 Thank you so much for being here with us today, so just a little bit of an intro. Work in Europe is a big event that brings together people from all over the world. Underrepresentation and discrimination in tech have been an issue for a long time and the WordPress community has always tried to bridge these gaps with different initiatives. Having a group of women and non-binary folks on stage in Athens is one of the many ways we have, as a community, to showcase our diversity. So, please give it up for Anne McCarthy, Product Wrangler at Automatic. A big whoo-hoo for Chaya Osterbruck, so CEO of Ghost and Entrepreneur. Massive round of applause for Jessica Liscik, front-end developer at Extendify. Cheers, lots of cheers for Rianne Rietfeld, Web Accessibility Expert for Level Level and a trainer at Ali Collective. Finally, I want to see the pom-poms in the air for Thelma Mutete, Happiness Engineer at Automatic. So, pom-poms. Yes, Chaya asked me to do the introductions. She says that I do great introductions. I'm available for birthday, bar mitzvahs, and anything else. And give a huge shout out to Francesca for hosting the panel. Thank you. Thank you. I forgot to introduce myself. I thought the dance was enough to introduce myself to Jessica. So, we've prepared a few questions, and we have talked in the last week. So, we'll start with one topic that we all felt was quite important for our career, about mentorship. So, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of mentoring people, coaching them, and sponsoring them. Mentorship is one of the first actions you can do for underrepresented people in every group. And they proved to be quite effective for professional growth. So, have you had any mentors in your career? And what role did they play? And have you been a mentor to others? Who wants to go first? Yes? I had a mentor when I was an analyst. I studied chemistry in the laboratory. And what I learned from him is there are no stupid questions. And you have to keep asking until you actually know what you want to know. So, if you're afraid to speak out because you don't understand anything, please say, okay, I don't understand it. Tell me it and keep asking. And that was very useful in my career. I'm mentoring now Katelyn. I don't know if she's here. Yeah. Katelyn is the new accessibility expert at level level. And she's very bright. Then we're showing Viter for our next panel. Who else want to say something about mentorship? Yes, I had a mentor at the start of my career. And his advice was become a mentor. And I thought that was the best advice he could give me because then I could look at it from a different perspective. So, and hopefully I'm a mentor to many of, of course, the Yoast people, our new folk people. And I think that at this, that's not a table, right? But in this half round, I think we are all mentors to each other, right? Yes. Yes, we were. My introduction to the WordPress community into the WordPress space was through mentorship and sponsorship. And I think a key part of it for me was the right amount of stress. So there's like a concept of like use stress, which is good stress. And so I learned something in WordPress and then he teach me something else. And it kind of just progressed from there. And now I feel like a lot of my mentorship is at a different scale. I've done one-on-one mentorship. But now it's about creating pathways for people to feel comfortable in reporting GitHub issues or trying something new out and giving feedback on what's being worked on at WordPress core. Yeah, yeah. Jessica, Thelma, something to add. My experience when I started working with WordPress, the people that helped me, I don't think they would even consider themselves as mentors. But when I look back, I see all the things that they did and how they helped me get into the space and get comfortable and start working on things which eventually led to a number of things. So that was like my experience. Yes? Yeah, I can actually share this experience. Like I never had a mentor that I defined as a mentor. Instead I had many people like helping me out in some way and kind of mentoring me, but I never had someone I called a mentor. Okay. And that's just a follow-up question. Do you be ready to be like officially a mentor for someone? Like being, you know, like, I'm going to be your mentor and reach out to people and say, hey, I can help you. Do you feel at a point in your career were you? I've never tried it actually to like be a mentor to have that mindset, but I think it will give it a try. Yeah, yeah, that never hurts to try. Okay. I do want to call it a mentorship program that's being worked on by Hari. I don't know if he's here, but that's something that I was thinking about with that question is that there's actually a program being started to help provide mentorship more formally in the WordPress project. So it would be amazing, I think, if you're looking at a panel of mentors. For me at least early in my career to see someone like me as a part of the initial group of that. So I encourage all of us to maybe be a part of that effort. Yes, please. Shall I move on to the next question? Do we want to add something to this topic? No, let's go next. So, being part of an underrepresented group, have you struggled in your job or the WordPress community? Someone wants to go first. Yeah, someone else should go first. Yeah, I mean to be candid. I think I'm perceived a certain way between my age, perceived gender and just needing to be friendly at all times, needing to be approachable at all times, needing to read paragraphs and paragraphs of text. Yes, that is part of my job, but it is interesting whenever I'm talking to other coworkers how they don't get those interactions. Yeah, there are times whenever I think it's been difficult to navigate and emojis don't cover up everything. So yeah, I've definitely had some moments where I've had to say this is where the project's headed, this is what we're doing, and then I've noticed the reaction is a bit different. And it's something I'm mindful of. There are times whenever I'll ask a male colleague to share a message rather than myself because I know it'll be perceived differently. And we were talking also about the age. I know that we'll have more to say about the topic, but when we were preparing for this, you really brought up the age issue. Yeah, whenever I got started in the repressed project, I was very young, I was 21 when I joined Automatic. And my first word camp got bossed around a little bit, which was in 2014, a lot has changed since then. I didn't really know how to advocate for myself. So I definitely have experienced that. And I know we were talking about Rion, I don't know if you want to share something. Yeah, I never was like filled left out as a woman, but I feel left out as someone who is not young anymore. I'm a baby boomer. So within the repressed community, I'm very, very old. I entered the repressed community in my 50s. So I already was a bit older, but if you have like an experience in web development in like 20 years, you've seen everything. And then new developers come up with, oh, I have this new idea and say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then convincing them that I've been there, done that, got a t-shirt, it doesn't work. And that's quite a sometimes, I think that is a friction between young, eager people who really want to learn and address stuff and then seeing, yeah, this is not going anywhere. So that's a bit, but I am struggling with that but when you're older, you're not taking seriously at that point. And I don't know the solution for that, but I think maybe it's just fact of life. I don't know. Well, shout out to our blog, Grumpy Old Women Codes. Yes. Rihanna and I have a blog, Grumpy Old Women Codes. We can be grumpy together, yes. Yes. And it's just me and Rihanna reading it, basically. But when we have to vent about something, we go there. Anyone else? Yeah, I think I had, I worked in several industries. And if I compare the WordPress ecosystem with, for example, corporate companies and now our example is that I worked at a huge insurance company, really corporate-orientated, of course, and there I had to struggle a bit more, of course. I belong to the minorities of the minorities. So that was in that time, that was really difficult. But when I entered the WordPress ecosystem, that was a warm bath. I really want to point it out because I felt that it was really inclusive. Everyone was basically adopting my background and there was not an issue. So that's also a positive story to share here. Tell me. Just the community, just after school, so the first industry that I experienced was WordPress-related. I didn't know much about that, but I experienced a lot of imposter syndrome when I started out. So as someone who is from a very small country in Zimbabwe, the community is not that big and WordPress was more European and American-centralized. So you're getting to this big world and the culture is different, but people are welcoming. So at the end, I did manage to go around this because of some of the people that I met after a couple of times. But at first it was very difficult to put myself out there and say, I want to do that because I didn't know how that would be perceived. That was the biggest struggle that I had. Jessica, do you want to add something? Did you have any struggle? Of course, did I have struggles. So it's... Yeah, I think it's... I would be surprised if there would be anyone with like zero struggles at all who is not male. Yeah. Yep. Someone had to say it. Thank you for saying it. This also reminds me that I said that I would do around robbing, asking you your pronouns and where you're from, and I totally forgot about it because I was very, very concentrated on the choreography. Do you want to take a moment to ask everyone for their pronouns and where they're from? Because maybe... Okay, sorry, let's go. All right. Seattle, Washington right now in the U.S. and she, they... The Netherlands, Nijmegen, she, her. Germany, she, her. The Netherlands, I'm a female baby boomer. Like I mentioned before, I'm from Zimbabwe, and she, she, her. She, her. Italy, she, her. Okay. And Francesca, yes. Torino, Italy, but also Norwich, England. I wanted to stay a bit more on the struggles, but I also didn't want to, to sound like, oh, poor us. We just, you know, it has been so hard and we didn't achieve anything because that's not true. Despite all these difficulties and the more that we probably haven't mentioned here, we also had some pretty impressive achievements. So who wants to go first? Ah, now it's the alphabetical. Yeah, we've been debating this. We're supposed to answer every question alphabetically and I was like, well, let's not. But this one is on you. Yeah, I was thinking about this. I think for me, it's recent, but the outreach program, the full-sighted outreach program, I've been proud of. I know it's been imperfect. And I think a lot of it is like a testament to people taking a risk and being willing to engage in an experiment and a first for the community. And I know it wasn't always met. Like I started it privately at first and people were like, what are you doing? I was like, oh, that was bad. Okay, let me undo this. So I feel like I've learned along the way and I hope it creates other outreach program efforts in the future. Yes, I was thinking about the Pride event that we are hosting tonight. Are you going to be there? And I think it started out small a couple of years ago and it was, I believe, done by a codable. We partnered up and now we have this amazing waiting list. So if you aren't there tonight, that's sad for you. But be there next year. Yes. Two of my biggest achievements so far have been being part of the 5.6 release as a default team wrangler and also being the lead organizer for WordCamp Osnabrück in 2019, which was a 250 person WordCamp happening in Germany. And I'm going to repeat both of these achievements again this year. Oh, wow. You hear it here first. My achievements is I think together with accessibility we got accessibility on the map of Edinburgh Press. And my 15 minutes of fame when I quit the accessibility team because I didn't agree with where it was going. So I'm famous for quitting my job. This is kind of a difficult one, but I think if I look at the things that I've done, I would say my biggest achievement was being part of the woman that released 5.6. Are you going to be part of 6.4? I haven't dragged you into it. You can come willingly, you know. We're a friendly bunch. So this question about the achievement and we were discussing this just before we came on stage and it's a hard one. I don't know why underrepresented groups of people have such a hard time boosting their achievements and I see this over and over and I've seen this over and over in my life and I'm exactly like that, you know, I'm like and then I was like, no, you led the three releases of where it was like, yeah, but you know, it's a group of people it's a well-old machine, we do it as a group, you know, I'm like, oh you're a director at your company. Yes, but we're four directors, it's not just me. So you know, I see this happening quite a lot in underrepresented groups. I don't know if you have this feeling also with your friends, you know, colleagues if you see there is this famous article by HBR Harvard Business Review, which is at this point like 20 years old that says that women and in general minorities apply for a job only if they take 100% of the check boxes and white men will be like do I fit two of them? Sure I'm gonna send my CV and then that's how you don't get a lot of women in executive roles because we don't apply for them unless we feel that we are the most the best most qualified person to apply for that job so if anyone in the audience also is downplaying their successes, find yourself a cheerleader that you know when you're like oh no I didn't do anything they will tell you no but you did that and do you remember that time you did that and do you remember that time you did that and then you say oh yes I did and that's healthy it's not you know it's not being showing off it's really claiming what it's yours already so that's important moving on to another topic where is our timekeeper what how much time do we have we're good? okay no because we prepared for this panel and we're like it's gonna take us four hours to talk about everything we want to talk about you know I want to make sure that we have the time to go over everything so this is a very hot topic I would say in terms of that it's very current we know that representation on stage is essential to showcase diverse voices do you think that underrepresented groups of people like women non-binary folks and minorities are reluctant to speak at events? I'll say personally I would not be on the stage or would speak it at word camp if it wasn't for covid weirdly it actually made me way more comfortable to be able to record a talk and give it so I gave like a keynote talk at word camp and I would never do that otherwise and I think having a lot of that is because of I think just the perception and the fear and what questions am I going to get asked because a lot of times I was talking about the site editor very early on and it's hard to share nuance in 10 seconds and honestly having the recorded format and the practice underneath me I think has allowed me to feel comfortable even doing this which is something I feel like I should be able to talk about without fear right so it is like I do think that is still in people's heads for sure I also think it relates to what you said women want to be perfect and then perform and you don't have to you just you have to say I'm going to tell you and you don't have to see the audience as hostile the audience wants you to do well and this sounds very zen like but feel the warmth of the audience because the audience wants you to do well and wants you to listen to you so don't be afraid if your talk isn't perfect my English isn't perfect and sometimes I mess up talks and people still get the message so don't strive for perfect just do it and practice it and you will very very nervous at the beginning and I'm still very nervous but when you start and you prepare very well it will just go right so try it and don't want to be perfect and try it and get passionate about a message you want to get through a message you want to tell you want to learn the audience something and they come to listen to you because they want to learn so I think really you do yourself short if you what you know if you keep that for yourself you share what you know and that will get you further in life so I have this amazing team around me and also I sometimes struggle should I apply for something should I be on stage but my awesome team pointed out that and I think that's really awesome advice like do it with anxiety just do it try that and then let's see what happens and then it is he'll survive probably I will say there is a cost like my mental health I really will not sleep the night before even when I record the presentation having to watch myself I thought my heart was just going to jump out so I think there is a cost to it and I think we can all be supportive audiences and I agree with you like I wish I could get that out of my head but yeah there is a very real like my anxiety will stay for days yeah yeah yeah maybe if I can add a personal story to this so when I had my first talk at a word camp I did not do my topic was introversion so it was not a technical talk because I was too afraid of giving a technical talk of being like getting like questions I could not answer for whatever reason or so so I gave myself the permission to give a talk where I could about a topic where I could feel confident of where I had personal experience and as you just said where I had a message because it was helpful for me to understand myself after I learned that I am an introvert so and this is how it got me started and like going past that anxiety to actually share my message and then from there slowly get into the more advanced talks I think what I would say would just echo what everyone has said here and maybe I'll share a bit of my experience why myself I don't try to speak at events I have the worst edge right in the world I never used to do any presentation in school but like I'll do everything else as long as you go in front because I don't want to be part of that and also organizing word camps and volunteering I can do that but I can't be a speaker it's not something that I can do so that's why I would want to give a talk but I think sometimes there are people that are the biggest share leaders and if we manage to have that in our community people will be more comfortable to be doing that even if they are going to be like oh well people won't say anything bad or anything like that because they want me to learn so if we have a space where people feel comfortable to learn and grow while they are doing everything then maybe that could help now you don't have to start at work at Europe you can start at your local meetup or for your colleagues and don't start small and then practice and practice and then you end up on the stage somewhere I also want to say that you said yes without hesitation to this panel you said yes without hesitation to this panel so you know I was so excited to I saw the heading and what we were talking about but then I forgot that so you have a message so go for the message not for your anxiety I agree it's a great story Thelma because you really said yes without hesitation and I was like I have stage fright and I was like you realize we're going to do this on a stage but I'm really thankful that you decided to overcome this and I know that it's very expensive for your mental health and this is also something that so I feel the need to volunteer for everything and say yes to everything because I'm like I'm a woman, I'm a bit older I was technical I'm not so technical anymore I'm an executive so I was like I feel this urge and responsibility to be on stage for a younger generation on one hand or for older women that feel that you know it's late for them to start something I have a talk for work camps that I never it never gets peaked but it's like starting something new in your 50s at one point I'll manage to give this talk but there is a cost attached to it I came on stage dancing and being a fool my heart was pounding because it doesn't matter if I get on a stage with 10 people in front of me or a thousand people there is that moment before you go on stage it's like why am I doing this I do also want to just call out I joined the project much after I think a lot of people on this stage and just say thank you for paving the way and also I am younger than you and I really appreciate that you are paving the way for older people because I will one day hopefully be that so thank you and may I say what we are saying doesn't apply to women alone I think a lot of men have the same issues like I'm afraid to go I'm afraid to talk so this is like a human thing yes I think yes yes please I think and that's basically the reason why we are here is that it's still this old HBR article that actually kind of set the tone for a lot of things a man has a stage fright and then he applies for an event he has more chances to be picked than us so the problem the initial problem issue might be the same but I think that women and minorities in general underrepresented groups of people don't always get to overcome that fear because they don't always get called on stage so that's a big issue I think so we are at time I'll take another five minutes just to finish do we have any questions there are some questions just to gauge the audience because if you don't have any questions there are a few questions so how can we encourage and achieve more diversity on stage Chaya do you want to go I saw you reaching for the mic so I was wondering if she's going to start oh yes because we're going to get to her alphabetically yeah I think that I've been thinking a long time about this question of course I don't know if it's of course I got asked a lot of times to be on a stage and we covered this topic already but what is actually the purpose of being on stage from a minority group like are we just now being role models is that what is expected of us I'm just wondering about that that's a question I remember there was a conference at U Tech and one of the speakers said we'll know when we've achieved success when you can have a mediocre lesbian in leadership but I think about that a lot because I think there is that's part of the pressure I feel I'm like oh I got to be perfect because I want other people to see that we can do this rather than just thinking about speaking in general I think in terms of other pathways one of the things I really appreciate is across the project there are a lot of ways and the more we can elevate that so maybe you're really good at reviewing documentation like let's elevate that maybe you're not just writing it maybe you're reviewing it and you're excellent at spotting sorts of stuff I need someone who does that for me I can bust out a lot of content but need a reviewer and I think everyone on stage has done it in their own way and I think it's a the more we can get the next generation and the generation above involved my mom has a macular degeneration which is like partly losing your central vision and so I think a lot about accessibility from that standpoint and I would love to have her doing testing with that we're all going to be there at some point we're all temporarily abled and so I think there's a lot of interesting things there in terms of thinking about the resilience of an open source project where we just need more and more people from different backgrounds to be successful you had something to you wanted to say something about how to encourage and have more women more diversity in general on stage yeah now you called me should but I have notes that's why I asked you because you told me that you had notes about it I was just following so concentrated like your discussion and I was like yeah yeah and then my memory just cleared away yeah so maybe so there are initiatives out there who encourage women and non-binaries to get on stage and do that and I think they're quite successful and I think there's a lot of things going on there but maybe we also need a discussion about like the ugly things the things of me forgetting what I wanted to say the things of me not breathing enough and just talking talking talking and then not really being able to talk because I cannot get air like these things it happened to me so and it's not very does not look very professional and I think many people maybe paralyzed by these things that they cannot they fear this would happen to them and not do it because like they're scared of like what could potentially happen and maybe we need some more discussions of this because I've never heard anyone talking about these stuff yeah that's true I I think that in the diverse speaker program that the wordpress.org if you go to wordpress.org I want to say learn or training or well you'll find it Google is your friend there's a diverse speaker program and there is actually a section that addresses a little bit also the you know the on stage presence which is very difficult to achieve and yeah that's something that I think it's in a lot of people's mind and again we go back to the fact that underrepresented people feel that we always have to be perfect before we do something and I think it was John did you tell I think one time you told me you went sorry to put you on the spot but you told me that there was this you went to a PHP conference when there was this great developer that basically spent 20 minutes introducing himself and this was like a PHP guru that you know people came from all over the world to listen to him and learn stuff and the guy just spent 20 minutes randomly so and but the thing is that he gets away with it because it's a white man PHP guru and when women do that we don't get away as easily with that that's the sad reality so can I quickly add to that another way that I think we could help is to have folks who are from more represented backgrounds to give out their seats and to pay attention to that stuff it shouldn't just be on us it really is not fun to be that person or to get the last minute asked when I'm like you should have asked you can ask yes and then I'm going to point the attention to my friend you said I'm not going to MC events anymore because I always get asked and I think it's time people that look different than I am should do it so give it up for Alan Jordan as well who is a true ally okay last thing like quick round of what advice would you give to people starting out underrepresented people starting out in the workers community or tech yes yes I did I was trying how many things can I fit into like one thing but I would say just do you yeah find something you're passionate about and you want to tell about and prepare the hell out of it so practice practice practice practice like a talk like a zillion times I know my slides by heart and I go stand and do my talk because I own the material and if you do that it will all be okay it depends on like how everyone how everyone's personality is so either connect with people directly like go up to them tell them hey I love what you do or find another topic like you can talk to about that person I'm not that person and the way I did it was by volunteering or like getting like having a job to do and this way I got to know more and more people over time which grew into in my network that I have today and this is another way you can do it yeah I would say go do the thing no one wants to do and be great at it honestly like build subject matter expertise on the stuff that people are avoiding until it's cool I've noticed that time and time again honestly for a while that was DEI work no one wanted to touch it and so you can kind of build some expertise and kind of grow from there and you can also make a lot of mistakes because no one's looking can I add one more thing you can I think we all should accept the empowerment that you receive yes so I think that we are all empowered by people coming up to you you engage with them and everyone is probably pointing out you have a great story to share but what we do we downsize that so if we are open to accept that we probably will leave that thank you for reminding us that because that's also another thing that we discussed that we're terrible at taking compliments that was like an agreement more or less yeah I would say do it and do it within the boundaries that you set for yourself for your health because sometimes also kind of persevering and trying to do something when everyone tells you that you cannot do it it sucks because you should be able to do anything but your health you know I think should come first like I always say that I want to retire as the CEO of Microsoft I think that's a pretty hellish job so I don't think I really want to do it but I say to myself to pump myself up and say the sky is the limit I think you're right that there is something to be said for being a slow burn rather than a quick flame and that the slow burn is often what leads to a longer impact well thank you so much for being here today thank you for saying yes to this conversation and to this panel it is the first time that there is a panel like that is at Workamp Europe there were other work camps in the US I think there was one at Workamp Lisbon last week but basically let's keep having this conversation they might be a bit uncomfortable sometimes but we really need them right? so please round of applause for the team I will not say lovely because that's also another thing they always tell us oh you're lovely I'm a questions we have time for maybe one or two so if you run fast you can be them I told you we had four hours of content you didn't know first of all thank you all so much for overcoming the fear and getting on stage these are really important conversations to be having so you're great thanks there are a number of initiatives out there more women and non-binary folks speaking but what else could we all be doing to make the WordPress community a whole more safer welcoming and inclusive space do you want to take this? I've been thinking about this I think there's something to be said for having resource groups similar to companies so having things there's a group called BlackPress for example that I think is awesome and I think we could have more of these kinds of groups where necessary conversation can happen amongst the group but then also that can be brought out and advocated for on a larger scale and similar to like make teams you could have some level of authorities not the right word but there would be a way to be listened to or a pathway that is recognized in the project that I think could be really interesting of course then you can run into which we were talking about earlier there needs to be some intersectionality so I don't want a black peer person having to pick between which group they're going to join for the day and so I think there's a lot of work to be done but in my mind that's a place to start and to potentially experiment with I know that there is some talk about creating well there was yesterday a table diversity equity inclusion yesterday or today there was a blog post in one of the make blogs so I think things are moving just if you want okay I'm going to read this because I'm nervous but I don't actually have a question I just want to say thank you for putting yourself out there and being vulnerable I also think we should probably acknowledge the men that are here today I think there's a lot of men that we work with in the community that are incredibly supportive of non-binary and you know the sorry I'm nervous I'm not saying my words properly but the underrepresented groups there's a lot of men in our community that support those groups and I just want to say thank you for being here and for listening and whether you're battling to breathe or forgetting your words or not feeling like you should be out there I hope I speak for everyone to say that we as your audience are here to learn we're here to listen and we are not here to judge so please keep being out there so we can be here and learn from you thank you thank you very much it was great listening to you and yeah I had today also my first talk you did awesome my first big talk I had a lightning talk before in Portugal and when I had my lightning talk they told me Viola we are so sorry no one can ask you questions and my first thought was oh my god yay I don't need to answer questions I was so happy so what I would suggest is also choose the person who is going to speak because when I talk to some friends of mine and I think they would be great speakers but they say Viola I could prepare but if they're coming bad questions and yesterday some friends of mine they helped me to prepare some upcoming questions but if you are on the stage whew I was so nervous afterwards so I think we should let people choose if they want to have the questions on stage or afterwards because I think then we can decide on our own and yeah on the stage you're feeling sometimes not secure I like that thank you can I add I totally agree because I'm not a native English speaker and sometimes I get a question in soft Irish and then I totally don't understand what the question is and that will get very very embarrassing so and then I say come afterwards to me and then I will answer it but having to choose I think that's an excellent idea yes thanks Alma is about to kick us off Alma is about to kick us off stage I think first of all you guys are fabulous second of all there is one other thing that we can do as a community to ensure that this stage looks more like us and that is when you know someone who's fabulous but they're not up there tell them encourage them say get up there and let's just keep that applause going for a lovely panel