 to come out and hear the best culture has to offer. It's a high bar. It's my great pleasure to introduce Michelle Glosser. And I don't know if this has happened to you, if you're members of the online Mormon communities, any of them. But sometimes we see people's names online, and we think, all right, that woman's in Feminist Mormon Housewives, or that one's in the hub, which is the Facebook group attached to Sunstone, and we think of us as just inhabiting this little pond, this little place on the internet. And then sometimes you open your computer and you see Michelle Glosser's name on Yahoo! Glousers, Sue, Sarah, Glouser, on Yahoo! News, and you think, oh, she looks just like the woman that I know from Feminist Mormon Housewives. The person that I know online must think it's really neat that this other woman is doing this thing that's in the news. Then you realize that your little puddle, your little pond is in the news, and that the women of FMH, the women of the hub, and the exponent are out there doing these really amazing things. And I'm so glad that she agreed to come and talk to us about them today so we can be brought into her little pond, too. Welcome, help me welcome Michelle Glosser. All right, thank you, everyone, for coming. This is my talk, I look like an engineer, but my Mormon community hasn't always thought so. I'm Michelle Glouser, as Sarah just said, and I look like an engineer, more specifically, a software engineer. However, if you had told me this 10, 15 years ago when I was in a Mormon majority high school in Salt Lake, I wouldn't have believed you. Looking back, I wish I had discovered the tech industry earlier because it seems like a pretty clear fit. When I was in primary, I loved playing with DOS, and I played Thexter and Tetris and all sorts of games on my computer, and I fiddled around with MS Paint and basically hogged the family computer. I was in the multimedia computer club at school and I memorized all of the word perfect keyboard shortcuts because I like to write stories and I loved all those shortcuts and as soon as word took over, I was so mad because there weren't all those shortcuts anymore. And then when I turned 11, I found out about this giant DVD thing called a laser disc and I was like, oh, that's so cool. I should use that in my book report. So I convinced the school librarian to teach me how to use it and then I borrowed it so I could show one digital photo of an animal. Once I was in Young Women's, I had the chance to get on the internet at my uncle's house and I was supposed to be playing with my cousin, but instead I spent hours on the internet looking for Tamagotchi stuff. And I found a Tamagotchi cemetery. Does everyone here know what a Tamagotchi is? It's one of those Neopet things from 1998 or nine and you feed it and it poops and you're supposed to clean up after it and make sure it doesn't die. So I was so excited to find stuff about that on the internet apparently. After that I got pretty addicted to free-sell and solitaire on the computer and then I ended up teaching my grandma how to play these games so that she could learn to use a mouse so she could do family history. And after that she would call me whenever she had a computer question. And at the junior high, I was in the ex-filers, E-X-E filers club and we learned visual basic and I thought that was pretty awesome. I also got the chance to go to this girls in STEM workshop called Expanding Horizons and I made this my first HTML page called Michelle Glauser's Fun Page. I called it FOMG which isn't as bad as it sounds. It's fans of MG. That was before all of these shortcut words on the internet I think. Anyway, then I signed up for my first email account and I was amazed how it was so cool. Then I realized that I really wanted to have internet at our own house but my mom and my dad said no way. They didn't want it and they didn't want to pay for it. So I sneakily got a disc with Juno on it from my uncle and I got the internet working at home and we hit it from our parents for like six months. Even though there was that dial-up sound at the start we'd put a pillow over it and Juno since it was free it had like this ad that would show up and you could never get rid of it. So you just have to push it to the side and then check your email and it was so exciting. We got print shop and I loved playing with that and once we got a color printer I printed everything you could find on there. And then in high school I was the first person I knew to get a digital camera and when my AP art history class visited San Francisco everyone was amazed that I could take pictures and delete them and check them and they were horrible quality but I still have those pictures and it's pretty awesome to look back at those especially now that I live in San Francisco. So in the tech lab class in my high school which was Olympus High I was the only girl and I didn't think there was anything weird about that. I thought it was quite fun. I think I probably wondered why there weren't other girls there. And then at church I was the only young women who opted to do the family history Sunday school class because I wanted to learn to use PATH. So I was the only non-adult in the class and I picked it up really quick and after that they were all dazzled by me. So once I got into Relief Society after high school I started blogging. This was 2003. This was pre-blogger. I was using Joe user a really old blogging platform and I thought that was pretty awesome that we could blog online. I got my first jump drive. It was 64 megabytes and that was great for all of my essays at college and then I started working at the Family History Library in downtown Salt Lake and while there I realized there were a lot of things that could be more efficient if we use technology wisely and I ended up implementing a plan to use blackberries to have better customer service to get books out of high density. I thought that was pretty awesome and it was the first time I'd been able to look up internet on a phone. So that was pretty awesome. So then after that I moved to Germany and while there even though I was pretty far away from Silicon Valley I was in an early adopter of a whole bunch of Google apps. I had Gmail, I spent 30 minutes every morning reading my scriptures and then I spent an hour reading Google Reader all the blogs I had on there mostly mommy blogs, Mormon mommy blogs. And then I used Google Voice so my American friends could call me and I used Google Docs to work with my fellow students and Google Analytics on my blog. And even though I didn't know much about coding I was able to make a new blog template for my blog and I even finagled a dropdown menu which I thought was pretty awesome because I didn't really know what I was doing. I would just Google things and stick them in and see if they worked and play with them. So I ended up writing my master's thesis on autobiographical acts on the internet. And I now point to that as like my link to technology. I was looking at technology just from a humanities standpoint. But the problem was after my master's I was floundering. I had two humanities degrees but I was rejected by the PhD programs I wanted to get into for digital humanities. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do anyway since I had always had this feeling that I could have these career goals to be a professor but I really would just get married and have kids and that would be that. Because that's all I heard, right? And also I was working at a startup in San Francisco and I wasn't making enough money to pay rent. So I was definitely floundering and this drog that looks like it's floundering is actually the mascot of that company I was working for. I think that's kind of funny. Anyway, so there was this big turning point I was coming up to. I was working with engineers and it rekindled my passion for learning new technologies and then as the person in charge of social media for the company I wished I could build things myself so I'd have content when I wanted it. So I went to Google of course and I Googled how to build a website and I found a way for me to learn software engineering without having to go back to college. And it was Hackbright Academy which is a 10 week software engineering program in San Francisco for women and it was so awesome. It was like I had found my groove. I didn't know what Python was and within 10 weeks I was a Python programmer. I was able to make apps that I had always thought would be cool to have that maybe no one else wanted but they were useful for me and I learned about negotiating. I learned all sorts of things that I had never heard before as a girl growing up in Utah and I thought wow if only I had found the tech pathway sooner and I started thinking there were all these missed connections right so there are no church activities about tech or careers even though I think the boys probably had that and it felt a little bit sad to me so when I was a young women's leader I said let's do a career night. And then my pre-calculus teacher was my dad's best friend and we had dinner with him once a month and he taught a CS course and programed for Texas Instruments but we had never once had a conversation about it and I just thought oh I could have learned that from him but I didn't and then there was a strong CS program at the University of Utah which I did not know when I attended there. So I started asking what can we do to help Mormon girls and women find their paths. I'm a little biased and I like to tell every woman I know that they should become a software engineer but I realized that there are a lot of different paths and mine is different from the one that is usually prescribed by young women's lessons I would say. But there are some other ones as well that might be good for people. So these are some ideas I came up with. I think we need to have more intellectual encouraging conversations with girls and women. I feel like conversations with young women for example, center around looks and dating. I think we can move towards more intellectual conversation. I think we should also expand the focus beyond just motherhood and spirituality so we can feel more fulfilled and find our place in the world I think. And I think we should regularly educate girls and women about different life options and support them in those. Provide challenges and leadership roles all of which can be done in young women's I feel like and give visibility and voice to strong women role models. So after I did Hackbrite ever since then I've been really passionate about helping underrepresented people feel more comfortable in tech or to join tech and I've been organizing workshops. Right now I'm focused on coding workshops for low income women and gender queer adults in the tenderloin of San Francisco. Thank you. But last August my husband's coworker who is a woman's software engineer was on an ad for their company and people started taking pictures of it and writing on social media. She must just be a model. She's too hot to be an engineer. She doesn't look like an engineer. And she so she wrote a medium post about this saying I look like an engineer and I reached out to her because I found out she'd been getting a bunch of negative emails as well and people asking her out just because of this ad. So I said we should do something about this. Let's put up a response billboard just showing a whole bunch of different faces that aren't the stereotypical software engineer. So she came up with the hashtag I look like an engineer. It went viral in a couple of days because I shared it with a whole bunch of women in tech groups and it resonated with people worldwide. And we were interviewed by a whole bunch of news outlets and it was a crazy few days. But anyway we put up an Indie Go Go and raised forty seven thousand dollars to put up billboards in the Bay Area. And this is these are some of the faces we put on the billboards. And I yeah I feel so happy to see this. I feel like anyone can look like an engineer. Anyone does look like an engineer and anyone can be an engineer. You just have to have the motivation and you have to work hard and learn. So that's all I have to say and I'd love to answer any questions. This is my contact information if you'd like to reach out to me. Thanks. Yes mostly online from people I haven't directly personally been in touch with and mostly I just ignore those because trolls are going to troll and if you respond it just gets worse. I did go to a Python data science meetup and this guy at the table across from me was like oh I heard about that. That was really controversial and I was like what what do you mean by that. And he just hemmed and hawed and I said I don't think it's controversial. I think people should just be treated as people and be seen for their potential and and he got really quiet. How do those of us who have kids how do we encourage our local communities our local wars how do we encourage them to find a way to to make this thing possible. I mean I can go ahead and have a career with the girls but are there resources I can continue so that they can make that easier. Absolutely. I can mostly speak to the coding side of that. I recently went to a ward in Hayward for their young women's night and we just built a website and I'm going next month and we're just going to have a contest see who can build the ugliest website. And there are a whole bunch of free resources online. If you look up my name on my blog there's an open source spreadsheet for learning to code and there's a kids tab and you can find all sorts of games that kids would enjoy as well as some more hands-on project type things for adults. But yeah as far as encouraging career I would just find a wide spectrum of people to come talk to people to talk to young women or kids. Just let them know what's out there. I had no idea I could use this interest I had in tech for a career and enjoy it so much so. I have a colleague and one of the counselors there for very first conversation with the young girls that come in during high school is a man is not a plane and that starts a conversation. You might also want to check out Technovation. They do high school competitions where girls form a group, decide on an app and they have an advisor and then they have a national competition. So they build this app under the guidance of a mentor and learn a little bit about that. And you can set up at any high school you just need to find a mentor. In Utah there's the Women Tech Council they're on Facebook and they have something coming up soon about great companies for women in tech in Utah. Check it out. You can probably find some good panel members. Inside the church specifically for people to think that this is not the role for women. You know I haven't heard people specifically say anything but occasionally I get the feeling that like either they don't talk to me as if I don't have any career things to talk about and they'll just talk to my husband or they don't really understand what underrepresented means. My brother texted me when I was on I can't remember one of the big news outlets and he said what does genderqueer mean? And he never responded to what I answered and there's just like this lack of conversation like we don't really want to talk about it. Occasionally I will meet a male Mormon programmer and usually it's OK but sometimes it's been a little awkward like I feel if I were to join their company I would be treated a little bit differently. So I stay away from them. Did I face stigmatization or bullying from other girls. I think probably during my most awkward phase. Yes I went to Academy for Girls at BYU when I was 12 and I was just ridiculously nerdy and awkward but I learned really quickly how to fit in and how to be the bubbly Mormon girl. I have to say though I found that that's my default for job interviews now and sometimes that pigeon hold me a little bit because people say oh you'd be great for our customer support engineer and I'm like I don't actually want to talk to people all day but I can't I don't know how to like tone down the bubbly thing so I'm working on that. But yeah I don't think there was a lot of bullying. In fact there was one girl she always sent me emails on Juneau and we would like be so excited to check for each other's emails so we had fun together. Last year my husband in the church in one of the segments we did for the Institute here was on women working and it took a little bit of sleuthing to find people in different occupations, women in different occupations. Anyways last night I shared the example of a woman whose name I can't remember right now but she does, I'm sorry about that, she does genesis work and she talks about it in her paper for blessing telling her she would do something that she now interprets as leading her to this career path. When I shared that it was interesting to have young men say to women, one man said do women look at jobs differently because the message I get in church is you need to go out and provide, this is your duty. I would not look at it the way this man has that this was my calling in line and that God would direct it to you. That women might perceive working in a different way and in a more spiritual way than others. Yeah I forgot to mention something about one of the pictures on here but Carl your password is back up on here. So I don't know if you noticed that one of the pictures next to the ideas I had was just a mother with a whole bunch of children. I purposely put that in there because I felt like that was the only option I ever really heard at church and because there weren't role models I just had no idea. So yeah I think it is hard to find women who are pretty aspirational as far as careers go. There is the aspiring Mormon women Facebook group now which has some pretty great advice. Oh yeah great, cool, definitely, absolutely. In fact I talked to a lot of people about job descriptions and how little words can make women not even apply. Women won't apply for jobs unless they reach or meet seven out of 10 requirements I think a study said and men will do three out of 10. So there's like this big lack of confidence I think a lot of women struggle with imposter syndrome. I certainly do every single day and when I got to the point where I realized that I wanted to have a career and it would make me feel much better to have a career there was this small mourning period where I realized I'm not gonna be at home all day like I have to get up every day and get ready and go somewhere for the rest of my life probably and I'm making this choice and I'm happy about this choice but it's a different direction than what I had imagined for myself. So yeah, I think men and women in the church definitely look at jobs differently. In fact my first job after Hackbrite I was making more money than my husband and we joked that I was the breadwinner and we were breaking norms everywhere but yeah it's been such a relief to be in a marriage where that's okay and we are able to work things out I feel like so I was actually engaged when I was 18 and that didn't work out clearly but I often think if that had, if I had gone through with it that I would have a completely different life and that he wouldn't have been encouraging of me doing something that I felt passionate about. So does that kind of answer your question? Yeah. The story that kind of goes to what she's talking about my home teacher many years ago was in his early 80s and he had, he adored geology. He would plan car trips so they could go and study the sedimentation and he had a huge collection of rocks and books. He kind of educated himself as though he were gonna become a geology professor but what he had done his whole life was sell insurance and I think that might be what you're talking about. He was raised to think you have to provide a practical progression and not what you love doing it. And that's what he thought. Yes, that is what was being expressed by his kids. I can't do what I want to do. I have to do something to provide practically. It appears to me that women have more flexibility if they choose to work to do something they love to do or want to do as a passion because they work program from the time they were young. Interesting. Something they have to do. Yeah, I think there's something to that for sure. Your story actually reminds me of that poet who was an insurance agent and he wrote poems on the side every day. I can't remember who that was for you. Okay, because when you don't teach it to any womanism, if you don't teach it to whole sexes, then there's no way to do that sort of egalitarian marriage ideal. So even if you empower women to see themselves in tech and see themselves as engineers, if they get stuck in a marriage where like you said, your husband is fine with it. My husband's been fine with it. I've been able to do my dream career because my husband has no problem with it. But there are a lot of men who grow up in the church and think that women shouldn't work. So you kind of have to be able to appeal to whole sexes in this empowering movement, don't they? Definitely, there's an article this week where this woman wrote that we have to stop victim blaming as far as women in tech goes and that we are helping women instead of confronting the men who are making it problematic for women to be in tech. So you definitely have to work on both sides. I do know there was a little bit of pushback on the I Look Like an Engineer billboards. Some people said, well, how come you didn't include any white guys on there? Shouldn't you include everyone? And I was like, this is about giving face to people who don't usually have one. So yeah, I think I feel a little torn about that because I feel like the boys are gonna get it somehow. There are several guys from my high school who are now computer scientists and I just wonder, how did they get there? How come I didn't know? So, right? Yes. Like teach people as smart as, so instead of just focusing on the women and raising them up, focus on the women raising them up in the context of the larger, like, more women being. Just like you said, if you go to a job interview and men see you one way, all these white women men see you one way, you're not gonna get hired, but at least white women men have also been taught that you're just as smart and they haven't been talking less because you're female. You know, like if you wanna change the larger structures, you have to sort of put everyone in that. Absolutely, I think the idea I had for putting girls in leadership roles would be great, especially for activities that are young men and young women's and they need to learn to work together. I've noticed since living in the Bay Area that it's so much better to work with men now because they treat me like a normal person. When I was working at the Family History Library, there were problems all the time. I had a really great relationship with my boss and one of the employees reported us because she thought something inappropriate was happening. And I was like, we're having meetings, is that inappropriate? So it's, yeah, we need to figure out ways for us all to work together so boys can grow up seeing that girls can do what they can, definitely. Pointless to, besides just in career field within the ward setting as far as anyone who's been in leadership knows that not every calling is extended is based on inspiration, but it's more about a need in the ward. We have, I've found, the time I was in the Bishopric that people are vast on top of resources, mostly women that aren't being used to help fulfill the needs in the ward, often because of this, you know, they don't have a priestess. Well, I don't think the athletic director of the ward has to have a priestess. They just have to be someone engaged in sports and likes to oversee that. And that's a real frustration, I think, where there's just so much potential on tap just to get the basic needs of the ward met. So I know you've talked about doing something for young women is there something that we can do amongst leadership to tell them, hey, how can we allow these people to shine in the ward setting? I actually thought about that last night while I was going over my slides. Because I feel like there's no clear cut way to get women into more leadership roles in the ward until women have the priesthood. Because people just believe that's the only way they can lead. I mean, Sunday school leaders don't really do anything that requires the priesthood, but women can't be in that position. So yeah, that's a tough one. I will see what happens in the future. I do know there have been articles in the last few years of ways to make women feel more included in the ward. And that would be things like make sure the Relief Society president is always called president and make sure the Relief Society president is in ward council and things like that. You can, I'm sure you can Google it and find more of those. We'll see what happens in the next few years. Sarah, how are we doing on time? Okay, wow. Good question, I do not know. Actually, I am one of the leaders. The question was how do you handle children and your career? I do not have children, but I have several friends who have done the Hackbrite program or our software engineers already and they have children. I'm in their hacker moms group just because I'm a moderator and it's tough. They were talking this week about how one of them started looking for daycare when she was four months pregnant and was told there would be a spot by the time her kid was two and it's really expensive. And even though both parents are working, the mom is often expected to do more of the childcare when she is home. So yeah, it's really tough. I think the best way to deal with that is to talk to people who are doing it as well. And that's why I think those strong role models are so important because if you don't know anyone who's doing the same thing you are and you're struggling, who are you gonna turn to? So, and I think those role models can be a really great inspiration too when you get discouraged and worn out because you're running from work to kids all the time. I'm sure it helps to have someone who can relate to that. Yes? There's a code for male software engineers to jump into that role because they're male. How important would it be to have a female that you can do what it matters or would you want to? Make sure you've had the alternates of women, men, women before they're born and have women in these leader roles. I love the idea of having women in the roles. It's kind of what you were saying earlier, right? Because then the boys can see that women can do it too and that they can be leaders and they can teach. But I have to say that when teaching girls I like to keep it separate because I feel like this weird competition and imposter syndrome thing pops up. So maybe I would have women teachers for the girls and then women teachers for the guys too. But there really aren't that many. There are, I think the average now is 18% of software engineers are women. So that means the women who are software engineers are asked to do diversity and inclusion work and their jobs suffer and they get tired of being asked all these questions all the time, right? Yeah. But yeah, that's, it'd be great to have mixed teachers for both groups, I guess. Thanks for bringing that up. I'm not gonna think about that for my next workshop. All right, I think we have time for a few more questions. Yes. Do you get pressure, some of the poor can do job. Do you get pressure from friends and family in Utah? Even though you're successful in engineering and computer work, do you still get, like, oh, that's nice, but you still haven't made it yet because you don't have kids? You know, I have to say that it's been a huge surprise to me that the pressure to have children has been more from the Buddhist Chinese side, my husband's side, than from the Mormon side. So at our wedding, or at our reception or whatever you wanna call it, at our lunch, his dad got up and was like, we can't wait for you to have grandchildren for us. And I was like, what the? I have not heard anything from my parents. I do know one of my nieces has said, when am I gonna have some cousins? And her mom talked to her about how that's probably not an appropriate question to ask. So it's been fine, but occasionally, people will assume that I am almost ready when I may not make that choice at all. And that's something I wouldn't have considered a long time ago, that there's the option of not having children. And I've noticed that even though my husband is much, much better with children, when we go visit family, people will wanna hand their babies to me. And I'll be like, oh, you, over there. So yeah, there's this huge expectation and no one ever asks my husband that question, right? They'll just ask me. Like, it takes two to tango. So, yeah. Anyway, I'm happy to answer more questions via email or in person. So I'll go to the website, early on to the gentleman over here, and I was gonna write it down. Was it the learning to code resources? Yes. If you Google my name, Michelle Glauser, and learning to code resources, it'll be the first thing that pops up. Otherwise, I can give you the link later. Okay.