here is, hey, do you know any female engineers? We really want to diversify our team, but we can't find any female engineers to hire. Do you know anyone? I'm often the person that people ask, which is great, I think. It's good that people sort of see me that way. But that tells me that there's another problem. So it's not enough. I think while it's great that we have a recognition that we need to fill these roles and that we need to create space for women to fill these roles, but we also need to create an environment where women can grow to eventually fill these roles. So it seems that we need to dig even deeper than that, right? Those of you who are not engineers, who are women, what do you do? And how did you find out about Barkham? For myself, I also am interested in technology. Although I work in a broadcast technology company, I handle partnerships and marketing. But my interest in technology personally just, it allows me to be able to do events like this and be involved with the public community as well. I personally, I just see more women in my company getting into put up management than technical aspects of presenting their product. So I think it's an emerging trend in the UK, especially. Not sure about Singapore yet, but I think that this is the first part of your presentation. That's okay. It's not a presentation, it's a conversation. You can jump in at any time. It's an ongoing conversation. Like I said, what I said at the beginning was that we're not likely to find any answers today because it takes, I think it takes a whole planet to sit down and really figure this out properly. But it's important to have this conversation. So that's why I'm here and that's hopefully why you all are here in order to continue to have this conversation. Thank you for sharing with us. Does anyone else want to tell us? I'm Adrienne Finance. I work for a profit economy regulator and I help us, Michael, no. And I help us build up partnerships in emerging markets like Myanmar and Nepal. So I do new market development and I do partnerships with the government regulators and private sector firms. But like in our industry, we also look at, you know, how many women get in and like recently we did a study on like how, you know, for like corporate work positions, it's becoming a thing as well like what he said. Some countries are thinking about whether we should have a 30% corporate work positions for women and whether we should regulate that or we should just let that happen organically. We did a study where, you know, interestingly, most of the people who seem to have made it into corporate work positions, they seem to have had some sort of like a finance role. And one of the reasonings behind why people attributed that, like when we did the research, et cetera, was that we, you know, they considered that when you go into things like finance, technology, engineering, these are not like traditional women roles, like how marketing could be seen. And they sort of attributed that, oh, these women are like good in math, they're good in finance, therefore. What position? There is a higher number of women in work positions who hold a finance qualification than men who hold one. It's about like one and two kind of thing, yeah. There are certain professions that are very, that are quite significantly women dominated. And that's also a problem like nursing, right? Yeah. Like, yes, teaching is another one. The nursing, I think, is something like 90% women, at least in Singapore. Well, if you look at the statistics, it's quite, it's very skewed in the opposite direction. There's associated gender, stereotype to gender biases gains that. So, you know, there's really no reason why. It should be one or the other. But, you know, that's really interesting. Let's see, we have two more ladies. I promise, I will also tell you a little bit about it. I'm working as a lecturer at Neon Poly right now. Awesome. Educator, yes. Yeah, well, I'm from the Silicon Valley, so I just grew up around tech. I graduated last year with a degree in media studies and music, but took some CS classes on the side. I've always been interested in that, you know, tech, and so that's my point. Why didn't you choose that to study? Difficult question. Yeah. Well, I think I, well, I took CS classes like the second semester when you were here, and so by then I would have had to graduate. Graduate, okay. So, yeah. Okay. Were you interested though? What? Were you having thought about pursuing that as well? Yeah, I'm actually, we're hoping to do a tech-related graduate degree. Awesome. So, to be fair to all of you guys who shared some of your stories, let me tell you mine. So, I have a communications background. I don't have a technical background. I do have a bit of a programming background from learning things on the internet. I was initially going to study computer science, and I was very young, and I had a few choices, and I went to a computer science course in a foundational year, and my computer science lecture was like, hey, that's great. You know, you've got really good grades, but you know, you may want to think about later on, you know, what happens when you've gone to the working role of King, so you finish this computer science degree, but maybe hard for you to find a job. Maybe you want to consider doing something else and doing this on the science. That's exactly what I did. I actually had this conversation with a lecture, and when your teacher tells you this, maybe you shouldn't do this, maybe you should really think hard about doing something else. That really kind of sticks with you. You know, it's really hard to tell yourself, and you know what? I'm just curious, why do you think he said that? Is it maybe because of your general? To this day, I don't know. I wish I could track him down and ask him. He was saying that it would be hard for me to find a job. Not that he didn't think I could do it, but he said that it would be hard for me to find a technical position later on anyway. So it makes more sense to do a non-technical degree and add on technical skills on the side, because I'm not gonna get into a technical role anyway, is what he said. So he's like, look, this is what the job market is like now. You should know this before you start the degree. This is what he said. This was, to be fair, this was like 10 years ago. Right? But this is not a unique conversation. So throughout my research, when I started to dig deeper into this issue and I started to talk to more people, stories like this keep coming up again and again. So there are parents. There are teachers. There are people around us who often pigeonhole us into certain ideas of what we're in and shouldn't be studying software versus hardware, arts versus social science. The kind of kids you have on posters that are representing the different courses when you choose different... Because I prefer someone to be this kind of kid. Ha ha ha ha. Aha. You know. Okay. Yes. Your research is only for samples of Singapore? So the research didn't initially have a gender component and it was not just a sample of Singapore, but Singapore is sort of the launching pad. And it's based on working people, people endpoint or... It's based on people who contribute code to open source software. So it's only open source? So I speak to open source software. Okay. Yes. So I didn't catch your research topic earlier. So my research topic is remotely connected to this issue. I'm interested in conflicts in open source software development teams or communication breakdowns in open source software development teams. And how I came to this issue was when I started to look more closely at communications issues. And gender is something that comes up a lot as a sort of a focal point in a lot of open source software communities. So I've seen this issue come up again and again in my research. And so that was one of the motivations for... So your PhD research is not from computer science, but more on... Social science. Social science. That's right. Sorry. Yeah, one thing that I had to say is, okay, my team is very small. My team only got me and another person. That's two percent, but we are both male. Okay. I don't have any other female developers. But before the gender issue, I find that the nationality issue is a big issue. What do you mean? Like, for me, it's very hard to hire Singaporeans. Okay. Yeah, whatever that... I mean, all the other people have said, right, okay, don't apply to women. I think don't apply even stronger to Singaporeans. Because I also teach tuition at the same time. So my students are telling me, right, okay, their parents actually advise them studying computer science because they think that it's an easily replaceable labour force. Okay. So I don't find the gender issue that big of an issue. But I find race, nationality, a big issue. But the way that I try to see things right is that I do not try to set a quota for Singaporeans or Vietnamese or whatever. I try to diversify the thing. So I will try to identify the character traits I need, right, to make the whole thing more robust in their thinking. Yeah, I will actually just set out to look for that person. But nonetheless, when it comes to interviewing Singaporeans, it's always very difficult. Here's the thing, you're basing on, you're saying technology and you're using GitHub. GitHub is programming. But technology could be, may not be programming it. Like for example, in my building, it could be hardware. WSR, ISY, tons of females. But programming, right, in Singapore is very little. So, and the thing is, if you take sample size Singapore, programmers, I don't want to case up anyone or make a serial size, but it's tend to be Indians. And, like, I'm an Indian, I'm not from India, but... Our team is entirely Indian and Filipino. Sorry? Their team is entirely Indian and Filipino, every single one. One Singaporean. That's an interesting one. But the thing is here, even if you have a female developer, they tend to be here not on their own, but with the husband. And the husband moves, they move. If the husband does a thing like that, they follow. So, I don't know, maybe that is there, but maybe Github is not really a good indicator of that, that's what I'm saying, you know? No, wait, programmers in general, yeah. I mean, it really depends on who you're sampling. So, definitely, there may be components where there are more women. And I think it's interesting to identify things like this. I think it's interesting that there are more, you know, in your observation, more women Indian programmers rather than from anywhere else. That tells me that there's a promising positive stereotype there. It tells me that there is some kind of social reinforcement that doesn't happen somewhere else. That tells me that there's something to look at. So, we have like five more minutes, I think, before we break and go to the lightning talks. I promised you questions, not answers. My third question was going to be, what do we do about this, right? So, is it a problem? How do we talk about it? How do we solve it? Where do we start? Actually, a lot of these people don't even know this kind of things like this. Can you narrow it or actually specify which exact field you're talking about in a science or a multi-ethnic science program? I think these guys bring up an interesting point. It's like, you say, if you set a legit heart, then you get a very specific type of code that somebody does and should be able to solve the problem. And from my background, that's what I see. I will kind of research that, by the way. And people who are doing science, you see like, maybe like dark school females, who are looking in the more engineering fields, they're more like, so there is that general bias there. So, and I don't think it's true that you can't get good female coders, mathematicians, because we have so many really good students. And in fact, like 70% of all students. I should hope that that is not true. Yeah, it's not true. Because we see like, 60, 70% of the best better students effect from the secondary school time, their academia on female. And why don't they carry on to go on and do science tests, which then I think, why? That's the question. So, I think we've identified an intervention point. Yeah, so by asking the question, where are these roles going? So, if they're not choosing these roles, why not? What else are they doing? What are those things that are causing them to choose this? How do we intervene in that process? There we go. We have one possible action item. Some of you guys spoke to some juniors, I know, at Tech Fest. What happened? So, you were just telling me. Stop the silence. What happened there? You say it. I think that's something I strongly believe, before you get to the university level, that's where you have to fix the ratio. Because once they're out there, I mean, the majority of the pool of women and juniors and scientists will come from the universities. Of course, you can later on become one as well. So, I think Tech Fest is a great initiative to kind of bring their gender balance there before. And I believe that the conversation has to happen from now. It is the toys you play with. It is the parents' perception, the society's perception. Yeah. It has to come from the young, and we have to give it to a generation. Yeah, so clearly what I'm gonna solve is probably the next three minutes. Oh. It's a particular talk. To build on that, I'm gonna give you guys one last sort of takeaway story. And this happened literally two weeks ago. I was in McDonald's, I was getting my cup of coffee, and dad and little daughter are next to me at the other counter. And the lady behind the counter is letting the girl choose her Happy Meal toy. So, you know how Happy Meal works, right? There is the Happy Meal toy that everyone queues up for. Yes. Excellent. Well done. All right, Happy Meal story, and then Audrey. All right, so you know how Happy Meals work, right? There's the main toy that everyone queues up for. Usually it's a Hello Kitty, but there's also a boy version of the Happy Meal and the girl version of the Happy Meal. So there's, right? And so the lady takes out both toys and she waves them in front of the little girl, the little girl standing there quietly looking up at her and really shyly she goes, so which one do you want? And before the girl can answer, she goes, I know you want this one, and it's the toy. The toy, not the car. It's the girl, it's the girl toy, it's not the car. The pink color thing, the fluffy thing, not the Lego set, not the car. That's actually the drink in the business space. This is exactly what I'm talking about. So we need to even start on that level. So what is my takeaway for you guys before I, like, Lakshen? I want to introduce. Oh, that's amazing. So Audrey, welcome. My takeaway for you guys is only this. I want to have this conversation. You should have this conversation with other people as well. It's not an easy conversation to have. It's not an easy topic to frame without running into a lot of stereotypes, without running into a lot of problems, but it's an important conversation to have, and it's important to continue to think about this issue. I think as long as, even if we all think about some of these problems, and if we stop and question some of these stereotypes, that's really better than not doing anything at all. For both men and women, because there are situations in which the reverse is also true, like we said, you know, for nursing. This is a problem that's not just a problem for women. The problem with gender stereotypes is a problem that affects both genders. So my encouragement to everyone here today is just to think about this a little bit more. So the reason Lakshen brought Audrey in here, Audrey, you're gonna be like everyone's zoo animal for the rest of the day. What happened? This is a conversation about women in technology. And we are trying to, we're not trying to answer the question because we can't answer this question in a half hour, but we are asking the question, where are the women in technology and why aren't they, why aren't they more visible? Why aren't they choosing these career paths and why aren't they learning how to program? Do you wanna tell us a story? Yeah, can you share from here? Yeah, I just joined a tech company as an apprentice at a tech company. Thank you Audrey. Tell us how much programming experience you have. No, I thought that it's really seriously in May. That was on the ground before coming to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trained as a lawyer. So I studied law in SMU and then I went through the usual lawyer rule that I got called to for, and I practiced for about a year. I actually took a break to try and do my own startup, and I realized that as I was working on it, I found that I couldn't do a lot of things because I had to rely on my technical developer and I didn't like to, I mean, I found that things were moving really slow because I had to rely on him and it was just a lot of trouble for me to get someone to build my product for me. So I found myself handicapped technically and I didn't like the feeling. So I decided that I would actually go back to law. So I did go back to practice and I wanted to learn programming on the side because I wasn't really sure if I could program and I wasn't sure I would like programming. So I wanted to give myself some options, you know, consider going back to, I mean, practice again and just see if I like programming. So when I was practicing, I did that part-time after work, every day and on weekends. That was around May to now. And I picked up Go as my backend language in July. And back then, I wasn't sure what Go was about, what backend program is about, I don't even know what SQL was. I didn't know how to store data at the database. So I read this July, by the way. This July. Two months ago. This is two months ago. So prior to May, I didn't have any technical background at all. I didn't have any technical training in school. I did law. I came from an arts background, actually, in JC. Yeah, and so I actually went to Rails Girls in June, and I met Lakshan there. And I was playing with a bit of front-end programming, and I was like, I still don't get what programming is about. So let's just learn a backend programming language, and I asked Lakshan, so should I learn Node.js? Because I did JavaScript, and it's like, okay, let's just learn Node. And Lakshan was like, why didn't you learn Go? It has an easy learning curve. It's like, go easy on yourself. So I got like, you know, I got tracked by the promise of easy, you know, I guess one. You got things like this. Yeah, I really like Lakshan. I wanted to make it extra hard. It's in the real side of the book. Yeah, I know. That was cruel, Lakshan. Law is similar, but if then, it's like that's law. Logical. So actually, before I considered Node and before I considered... I mean, I did build code academy stuff, right? So I went through the Ruby cause, I went through the Python cause, and I was looking for tutorials online on how to build something in Ruby or Python, and I found that the frameworks didn't really teach me anything, and the tutorials didn't teach me anything because they just told me what to do, but I still didn't know the underlying concepts. Also my experience with Go was that, I mean it was very hard in Ruby then because I wasn't used to the syntax, you know, like, it looked really ugly and it looked like it had a lot of extra stuff compared to Ruby and Python. So every time I went back to Go, I had an effect on my head. What is Lakshan saying? But I just kept on, maybe... Then like, her friends came to me and like, Why the hell you suggested like, to learn from Go? No, she's struggling. Yeah, my mutual friends, so I just, you know, complained a bit, you know, like, this Go is crazy man. But she kept on telling me to learn from you on Go. But I mean, personally, I somehow didn't really like, you know, learning it, instead of learning. So, yeah, that's my story. And I left my local recently to join a tech company as an apprentice so that I can learn how to ask to an apprentice developer. So you built the way you built the app. Apprentice developer. Yes. So that's Audrey's story and that's... I think that's awesome. Thanks Lakshan for bringing her in here. So apparently we're studying light and talks outside right now. So think about this. Talk to each other about this. Whenever you meet a girl, tell her about Audrey. If you meet a girl who is thinking about getting into programming, tell her about Audrey. The first program that was done by a girl. Exactly, the first years for women. Thank you.