 I'd like to introduce Gloria and Kristi next. It's my absolute pleasure, especially seeing how they're both tech speakers like me. Kristi is an outreach intern at Mozilla, working with diversity and inclusion. She's a basketball player, even though I always want to say baseball, and she loves chocolate, and apparently if she's not at home, she's in the gym. We're going to assume this is sort of a gym, though. Gloria is a student, an engineering student at the Piraeus University of Applied Sciences, and she's been volunteering with an active listening site called Seven Cups of Tea. Please join me in welcoming them on stage. So hello, everyone. I am Kristi Pogri, as Alex also introduced me. I'm a Mozilla tech speaker and also a Mozilla representative. I am the board member and chairman of the Open Labs, which is a local hacker space that we have in Albania, in Joanna. I'm a site point author, and I also finished my studies this year for international affairs and diplomacy. I'm going to start my presentation, first of all, with some numbers, because it has to do with the involvement of women in open-source projects. In a survey done in 2002, it was the number of women of the contributors were only 1.1%, but then in 2013, the number were 11%. So we can see that the number is higher, but it's still not the number that we're fighting for and not the amount that we would like to see in Floss communities. And only 1.5% of the free and open source software developers are female. And related to the GitHub users, 5.4% of GitHub users are with over 10 contributors from a random sample are female. And among women who joined the tech industry, 56% live by mid-career, which is double the attrition rate for men. Usually the reasons that they live the career in the middle age is because they have to take care of the children, and then they become mom. And all the energy goes somewhere else like not in this area. And here are the numbers of the repos that are done with like from the female and from the male. As you can see from the chart, the number of the women is like really low related to the contributions of the male and the number of the repositories. And we have spotted out also some issues that we think that why does this low number come from? First of all, there is an invisibility, like there are a lot of cases where we are, for example, there are a lot of people and women actually who are developers, people behave like they are not there. And they usually try to avoid the eye contact. And in this way, they do not really feel very comfortable to go on and to express like themselves. Expecialism, gender essentialism and social expectations and sexual lives are also some other issues. The stereotypes there in the society that women cannot really do the task that are meant for men is also a very big problem because this affects a lot on the self-esteem since they think that they will not be capable to do something that is only meant for men. And usually they also do not feel when they are in an environment and they are expected to be valued for their information and for their work. But they get compliments or opinions or words that are not related to their work but to something else. There are a lot of initiatives done related to this. Mozilla has an initiative called Dwellers. And it's only for women in Mozilla. It's a community composed of members from different open source projects when they can all gather there, share their opinions, their thoughts, their insights related to different experiences. So in this way, when we exchange other opinions, this will help us improve our work and have also a better performance like in different tasks. It is mainly dedicated to improving women's visibility and involvement in free and open source. And it's free so everyone can participate despite their background or if they come from a technical one or from a non-technical. It's also written in our manifesto that it's a resource that must remain open and accessible. So this is also in our constitution that Mozilla and it's open to everyone. Women's is a very active group, full of ideas, things to do. And we discuss a lot of topics. There are a lot of channels that we go and that people can have information from. We have our own website, www.rg.org. You can find us on Facebook, IRC channel, telegram, mailing list and in your state. So if you live in the country and you have like a Mozilla community there, you can join and you can see there might be a group that are only for women or for people from under-represented groups that can be part of or if there isn't any group like that, you can feel free to start a new one. There are a lot of initiatives that are going parallel with WOMOs. There is also the Outreachee. I don't know if you have heard about it, but it's an internship that is like for three months and it's paid. And it's only for women and for people from under-represented groups. There are a lot of projects which contribute to the outreachee so they can get in terms and really inspire them to continue their work. As I mentioned in the beginning, we have a local hackerspace back in Albania and the situation is like completely different from the hackerspace or from the other Floss communities like around Europe as far as I've seen. And there are 70% of the contributors are women. So like there is a higher number of women than men that do contribute in Floss like in Mozilla, in Fedora, in Linux and in OpenStreetMap. So the men are in minorities. And this also comes from the educational system. There's a fact about the educational system. Like they do really inspire the women especially to go into study tech because it's seen also as a field that despite that you can have a good career which will help you like in the future, it also is well paid and you can reach and you can go like how far that you won't like relate to this. But during a problem with the outreachee, there are also other projects that do inspire women to participate in. Like there is for example Google Summer of Code or other internships that are really mainly and focused only to empower and to make the people coming from underrepresented groups to express and to share like their experience and thought without the fear of being judged and just to live how they really and just to act like how they really want in communities like this. So this was like for my part. Now please welcome my colleague. My colleague is Gloria so she is going to talk about diversity user research. Hi everyone. I'm going to talk about diversity user research and in specific how to become a better listener. My name is Gloria Jumeau. Here are different links where you can find me. My personal website where I have different blog posts about things I say. And my LinkedIn. And I would like to tell you today that the goal of this talk is to help you to be able to extract more information from your user research in specific for diversity. But this specific skill that I'll teach you today which is called active listening can help you in different areas of your career. And notice that since I learned this skill my emotional intelligence have highly improved. So that is why I believe that it's very important that you take this next 10 minutes to pay attention to what I have to say. And you know that there's a research that says that only 2% of people have done classes about listening. And we do classes every day about writing and we do classes about reading but we are never taught how to listen and that also is a skill. And that is one thing that we are going to learn today and hopefully you'll be part of that 2% that has done a formal class in listening. So one thing that is very important in listening is your body language. Because for example if you're talking to someone and when the person is talking to your young during their search the person will think that you're bored so then they will start cropping things and cropping important information. So your body language plays a very important role but unfortunately because of that we won't touch on that now but we'll touch on a specific aspect which is listening. Let me first say the difference of hearing and listening. Hearing is the act of perceiving sounds. For example you're in this room right now you're hearing different noises you're perceiving different sounds but that doesn't mean that you're listening to each and every sound. The person or the sound that you concentrate on that you actually set your ears on and you process what that thing or person is saying is the person whom you are listening to. For example if you're listening to what I'm saying and you're processing it that means that you are listening to me and that is more active than hearing that happens like without you even needing to do anything subconsciously. What I'm going to talk specific is active listening. Active listening is a skill which is what it says active listening. Listening actively and trying to understand deeply the person that you are talking to. These are some of the benefits of it. I'll just say one for example like it improves your interpersonal skills because the more you are able to listen to people the more people like you because people like to talk a lot about themselves or the things that they do so if you can listen to them then they're most likely like you. And then another thing that here also are some of the disadvantages of active listening in specific because there's a technique called mirroring where you try to rephrase what someone is saying and when you always rephrase what someone is saying even though that's helpful in some way it can also sound like pirating like you are a pirate and you are repeating repeating whatever the person is saying. So that is one of the disadvantages and here are more that you can see and what I'm going to say now I'll break it into three sections when you're talking to someone during a research you want to actually comprehend what they are saying so to comprehend what they are saying there are different scales one of the things that you can use is reflection reflection is when someone tells you something you try to reflect back what they are saying for example someone tells you that I'm very excited so reflection is saying so you mean that you are very excited to do it right that is reflection another thing is clarification to get clarification you can do different things one of them is asking open-ended or closed-ended questions and I'll get into a deeper explanation of those things in the next few minutes one thing that I want to emphasize on right now is this technique here response which helps you get more better response from the user it's called funneling and with that technique what you do is you are actually trying to extract more general information from someone or more specific information from someone and to do that I'll use an example of FOSDM for example someone tells you I'll be attending FOSDM if you ask the person tell me more about this that is asking something that will give you more general information because when you say tell me more about it someone will give you a general information about it but when you say are you going to FOSDM and which talk are you going to attend that is more specific and by asking this question you are getting more specific information so that is one way you can use this technique called funneling and right now I have a scenario here that I run through it fast so in this scenario I'm conducting a research to identify why there is under-representation of a specific minority group in the open source community that can be maybe a woman or people from a specific race or people from a specific gender just about anything and through this demonstration also you can use the skill called active listening to get more information from that person so for example we are in the interview and I in the interview I'm saying hello my name is Gloria I'm from this company and this is is that okay with you the person say yes thank you very much is that okay with you makes you understand if the person is ready for your research so by asking that question it helps the person feel more comfortable that okay yes I'm ready when they answer yes I'm ready let's start so as I move on during the conversation I tell the person to tell me a bit about their background they open up to me because when I tell them tell me a bit about your background the person now starts diving into their life and the more personal things that they share the more closer to me they feel and the more they trust me so by doing that I'm actually getting the person to open up then as you are speaking I tell the person oh that's interesting can you tell me a bit about your experience with open source then the person starts narrating to me a story of when I started contributing to open source I felt very alienated because I felt invisible and even though I was contributing like people didn't share me up enough or I just felt that I wasn't appreciated so a key word here is alienation the person said that they felt alienated during the interview so at that moment you can use a technique in active listening called sympathy not called empathy but right now explain to you what sympathy is and what empathy is sympathy is saying something like oh sorry about that but empathy is actually saying like an example like okay this time of my life I also experience alienation and that makes you build a connection with the person because you are putting yourself in their shoes so they feel that okay this person is also putting themselves in a vulnerable state they understand me so by doing that by putting yourself in the shoe of that person you are exercising empathy and when at some point of the interview the person telling me that I feel that people like me are just not for open source involvement or tech forcing ourselves into this industry is futile or are right to you in comparison to that of others proves that when someone tell you that a trigger like you want to tell the person no you are not invisible in tech we like you but when you do that you are actually kind of like indirectly judging the person telling them what you are saying is not true we like you it's not like that so at that point one of the skills that you have to use is deferring deferring judgment and to defer judgment what you do is actually when someone tells you something you don't say how you feel about it instead you focus on how they feel about it what made you feel like you are invisible like what made you feel scared or why do you feel that you don't have a place in tech when you ask that question instead you are getting more information from the person instead of saying like no what you are saying is not true then the person close down on you and won't tell you their actual deep feelings by actually asking them more questions and deferring your judgment you extract more information from the person and then you get more accurate results in your diversity research so in the end one thing that you can always do is summarize summarize what the person told you and that helps you get clarification that you understood what they said because if you say it wrong the person will correct you but it also helps you reinforce what you are spoken about means that it will help you retain that information more easily so that's it about what I had to say as I said here are some keywords to remember reflect, summarize, clarify and empathy and my call to action to you is to practice this and let me know your results you can find ways to contact me on my website and feel free to connect to me on LinkedIn do you have any questions from me and Christy anyone that has any questions for either the talk me or Christy gave you can raise your hands I think that a good way to have more women getting involved is like putting sorry is like putting a number that you for example want to have like 50-50 and in the process that you are hiring new people you get more focused on hiring more women than men or another thing that you can do is like for not like taking or being influenced to only employ men you can have like they can all have the interview like on the paper and you don't know the gender of the person that you are taking the information from so this is also a way that you will get influenced by their gender but you are going to hire them from really from their values or from their amount of you know information that they have related to something because also because there was done a survey that related to that like women were better developer than men but they were not hired because in the beginning the person that were going to hire them knew that they were women and they didn't know how to code so it's not they were not like getting employed so this is also that I personally suggest like a politic that you can use to hire and to have more women yes okay so the question was on the politics for example that we need to take to have more women in our work space or in different fields in gender okay so you ask about what about gender diversity that most people talk about yeah so yeah what I know about that is that there are some universities in specific that are more tailored to specific racial groups so I believe that by companies going there in career first at those schools they can locate more of those peoples but at the same time I believe that the way that the companies treat the employees from those minority racial groups in their company can also make them attract or repel people from that specific demographic so for those people like for those people that are minority by race I feel that it's very important to make the environment very friendly and comfortable for them to make sure that you create boundaries of what is allowed between how people deal with race and difference in the workplace and another way I think that they can fix that issue is to actually try to reach out to those people because usually companies what they usually do is say we want more people from this specific country come to us they just sit down there and wait for those people to come to there but that's not how it works if you want something you have to go get it so you have to find where those people usually are located at and go there and tell them I'm from this company I have this offer you do you have those skills that I'm looking for and if yes come let's talk about it that is what I feel I think that it starts from the not from the it starts from the opportunities that some people have like for example someone from a poor family that can't go to school like whether the education there is good or not or other poor so it starts from the economy of the country or that specific family or that specific racial group as a whole and then it moves on to education and then from education it moves on to companies that is how I feel it starts from the economy and then education and then to companies so any other questions I think you had a question I have information from Mozilla because even Gloria was an outreach in Mozilla back two years ago even when the outreach interns of Mozilla finished their internship there they still they are very like inspired to still contribute in Mozilla they can get like starting to contribute for example in diversity and inclusion team that we do have like we do a really big work and doing some research on the things that we really need to improve to get our communities more diverse or they can for example start contributing in technical areas so the field is like really wide and they can find themselves wherever they they feel good and there are a lot of opportunities even if the outreach interns do not like find for example themselves afterwards in the company for the foundation that they were that they have been working on start to search and to see for other opportunities in other companies because I think that the gain of the experience that they take at outreach will help them a lot like in every kind of job that they will have like related to the topic that they have worked on and doing their searches you're welcome a quarter of them become mentors for the others who are coming and they even have a grand band that already like to dance for Gloria really I was wondering if there is any research on benefits of active interviewing listening in interviewing on hiring people from underrepresented groups I'm not sure if it exists because it's very specific really they do a more general interview and then when there's a problem that they are trying to face then it's when they go to more specific types of research so for example in diversity I haven't really seen people using that skill to be honest so I don't really think that anything exists but I can be under percent sure but even from my own research when I was trying to find studies on it in relation to interviewing I couldn't find enough data so I don't know about that maybe you can research and find something I think there's one, maybe we can get one last one at the back there yeah yeah no it was not for just the country it's in general in general terms actually this is interesting because the numbers are not like for specific countries like in general terms and if for example what I have spotted out is that in developed countries like in western Europe the number of women getting involved in flower communities is really low and this happens quite the opposite in the Balkans for example because the educational I mentioned that the educational system is like a little bit different like we still have that Russian mentality on learning stuff and while the westerns come from like completely other field like they give the space to and to attend like whatever school that they want to and they just like do not focus only getting a good job and starting putting the energies on something that will give like benefits in the future so for example if the numbers should have been as I mentioned for Albania there would be like completely different because the number of women are much higher than the men it is the opposite for the westerns so this is just like in the general view if you have any other questions you can catch each one of us we'll be around here and ask us thank you very much