 Okay, so this is anti-requestion 101, and I'm Lindsay Nida, and I'm a developer at brandygbrand.com. And, Hi everybody, I'm Steve. You just heard me ramble for five minutes. I work with Jeff at Jumpstart Lab, as I just told you the beautiful story of our origins moments ago. We choose the best Ruby and Rails classes in the world. So if your team needs to like level up at what you do, give us a call, cause you know, it's awesome. So, this talk. So, you know, we all love Martin Fowler, right? Like Martin Fowler, like anything that he writes instantly becomes crazy programmer canon, and we like memorize everything he's ever done. So, Martin Fowler has this thing called a DSL, so obviously it's you know, 100% awesome, and we in Ruby in particular use DSLs. And DSL is short for a domain specific language, if you don't know, and that's a computer language that's targeted to a particular kind of problem. So, from a certain perspective, Ruby on Rails is a domain specific language that is used to tackle the application domain of web programming, right? So, Rake is a DSL that is used to make things. We tend to use this technique a lot in the Ruby world, and we're like really big advocates of it. So, it turns out that many other fields also have their own kinds of domain specific language, and sometimes this can come into friction with the kinds of things that we're used to using words for. So, every single field has some things that mean different to someone in another field, right? So, it turns out one of the things that I've been really interested in lately is applying the things lessons from other fields to our own field. So, when I see that we have a particular problem, I don't honestly listen to you guys about how to solve that problem. I go read some philosophy books, or talk to some people that aren't programmers, because they're thinking outside of our box, and so it's a really interesting way to apply their lessons of what they've learned in their field to what we're doing. So, as you know, we have a little bit of a problem in our computer science community and web programming, not so specifically, but just in general computer science, and it turns out there are other fields that have domain specific languages that let us tackle that problem in a better way than we currently are using with our generic language to do so. To solidify this problem, I have this graph here, and what we have is the bachelor's degrees received by women in various STEM fields, and that horrible little mountain there, that's computer science, and we see that it peaks at 1985, and ever since then we've been on this negative trend downwards, and that's something that we really, really need to think again and go back on, because right now, 51% of the US population is women. We make up a large percent of the workforce. Now, right now we're about 25% of the bachelor's degrees in computer science are going to women. That's half, that's really, really horrible, and while a large chunk of people using technology are women, very few of them are actually contributing to the code that we're actually using, and there's a similar problem from a racial perspective. This graph here shows Silicon Valley workers in the dark blue and all US workers in the light blue, and what we can see for black individuals is they are at 6% of the Silicon Valley workforce, but 11% of the overall US workforce, and that doesn't sound like that much of a difference right now until you realize that that is also half. So there's a huge chunk of these people not being involved, and same thing goes for the Hispanic population which is 9% of the Silicon Valley workforce versus 15% of all US workers. So right now technology is very white and very male, and we need to work on getting more people involved in using the technology. So this field of this terminology that's used, and it's called social justice basically, and it is in program or speak, it is a DSL for discussing equality and social relationships, and we can use this DSL to help us grapple with these issues. Ultimately in American history, this sort of notion of social justice has been associated with leftist political movements, but actually if you look at where the term comes from, it's actually from Thomas Aquinas and a very right leaning perspective, so this does not have to do with left versus right politics, I don't even wanna get into that. This is about treating human beings as other human beings and various people from various political sides have come to believe this is a good idea over our history, and so we're not trying to get into those kinds of political discussions. This is about people and humans, not about politics in some form, although whatever, yes, ultimately still politics, but not of that kind for that way. So there was this Reddit thread one time, and I don't read Reddit anymore, but it was pretty awesome, it made me laugh really hard, and the question was, what is the worst possible thing you could call a white male person? And so the one that everyone got actually upset about was privileged. If you've never heard this term before, we're about to talk in a second, but all the other ones people were like, oh yeah, you say like cracker, I don't, that doesn't get me mad, right, at all, like that's not actually a negative thing, it doesn't hurt me at all, but you insinuate that we have privilege and all of a sudden everyone got really, really upset. So this is like the primary topic as far as attacking this thing that we wanna talk about. So. Okay, so privilege is how society accommodates you, it's about the advantages you have that you think are normal, it's about you being the normal and others being a deviation from the normal, this is you being born just lucky, lucky enough to be a white male being sort of like this top rung as far as like the privilege spectrum goes, and one person related this to being sort of, and it's one thing that people get very angry about was she wrote that being a white male is sort of like being on easy mode. So you're playing a game, you set the modes, you still have some difficulty, you still have some challenges, but it's still easier than those people that don't have the advantages that you have. And it's something that you were just given by just being born, it's just luck. The privilege and the unprivileged live on the same planet, but two different worlds. It's not something that you're really aware of, you don't see other people's privilege and how that's really interacting so much until you have that sort of taken away from you. So there's this real cool sociology experiment about basically they said, okay, so we're gonna put this video in front of you and there's gonna be two basketball teams, one has white jerseys on, the other one has black jerseys on, and they're gonna pass basketballs back and forth between each other. And I want you to count the number of times the basketball gets passed between players. And so then that went on for like 45 seconds or so, and then they said, okay, so what did you think of the gorilla? And people went, the gorilla, and they're like, yeah, the gorilla that walked across the middle of the screen, like the guy in the big giant gorilla suit, what did you think about that? And they were like, I don't know what you're talking about. And if you go and actually watch the video, you can find this experiment on YouTube, but you get so focused on paying attention to this task that even though a guy in a gorilla suit walks through a bunch of people, shooting basketball back and forth, you totally don't see it. Like when I did this, I watched the video I heard about, like, oh, this is really interesting, right? I didn't explain it at all at first. I watched this video and I was totally shocked because I didn't see it either. And this is a fundamental neurological process of the way that our brains work. Especially when we focus on something, we tend to ignore what's in the periphery, like moving the microphone away from my mouth so you can't hear what I'm saying. And so this is one of the examples, not necessarily of privilege directly, but this kind of perspective. You're so used to what you're used to seeing, it's hard to relate to other people, I guess is kind of the point. And it's also difficult to spot in yourself because it's what you've been focused on, like what you normally do. And so that's like the real lesson is that this sort of privilege is very difficult to notice. You know, again, being like, I'm privileged on every possible axis, right? Straight, white, male, upper middle class, all those kinds of things. And so it's very difficult to grapple with this kind of thing because I can't experience what like Lindsay experiences being a woman in computer science. It's not even that I can't empathize, but since I'm not a woman, so I will never have a woman's experiences. So Steve just kind of slightly mentioned this term, axes of identity. So that's like the things that sort of affect the privilege that you have. And here we have listed five different ones, gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability, but these are only just a couple of the things that sort of affect the privilege that you have. There's a lot of different moving parts at play here. There's a lot of things that greatly affect the privilege that you receive. And it's not something that we can kind of step back and really be aware of until we deeply, deeply try to empathize, but even then you cannot fully, fully understand someone else's experience as far as how these axes of identity are interacting and how their place in society is being affected by this. So intersectionality is a sociology theory of how various biological, social, cultural categories interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels contributing to systematic social and inequality. And this is something that's complete bullshit. I'm just gonna say that, cause we shouldn't be judging people on more than just being people and when we start looking at them and start making these judgments on them, it's greatly affecting their place within the world just because of their luck, their happen chance to have these certain axes of identity interacting in such a way that they are not the highest role in the society. And the other thing about intersectionality is that's how sometimes you'll receive certain kinds of privilege in a certain situation and not in others. So we are full people, we are not like just a white dude or a white woman or a black dude. We are some of tons of attributes and so they all interact with each other, which is what this concept talks about. Another thing that's a really big thing, especially online, you will see endless people talk about this or in the wrong way, that is. And so the isms, namely racism and sexism, actually are discrimination plus power equals oppression and therefore racism or sexism. So this is why you'll hear some people say you cannot be racist against white people or you cannot be sexist against men. You can obviously discriminate against men but without the systematic power that men have in society, you cannot oppress men in the same way that women have been oppressed for thousands of years. So that's a significant difference. And so in a social justice context, these sort of words have a slightly different meaning than what people on Reddit tend to say that they are, for example, which I shouldn't really even have to say but I kinda do. So but that's what's important is that it's systemic power. It's not anything about even individuals. It's about the power of the group dynamics of the society that we live in. Yeah. Okay, so the imposter syndrome is something that everyone can be affected by and it's when people are unable to internalize their achievements despite evidence of confidence, they believe there are frauds and undeserving of their accomplishments. So it's something that affects everyone but when you're say like a minority in a field and suddenly you're being asked to give a talk and it's like, is it because I'm just a woman? Like why am I here? And suddenly you're being like put all this pressure on yourself and you're just completely unable to accept that yeah I know what I'm talking about and yes I can do this and it's something that we all deal with but there are more factors that go into affecting more people greatly with this particular problem. So this is example like at the University of Pittsburgh we are redoing our notes said which slide was which people so that's what we lost. So that's why there's some funny things. So at the University of Pittsburgh we had some people from other schools like we were trying to redo our computer science program and so we talked to the guy who was in charge of Harvey Mudd and they had had a really massive first of all downturns in computer science enrollment but also it disproportionately was affecting women and other minorities and so all they did was have two sessions and they asked everyone like so every student at Harvey Mudd has to take an intro to computer science class so all they asked on the entrance exam to the school was have you ever programmed before and if you said yes they put you in CS 101 and if you said no they put you in CS 102 or whatever just splitting those two groups apart and just by changing that nothing else about the curriculum the teachers anything they saw a massive increase in enrollment in computer science period but also the women specifically sprung back like crazy and the reason for this was due to this imposter syndrome so what would happen is so like I started program when I was seven so I don't know what it's not like to not program so when I went in my freshman you know computer science class the teachers like you know y equals x plus five x equals two you know what is y and I was like obviously it's six or whatever and so all the people that had never like done this before or you know in the room are like oh wow this is really hard for me and that person is doing really really well maybe this is just not my field and so it turns out that like people who are good were poisoning the discussion and that made it difficult for new people to like enter the field and so just by making that one simple change and who was in what class they saw like massive increase of people that are like yeah computers are for me because I'm not stupid so that's sort of a real world example of this kind of syndrome how these things like interact with each other I should note that that increase was from 17% to 47% so they were nearly at gender parity after they sort of made that shift and that was really really big deal for them to completely change their CS program and so it wasn't because of lack of interest it was because there was this massive attrition rate with this initial class were just bunches of people were just dropping out okay so stereotype threat it's an experience of anxiety in a situation where a person has potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group this is something that has been proven in numerous numerous studies time and time again there was a study I believe when it first came out in like 1994 that talked about you know African-Americans taking the standardized tests and just by basically priming them with the idea that African-Americans do worse on the standardized tests they did worse and by saying no African-Americans do the same as everyone else they did the same as everyone else what you believe in your mind sort of comes real and it comes into play because you respond with this stress response when you're told you're going to be bad at this you will be bad at it the same thing happened with women in math exams they primed them with gender ahead of time told them you know women generally do poorly and they did worse the moment that they undid that moment they said you know women do the same the scores were basically the same and actually slightly better for the women than the men in that math exam so this it's so amazing it's like how powerful the mind is when you tell someone something that was sort of like affect the way that they learned it affect the way that they you know are actually able to interact with material and I've had women for example say like I don't participate in discussions about feminism in front of people because I don't want to be seen as a bitch and so like you know they will not say anything even as people say terrible things about women in front of them for that reason so you know this kind of thing happens all the time this is one of my favorite terrible things that people say on the internet about this topic and in our community too I can't be sexist because I love women so much and like I you know I don't want to point too many fingers but like this has been the root of the cause of some of the presentations that we've had in the Ruby community where there's been like bad things have been put up on these screens is because of like this justification which sounds ridiculous on its outset but like people do you know believe it so there's that and then also something else if you do make a faux pas and you probably will because this stuff is hard you should definitely apologize honestly whenever you do something that's bad so at LA RubyConf this year for example I saw a woman tweet like I'm really excited to meet so and so and so and so and so and Steve and you know she had her face as a picture on this you know Twitter account and so I saw her at the conference and like following Corey's advice like oh I'm gonna meet new people so I walked up to her and said hey how's it going you know my name's Steve I saw you tweet about me yesterday and she's like yeah and I was like I thought that was what I said was I was you know slightly nervous you meet some new people and so I said hey I thought that was you because you know honestly like how many girls are there here and like I felt really really terrible about that and later went up to her and like apologized for like singling her out in that way and like drawing attention to this kind of thing and so even though I've been studying these kinds of topics and like working on developing you know attention to these kinds of things you can absolutely screw it up and she was confused as to why I was apologizing to her because she didn't see that it was like a problem but I felt really terrible about it and it was important to apologize honestly and to not fake apologize if you're not if you are being a sexist asshole because you are a sexist asshole you shouldn't make a fake apology about how you're not actually a sexist asshole like basically and you know because like I'm sorry you're offended is not an actual apology basically and it's terrible I have to say it but it's true so but it's important to like to make an apology because you know it does mean something and so yeah oh and lighten up is not a valid response to someone you know being bothered by comments it's just not okay microaggressions which I would count light enough as a microaggression it's demeaning implications or other subtle insults against minorities so these things are sort of like you know doing dishes is women's work and sort of these sort of little subtle jabs and implications you know you don't really Obama is so articulate is a good example of this kind of thing yeah that's a really microaggression and there's actually a huge website for all these if you're like I wonder if that's a microaggression go on microaggressions.com and they'll see a list of them and I actually I wanted to add one and then I went through it and I was like oh somebody else already added the one that I was insulted with awesome so they're not even creative they're just repeating the same things over again oh and frown power okay so the big deal right now is there are a lot of things and I realized I feel like it's the the vocal minority that's sort of pushing out all these sexist and racist things right now and frown power was sort of coined in the 1940s when Stetson Kennedy was sort of infiltrating the KKK he was sort of trying to take them down and it was just like you know when someone says something racist you frown in their presence you know make it known that it's not welcome but as far as the internet goes you know you need to do a little bit more than that and you need to let them know when they get something wrong and also when you're having the conversation when someone gets something wrong it's really important to have it in such a way that they're receptive to you so instead of saying you're a racist because you said this thing you know like it's hard people get the stuff wrong so instead of saying that you need to say what you said was racist or what you said was sexist instead of just calling them out for it and like accusing them of being a racist or sexist because they might not be and they just might not understand the what they said was out of line but it's really important that we get as many people as possible basically you know calling people out for this because we need to make it known that within the community this type of behavior is not acceptable anymore so this is sort of a concept that's used often when describing films or media the male gaze so whenever the audience is put in the perspective of a heterosexual male actually a really great example of this yesterday if any of you follow on Twitter if you saw the link about what if other Olympic sports were filmed like women's volleyball okay and so they had like these screenshots of like what the coverage of women's Olympic volleyball is like and it was basically just like butts right like that's all just like total nobody no legs like just butts because that's apparently what beach volleyball is and so they said like here's some other Olympic sports that would be filmed in this way and then cropped and zoomed like men's basketball you know soccer like all these other sports and it's really illuminating how like oftentimes media assumes that the audience is in from this you know perspective of a heterosexual male and if you're not that becomes alienating because you can't relate to the material so like when all of our movies and most of our media comes from like my perspective means that other people don't relate to it in the same way that I do and they're constantly reminded like I'm supposed to be thinking that this Olympic coverage is pretty hot right now but you know you know I'm a straight woman so I'm not really in a girl so obviously this is not meant for me is like kind of the the reason that this is particularly alienating and this is really hard to notice as a straight male dude because like I'm just like yeah beach volleyball which is terrible and it's something that you don't know like yeah it's it's prevalent in tech right you know you've been to conferences you've seen people trying to sell technology with you know scantily clad women like that's something that's really not I'm not going to buy an iPad because like a woman in a bikini gave it to me like that's not going to happen but I mean that's how the mentality is sort of going and you know you need to realize that you know there are more than just heterosexual male in your audience and you need to you know kind of apply to all of them no one new Pinterest was going to be like big because like everyone in Silicon Valley is a dude right and Pinterest is audiences like vastly women and so all of a sudden everybody's like Pinterest out of those webs like it's so huge and that's because like women use a lot of technology too so you should make things that appeal to them as well as you know dudes on after news so I have an awesome quote here I would suggest reading it later I'm not just going to read this quote to you but it's pretty awesome and Francis Allen is kind of amazing she's the first female recipient of the Turing Award and kind of one of my heroes yeah so this is sort of what I was saying a second ago like what we create is colored directly by who we are so you know if we have a Silicon Valley that is all straight white men creating computer stuff then technology will be straight white male focused and that's a problem because there are a lot of other people in the world they're that way and especially as more and more the world runs on computers it's really very important that we include everyone right and this is I'm totally ignoring the digital divide of like people that don't even have internet connectivity their home like elsewhere outside of you know the first world but like disregarding you know that problem which is totally important and separate one you know you don't want I fear very strongly that as more and more of the world becomes reliant on the internet that these like groups will continue to maintain their power because they have control over the way we communicate and they're the ones that shape the way that we communicate so you know that's that's really important so I have I don't belong here so I mean the sense of fitting in is actually extremely important to people and there was a study on a paper called the signaling threat and it talked specifically about conferences and they framed one conference with a 50-50 gender divide and they found you know lots of interest from men and women to go to the conference and they framed another conference with like a 90-10 gender divide and they found that you know there wasn't that much interest in the conference but the really interesting part was there was more interest by both men and women in the conference that had a more fair split than the conference that was unbalanced like it generally pulls more people in to be part of a diverse community and similarly this you know feeling like you belong really greatly affects the rate of attrition which specifically in tech is kind of staggering so we have a hard enough time getting women you know to come to the table and actually be a part of the tech world but once they're there 41% of women and 17% of men quit their careers in tech companies after 10 years that's a huge chunk and we're starved for workers right now everyone is out there looking for you know talent to get in their companies I mean I was hired in my company I interviewed on Friday I started on Monday like they're everyone is that starved for talent and here we are you know kind of actively pushing people out of the door because you know they don't feel like they belong and they're in their environments where you know they're being harassed or you know these microaggressions are kind of slowly digging away at them so and as an example of how this could change you know again everyone is hiring all the time right so if we just reduced female attrition we didn't attract more women to detect we just stopped them from all quitting if we did that by 25% then we'd have an extra 220,000 people to the talent pool over the next year right and like think about how much more awesome you'd be able to have more co-workers you'd be able to hire people and you know we'd have a ton more people building technology and that's simply by reducing the number of people that try and then quit computer science not even like attracting new people so yeah this is sort of the same deal I guess we don't want to like read you a giant quote but Mary Curie is awesome yeah she's she's pretty amazing and fun fact about her she was the first female professor at the University of Paris but she also did some pretty awesome science things too so the point is ultimately of all this stuff is that we do need to do better and we're not trying to scold you and tell you that you're all bad we're trying to provide you with new tools to talk about these subjects and to think about them because that's really ultimately what changes culture right is being able to communicate in different ways or be able to have a reasonable discussion about this right it's impossible you know like so the thing earlier about Amy for example like Amy's not some person but Twitter is not a way to have productive arguments at all like I as someone who's gotten into many a Twitter battle like it's not big enough to have any sort of reasonable discussion right because you can't fit the language in there so we need to actually be able to like have the words to express these kinds of problems and talk about them seriously and so we're just trying to demonstrate to you some things about this topic that may interest you so hopefully you can like look into them and think about your relationships with people and how they work so one of the big things I think until I was sort of helping to improve this problem is encouraging anyone that has any interest at all in computing like because it's hard right you're getting started out and for the longest time I always heard you know just read your manual do it yourself whatever you'll be fine but then you know now my mom you know she's in her fifties and she's like hey I want to learn HTML and I was like well I was doing it third grade I think you can do it she's like I don't know if I can do it but you need to like push these people forward let them know that it is possible you know you can do it you can learn these things and yeah there's some barrier for entry but you can be there for them and help them learn another thing that you can do and this is slightly self-serving obviously but it's contribute to projects that help learners so you know this is the reason I started working on Hackety Hack is that that same problem about like specific kinds of people taking over technology I'm just concerned about the number of people that know about how technology works so like what we do to most people is total magic so I'm interested in raising getting more and more people involved in technology periods so that they know the things that affect their daily lives like when I swipe my credit card I know like half the technology that makes all that stuff work so like I'm pretty confident but like people that don't like it's just total craziness like imagine what that's like to like walk through this crazy computerized world what cars have like over 20 computers in them now to help with all sorts of stuff so like imagine what it's not like to know that kind of thing and so I think it's really unfortunate and so you can help by helping projects that are helping people learn which is a lot of helps for one sentence but whatever we really need to start mentoring people who need help getting started yeah when I first learned programming I was sitting alone at my computer just reading everything asked like a bunch of hackers what language did I learn first and they're like learn C so I learned C as my first language which was a fun process but you really need to sort of like step out there and definitely help like reach out into your community because there are groups out there that are trying to help learners and if there aren't you can start one and you can ask me about starting one because I can help you with that now but you really need to help learners because that barrier for entry is hard telling someone RTFM is not a valid answer for a learner that's like how do I do this go the extra step and like show them the first beginning steps don't do it all for them but you need to show them how to progress and those people are already in the tech world you need to kind of help them out someone starting out as young doesn't know what to do you know you've been there for a while probably a lot of the people here might just be starting out but many of you have been here for a bit and you can definitely help out with that and every little bit helps as far as eliminating bias and stereotyping this is going to be something that is going to take us as humanity a really long time to get over and we are probably never going to be perfect at this but that doesn't mean that it's not worth trying when you grow up in a patriarchal homophobic white supremacist society it takes a really long time to get over those ingrained notions so like I know someone who has raised super religious and even though she rejects religion now she still is like I don't think that being gay is moral because she grew up in that upbringing and so it's been really hard for her to like get over these ideas that were planted in her head when she was really young so I'm not saying that if you screw up that you're a bad person or whatever but the point is to try to make an effort to improve right like we work on Kata's to improve our programming so you can also work at eliminating bias from your social interactions as much as possible and so that maybe someday we as humanity can get there and like that's sort of the point is that we want to create we're working to create a culture that we want people to stay in right so one of the reasons I care about this is that if I'm working on a hackety-hack and I'm minting brand new programmers do I really want to bring them into an environment that's going to be hostile to them right so like I don't want to and I don't obviously we can't fix it before we start doing this but like one of the things that conflicts me ethically is that like if I'm if I'm going to encourage women to get into programming and then you know dudes at their work are going to sexually harass them like is that an ethical action on my part like I don't know and that's a bigger question but we want to work to build that inclusive culture someday is is sort of the ultimate point and this is what we're doing here in Pittsburgh myself and a couple other awesome women here who should like stand up or wave their arms or something to show that they're like all kind of over there are starting girl develop a picture and so we're doing this for reaching out and you know we should have classes late October I mean no early October late September but you know we're going to get more people programming and really reaching out into the community the other thing you told me this earlier too is that it's not exclusively women so they're not only accepting women they're just focusing on trying to get a lot of them too so it's not about separation or exclusion or like hiding women in some sort of bubble it's just that they're focusing on the marketing efforts towards getting girls involved so so yeah thanks a lot like I said I'm Steve and I'm Lindsay and yeah