 Good morning. Can everybody hear me? I guess I don't need to scream, sorry. Thank you all for coming. My name is Erin O'Brien. I'm on Twitter as Cool Aunt Erin. It's three separate words. It's not one like foreign word that people don't recognize. I'm actually a student at Wright State University. I have my master's degree. I'm getting my PhD in Industrial Organizational Psychology. So you're probably all wondering, what are you doing at a Ruby conference? Well, it turns out that my brother is actually a program. I don't know if you've heard of Joe O'Brien, but he is my brother. I've heard he's a big deal, but I don't see it personally. Sorry, Joe. Anyway, so I've been tagging along because apparently when you go to Ruby conferences, you get free drinks. And so I thought I'll go hang out with the conferences afterwards and get free drinks. And so every time I would sit around at these pubs with everyone, the same conversation kept happening where all the women, we'd look around and I would be one of very few. And it would be like, well, I'm not even a programmer, so I technically don't even count. So where are they? And then the conversation would just stop. No one knew what else to say after that. It's like, okay, what do we do about this? So I thought maybe I could profit from this conference thing that my brother goes to and maybe I could try to speak about the topic I do know a little bit about. I did my undergraduate honors research on sexism and stereotypes a little bit. So I have a little bit of information and I'm a psychology major, so I'm coming at you from the psych side of things, not the programming side of things. So I'm hoping you'll get something out of this. It'll be worth it, worth your while. The first thing I want to do is show you a couple graphs. I want to try to convince you that it is a problem. Maybe not a dire problem. We're not going to die if this doesn't get changed, but it's a problem. It is. I'm going to try to convince you of that. I'm going to give you some of the research that's out there. I'm going to warn you there's not much, unfortunately. I am a researcher by trade and I like it and I like to read the research and I'm very frustrated that there's not more out of it. And then I have a whole laundry list of do's and don'ts. So please forgive me for that. Or as the slides will say, don'ts and do's. So anyway, let's start off. Right now in the US, the workforce is almost 50-50. This is great news. This is exactly what we want to see. I'm not disappointed by this number at all. I'm happy with it. Most of us should be. This is what we want to see. However, what we don't want to see is these computer and math occupations. We're looking at about a 75-25 split between men and women. That's not good. And the worst part of this is that it's actually declining. These numbers are getting smaller and smaller. And there's a couple years where that number has stagnated, has been still, hasn't changed. But overall in the last about 15 to 20 years, it's been declining. And that's kind of bad news. So we need to fix that. For computer programmers specifically, it is about 22% female, which isn't horrible. We would like to see that number get bigger. And I'm glad that the previous talk mentioned open source because I'm sure you've all seen the statistic here. This is horrible. We want to avoid this at all costs, right? 2%. It's about 1.5 to 3%, depending on which statistic you look at. It doesn't matter. 1.5 to 3 is a really, really small number. We definitely want to see this increasing. So there's going to be a lot of variability in the different types of programming, et cetera. But anyway, this is a bad number. So I think that, has anybody here ever heard of Louis C.K., the comedian? Hilarious, right? I was going to show a clip, but he's completely inappropriate to show a clip at a conference, right? So I'm just going to do a little quote here. He said, and I'm a man. How many advantages can one person have? I'm a white man. You can't even hurt my feelings. And it's so true, right? I mean, this guy, he's a comedian, but he's so in tune with this. Like, he understands. He's like, I'm totally privileged here. And we can see it in the numbers in the programming community. It's not just limited to males and females in the U.S. We're seeing a division with races as well. So 75% white, the rest split between blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. So this is not just a male, female problem, okay? It's a diversity issue as a whole. Today I'm just going to focus on men and women. And I think that you could probably apply some of the things I talk about today to other groups of people. Yes. Off the top of my head, I'd have to say that it's 10% blacks, 11 to 12 Hispanic, and I don't know the Asian breakdown, to be honest. Does anybody, that's the closest I've seen 30 total. Okay, so I guess this isn't the worst case scenario. So, all right, employees are more aware of the sex of their coworkers than any other characteristic, religion, national origin, ethnic background, marital status, race, etc. The first thing you notice about your employee or co-worker is their sex, their gender. That's probably something there, right? I mean, if that's the first thing you notice, I would have guessed race personally, but I think that that's my racial bias that I have. I don't know. So anyway, this is an important topic. So I want to talk to you a little bit about stereotypes. Clear up a little bit of confusion. Stereotypes are a belief that we have. I believe this about a group of people. It's an overgeneralization. Obviously, there are always going to be differences within groups of people. It is different than like a prejudice, which is an attitude you have towards a group of people. So I can say I think that all computer programmers are geeks. They like Star Trek and Star Wars. That would be a stereotype, whereas a prejudice would be, I don't like geeks who like Star Trek because I like Star Wars. That's a prejudice, right? That's my own personal preference. I'm not giving anything away there. But those are the differences. So today, I'm just going to talk to you about stereotype, just the belief we have. Let's not get into the attitudes. That's a whole another can of worms that we don't have time for today. So just the stereotypes. And it's likely that you have stereotyped me in some way. And you don't know anything about it. Well, some of you do. Some of you know a lot more about me than others. But some of you know nothing about me. So you've probably stereotyped me in some way. I'm a female. I'm dressed moderately okay. I don't know. I'm not a fashionista. So maybe you thought I was, but I just broke that for you now. I killed that stereotype. I'm an academic. So you probably think I'm pretty nerdy, which I am. Unfortunately, I don't know what other stereotypes might have. But you've probably done it already. So here's one for the programming community, right? And it's unfortunate if you're within it, if you're in this stereotype group, you may not know that this is how people are looking at you. But when I did a Google search on stereotypical images of computer geeks, this is what I came up with. And I have to say that 10 years ago, this is exactly what I thought of people that programmed. That you were all sitting in your parents' basement. You were like coke cans and computer parts, like everything was stacked around you and you didn't like see sunshine for days on end. And you know, this is the stereotype that people have. And this is an issue because women see this as the stereotype of programmers. So how do you think they're going to enter into a field where they don't feel like they fit in? Or that this is a stereotype that nobody wants to live up to this? Now that I've worked in IT and a couple different companies and obviously my brother's a programmer and I've been around this community. So I know that this stereotype is not necessarily true. I don't know if most of you live in your parents' basement, though, to be honest. So I can't speak for all of it. But I don't think that I can speak directly to this stereotype. But I know it's out there. I Googled it. I mean, if Google tells me it's right, right? I mean, this is this is truth. So anyway, what does this what does this tell us? Well, there's actually really interesting study that they did. University of Washington, where they introduced women into a classroom for a computer science department. If that department, if that classroom had images of Star Trek posters and video games laying around, women were less likely to show an interest in the computer science field. If that same classroom still labeled as the computer science classroom had nature posters and phone books laying around, they were as likely as men to say they were interested in the computer science industry and field. Huge difference. They're stereotyping the images when you walk in the classroom. Okay, so this is a this is a problem that you guys, the technology industry has is maybe this image that people have of you. Now I don't want you guys to think that I'm here to point fingers and say all men are bad. It's all your fault. I'm not. I think it is a two-way street for everybody. People not in the field need to work hard at breaking stereotypes as much as you need to work on breaking those stereotypes. Men need to work as hard to recruit women as women need to work to get into the field. It is not a one-way street, so I'm not here to blame anybody, so please don't think that. So this is an obvious one, right? Just don't make your office space very stereotypical. You can fill it with non-stereotypical images. There's a renowned social psychologist who works with stereotypes and prejudice as a living, and she's awesome, huge in the field. She acknowledges her own stereotypes. So she says, I think I have this horrible image that black men don't raise kids. They don't raise their children. It's a very negative stereotype, unfortunately, and it's very predominant in America, unfortunately. So what does she do? She changes her screensaver to show men playing with their kids and parenting. She has images within her office that show this. It is going against the stereotype. It is helping her see images that are breaking the stereotype for her. So maybe these are some of the things you guys can implement in your offices, in your workspaces, etc. Break the stereotypes for other people and for yourself. So that's the other thing, right? Stereotypes go both ways. Not all women wear high heels walking around New York City and shop all day. I lived in New York City. I can guarantee you that's not what we do all day. Some of us barely scrape to survive, like, to eat food every day, much less go shopping for $400 pairs of shoes. So don't assume that all women like shopping or the color pink or panda bears. I picked that specifically for those of you that know me. Don't make these generalized assumptions about all women. So when you're developing sites for women, for example, maybe you want to avoid the ultra pink sites. If this is not aimed at a 10-year-old girl, then maybe we should have reconsidered some of the colors we used in this, right? This is a total turnoff for someone like me. I like the color pink. It's fine. It's as good as any other color. I have a preference for blue myself, but I'm not going to stick around a website like this for long. I'm assuming you're going to be selling me cupcakes. And if I don't want cupcakes, I'm not going to look at your website. And these, unfortunately, are both targeted to women in technology. Okay. Not all women in technology like pink. Not all women in general like pink. Some of us do. Some of us like other colors. So maybe we could try to tone it down a little bit. I'm actually, oh, and you can't see it very well at all. This is the Women's Institute website right here. These colors are actually kind of hideous to me, but I would much rather wander around this website than a pink one. Okay, because I feel very like I should be a little girl and I should be playing with princesses if I'm staring at pink. And here I feel fine. Like, okay, I can just read the text. I'm not worried about the design of it itself. Obviously there are special cases for everything and there might be an instance where you need to program to 10-year-old girls, in which case flowers, rainbows, unicorns, you know, fill it up. But in the meantime, just, you know, think about this. One other thing I want to talk about with stereotypes is that when I have talked to female programmers, one thing they have made very, very clear to me, the minute I meet them, is that they are not a stereotypical female programmer. I was like, oh, I didn't know there was a stereotype. I hadn't thought of it because honestly there's not many of you, so I hadn't really put you into a box yet, but I can gladly do that. The problem is no one can tell me what that box is. Nobody knows what a stereotypical female programmer is. So there's an identity crisis happening that I've noticed, it's anecdotal, not research based. So we need to figure out what that, what to do with that. So I don't have a do or don't here and I apologize about that. Yes? Yes. Don't ask. Do you do design? I'm actually going to get to something very similar to that. So thank you for bringing that up. Let's talk about job titles and the language we use. Sorry, keep dancing around. I should stop. I picked an organization that I'm 99.9% sure is not represented here. Just so they didn't bash me later on for doing this. So these were some of the job titles I picked off of their website. Can you all see? Yeah, you can see that. It's too bad I have a really cool little fancy design down here. Anyway, it's not pink. There are two things that should pop out at you from this right here. The first one, dispatch diva and princess of particulars. If I walk into an organization and I am told that somebody is a diva or a princess, I am no longer taking them seriously. It's true, right? Most of us are going to be that way. Yes. Rockstar. Yeah. Ninja. There are a lot of terms that you're going to stop taking people seriously. I would venture to say that it's probably worse for women. So if you call yourself a princess, people are going to think less of you than if a guy is calling yourself a rockstar. They might think a little bit less of you, but probably not as far down as a female. My guess. Again, it's not research based. So this bothers me. I am not a princess and I'm not a diva. And if I am a hard working programmer and I contribute to the organization, my job title should reflect that, right? These two don't. The other thing that stands out to me, yeah, I hate this, this image of a woman in a dress. And I know you guys are probably like, but we need to know very distinctly in all languages which potty to use, right? So we have to have the dress. But it bothers me because I don't wear dresses. So I don't associate with this image. And yet this is an image of a woman. Does that mean I'm not a woman? I realize it's very trivial and it gets into that feminist literature that everyone's really, really scared to talk about. But it's true. These images really do affect us. Some of us don't think about it. And so we don't talk about it. But it really does. And the image of a woman in a dress really, really bothers me. I don't want people to think of me as a girl who wears a dress. I want people to take me seriously. I want them to think of me as a researcher or a mother or whatever it is that I do that I'm good at. That's what I want them to think of me as. And a woman in a dress is not me. So this bothers me. So maybe one thing we can do is allow for more gender neutral or job titles, not necessarily gender neutral, just job titles that speak to your skill, to your attributes, to whatever you do, and you do it well. Don't sell yourself short, okay? If you have something like mother or babysitter or caregiver or princess or diva in your job title, you are demeaning the work you do. So women don't allow these job titles to appear for you, represent yourself, and men don't let the women around you that you work with use these titles. Tell them people are not going to take you seriously. Please, let's think of something else because you contribute to the team. How do you contribute and let's get to that? Okay, just something to think about. Family, this is a really big issue. Women work as many hours during the week as a man on average one hour less. But we go home and do twice as much housework as men do. That's a bummer. That's a lot of work. This is, this came out of Stanford research. You don't really need to pay attention to three separate subsections. Just know that when both parties, when both the man and the woman in a heterosexual married couple, when they're both working, if the woman is a scientist, she is doing 52% of the chores. If the man is the scientist, she's doing 61% of the chores. Both people are working full time and the woman is still doing 50% of the housework. Okay, so as an organization, there's really not much I can tell you here. As a husband, as a boyfriend, as a spouse, as a significant other, split it evenly. We don't want to come home and work twice as hard as you do. Right? This is a constant battle with some people. Don't be that guy that's sitting on the couch while his wife vacuums under his feet. And I do have to say this is a little bit ironic. I did try to search for an image of that online and I kept coming up with images of women on the couch with the men vacuuming because Google thinks it's funny to be ironic apparently. So I didn't have any stereotypical images to put up here for this. But this is one thing. This surprises me. As a woman scientist, I do not want to think that I'm going to come home and do twice as much housework as the guy. It's not really appealing to me. But it's not just about housework. Women are not appealing candidates for jobs because we have to go on maternity leave. How dare we? How dare we give birth to your children and have to leave the workplace? So we're not good candidates for stuff like sick kids. Who gets called when the kids are sick? The women always get called. We're the ones that have to leave work. When there's school vacations we're the ones that have to leave work and go spend time with the kids. In some cases it's even with the sick spouse. We have to go home and take care of the sick spouse. So it's a little bit uneven, a little bit uneven with this. As an organization, you need to be flexible for all of your employees. Not just the women, but with all of your employees. Make sure the men understand that if their kid is sick they should be at home taking care of their kids, that they shouldn't be on the phone to their wife saying what time are you going to pick up the kid, right? So as an organization make sure the men feel just as flexible to leave as the women do. And be flexible with women who are on maternity leave because you're lucky in that a lot of you are able to do your jobs not in a office, right? A lot of you can do work at home. So tell the women, hey, you're on maternity leave, you want to work a couple hours a week. Great. We'll allow it. Okay, so just be very flexible for everybody. I'm not saying that women need concessions here. I'm saying that the men need to understand that they should also be taking a part in this as well. Okay, it's a two way street. And I don't think the men are getting encouraged to leave. Men don't get maternity leave, right? We get in the States, we get like three days or a week or something. It's pathetic. Who says the man doesn't have to be at home with the kid? I don't understand this. It doesn't make sense to me. And the women get six weeks, which in America is just a, it's an atrocious concept anyway, but the point is be supportive, be flexible for everybody, networking. So how did all of you get into your job that you're in now? You at some point had to speak with another human being in the same job, right? I'm assuming you did. You had to get the job somehow. So one of the ways you do that is you go to conferences. Conferences are awesome. You get to meet new people, you get to socialize, you go out to the pubs at night from what I've heard. Rumor has it some people occasionally will go out and drink afterwards and socialize and you keep talking about this stuff. So think about this as a woman coming to a conference like this. And I have to say that I actually was physically overwhelmed this morning with the number of men and not just the number of men, but the number of men I don't know. And so I'm not a very outgoing person for people I don't know. And I just can't go up and talk to somebody I don't know. Well, as a woman, it's not just because me personally, Erin O'Brien is shy and introverted to an extent. It's also because men are scary, right? Men are scary. You guys don't know this sometimes, but you are. When I walk home, I like to say that I've been staying here for three weeks now. So it's technically home to me. When I'm walking home at night and I see a guy walking down the sidewalk, I instantly grab my purse just a little bit tighter, put my head down a little bit further and I walk just a little bit faster. And then I start calculating, where's my phone if I need it? You know, who am I going to scream to if somebody, something happens to me? These are all processes that I have to go through walking home. So when I'm at a conference and I'm surrounded by big, scary men, I'm not necessarily going to go talk to you guys really aren't big, scary men, I promise. I'm trying to make a very big broad point here, that it's hard for us to go out to a bar, very bad situation for women, right? We don't want to put ourselves in this situation. There's alcohol involved, bad things happen when alcohol is involved with men and women. It's unfortunate that it happens. So I don't want to do these things necessarily, but to further my career, I have to. I just went on a job interview right before I came here and I had to go to dinner with, like, the department and it was all a male-dominated department and I just felt really uncomfortable. It was just not a good situation and one of the guys orders wine and I instantly start thinking, oh, there's alcohol and this is terrible, you know? So just be mindful that it's not always easy for women to break into networking through the social aspect. I do have to say, and I'm going to pat you all on the back for this, is that honest to God, I have never, ever, ever felt unsafe, ever hanging around this particular group, okay? Meaning the programming community from what I have spent time with. I have never felt uncomfortable, unsafe. In fact, quite the opposite. I've always felt quite safe. And doing a quick search, I know that there have been incidences and I don't want to get too far into them. They have been very few and very far between. In other male-dominated organizations or groups, whatever you want to call it, that is not the case. So thank you all for being the safest of the male-dominated groups that are out there. I appreciate it. But seriously, I mean, you guys just understand that this is how you network. This is how you move forward in your career. And it's a little bit harder for women. It is also harder for women to travel. So how many of you here have a spouse or significant other that you left to come here? Yes? Keep your hands up. How many of those of you left kids to be here? Yeah. It is very hard for women because most of the people that had their hands raised were the men, right? It's not just that you say to your wife, I'd really like to go to this conference. And she says, great, go. You know, she has to let go at some point and say, I want to go to a conference. And if she says that to you, you should say, hmm, I've gone to quite a few this year. Maybe I should let her go as well. And I will stay home and take care of the kids. So it's not just a matter of networking and socializing. It's also just trying to leave the house. They want to go to conferences too. So as an organization, encourage your women to go, encourage them to use a buddy system, take somebody to a conference that you do know, it's much easier to meet people when you're a team. Okay. So we'll move on. Now, this is my specialty. I do IO psychology. One of my specialties is selection. Let's say we have a job advertisement, and it says requirements of college degree, two years of experience. And this is my bias here. I'm a statistician. So we need you to know Excel, SPSS SAS are, when I put by log and HL on, these are just statistical tools that we use. A man is going to say, I've definitely got Excel. Who doesn't? I've definitely had SPSS. I've worked with it. I kind of remember doing R in a class one day. We think we did a school project on it. And my two friends do all this other HLM by log stuff. Right. So totally qualified for this job. Totally got this. I'm going to apply. What a woman is doing is she's saying, okay, I've done projects where I've used Excel and SAS and R. I did a school project where I use by log, but I didn't really quite get it. And I've never seen HLM, but I've heard of it. Totally not qualified for this job. I'm not going to apply. These are the thought processes that women are going through were self selecting ourselves out very early on. So as an organization, one of the things you should do is be a little bit more flexible. Don't be so stringent because you might be losing out on somebody who has four out of five or three out of five skills, which would be enough for you. Okay, so be realistic in your job advertisements. You are not being sexist in your job advertisements to post these things. But what I'm telling you today is that women are self selecting out. So try to be a little bit more flexible as an organization with these. Another thing that we do as women is we sell ourselves short. On a resume, you will see I completed this project on time under budget and beyond the customer's wildest expectations. I'm awesome. I'm a rock star. Right? That is what a man is going to put on his resume. A woman is going to say, oh, I was so fortunate. I got to work with a team of people and we completed this really cool project. Okay, I'm not taking ownership of it right away. I'm telling you how lucky that I was to be on the project. Okay, these are all things that we do to sell ourselves short. Women stop doing it. One of the things I want to challenge all of you in this room to do is I want you to take a co-worker who is different from you, male or female, particularly, and I want you to write their resume for them. You know what their skillset is, right? You work with them. You should know their skillset. Write their resume. I dare all of you to do it and then compare it to the resume they have. It's going to look differently between the men and the women. I guarantee it works every time. Okay, so that's one way to think about it. So women step up, take claim, take ownership of what you've done and men understand that when a woman says that I was so lucky that they let me work on this project with this great group of people that what she's saying is I went in there, I took charge and I got it done. That's what she's saying. Okay, unfortunately, when we attribute success and failure, it's different from men and women. When men succeed, obviously it's because he's good at what he does. Obviously, he's got the skill to do it. When a woman succeeds, wow, she got so lucky. I wonder where this attribution is coming from on her resumes, right? When a man fails, it's because of bad luck. When a woman fails, she wasn't good enough. She just didn't succeed. Yes. Perceptions. This is everybody. This is a research done for perceptions of people's successes and failures and the way we attribute it. And so as a society, women do it to women. So we're just as guilty as anybody else for doing this. Okay, we can sit like, whoa, I got on this project. I got this job. I was so lucky. The other two people must have been total crap. Right? That's what we tell ourselves. Whereas a guy is like, obviously, that's the greatest thing they've ever seen when I walked in there. Okay? So unfortunately, we have these societal beliefs. I'm going to challenge you to not reject a woman at a resume level. If you, she sends you her resume. She finally thinks she's good enough for this job. And you compare it to a man's resume. And it's a little bit different, a little bit less. I'm going to challenge you as an organization. I know this is tough to go ahead and interview her anyway. Because she is likely selling herself short. And both of you are going to be missing out. I know that's really difficult to ask. Organizations are like, no way. The selection process is hard enough as it is. And I get that. But I'm challenging you today to interview her anyway. Give her the benefit of the doubt. If you want to see more women in this organization and this group, then please do this for us, for them, for you. We also, as women, we get shorter letters of recommendation. Bummer. There's a study done that there's actually a word count done and women have shorter letters of recommendation. They tend to group all of the adjectives together in one sentence instead of explaining each adjective in a separate sentence, which they do for men. So if you're writing a letter of recommendation, please be conscious of this. Think of it as, I'm writing a letter for Mr. So-and-so, write it out and see if it's different than writing it for Ms. or Mrs. So-and- So. See if there's a difference. We also get lower job performance ratings overall. Female and male managers rate females lower. It's a bummer. Blacks and whites do it as well. Blacks and whites will actually give lower job performance ratings to blacks. It's a bummer. It happens. So think about this when you're doing job performance. One thing you can do if you're doing job performance ratings is make them objective. I know that you guys don't necessarily count widgets. I get that. And it might be a little harder and I can't give you a specific example of how you might make a job performance rating objective. But when you are doing these, think of the most objective things you can that you can check off for these people. That is one way of reducing this variability. The other thing you can do is don't use these job performance ratings to determine pay increases. Because when we use these reviews that now we know that women are already a little bit behind in the review, now they're going to get paid a little bit less as well. Which brings me to my next point. That 82 cents does not equal a dollar. Does anybody know what that means? Women are getting paid 82 cents for every dollar a man is making for the exact same job. Don't be that person in the organization who is paying a woman 82 cents for every dollar they're paying a man. This is criminal. This makes me so crazy. On average at 75 cents in the computer science field it's 82 cents. Yay, you guys are so much better. I would pat you on the back but I'm morally obligated not to. One way we get around this is job titles. If you have a job title like princess or diva and somebody else has a technical maven or whatever it is they're calling themselves. You can easily say they're not technically the same job. You know what you're doing and don't do it. Go through and make sure you're paying everybody the same. Okay. Now I'm going to get into my whole big long spiel of do's and don'ts. I'll try to go through them quickly. Don't ask women why there aren't more women programmers. They don't know they are one. They did it. They don't know why their peers aren't doing it. Right. They don't know. They are loving life and they don't know why everyone hasn't come to the light side, dark side, whichever one you prefer. Instead how about you read the blogs that they're writing, the interviews that they're doing, the articles they're writing, et cetera, and find out. That's what I did to get this stuff. Don't ask a woman in the field to speak for all women in the field. One of the reasons why I thought that it would be better if I came up and did this than asking somebody else to do it was because I'm not technically in the field and it's very hard for a woman, some women, to come and speak for all women in the field. They don't know. There's individual differences. They've all got a different opinion. They don't want to piss somebody off. You guys get really aggravated from what I see of little things. I've realized they're big things for you guys but you guys have like a difference of opinion in one place and the whole thing blows up, right? So a woman does not want to come up here and be like, you guys remain and you stop, right? Don't ask a woman to do that. Don't do that. You should be asking men to speak to other men about this problem, preferably men that understand the problem, except the fact that they have privileges that women don't, etc. Don't assume a woman works in HR. That's one I got. What did she say? Don't assume she's a designer. Don't assume these things. Assume she's a programmer. She's at a programming conference. She works in a programming industry. Assume she's a programmer. If she's not, she'll tell you. Trust me, I tell everyone I'm not a programmer here. Okay? I don't want you guys to start talking to me in a language I don't speak. So assume that she's a programmer. If you're going to make an assumption, let it be that one. Yes. Yeah. Oh, okay. I see. Okay. But you all understood what he was saying. Okay. Right. The whole point is that you're not, you're not a real programmer from what I've seen. That's the problem, right? I was going to have all the women stand up at the beginning and be like, raise your hand, tell me who all the women are. And then I was going to tell you, don't ever do that. But I just got ahead of myself. Don't point out, especially if like a woman walks into a room and it's a room full of guys, we're like, yay, a woman just walked in, yay, everyone clapped. Don't do that. She is going to want to turn around and run as fast as she can, right? Nobody likes to be put on the spot in that kind of way. It's kind of a negative thing. So don't do that. Try not to point out, try not to do it. It happens. Instead, ask her how she got started. Start a conversation with her. I mean, she's here for a reason. Find out why. You've got some common link. Try that approach instead of, you know, cheering for her as she walks by. Don't assume a woman isn't a real programmer. I've seen that on several blogs, several, more than three, I believe. I've seen people say I'm so tired of people assuming I'm not a real programmer. I would love to give you details about what that means. Unfortunately, I'm just not quite qualified. Instead, ask her what her favorite project was to work on. I've actually heard conversation talk of guys doing that with other guys. Like, so what are you working on? And oh my God, I got this great project. Do that with a woman. She likes her work. That's why she's here. Ask her what she's doing. She loves so much. I love this. There were so many cute pictures of babies on computers. It's adorable. Way too many pictures of babies on computers. Start them early. How many of you here have kids? Raise your hand. Very high. How many of you have girls? Almost everybody. Start them early. Your kids as babies should be comfortable with computers. We didn't have that luxury. We were told if we touched a computer it was going to break. And that thousand dollars your parents were just going to take out of your hide, right? Computers don't do that as they used to do. Get them on there quickly. Get them comfortable with the computer. Get them programming as early as you can. One thing I do want to quickly mention is there's this thing called a hacker culture. You guys talk about hacking. As an outsider when I hear hacking, I don't always just think of the movie. I think of illegal things that you're doing. You're hacking government computer websites. You're getting all this information, right? That to an outsider is what we're talking about. It's illegal. Women are risk averse. We try to avoid risk at all possible. So when you start talking about hacking, we think, oh, it's illegal. I might not want to do that. Whereas a man's hacking awesome. Where can I get into? What databases can I break into? So some of the terminology is a little bit turning off women. So we want to think about that. Do get involved with organizations helping women. There's something in the US and I'm not sure if it's here yet. It's called STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. And it is trying to recruit women and minorities into science, technology, engineering, and math. There are awesome, awesome programs. There are scholarships out there. There's all kinds of things going on. Find it. Find it near you. If it's not near you, start it. Figure out a way to start encouraging women and minorities to get into this field. You love it. You are here because you love it. Spread that love to people who don't know that it's out there. Okay, and this is one way to do it. As an individual, you should be doing it. Find people to mentor high school kids, et cetera. Don't go and hang around high schools. That's creepy. Find out legitimately how you can get involved. Yes, there are plenty of organizations out there. You can look them up. There's girl IT in Columbus, I think, girl develop IT with a pink website. You can do it as an organization. You can support them. Do it individually if your organization isn't doing it. Okay, this is my last don't. Don't ask out a woman that you work with. Oh, that is a big negative. It makes a very hostile workplace. If I think that I'm going to a place where they're just going to keep hitting on me, I'm going to be very uncomfortable and I'm going to leave. Don't do it. Yes, there are workplace romances that work, but the majority of them don't. They cause uncomfortable situations and just don't do it. If it's worth it, one of you will leave. Okay, don't do it. Do. I'm stealing from Dave Thomas because I love, love, love his talk that he did. And thankfully it was online. Inspire someone. Mentor someone. Be that somebody that guides you in guides them into this path that you chose. Somebody did it for you. Do that for somebody else. Okay, very quickly. I told you guys I'm a researcher and so hopefully I'm going to get started on this stream of research actually legitimately studying some of these questions that are out there. There's a ton of questions. And so you may be seeing solicitations from me in the next year or two asking if I can please send out a survey to your organization. And I would appreciate any help that you can give. And I'll be looking at specifically I'm an IOS psychologist. I want to know about selection procedures, job performance, et cetera to see what these differences are. So anyway, that's all I have to say. So thank you. Question. Do you have a question? You showed the balance of so you said I want to I want to demonstrate to you that there's a problem. Right. What I would really like to see there is not just that there isn't an even number, but that we're missing out on something by not having women in teams. Okay, so if you can do research about performance of teams and teams that have got a better gender balance to demonstrate that those teams are actually more effective because that's my you call it empirical experience. I actually like I'd like to see that proven so that people can see that it's it's worth it. I've actually taken a class on teams. And one of the things we do know is that smaller multi or smaller, more diverse groups for shorter periods of time are the perfect teams and diversity, including gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, et cetera. So we do know that those are more effective teams specifically. But yeah, I see what you're saying. So I will definitely look into that. Less than 18 months, any team that was around for more than 18 months became less effective. That was the research. Just in general. That's obviously there's always going to be differences. Yes. You said you said I am a something psychologist a couple of times. Sorry, you didn't get that industrial organizational. Oh, obviously. It's it's IO. We call it IO in the States. Here it's called work psychology. There's not many programs here, unfortunately. Work psychology. It's just about selecting great individuals, good performing individuals, making them better performers. How do we keep them happy? Do we pay them more? It's not how we keep people happy. How do we select people? How do we keep them, et cetera? That's what IO psychology is in a nutshell. Yes. So someone of the vocabulary, one of the things we have a problem with is around vocabulary, right? And I understand that a lot of things shouldn't be excused off because, Hey, this is part of our culture. But I actually would would I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about the hacker word, because we've had a problem in our industry of taking back that term. It was taken and used modern media, that kind of thing for what it is. But there's actually a true set of pride, which comes with finding things that you want to know how much it gets done, finding things that need to be fixed and going deep. Where is the balance? Using that as an example, how do we strike a balance of going, Yes, this is something that's putting people off versus this is part of the culture. Yeah. And no, I mean, every every organization, every group has that problem. Psychology has that problem with things like you Myers Briggs. We speak a different language than you people, you non psychologists speak. And I'm obviously grouping and over generalizing again, but we have a different way of speaking. And so we run into the exact same problem. And so go to Hollywood and have them make a new hackers movie and see how that turns out. I don't know. Yeah. Yes. Hacker culture and get them started earlier on the same slide. Were you saying expose them to that concept early? Or were they just kind of on the same slide by chance? I think that I tagged them on the same slide as two very separate things. And I just didn't want to leave the baby picture too early. It was too cute. I'm sorry. You could make that argument too. If you expose kids to the hackers, not a bad thing. That's actually a really good point. Yeah. So like societal problems, this is one of the less actionable ones. And I want to encourage people to take action on the more actionable points that you raised primarily. But I mentioned it anyway. You didn't mention education system at all. Are there any particular things that you'd like to see that you think we could benefit from doing different as people move through schools and colleges? Yeah, I actually read somebody out there was taking programming into high schools and getting girls interested in it. And one of the things he did was he would give them a tat like a homework assignment like, you know what girls, I need to figure out how to balance my checkbook or I need to figure out how to do this or whatever. And every day they would get a new assignment and they would be really charged to do it. And so I would encourage that if you have the time then to go out to these schools and give your time freely, hopefully if you're willing, nobody's going to make you do it really. But yeah, that's the education system totally sucks in general, even with the universities in the U.S. for computer science in general. So I think I'm done. I just got the big, sorry.