 Okay, so that says if you want to follow us on Twitter or elsewhere, we both have handles and those are our nicks, et cetera, in case you were wondering. This is the track. So we'll start out with this picture. It doesn't blow up as well as I was hoping, but what's wrong with this picture? Anybody? Anybody? Can you see? So this is a meet-up I went to. I think it was the Twitter World Tour. Can you still hear me? Oh, are they? Yeah. I don't know if they are. No one came to check the recording. Anyway, whatever. So this is a meet-up that I went to in Denver. I'm from Denver, Colorado. And this was, I think, the Twitter World Tour, Hello World Tour that I've been doing. And it really meet meet-up and they gave lots of beer and lots of food and took really good care of us and really great information. And there were some women in the crowd, but it'd be really awesome if 40 to 50% of that room was women, but it was probably the usual 10%. And what we need to do as a community, as a tech world, as a business world, is increase those numbers. So the next year or five years, I go to the same meet-up and it's 50-50. And I think that would be more equitable. So why are we here? As Nikki was mentioning, we're going to provide some actionable items that you can take with you, continue the conversation with your companies, with your local communities, with your home, with yourself. How do we keep this growing? How do we become the example for tech? We're doing a good job with 23% registrations this year where people identifying as women. So that's pretty good. It's up from the usual 20% for most of our sessions, but most of our conferences in the past. So we're going up. And if you look around, and I've been looking around the last couple of days, definitely more women than I saw when I first started doing these cons. So I think that's huge. And last night, those of you who got to make it to the Women in Drupal event, it was extremely success. It was fantastic. I think people got to make new friends. My co-worker told me she had to meet lots of new, make new friends and make new connections. And so we know we're not alone, that there actually are other women doing this. We're not, we're not islands. And that feels a little safer. Also, what does it mean to be a good developer citizen? How do we encourage this? So I went to a talk recently, another talk meetup by a gal, Elaine Marino, and she does different ways of diversity stuff. And she gave some pretty neat quotes. And I refer to this later on in the references. We added some references at the end of these slides and they will be available. From the Harvard Business Review, a 2016 study, well, published in January, so it was obviously done before 2016. They did a study of 24 top CEOs regarding why they think diversity is important. And they believe, they, the CEOs, believe that diversity was a business imperative because their companies needed it to stay competitive and they believed it was a moral imperative because of their personal experience and values, diversity. And Paul Block, CEO of Merisant, also said, people with different lifestyles and different backgrounds challenge each other more. Diversity creates dissent and you need that. Without it, you're not going into the, to any deep inquiry or breakthroughs. And that's true. You get a room full of 20-year-old programming white males. They're only going to have one view of the world. There's a few other views in the world. So how do we encourage that? So a couple of vocabulary, a quick vocabulary lesson as to things we'll be talking about during this talk. Diversity, quality, inclusion, and marginalized group. And so diversity in broad terms, diversity is any dimension that can be used to differentiate groups and people from one another. It means respect for and appreciation of differences in ethnicity, gender, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, education, and religion. And this one, so, I'll get to that in a second. Equality, everyone having an equal access to the same opportunities despite any of those situations. Regardless of inclusion, inclusion, the state of being valued, respected, and supported, we all want to feel included. You go into a shop and you're the only woman or the only person of color or the only transgender. You want to feel like you're included and no one's looking at you going, oh, well, they're different, so I don't really want to include them. And it's more than just getting them to join in, right? And any, marginalized groups, anyone who appears to be different from the norm or baseline, we all dealt with this in school, right? We were all the different kids in school because we were smarter or different, talked different, had different aspirations. So we've all been there. You can be one marginalized group and not in another one. For instance, a white gay male, the white male, you're definitely not marginalized, but the gay male you may be. And we don't want that to be, let's not be. And some fun numbers. So I particularly like the second slide over there. Diversity is not found here, right? So these major tech companies and clearly missing some diversity, race-wise and gender-wise. So we've got a lot of work to do. I think these are both 2014 studies. The first one is 2014, the year, Silicon Valley spilled its diversity data. So an interesting piece of, an interesting fact is, every month, the tech industry has about 9,600 jobs in the U.S. So this is just talking the U.S. at this point. By 2018, we're talking another 1.2 million jobs, boasting an average salary of about $78,000. We're all hoping for more, obviously. Especially like 2018. So women make up about 28% of these numbers in the computing workforce, but in the U.S. workforce, we make up 53% of the overall. So there's a little differentiation there. And we need to figure out how to equalize that. And Latino and African-American workers are each making up less than 5%. So we've got a lot of work with people of color. I have one example of that, and this is horrifying me. I was working for this couple, not for much longer after this happened, but we had a man of color come in and he was building these, it was a hardware company at the time, it was long. Building these awesome, awesome computers. And he had some connections in the hardware field, so he's getting these really cool components for really cheap, so we were able to sell these, build these really cool computers. And they wouldn't hire him. And this is in Southern California, which I always thought pretty diverse. They wouldn't hire him because he was of color. And I was just horrified. And they said, well, our clients wouldn't want to buy them if they knew he built them. And I was like, wait, what? What century am I living in? I was so upset. So, when you're marketing your company, make sure you're watching how you market your company. Make sure your pictures show women not just helping out or looking like the secretary at the front of the office. Have her showing code, have her writing code, have her drawing out diagrams of the images or have them on the screen. You get the tech pictures and the gal looks like she's really the secretary that came over and helped the guys. And she's all just fancy in there in their shorts and t-shirts. Let's make it equal. You know, these pictures just aren't in quality. And make sure when you're putting out Facebook it's not showing your image on Twitter and Instagram and marketing materials. Make sure double-check your stuff when you're looking at the stock photos that you're grabbing to advertise your company or show this great event we had. Make sure there's women in the picture drinking their wine or drinking their sodas, not just the boys in their beer playing ping-pong. If they're there, include them. Make sure they show up. Physically. Not just metaphorically. The work environment. Is your work environment open to diversity? Think about this when you go into your shop. Is it all pool and ping-pong? Is that what you see first or you're seeing really cool computers? You're seeing people at desks. Some women, they've put the flowers on the desk and pictures of their children. Is that okay? I have been in offices where they've told me, you know, the pictures of your children. Because that's my world right there. So my kids come with me wherever I go. And I'm going to have my box of pretty tissues because I have to have tissues because somehow if I don't, my nose will run. It's just, you know, typical. Beer and kegs. Great. I have no problem working in a company with beer and kegs. But sometimes I want a glass of wine or I might want just a soda. I don't drink soda. But I might want soda and there should be a variety of drinks that make everybody feel included. Skateboards on the wall. Nicky works at a place that skateboards on the wall. Okay, one or two skateboards maybe, but are you a bunch of teenage boys? You're going to grab them down and go play? We talked to a friend yesterday and he was saying, how about everybody in your company gets to bring something that means something to them? And that shows everybody's personality, not just the boss's personality. Now everybody feels included in the decor and they feel more invested in the company and feel comfortable. It's like, there's my pictures of my bulldog or my two crazy puppies. I would love to have pictures of them and my kid and something, my kid, some silly piece of clay that my kid molded into something that he thinks looks like an ashtray. Even though mom doesn't smoke. Yeah. Those things. So think about your office environment. Is it cool or is it exclusionary? Does it make people feel uncomfortable? Because they're like, well I don't really skateboard and I don't play ping pong so am I going to feel stupid if I don't take my boss's challenge every day to play a ping pong game? I don't want to lose and I suck at ping pong so I'm not going to play the game and then I feel like maybe I'm not included because I'm not playing the game. So these are things to think about. A one quote, a female senior step forward engineer I did not write this but it very well could have come from me. So she's trying to find the right culture of a shop to work on. She wants to write on code and she's a mother of two. In my case it would be a single mother of one but I could say this too. I don't care about the beer and ping pong. I'm not there, I'm going to be there, I'm going to work, I work down and up 4.35 o'clock whenever the end of the day is I'm going home because I've got things to do I'm going to play ping pong with my son and either one of us can play so I feel like I can actually compete. Are there drawers for women? If you've got those cool stand up desks that's great but is there a place for us to put our feminine supplies? We don't want to stick them on the table. The men are going to feel awkward and then I've made you feel bad but I need to have a storage of those with me at work because accidents happen and I need to be able to grab what I need at a moment's notice and my snacks. I like my snacks, I like my healthy snacks but I'm not really necessarily going to share with everybody and somebody might have medication they need to have but they don't want to stick that on the table and they don't want to have to haul around a purse but they like to have a supply at work for whatever reason. And make sure again, make sure shop doesn't scream bro shop. So gender pronouns something to think about and this is actually something I learned doing this because I didn't know such a thing existed but I've been schooled. Some people who've transgender have decided or I suppose even straight could choose their own and I say suppose because I haven't met anyone who has gender pronouns they want to be called never call somebody when I say he she or an it because nobody wants to be that that's horrible but ask somebody if you don't know how would you like me to refer to you? Here's some, excuse me some examples they, them theirs as in the singular they got their glass of water and sat down. My co-worker tells me she'd rather be called she because you just want to introduce all new pronouns and confuse people which is fair. Absolutely. Z and here and I'm going to read this because I'm still learning this one so as in the case example here Z net eight here food because Z was hungry Z replacing he she and they here replacing her hers him his they and theirs and these are just examples there's a ton more I saw big grass I'm not going to go through them all or just using someone's name Joe, oops sorry Joe wants to eat Joe's sandwich alone whatever be mindful of those and when you're doing your meetups what can we do to make those more diverse why if I have 50% of my community there's only three women showing up why aren't they they're probably just as many women out there are curious to learn but they can't make it to the meetups why maybe they've got kids at home they got to take care of and consider this too it could be a married gay couple and both of them need to go take care of the kids neither one of them can get there after work because we're all tired and we want to go home we got to take the kids and sit on the couch I'm tired I don't want to do this anymore today so maybe Saturday mornings meetups once a month or once every once a quarter figure out a different time figure out something else to include people maybe childcare there's always teenagers in every community and they were always looking to make a buck maybe invite a couple of teenagers and have a room they can hang out with the kiddos they should be careful with licensing and everything else but you know these are just some thoughts drinking is only beer available maybe there's people who are coming who don't drink beer and they feel they feel left out because there aren't other alternatives and they feel like well this is just really it's just an excuse to get together and drink beer I don't drink beer so I'm not going to go to the meetups and they may be missing great opportunities to make connections so some ways to impact your micro communities some of these also work for work environments but you could put it to a bigger location thing a bigger community so setting quota quotas sorry not forever because we know that quotas forever don't really fix the problem but if you're trying to go from like 1% diverse to 5% diverse community work environment office space whatever set a quota by the end of 2018 we want to have 5% women managers or women developers on the team so now your goal you're going to be set to that goal children if we're going to be teaching our children make sure that if you're going to do an invite you only allow 5 boys if you get 5 girls and then you could up the thing to try to keep the numbers equal so when the little girl who wants to be a programmer shows up she's not the only little girl and she's like well last time there was no other little girls and I felt kind of silly so I'm not going to go this time on make sure there's other people make sure there's at least equal or close to equal amounts of both mentor programs set up a mentoring program in your meetups or in your community and set specific goals not just like hey call me if you need me it's like hey let's get this project together in two weeks I'm going to check up with you act like it's any kind of project set goals and meetings and by the end of this I expect this much I'm going to do problems in between call me but if not we're going to check up in two weeks everybody works better with some kind of goal we all know that if you don't have a if the school says just turn it in whenever two days before the end of the semester you're going to turn it all in never works for any of us like another project it could be another agile project if you want to test your agile experience but you haven't already to bring it into the office grab a mentor and there you go test on them another thing to think about is make your jobs descriptions when looking for employees very specific not just somebody who manages websites before or just Drupal websites like I want Drupal 8 I need to have 6 months of experience and gals and this is something we all do really bad I don't think men know that we do this necessarily we make sure we've checked every single box I can tell you what the boys aren't doing this we're doing this so if you think you have some of them give it a try put yourself out there give it a try and that's pretty much what I've got and I will turn it over to Miss Niki I have another quote I'm a big fan of quotes Edmund Burke lived a long time ago so this original quote said nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he who could only do a little so I updated the gender pronouns so that it includes all of us I think for me at least when I hear stats about women in tech on a community level or on an industry level or on a country wide level it feels really overwhelming and it feels like well I'm just a person like I can't I can't change the number of women who are entering STEM programs in college I can't change the experiences that people are having at Fortune 500 companies there's all these things that I can't do and you kind of feel it's powerless I can't change you know racism in any community but what I can do is change the way that I interact with the people around me and hope that the people around me will change the way that they interact with the people around them so for me when I think about diversity inclusion and inclusion I think about things that we can do starting right now like we can all leave this room today and be better allies and be more welcoming to every single person that we interact with for the rest of the conference and we can take that attitude with us and hope that the ripple effect or the butterfly effect or whatever magical effect you want to call it actually happens so when I first gave this talk it was to a room full of developers and I came up with a list of things that make you a good developer and then I started thinking well no these is a list of things that make you a good tech worker in general and then I was like well actually this is a list of things that make you a decent human being so I've kind of started through this list and talk about how it applies to our interactions and a little bit how it applies to our work in technology also since we're at a tech conference but for each of these to think about the ways that it can make us a better ally and the ways that we all do it correctly and incorrectly and just to put this out there nothing that we're about to talk about is saying you're a bad person or you should feel guilty for being a white guy or you should feel guilty for being able bodied or you should feel guilty for having all this privilege that you were born with none of this is about that this is about saying okay how can I just be better to the people that are around me so the first one is listening how many of you have had this conversation at a tech conference I see one hand but I'm guessing it's everybody I thought it was four right it's everybody right we've all said to someone yo I can't get on the wifi and they're like I'm on it whatevs and this is I think the perfect example of denying someone's lived experience and we hear the phrase lived experience all the time if you do diversity or any kind of reading in that we do it to each other all day long we are constantly denying each other's lived experience and we do something as small as well the wifi works for me so you must be doing something wrong to oh well we went on the same interview they really liked me they didn't like you to oh I felt that conference was super welcoming I felt so at home did you not feel welcome they were nice it must be something wrong with you and we do it to each other constantly it doesn't make us bad people it's just something that we have been acculturated to do and absolutely unlearned to do and I think this is absolutely foundational to being a good ally to each other is when someone's saying I had a hard time this makes me uncomfortable I don't feel welcome here this is not accessible to me because of my different set of abilities honor that for me when I think about it logically who am I to say that that made you feel uncomfortable or didn't right and the only thing you need to do is just listen to yourself when you interact with people and it takes practice and we're all going to deny people's experiences all the time it's just going to keep happening but what we can do is make a conscious effort to not do it and just as a side note as I don't know how many of you are developers but as a developer my first inclination is to fix someone's problem and so when they're telling me oh I have a problem with this fix it rather than maybe what they just need is for me to acknowledge the problem and empathize with them and be like oh I'm sorry I feel bad I'm with you in this problem so this is a bear looking very serious for any of you who can't see the meme my part of the talk is all memes just by the way so something else that I think we can all do is make a decision within ourselves that we're going to be someone who stands up for diversity and inclusion and it's a really simple statement to make to yourself but it will absolutely color the rest of your interactions so I think there are a lot of things that we know we should do but we don't do for whatever reason an example I like to use is recycling I think everyone agrees that we should all recycle I think most people would recycle if they had two options in front of them they would say oh I'm going to put this in the recycling bin but if the recycling bin was way down the street would you probably just throw it in the trash can? yeah probably if you said to yourself I am a person who is always going to recycle 100% of the time no matter how inconvenient it is for me then when you were standing there and you saw the recycling bin down at the corner you wouldn't even think about it you would just go and say oh well I'm a person who does this so I'm going to walk and I'm going to do this thing that I believe to be correct and I think that this is something that we can apply in this context okay I am a person who when I see something that I believe is unfair or unjust or inappropriate I'm going to stand up because when you're in that moment and I think everyone's been there whether it's about something as important as diversity or just something kind of light you're in that moment where someone makes a joke and you're like I'm just not going to say anything I'm just going to back away I'm really uncomfortable I don't want them to think I'm not cool or whatever you're feeling at that moment I don't want them to think I'm cool I can just it's fine if you have already decided I'm a person you can't use the word cunt in front of for example then when someone uses it I already know that I'm this person I've decided that this word is not acceptable around me and it takes that pressure off in the moment and you can start really small you can start super small with that picture on the wall makes me uncomfortable the way that you address that person who came in for the interview seemed a little strange to me can we talk about it and it's easy because we're humans and we make mistakes and balance is hard it's easy to overshoot this and be like oh I'm going to start calling out everything I'm practicing and that's okay that's okay too it's okay to come to one side and be that person who's hyper aware and then you'll settle into the balance that you find for yourself but something that I want to acknowledge is that this is a risky thing to do because we all have patterns of interactions with our coworkers and our friends people in our lives and so making that change to be the person who suddenly you can't say that word in front of everyone around you is going to be like oh you used to be cool with this and this comes back to honoring people's lived experiences and if you're whoever you are and saying okay I'm going to start standing up for accessibility in my workplace I'm going to take that risk and as a person around that person I'm going to take that risk that they're taking and acknowledge that that's a big thing for them and so and a lot of this really the underlying message of all of this is just empathy empathy and patience with each other and trying to be present and when you think about risk and technology we all take risks all the time and I think most of us are pretty comfortable with it we all say yeah I'll do that big project yeah I'll get it done by that date yeah I'll present at that conference I'll do that thing so I didn't think that joke was cool suddenly we're super risk-averse and so just thinking about the way that you process risk and the way that you tolerate risk in your life will help you figure out kind of just what you're comfortable with this is a cartoon one is the right answer and one is the wrong answer as developers as technology workers there's something to say oh I've seen this problem before it'll take me three hours to solve and then you get into the problem and you're like oops turns out this just looked like another problem that I've seen I actually don't know how to fix that and this pattern and as humans we all just look for patterns seen that problem seen that problem great great I know how to fix this problem and so when we apply that kind of thinking to human beings and we again don't honor people's lived experiences and we say oh you're a person like this you must have had this experience this must have been like this for you and so this is just taking the things that we learn as engineering employees engineering technology workers and we've all learned to take a close look at a situation before we make an estimate or before we make a decision and just applying that to people and situations so we're gonna make mistakes whenever you're trying to do something new or do something better you're gonna absolutely mess up and because we want to leave time to talk I condense two slides into one but the other slide was basically about does anyone have someone they really super admire who is also a huge racist or a huge misogynist thank you for your honesty and it could be a celebrity it can be or you know a famous individual oh you know I don't know if he was or not oh Gandhi was so great but there's some other stuff in his history I think I have a grandpa who was really great but also a huge racist and so just thinking about like do you want to be that person in someone's life do you want to be that person and he's really great but Jesus Jesus racist sometimes um no like of course not right that that question was rhetorical so as we're trying to to not be that person as we're trying to learn from the people around us we are absolutely gonna make mistakes and part of it is slowing down and not getting defensive when those mistakes are called out and trying to just make a point to learn from them because for sure they're gonna happen absolutely when you're trying super hard and you're nervous or you're standing up for something you believe in the first time you know it's gonna be a rocky path so just acknowledging that that's gonna happen and being kind of nice with yourself and on the topic of mistakes there's I'm a lesbian just want to address a way that people commonly make mistakes which is asking invasive questions asking inappropriate questions or wanting to know and not knowing how to do it so I can only speak for my lived experience which is some of the questions that I've gotten about my sexuality or about my personal life from people who are just curious and not trying to be offensive and I think now we have Google we have our books we have libraries there's so many ways to find out about the experiences of people who are different from you rather than making your first instinct being like can you explain to me how this works right you're laughing because you probably experienced it also yeah and so this is both ways this is like as someone who is different than the majority wanting to respect that person's curiosity assuming that it's respectful being like okay I know you just want to know let me answer this for you and also encouraging everyone who's curious to use Google first you're going to get a lot farther by saying hey I googled I googled I know you're from Nicaragua I googled something about Nicaraguan history can we talk about it rather than just being like so you got rainforest there and so part of this also is consistency and as you make the choice to be a person who stands up for diversity and as you make a choice to be a person who honors people's lived experiences knowing that you need to do that consistently because in order to gain in order to build relationships with anyone for any reason you need to know that you need to be a person that they can count on and so again going back to the recycling metaphor right if you recycle on Tuesday but not on Wednesday but again on Thursday and then on Saturday someone's like you don't recycle you're not allowed to be defensive about it because you're not you haven't been consistent about it and so it's about making a level making a commitment at a level at which you're able to sustain and being aware of that commitment as time goes on and as we make mistakes one of my favorite questions to ask is how do you know if you've hurt someone's feelings you ask them and taking and just being simple about it right avoiding over engineering not making things more complicated than they need to be and just being empathetic with each other being like oh I made a mistake I shouldn't have asked you that question I think I hurt your feelings and I'm sorry right I'm just moving through that now we get to talk all of us I'm done so now it's your turn thank you and our slides will be up but here are some more resources one that I do want to point out before we all start talking is a developer named Fury they wrote an extension called unbiased me that lets you remove identifying information from LinkedIn so that you don't see a person's name gender profile picture when you're looking at their qualifications and there are more resources that I want to add including this top women in tech twitter list I found a better one at one point and I couldn't find it this morning this list is a little skewed towards white cisgender women but we'll add some more when the slides go up the last one is the arc and bell hooks everyone read bell hooks because she's wonderful that's awesome thank you you're at the mic that's amazing hi Ruby my brain is about exploding with stuff about this topic yes please I don't want to take over everything so I may speak a few different things thanks so much for doing this session it's been a really important conversation I hope that we can I'm really curious about other people's experiences at Drupalcom I definitely noticed that there are more what more white women here and I'm starting to feel like okay cool there's been initiative towards this effect and that's working now let's have some initiatives to bring in other things because we really have to remember that like more white women doesn't equal okay now we're diverse we have a lot of different people who are not represented here and we are all missing out by not having the perspectives of more people of color of more working class people of more people who don't speak english as their first language off the top of my head there's probably a lot of others who have very interesting and important experiences at Drupalcom that we would all benefit to hear so I'd like to in general I'd like to encourage people to think about being intersectional so that you don't get caught up in just like well I'm just for women's rights and you know if you're a black woman you can come with us but I'm just doing this women thing but instead think about how very very connected all of our issues are we really have to work together and that really actually includes everybody even white cisgender, affluent men can be part of that intersectionality because they grew up in a working class house or something you know like we all have stuff we can work on together so on the issue so on some of the workplace stuff I have a lot of thoughts about that those were great suggestions Karen I wanted to just like to throw out some more suggestions one is to think about a lot of what you're talking about the organizational culture and whether it felt welcoming for women but also does it feel welcoming to people who aren't white like is everybody on going out to movie night and this is always like something that you'd be interested in or things like that but even more than and so lots of cultural issues but even more than that organizations should think about their policies and how they affect people and we've all heard like those horror stories unfortunately I work mostly in non-profit tech where it's slightly better but we've all heard the horror stories of how developers are expected to work 60 to 80 hours a week and young, childless people can do that work and so moms especially get pushed out but parents in general and family friendly workplaces can benefit lots of people so thinking about going beyond the culture but actually the policies of the organization like do you have paid sick days do you have foreign to leave do you have flexible work do you allow people to work from home when they need to stuff like that you can really do like to support having a more diverse workforce and on that note thank you so much for everything you're sharing a new initiative just came out with a bunch of workplace policies I think it's called FEM Power but I'll add it to the resource list also where they literally are just giving you suggestions of policies for companies 1 to 20 employees, 20 to 50 100 plus of things that you shouldn't should not be doing to create inclusion across all margins we'll have extra meetings differently maybe we have more meetings online where they're not face to face and someone who's more timid might feel comfortable talking and things like that and there's some great conversation about imposter syndrome there was a good session about it yesterday you know there's stuff that goes on even at this con that actually fosters imposter syndrome that invalidates certain types of group of developers or certain types of users based on gender or skills background or vocabulary so try not to foster imposter syndrome really like validate everybody people that couldn't be using group for longer than you but they don't know PHP as well as you do or something but they're still legit developers so just think about some of those things and I'll just close by saying my little rant I really am interested in hearing about the experience of people of color in the conference in particular so I was also I guess encouraged people and they want to share those experiences I'd love to hear so we are having a bop tomorrow from one to two so if we've run out of time here let's get together and let's start putting together documents and kind of keep this conversation going I certainly don't want this to stop at the end of this session I want this to be a conversation and I'm also curious how people's experiences are in their local communities DrupalCon and this is neither good nor bad is a huge organization the DA is a huge organization with a lot of stuff going on so sometimes it can be hard to make a change but local communities are much more agile I personally have had very bad luck with that straight up I've gotten a lot of feedback from people that is like oh we're pretty sure you hate white men and so now I start every conversation with white men because I don't know what else to do right there's no other word for cisgender there's no other phrase for white man these are the only words that we have and they're not good or bad you're not bad for being a cisgendered white man it's fine so I'm still searching for that vocabulary if anyone else has any success with that I would absolutely love to hear it also it wasn't it is hard it is not hard because that's true thank you very much for this I have a couple hopefully very quick comments we got time I'd really like to say about devaluing people's lived experiences obviously as a also we're reading that's not obvious as a developer I also have a sort of reaction to if somebody says a wifi isn't worth doing something my immediate thought is oh I'll add another data point to this so that you get the bottom of it so I was sitting here thinking like oh great now I have to so I was like no all I have to do is say that's interesting I hear you my experience was this I wonder what the was the difference then I don't have to say just oh wifi worked for me I could say oh let's add another data point or something like that I haven't given much thought obviously but the point is there are ways to say oh I have actually been able to feel comfortable at this conference without saying and I therefore think you also do not I can say as you said I'm sorry to hear that hopefully we can make this better in this particular instance it worked for me how can we make it work for more people next time or something like that yeah I hear you and I think what also might be helpful is even just moving away from the paradigm of comparing experiences at all and just letting people say you know because I hear your developer voice thinking like oh you owe me me too and just saying like oh you had a bad experience that's hard I'm sorry and the conversation can just stop there rather than trying to accumulate another data point or dive deeper it can just be like sorry it sucks to feel left out and that's and then you leave the focus on the person talking and you because they're what we're talking about right we want to empathize with them cool thank you it was for like families it wasn't actually childcare it was like you could bring your partner and the partner could go tour the city well and your partner and your partner's kids or whatever while you did with conference it wasn't childcare I know I tried to set it up in Denver and it was really hard to find it like a company that would do it for us like even it because to bring it into the conference the convention center they were like well you have to get licenses into this so we won't let you do it here there is a nursing room I'm like well that's not what I'm looking for because some people like single mom I would have loved to brought my kid but I couldn't but if I could I would have let to brought him and what do I do with him during the day so I can't so we have looked at that in places just it depends on the venue and but now they've got more like drop in childcare places they could do more of that what could a place and recently we had to hire and we have a very heavy focus so we asked we were looking for a group of consulting firm and so I was getting it making judgments and the first thing my boss would look and say oh look they've got lots of women on this and I said first you have to think of all the designers and project managers for the world and now told me how much diversity they thought and then the other thing basically setting out who I think can join them let's say culture how many people have been talking about this because you're a woman so what you saw on page guys tell us a lot about you that's awesome it's important to say it's not just widely accommodated we have a reputation for being super liberal we recently came last in the Asia-U.S. city schools so the number showed I'm from DC one of the things that the women in tech community has done is they taken the 40 different women in tech groups and made a DC FemTech and often run all of their events together to get everybody out in a much bigger light that's one kind of thing but husband and I run our consulting company and a lot of that has to do with the way we want to be so our company was sent out with kids wives, husbands other significant others and the number of people who had never been to one of our things before said that was one of the coolest parties we've ever been to because there were so many different types of people there so you just have to run your business and run your lives as you want it to be to your point I just want to let's speak on a few of the points that Nicky made and also on the company that you brought up, a thing that I think is really important that we all keep in mind we absolutely should not stop having a conversation about different ways of being a female technology but we need to speak on intersectionality because that is he has, he has, we all have issues and if we make it about if we continue to have the conversation so centered around females and technology and that's the only conversation we're having we're leaving out a lot of people so I think we need to make all of these issues intersectional and when we're talking about company culture talk about company, like we need to talk about culture we don't need to say our company culture is so friendly for women that's great, but company culture needs to be so friendly for everyone for sure so I'm going to be really done over here by saying something because I want to stand up for what I believe I come from Denmark Denmark has one of the better ratios in terms of these issues first thing is we don't really talk about race, we talk about male email but we don't really talk about race and that's not because we don't have race because the issues are so much smaller compared to the males we don't have either a equity thing there's so we have a lot of things that are good that are good on that money but when I hear you talking about females and technology or diversity in technology what I think of when I am sitting in a situation where I have to be free for a company that I'm working for is to be the best qualified person so when that person comes in and applies to this company I don't necessarily look at names except if I want to respond to them I look at what are their qualifications now I'll grant that looking at qualifications sometimes can be biased because although we haven't been that long in the technology industry but one of the things that really have begun annoying here is that we talk about these ratios and we're not talking about qualifications one of the things I heard Nicky told me yesterday was that training here there's just a separation between how much training you get we have in tech, in schools and this becomes a really tricky thing in Denmark because we don't have that if you apply to school then you go to that school we don't have it in our high schools or anything like that and that means that when I'm looking at a resume I look at basically how many years have they spent in the industry and what kind of education do they actually have and then when they come in for an interview I usually subject to something I have to figure out what can they actually do something and I'll admit that I have never actually hired a woman to develop I've probably hired 10 people for companies and I've never actually hired a woman and the first thing is that when you get 20 applications usually two are women because there's the option not to have many female developers and the second thing is that usually there's a better qualified person in there so how do I handle that like am I still allowed to pick the most qualified person but yeah, you first the first thing I would like to see personally is your ads I think a lot of the other states have a lot of studies done about like verbiage and saline learning of ads and how that returns he's got something to say yeah, because one of the things that my time with me was like people do exist yeah, how does it exist it does exist it does exist but one of the things I think that ran through with me was that women have a tendency to check all the boxes whereas I consider myself why you could change the way you write that description to make it sound kind of more human exactly yeah, I mean 18 years of Google insurance that's what I was saying earlier that women when we tend to apply we'll look at a job description and be like oh my god I can't do all this I only know this and so we won't even apply we literally won't apply where men are like I can only do a quarter of that I can totally handle the rest of this and they drop fly and I would extend that to marginalize groups in general yeah, not just women I can only speak for women because I'm only am a woman there's a two-way street here because I think women also need to realize that it's okay to not know everything when you go into a job that's what I'm saying, that's exactly what I'm saying that's why we don't know that I'm on those candidates and I identify the one who maybe had just as much talent depending on who's mentoring are the opportunities so I have two things I want to say first, when you think about publication you might be looking at that in a kind of narrow way yeah a lot of people have already shared good examples of how having more diverse teams benefits the organization a lot of the way the perspective understanding different kinds of users and things like that so for one thing years in the industry might not speak to some of those other important qualifications so first of all prioritize those other things and if it's important to your organization to have that then you actually need to prioritize so that you look at again, you know, different understanding that people have had different things that led them up to it I mean, you know I've been programming since I was 10 years old but nobody ever suggested I should be a developer or a professional programmer in my life in over three decades so you know if you want to change the situation if you think we've helped your organization you could do some of that work you have to reach out, pull some people in that's something that helps all across the board for doing a developer of any kind mentoring can be very, very useful also though, like if I was a woman and I was just trying to work with the organization and I looked at the about page and thought there were no in the end of the year I wouldn't want to work there so another reason that you can't just expect people well, you know, they want to work here they can apply, you know, like you really have to, if you decide it's a priority for you, you have to go out and then we're back to the photos which I honestly would test a guy in the green shirt in the back you've had your hand up for a while so I recently went through a hiring around my organization so there are a lot of reasons to work towards a more diverse workplace obviously, but our solution was one practice we have is that when reading resumes you're more likely to invite a candidate for an interview but it's been a man because we have noticed in our experience that men are more likely to both get a brag on their resumes so you have to kind of like take off 10% of the experience and in our experience we are less likely to do that so you probably have to add I'm not saying we're a practicing affirmative action we don't we're more like a team we mean for you and that's worked very well for us the second thing is that because we've noticed a mid-career developer who is probably put up way more shit than a man who is in exactly the same age same experience and so all else being equal is probably way better at the job and so we're more of a team who wants to be physical and have because they're probably going to be good at the job so we're probably going to be good at the job and we're going to be small teams that they're probably going to be managed by or send offers to their clients that worked out really well for us the reason we're called is because our goal is to have 30% of our staff well, is it your goal or not? it's a way to get you there the first key is important in the sense that I want when I'm hiring I'm being given a set of tests and then I'm being told I'm being handed I only have one more minute Sam Boyer I understand some of that but what you said given that I'm not going to see some notion of qualification and there's a lot of noise coming at this problem but at the end of the day I think a lot of the officers there there's a well known problem for example by technical items or this goes maybe but can we start right now? we're so linked to this I actually didn't know I was trying to but there's a thing that happens to be here next week I like certain characteristics you know we understand over time what brings work but if I look for these characteristics and that turns into a notion of are they better qualified