 Okay, are we ready to start? Should I go ahead? All right, great. Welcome. My name is Cynthia Coupe, and I am here to present about the SDDI, the Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion Project that the Linux Foundation launched in July of 2021. It paused for a while, and we've rebooted it recently. So what we're doing is exploring, evaluating, promoting the best practices from research and industry to increase diversity and inclusion in software engineering. So in 2020, what happened is that the SDDI group started looking at what the percentages of people in the tech industry were. So how many men were there? How many women were there? How many non-binary, genderqueer? How many white people, people of color? How old were they? Where did they come from? And then there was a few questions as to what kinds of abilities or disabilities they had. So in 2020, the information that we found was that there were 91% men, 7% women, and about 1% non-binary. 70% of people were white, 9% were South Asian, 7% Hispanic, almost 5% Middle Eastern, 4% East Indian, South East Asian, 4% Black or African descent, 3.6% multiracial, almost 2% biracial, 1.2, and then indigenous, not even 1%. As you can see in the other slides, most of the people are 25 to 29 years old, then it's 30 to 34, going down as people get older. The disabilities that we looked at were being blind, being deaf, being unable or difficult to stand without assistance, and unable or difficult to be able to type. So something that was left out of this capture was people that are neurodivergent. That's, sorry, touched the mic there. That's the area that I specialize in is neurodiversity. I'll introduce myself a little more in a minute here. So we do have a little bit of information, not from this survey, but from another one that was put out about a year ago, I think. And let me see here, I have it on my phone. I wasn't able to include it in the slides. So there were 16,000 people in the tech industry that were surveyed for this and found that there were 10% of people that had concentration or memory disorder, such as ADHD, about another 10% that said they had anxiety, 9.7, so almost 10% of people that had an emotional disorder, such as depression or bipolar. 4.2% that said they had autism, such as Asperger's, or we don't use that diagnosis anymore, but that was included in there. And then 2% that said they had learning differences, like dyslexia. And 1.2% said that they had something that was unclassified or they were gonna use their own words for. So anyhow, that factors in as well. So that's my specialty. I am actually a speech language pathologist by training. I work in the area of DEIA and I'm an autism specialist. So I have a lot of experience with working with people who are neurodivergent. I recently, okay, so sorry, I'll go back to that anyway. Anyhow, so that was in 2020. We resurveyed again in 2022 with about 70,000 responses and it was almost exactly the same. We had a little less, a little more women, so actually a little less women. In 2020, we had 7.7% of women. In 2022, we had 5.1% women, but then there were a little more non-binary, some people that preferred not to say or in their own words. If we can compare again, so white or European. They have those lumped together in 2020 and then they had it separated in 2022. So there were 39% that were white, 37% that were European, whereas it was 70% before. So essentially it's the same if not more now. All the other percentages are really very, very similar, including the ones for age and other disabilities. So we know that we're not evening the workforce yet. So what our goal is to do, our challenge to solve is how do we get more diversity? How do we get more women? How do we get more people of color? How do we get more people that are neurodivergent? And then once they're here, how do we keep them? Some of the opportunities that we have that we know are that racially diverse groups make better decisions. So we have racially, this is based on an article about racial diversity. That's research that has come out. Diverse open source projects are more productive and working on gender diverse teams improves attitudes towards women. One that's not up here is that groups that are neurodivergent are also function better. They actually are shown to be at least 30% more productive. So if you have a group of people that are neurotypical and neurodivergent, so that means ADHD, autism, dyslexia, they're gonna be about 30% more productive than they are if it's just neurotypical. So we want to have diverse teams. It strengthens the workforce. I actually like to think of it in terms of biodiversity. If we think of biodiversity, what makes plant and animal life stronger is variation. It's the same in the workforce. Our mission at SDDI is to discover, evaluate and promote the best practices from research and industry to increase diversity and inclusion in software engineering. So I don't come from a software background, but that's why I am here as the chair, because we want to again, diversify. We want to find out information from other areas, other practices, what's working in different places and how can we bring those ideas together to strengthen what the best practices are. So our organization, we're going bottom up here. So we have a community of contributors. There's 12 people that we have on our steering committee. They're from academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, corporations and open source project participants. They're all volunteers, so we're working together. We have three different working groups. The three different working groups that we have are neurodiversity, DEIA best practices, and then we also have talent pipeline for diversity. So for all of these, how are we recruiting talent and how are we retaining talent? And then we have the steering committee. So we have three different working groups. We have a steering committee that meets once a month and the working groups are also meeting independently about once a month. So the neurodiversity working group, I had meant to put way less words on the slide but I did actually, but I didn't save it apparently. So anyhow, so our goals, this is really wordy. I'm gonna go through them and simplify it really. So basically what we're doing in the neurodiversity working group is we wanna find out what the needs are of people who are neurodivergent in the software industry. So in terms of like, how do we prepare them for jobs? How do we recruit them? How do we hire them? How do we retain them and how do we promote them? It's becoming more obvious what best practices are but it's also so varied and different but we wanna know what actually works. What's actually shown to work? There's no way to make a template for this really. You can't say, here's what you do because each person is unique but we can say, here's some things that worked. Have you tried this? Another goal is that we give guidance on how we train managers to be inclusive towards their neurodivergent employees. What does that mean? Does that mean how do we support the managers and support the neurodivergent people in their employment? I personally believe that we need to restructure the way that we're doing management because I don't think it's fair to put another task like this on a manager. Some managers can naturally understand that but not everybody. You might have a very good manager that doesn't actually quite understand how to manage their neurodivergent workforce. So can we set up a co-management? Can we find somebody that is good at the neurodivergent management and help the manager with that? Guidance on processing and tools to be more inclusive for recruiting neurodivergent people. Where do we go? How are we looking for them? And in hiring, I think this is a big thing at least in the world that I work in with DEIA and neurodivergent and best practices is like the hiring process itself filters out probably 80 plus percent of the people that are neurodivergent because typically we don't interview very well to a typical interview. Some things that are currently being done for that in different work systems are to when you're interested in having somebody work for you rather than having just an interview process you kind of have like a tryout process. So you have them kind of shadow the job for a week or you have them do parts of it and see how they fit into your culture how you can work with them. Guidance on, sorry, a strengths-based approach to understanding neurodivergent people and their superpowers. I don't know about superpowers. I feel like that's kind of overused. But anyway, what we mean by that is like everybody has skill sets that are strengths especially neurodivergent people. Neurodivergent people tend to have spiked skills so they have some strengths that are really, really, really apparent and then some things that are, you might expect for them to be able to do and they can't. So how do we take what they're naturally good at and use that in the workforce? And then support the areas that might be harder for them. Along in our working group, we want to collect community testimonials from people who are neurodivergent, see what their experiences are like at school and at work. Something that we know also a lot of is that people who are neurodivergent come in with a support team a lot of times. If somebody, think about a person that's been diagnosed with autism when they were in second grade. They've probably had support their whole way through school and from their family. And so when they get to the workforce, that support system hasn't gone away. Their family is often still their support system. I've talked to managers that are like, oh yeah, I get calls from mom every week. You know, how's Mike doing? Is he all right? And you know, maybe that doesn't feel appropriate but maybe that is appropriate. Maybe we can ask the person coming into the work environment what's your support system look like? How do you want that to look for you? So it's not that we're managing the parents but that's another aspect to think about too. It's not necessarily inappropriate. Anyhow, so creating also, we would like to create resources for managers, employees and students. So we'd love to eventually create an online place that people can go and click on something and read about like, hey, I'm having this issue. What should I do? Or here's a story about how my work life went or what I did to be successful so that it could be a resource hub. We'd like to eventually create a community support mailing list for people who are neurodivergent at work. Maybe people that are having problems with being neurodivergent. How do I handle this at work? Or, you know, again, just a resource. Some things that we're not going to be doing as neurodiversity working group is we're not a job matching service. So we're not, there are services that do that which is a great service. That's not what we're doing. So there are services that will take a person who's neurodivergent, look at their skills and then work with organizations to get them hired in the best place for them. Wonderful, wonderful skill service. That's not what we are doing as this working group. We're definitely not a tool for diagnosing neurodivergency. And we're not addressing mental health or being therapists. What we want to create is deliverables, our training materials for managers, employees and students. We're starting really with managers, employees, students as sort of the afterthought we'd like to do that as well. And then have a community testimonial website so that people can understand what these accommodations or changes in the workforce look like. DEIA best practices working group. So this group is making evidence-based recommendations for best practices in open source. They're looking at what practices have been tried. So not just, you know, hey, we should try this or we have this type of diversity, but what is working and what have you done? What's, have you tried it? Has it worked? We're currently in the process of putting together a survey to find, to answer a lot of these questions. And so again, we want to follow evidence-based practices so that we know that what we're recommending is really what's working. And we will look at this for research as well. So not just what people are saying, but also, you know, what is being researched. And we explicitly incorporate activation, so that's the A, so diversity, equity, inclusion, and activation into the approach to move beyond the conversation. So it's not just the same conversation over and over, which I don't know, if we look at the statistics of how many people, you know, what our diversity background is, like it seems like the same conversation keeps happening without the actual action the next step. So we want to figure out what that is, compile the best practices, structure it into a framework. And we're gonna start this with surveys and interviews so that we can evaluate the whole framework of what's working, and then be able to, as a deliverable, have survey results that show what practices work and which ones don't work. We want to create a resource for open source to learn about the best practices, what to try, what not to try, and then hopefully publish an academic research paper, popularize or, you know, facilitate making our findings well better known, and then creating a digital research library. So as we're going into our best practice working groups, we're kind of structuring and restructuring them too, because we initially divided up into neurodiversity, DEIA best practices, and the talent pipeline. And there's so much crossover in all of them. As we find out what we're each doing, we're finding that we're probably gonna work together, all together at some points to come up with things, and then change. Talent pipeline for diverse individuals working group. So this working group is building relationships with D&I groups to build coalitions. So what is working in order to get people that are divergent or, you know, whether that be gender or race, neurodiversity. And then we want to be able to, again, create clearinghouse for D&I communications and internships and mentoring. So how far out can we reach? Can we become a source so that there's a way that the talent pipeline can be utilized for all of the tech industry? We don't wanna wait for people to find us. We wanna find out how to find them. Gather influencers to help spread and create communications. For now, we'll focus on North American-based companies, tracking the data to make sure we're making progress, and then matching people with internships. Nongles, this is not global. Again, it's just North America. We're not redoing things that other groups have already done. We're really just looking at what is being done, what's working. It's sort of the same with all of these working groups, right? But it's the beginning stages of it, the next step for the beginning stages. So again, same with the other groups. We wanna be a clearinghouse for D&I communications across the coalition. We want to have events eventually where students and adults that are learning new skills can come to so that we can provide mentoring for them. Virtual career fairs for internships, community colleges. Again, adults that are reskilling, learning new skills so we can be a place that's like an active recruitment. And making materials that can give students to work on that internship so that other colleges or even internship places can have those available. We want a list of people who run organizations that have mentoring opportunities so we can just have more of a push and a face really of who we are and what we are recruiting for. And then eventually set up a WordPress site for gathering opportunities and communications and connect that with the SDDI project. So we have a website mailing list chat. Like I said, we have a survey that's going to be coming out soon. So we're hoping that people will join our mailing list. Our monthly meetings are open so if anybody would like to join those at any point, we can send out information about that also. And then we really just want to work closely with the people in the industry and find out what the best practices are and what people are doing across industries so that we can foster a better structure. Any questions? Thank you. Cynthia, a question about privacy and how you handle the delicate topics sometimes. So is there best practices on how managers can sort of approach both from a hiring perspective and from a project perspective if we build this clearing house, how do we capture important information but respect privacy? Yeah, that's a good question. How will we be doing that? I mean, I think for now, what we're doing is, I mean, it's all volunteer people so far that are volunteering the information about themselves. So we're not attaching any of the information to an individual. And as we go forward from there, I'm sure we'll find ways to either have to get, we'll have to get releases or we'll have to create a system where the information is definitely kept. I mean, it's sensitive. It is, it's sensitive information. And I don't have an exact answer for you on that, but definitely that's something that we've discussed on how to best handle going forward. I think so far it hasn't been something we've actively had to do because we're really just at the like, what is it that we want to be doing stage? If that answers your question. And my second question is around resources for managers and companies. That would be a wonderful resource to, so especially if you've got a team and you want to bring diverse individuals into it. It's not just management resources, it's how do we as a group support that individual and share the work and make sure everyone understands their capabilities, so some comments about that. Yeah, so and you, well, you mean this for any of the, any of the differences that people have, right? And I think, you know, you and I were talking about this a little bit beforehand. It's really changing the culture of the workplace. And I think that that is done, I don't think you can have a blanket statement for that. I think that's something that's done, you know, more one-on-one, right? Or once, I think some of it is really being sensitive to what the employees are saying. If employees are asking for something or saying something or, because not with, you know, I'm sorry, I have like 10 different thoughts going on in my head. So one of them is I'm thinking of, you know, employees that I've talked to, women who went into the tech industry and were like, it was just like such a male environment, right? Just the way things were done, like whether things were kept extremely messy or the language that people used to talk to each other, like it was just a very different environment than what they felt comfortable in. So while you could maybe put up a blanket statement of like, keep your workplaces neat and this that, I mean, you know, not to say like, this is such a gender lay, not like women are not messy. I'm just trying, I'm thinking of a specific example. So, you know, I think a lot of it is like being open to wanting to change the culture of where you are and recognizing that just because something has always been done in a certain way, doesn't mean that it always needs to be done in a certain way or that's even the best way. We see this a lot with neurodiversity too, when people that are neurodivergent come into the workforce, there's a lot of accommodations and changes that need to be made and it's so person specific. I mean, you know, or if somebody comes in with a physical disability, it's also very person specific or, you know, maybe somebody comes in from, you know, they're raised in a different culture and we don't, you know, we need to learn what that is so that everybody feels comfortable. And if we're aware of ourselves and we're aware that we want change, I think that's the first step. But it's one of those ones that I don't think we can prescribe what that means, you know, other than to say, be willing to change. And then when you hear feedback, like create a culture where it's feel safe to share information and it feels safe to talk about yourself too. You know, I think we really need to be able to address our own biases and differences because when we do that, then we create a culture of safety and awareness and, you know, communication for other people. So, I think wanting to change is the first step and then being open to it and open to feedback from, you know, whether that be professionals or people that you're working with or, you know, even a family member, right? Like they might say something and they're like, oh, that could apply to me at work. So, it's not something we can write out. You have a question too? Thank you. This is a very interesting topic to me. I was thinking about something you mentioned which is neurodivergent groups tend to be 30% more productive than neurotypical groups, which is interesting. My question is, has there been any studies about within those groups which are 30% more productive, are they receiving the kind of support they need or are they just pushing through in spite of all the difficulties they have? Right, that's a very good question. I believe that that statistic came out of a study that's being done in Australia. They had a certain amount of neurodivergent employees that came into a workforce and they did have support. I don't know exactly what kind of support they had because that wasn't the highlight of the study, but I think that, trying to remember exactly what the quote was that talked about it, it didn't specifically mention what they were doing but it did mention that they had support and so that's what they were looking at was kind of like, how did these people do, how does this group overall do? Another statistic though that I thought was really interesting and I'm gonna get the percentage wrong so this isn't really gonna be great. But when there are people that are neurodivergent, I think they were looking at autism, that their productive abilities, just people that are autistic, if they're focused on something where their skill set is, they can be 75% more productive than somebody who is neurotypical, which is, I mean, that's incredible, right? I mean, again, it's like finding that skill set. Yeah, and then being open to understanding where those skills fall short too, right? So it's like, maybe somebody's highly visual and they can look at code and find where the code is written incorrectly, right? I mean, this is like, this can happen but they aren't going to look at you when you're talking to them and so maybe they're left out of promotions because they don't have the people skills or maybe they're left out of social groups because they don't appear to have the social skills and so understanding like what we can do to include these people to the best of the ability that they want to be also because, I mean, a lot of people in that context want all the same things that everybody else wants. It just looks different, you know? I mean, I feel like something I hear all the time is like, oh, people with autism don't have feelings which is completely untrue. We have the same feelings that everybody else has. They just sometimes present a little bit differently. Sometimes they present a lot differently. So, you know, something that I also think is really positive actually about people that are neurodivergent is that by the time we get into the workforce we know ourselves pretty well. Like we're grown up, we're old enough, we've lived in this world for a long time. We know what works for us and what doesn't work for us and we're willing to talk about it. So, sometimes being able to directly approach somebody is it's not being rude. It's actually being really helpful. But, you know, again, neurodiversity, neurodivergency is hidden. Not everybody's sharing it. Not everybody realizes that it applies to them and so it can be rude to be like, well, I think you're autistic, you know? And you're like, what are you talking about? That's rude, right? But, so again, it's like creating a culture where the label doesn't matter. But that was a bird walk. Anyhow, I hope I answered your question. I'm curious if there's been any studies around remote work because in the last three years now after the pandemic, do we see it easier for someone with DEI to enter the workforce or harder because of the go-to-the-work place is sometimes more difficult or is it, you know, you're able to do it from your home? Yeah, from what I'm aware of and I can't think of any specific studies but definitely information that I've read and been exposed to is that having the flexibility is what's been the best for people because some people work better from home or they work better in a combination of environments, right? Or some people work better in an office. So it's like having that flexibility is what creates more better production, really. I mean, it doesn't seem to, like I haven't read anything that's like, oh, here's the magic number, like three days at home and two days at the office, right? But that ability to be able to be flexible, I've heard that not just from people that I know, like I hear that all the time, actually. So like just, you know, colloquially, like that's what I know but also what I've read is that it's really important to keep the diversity, the diversity of like where you're going to be working fluid if you can. And I mean, I do know a lot of companies too that have kind of like shut down their in-person and then they have, you know, they still have community-building events or they have times that they get together other places that seems to be working for some of them. But, you know, again, it's like people are so individual. I mean, no matter who it is, right? Like whether it's just because you're a parent and you're like, great, I can, you know, balance my parent work life better now. But yeah, I don't have any hard data on what's really working for that. But it does seem to be that like having all of it available is really important. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you coming.