 Before I start this talk today, I need to give a couple of disclaimers, mostly because I picked this title before I wrote the talk. Number one, see that big D word up there, diversity. Now when I originally thought of this talk, it's like, oh man, I could talk about all kinds of diversity, you know, I could talk about diversity of religion and ethnicity and disability and oh my god, this reading is piling up really fast. So for the sake of my sanity, I'm limiting myself to more talking about gender, specifically men and women in terms of gender, and also race, as race issues happen in America. So getting a little specific there. Okay, disclaimer number two, see those last two words down there, liberal arts. There's a lot of them too. And talking about all of them is just, you know, not really feasible. So for reasons that are going to be clear in a moment, I'm mostly focusing on English language and literature. Disclaimer number three is that it doesn't escape me for a moment that I'm going to be talking a lot about race today as a white woman, and that I'm going to be talking a lot about gender even as a woman who experiences gender in my own limited way. I'm not transgendered. There's all sorts of different ways to be a woman that I'm not. So please, oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please, do not let what I am saying today be the only thing you hear about race and gender in this industry. I mean, really, go on Google, find out what people of color have to say about these issues. A lot of what I'm saying up here is based on what they've been saying for years, and as well as my own personal reading that's been accumulating over years. So please, educate yourselves. My last disclaimer, a little hesitant to say, but you should know, I am one of them. Can't take the speaker and invite back now. This is me graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in medieval studies. Yeah, and here I am today, go figure. In another year, I graduate again with a Master of Arts in English, and then I'd move to Louisville, Kentucky, a little bit later, to follow my dream of becoming a high school English teacher. And it is in Louisville, Kentucky that I would learn one of the most valuable lessons of my life, which is that you can love our amazing English language and its power and its beauty and its nuance and its sound, and you can love sharing that with other people, especially young people, and at the same time, you can hate the American education system. So I got out of teaching and sort of fell into my current job as a Rails developer. That's its own story. And as I changed industries, I noticed some things were different, and some of those things were great. Like for instance, I am a huge fan of the fact that in this industry, you guys pay people with real-life actual money. I remember going to my first interview on my bus saying, oh, we'll start you off in such and such dollars an hour, in a year you can renegotiate, and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't have to do a nine-month unpaid internship, followed by a three-month unpaid internship, followed by maybe a minimum wage part-time job. This is amazing. Some of the things, though, weren't so great. I think we're all pretty familiar with the statistics that women and people of color make up very small percentage of people in this industry. And this interested me. So I went to find out why, and read what a lot of people had to say about this. And I noticed a bit of an intellectual Bigfoot running around. It's kind of blurry, never explicitly shows its face, but there seems to be a widespread belief that it's there. And that Bigfoot is this. By their nature, the arts naturally attract women and people of color, and they always have. Now, this is a little, this is kind of complicated, like, there's a grain of truth in this. Maybe you've got, like, a quarter of a Bigfoot running around, which you should really get looked at. But let me talk about a few things to just problematize this. For one, I want to talk about the canon. Now, for those of you who don't remember hearing this word since high school, C-A-N-O-N. It's the writers and the works of literature that we consider to be really, really good. Now, start of the 20th century, like up until about the 1950s, this was the canon. You might notice something that all of these writers, pretty much all of them have in common. I mean, we've got a few exceptions with Jane Austen and Alexander Dumas up in the right hand corner. He, he wrote Count of Monte Cristo, among other works. But for the most part, it's the people who were considered the luminaries of English and language and literature were a lot of white dudes. Second thing I want to talk about is when we, when we say liberal arts, now that's actually shortening for liberal arts and sciences. There's a reason why sciences is appended to the end there. It's because up until before Sputnik, the division in higher education wasn't so much arts versus science. It was vocation-based higher education, so in things like law, medicine, dentistry, stuff that's tend to be a little bit more STEM-y, and everything else. And everything else included things like chemistry, physics. Anyway, so this is a picture from the 1922 yearbook from the University of Louisville. And all the ones that have circled in red are, this is the liberal arts and science department. And all the people that have circled in red are professors that do traditionally already what we associate with subjects. So you notice there isn't a bunch of women out there, and this is where your grain of truth is. There would have been more women in this department than there would have been pursuing medicine, or, and same goes for people of color, although for African Americans in particular who were studying medicine, at this time your employment opportunities were really limited. So there also wouldn't have been a lot of them. There were a good number, but not obvious for obvious logistical reasons, not as many studying medicine, dentistry, law, those sorts of subjects. But one thing I want to point out is you see those three women at the bottom who are not circled in red, that one was studying, one was teaching chemistry and one was teaching mathematics, and I think the other one was teaching home ec. But it wasn't uncommon to see women who were studying chemistry and physics and biology in college at this time. So something I want to emphasize here is that, you know, the liberal arts have had their own diversity demons to face down. And the diversity that you see today in most of the liberal arts has to do with, has, they're because of a lot of strategies that were deliberate, that were employed to, to combat these demons. And some of those strategies that were employed, I'm seeing copied in STEM and tech, and some of them not so much. And I want to talk about those strategies today that aren't being copied, that we could be copied. Starting with the first one, which I'm calling fun with Dick and Jane and Power Rangers. What the heck could this be about? I don't know, we'll find out. So for those of you who aren't familiar, the Dick and Jane series was a very popular children's primer series. It started being published in the 1920s, stopped being published around the 1970s. It was for teaching children how to read. And it featured these two characters, Dick, who's the brown-haired kid, and sat, excuse me, Jane is the blonde, who went on these little white-bread suburban adventures and chase spot and all sorts of things. And what you see with Fun and Dick and Jane is pretty representative of what children's books look like at the start of the 20th century. A lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of white people. Obviously with one big exception here, the little black sandbow books were pretty popular. I couldn't find a cover that wasn't horrendously offensive. If you want to look that up in your own time, you can. But not a lot of people of color and mostly very traditional gender roles and it tended to be boys that were taking the active role and girls who were learning to cook. Now this is a problem because kids have a super, super, super, super concentrated form of what every human in the world has, which is vanity. And to demonstrate my point, I want to talk a little bit about Power Rangers. Raise your hand if you were growing up when Power Rangers was a big thing on TV. Good number of people, my gosh. I wasn't allowed to watch Power Rangers. That didn't stop me from watching Power Rangers and playing Power Rangers with my friends. So just as a quick experiment here, when you are playing Power Rangers with your friends, raise your hand if you used to pretend to be the red ranger, okay, what about the blue ranger? What about the pink ranger? The girl's raising their hands. You see, people tend to gravitate towards people that look like them. And it's not limited to kids. I will be the first person to admit that every time I watch the Pirates of the Caribbean series and will what's his face goes, there's pirates and I love you, Elizabeth. I go, Orlando, I didn't know you felt that way. For those of you who forgot, my name is Elizabeth, which it's okay. I don't know your names either. So what the heck does this have to do with tech? Well, this is important with, I'm sorry, let me backtrack a little bit. When you have all of these books that are catering towards one very specific demographic, it tends to get people who aren't in that demographic to sort of phase out and not pay as much attention. And in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and continuing, there's this big push to make sure that children's literature, the stuff that introduced people to language and literature that pulled people into our subject, represented the kind of diversity that we wanted to see. So I got a couple of examples up here. I've got, let's see. An Anklet for a Princess, a Cinderella story from India. All of these came from my local library. And I've also got, for a little bit older, there's the Be Forever American Girl series. This is one's about a Native American girl named Kaya. There's still a long way to go here, but for the most part, for starters, there are laws that make sure that the books that we're using in our classrooms represent diversity. And if you are a Native American man and you want to make sure that your daughter can see herself in the books she's reading, it's not that hard to find. So what does this have to do with tech? Well, I started thinking, are really introductory materials that bring people into this industry? Are they representing the kind of diversity that we want to see? And to some extent, I can't answer this question because I kind of, I came into this industry in a little bit of a unique way. I didn't use a boot camp, I'm not a computer science major. I can, however, talk about some of the things that I did use to learn about coding. One of them was this. Anybody here use Rails for Zombies? A lot of people. It's a fantastic program. It's been wonderful teaching me Rails. But for this presentation, I went through Rails for Zombies 1 and 2. And I took a screenshot of every single example of a person or a zombie that came up. And I wrote down every single sample name that was used. And this is the result. For names, we have Ash, Bob, Jim, Billy, Greg, Eric, Tim, Joe, Tony, Kaike, and Amy. As for pictures, we've got these three down at the bottom. Those are the three examples of explicitly gendered female zombies or people, and one of them's a logo. We have a couple of gender neutral zombies also as well, which I felt I should point out. But for the most part, the zombie apocalypse is very male dominated. It goes a little worse, it gets a little worse than this when you think about it. Because none of these zombies are wearing hijab. None of these zombies are wearing hearing aids. None of these zombies have a beard and a turban that would indicate they were sick when they were alive. I mean, there's really not a lot of diversity represented here. And to be clear, this is not, not, not, not an exclusive to code school problem. Got another book up here, which some of you might be familiar with. HTML and CSS by John Duckett. This was my, if you can see how well-worn it is. This was my Bible when I was learning HTML and CSS. Representations of men, outnumber representations of women in this book by about three to one. Representations of women, excuse me, white people, outnumber representations of people of color by about four to one. Which is actually, it's worse than that because most of those representations of people of color come from exactly two examples, half of them do. Whereas, white people are more scattered throughout the book. So, to be clear, I'm not trying to call anybody out or embarrass anyone. And if this eventually gets back to code school, like I'm not trying to accuse anyone of trying to be discriminatory. And also code school for heaven's sake, if you get this, like, please don't just go back and put a pink bow on half of these zombies. Because for one, let me ask you something. When's the last time you actually saw a woman with a giant pink bow right here? Like, how the heck did that become the universal signifier of femininity? But I think, if anything, this just demonstrates that if you're not actively trying really, really hard to make sure that you're making something that's diverse, it's easy to fall into a pattern where, all of a sudden, everybody's a guy. Anyway, I'm gonna move on. Next part, I'm calling on canon and the characters. So, I wanna take you back in time to this slide. Everybody remember this? This was the canon at the start of the 20th century. You could fight me on a few of these names about when they were included. You'd probably lose, to be honest. But anyway, so this is various artistic representations of the main characters of some of their most popular work, or one of their most popular works. Does anybody, I mean, we have a couple of exceptions here. There's La Belle D'Aum, Sans Mercie in the middle. For people of color, there's Ozzie Mandius, a.k.a. Ramesses II, who would have been obviously of Egyptian descent. But for the most part, white dudes tend to write about white dudes. Now, this is a slide of, during the 60s, 70s and ongoing, there's this big movement to say, are there people that we're overlooking that are deserving to be put into the canon, who are writing really well? We might have dismissed them before because they were a woman or a person of color, or in the case of Oscar Wilde, well, gay or bisexual, depending on whom you ask. And so there was this big push to go and find these names, and this was the result. There's a lot of modern people, a lot of people from back in time. You've got the Brontes down in the corner. And all of these people wrote works that are amazing and just as worthy of being called canon literature. And this is a slide of representations of main characters of their books. You might notice this page is a lot more diverse than the previous one. Because, again, people like to write about and can identify with people who are similar to that. Usually in ways about race and gender. So, what the point I'm trying to illustrate here is that, there was this push to really valorize and celebrate women and people of color who were writing books that we might have overlooked. But it came with a simultaneous push to make the content itself more diverse. To make the literature that we're reading represent the stories of more kinds of people, and the results have been amazing. So what does this have to do with tech? Well, one of the strategies that tech's been copying is celebrating the names of people who have contributed to this industry, who might have been overlooked before, and especially with women, people of color, and other poorly represented groups. I mean, Grace Hopper's everywhere. And rightfully so, she's amazing. But it hasn't really come with a simultaneous push to make our content itself represent more diversity. And to be fair, this is kind of hard because this is what we got to work with. But it's not impossible. For instance, maybe we can start celebrating applications of technology that help underrepresented people just as much as we celebrate Grace Hopper. I mean, guys, we have an app that maps safe restrooms for transgender intersects and gender nonconforming individuals. Technology is making people's lives better who are traditionally underrepresented. That's awesome. We can start talking about that too. Another thing we can talk about is video games. It's one of the most direct ways that you can see actual diversity represented in content. So this is another thing that we can celebrate. Anyway, let's keep going. Next part, getting rid of genius. Now, one of the limitations that I was talking about earlier, if you remember at the start of this talk, was that I'm mostly gonna be focusing on English language and literature. And the problem is, not all the liberal arts see the same kind of diversity that English language and literature have. And also, not all STEM subjects have a problem with lack of diversity. For instance, philosophy has about 30% female representation in undergraduate majors. And it gets even worse when you consider that the canon philosophers really aren't as diverse as they could be. And in subjects like microbiology, for instance, that's got about 54% female representation in it. So some researchers set out to figure out what the heck does microbiology have in common with English? And what does philosophy have in common with physics? And they figured out that the answer was genius. We found academic fields that emphasize the need for raw brilliance. We're more likely to endorse the claim that women are less well-suited than men to be top scholars in the field, and further that such fields are less welcoming to women. Now, the study focused on gender representation, but you can copy these results that are almost exactly the same for people of color as well. And the reasons why this is the case aren't that hard to figure out. I mean, all of us are growing up and living in the same sort of toxic stew of misogyny and racism that permeates our society in ways that we don't realize. And when you grow up associating the word genius and brilliance and intrinsic worth with people who are white and men, then it's going to permeate you the way you think in ways you don't even realize. So English used to have a really big problem with this in terms of saying, oh, there are luminaries and geniuses that are absolutely untouchable, such as this guy. You might have heard of him. I think his name is William Shackaspeary. Now, Shackaspeary was at one point considered this is the high point of literature. He is the greatest writer that ever was, that ever will be, that ever could be. Probably came from Krypton when it was being destroyed. He's amazing and nothing can ever touch him. And don't get me wrong, I am the number one Shakespeare fan girl. But Shakespeare didn't write about the experiences of Chinese merchants in the 12th century. Shakespeare was coming from a fairly limited understanding. And he did a pretty good job actually for his time of representing voices of women in particular. And also to some extent people of color, but it was still extremely limited. And so there was in this movement in the 60s and 70s and ongoing, there's like this call to say, okay, Shakespeare was brilliant. But let's step back and say, there's more room for brilliance in this field. So what does this have to do with tech? Well, one thing I noticed when I changed industries that wasn't so good is that when you look at job postings, it becomes clear that there's yet another mythological beast permeating the subconscious of this field. And that's this, the elusive wizard, ninja, guru, rock star developer. It becomes clear, and even if you're not using these words exactly, it becomes pretty clear that everybody is looking for this mythical genius who's just intrinsically talented at code who can do the work of ten other developers that it takes in the same amount of time. And to be fair, we all know these people exist. But the way that you ask for them as you're phrasing it as just, I'm looking for a genius, isn't gonna be as helpful. Because, guess what, internalized misogyny and racism exist. And they found that women are far less likely to associate themselves with a title genius than men are. So maybe if we can change our job postings to something like, instead of I'm looking for a wizard, ninja, guru, Jedi. Say, I'm looking for somebody who's never satisfied with the quality of their code. I'm looking for somebody who's dedicated to test-driven development. I'm looking for somebody who shows a commitment to make sure that their code is still readable in the future and to other developers. That's what we're really looking for, right? So if we can change our job postings to be something about this and less about mythical creatures, we can free up space in our brains for other mythical creatures that are much cooler, like dragons. One other thing that I wanna point out before we move on, take a look at those words. Wizard, ninja, guru, rock star. With the possible exception of rock star, all of those are male gendered terms. Just as an experiment, I went looking for a programming witch, programming priestess, and programming Amazon. And the only one that turned out of any hits was Amazon. And that's just because Amazon's a company that hires programmers. So my point here is that, be careful of the words you use. It might reveal who you're actually looking for in terminology. Anyway, last part, I'm calling the damned mob of scribbling women. I'm not gonna lie, this is my favorite part just because that is so much fun to say. So let me explain what this is about. This comes from a quote from this guy. His name is Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some of you might know him as the guy who inflicted the scarlet letter on you in high school. Hawthorne went through a bit of a rough patch in the 1850s, where his books really just weren't selling like they could have been. And he wrote to a friend for the reasons he thought of why. And this was a part of the letter. That America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women. And I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with that trash. Okay, flagrant rampant misogyny aside, what's he talking about? Well, at this time, there were two very popular movements in literature. One of them was sentimental literature, which really got, I got to start way earlier, but it was very popular at this time. And sentimental literature was primarily written by women, about women, and for women. And sentimental literature tended to be kind of formulaic and went something like this. There's a young woman in her adolescence who falls on terrible misfortune. She's about to give up her virtue, but lo, she is saved. Marys a nice Christian husband, lives happily ever after, but somebody dies of tuberculosis. The other very popular movement at this time was gothic literature. And gothic literature was very, very distinct from sentimental literature. Let me explain. There's a woman in her adolescence who falls on terrible misfortune. She's about to give up her virtue when, lo, she is saved. Marys a nice Christian husband, somebody dies of tuberculosis, but they live happily ever after in his castle. So these were very, very popular at the time. These were the reality TV shows of their day. There were actually, preachers would say women do not read books, because they will spoil your mind. It's hard to comprehend today, but that's really what people thought of these books. They were regarded so low. And the women who are mostly women, although some men who are writing these books, they didn't even consider themselves writers. They were just women who were writing books for the general public consumption. Now in the 60s and 70s, there was this big movement to find people who might have been overlooked. And this came up and people said, okay, let's step back with our prejudices. And see, are there books of worth in these two corpuses? And the answer was yes. Up at the top, that's a screenshot from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Very sentimental book. To the right, that's from Jane Eyre, that's Gothic. The bottom, that's actually a little bit of a more recent discovery. It's called Carmilla, which is, it's kind of amazing how much Dracula completely flagrantly ripped off this book. Only in this book, there's lesbianism along with vampirism. So go read it, it's very cool. Anyway, so they found these amazing canon works in here. And to be fair, there was also a lot of not so canon works. But they said, you know what, these women were talking to other women of their time about the things that they were struggling with. So there is value here. This is something worthy of study. And all of these women were writers. So what does this have to do with tech? Well, when I was writing this presentation, I think, does tech have its own damned mob of scribblers that maybe were ignoring as well? And at this time, a tweet happened to come up in my Twitter from this woman. Her name's Kate Ashwin. She writes a webcomic called Widdershins, which is fabulous. And everyone in the whole wide world should read it, but that's beside the point. She spent the whole day talking about, man, I need to clear out the CSS, rearrange my website, gah, CSS, am I right? Just so you know, that's about my once a week, gah, CSS, am I right? She's a full time artist and she works on this webcomic as well as other art commissions. But she probably wouldn't think of herself as a developer or a programmer, but she's still coding. And I thought about my never ever used WordPress blog. Don't even look for it, it's just never ever used. And how it's got that tab up there in the corner, it's a little hard to see next to visual, it says HTML. So you can write your blog post in HTML if you want. And from what I can tell, most of the statistics on who is blogging says it tends to be 50, 50 male, female. And there tends to be fairly good representation of people of color here. So these people are coding too, at least some of them. And I thought about my sophomore year of high school, I went to an all girls high school when Facebook was discovered and suddenly everybody had Facebook. And within a month of me getting a Facebook, I learned to hack just enough to get past the school firewall so I could go on Facebook during the day. I was to coding, and there's more experiences than this. There's people who are making websites for their restaurants. There's people who are engaging in code and maybe they're not writing very dry code, test driven development type of stuff. But they're coding. And so far I've had a pretty clear call to action in everything I've mentioned so far, and this one I actually have to turn over to you guys to think about. I think we do have this our own damned mob. And is there that has that kind of diversity that we're seeking in this industry? And is there a way that we can say, number one, you guys are programmers. Number two, there's tremendous talent here, at least some of you. And three, you have a place in our community. So this one, I don't really have an answer to this. I'm turning it over to you. Anyway, that is the conclusion of my presentation. I hope you learned something. You may now question the vocationally confused developer.