 Hi everyone, yeah so my name is Ash Strud and I've been very lucky to be able to travel the world's basically giving this talk and talking about something that's really passionate to me. I wouldn't have been able to do this if it weren't for the help of a lot of companies that are basically sponsoring a lot of the work that I do because I work for myself and I've been basically educating people full time about this for the past six or eight months. I haven't had time to actually make money so I appreciate that other people are helping me out and doing something that's really important to me. So programming diversity, like I said my name is Ash Strud and I'm Ash Strud and pretty much everywhere on the internet so if you have questions later that you don't get a chance to ask me or if you're looking for some resources you can find a lot of that stuff on my website. So what is diversity? A lot of times when we talk about diversity it's kind of code for where are the women and I want to talk about the fact that diversity is a lot more than gender. It's about a lot more than just male and female as well. There's an entire spectrum that we're kind of leaving out when we ask the where are the women question. Gender or I'm sorry, diversity makes up various backgrounds, experiences and lifestyles. There is a lot that you can't see about a person that makes them different and makes them diverse in our industry. So what actually goes into diversity? These are some of the larger groups but certainly not all of them. If you think about for instance age we tend to not have people that fall on the younger or the older end of the spectrum. We tend to have people that have at least graduated high school and many who have gone to college even though they might not necessarily have computer science degrees and socioeconomic class which includes not only their current socioeconomic class but ones that they had previous in their lives. So just so we're all on the same page I kind of want to define a few terms so that we can kind of speak the same language. A lot of the work that I do is founded on this idea of intersectionality. Intersectionality is basically the way that the different traits that make us up interact and the way that society chooses to allow us to go through life because of that. So if we looked at those bubbles again this is basically the overlapping, the pancaking effect of all of these different things together. So the way that I go through life as a white queer woman is very different than say a black queer woman would go through life. So what does this actually mean in reality? Well in the United States women earn about 80.9% of what men do. This is controlling for other factors including education and time in and away from the industry. But Latina women earn only 59.3% of what white men do. So we can see that just by adding one other vector this drastically changes the way people are going through life. Another one the unemployment rate in the US depending on who you trust is about 7.5% but for the blind community it's 10 times higher. So we can very quickly see that just by adding this one little bit of information, this one other piece that makes up people's lives, it vastly impacts the way that they're able to go through life. So the next term is privilege. Privilege is an unearned advantage that you get for being the person that you are growing up the way that you did or the place that you were born. Having privilege doesn't make you a bad person but it just means that we have to keep in mind the kinds of things that we get for free because we have privilege. So what kinds of things make up privilege? For instance, I'm a white person. White people get some of the most privilege that you can have in the world. I also live in the United States. I was born here. I speak English as a first language. I'm abled. People assume that I'm straight. So even though I'm not straight, I still get the privilege of the people that are straight because I pass a straight. So it's kind of complicated. We just have to keep in mind the things that we get that other people don't because of this privilege. So what kind of stuff do we actually get? Things like a better education, access to technology at an earlier age, higher pay, assumed competency. People aren't constantly challenging you for the things that you know. And you're seen as a skill set instead of traits. So that's the difference between being a geek and between being a geek girl. The first one you don't have to qualify because you already assume something about somebody who's a geek. So the next term is stereotype threat. I think most people know what a stereotype is. But a stereotype threat is the fear that you're going to confirm a stereotype. So I think that most people have seen this comic before. This is XKCD. On one side, you have a man talking to another man saying, wow, you suck at math. On the other, you have a man talking to a woman saying, wow, girls suck at math. So we have the stereotype that women are bad at math or bad at programming, whatever it is. And a stereotype threat is worrying that you're going to confirm that. Because not only have you proven to this person, just because you happen to be bad at math or bad at programming or whatever it is. Not only have you proven to that person that you are not good at what you do, it's also being able to confirm that for everybody else in that group. So I have this empirical evidence now, this data, because I have seen a woman not do well at math that all women are bad at math. There's actually a study that was done at Yale that shows that prompting people based on their gender or their race. And saying, did you know that people of your gender or race don't do as well on this test as people who are of another gender or race actually makes them do worse? By saying, did you know that people of your gender or race actually do just as well as people of other gender or races? They do not only just as well as the other group, but actually outperform them. So there's something about the stereotype threat that kind of makes you take it in and say, I'm not good enough. And that's okay because biology says that I shouldn't be good at this. And that's perfectly fine. So imposter syndrome, how many people in here have imposter syndrome? Okay, a few of us, cool. So imposter syndrome is this phenomenon where we're unable to internalize any accomplishments that we have. So people who have imposter syndrome will say things like, I am really bad at what I do. I'm so afraid that somebody is gonna find out that I'm not as good as they think I am. I'm a fraud. I can't imagine doing something like pair programming because someone will sit next to me and they will see exactly how bad of a programmer I am. Regardless of how good they actually are. And unfortunately this is especially pronounced in groups that have a negative stereotype that affects them. And people like this are less likely to apply for certain jobs, especially where they have to prove their competency. They're less likely to submit a talk to a conference. They're even less likely to attend a conference. Considering a lot of people in our industry get jobs and other opportunities specifically by going to conferences, they're basically removing themselves from an environment where they can do better and they can be better, specifically because they have this imposter syndrome. So the last term is marginalized. Now if you remember from high school when we had the ruled paper with the blue lines and the pink lines, you can think of marginalized is kind of the same way. You have the big middle area where you would write all of your chemistry notes. And then off to the side, there was a pink line. And out past the pink line was a little bit of space and that's where you would draw your unicorns and write like little sarcastic things about your professor cuz you didn't really care for them. And marginalization is kind of the same way. So this middle area is where the needs for the vast majority, the default, the normal group of people go. Marginalized people, their needs or their wants are kind of pushed to those margins where we draw unicorns. So there's not a whole lot of space for them. They're not given the spotlight and they're kind of ignored. Unfortunately, society teaches us to do this to everyone with the marginalized groups. This is just kind of the way that our society works. And you might be sitting there thinking, but I don't do that. I'm logical, I'm rational. Especially people who are programmers tend to think this. We don't see gender or race. I don't discriminate against people based on their gender or race, because I'm a very equal person. But unfortunately, we know that this isn't the case. The people that we exalt most in society for being logical and rational, scientists, STEM professors, if you're not familiar with STEM, STEM is science, technology, engineering and math. They do this to each other as well. There was a study that was done where they took a bunch of professors and they said, hey, we want you to hire somebody new for your department. We're gonna give you two resumes, like let us know who you'd rather hire. What you would pay them, rate them on a scale of one to seven for how likely you would be to hire or work with them. And then give us some adjectives to describe these people. What they didn't tell them was that the resumes were exactly the same with the exception of the first name. One was named John and one was named Jennifer. So they gave them the two resumes, they went away, looked at them and came back and they said, okay, who would you rather hire? And they said, well, we think we would rather hire John. On the scale of one to seven, we gave John a four and we gave Jennifer a 3.3. We figured that Jennifer, she should probably make about 87% of what John is making. And we decided this because John seems like he's a really good team leader. He's somebody that you really wanna work with, he's driven, he's passionate, he's uplifting for other people. Jennifer seems to be out for herself. She's a bitch. People aren't gonna like her and she's just kind of out for herself. And again, these resumes were exactly the same with the exception of the first name. What I didn't tell you is that this was actually a group of professors that was mixed gender. So women were doing this to other women as well. This is something that society just teaches us and we don't realize that we've internalized it. So now that we've established that exactly, how diverse is the tech industry? If we take a look at the tech industry versus the US population, we can see some weird discrepancies, especially in this top area. So women make up about half of what we would expect them to make in tech. And like I said before, women are the group that we tend to talk about when we're talking about diversity in tech. But then you also have these two other groups. You have Hispanics and blacks, and this is specifically for the United States. So blacks make up about half, a little bit under half of what they should make. But Hispanics make up only a third of what they should make if they were equally represented as far as the US population goes. So they're actually the most left out group in tech. And that's a group that we tend not to talk about when we're talking about diversity. So let's dig a little bit deeper. Unfortunately, a lot of these statistics are women based because that's where a lot of the research dollars go for universities and that kind of thing. But women make up about 24% of the industry. Like I said, it's about half of what they make up in the US population. But we're only 3% of all open source contributors. So think about every job that requires that a candidate has open source contributions. You're automatically weeding out a very large percent of the population just because they aren't able to participate in this one activity. And we can kind of feel better about ourselves because it's not just us. There are a lot of places in the world that have the exact same problem that we do. So if we just look at the computer science graduates that are women from a lot of different countries around the world, this is what we see. India about 8% of computer science graduates are women. The US is 17%. This is actually falling by about 3% or 4% every five years. And it's been steadily declining since the 80s. The UK is 18.2%. France is 20, Brazil is 20, South Africa is 25. Like I said, they're all pretty close. And at this point, a lot of people will stop me and say, well, maybe women just aren't interested in programming them. Like if they're not there, then maybe they just don't want to and we shouldn't force them. But we also forget the fact that the first compiler and the first programming language were written by women. We have women that have shaped what we see today as computing and programming and so saying something like maybe women just aren't interested in programming is categorically false. There would not be a programming industry if it weren't for women. Or people will say, well, maybe women just aren't biologically predisposed to programming. Which is possibly my absolute favorite reaction to this. Because I love science. I actually was going to be a biologist before I decided to be a programmer. And I learned a lot about evolutionary biology. And evolutionary biology basically says that you tend to pass on traits that make it better for the next generation to survive. It's fine over here, whatever that was. So for instance, if you know that you can run faster. So you can escape bears and that kind of thing. That is an evolutionary advantage that you would want to pass on to your progeny. Programming doesn't give you those kinds of skills. I've never been able to outrun a cheetah because I'm a really great programmer. That is just not something that we pass on. Science has taught us that there's no physical or biological difference between people of different genders or different races that makes them better at being a programmer. That makes them more logical or able to do algorithm work better than any other group. The nice thing about that is that means that these are purely social and cultural constructs. These can be changed. We just have to want it enough. We have to be able to focus on it. And we have to actually look at the problem critically. So one of the countries that I failed to mention before was Bulgaria. So comparing this to the United States, I said it was 17% of CS grads in the US or women. In Bulgaria, it's 73%. Now, as an American who has an American high school education, I would be hard pressed to locate Bulgaria on a map. Let alone think very highly necessarily of their STEM programs. But they do a lot actually to push people of all genders into STEM. They know that their economy and the wealth of their nation, the innovation that they're able to produce as a country, is directly related to how well they do in these fields. They don't see programming as something that only men do. They push all of their children equally into this. So why does diversity matter? Especially sitting here is a lot of people who look kind of the same. The vast majority of us are white. So how does it actually affect us? Well, we know that as racial and gender workforce diversity increases, so do things like sales revenue, the number of customers you have, market share, profits relative to competitors, all of those things go up. We know that diverse teams solve complex problems better and faster. We know that they're more creative and stimulated through persistent exposure to minority perspectives. When I say minority, I don't necessarily mean racial minorities, anybody who's in the minority in the US population. So we know that this is the case. We know that diverse teams make better decisions and they generate more innovation. This is especially important in a field that is pushing for the boundaries of everything that we know. We're making changes today that affect how we do science, how we practice medicine, and the kinds of things that we are able to explore in space. So we affect a lot of things all across the board. So we know that the financial success and viability of not only our companies, but of our country and our global economy is all directly related to how diverse our teams are. So why aren't we spending more time on this? So why do we have a lack of diversity? While there are three main areas, the first one is pipeline. This is the people coming into the industry. And we're seeing that they're not having things like cultural cues that tell them that this is something for them. We have a difference in toys and games that are given to children in a very young age. Boys, for instance, given things like Lego. Girls are given things that are much more static and require imagination, but not a whole lot of modularity like dolls. We don't have any famous role models to represent these groups of people. The access to technology that they have at a very young age is different. So for instance, boys get their first computer at age 11 and girls at age 14. We know that from biology, this period in a person's life is extremely important for what they're able to learn. During puberty, your brain is being washed with new hormones and chemicals that are rewiring your brain. This is the best time in life to learn something new and you'll hold on to it for the rest of your life. So things like musicians, other scientists, people who are able to do really great at math. This tends to be the area that they are starting to focus on those things. We're seeing them start to study those things at this age and do well all through the rest of their lives. We also know that African-American and Hispanic households have much lower computer ownership rates and also broadband adoption. But they also adopt smartphones at a much higher rate. Now, how many of you have ever tried to do something on a mobile phone that was extremely frustrating, gave up, and then went to do it on a desktop? Imagine if that was the only view of the internet you ever had. It's extremely frustrating. There's a lot of things you just literally cannot do, because we're not programming our websites or apps to be able to have the full functionality of what we can do with an actual computer. Access to quality education is extremely important. We know that a quality high school education is one of the greatest indicators of earning potential. And we know that schools that are in poor neighborhoods are releasing children that are going to college that are about 25% less prepared in science and math, specifically for people of color as compared to their white counterparts. Access to healthcare is also a huge issue. In the United States, hopefully this is becoming less of a problem. But we know that people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, all of these people have less access to quality healthcare and it's less consistent as well. People are much less likely to take a risk of moving and losing that insurance because they might have people that rely on them for things like childcare or they might be taking care of sick or ailing relatives. The second area is attraction. There's a lack of role models, like I said before. We're less likely to see people that represent us in companies and at conferences. There's also this idea of a geek stereotype. Who knows what a geek is? What does a geek look like? I mean, what does a geek look like from movies or TV? Any adjectives? Pocket protector? What else? Glasses, okay, what'd you say? Urkel, okay, anything else? What's that? Anyone else? Okay, perfect, okay. What do they tend to look like? Male, anything else? White, okay. Cool, how is there social anxiety? Pretty high, right? So we have this shared cultural understanding of what a geek is. And we're teaching this to people from a very young age. You see it in TVs and movies all the time. We have this one stereotype of what geeks are. And we know that this is not what all geeks look like or how they act like. But we see this over and over again. And we actually have studies that show that this is hindering us. There was a study that was done in a university and they took a class and they brought in a visiting professor that met the geek stereotype. So this is somebody who's socially awkward. They're kind of fumbly. They're not too great with talking to people of the opposite sex. They feel really uncomfortable standing in front of a crowd. They wear glasses. All of these things that we know about the geek stereotype. They followed the students for the rest of the year and they found that students were 40% more likely to drop out of that program after being exposed to somebody who meets the geek stereotype. So this is kind of complicated. I certainly don't want to discourage anybody who meets the geek stereotype from talking to people or from interacting with other people. Or doing awesome things like helping out college students. But this is a really complicated problem. It's not something so simple. Just being exposed to somebody who meets that stereotype that you might not feel you identify with is enough to deter you from going into a field. And this is regardless of the person's gender. So it's a really complicated issue. So the third area and why I actually got into this is attrition. We see that about 56% of women leave tech within 10 years. I'm very lucky that every day I kind of get through this. I've been in the industry for 12 or 13 years now. So I'm beating this statistic. But the longer women are in the industry, the more likely they are to drop out. And this is twice the attrition rate of men. And this accounts for things like people leaving the industry to have children. So what is actually happening that so many people are leaving? Well, we have issues like harassment, especially over the past three months we've seen, or I'm sorry, the last six months, we've seen a lot of very visible incidents of people being harassed at conferences. A lot of very visible reports. There's been a lot of very lively discussion about it. And not going into any of the specifics of those, because I think a lot of us have seen them, I was kind of curious. And I said, well, I wonder how we affect that? Like, I know that people react really poorly when people report. But what does that actually mean for the person who's going through this? I asked on Twitter, I said, hey, if you have reported harassment at work, can you just shoot me an email and let me know what happened to you afterwards? Like, don't tell me about the incident itself, that's a privacy issue, but just let me know what happened afterwards. 25 people responded, and 23 of them were fired within three months. The people who reported. I tweeted this, and it's one of the most far-reaching tweets that I've had. Thousands of retweets, hundreds of people replying to me saying that that happened to me, too, that happened to me, too. So it's not only on the people who are doing the harassment. It's not only on the people that are being bystanders and maybe acting like horrible human beings and making us really sad. It's also on us as business owners, as coworkers, to understand what people are going through and to empathize with them. To work with them to make a situation as good as it can be coming out of something like that. If we need to be giving people counseling, if we need to be making our environment a lot safer, giving them more flexibility so they can deal with something as catastrophic as harassment can be, we need to be doing better with that. We know that people in marginalized groups are twice as likely to report being harassed. And there are a lot of people that are probably sitting in here thinking, well, I've never seen somebody get harassed. And that's probably true. We tend to go to conferences and meetups and other events that are very homogenous. There are a lot of people that are like us, that look like us. We tend to hang around with people that are like us. So we're not always exposed to people that are different to be able to see this kind of behavior happen. We also know that it's really subtle. It's not always obvious to us what exactly harassment is. And that's tough. It's super tough, especially if you don't want to be a person who does or says those kinds of things. It's hard. So the last area is discrimination. And this comes in three different areas. Pay, advancement, and job offers. Men in the US are 2.7 times more likely than women to be promoted to high-ranking jobs, even though they're just as likely to be promoted to mid-level jobs. Just as likely. So something is happening here that we're only recognizing the achievements and then the drive of certain groups of people. We also know that other things factor into this. People that are able to work longer hours who maybe don't have to take care of children or who aren't worried about health conditions that they have to leave the office to go to a doctor or to take care of otherwise. And a lot of you might be thinking I had to work hard to get where I am. And I know that it's hard for other people too, but I've had a lot of horrible things happen to me and things that I've kind of stumbled on. And it's made it more difficult for me as well. And as somebody who speaks about this a lot, and I talked to a lot of different kinds of people. This is something that I actually have a hard time learning and I re-learn it every day. The last time I was in San Francisco was a few months ago and I gave a talk similar to this. And I said, I go to a lot of conferences and I talk about programming and I talk about what we can do to be better teams and work better together and be more innovative as an industry. And I'll go to an after party and three or four people will come up to me and say, so are you a project manager? And they don't mean anything bad by that. But once you've had it happen to you so many times and you've told people outright, that's not what I do. I'm a programmer. It gets to be a little rough. And after I told that story, a Hispanic woman walked up to me and she said, I go to conferences and people think that I'm catering staff. And I was like, that is my privilege showing. Like the fact that people don't assume that I'm there working the event for far less money that I don't actually even belong there. So that's an aspect of my privilege that I'm dealing with every day. So I do work hard and I struggle a lot. But there are some people who struggle a lot more than me. So we just have to recognize that kind of thing. So what can we actually do about this? Now that I've given you this litany of very depressing and sad things. There's a lot that we can do. That's the nice part. And the good thing to know is that change starts with us. Like I said, this is a social and cultural problem. And we are social and cultural beings. So we just have to change the way that we're acting towards each other and the way that we're interacting with people who have these kinds of problems. Start educating people about these kinds of things. Share the kinds of things that I told you about today. Read things that you wouldn't normally read. I share articles all the time about the inequality in the industry. The difficulty that certain people have in just obtaining electronic devices to be able to even begin learning programming, to be able to go to school if that's something that they want to pursue, or to be taken seriously because of what they look like. Get to know people that are different than you. This one is a little rough. Like I said, we tend to know people that are like us. This is just a sociological fact. We tend to be around people that are of the same socioeconomic level. They tend to be the same gender or the same race. So we aren't really seeing the kinds of problems that other people are having to deal with on a daily basis. One thing that I do is anytime I go to a new event, I pick a color and I go and talk to every person who's wearing that color. So it's something that you can do that you don't have to worry about, am I walking up to them because they're a woman or because they're a person of color or because they're visibly handicapped? You don't have to, none of that plays into it. It's basically the randomness in which people choose their clothing in the morning. So for as people who have a lot of social anxiety and people who tend to be introverted, which a lot of us are, start this off easy, pick yellow. Not a lot of people wear yellow. If you're in Portland, don't pick plaid, that's boss mode, right? That's a little bit tough. Know that bias and discrimination are often subtle. A lot of the things that we see when we start at new jobs and you go through sexual harassment training, a lot of the videos are still like, hey, slap somebody on the butt, we know that that's not a thing we should do hopefully. But that's not really the vast majority of cases of what's happening. When I talked to my grandmother about what I do and about the kinds of things that we face in the industry, she actually told me, did you know that I'm a programmer? I was like, I had no idea, that's really cool. And she said, when I started programming in the 80s and she lives in Chicago, she used to, when she started programming she was a programmer for one of the largest health insurance companies in the country. And she said, in the 80s, at this first job I had all of the programmers for women, and they sat us all in the middle of the office in this huge sky-rise building. We're all sitting in the middle of the office together in a cage made of steel, locked from the inside. Just like, I'm sorry, what? I don't even, that doesn't even process in my brain. And she said, well yeah, because we were having a hard time getting our work done because the sales people who are sitting around us would come up to us and touch us or talk to us or otherwise distract us from our work. So we couldn't actually get things done. So the solution that this company figured out was to lock them in a cage from the inside. And I was like, well, I'm very happy that I'm not treated like a zoo animal. I appreciate that. Progress has been made, yay. But there's still a lot of bad stuff that's going on. So that kind of stuff isn't happening on that kind of scale like it used to. A lot more people are much more aware of those issues. But going into meetings and always asking the woman to be the one that takes the notes, walking into an office and seeing the first person who is a person of color and asking them to get you a glass of water. Like these are things that are all subtle about us that are biases that we have that we don't necessarily realize. Learn to apologize. This is a tough one. We practice a lot about being better at what we do every day. We read books. We talk to other people. I'm a programmer. We do things called code retreats where we literally sit in a room for a weekend and practice over and over and over again, being better programmers. But we don't do this with being people. We don't have really a lot of the people skills that a lot of other people, a lot of other industries are forced to practice. And apologizing is a skill that we need to work on. A friend of mine, Kronda, told me this awesome story about how when she was a kid, and like many of us, an officer came to their school and they said, hey, we want to teach you about fire safety. So what do you learn in fire safety when you're a kid? The one thing. Stop, drop, and roll, right? Exactly. And they teach you this over and over and over again. I mean, when I was in school, they actually made us practice it, like stop, drop, and roll over and over again. And the interesting thing here is that the statistics on the number of children who actually catch on fire every year extremely low, believe it or not, right? Like not many kids jumping over bonfires while drunk or playing with grills or any other incident that would actually cause you to catch on fire. So why do they teach ten year olds this? Why do they teach kids that are younger than that this? Because they know that when you're an adult and you're on fire, because you're doing stupid things and you catch on fire, that you're on fire, right? And it is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you and the first thing you do is panic. And then you flail around, you make the situation worse. And being able to teach kids from a very young age, drilling this into them, stop, drop, roll, kind of makes that intuition then when something bad happens and they catch on fire as adults. And it's much the same thing with apologizing. We tend to make situations worse because our first reaction is to get defensive or to get angry versus actually being like, hey, I did something wrong, let me think about this for a second before I react. So apologizing is much the same way and a skill that we have to practice for when these things happen. So apologizing comes in three steps, just like stop, drop, and roll. One, what I did was wrong. Two, I'm sorry, and it's as simple as that if you say the word but, then stop and start over because that's not an apology. And then the third one is try and do better next time. Try not to do this again. When somebody steps on your toe, the first reaction you have is not what the hell, why did you step on my toe? It's like, and back up, and then they apologize because it's not something they did intentionally. And it's much the same way with being people. We make mistakes and we apologize and it's the same thing. We can talk about these issues openly. That's fine, I'm on like last couple slides. Let me fast forward here. Cool, yeah, there's a few more. Cool, all right, so things we can do, change our workplaces. Remember what the about page of your website looks like. There's an awesome Tumblr called 100% Men. You do not want your business's website to look like that. We can change our cultures internally. It's a lot harder to retain than it is to recruit people. Think of your culture internally as a garden. You want to value variety and prune any of the weeds. Do a lot of outreach sponsor events where people are different than you that attend. And change your job listing language and requirements. Make sure that all of the gender pronouns are not he. This guy, this man, his duties will be. Make sure that your benefits are inclusive. What are your same-sex partner benefits? Do you have trans-inclusive health care? Do you have flex time? What are your parental leave policies? Go through and make sure that people are actually being paid equally. You actually have to do this about every six months. This is something that is the law. People should be paid the same amount of money we still have vast income equality. Do things like mentoring and career goal attainment as soon as people come into your company. Ask them what they want to be learning, what they want to be doing, and train them on those new things. Like I said before, this requires participation from everyone. All of us can do better at this. I practice it every day. I fail all the time, and that's perfectly fine. I just stand up and start over again. But think about what we can accomplish together if we work on this. So thank you.