 Thanks for coming. My name is Charles and I work at automatic which is kind of the parent company if you will of wordpress, but I wanted to make mention of both my telephone number four four four two one nine three one six and Twitter handle I was just going to ask a couple of questions during the presentation if anyone's more comfortable with just doing text or Twitter then feel free to chime in that way and I'll also kind of leave that up there for any subsequent discussions Okay, so with Out further do I'm going to put this up here just kind of to give you a sense of the company behind wordpress. We usually have a Collective gathering Every year where everybody gets together and just talks about what's going on and Good time for face-to-face but before I go into a deeper discussion of distributed diversity and life at automatic Just wanted to give kind of an acknowledgement that we're in Atlanta, Georgia, we're kind of kind of inhabiting the space building upon the work that the Muscogee and the work that the Cherokee did to make this a habitable space and Also, if you've gone back 50 years ago last Monday Just down the street that way we were all You know kind of commemorating dr. King's Passing his funeral took place a couple of blocks that way so I Say that to just kind of give my context I grew up in Atlanta And I'm kind of one of the older people Now in the community was old enough to have witnessed the events around his passing So I want to jump into automatic now I've been there for about two years and one of the great things about it is that you get to Hang out and work at a very welcoming Company as you can kind of see from the photo here. There's a lot of work that I think has been done at least on gender Inclusion in the company. So I think that's a thing that's to be praised and The company is also Distributed in the sense that we work all over the globe So I'm a data scientist there and a lot of my colleagues work in In Europe There's a colleague that I work with quite closely space in Israel There's another colleague who's based in Australia so distributed Companies can work they can be effective at doing important things in the world And that gets to one of the things that is most important for me about Being an automatic and I'll come back to it later Which is being able to have kind of the world as your office place So this is a photograph. I recently took of my office for the day, which is at a coffee shop here in Atlanta I dropped my kids off to school and I find a place to work and I can look you know listen to stories going on in the background I can listen to the birds chirping. I get to kind of create my own space to do Work in and I'm communicating with people all over the world literally I Think that's very empowering and I'll get back to that also, but I think that empathy For this company plays a large role in making it work in the sense That when we first start at automatic everyone does what's called a support or happiness rotation as in the first three work three weeks of work are Listening to or taking live chats about how the products are doing The first three weeks are actually understanding how people are experiencing the various word press calm Products and answering questions about them So this is a screenshot. I took of an internal Memo, it says if you can read it February empathy challenge It was put out by the lead of our mobile group Kate Houston Basically the sense of getting into the design of the word press application and Understanding how the people that are using it are experiencing it in order to really build some empathy With the users with the designers that are making this thing happen here's another screenshot of Alan who is a engineer associated with the the Gutenberg project and He is kind of looking at how the user flow and in Gutenberg looks as a real user of it and I think the Gutenberg workshop is the competing one to this So I have a lot of I'm showing empathy for Gutenberg, okay, so all the sense that Everything aside, I think that Automatic really puts a lot of effort into Developing kind of external and internal empathy trying to put yourself in the person the other person's footsteps and This is another kind of empathy that I really like about automatic which is This is a photograph taken from a designer Hang out in Detroit in which they actually kind of went into communities In Detroit and said, okay, can we put up a web page for a given small business and I think the woman and the lower Left hand at the screen owns a business in Detroit and Some you my recognize Ola here who's co-staffing the booth with me And they kind of came in and said How can we make a WordPress site work for you? We spent the whole week Just going around in the community in the hood just saying how can we get a site going for your business? And I think this to me shows a lot of empathy for you know, how people are experiencing the product and how we can make it work So this is another thing I wanted to highlight which is that our head of design John Mada is here with a High school principal in Paintsville, Kentucky and John had the idea well Okay, maybe we can have a design class for high schoolers there so that they come out knowing skills and Just wanted to take a second here let that Gestate but wanted to get a sense of why people are here or let me ask Just ask three questions Are any people who here who work at a room work remotely? Okay, so maybe Fridt Lanser cool. Yeah Any people here that are really actively thinking about well, how can I make my Wherever I work more inclusive more diverse Okay, so it's it's it's in there and so hopefully I can touch on some of these issues and At least got a discussion going Okay, but the thing I wanted to bring up with both You know the experiences kind of in the community in Detroit and in my kind of Acknowledgement of dr. King's work is that opportunity is still kind of in the exclusive Mindset if we look around at what's come going on in our world in our country Just some graphs here. I'm a data scientist at WordPress So I'm always being called on to put together charts graphs analyses for the stuff that's happening internally So a graph just to illustrate that economic opportunity in terms of just salary is still kind of racialized in our country Black Latino People just making a fraction of the pay of others in our society if we look at kind of a measure of Economic inequality The definitely seems to be some patterns here in Atlanta unfortunately scores kind of high in the Genie index which is kind of a measure of how You know the economic divide of an area it's a kind of a You know kind of a dark patch there and the Atlanta and the You know southeast and it's kind of spread throughout the country And just to kind of apply one racial lens to it the areas at least in the southeast of this high inequality also kind of overlap with the proportion of African-American the African-American population Let's see so All that to say that there, you know exist some disparities both along racial and geographic lines They kind of intersect right so one way to think about what distributed work as in the the companies that are like automatic could bring to the world is a A more acute equitable distribution of Resources wealth however you want to put it right if your Opportunities are not necessarily linked to and limited by your place Then maybe that opens the world up to a lot of other possibilities So again, I think back to the work that John Mada was doing You're actually saying that you could go out into a place and introduce a Technology as kind of an equalizer and this when people go out and do surveys of Women underrepresented minorities One factor that keeps coming up, especially when you ask well What's what's the most important thing about working in a place for you? Is that this this notion of flexibility and work? Comes up as a key factor. In fact among 83 percent of Underrepresented women in the sciences and engineering the ability to do Flex to have flexibility and work to be able to work from wherever you want it to be able to kind of chart the schedule That you want comes up as the most important factor So another factor kind of looking at and trying to tease out where to Look for people and what to think about in terms of how Distributed work could have a real impact You're just just thinking about where Skilled people are so as just one data point The black colleges the historically black institutions, especially in the southeast pay Play a large role in producing graduates in the sciences and engineering so again It's kind of a way of looking at you have a large population in a given era you have You know skills concentrate it there so Kind of bringing the work to the people so to say it's a very powerful way of thinking about things and You know If you're skeptical about saying well you know what is the value of Equality or Distributed work for You know what is the value of being more inclusive Then this report done by McKinsey 2015 Kind of hits home a point which is our latest research finds that companies on the top Quartile for gender racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have Financial returns above their national industry medians Which is to say that Making an effort on for inclusion making an effort for Constructing a diverse workforce You know has a benefit for everyone and you know most recently I think this is kind of the You know the movie child the poster child for what? diversity means an inclusion means in terms of profitability in The movie Black Panther, you know kind of internationally kind of across all demographics it's one of the most profitable movies that has been made and Again, it speaks to inclusive and diverse themes So, you know we kind of broaden what our Reach is if we broaden inclusivity then you know everyone wins So, where are we so one of the discussions that I was having earlier with my colleague? especially about the Detroit hangout they did was that Well, it's okay to go to some place and try to make a you know Teach them development skills or teach them about putting up a wordpress site But what happens if they don't have reliable access to the internet? What if the people they're trying to reach don't have that kind of Access and that's a good question. So I was trust trying to think about this question in terms of the training how much do you need to to be able to construct a Distributed workforce that impacts people that have been underrepresented and How much burden are you placing on them in terms of training and in terms of the resources they need to enter? into you know distributed company so one Piece of this spectrum. We have companies that we think about in terms of their distributed workforce WordPress or automatic as I mentioned everybody works remotely Companies that you may be aware of Mozilla the the browser There's this search engine called duck duck go And there's this company called github that hosts a lot of open source Projects well these companies all have a significant number of distributed employees people that work all over the globe But in some sense even for roles like product development engineering software development Marketing you need some skills. Maybe they can be acquired formally and formally You know, maybe you need a college education. Maybe you need You know some some kind of technical training. It could be formal or not But still there's a lot of investment you need to be making in training On one end of the resource spectrum. There's companies like Lyft. I mean you can be a driver Anyplace, but you need to own a car, right? Leasing a car Yeah, there's some kind of Yeah, I mean and and increasingly, you know places like Walmart or Amazon of course are talking about Creating You kind of I would say hybrid workforces that you know some portion robots some portion You know people doing the restocking people Handling customer support, so there's a lot of You know stuff going on in this space But I think that the kind of barrier to entry, you know getting the job is less burdensome than You know having to you know necessarily have the the car or have the You know be highly credentialed, okay But the questions you could ask in the space are you know kind of stability of the job You know what are the the benefits you're receiving? Are you having to make lots of compromises in your? You know other aspects of life in order to juggle You know getting it. So what's the is the work life? Equation really working out And you know you so you could go in this other portion of the spectrum You know telemedicine where you know you're a highly trained Physician here, and she's making a you know essentially a telecall So you know just really a lot of things to think about And I think remote work is increasingly becoming the Thing on the horizon, but how what questions should we be asking about it? And here I really have more questions than answers So I just want to this is not exactly as Visible and legible as I would hope but I just wanted to throw up some Indicators and some data that we have from distributed companies about how Inclusive they're making their workforce So this may be a little hard to Parse but on the left-hand side. I have some data from github another You know technology company, I think It's around five percent or so participation of black and Hispanic Engineers About 22 percent. I think women in technical roles. It's larger for the company as a whole Get lab is another Distributed company that makes basically software a software hosting platform and The thing you'll notice here, although it's It you know does have in the teens representation of Black Hispanic employees, but you know again, it's a smaller company and the numbers are low you can have one black technical employee and still have 12 percent, which is interesting but So in other words, there's still You know, there's still this gap in between the promise of the work and kind of the representation there again, this is Not that legible looking at it, but The summary here is that for black Latino College graduates in the in the sciences engineering The rates are something like eight to ten percent So it's coming towards what you expect from the overall population, but the kind of labor force participation Still is going toward the five percent level in these kind of STEM fields, so there's still some drop-off is in You know the graduates are being produced, but are they finding work in this area and You know, it's also so there's also kind of a really credentialized Look at the the data because you know, I'm looking at college graduates people that could You know afford the tuition have the resources to make it through college What about the people that need work? that are perfectly capable of doing things but You know, how do they get into the pipeline for work that? Gets out of this huge Barriers in terms of inequality So, you know, here's another graph kind of illustrating the same point So I made a quick survey. I was just trying to send this out to people at the various Distributed companies to ask well, you know, what are you doing? What are your thoughts on going forward? Strange well the interesting thing about it haven't had much feedback But I would just kind of welcome people to just dive into it took a site here distributed inclusion org and You know feel free to go to it or just dabble around in it and how much? How's my time? Okay So I'm gonna try to experiment actually we're going to the survey and while I doing that are there any questions or You know kind of yeah, I do have a question about the definition of diversity Because here I did I went to a non-profit Diversity summit there were three white guys and two black guys at the panel everybody over 50 non-profits probably mostly female employees there younger so the audience was mostly female younger black white Hispanic Asian and then we had these five guys older guys up on stage talking about the importance of Inclusion and it was ironic So from your point of view I wonder how maybe or maybe from automatics point of view or How do you actually because sitting in your session? That's diversity You're looking around this Conference we see a lot of people It's not just black and white in Atlanta. It is in Seattle. They think about American Indian population So it's Well, I had a nice quote there, but it's a complicated You know, I meant in light you bring up the complexities of the issue when I think of I mean, I've been thinking about three things lately There's the word diversity. There's the word inclusion. There's the word equity and What I'm really trying to think about is You know really the thing I was getting to in the beginning of the the talk which is that You know King was assassinated trying to get some work done for the striking garbage workers but striking sanitation workers in Memphis You know at the end of it all We're all trying to participate. We're all trying to put food on the table educate our children what are the barriers to getting there and I think of Inclusion and equity particular as saying that you know a as a you know as a native person in Seattle as a Young black man in Atlanta You know, you're trying to You know really exist you're trying to fulfill your human capacity and it's a society We benefit from those human capacities being fulfilled As a company we benefit from having You know multiple eyes on things when I do when I write code I Submit it to a platform like github and three other developers look at it and a developer who's You know 20 years younger than I in base in Australia May have different perspective than I would on the code When I'm trying to present a You know just a plan for three years going forward For my work and I make a comment The woman who's my manager may have a different Thought about the structuring of those goals than I would so I I mean I think that the a the perspectives Play out in a real way. I think the opportunities for a company play out In a real way, and I think that when you And I also think that when we let artificial barriers that we've inherited. I mean we were born into society. We can't control the fact that You know Georgia is what it is The the world we are born into we have no control over but we have some control over just saying You know you have a valid idea. You have a valid idea. Why you know, why aren't you being heard and I think That I kind of view the inclusion as that being invited to the table Making decisions about how a company reaches out to the the people that it wants to support and I view the inclusion and equity as What are our customers need? Maybe there's a huge market that we haven't identified So that's Kind of how I view it You know, I think automatic is still like many companies making it shift So I've been going giving you a long-winded answer to your question, but I'll just Mean as a human being we all want to be a contributing member to the society, right? if a company Company with benefit is that have a lot of different I put a lot of time Okay, particularly in a place that they would get from having those diverse People the best way that we would look at it the college Inclusive college equality college diversity and those three companies that way Right. Hmm. So we need to Have that communication has a dialogue and have that happening And that's why we have to start talking about it and that's why I talk about accessibility When it comes to people But that's about a lot of people apply to everybody Do you find In the same way that companies release Diversity data race that they're releasing salary data according to Diversity because I think that's the other part of the equity scale. Yeah, it's nice to know that we have a diverse Workforce, but what are we paying them because that is like the onus of salaries on that? Yes, I feel like the minority group may have less Affordability, you know in that negotiation factor for time and to hold out for the salary Yeah, I Yeah, I did I've seen Two that come to mind. I can't really place where but One was saying that you know the In essence it seemed to be saying that They were particular underrepresented groups that were more prone to take, you know, kind of their reasoning was take a lower sell The explanation was take a lower salary get the job, you know, just nail just something down kind of thing And so not having Right and I don't think this particular survey teased apart, you know With their skills and negotiating with their I think If I'm not mistaken Maybe Facebook Google have Released some data about, you know, pay equity for women. I Don't know if it's been done along racial ethnic lines But yeah Intentional And then As crazy as it may seem Everyone's not pretty into it Always have a way to find them So if you're just figuring out ways to get to those disadvantaged people Or people who have the skills that they don't know how Is it going to be taught how to figure out where to find those jobs that would help too And I would also add to that one of my friends and my cousin works in IT and They intentionally didn't put their Ethnicity on their application Because they don't know if they're going to be looked at and not given the given the opportunity because they're qualified or not qualified And so if you went to the university of wisconsin, which is, you know, big cheese state But he got a job. He loves it. He's in san diego But the company that he works at believes in diversity and that's part of their culture And I think it really comes down to what the company's culture and their values are and then that's reflected in how they execute things and then Like you said you surround yourself with diverse people it's kind of like a It's accurate kind of thing like if that's what you're fostering Other people are going to foster that as well. And then it's not just all on like the head of the company I say like wipe that question off Yeah I really hate that question But then, you know, like I have the opportunity to do that and by the end of the story it's the same thing That's a probably good place to start And another example is my friend. Um, he's the owner of an educational Platform, I don't know what it's called. It's called bridge prep solutions and what he's done All of his employees work remote. They're international and he's taken off ethnicity Gender and something else on there And he's just he has like key questions that he wants to have for example, like a person at polytech That didn't all get the degree but has the skills He has certain questions that meet the criteria for what he's hiring for and he goes to different pockets So like for example, he has an ad on career contessa, which is a female Oriented website for women to get jobs. He has a job posting on I think it's nezvi or national association of black engineers And then he has a posting on another website that's for all minorities and disadvantaged for People that need accessibility and that's how he's like picking out employees based on those skills rather than trying to like fit them In those holes Yeah And that might be something you can try and do and it'd be less work on your part because a lot of people They might know one website Or something like that. I don't know Well, I I'm getting the signal to Oh Okay, um, I was I think in in building a team and hiring a team, um I was fortunate enough to learn in a corporate environment from A wonderful manager and I've had a wide I had a wide variety of managers, but one in particular was Very good at Talking to us as junior people who would eventually move up the lab Talking to us about diversity about the importance of I think it's important to not like we've been talking about What you're hiring but also the people you're already working with talk to them about being inclusive Being empathetic being Opening to new ideas because when you have a lot of different ideas, there's a lot more conflict, but it usually results in more interesting ideas And a really good product and like I said, I learned that from that manager really early in my career and It made a big impact and I mean other managers have Closed off points of view. Yeah, and so I think that's in addition to hiring You know looking out to to new people when you talk to your existing Yeah, yeah Yeah, I mean, I just feel that um whatever however, you want to phrase it but the quality of being empathetic of listening of trying to build that Um, I think that it's an important and maybe a skill that you should That I would say people should hire upon because a lot of times Um, you know, I can't tell you how many times that You know, you'll get into a technical discussion And it's really the person who kind of builds the bridge It says, well, okay, I see your point, but we need whatever it is And that's really the thing that gets a product out the door And I think that if you're you know, I really think that the contribution one Contribution that will be talked about maybe 50 100 years hence In terms of automatic is the ability and maybe other companies too just to create a wide-ranging distributed You know workforce in a way that's And hopefully at the end of it That's equitable and I think that Those kinds of things don't happen by accident and you like you said you have to You have to go out and find the The manager that you mentioned, you know And you know as people Right Stating that your diversity minded so that I know in applying for jobs No one's going to say we don't like this group of people, but if you you may be Lost to words like overwhelmed at the idea or Feeling like you may not belong there if you're looking at the present team or something like that and If you go we're diversity minded. These are the things that we're looking for and we're open to All these types of people and the person won't feel as though they don't belong and they'll they'll be It won't be a scary to apply to whatever position it is. That makes sense. Yeah Yeah, applying for a job is scary enough You know, why are you gonna? You know, it shouldn't be an open question about whether I'll be included there or not Yeah, intimidating exactly Oh marvelous Well, uh Well, yeah, I think if I leave you with anything It's that first line up there that It's not as visible as I want it to be but it's cultivate empathy and I think of the You know the story of your manager and the story of you know coming to apply for A job and am I going to be accepted as I am? Um, you know all of those things the degree to which we can just remove those barriers and You know and make it as Open and you know open to the challenge of You know pulling through more applicants You know, that's a good problem, right? I mean You know if everybody's there then you can say, oh You know, this is a skill I value and you can you can make better choices. You can make you have larger options Um, so that's the thing I would encourage cultivate empathy Thank you. Thank you