 Why do we care about diversity in WordPress? So the WordPress community is putting more and more effort into diversity. Why? And why is the community asking you to get on board with this vision as well? At all tech events and WordPress is no exception, diversity is a point of concern. Even if your event already seems like it's diverse to you, there's always more that you can do to make sure that people from all walks of life not only feel included, but valued. There may even be members of other underrepresented groups who you hadn't considered yet who could benefit from your event. Let's talk now about seven reasons why diversity in WordPress events is beneficial to WordPress and to your local community. And you can probably tell I'm reading off these notes. This is from an article that I published a few years ago on a Tuesday training post on the community blog. I can send out a link to that in the follow-up email after this workshop. So point number one is diverse events reflect the diversity of the WordPress users. As developers, designers, marketers, business owners, and content creators, we're not building WordPress and WordPress products just for ourselves. The group of people building WordPress must reflect the group of people who use it. When it's mainly one kind of person building it, we fail to include the voices and perspectives of other types of users. Just like how new designers who are unaware of color vision deficiencies may not consider adding other forms of visual cues while creating a user interface, there's also all kinds of things that we may be overlooking for our users. And a little quote, WordPress can be used by anybody, so it should also be built by anybody, just stuff I haden from who's our WordPress executive director. Number two, diversity makes WordPress more innovative. People from underrepresented groups in technology have a wide range of history, life experiences, and knowledge to share. When you have a diverse array of life experiences, you approach problems differently, just as a developer's point of view is going to be different from a user's point of view, so are our overall viewpoints. And by inviting more people to the table, more people's needs will be included, it'll bring in fresh ideas that will benefit everyone. Think of how video captions were originally created for people with limited hearing, and now they also benefit people who don't want to wake a sleeping baby or pet or person nearby or who prefer reading along while watching your video. Number three, diversity creates space for unique perspectives. More diversity means a better chance of bringing in contributors who are straddling several roles and thus creating unique things with unique perspectives. For example, consider power users who use WordPress in interesting ways, front-end developers, business people who use plugins to make specific kinds of sites or typographers who use WordPress to do creative things with typography. It's also important to include people who can talk about running a business in WordPress, how developers can communicate with designers, different things you can do with WordPress, et cetera. And people who come from different backgrounds have different life experiences that bring in all these different skills that overlap and create the unique perspectives. Number four, fostering a more interesting, creative, and engaged community. A diverse set of people are more creative. They're also more productive and motivated, and overall, everything becomes far more interesting. In fact, diversity and inclusiveness help people stay, invite others, and be far more engaged than a group lacking in diversity and inclusiveness. And this makes a lot of sense. If people feel welcome, safe, and don't feel like the odd man out, they are more likely to enjoy themselves and to contribute more. And just like a colorful mosaic wall is more fun to look at, a variety of people makes for a more fun and interesting experience. Number five, growing your community. As event organizers, we care about how many people are coming out to our WordPress meetups and work camps. The more people, the better. Diversity efforts are a great way to grow your community and have even more people with different backgrounds and skills attend your events. Especially if you see the same faces all the time, it's always nice to have fresh faces and perspectives. Attendees who come to events for networking or job opportunities will find immense value in the prospect of always meeting new people at each event. Number six is creating diversity in leadership. More and more people are recognizing the importance of having a diverse group of leaders for their meetups and work camps. When the leadership team is diverse, the events will benefit from having multiple perspectives and attendees and volunteers will feel more comfortable participating. Invite people of underrepresented groups who already attend and love your events to be leaders in order to empower them and encourage them to grow your event. In Vancouver, after Louisa and Andrina took our diverse speaker workshop, they created and led a new initiative in our community, a monthly WordPress users meetup, and it was very popular. And number seven, and this is why I do it, the things that happen for people through this work. Unlocking new opportunities. Bringing in more people with different opinions, viewpoints and experiences can unlock more opportunities for them. For example, when Kirsten contributed at our local Vancouver camp, she got spotted by a local agency, became their first female developer and quickly became the senior developer and team lead. Simply by being at the event, she was introduced to an opportunity that she may not have discovered otherwise. Another example is, because there's a lack of learner advocacy, TC, aka co-brother, created a business helping Black men learn JavaScript for WordPress. He created a community to support and enable men of color to earn a living in tech. And he had his own podcast for a while on the Do The Woo podcast network. And I know that for me, WordPress has changed my life twice, once getting out of debt by becoming a WordPress developer freelancer, and then a second time when I started doing this community work full time. And lastly, bonus PS, it's just the right thing to do. Although I've pointed out some good reasons above, you don't need an objective reason to make your events more diverse. Creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment is also just the right thing to do. I love this quote from somebody who posted on Twitter, John Cutler. Diversity is good for business, is not the point, even if it is true. It's almost like people are afraid of taking an ideological stand. It's okay to want to just address systemic inequality. You don't need a business case. Yay, okay. So now let's get into what does diversity look like in your part of the world? This section, this whole section is an experiment. We're going to try it and see how this goes. And I would love feedback afterwards. So first, I want to make an important distinction. A person themselves cannot be diverse. Diversity refers to a mix of variety. A person can however be from one or more underrepresented groups. So when we talk about diversity, this is for groups and underrepresented is for individuals. We use diversity to refer to a group that has a mix of different identities, both well and underrepresented. And we use underrepresented to talk about groups that aren't part of the well represented majority. So for example, where I live in Canada, the well represented are the straight, able bodied white men and the underrepresented are basically everybody else. Now when I say everyone else, here in North America, generally that's genders, races, ethnicities, sexualities, physical abilities, neurological abilities, age, etc. And I have since learned that other parts of the world have different underrepresented groups than we do in North America, such as spoken languages, countries, cultures, class, caste, religion, and more. You're probably thinking of some other ones for your region right now as well. And it's important to ensure that each events lineup is diverse for where it is located. What does diversity look like in your part of the world? So this is the experiment part. We're going to do two exercises now. Both of them will be individually and silently. You can share in the chat if you want to, but it is, you don't need to. The first one is we're going to look at, first of all, what do you think your diversity is? And then for the second one, we're going to look at data and facts. So first the question is, what are the demographics of where you live? In a moment, we're going to take one minute and write down what you think are the underrepresented groups of your area. When you're doing this exercise, don't worry for this if you don't know or you just don't have the right terminology yet. Just try and write something down. For example, completely guessing for Vancouver, I would say genders, all genders, people here are quite out about their genders, such as women, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, two-spirit, pangender, etc. And we're also very multicultural here. So I imagine there'll be a lot of black in Asian, maybe some East Asian in our mix as well that we should be paying attention to. So take one minute now. Pop in the chat if you have any questions about this exercise. I haven't been reading anything in the chat, so if there's anything important, nope, great, okay. So I'll give you one minute now to do this. Jill, just wanted to let you know there's a question in the chat. Thank you. About 10 more seconds. Doesn't matter how much you've written or not written at this point. So one of the arguments that I hear from people is, but there's no da-da-da people in my city, for example, here, but there's no black people in my city. Well, let's find out if that's true. Let's find out exactly what are the groups in your area and not only that, but what are their percentages. The reason that we want to do this is so that you have some facts to work off of and also could help you when you're creating guidelines for what diversity that you're working towards for your event. And a possible, one ideal version of your event could be making it like a miniature version of your region or better. So if I have, say, 70% white people and 30% black people, it'd be great if my event had 30% or more black people in my, say, in my speaker lineup or in my organizing committee, whatever thing that we're looking at at the time. And of course, you might be thinking, that's hard. I can't do that. Don't worry right now about the how, we'll cover that later. Right now we're just gathering information. So what we're going to do is we're going to pull up the demographic information for your region. If you already have a great site to use, use that. And if you don't, then pull up your Wikipedia page, which actually usually pulls from a great source anyway. If the information on the page is overwhelming, you can use a tool like chat GPT to summarize it. I will give an example. So for example, the prod, I'll show you the process for Vancouver. Please note that I'm not on the Vancouver organizing team anymore, nor have I talked to our organizers about this material. So this is all example hypothetical. So I would look up my Wikipedia page for Vancouver. And then I do a search on the page for demographics. And I get this information plus a whole lot more information when I scroll down. Personally, I find this a bit too overwhelming to understand how to apply this in a simple way for my events needs. So the magic of our AI tools, chat GPT, in order to get a quick snapshot for myself, I copy and paste all of that information into chat GPT with a prompt. Can you please summarize this demographic data and give me a percent breakdown of each type of group of person? And then I gave it examples. So I would understand what I mean. Let's say ethnicity, religion, etc. So this is how I put it in. And I copy and pasted all of the demographics that it gave me. And then it popped back with a simplified breakdown on ethnicity, religion, language, immigrants, and our LGBTQIA community. So this tells me what the people who collect data in the world, the census takers, what information they think is most important about our demographics. And then I can pick which groups are important and which ones do I want to actually look at further. So for example, for mine, the most important for my pretend event is going to be ethnicities, because in my region, language and religion aren't part of the culture here. They're not things that I want to focus on for my event. Immigrants is already covered by the same data on ethnicities. LGBTQIA is actually very important, but it's an invisible group. And I don't quite have the resources to know how to include it just yet. So great if I can have some people of that community at my event, but I don't quite know. Invisible minorities are harder to do. I'll talk through that a bit more in a moment. So what I would do is I would focus mostly here on the fact that surprisingly, to me, this was actually some new information, we have fewer white people than people of color. Our white Europeans are 43%, and we have 57% people of color, which actually isn't that surprising when I think about it. We have East Asian 29%, South East Asian 9%, South Asian 7%. Black community was way down the list at 1%. It didn't even show up in the top numbers, which was also very surprising to me. But this is a great reason to have data, to know, okay, if I'm finding it harder to get people out from that community, oh, there's a reason. There's just so many fewer of them here. Maybe there is actually none here. It's great to know what it is. And before you ask me if 43% white means of the white people here are underrepresented, it's all on the lens that you look at it. We are still overrepresented in technology. So there's the groups of my region, but there's also the groups of technology and my word press events. So you can think about that. Once you have the data, it gives you a better idea of how to think about it. And then you can still use your common sense and go, white people are still overrepresented, even though there's fewer in my region, still at my event, it's almost all white people. So if I want to work on that, there's obviously a discrepancy there. So this gives me, this could be an ideal to strive for based on these demographics, or it can just be data that I use to work, to figure out my guidelines. It's just more information to use to help with that. In my case, in my hypothetical event, I would also add in gender, even though it wasn't included in my wiki page. And also if there's anyone else of other groups that are not included here, who are a great fit for the event as well, such as people from the black community, from the LGBTQIA community, people with vision impairment, people in wheelchairs, et cetera, I'm definitely still going to include them. I'm not going to say they didn't show up in my percentages. I'm still trying to include as many people as different kinds of identities as I can. I'll give you a moment to try doing this now and ask me any questions on it. And if you want to spend more time, and if you want to spend more time on it, you can always take more time on it later.