 Hey, everyone. Welcome. This is Women in the Tech Workplace. I'm Alana Burke. I work for Chromatic. You can find me online on Twitter, druple.org, and GitHub. So these are three of my guinea pigs. And I named them after three really important women in computer science. Their names are Ada, Hedy, and Jean. And those women were here long before any of us. Ada Loveless, Hedy Lamar, and Jean Bartick were some of the early pioneers of computer science. Women have been a part of this industry since its birth. Women aren't new to the tech world. We've always been here. So why are we still struggling to fit in and succeed in the tech workplace? Once upon a time, computing was seen as women's work. Programming was seen as similar to running a telephone switchboard. In the first half of the 20th century, programmer had a negative connotation. Computers involved a lot of manual labor. When you see those old paper time cards that people had to punch, men didn't want to do that. They thought it was secretary work. So what happened? Well, the industry exploded. By the 1960s, there were more jobs than programmers to fill them. Two male psychologists, William Cannon and Dallas Perry, were hired to find recruits who would enjoy programming. So they profiled 1,378 programmers. And only 186 of them were women. They came to two conclusions. The first was the people who liked programming and enjoyed solving puzzles. The second, a problematic conclusion, was that satisfied programmers don't like people. That personality test became widespread and created the stereotype we still have today, which excludes women. This test made the reign of the nerds a self-fulfilling prophecy. The industry self-selected for anti-social, mathematically inclined males. And that created the perception that programmers should be anti-social, mathematically inclined males. So what happened to women in computer science? This graph from NPR shows that there was a peak around 1984 and then a really steep decline. Around that time, there was a huge demand for computer science classes. So universities like Berkeley and MIT started restricting admission to students, only those with a 4.0 major, but only those with a 4.0 could major in electrical engineering or computer science. These barriers to entry pushed even more women away. Computer science became not only nerdy, but elitist. The only way to become a programmer was to already be a programmer. By 2001 to 2002, only 28% of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004 to 2005, the number had declined to only 22%. Data collected by the Computing Research Association showed even fewer women at research universities like MIT. Women accounted for only 12% of undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering. In the United States and Canada, granted in 2006 to 2007, down from 19% in 2001 to 2002. Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10% of the newest undergraduates. I know that when I was in school from 2004 to 2008, I was often the only woman in my computer science classes. So why did this happen? We talk about the pipeline a lot. A lot of people blame the pipeline. They say there aren't enough women in tech. There aren't enough women graduating. There aren't enough women applying. But is that the root cause? Women need to see other women in tech careers to want to sign up. It's not enough to just get girls into computer science and coding classes. There have to be successful, visible role models in tech. I know that I was interested in computers all throughout high school. But I thought it was a thing that weird nerdy guys did. I never thought it was something that I could do or that I wanted to do or that I would be successful doing. Or I thought I would just be too creeped out by the nerdy, stereotypical guys in the computer science department. And then I had a really amazing role model. I had an amazing faculty member who I had in a basic class that I had to take who took every female student under her wing that she possibly could and said, look, I am a successful woman in computer science and you can be too. And she was really successful at that. And we loved her. And I'm still in touch with her today. And I think it's women like that that make a huge difference. We need more visible role models. Because right now, what women are seeing in the tech industry, scandal, wage gaps, hiring bias, bro culture, and the few highly visible successful women are just not cutting through that noise. Here's a good example of what happens when you do try to ignore the whole pipeline crap. In 2015, Intel set a goal that 40% of all new hires would be women or underrepresented minorities. They got 43.1%. And Intel chief executive Brian Krasanich said, if the pipeline was such a big problem, I would have come back as a failure there. So if one huge tech company can do this in one year with one goal, anyone can. Don't believe that the pipeline is a problem. So getting women into tech, one problem. Keeping them is another. The leaky bucket is the name given to women trickling out of the industry. The tech world needs to attack this issue on both fronts, attraction and retention. Getting women into tech is pointless if there's no effort to retain them. But we can't make assumptions as to why women leave. So why are women leaving? One of the main reasons is pay. Women are actually more likely than men to leave because of pay. And the other reason is bias. Why don't women leave? They're actually not leaving because of motherhood. Companies assume that women of child-bearing age are leaving because they're having children. But that's really just not the case. Most women who leave their job stay in the workforce. So when it comes to retention, don't focus your retention strategies on motherhood. The difference between men and women's reasons for leaving are really highly overstated. So don't assume. Talk to women in your company if you're losing women. And develop data-driven retention strategies. I read a really fascinating study called the, it was called Gender Bias Against Women of Color and Science, and they talked about the five biases pushing women out of STEM. It was the Center for Work-Life Law. They studied decades of gender research as well as doing some of their own studies. And they identified five key biases encountered by women in STEM fields. So the first one, they called Prove It Again. So women often have to provide more evidence of competence than men in order to be seen as equally competent. The Harvard Business Review did a follow-up study on this. And two-thirds of women reported having to prove themselves over and over again. They had their successes discounted and their expertise questioned. The next bias they called the Tight Rope. Women often find themselves walking a tight rope between being seen as too feminine to be competent or too masculine to be likable. Women are also more likely to take on administrative tasks or things like kitchen duty and to be looked down on if they don't. I know this one is one I can really identify with throughout my career. I know a lot of other women in the tech industry too. You know, especially when you're younger, you think should I act like one of the boys to fit in? Do I prove I have to be a girl? Now am I being too girly? Am I trying too hard to fit in? I also identify with the other part of it feeling like I wanna do administrative tasks or clean up after things. Although I don't think I've ever been treated poorly for not doing them, but I know this is a really, really tough one, especially in our industry. The third one, the maternal wall. So when women have children, professional opportunities dry up. There are strong assumptions that when women, that women lose their work commitment and competence after they have children. But women who remain indisputably committed to their work are then penalized because people assume they're not good mothers. So it's a catch 22. People assume you lose your commitment to your work when you have children, but they look down on you if they assume you are prioritizing your work over your children. You literally can't win. A quote in this study from an Asian American immunologist said, I have to fight very hard to show that I am a good scientist as well as a good mother. A black microbiologist said, there is an assumption that your career is more of a hobby than a career. And I think these quotes are just heartbreaking. The next type of bias that they identified, they called tug of war. Sometimes gender bias against women fuels conflict among women. Women often exhibit the same bias against women in traditionally masculine careers that men do. And when women have experienced discrimination early in their careers, they may distance themselves from other women. And I have to say that this one really bums me out. Women have to deal with, and we just have enough to deal with, and we should be in a position to support one another. If you're a women developer or anyone, of course, who's met another woman and you've questioned her technical skills based on her gender, or been surprised that she was a developer or an engineer, I want you to sit with that and really think about what made you think that or assume that, and think about how you can change your thinking in the future because that's really important. You want others to think of you the same way that you think about them, right? I don't want to judge women for thinking about this because, like they said, a lot of this is based on how we've been treated, but we just have so much to deal with that we should try to make sure that we're lifting each other up as much as we possibly can. And the last kind of bias is not a surprise, it's sexual harassment. In a study of 60 scientists, all women of color, 34.5% reported sexual harassment. A 2014 study of scientists found that 64% of 666 respondents had experienced some sort of sexual harassment while doing field work. Sexual harassment is also a major problem in science fields at university. Kelly Ellis, Susan Fowler, Julianne Horvath, Katrina Lake, and Whitney Wolfe. What do all these women have in common? They are just a few of the women who have spoken up about sexual harassment at tech companies like Google, Uber, and GitHub. Sexual harassment is a huge and ongoing issue in the tech industry, and we are just starting to pull back the curtain. This quote from Katie Levinson in Lean Out really nails the culture of hushing up and keeping quiet. We don't call anybody who talks about sexism in tech a whistleblower. But there is a revolution happening and women aren't keeping quiet anymore. So what needs to change? Break the silence, keep talking about it, call it out. We also need clear codes of conduct. We need clear reporting and follow-up with no retaliation. Most women don't report harassment, some don't want to take the risk alone, some fear retaliation, some don't know who to report it to or they don't think anything will be done. Some don't want to end someone's career, they just want to stop the behavior. We also need a very serious personal commitment at all levels to stopping this. Everyone at every level in every organization needs to be committed to this. Also in the university level when it comes to illegal discrimination against parents and pregnant women which has also been reported in the science field. Universities need to take this really seriously. If federal funding is involved, Title IX also covers women against this discrimination and harassment. So some tools for change. A really interesting site called Know Your Title IX. It empowers students to stop sexual violence. It has a lot of really good information. Another really interesting thing is called bystander training. Sexual harassment training as we know it is mostly useless. At worst it enforces gender stereotypes. Bystander training, on the other hand, empowers people to do things like call out offensive jokes, ask a coworker if they're okay after being the butt of a crude joke or offering to accompany them to HR. It helps to create a dialogue and tell people that it's okay to speak up. We also need to promote more women. Research has continually shown that companies with more women in management have less sexual harassment. It's partly because harassment flourishes when men are in power and women aren't and men feel pressure to accept other men's sexualized behavior. So speaking of promoting women, let's talk a little bit about hiring and also imposter syndrome. Women are often less confident than men and their technical skills. Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women will generally only apply when they meet 100% of them. Oops, just trying to make that gif happen. We do not all have the confidence of Olivia Pope, unfortunately. But is it just a perception and confidence issue? Imposter syndrome is very real, but women often do need to meet more of the qualifications to be hired than to their male counterparts. A 2011 McKinsey report found that men are often hired or promoted based on their potential and women are hired or promoted based on their experience and track record. So what do we do here? Do we just have to get better? Do we just have to be so much more amazing at everything that we do? Do we make sure we have a genderblind application and hiring process? Do we hire for skill? Do we hire for merit and ability? Let's talk about that one and talk about meritocracy. There are some words that come up when we think about meritocracy. These are all quotes. A lot of them from companies like Uber and Google. Super pumped. Meritocracy and toe stepping. I did not make that up. We always see words like rockstar, guru, ninja, unicorn. People refer to themselves as a self-made great man. They say, let's get people like us. We don't make mistakes. Always be hustlin'. He's a top performer. He's the chosen one. Well, what's the problem with getting people like us? This is a quote from the book Lean Out by someone who's sort of an avatar called fake Grimlock and they say, if you let someone build tomorrow, tomorrow will belong to someone else. They will build a better tomorrow for everyone like them. So meritocracy, at its basis, is selecting people on the basis of their ability. And it's crap. It doesn't work. The term became popular after it was used in a 1958 satirical essay by Michael Young, which pictured the UK ruled by a class that put aptitude and intelligence above all else. It results in hiring people like you because you view their ability through your lens and ability is a function of education and privilege. So say you're an MIT-educated upper middle-class white man who majored in computer science. You're probably going to think very highly of the ability of another MIT-educated upper middle-class white man who majored in computer science, especially compared to, say, a working-class woman of color who went to night school and got her associates and then self-taught with online classes. If they can code the same, what's the difference? They have the same ability, right? But you, MIT-educated upper middle-class white man are thinking, well, the quality of his education is higher, but now you're judging his privilege and his background and not his ability. So you think, well, what's the worst thing if we only hire a billion programmers as long as they come from all walks of life? You get asshole genius coders and there's no room for them anymore. And people should never be hired or judged on one characteristic. It doesn't matter what it is. And a lot of startups say, okay, but I need to hire people now, so I'm just gonna hire people I trust. I'll hire all the people from my school and then I'll hire a whole bunch of black people and ladies. Yeah, okay. But if you start hiring people who look and think like you, it only gets harder and harder and harder to become diverse down the road because who's gonna wanna come work for your stupid company full of white dudes? Nobody, white dudes. Because guess what? Being a woman of color and tech is even harder. In a study of women in STEM fields, black women were 76.9%, more likely to report having to provide more evidence of competence than others to prove themselves to colleagues. Again, Olivia Pope. 48% of black women and 46.9% of Latinos report having been mistaken for administrative or custodial staff. This is from that same study of women in STEM. These are scientists being mistaken for janitors because of the color of their skin. This is messed up. Black women also reported being openly confronted by negative racial stereotypes. The postdoctoral advisor of a biologist, quote, turns to me and says, hey, do you have any family on drugs or in jail? This is a woman who is working on her PhD. Let's move on to something else. Work-life balance. Slack has it, right? They have signs in their office that says work hard and go home. That should be the norm. Why is that not the norm? That's what we should do at work. We should work hard and go home. Women are especially penalized for having to leave at normal hours because women are more likely to be primary caretakers of children or relatives and they're penalized for being seen as less committed to their jobs. But a healthy work environment recognizes and encourages a life outside of work did a whole talk on work-life balance last year. Along with work-life balance, we also need good benefits. Big tech companies now offer many benefits that are aimed particularly at women and mothers. Childcare, parental leave, egg freezing, IVF, surrogacy, paid parental leave for partners, concierge and convenient services for new parents, fancy. Shipping breast milk home when traveling for work. This is a huge step up, but equal pay at 40 hour weeks would be even better. Especially because many of these benefits kind of seem aimed at delaying motherhood for the sake of career or getting moms back in the office a little faster. So let's talk about that pay. By the way, I found out today that it's equal payday and I didn't know that until I'd already left the house. So this is very, very on point. Hired.com did a study called the State of Wage Inequality in the Workplace. So here's one. On average, women are offered 1% less money than men for the same role in the same company. So here's a graph showing that there's a high variation in the salaries offered to candidates for the same job, the same company. And the number of times women are offered less than men is almost two times greater than the number of times that men are offered less than women. Not cool. They also found that 63% of the time men are offered higher salaries than women for the same role at the same company. On average, these women, these companies offer women 4% less than men for the same role, with some offering women up to 45% less for the same role. Age also plays a role. Women ages 41 to 45 get paid 90 cents on the dollar compared to men. Women ages 20 to 25 are doing the best at 97 cents on the dollar. Naturally, experience plays a role in salary. If you think of 13 to 14 years experience, the wage gap really wouldn't be a thing anymore, right? But women with 13 to 14 years experience earn 92 cents on the dollar compared to men. I have so much to look forward to. And when broken down by race and gender, black and Hispanic women made the least at 90 cents on the dollar compared to white men. They also did a state of salaries report, where the average preferred salaries and then offered salaries by race. And this shows a significant difference in the salaries asked for and received by candidates according to race. With black candidates receiving the lowest, lower still were candidates who identified it multiracial with an average preferred salary of just 123K and an average offer of 128K. So, what can we do about all this? How about that? Equal pay or equal work. We can also hire women, find them, recruit them, do the work, stop sitting around blaming other things. Don't blame the pipeline, the leaky bucket. Don't passively wonder why there aren't women in your company. Talk to women. Ask women to look at your job descriptions. Avoid loaded and masculine terms. Don't ask for ninjas and gurus and rock stars. Don't have beer in your office. Stop with the ping pong and the happy hours. Women don't want to play ping pong and drink beer in the office, okay? It's not that we don't like ping pong and beer. It just makes us think that it's a bro culture and that's not what we want. I actually recently wrote a blog post where I asked all of the women in our company like what made you want to work at Chromatic? Like what drew you in and what are things that have made you not want to work at other companies? And one of the things that a lot of the women said was one, that we didn't say we wanted ninjas and gurus and rock stars and that we didn't apply to other companies because they did want ninjas and gurus and rock stars. That language matters and it gives you an impression of the company and its culture and what's going on there. And you also really need to assess and evaluate your culture and find out if it's friendly to women. And if you don't know, you have to ask women. If there aren't women in your company, you have to seek some out and find them and talk to them. Talk to women in other companies. Talk to consultants. Talk to them. We're not scary. We're here. And we will answer your questions. You have to do your research. You have to approach this as any other business need. Making your company diverse isn't just some pipe dream. It's vital. It's how your company is going to grow and have different voices and have different perspectives and be intelligent. It's so important. I just can't stress that enough. I feel like there are so many companies out there that just sit around going like, where are the women? And they don't do anything about it. So I want companies to just reach out and talk to people and talk to women and put it up there with all of the other important business needs that they have. That's my last slide. I finished a little bit early. If there's any questions or Q&A, I'd be happy to answer. Thank you. Hi, Dave. I have a question. You were the first female to join the Chromatic team at the time, all white men. What advice would you give to a woman looking to enter into a team that might be in the same position? I did give it a lot of thought. I researched the company pretty heavily. I googled you guys. I did. I wanted to look and see if there was anything that gave me pause about you guys as individuals. What did you guys... Your website looked great. Everything you said on your job listings already... There was nothing there that were red flags as a company. Then I wanted to see as individuals what you guys seemed like was... What kind of things did you say on Twitter? Did you seem like total dude bros? Were you into social justice? What kind of things? Everything that I saw about you as people I liked and when I talked to you... We addressed it. We brought it up in some of our first conversations and that made me comfortable. When I came on full-time we spent the entire dinner talking about me being the first woman and me being an ambassador for the company and that made me really comfortable and that you guys were passionate about diversity and that you were excited to bring a woman on. That made me really happy. Those were all really good signs and I knew that you guys had been... It showed me that you were trying and that you were happy to be increasing the diversity and this wasn't just like, oh, yeah, we're just a bunch of white dudes and now you're just a woman that you were happy and this was purposeful and that just all made things feel really good to me so I would encourage other women to do that. Have the conversation see that these are individual people that you want to work with and somebody has to be the first woman unless it's a woman led company in which case you have to be the first guy so do the same thing, I guess. Does that answer your... Okay. But now we have five women which is pretty cool. Anything else? Anybody? You know, when we're trained in a very serious way and so then when the workplace has been shut down so saying that we don't want we don't want to be right here with the camera we don't know how to let down we're afraid that we'll be perceived to let down our guard as not as competent as we want to be seriously human no matter who those things are still being considered. It's a sort of a vicious circle that we kind of call it because so I think your point about talking to women and what I heard you say to the folks who hired you that they're willing to have that conversation right up front and that you're able to say things like the whole thing probably doesn't work for me here's what I need to have fun that's really powerful and that's something that's not happening I was saying that if you have that conversation immediately a lot goes up and if you learn how to deal with it so I think that you will get away with some of the things that sort of fit these persons will work a bit well let's talk about work that out a bit and you should not but it's great. Now I totally agree I think there's also another layer to that of companies that tend to have their level of serious might be like a different you know the way that they see themselves and the way that their culture is is something that is often just not as friendly to women it's not even just about fun but they tend to also be the cultures that they don't take sexual harassment as seriously and when people are drinking in the office especially during the work day that's not going to be as safe as a place to be for anybody so I think a lot of women see that as a turn off not just because of the fun aspect but like are you taking the things you need to be taking seriously seriously or are you all just like yeah let's just have fun and bust out some code this is just so I think especially that sort of start up vibe where it's like nah we're not a business we're just like some dudes having fun and I think that that's that can be a real sketchy area for women oh yeah sorry the answer might be obvious I mean Google indeed all these things LinkedIn but where would you say is the best place to find women to hire I think that's a really good question there are a lot of there are a lot more job sites that are for women specifically these days I haven't been looking for a job recently so I'm not so I'm not sure I know that a good one that I recommend to people who are looking for remote jobs is called power to fly because they specifically try and place women in like flexible remote jobs but I think that that is a growing like a growing industry of like job sites for women but if not there need to be certainly more of them just step up I will say first that I'm upset that so many of your anecdotes deeply relate to my experiences in the tech workplace so I can definitely feel you there but I just wanted to ask so I work in a non-tech environment and I'm the only technical person there I'm also up against a strong age difference in my supervisor lineup about 20 years difference in the youngest person there so I just I want to ask about your questions for advocating for your technical needs resources professional development when you have non-technical people above you I think that can be a really tough one and depends a lot on your relationship with like your managers and your higher ups I had dealt with that one once and what had worked for me was I had a really non-technical direct manager but I had a better relationship with his manager sometimes just wind up having to go a little bit over his head even though that was uncomfortable but he understood my needs a lot better because he just came from a more similar background so sometimes just finding someone else in your organization who can relate to you a little bit better can be the best thing like even if it's not the person that you're supposed to and that can really depend on your organization but just finding the right person but I think also just finding a way to back up your needs and saying like and also not asking saying like I need this because data and I need to do this because data and instead of just saying could I, may I and just putting it out there especially because you're younger and asking permission might make you feel like you're a kid just saying like can I please do this and instead just stating your needs and can help you feel a little more you know just putting it out there and saying that it's what you need I have a suggestion in your review process can you ask specifically to have a line of someone who's doing the same job as you in another area give feedback because we even at Penn State you know they don't do anything but they do it in the review process they do allow feedback from a colleague on the same level maybe that for the review process of it all yes exactly like my title as multimedia specialist too so I could say somebody from another department like my friend Nikki back here since we're doing the same type of work she could review me on the work that I'm doing the technical work so then my boss can do that thanks microphone is for tall people so yeah I've been in tech since about 2000 and the majority of my career has been with companies run by men working mostly with men which is not unusual I currently work for a company called communicate health and it's actually a women owned women run company we're not just a web development company though we do communications for the public health sector so we have researchers writers developers designers so we have a kind of small development team within our larger team but even on our development team in a company run by women we have seven developers and only two of us are women which is interesting so I know we're working are we're actually dedicated to trying to get a more diverse group of people in our in our employees now and that's something that the company is actually like striving for so what advice would you give a company trying to find more women technical women like where do you find them how do you go about finding them like actual real world ways of recruiting them and seeking them out I think one way would be to get involved and look at like you know if you're like local groups like you know who's teaching you know say if you're looking for a javascript developer who's teaching the local girl development javascript class you know who's teaching the local you know like ladies learning code class or things like that like reach out and you know see who's doing that like who are the local subject matter experts in the thing that you want to do like look on meet up look on twitter and like actually seek them out and like recruit those women directly and find them like that's that's what I would do like that's what I you know I was the I'm the track share for the back end development team and like I actually went out and like searched for women in you know the space that I wanted to and send the messages and was like hey I would love for you to submit a talk and that was a much broader thing but I think especially if you're in a location yet it's even easier like find organizations and find the women in them and or just go to meet ups and talk to women and put your name out there and things like that hello I mean for me I often think about like impact and intent of our privileged positions like I'm a company you know whether we have a beard I'm a dude and I always tend to think about just you know what position can I be in to really help people and you're kind of talking about privilege before metaphor is to that we use are very powerful it could be a sports metaphor to contribute to like bro culture the pronouns we use a lot of latent things that we do that are implicit that cast value in meeting we really need to kind of look at that so something I tend to think about less of a question I'm curious what you think yeah I totally agree and also like coming from a place of privilege like you have the best vantage point to call that stuff out because the other people in the room are going to be less comfortable like you know someone's saying like hey bros or hey dudes or whatever you are the strongest person in the room to call that out and say hey maybe don't say that or if someone says an inappropriate joke or anything like that like you have the privilege the most comfortable privilege to call that out because you're not going to get flack or if you do it's not going to affect you in the same way that it's going to affect someone else so the people with the privilege are the people who have to do the calling out yeah come up this might have been answered earlier so I apologize but I don't think there's much difference between the needs of a man and a woman but I'm just curious if there are any specific needs for females is it more because of historical values historical reasons that causes these values or is it more intrinsic for example like safety in a workplace historically has been a little bit more difficult for female than for men I don't think that the needs are different I think that we've made the reality different so we need to change that reality so that we're facing the same thing like you know our safety we both have the same needs for safety but our reality is different because we're treated differently you know like because you know in general women are preyed on by men in a way that men aren't preyed on by women so men don't have safety needs that we that women have so it's not it's not that our needs are different you know like or in terms of pay like we don't have different needs for pay but we aren't valued in the same way that men are so we need to change our reality to match the reality of men does that make sense does that answer your question okay I think there was someone else over here who was about to stand up and then oh come on maybe this is like a bigger and harder question but I couldn't help but notice that there's more women in this room than men and this talk seemed like it would be a really important one for all the men in our community so how do we get more men in a room like this do you have any ideas for that I think that's a tough one and I'm happy to see that there are men here I know honestly and I was happy that this was in the business track I had some discussions with the tractors and we decided to put it there and one of the reasons was to get more men in it I had originally we thought about putting it and maybe being human and we thought no let's you know this is a business related discussion this is about the workplace and maybe we'll get some more guys in here and I'm happy to see that there are guys in here but no you're right and I'm not sure how to get more men to just keep trying go for it come up to the mic I was just going to speak to that because we have a few diversity initiative groups at Four Kitchens right now and there's like four different groups who are kind of tackling different issues like marketing like how do we fix our marketing to like be more inclusive how do we fix our interviewing to be more inclusive etc and when we opened up the groups to volunteers it was immediately like all of the women who volunteered and so I just called people out and I was like we need more men like there's also diversity issues on that end if we don't have like you guys supporting us and being a part of the conversation so call people out and just like if you have your team say there's a session I'm going to you should come with me because I know that you know it's important to me for me to have that support so that's my advice hey I'm being represented by the guys on my team here so ladies bring your male team members to the diversity sessions just saying is there anyone else we've still got a few more minutes yeah come up part of the talk but I just wanted to say that I think part of the thing that separates us puts us in a different place from men is that things that are expected of men aren't expected of women we're raised in a different way where we're not challenged you know things aren't expected so we're forced to do these things but also part of that is us sort of supporting this male stereotype where we're expecting men to know things we're going to them for help we're asking them to do like certain manly things and we're treating them as if we expect them to have their manly role so I think part of it is not just thinking about how men can treat us but how we can treat men and not sort of like supporting the stereotype that they have to be doing their men things because it sort of reinforces the you know the need for them to feel like they have to act in that way where they have to act like they know everything and they have to act like they have to take care you know do things for women and you know not expect things of women so I just want to mention that part of it is you know thinking about the way we treat men because it's also difficult for them to have these expectations that they've grown up with that we haven't necessarily grown up with and yeah just like kind of keeping that in mind also yeah I know I've definitely thought about that one before and there's been times where I've like asked a male co-worker to grab my suitcase asking him because he's a guy or is it because he lifts weights competitively hmm so sometimes you can overthink that one too but no that is definitely a good thing to keep in mind is there anything else one more time that just made me think of the whole issue of toxic masculinity and is something that I feel like needs to be combated in order to make things more equal for women and that includes equal parental leave parental leave for dads too so that it's seen as not a women's issue but a human issue which is a big topic for me right now yes I like your future geek shirt yes this is not a question but just on terms of hiring and job posts there are tools out there that you can use you just put your job post in and it'll read through you'd be surprised what other words get picked up so I think it's a good idea to write as more masculine coded versus feminine coded so I always make sure to run my job posts through this just to make sure that they're more feminine coded because it's shown that like men are still going to apply to more feminine coded job posts than women are so women are going to mostly apply to feminine coded job posts so just things that come up are like things that sound super competitive will generally deter women so I can never remember the URL for it but I usually find it so put your job post in and that's a good place to start if you don't have any women in your organization to review your job posts it's an easy place to start what is it T-E-X-T-I-O dot com okay I think it even flags things like outgoing because you know some women don't want to be like hey team how's it going every morning really who does anybody else got a couple minutes run up I missed some of your presentation too so if you covered this already apologize you talked earlier about like a boozy culture being something that might want to be avoided from a discomfort level too if you're looking at making it a more inclusive culture kind of from the top or at least from all of the different groups levels I don't think it's arguable that there tends to be different cultures depending on the disciplines in the technology company right sales marketing development that kind of thing too so besides not having a boozy culture what else do you think might be a consistent thing that we could either proactively do or proactively avoid that would still be applicable whether a female was in sales or marketing or development or anything like that where it's maybe that would be a great fit for a development manager to be concerned with but not necessarily something that would I mean you want a sales person to be outgoing right so you wouldn't necessarily want to avoid that in a job description for a sales person so what are the other things that maybe we can do from a consistency standpoint that would apply to all these different groups and cultures within a larger organization do you mean in terms of job listings or in terms of like other like extracurricular type yeah extracurricular type or just how communications and are done throughout the day stuff like that I didn't necessarily mean job description but when we talk about even job descriptions right I mean there are some very specific roles within companies and again you don't want a sales person to not be outgoing for instance right so and something might make any developer frustrated whereas it would be nothing to any sales person so but there's got to be consistencies across those groups in general I would think well I mean obviously I think it's fine to use a term like outgoing for a sales person I was thinking more like you know tech culture really off-putting term to a lot of people one thing that I find that I see in more and more tech cultures is like a lot of like hey we go hiking and we do yoga and we have all this like in-house like working out and that can be like you know that can start to border on like the ableist kind of thing and you know not everyone can or wants to work out and again that can also be kind of veering into like bro culture of like hey we all want to like get pumped in the morning and you know not everyone's into that so you know obviously offering workout classes is one thing but when you start to make them feel compulsory or feel like something that everybody in the company has to do like that needs to stop and I'm seeing a lot more of that not just in the tech culture but like all over the place if anyone reads ask a manager it's a really fantastic site but there was just a question the other day about I think or maybe I was reading an old one about like mandatory yoga and I was like why would you do that like that's the worst thing I've ever heard of because the person was saying that they like couldn't do it so things like that like actually I mean anything that's mandatory that any mandatory fun should never be a thing like no one should ever have a mandatory fun but I mean thinking about anything that can make people uncomfortable like you know the only thing that should be mandatory is you know doing your work and communicating with your co-workers and your clients there really shouldn't be anything else that's ever mandatory and you know things like you know you should never have a drinking culture it's you know obviously you know like we got to do a book on we have a few drinks but some people don't drink or like I only have a couple drinks because I get migraines and no one ever pressures anybody and it's fine and you have to make sure that that's a totally okay level like it's okay to not do things and it's okay to just be yourself and that needs to be like the level that it is and things like that so I hope that answer your question I don't run a company so I can't answer like how all departments should be run I would say it's important to men and women but I know what's really important to me is work-life balance so anything that like verbally promotes that you know oh it's okay you know she has this great thing to go to like just you know saying that we you know we should be able to to turn off so okay well it's almost one so I think we can wrap it up thank you you had an amazing question