 As Eric said, he gave me a really great introduction. I'm Kinsey Endurum. I'm from Denver, Colorado. Joanne had a lot of awesome pictures of the mountains. It's that beautiful in person, so you should come and visit us. I'm a software engineer at Ghost Spot Check, which is an awesome startup in Denver. We're always hiring. And a couple years ago, I was giving a talk at different Ruby conferences, one in which I actually met Eric at, and talked about breaking down the barriers to entry and getting more people of diverse backgrounds into tech. But there's a much bigger issue. We've heard about this in two other talks and in the code documentary. If you had the pleasure of seeing that last night, how many people went to that? So most of the people in the room, cool. So to quickly reiterate, 56% of women end up leaving the tech industry, compared to the 17% of men. And out of those 56% of women, 97% of them are never coming back. So it's awesome. We have some awesome organizations that are working really hard to get more women and minorities into tech. Here's some of them. I learned about a couple more in the documentary last night that I haven't had time to put in here. But compared to the organizations that are working on keeping women in the industry, very few. So during my research, I decided to screenshot articles about women leaving the tech industry. Three years ago, when I was first getting introduced to programming and the tech industry, I would have been so discouraged after reading these. In the documentary yesterday, one of the women in the video talked about how she feels guilty about encouraging women to get into tech. Because sometimes it's not the best place to be. So yesterday, Leslie mentioned the issue of the leaky pipe. And I'm using the same analogy, but calling it a leaky bucket, mostly because that's the only images I could find on Google. But we are putting so much effort into getting more women into our field, which is great, but we have this problem of the leaky bucket. Over half of the women that successfully break the barriers to entry, end up leaving. So I was curious, why? Why are women packing their bags and leaving? So I did a bunch of research, both online, and I also got to interview some really awesome ladies in the Ruby community to understand why. So now I will dive into the reasons that I found through all my research. And I refer to them as trends. So the first trend that I found is a lack of flexibility. Lack of progressive maternity leave policies, but it's better here. Germany gets 14 weeks of paid maternity leave, so I realize it's a lot better than the US. We have very bad policies, but I think it's important to mention, because ultimately that isn't the reason why women are leaving. Many women cited inflexible work schedules as the reason they left. The tech industry, especially startups in the tech industry, are notorious for maintaining crazy work hours. Obviously this affects both genders. But familial responsibilities usually fall on women. We are stuck in our gender specific roles even to this day. Men more often than not don't have the same issue of choosing between a family and a career in tech, or choosing between a family and a career in tech. And if they choose family, it's really hard to come back, especially in tech, because things are moving so fast. By the time they came back, there would be 10 new JavaScript frameworks that they would have to learn. So women are still getting more maternity paid leave than fathers do. A lot of our, my company one time told me, oh, we have really progressive maternity leave policies. And I asked what it was. They said three months paid. And I was like, that's awesome for the US. When I asked how many weeks fathers get, they said two. And I don't think those are very progressive, because we're still reinforcing these gender stereotypes. So flexible scheduling is essential for retaining women who often face unique work life challenges. The second trend that I found was biased evaluations. They just kept asking me to prove myself over and over again. Like now, when people ask me what I'm talking about at conferences, a lot of times I feel embarrassed to say, oh, keeping women in tech, because I feel like I should be giving a technical talk. But these are the ones that I'm passionate about. And it doesn't make me, it shouldn't make me feel like less of an engineer, but I feel that way sometimes. 72% of women sense some sort of bias. A study of performance reviews in Fortune magazine from 28 companies all over the world, this wasn't just the US, with 248 reviews found that nearly 88% of women received critical feedback versus 59% of men. The word abrasive appeared on women's reviews frequently while the word was totally absent from men's reviews. Bossy is another word that commonly refers negatively to women who are powerful and assertive. There are a lot of themes in women reviews that were also centered around being quiet. You don't let other people shine as much as you should. You should be less judgmental about so-and-so's contributions, et cetera. The third trend that I found were less technical roles. We have a lot of awesome junior developers, female junior developers entering the scene. A lot of these women have previous careers in other industries and have other things that they're good at. So they ultimately get pulled into non-technical roles. This makes sense because a lot of small companies, employees have to wear many hats. So personally, I experienced this. I was working at a startup in Denver and I was told that I would get to write code and do all this awesome tech stuff and ultimately I got pulled into doing other jobs. And I had to make a decision, leave this very high awesome paying job or quit without a job writing code. So ultimately I chose to quit the high paying job and write code and I'm really glad that I did. It was honestly the best decision I had ever made. So I've talked with a lot of other women who are struggling with the same issue. It isn't just me. Mid-level developers are getting pulled into more management positions and eventually stop writing code. Men also experience this issue. The fourth trend that I found was a sense of isolation. This was a big one. I got to talk with Sandy Metz for a little while about this and she said that feelings of not belonging in a homogenous group is one of the main reasons why women leave. Basically you feel like a fraud, a novelty, and that you don't deserve a seat at the table. We saw a lot of this in the documentary last night. Eventually you get tired of being the odd duck. Eileen, who is an awesome engineer at base camp, said she wouldn't feel alone if more women gave technical talks. We've seen a lot of awesome talks by women at this conference and I think that's pretty rare. Also only 1% of open source contributors are women. Pamela Vickers, who is an awesome Ruby engineer in the community, felt like she should reach out to her manager to tell him how much she was struggling but she didn't want to feel like the odd person out. So yes, the simple discomfort of not fitting in a homogenous setting. Someone to talk to a lot of times would be really helpful. I feel this at times too. I'm the only female on an all-male engineering team. The fifth trend, which is something that we hear a lot of, are the little things. I'll let you read this quote, I don't want to read everything. There are a lot of things that piled up over the years, not knowing how to move forward with it. Things so small you never complain about them but they're happening day after day. And it makes you think, hey, is this the right career path for me? So in the documentary yesterday, the CTO of the United States, Megan Smith, stated that the main reason why women leave the tech industry are the death by 1,000 paper cuts. 1,000 tiny paper cuts that make up life as a woman in the industry. So Joanne Chang, our awesome keynote speaker, says that it gets exhausting to have to constantly explain that she's a senior developer. It's okay for the first few years, but after 10 years it's ridiculous. Kylie, who will be speaking in a few hours, says more often than not, people think I'm brand new or more junior than I am. She feels this way a lot at meetups. They usually are newer to the community, those who ask her this and seem to apologize and take it back when they find out that she works at Big Nerd Ranch. So what do all of these things have in common? All of these come down to company culture, a macho misogynist culture, programmer culture is something we hear a lot about in the tech industry, especially in startups, an old boys club, lack of support and microaggressions. Women are leaving tech because they're unhappy with their work environments. NPR did a big study on this and found that female engineers leave because of the environments they work in. Pamela said she dreaded going into work every day and she felt stupid. But at the same time, once she changed jobs and found a company where they had a better culture, it completely changed her way of thinking. So company culture was responsible for her feeling so miserable, but also for her feeling so great. So the CEO of Airbnb was asking Peter Thiel, who is our VC, what's the single most important piece of advice that he had? And his answer was don't fuck up the culture. The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. So company culture is really at the root cause of this problem. So what can we do about it? I've seen a lot of quotes like this from prominent community members and I really think that this isn't true. Also, I think that men are crucial for creating this environment. There are a lot of women in the tech industry fighting for gender equality but blatantly saying how much they hate men. We are not going to achieve equality this way. We are only gonna make it worse. Plus all of us are responsible for holding these stereotypes in our head. It's everyone's issue and we need to solve these problems together. So all of us need to have a culture where we acknowledge there is a problem. If we can't talk about it openly then we have no hope. We also recognize our biases. Sarah Allen also talked about this recently at Brighton RubyConf that if we think about our biases, recognize them, they will start to radiate into our daily actions. Google has been doing unconscious bias workshops for their employees. Research shows that simply raising awareness about unconscious bias can lead to more conscious decision-making. We have open casual conversations. Something that offends me might not necessarily offend you so we need to be able to discuss this. We have a culture where we sink and we swim where it's okay to make mistakes as long as we learn from them. We educate ourselves on these issues. We mentor and onboard. We make mentoring matter. We heard a really great talk yesterday about this as well. So I'm really impressed with what SoundCloud is doing. They're very invested in mentorship. They give employees 20% time each week to spend time doing this. They also have Rails Girls fellows in the office and do internships with them for three months which I think is really cool. We have flexible work schedules and equal maternity-paternity leave policies. Travis CI has 25 days of required paid time off and these are required and they're also vacation days. So six days, moving days, et cetera, don't count. I think this is awesome because it is really flexible and ensuring that people take the time off and breaks that they need for a healthy work-life balance. So develop a reputation for being a company that acknowledges health and well-being of its employees. So we invest in learning. This is super important. Investing in professional development is the most profitable step high-tech companies can take to advance technical women and retain all technical talent. Google pays for its employees to go to classes, conferences that are all geared toward your career advancement. So why? Why should we be doing this? Why should we care? Improving company culture will solve this problem. Teams with greater gender diversity are twice as likely to exceed performance expectations. They make better decisions and they outperform homogenous groups. But it's bigger than this. Women are still fighting for equal rights. Women make 75 cents to the dollar of a man. We are still defined by our gender. I hope that one day I can be a programmer, not a female programmer, not to mention globally. We have made some progress in developed countries but many of our fellow human beings face atrocities based on their gender, such as gender-based violence, female genital mutilation, et cetera. So change can start here with us, with all of us. We need to be the role models. We are the builders of the programs that we spend hours a day on. When are you not on your computer or your phone? So we have an opportunity to create this culture, this culture that we have dreamt about for decades. A culture where equality, progress, and differences are tolerated, even encouraged because we are the future of innovation, especially in the tech industry. We need to perform at our best because we are the future of solving problems that are dire. So we can change this, we need to change this. And always say to yourself, I really like this quote, if not me, then who? If not now, when? Because in the end, we're a culture. We are the innovators of the world. So let's not fuck it up.