 So, a lot of firsts, thank you. As Claudina mentioned, my name is Alicia Ramos. My talk is called Coding as a Privilege. So I work at Vox Media as a design director. I'm based in Washington, D.C. Raise your hand if you've seen any of our brands. These are, oh my gosh, yay. Okay, so I don't have to do too much explaining, but we are basically a media and tech company and we own eight brands currently. So before we get into it, I kinda wanted to lay out my two big assumptions about you, the audience. The first is that I'm assuming that you care about diversity in tech and the second is that I'm assuming that you're interested in doing something about it. So hopefully I'm right. Thank you. So today's talk, I'll be going over what diversity in tech looks like, where we're at today. Spoiler alert doesn't look too good. I'll go over my own personal story of how I got started in tech. The big so what, why should you care about all of this? And then lastly, some simple tips on how you can help. So this is the thesis of this talk. I believe that access to becoming an engineer should be wide and open to all, but today that's far from the case. And to start, I want to demonstrate this with a metaphor, of course, of swimming versus computer science. This is a photo of Simone Emanuel at this year's Olympics. Simone became the first African-American woman to win gold in swimming. In an interview, Simone told a reporter that the gold medal wasn't just for me. It's for a lot of people who came before me. So what exactly did she mean when she said this? Who was on her mind? Perhaps this image in these people were on her mind. This photo was taken in 1962 in South Carolina. It shows a public swimming pool that was closed by the city after four black males went swimming with their white companions, the ones that you see here. Their swim was a demonstration that became part of the civil rights movement efforts. With the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, public pools in the South like this one closed rather than integrate. Pools in the North were drained of government funding that once kept them well maintained. And so you had demonstrations like these that fought for desegregated swimming facilities. The history of swimming in the United States has led to generations of people of color, African-Americans in particular being denied access to safe and adequate swimming facilities, as well as swimming instruction. The history of swimming in the United States is simply put, one that's closely tied to racism and privilege. And the consequences of that are simply devastating. According to statistics released by the CDC, African-American children and teens are almost six times as likely to drown in a swimming pool. Today, 70% of black teenagers and 60% of Hispanic teenagers don't know how to swim. And if a parent doesn't know how to swim, it gets passed down too. There's only a 13% chance of their child learning how to swim. So why am I talking about swimming and a talk about coding and privilege? Well, in preparation for this talk, I read this really amazing book by Jane Margulis, who is a professor at UCLA, called Stuck in the Shallow End, Education, Race, and Computing. In it, she compares a history of swimming with that of computer science and its effects today on our society. She and her team conducted research at three separate schools in the Los Angeles area with varying degrees of resources, funding, and student population diversity. They spent time in computer science classrooms and among students trying to better understand why is there such a stark racial and socioeconomic gap in computer science education? And these are the three types of schools that they visited. And her findings showed a couple of things that all pointed to a very clear what she calls race gap in computer science education. Many classrooms were technology-rich but curriculum poor. They had all the technology, the computers, but the students weren't getting the instruction that they actually needed. Furthermore, only the wealthiest schools offered advanced CS courses. And on top of that, only a few students of color enrolled in them. Lastly, she uncovers dangerous belief systems that students had about themselves and the teachers had about their students and their abilities. And so from her findings, she compares swimming with computer science. They're both something that people of color don't do. They're both associated with a certain type of person. And historically, they also both began as a white-dominated activity. Margolis, she concludes that the race gap in computer science education denies students a wide range of occupational and educational futures. And I actually thought this was worth keeping in because it's such a strong statement. It's not just affecting their present but also their entire future. So Margolis' research was conducted in the early 2000s. But the picture, unfortunately, isn't any brighter today in both computer science education and what we do in the tech industry as a whole. Computer science is still missing from American education, as Brian mentioned earlier yesterday. By some estimates in the past year, 75% of schools do not offer a single computer science course. And as Margolis' research found, this lack of access is even worse for underrepresented communities. In 2015, only 22% of the students who took the AP computer science exam were girls and only 13% were African-American or Latino students. And here's a look at the data for the industry in which we all work in as a whole. And it's worth noting that these numbers became transparent only recently. The sample average across top tech companies was that 7% of employees were black and 5% were Hispanic. For women, it falls lower. Black women were at 3% and Hispanic women were at 2%. So why is there such a big gap, racial gap in tech? Well, Facebook would probably provide this answer. It's simply a pipeline problem, right? There's not enough talent out there. And to give you some background, Facebook's diversity numbers are also low. The percentage of black and Latino employees caps off at 4% and 2% respectively. When this data was released, Facebook's head of diversity responded with the fact that there simply isn't enough skilled talent in the pipeline. Our students just aren't getting the computer science education that they need. And there is truth to that statement as I went over earlier. Students aren't getting the computer science instruction that they need, but here's another statistic that's true. There are more minority students with engineering and tech degrees than there are jobs readily available to them. While blacks and Latinos earn nearly 18% of CS bachelor's degrees, they make up only 5% of the technical workforce at top tech companies. And so we can see that broadening computer science education is definitely necessary, but it's only one part of the equation. There are so many other factors at play here that are keeping people of color and the underprivileged from working in tech and becoming engineers. And so with that, I want to pause with you and share my personal story, because I've been technically writing code for eight years, but I didn't really consider myself a programmer until maybe two years ago. This is me when I was young. I'm the child of two first generation immigrant parents. My mother is from South Korea and my father is from the Dominican Republic. Growing up, we made ends meet. We were never in poverty, but I do remember I never really had as much as my peers growing up. However, I was lucky enough to have a computer in the house. This was my first computer. I got it in, I think, 1998 was the year. And this opened a whole new world for me. I first learned HTML through this website called Lisa Explains It All. I don't know if anybody else remembers that, all right? It was run by another girl just like me, and I love this site, and I would learn as much as I possibly could from it. I created websites about things that I was personally passionate about. I had many passions. Beanie Babies, Neopets, Sailor Moon, Dolls. It was great. These are real screenshots of sites I made in my teenage years. Well, the left one is my live journal. As you can tell, I really loved Lord of the Rings. Super obsessed. And because Brian shared with you his bad code from years ago, I'll share this little snippet with you. I had multiple style sheets, and then in the markup I just dumped this and had importance on every line, because why not? At around the end of high school, I stopped coding and designing because I never really considered it to be a serious or lucrative career path. This was just a hobby that I did on this side. And this graphic is a perception of what I had, and I'm sure my parents had, of what a career and design and code would look like. I didn't know anyone who did this successfully for a living. I had no idea programming was a thing, nevertheless, a thing that I could do. So I stopped coding, and I started spending time studying other things in school. Eventually, all that studying paid off, I guess, because I ended up getting a full-ride scholarship to Harvard, just across the river. But I still didn't know what I wanted to do in life when I got to college. So naturally, I graduated with two degrees in sociology and medieval history. Turns out those degrees aren't really the best for figuring out what you want to do in life, either. Eventually, I ended up taking a job that really wasn't meant for me. I worked at a consulting firm in New York and left after a year. And if you ever wondered what consulting is or what a consultant does, this is a pretty accurate depiction of that. So at this point, I was kind of at a low point. I had just left my job, didn't know what I was doing, was trying to figure out what it is I truly wanted to do. So after some brainstorming, I thought, hey, I used to make websites, and I really love that. I love design and code. And there's this new product design thing that I'm hearing about. Maybe I can do that. But after arriving at that conclusion, I felt a little stuck. I didn't know how to start or what the right path was. I knew I needed to level up in design and code, but coding bootcamps were way too expensive for me. The average cost for a bootcamp was $11,000. I was living in New York City, and attending a bootcamp would eat up all my savings and more. And so I researched as many free online materials as I could, and I'm sure this resonates with a lot of you, and I taught myself for a few months. After a few months of learning on my own and building a portfolio, which if you ever have questions about, I'm happy to answer. It was not easy. I did a round of interviews and was finally employed as a designer and a coder, what I always wanted to do. And then something really nice happened. This is a chart of my salary increase. When I went from consulting to front-end designer, the actual value is obviously not shown, but that's about a 60% increase in salary. 60%. And this was my reaction. It's supposed to play a video, but it's fine. This is my reaction. I asked myself, why didn't I know about this sooner? Right? My whole life changed. I was able to pay off my debt, my student loans. I took my family on a nice vacation, which we never did growing up. I finally felt comfortable financially. And my story is not the only one. The average salary of a tech worker is more than the median household income of a black and Latina family combined. This is significant when you consider the existing racial wealth gap in our country, which is huge. The average net worth of a white family is 15 times that of a black or Latina family. And so this kind of transition into tech can be transformational. The tech sector's high salaries and high demand for employment provide an opportunity for underrepresented communities to build generational wealth and can help close that massive wealth gap. And so the opportunity is huge. A little after I was employed, I asked myself, if it took me this long to figure out my path to coding, what must it be like for people who are less privileged than I am? Because after all, I didn't have the cushiest of childhoods. However, I had all these other privileges. I had a computer. I had an internet connection. I had supportive parents. I went to a good school. I had all of these things that made me feel very lucky. But what about others who aren't as fortunate as I was or as fortunate as maybe you were? And this is really central to why I'm giving this talk. For myself, coding has meant mobility and freedom. Part of me wants to give this gift to everyone, every student, every person who feels that they're stuck. Being a developer is a position of privilege, but privilege should not be the only path to becoming one. Thank you. As Jane Margolis put it in her book, computer science can break the cycle of inequality. The opportunity is huge, but there are many obstacles in the way for a whole subset of the population. You might be thinking, but wait, I learned to code for free, and so did you. All you need is a computer and an internet connection, right? This is a response I get quite often when I make the case that coding is a privilege. This person, who some of you may recognize, tweeted this out in response to my original essay on the topic. He thinks that it's just a matter of putting your rear in a chair and writing code. So I want to take a brief detour and talk about the difference between equity and equality, because there is a difference. It's not just a matter of sitting down and writing code. We must all have the same foundation first, but the reality is we're not all on an equal footing. Some of us enjoy some combination of racial privilege, socioeconomic privilege, male privilege, religious privilege. The list goes on. So while coding, free coding materials may have gotten you far as an individual, it's important to realize that there are many other factors at play here. So you might be wondering at this point, okay, so what? Why should I care? Why am I listening to you talk about diversity and access? I came here to learn about CSS, and I understand. Let me tell you why you should care. Understanding our own privilege ultimately means allowing for more diversity and more voices in the room. And this isn't just good for society. Increasing diversity also means better business results too. Mackenzie recently conducted a research study that found that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. It's a mouthful, but basically better business results if you have diversity. Who doesn't want that? Increasing diversity in tech is also the more realistic thing to do. Recent projections suggest that by 2040, non-whites will form the majority of the American population for the first time ever. Wouldn't you want a workforce that reflects the consumers you're trying to reach? And now let's look at the flip side of things. As Yvonne Hutchinson wrote for the MIT Tech Review, companies that lack diversity risk building products that exclude their customers. We're in danger of building products and services that are biased by design. There are just a couple of recent examples from the news, and I'll go through a couple of them. A recent HBS study found that Airbnb guests with African-American names were 16% less likely to find lodging. Snapchat has had a couple of stumbles recently when it came to releasing racially offensive filters, such as this questionable filter shown here that resembled yellow face. The app next door had rampant racial profiling in its crime and safety reports feature. Users of the app were reporting detailed descriptions of someone, including race, but failed to describe them doing something actually criminal. It's not a silver bullet, but I wonder how this bias may have been avoided or caught early on if these companies had diverse voices on its team able to call out this bias. On the flip side, with more diversity in tech, we can all help create better products that work for everyone. This is an amazing app created by my teammates at Vox Media called Toner. The problem that they identified was that some photo apps like Instagram tended to have filters that whitewash the skin tones of people with darker skin tones. They created Toner as an Instagram-like app that has filters that compliments their skin tones rather than brightening or whitening them. This is a really neat app that you can actually use today, by the way. Tristan Walker built Walker & Company to address the needs of people of color in a growing beauty and grooming market. He's found great success by addressing the specific needs of this very underserved market and has raised over $30 million in VC funding to tackle this problem. So as you can see, there are many benefits in increasing access to tech for all people. We end up creating better products that way that everyone can use. So now I want to share with you eight simple quick tips on how you personally can help make coding in a career in tech more accessible. Tip number one, support the computer science for all movement. As we've seen, computer science education is not open to all and there's a looming race and socioeconomic gap in our public school system. Two weeks ago, the White House announced the CS for all consortium initiative, which is a network of computer science education providers, schools, runners, researchers all working to support the mission of expanding access to computer science education. So if you go to this website, you can click get involved and find some ways that you can possibly help. Tip number two, this is my favorite because it's probably one of the most impactful things you can do as an individual is to find volunteer opportunities. This is a list of just some organizations that are doing the work. There are many out there and the number is growing. And I have a GitHub repo if you're interested in accessing the full list or if you want to add more to this list. You can do a lot of things for these groups. You can volunteer as an instructor. You can help define curriculum if you're interested in that. Or if one of these organizations doesn't exist yet in your area, which a lot of them are geographically very much geographically focused for now. Maybe you could help start one in your local city. Tip number three, if you're a woman, person of color, or a member of some other underrepresented group, making yourself visible as a role model and available as a mentor can go a long way. This can mean different things. If you don't feel comfortable being on platforms like Twitter, try starting small like visiting a classroom in your city to inspire students. Because as you know, the images that we see in media today that represent tech look like this. And they are pervasive in our culture. They exacerbate stereotypes about what tech is about and who belongs in tech. By making yourself a little more visible, you can help inspire others. Tip number four, grow your networks to include people from underrepresented backgrounds. And this is something that I think everyone can do if you have a Twitter account. These are some lists on Twitter that are pretty easy to follow. This one is called Women Who Code. It's a list compiled by John Riesig. This is seriously one of the most hilarious lists of people I follow. Only are the women so smart, so on top of their game, but they make really good jokes too. And that's what Twitter is for, right, jokes. DC Tech Ladies is a good one. I'm sure wherever you live, there are probably local lists of people to follow as well. Quick shout out to Women of Color in Tech Chat is a great community, providing more visibility and support for women of color in tech. And quick aside, growing our networks in this manner, by doing so, we expose people or we expose ourselves to people and communities we otherwise would not interact with. And this can lead to some really awesome effects in your hiring and recruitment. Many companies and employees look inside their own personal network of friends first when looking for job candidates because, you know, that makes sense, right? You trust these people. While this can work well in some cases, the flip side of this is that you're going to miss out on a whole pool of candidates out there who aren't in your network. So growing your network is a really great way to ensure that you're reaching a diverse, a diversity of communities and finding the best candidate. Tip number five, help create a safe and inclusive environment at work. It's not just a matter of getting people in the door. It's also keeping them there and making them feel safe and welcome and like they belong. This is an example from my own team, the product team at Vox Media. We recently released a code of conduct which you can see online and it's open sourced. As my co-worker Mandy Brown wrote, we created this because we truly believe that a strong pipeline is worthless if it leads straight into the sewer. We wanted to not only create a safe and inclusive environment for our teammates, but also this is a really great way to show the world what your values are as a company too. We want to show that we're serious about diversity and inclusion and that we're not just talking the talk, but we're also walking the walk. One other quick tip I want to share with you in terms of interviewing is to reevaluate what cultural fit means in your interview process. Should your next hire really be someone that you want to grab a beer with or should they simply be someone who can bring unique value and skills to help make your company better? Just think about that. Tip number six, lend your visibility. Have you ever been asked to speak at a conference or a panel? Are the speakers there not diverse? One thing you can do is offer to step down and instead volunteer the name of someone else who may have less privilege than yourself and who would really appreciate that platform. So the next time you see a panel of all white men. Yeah, do that. Tip number seven, support others who are just starting out. When I was just starting out, I wanted to feel welcomed in the community and like I belonged. Also, I had no idea what I was doing. And I want to learn as much as possible from people with more experience. So quick shout out to this really great and diverse community called Code Newbies. That's filled with driven people who are just starting out. A lot of them often ask for mentorship or you can offer to hold office hours. It's a really wonderful community and it's very diverse. Last but not least, tip number eight, become aware of your own privilege and unconscious bias. Because guess what? Everyone in this room experiences unconscious bias, myself included. It's how our brains are wired to survive in the world. Our brains have to process millions of pieces of information every day and second. Luckily, our brains have evolved to the point where we can make split second decisions based on prior experience and knowledge. This is helpful for us when you have to remember facts like two plus two equals four, or that if you see a lion charging at you, you should probably run. Unluckily, our brains have also been conditioned with cultural stereotypes as well, regardless of whether or not you believe those stereotypes to be true. If you have some time, I really encourage you to take this test called the implicit association test, which you can go to implicit.harvard.edu. It tests your unconscious bias. It's a famous research project developed by researchers at a few universities. It's really interesting and the results might surprise you and there are a couple of different ones that you can take. But the most famous one is the race IAT test. Luckily, we all experience unconscious bias, but we can have some strategies to manage that unconscious bias. This is a really great white paper from a firm called Paradigm called Managing Unconscious Bias. And they offer some really great suggestions on how to deal with this. So some things that they mention are spending time with people from different backgrounds or exposing yourself to them and setting data-driven tools and processes, especially when it comes to things like hiring or promotions. Coding is a privilege. Having access to a career in tech is a privilege. I hope my talk has opened your eyes to the many ways in which underrepresented and under-resourced people base barriers to careers in tech, how you can help and why it matters. We must all become aware of and work together to remove the barriers so that we can create a world where everyone can enjoy equal opportunity and thrive. As Jane Margolis puts it in her book, providing access to computer science and careers in tech is a civil rights issue for the 21st century. And I can't agree more. The opportunity is huge. This work that we do, the products that we build, the CSS that we write, can be life-changing. It's on us to work together to make sure that no one, no community of people is stuck in the shallow end. I hope you agree too and can find some ways to help. Thank you. Such a great way to end this conference in such a necessary way. I actually had to bring this napkin because I started tearing up when you were talking and I'm probably going to cry up here because this is such an important issue. I just want to thank you for being so honest and true and telling your story. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Also really cool to learn that you are half Dominican. I am too. So when these tears go away, I might be able to ask some questions or have a dialogue because so much of what you said, I'm just like, yes, yes. So you touched a little bit on your code of conduct, which is a way that Vox has created something to make a safer and more inclusive space. But what other things are you and your team doing or is the company doing to increase your pipeline, not only diversify the pipeline, but keep people working at Vox longer? That is a great, great question. So one other thing, aside from the code of conduct that we've done is try to be transparent about our own diversity numbers. And that just kind of helps keep us accountable. So if you go to our site now under our career section, there's actually a diversity tab that shows you not just what our current diversity numbers are, but also the evolution of our numbers. So if you look at, I think it starts at like 2008, our numbers were really bad. They still are not super great, but it's really neat to see the bars going up and up and up. And internally, our leadership supports diversity, which is really important. A lot of companies don't have that. And I feel lucky to work at a place where our CEO and leadership actually take this seriously and mean it. And we've also hired people whose work, this is like their job to think about these issues because this is real work. It's a lot of work. It's hard work. So I'm really glad that Vox has been able to put money where their mouth is and hire the people who understand these issues best because it's very complex and it's really difficult. Absolutely. And to also be so transparent about it because I feel, I mean, I can, the company that I'm at right now, I can imagine it's so hard to be like, here we are at zero, right? And imagine that that doesn't look good. But I've heard from many underrepresented folks that even just that honesty and the showing and is what really compels them to be like, yeah, if you're gonna be honest about it, then I know I can come. Yeah. Even if your company is at zero, I think personally that you should make that transparent as long as you pair it with, we know that this is a problem. And we are going to do something about it. So be honest with yourself. That's great. Are there ways that even are at Vox or you when you're speaking with people like kindly call people out when they're saying things that perhaps aren't so inclusive or let's say, you know, for more white male hires came through your door and you're like, what do I do? Like, do you have any suggestions for that? So things that happen in the moment. So our code of conduct kind of lists out as an employee of the company here are the steps that you can take. Usually it comes down to like, if you don't feel comfortable approaching someone about a specific thing that they said, you can always talk to their manager about it and it will be dealt with in terms of hiring. If we hire four males, that's fine. But I think what matters is your process should be as diverse and inclusive as possible. If you're bringing people in to interview, make sure that you're like, if you have like a lunch date plan with that person, make sure that they're being exposed to a diversity of employees at the company so that on both sides they can see what they're getting into. On the other side of things, a diverse number of people can help that the candidate. So can you share a bit about Vox's hiring process and how it's been designed to help with diversity and inclusivity? It's changed so much. I don't know if I can talk about it officially because I'm no longer super involved at that level. But I can say about a year and a half ago, one tactic that we had was we started a spreadsheet of all these different diverse communities that our own employees were a part of. So like I'm a part of this group called DC FemTech or Hear Me Code and we each have our listservs. And so every time a hiring manager would put up a new job, they would be like, hey, like I saw in this spreadsheet that you're a member of this diverse community. Would you mind forwarding this job description out to this group of people? Which is great because before that we were just posting to the usual suspects and those usual suspects tend to have a very homogenous group of people looking at those job descriptions. So it helps to have, to like mobilize your own diverse employees in spreading the word to their own networks going back to the point about growing your networks. That's so crucial. Very, very interesting. Wow, well, I mean, I could keep going on and on and on and on with questions as you can tell us is something so near and dear to my heart. But I know that they want us to take a family photo. I mean, this is an incredible, first time speaking, first time speaking everyone. Thank you. Wow. I truly do hope that you are able to go out and continue to give this talk. Thank you so much. I will. Thank you so much for having me. You guys were great. Thank you.