 Hello, my name is Lee Brandt. I'm a developer advocate at ACTA. I'm joined today by Heather Downer, who's also a developer advocate at ACTA. Today, we're going to talk about what it's like to be a woman in technology. So this is kind of a, can be a divisive topic, but I think it's important that we talk about it. So first of all, Heather, why don't you tell us what it is that you do at ACTA? Well, I'm a senior developer advocate working on a lot of the same things you are, Lee, which is in the Batman space, for sure. I've been here about a year, so I can tell you that I spend a lot of time looking at all the different kinds of technology that is both older and newer that has to do with the Batman ecosystem. And then I help create technical blog posts and thought leadership articles to kind of help people understand how to use ACTA with all of the new up and coming things that we have available in .NET. Nice. And how long have you been coding, programming? This is the anniversary year that will hit roughly about 10 years. So I'm really excited to say I officially have a decade in it. I was a career teacher, so I did this, of course, much later on in life than a lot of you guys have, but I'm so happy that I did. Nice. So that's a good segue into my first main question, which is how did you get into technology? Wow. It's going to sound a little crazy, but I've always been fascinated by some of the sci-fi movies that we watched, especially lately in the past, you know, 20 years or so. They've kind of stepped up their game and they have the most mind-blowing CGI. One movie in particular kind of cued me into how the CGI was even created. How was it put together? And that was Tron Legacy. So I love the immersive world that it was in. Regardless of whether or not you liked the plot, it is such an amazing thing to watch. And I remember asking a friend of mine who was going to film school, how did they create CGI for that? And they said, oh, there's this computer program that does it. I said, no, no, no. The real question is how did they create that computer program? Like, how did they put it together for that? And then I just kind of walked it back and it turns out a lot of the questions were answered by looking at some people who were doing C and some basic as well and how they were putting things together for, you know, the cinematic universes. It was pretty amazing. And so I wanted to know how they did that. And of course, I was drawn in by something called Flash back in the day because of how amazing things looked. And a lot of that was code that turned individuals, you know. So after that, I kind of wormed my way into a boot camp that I found in the Kansas City area. And I've never looked back. Nice. Nice. So this is the main crux of what we're going to do here. Do people treat you differently in technology because you're a woman? That's an excellent question. Yes. It depends on who it is. I think other women don't treat me differently because we all kind of want the same thing. I think a lot of us acknowledge that we have different life experiences in certain ways. But I think that you might have a different life experience as somebody who grew up in Silicon Valley because you're from the Midwest. So there are things that don't really separate us a lot. But I do think there is a tread lightly kind of approach by people who are not other women in technology that the first thing they want to talk to me about is the fairness aspect or whether or not I've been harassed. And I'm like, I would love for us to just talk about .NET 5 instead. How do we do that? And that's only a personal thing with me. It's in my face all the time. It's very obvious the differences. I also have an age difference too. I'm in my late 30s. And so that's also going to be something that's going to be difficult for me to relate to somebody who's just in college. It's just a little, there's all sorts of different things. But I think the answer is yes, they do because you stick out naturally. It's a natural human thing. They're like, oh, look, somebody who doesn't look like me is here. And it's the same for somebody who is of a different skin color as well. That's the same thing like, oh, it's not very often that we see somebody who is Hispanic that is, you know, a developer, maybe, at least maybe we're not familiar with it. But yet to them, maybe all of their co-workers are the same. You know, it's pretty natural for the question to come up. Okay. So one of the things and the thing that kind of started this all off is not long ago, you published a video. And I don't remember what the video was about. I think it was about what's it called, the new technology that's taken over JavaScript. I think it was a goodbye blazer. Blazer, yeah. And the first comment, the very first comment was, well, you're beautiful, will you marry me? I was thinking, okay, no, I'm not a super attractive dude, but there are attractive dudes that do videos on technology stuff. I've never seen a woman or a man for that matter comment on their video and say, you're beautiful or I want to be your boyfriend, girlfriend. I know that ever happens with men. So why do you, I don't know, how do you, how do you deal with that? Why do you think that is? I have experienced that before because I take pictures of myself as I travel and I put them on Instagram because I travel alone a lot. And that's a way that I capture the feeling I have in a certain location. So I was kind of used to the kind of creepy comments that are left. It was disappointing to read it, to see it on it. It hasn't just been on one video. It's been on at least 80% of them for me. While part of me is just like, it doesn't matter, turn YouTube comments off, it shouldn't even think about it. The reality is that some people just feel more bold because they can hide behind a keyboard. And a lot of them are intent. We like to think of ourselves as the smarter ones. We like to think of ourselves as the problem solvers. But oftentimes there are a lot of things lurking emotionally and mentally inside of developers, and not all of them, of course, but just because of the amount of isolation that we experience, that sometimes people won't really know what to do socially. They just kind of do whatever they feel like to do and they don't really have a lot of consequences because nobody knows who they are. It's become more prevalent now that we put our real names in front of things. But there's still plenty of people like on YouTube or Instagram that have usernames and we don't know who they are. I don't really know why this continues. And believe it or not, it actually is worse in the middle of the US than it has ever been for me when I go overseas in Europe. It seems like this particular area just seems to have a lot of people who I don't know forgot their manners or something. How I deal with that is really interesting. I try to delete it when I see it. And it is disheartening because there's part of me that wants to take any sort of suggestions or criticism that's helpful to get better at something. Maybe I didn't explain a concept very well for that or they didn't have enough information or maybe it was too long, too short. I welcome those kinds of comments. Please give them. But this is much more that has nothing to do with tech and they're just saying either really creepy things that sound positive or they're saying really negative things for no apparent reason. I mean the only way that I could deal with that is just have it removed. Although part of me wishes we could just turn off comments altogether because that seems to spark one troll allowing another troll to kind of just hang up. This psychologically I've had to go to an actual professional therapist and been like, I'm, this is my job. I have to be in front of people. How do we deal with this? It's just all the time. Well, you know that this is going to be here. It doesn't make it correct or right, but as long as you know that this is happening because they can hide behind their keyboard that you can take them a lot less seriously when it comes to these things. Remember, you're a logical human and therefore you should respond to logical questions, logical comments. If it wasn't a logical question or comment, you don't have to respond to it and you should probably remember it. Yeah. Do you find that? So one of the things that you mentioned is that because they can hide behind the screen name or behind their computer, they're a little bit more emboldened. Do you find that? Is it better in person or is it still the same amount of previous? Oh, it's much better in person. Okay. Because we have, first of all, I'm not saying that this is the case for all of us, but a lot of developers are naturally either shy or introverted, so they tend not to just come up to you and talk for better or worse, but there are also people who think very highly of themselves and their opinion should just always be shared in person and they certainly come up to me and talk to me about it occasionally. But I actually find that if they are an audience member for a talk I'm giving or a workshop or something like this, they tend to stick to what we're talking about a lot more because I constantly redirect the flow. I constantly just go, great, we could talk about that some other time. Let's go back to Blazer. Let's go back to talking about this. And usually there's a lot of very supportive people in the room. And so there's that non-verbal social pressure of others watching you be an asshole that is present. However, there are still some people that like to be heard, like to be on a platform, politicize their thoughts a lot. There's a lot of things that I feel right now is very scary specifically for men. Like if you were raised a certain way and it's no longer socially acceptable to behave that way, and you're still trying to figure out your way in the world, sometimes holding all of that concern and frustration inside leads to anger. And so I have been on the receiving end of outbursts or accusations like you're only here because you are expected, you are part of the expectation of diversity. You don't know what you're doing. Or I don't feel like you are enough of a nerd, enough of a hacker or whatever this is. Those are things that of course mirror my own insecurities of like, am I good enough to be here? And that's something that I'm sure all of us feel at some point. So it's not just a female thing, but it is definitely something that all of us want to be valuable. So it's really, I have to take that as if somebody is just suddenly attacks, they definitely have a lot of fear and anxiety inside that they are fighting with, because they don't know what the new normal is. How can you normally have a conversation with the women and have her not think you're creepy? You know, like, that's a big question that some friends of mine who again, don't have social skills, they have good hearts, they just don't have good social skills. They're like, I want to ask this person, but I'm afraid if I come up to her, I'm gonna look like I'm some sort of creepy weirdo, you know, and I said, well, just don't compliment what she's wearing or she looks like compliment her, the knowledge you got from her. Like, if you start with things that are not visual, they'll really help. Like they'll really help because then she feels like, oh, we're gonna talk about the thing that I'm passionate about. Yes, let's talk more. I don't know one woman in tech that wouldn't respond positively. Okay, nice. So you mentioned something earlier about diversity and the imposter syndrome. And I think that this is something that a lot of people who treat women in technology poorly don't think about. We all, I mean, I've been doing this for over 20 years, and I still have imposter syndrome every day. Every day is the day that I don't know what I'm doing. Right. So one of the things that I've heard and I've heard secondhand is someone saying she just got her talk accepted or she just got keynote or she just got that job because she's a woman. What does that do to someone when you hear that? Well, of course, the initial responses for me is probably different than what the initial response might be from another woman. So please understand, I do not speak for all women. I speak for myself. Because my first go to emotion is not anger. It's usually self doubt that I hear that and I'm like, God, maybe they're right. Like that is a terrible, I remember very specifically, I got into a conference in the UK at some point. And I remember sitting down a speaker dinner and I asked why they thought to accept me. It was a paid gig. And I was really like one of two, I think women there. And I asked, I said, oh, well, why did you accept my proposal? And like, what did you, what made you say yes? Because, you know, I came all the way from the US and there's lots of people here. So why would you say yes? And they said, well, we really just wanted to make sure that we had more diversity of speakers. And I was like, well, that was the wrong answer. And I said, he's like, well, that that was the reason I said that was the wrong answer. Because there's lots of women who are great at what they do because they're great at what they do. I know Tess Fernandez comes to mind immediately. Like she knows more about AI than I think a lot of men in her position do. And she's done a whole lot of studying specifically about that. And whether she was male or female, I wouldn't want her to be the expert to go on stage to talk about. You know, I understand that I'm not personally an expert at anything in my brain yet. But I do know a little bit about how to teach people a very complicated subject matter in a very simple way. And that is my superpower. Everybody has one as a speaker or as a teacher. Somebody has their thing. So when I said, oh, that was the wrong answer, he's like, well, that was the answer. And I said, okay, but there are women who also aren't good at this. And they don't have something to bring. But what I've discovered is that those women who aren't good at this job and aren't don't know enough to really share anything of value, they don't last very long, they leave. This is really difficult waters to swim in. So someone, I mean, you can't fake something that you know. It's very easy to expose someone that doesn't know the answer to a question or what they're doing. So it's always best to be honest, because we would much rather support somebody who says, I don't know, I haven't used JavaScript in this way yet. We are much more open as a community to somebody saying that than saying, oh, yeah, I know exactly what I'm doing. And then they don't know how to answer half of the questions is really frustrating. So I don't think those women stay long at all. We're talking less than a year like I don't think they would stay very long because they're not going to get asked to return for these things. So the women that you have left probably pretty badass. They probably do know what they're doing. So try taking a look at what their specialties are. I know it's difficult right now because I even I looked at, you know, all the submissions and I'm like, we have to take a look at making sure we have, you know, different faces of different people represented, but we don't have to, you know, take a subpar speaker just to do that. And I feel very strongly as someone in tech about that. That being said, you know, just it's worth taking another look at your female speakers or whatever female developer in your team, and look at what they bring if they were to be behind a Slack channel, and you were not ever to see their face and they had a different name. What have they brought of value to the team? And that is what you should talk about with them, not the fact that they look different or were born differently. So, and another thing that you brought up is generally women in tech that are there for a while are generally bad asses. Jennifer Marsden comes to mind every time somebody talks about women in tech. And part of it is just because she is so, so extremely intelligent. But at the same time, one of the first, we used to do these community jams before conferences, where everybody from that community was a like a user group leader or conference organizer or whatever, we'd sit down and one of that was one of the first times we talked about diversity in technology. And it was open spaces, I think, and Jennifer led the women in technology open space. And I sat down thinking that I had figured out that it was that men were the problem. We grow up being socially isolated sitting in front of a computer, so we don't have any social skills. And that's the reason when we get around a woman, we're just like verbal vomit, right? But she said, actually, no, it starts earlier than that. It starts at the very beginning when we baton howl all the boys and we better ready for all the girls from a very young age. Did you experience that growing up? Oh, of course, I was raised incredibly traditionally. I am the only one of my family that has had a career this long. I was pretty much encouraged to just be very customer service front facing. And I did that for a long time. I was in hospitality for 11 years, drove me nuts, because I was tired of telling people I'm sorry, instead of solving the problem. Because that was my your hands are tied and you work at a front desk at a hotel. And I was like, I can't handle this. And I would just wait for our computer system to go down so I can mess around with it and get tech support mad at me for touching anything. But it was definitely something that you are surrounded with. I think it's a little better now. Like, I have to say this, that I do think there are aspects that have improved since the me to move. I think that we are allowed to be more vocal. It's more socially acceptable to be loud about it. Whether that you like it, you know, like it's more acceptable to be loud. It's more acceptable to see somebody going into something technically. Like there is a Victoria's Secret model that famously helped to start an entire like coding boot camp movement. It's because she really fell in love with it. I can't remember which platform it is. I don't remember if she's one of those PHP people. But I do remember that she got pulled into it. And there's this whole movement about what does a developer look like? And there are pictures of different kinds of people, like all different shapes and sizes. And that's something that I was not brought up with. I was brought up with science as cool as a woman. I was brought up with, you need to find a job where you please people. That that was something very much a part of not just the family I was raised in, but like I was homeschooled. And I was like raised around a group of homeschoolers and that we all kind of were raised in a very like religious way that just said this is what women are supposed to do. They're supposed to be sweet. They're supposed to be pleasing others. And that was doesn't mean you can't do those things while in the scientific fields. It just was never promoted to me as a young girl. Interesting. Yeah, I remember her saying that very early on, women are complimented for being pretty where men are complimented for being smart. Yeah. And it just, it totally changed the way I thought about the situation because now I was like, Oh, wow, we got a much bigger problem than just giving some social, some social Emily post classes to a bunch of geeks in a dorm room. We've got to go all the way back to the beginning and start changing parents minds now. I think it's starting to happen. I think that it's just a little difficult for parents to even know what to tell their children. How do parents raise their boys now? How do parents raise their girls now? There's a little bit more of a, a little bit more help out there for like, how should you talk to your girls? Because there's entire organizations and movements just in the past three years that have started coming up saying, this is how you talk to your daughter and don't like praise her for this, praise her for that. There are guidelines right now. There still aren't really guidelines for boys in like the new world we live in. There while I agree with you that yes, this problem runs deeper and earlier in our, you know, the way that our brain develops. I think that we can't just be like, you go girl, you are awesome. Go girl, you're a queen and be like, guys, you're stupid because that sets us up for separation and not just our country, but our world is already very polarizing. So that doesn't help just within, you know, your own community. We have to find a way to lift both young boys and young girls up in ways they're empowering that they can work together and they can see each other for the interests that they have and not how their body looks. It doesn't mean you can't celebrate your differences, but just focusing on, you know, what value they can give to society outside of just something that was with, you know, beyond their control. Yeah, nice. So that's all the questions that I have. Do you have anything that you'd like to add to what we've talked about today? Oh man, I think if you are somebody in tech and you have children and there's a lot of you, I don't have children, but I can tell you this, you are not responsible for whether or not your child, your girl turns into a developer. You're responsible for giving them opportunities to be what they ever they want to be by giving them exposure to different kinds of jobs. And that's it. You don't, there shouldn't be a pressure on you to be like, well, they have to follow in your footsteps because that's also how girls start feeling like, well, I don't really want to be a part of this movement. I just want to be myself. And I don't want the expectation that because my mom was a dev now, I have to be a dev, you know, it's very similar to anybody who, you know, was a doctor or a lawyer, you know, like, well, this is the answer, you know, you have to you have to influence your kids. I think that's the wrong answer. So don't worry, you already have lots to deal with as a woman of tech anyway, just make sure that they are exposed to different options of things they want to do. And I think that this will generationally change probably within the next couple of generations. And we'll probably won't even really be talking about this. Nice. Well, it's helpful to remember that the development software development programming is infant. It's an infant in in its journey so far. I mean, I remember going through a talk and the guy said, so how many of you your parents were developers? And a few hands went up and then said, okay, how many of you your grandparents were developers? And there wasn't a hand in the house. He goes, that's how long this has been around. It's only been one or two generations. So this will, hopefully, like you said, hopefully, all this will get better. It's difficult to know what you're supposed to be because part of the way that we learn how to do anything is emulation. And if you came into programming, watching the matrix, you're like, well, I have to act and behave and look like Neo to be accepted among people who do this. And that's natural. That isn't something that we just invented. That's something like if you want to be a runner and say you loved running, but your body is the way it was born and you're kind of short and you have really big shoulders, but your legs are not as strong and you're supposed to look at this spelt deer running along with all these other runners. You're going to feel like I don't belong here. So I think part of the way that we can make this a little bit easier, a little bit better is the Hollywood portrayal of women as scientific people needs to change because that's how we program our brain to think about it. How do we fit in? We try to emulate. So I think it's an NCIS or something that comes to mind. And I'm like, well, you can be, yes, you can look like a semi-goth kind of girl who definitely is the rebel in the family and became a developer because that's a different job. But Tracy Lee is amazing. She's this amazing JavaScript developer that I know and she dresses like Alice in Wonderland. Like she's a beautiful girl. She enjoys makeup. She loves baking. There's nothing wrong with that and also slinging some code. And so I think once Hollywood helps us out a little bit with retraining different ways that developers can look, I think it'll go a long way to kind of making somebody feel comfortable to come into our community. Nice. Well, that sounds like a perfect place to end this. Thanks for taking time out of your schedule. I know we've got the company conference going on this week. So everything's super busy. So thanks for taking out some time to talk to me about this. I think that that's the only way we're going to make anything better is to get it out in the open and talk about it. But you have to talk to people with mutual respect. You can. So thank you for doing this. And thank you to Octa for letting us do this on our channel because not a lot of tech companies are comfortable talking about this subject. In my brain, it speaks a lot to our leadership that we get to have frank and honest conversations about things that are plaguing our communities. Yeah. And we've got women at Octa, which is a whole organization within an organization that's all about promoting women in technology. And it's all about talking about these things regularly, not just here in video, but every day at the company. So that's pretty cool as well. So thanks again for joining me. And thanks to everybody out there for watching. Hopefully this is helpful. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel and hit the little bell icon down there so you get notified when new content comes out. Like and subscribe. Yeah, like and subscribe. So and if you have anything that you want to add to the conversation, put it in the comments below. No creepers. So thanks. And until next time, keep going.