 Hey, everybody, good afternoon. Thanks for joining me this afternoon in Seattle. My name is Jen Modriaga. I am the senior manager for Global Community Event Strategy at Red Hat. My pronouns are she, her, and hers. And I'm really, really glad to talk to you today about the journey around creating an employer resource group, the Red Hat Asian Network. So just want to give a little bit of context to the Asian Network. It's a very, very young ERG. It actually just launched this past February this year. The genesis of this group started a little bit over a year ago when we started talking with people within the leadership team within DNI at Red Hat about forming a community. And the main driver for creating this community was because there was a lack of an official entity at Red Hat to support Asian-American associates because there was a lot obviously going on with COVID-19, including a charged political climate, increased incidences of harassment and violence, a lot of which were targeted towards the elderly, and the corresponding negative effect on mental and social health. And so a few of us were looking to see if there were any places where we could have a conversation with each other about the things that were affecting us. And so we found each other really through serendipity. There were five of us that came together that decided that we wanted to get this done. So the founding committee, like I said, is composed of five people. I'm one of the five people. I am of Filipino descent. My great-grandfather came to the United States through Hawaii as a sugar plantation worker. Robin Chan, who is my co-chair, I believe, is seventh-generation Japanese-American. Laura Thu is half Chinese, half German-Irish, and she grew up in Michigan. Joe Tsasi is of Taiwanese descent. He immigrated over to North Carolina, grew up here in the United States, but spent 15 years abroad in Japan before returning back to United States. And then we had Tesh Patel, who grew up in the UK, is of Indian descent, and that rounds up the five people that were in this group. We also retain an executive sponsor, Helen Kim, who is actually a Korean American that lives in Singapore, and she is our current vice president of marketing for APAC. So the five of us came together, and really the reasons are really, really personal for us. This group was not driven by any initiative by Red Hat. This was completely driven by us, by employees that were really concerned about the fact that we were feeling isolated in our teens, and that, you know, who could we turn to to talk about the things that were weighing on us, and they were weighing on us and affecting us in the workplace, because the past year demonstrated that the line between the workplace and home life is pretty much not there anymore. And as a result of everything that was happening around the pandemic and all the other conversations that were happening related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, such as the things that were going around George Floyd, we felt very, very compelled to act on those things because we actually felt like it was the right thing to do. So I'm gonna go through the next couple of slides pretty quickly, so we have a mission statement. So the Red Hat Asian Network is actually open to people who identify as part of the Asian diaspora, but we also include allies to join us. In fact, a really large number of folks that are a part of the Asian Network are actually allies. And as I said, if you identify the Asian diaspora, I want to learn more about the Asian diaspora, we welcome you, and the Asian diaspora actually encompasses pretty much all of Asia. So we do East Asian, South East Asian, South Asian, Central Asian, and Pacific Islander identity. And I will go a little bit into the ins and outs of the challenges of creating this organization and also trying to be as inclusive as possible as we scale this organization. So the ultimate goal for this group is really just to have a space to gather, right? It's a space where we can address the needs of all associates. Full disclosure, all the current leadership at the Asian Network is currently here in the United States and specifically within North Carolina. So we identify as the North American chapter of the Asian Network. We do have associates from around the world, from Amia, from Lattam, and APAC that participate in our organization, but we have a particular emphasis currently on North America and specifically the United States. And the next two slides will explain why we have that emphasis. One, it's because we're a volunteer organization. And two, we could speak best to the concerns of associates that are in the United States. However, we do engage in conversations, as I said, with associates in all regions and we try to support the best we can. And a large part of how we want to move forward in terms of advocacy is actually through efforts and intersectionality. And so I'll talk a little bit more about our efforts and intersectionality in just a bit. So we were asked to present a business case to senior leadership about why we would need an employee resource group for Red Hatters of Asian Heritage. And it may be surprising if those Red Hats been around for close to 30 years now, almost as long as Linux has been around. And it seemed kind of surprising like why wouldn't a tech company have an ERG actually dedicated to the Asian diaspora. And so that was something that we had to justify. We had to justify why we would have a group for folks who are of Asian descent. So we just went through some stats. Of course Asians are still very much a minority within the American population. About 6% of the US population, but we actually do have a fair number of software jobs. I will explain though how Red Hat is an outlier in the tech industry in just a moment. So this is for tech in general, but not specific to Red Hat. We are the largest underrepresented group within Red Hat. If you look at the Asian diaspora, we're the largest, but then again I'm gonna explain a caveat attached to that. And then the other thing is that we're greatly underrepresented in tech leadership. In fact, Asian American women are the least likely to be promoted into management roles. So there are several things that we presented this senior leadership about like why we wanted to have a group dedicated to that. So this is not a secret. This is actually on the redhat.com website, but this is our breakdown of the population at Red Hat by ethnicity and race. And so you can see that I put a little red box around the Asian grouping. It says that it's only in the US, so in other countries is actually not legal to track people by race or gender. So these are statistics that speak to the United States, but you'll see that the percentage is 12%. Hispanic Latina is 5%, Black is 4%, and then are 2% is 2 plus races, 1% is other, that includes folks that may identify a specific islander and perhaps native and indigenous. But 12% is super low compared to our peers within the tech industry, so you'll see that we're 76% white within the United States. And there are a few reasons for why that may be. So Red Hat is not based in California or in the West Coast like many other tech companies. It was founded in North Carolina in the American South where headquartered in Raleigh. And so that probably accounts for the reason that it's not as diverse as you would see like as a company that's based in Silicon Valley. And so there is a historical context for why these numbers look pretty low compared to our peers. And so because we are underrepresented within Red Hat, we felt like we had a really, really good case to start employee resource group. There were many instances where those of us who identified as part of the Asian diaspora were the only Asian and sometimes the only person of color on our teams. And so that contributed to feelings of isolation, feelings of our teams, perhaps not fully understanding the full impact of what was happening to us, particularly during COVID-19. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about the demographics of what we consider to be within the Asian diaspora. So it's really, really, really broad, right? Listed within this is not Central Asia. We actually included Central Asia because we had a few associates that came to us that identified as being from Central Asia. So we included that within our definition of the Asian diaspora. Yeah, I'm about to get to that, Troy. So that would be like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, that area. So it's basically kind of adjacent to Iran and Iraq. So it's the stands or what's Central Asia. I actually had someone from Kazakhstan contact me about it. And actually my stepson was a doctor from Kazakhstan. So I actually had a familiarity with Central Asia. So we decided to go ahead and include that in there. We did not want to turn anyone away. We felt like it was very, very important for people to advocate on behalf of their culture, to feel like there was a space where they could showcase cultural pride and identity. And we definitely wanted to feel like we could provide that for them. Another thing to really understand about the Asian diaspora within the United States is that there's a really wide range in terms of education, a wide range of socioeconomic levels. That it's not monolithic by any stretch of the imagination. And what we found within our company, and I think this is actually really, really common for a lot of folks who are part of the Asian diaspora, is that people don't realize that there are issues within the Asian community related to poverty and a lack of educational attainment. And folks find that really, really shocking. And so there's a lot of education needs to happen in terms of educating people about the fact that those disparities actually exist within what we call the Asian community. Also, the Asian American population is projected to become the largest immigrant group in the United States by 2055. And so we're already seeing the workplace starting to change. Like even in North Carolina, I've lived in North Carolina actually since 1991, I went to school there. And I've seen a lot of shifts in the past 30 some years in terms of who lives in North Carolina. Like when I first moved to North Carolina to attend undergrad at Duke, it was still very much a tobacco town. There was a functioning cigarette factory in Durham, North Carolina. And it was very Southern. Now it's a place that's characterized by a lot of transplants. Like it's definitely more diluted in terms of what we would call the Southern identity. I don't see that as much anymore. Like when I interact with folks that are within Durham or Raleigh in that particular area, the likelihood is quite high that they're not from the South. So I wanted to talk a little bit about COVID-19 and how it's impacted the Asian American community. But I'd also just wanna recognize that it's affected the Asian diaspora globally very much, but I'm not gonna address that here because that's kinda out of scope for this talk. But for me personally, it's affected me personally. As I said, I'm a Filipino descent. And there are a large number of people of Filipino descent that work in healthcare. And we've been very adversely affected. I have family members that work as nurses who have been personally affected by this. And there have been people that have died that I know. But the stuff that happened during COVID-19, there was a stuff with obviously death, but it was also accompanying racism that's always been there, but has been greatly amplified, particularly with the political rhetoric that was happening in the last year. It was super painful. I found it personally a source of really great distress and as did the other members of the founding group. And we realized people actually don't realize how much this is affecting us at work. Like it just wasn't on anybody's radar. And one of the things that we realized as a group that even if we couldn't accomplish anything outside of just talking to each other, it was actually a real great gift to find each other, to have five people who were going through a really tough time given the context of the pandemic that we had the gift of actually talking to each other and saying, you know what, the issues that we're encountering are real. You know, there's so much validation and finding someone else who knows what you're going through. Like that to me is super, super important to have a space to have conversations like that. The other part that came about as part of our conversations was this issue with the bamboo ceiling. And this is something that people don't realize exists because as I said, there are a large number of Asians within the tech industry, but they're the least likely to be in management. There's definitely a ceiling for people to get promoted. And even within the conversations I've had with folks within the Asian network, it's something that people have brought up. And it's not something that's comfortable to bring up to be honest, but we realize that we needed to do some advocacy in terms of promotion opportunities for folks within our community. So I wanna talk a bit about the challenges to the creation of the Asian network. One of the things that was just really interesting was that when we came together as a group to talk about creating this employee resource group, there were folks that actually said, why do you need a group? Because Asians are really successful, they don't need a group to talk to each other about stuff. And so we really encountered this model minority myth and a lot of our conversations across the company. And it was really hard to deal with the model minority myth because what it does is it diminishes the real issues that we face as a community. It's like the issues that are related to racism, related to lack of promotion opportunities, the duress of worrying about our elderly parents living on their own and being fearful that they may be attacked. Then of course there was the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings. All these things were coming upon us where there was so much emotional labor associated with dealing with these things happening and other people believing that there was nothing wrong. Like you really have success, you're a success story, there's no reason for you to have an organization. And the fact that we actually had to say, no, we need this organization because our issues are real, I mean it spoke to the fact that there are so many things around invisibility, around our community. And it also tells you that this model minority myth actually doesn't do a service to anybody. It's actually something that I would say is in service of white supremacy. And that may sound radical to some people, but it is. It's actually a way of creating division and it's a way to keep the Asian community quiet because they should have nothing to complain about. But as you saw in the earlier slides, there's a great disparity with education levels and socioeconomic levels within the Asian community within the United States. Another challenge that we had was a lack of formal support organizationally. So there were a couple of folks that were working in DEI space within Red Hat. We did have an office related to diversity just recently formed, but that did not exist when we decided to start this organization. And so a lot of it had to be led and volunteer run. And so there was such emotional labor associated with having to create an infrastructure from scratch. And also with having to educate people about why the model minority myth was not something that was beneficial, was something that actually was very detrimental and not in service of the greater good, not just for the Asian community, but also for diversity, equity, and inclusion issues at large. And then there were just some other things, these other layers related to being within the Asian community. The fact that there was honestly some cultural discomfort with putting ourselves in the public eye, that's not something that we were really used to and it really meant having to put ourselves out there. And it was kind of scary, particularly because one of the top issues that came to the forefront were mental health issues that were arising within our community and trying to find ways to assist with those issues coming up. And then also, there were issues with the fact there was the internalization of racism and how do we deal with the issues of intersectionality with other groups because past animosity, for instance, between the Asian and Black communities. And of course, we were asked to do a global mission and it was hard to do it because we're all North America, specifically with the North Carolina. And we wanted to, like I said, provide a united group for everyone who was there including the Pacific Islander groups. We actually originally had Pacific Islander in our name but there was feedback from associates in APAC that Pacific Islander was an American thing and so we were asked to drop it. But I still regret that we don't have that in our name, particularly because they had several Pacific Islanders reach out to me and they said the Asian network does not acknowledge me by name. And I said, you're right. Asians and Pacific Islanders are not the same but because of our numbers we tend to do it as an umbrella group of people are wondering why that is. It's really actually because it's in service of a political united cause. However, I wanna talk about the flip side of why it was awesome to do this ERG and it was the opportunity related to the intersectionality that I mentioned earlier. So we do a lot of intersectionality efforts and one of the intersectionality efforts that I'm really proud of is the work that we're doing with Black United Leadership and Diversity, the BUILD organization because we realized we wanted to provide an example of intersectionality first with the two largest underrepresented groups at Red Hat and also because we want to acknowledge that there have been issues between our two communities within a national historical context and we want to model that we could partner with each other successfully and advocate for each other and raise each other up. And so we have a joint workshop that's planned for both communities that we're gonna hopefully include our corporate leadership team on. So we're being really, really ambitious in terms of scoping this and also finding deliverables from these conversations that are gonna take place with the help of an external consultancy. We've also done joint workshops with a native indigenous group as well as with neurodiversity and we're partnering with all the other groups such as diversibilities, pride, women's leadership community, UNITOS and the military veterans. And so we've created all sorts of new relationships that would have never been possible by creating this ERG. We're here to celebrate each other, to amplify each other. Yes, it's also a space to express grief and frustration but really we're here to lift each other up, to create success for people within the Asian community, within the Asian diaspora but also for other groups who are not as represented. We feel like it's very, very important to partner with other groups and to amplify their voices too. The one thing that applies to all of our groups is colonialism, it's imperialism. So when people are like, okay, you're focused on the US, how does this scale globally? My response is, hey, every region in the world has been affected by some form of imperialism, some form of colonialism, some form of power system that's interested in keeping people divided instead of uniting them. And so we're really interested in uniting people. So you can get this on the slides later but here are a list of resources that we provide. We have a webpage as well as a number of workshops that we've created. And then I just wanted to cite this report by McKinsey and it cites an employee resource group as being really key to helping Asian-American associates be successful and so I wanted to put that out there and say, hey, you know what, that's actually being recognized as something that's really, really necessary for the success of Asian associates within companies. And then I'm just gonna add with a slide around diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. I won't read through it, you can read through it later on my slides because they're posted. But just wanna know, want people to know that we're really wanting to make sure that we have a whole conversation about the authentic self and that's really what diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice is all about. And so keep in touch with me. This is my information. I will be at the Red Hat booth immediately after this presentation if anyone wants to chat. You can connect with me also on Twitter and LinkedIn and thank you very much for your time. I'm trying now, until you guys said something and then I saw what was going on. You know, my daughter's married to a girl and she never spoke to me about any of this stuff until I asked her. She's like, oh yeah, this is going on over there. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I've found is that a lot of us tend to suffer in silence and what the pandemic brought out was that we couldn't do that anymore. Like it just was an untenable situation to remain quiet about the things that were happening with ourselves and with our families and with our greater communities, you know. And it was affecting us in the workplace because you're at home all the time but you're sitting with all these things that are heavy. And so how do you tell people this? Because it's like as an individual, it's really scary but if you can do it as a group, it's so much easier to say, hey, this resource group is talking about these issues and it's affecting me versus me coming as an individual in a conversation and saying, you know, this affects me and people going, oh, okay, you're just one person. Well, you know, we feel bad for you but this, you know, doesn't affect the rest of the team. So, you know, like we're not trying to be unempathetic but it doesn't really matter to us. And that's what people were hearing is that when they were trying to approach their managers or teams about the fact that they were worried about like family members, like maybe they were living, you know, somewhere on the East Coast and their family was in the Bay Area and there were a lot of tax going there. Like how do you tell people, I'm afraid that my, you know, my parents are gonna be attacked and possibly killed. You know, so there is also the issue of the secondary trauma that happens with incidents like that even like if it doesn't affect you, it just, it stays with you and it resonates with you and it does, it affects you and it's just, it's a cumulative effect and it's also just amplified by everything that's going on. I mean, these issues have always been here but it's the amplification of them that I think that finally caused, you know, the five of us to finally act upon this and say, you know what, we know we're not the only people going through this and we wanna make sure that people are seen and heard and that we erase invisibility, so. So anyway, thank you. I guess I need to unmic myself now because I'm done. But come by the red hat please if you wanna chat some more. I really appreciate seeing all of you here. Thank you.