 So I'm Lindsay Bida and I'm a developer at brandybrand.com and we're gonna be talking about anti-oppression which is something that's extremely important to me as I entered you know the field and I noticed that no one else sort of looked like to me. Hi everybody I'm Steve as you may or may not know I teach the best Ruby and Rails classes in the world with Jeff over there so if you need to get better at Ruby she'll give us a call. Yeah and I care about the stuff a lot so Lindsay and I put this talk together to share these concepts with you. So when we say anti-oppression what do we mean? Well so one of the things that I've been really interested in lately is applying the languages and techniques of other fields to ours so basically like I've stopped listening to all of you and started listening to people who do things like philosophy or you know the humanities stuff and I think that there's a lot to be learned from an interdisciplinary approach right so like everyone is concerned about the startup echo chamber and I'm kind of concerned about the programmer echo chamber in general not that I do anything to not contribute to that but you know whatever I'm on Twitter just like everybody else is but so I came up with this analogy that I think is pretty reasonable for how to think about other fields so in Ruby we love DSLs right like Rails is a DSL to write web apps we just use DSLs constantly for everything basically rake you know all sorts of stuff and so other languages have these domains that are not programming and so they also need to use language that addresses that particular domain so what's unfortunate is whenever we encounter a domain that's not ours we sometimes assume that we know what words mean because we use them in our regular context but in the context of a totally different field of study a word that you may be aware of means something else entirely but seems pretty obvious but it's really easy to forget so what we're going to do today basically the point of this talk is to present the ideas of social justice as a DSL for solving the inequality problem that we have in programming so you know just remember that this is sort of an overview of terminology that you may think you know what it means but you may not fully understand what happens when people that care about this stuff talk about it so you wanted to share it with you so first we're gonna start with some data so right here is a graph of the bachelor's degrees in various STEM fields so that's science technology engineering and math and we notice this red line here is computer science so this peaked around 1985 1986 right when I was born it's all your fault so you know clearly there was a lot of interest and suddenly we have something dropping off and it's so negative trend we have had some small increases recently but it's an overall negative trend and what we have right now is about 23% of women the people receiving degrees are women there's a similar issue so we talk a lot about like women in computer science we need to understand that this is an intersectional problem so this affects multiple people and multiple areas and different experiences and stuff so what we have here is sort of the race breakdown of all US workers compared to the workers in Silicon Valley and we see for Hispanic individuals in Silicon Valley they only make up like 9% and the overall workforce they make up 15% for black people it's 6% compared to 11 so that difference to goes okay that's not that much difference but then you think about it you realize that it's half and that makes it a staggering amount so there's something at work here something going on that are keeping multiple people from different backgrounds from entering this field so yeah so this is sort of the data that supports this problem and so there's this field called not really a field exactly but maybe a term that certain people use called social justice and it is essentially a DSL for discussing equality in social relations now one thing that we want to definitely emphasize so like I'm sure that a lot of you read my Twitter and so this is not necessarily about politics social justice is a term actually originates from Thomas Aquinas and it used to be a very conservative religious we need to help those who are less fortunate kind of thing so this isn't really anything to do with like my normal like raw raw smash the state stuff this is about like being humans to other humans regardless of whether they vote Republican or not there's still people and so I say that in all seriousness like this is this is a bigger topic than petty political squabbling and this is what that what it really gets down to is is like we are all people and we should be treating each other as people and that's important and it's easy to forget sometimes because we deal with computers all the time so a long time ago some of you may know that I used to read it a lot until I got really really upset and quit but there was this really great thread that happens about reddit that I think that illustrates one of the biggest concepts in this field and one of the ones that's hardest for us to understand as programmers and it was an ask reddit thread and it said what's the worst thing that you can call a white male and people were like somebody said like cracker and they're like haha that doesn't bother me whatsoever right it's like totally ridiculous that I would get upset about this word and then someone said privileged and then all of a sudden everyone got really upset no no no no I'm definitely not privileged whatsoever I worked really hard I did all my homework in high school you know yeah maybe I went to private school but like that's because my parents worked really hard and like there was this huge like no no no no no no and so it's really really amusing in general that that's that's what gets us and me upset mostly is by accusing us of this like social privilege this is like the most key cornerstone concept to understanding social inequality is privilege so privilege is how society accommodates you you know it's like sort of the things that you get when you enter a situation it's how you know you were being treated one particular way because you're presented in a particular way it's actually situate situationally affected I had a friend who he's a Korean born person he was adopted into American family and when people were reading over resumes you know he has sort of a name that people associate with him being like white but then when he comes into basically to get interviewed they look around and they say oh you know Zach and they look over and they go to this one guy you know who wasn't him and they look at him and so he had privilege in like getting the interview and stuff because he said you know people thought that's who he was but then when he's actually there you know it was a totally different situation and it's basically kind of like a luck thing you don't really sort of you don't have a control of this yes some of these things can change about you you know like your religion may change or you know other things can change as you grow but a lot of it is things that you're born with you're lucky if you know you're a white male and you're entering the computer science field just it's kind of how it is because you're sort of the norm it's what people expect and yeah so the privilege and the unprivileged live on the same planet but two different worlds the experiences that I have are completely different from the experiences that Steve has because of who we are and it has nothing to do with you know me choosing to be this short woman it's like you know this is who I am this is how I present myself I don't have a choice in that really. There's a really good blog post that happened a little while ago that you may have seen me tweet about where somebody compared the idea this idea of privilege to difficulties in video games so like if you have privilege in a situation then you're playing the same game but on an easier mode and it's not even that you'll necessarily notice that like things are simpler it's just that things are simpler and you just sort of assume that's true. Another sort of example of this like these social norms are privileges so I was at dinner recently with a lady friend of mine and the person brought the bill and he went and handed it to me and I made a big deal of handing it to her because she was paying and she put her credit card in the thing handed to the waiter and he said thank you walk back ran the card walk back out handed the bill to me and you know so like this is these kinds of things where this is like a social norm you know that like people like every day you just oh this is just the way things are and so you're treated in a special way because you happen to be male identified. So there's this really cool sociological experiment called the invisible gorilla basically these they wanted to do this study on perception so they told all these people we're gonna show you this video and it's gonna have two teams one's gonna be wearing white jerseys one's gonna be wearing black jerseys they're gonna pass basketballs back and forth to each other on the screen and we want you to keep track of the number of times that each team passes the ball to each other and so we wanted to tell us you know the black team passed the ball ten times and the white team passed the ball five times or whatever so then they show them video and afterwards you know they did this with a bunch of individuals they didn't do it in a group and afterwards they asked all of them okay so what did you think of the gorilla and they're like what do you mean the gorilla and they're like the gorilla that walked across the middle of the video and I don't know what you're talking about said most of the people so they replayed in the video again and in the middle of these jumble of people passing basketballs this dude in a ridiculous gorilla suit walks over and is like waving his arms and then he walks off the frame and so the reason that people miss this and you can see the video on YouTube if you want and I totally miss it the first time that I watched it as well our brain is not really good at paying attention to things that are in our periphery so we tend to focus on things and so especially when you prime someone with the idea that you need to count these basketballs you focus on that and since the color of the gorilla suit is similar to the color of the people on the team you just totally ignore this like blatantly obvious thing if you weren't trying to focus slightly and so this is really what a good metaphor I think for the idea of privilege so like as a person who is privileged you won't notice the ways that you're privileged because you are normal so it's a situation normal and so it's really really difficult to notice the ways that you are privileged if you have privilege in a given situation and that's one of the things that make this concept really hard to identify with and to address especially if you have a lot of it if you are a straight white middle-class male dude it's very difficult to notice all those things together so what Steve went over was his personal axes of identity and so it's all these things that sort of like make up who you are and sort of affect the privilege that you receive in what situations yeah this is a list of just five of them the gender sexuality race class and ability but there's a lot more at play here you know being cisgender and stuff does give me privilege that you know transgender people don't have and it's really important to keep in mind that you know a lot of these things are at play and nothing is really quite so cut and dry it's one of the things I have issues with a lot of the data that we collect about people in you know computer science because we're looking at it at a like a really base level we're only looking at it like gender as being male and female and there's a lot more going on there we don't do any studies about sexuality and there's very little data about race actually which is surprising and one short note of what we mean by ability here this is like if you have mental health issues for example or if you're handicapped not like I'm really good at Starcraft versus someone else is kind of okay at Starcraft we're talking about like physical ability there were some questions last time we gave this presentation about what ability what we meant in this context and that's actually one of the harder ones to notice but anyway so intersectionality is how all of these things are interacting at once and a lot of them lead to you know basically systematic oppression of these people and inequality and it's something that we need to really keep in mind and it's one of those things we need to keep in mind as we push forward and we you know push for more women in the field we need to keep in mind that you know we're leaving other people behind if we're just talking about women in the conversation we need to be very very aware that we are talking about increasing everyone's ability to interact in this field and it's it's something that's always kind of problematic anytime you push for like you know basically equality in any situation sometimes someone gets left behind and it's time that we stop doing that this is also a common derailing tactic of people and you say like oh well women you know don't have as much social power and they're like what about that woman who's a CEO you know that one woman who's a CEO so there's intersection between all these different kinds of things that make up like people aren't just one attribute so it's important to acknowledge them as whole people instead of you know just pigeonholing them into one particular part of their identity this is something that is really controversial on the internet and that's because nobody studies these kinds of things you may have heard people say previously like that you cannot be racist against white people for example and then there's huge arguments about what that means the issue comes from this to the isms specifically racism and sexism but also ableism and classism and all those things basically it's it's an equation of discrimination plus power equals the oppression so the reason that people say things like you cannot be racist against white people is because racism is about systemic inequality across all of society so you can discriminate obviously against any particular category of these things but if you are the if you are the dominant or the most privileged along any of these particular axes then it's impossible for you to be ism because they're talking about a bigger societal force and this is something that people don't really appreciate in many ways and this derails tons of discussions online because people get into these details about what this words actually mean so when you use the ism you're talking about broad social issues not like you know a particular interaction or one instance so okay so imposter syndrome is when people are unable to internalize their achievements you know despite any sort of evidence that they are you know really good at what they do and they think that they're basically frauds and this is something that affects a lot of us I know Steve has talked about you know sort of experiencing this imposter syndrome before I've definitely talked about it but when you're sort of like a minority in the field it's sort of kind of like crumples down on top of you too because I remember like getting a job and I'm like am I getting this job because I'm a woman or I'm getting this job because I'm genuinely a really really good programmer and basically trying to get that through to yourself and basically trying to internalize these achievements is something that's actually extremely difficult to do sometimes and it's sort of surprising there's all this evidence there but despite all that evidence you just can't accept it for what it actually is so one of the situations I love bringing up is you know going to just any sort of tech meetup and the really really problematic thing that I've ever been asked is who's girlfriend are you and even more so I've had multiple people basically ask me you know if I'm dating Steve which I'm not and it's happens over and over and over and over again and it's you know you're in a situation you're trying to present yourself as a programmer and I was like oh you know who are you dating what which man in this room are you here with him's like no I write code I this is what I do with my life and that's sort of like builds upon this imposter syndrome right because I don't feel like I belong in that situation this happened two three days ago I got lunch with someone who I know through the internet and he said like didn't I see you tweet something a couple months ago about you cutting your girlfriend's hair in the same way that your hair is cut and I shaved a bunch of my friends heads like a couple months ago but they're all also programmers and I retweet them all the time so people are like vaguely familiar with my friends group but that was the thing that he remembered was like I think that you're a woman attached to this dude not like you know anything else so it's really really common and tech events and numerous women talk to me about how this is like something that really bothers them and it should so yeah so the stereotype threat this is something that's really I'm assuming obviously I can't really experience this at all but so a stereotype threat is a very common thing where you have anxiety from you don't want to perform in a way that would reflect negatively upon your social group in general right so I think you had an example of this yeah actually the really interesting thing about a lot of studies that say that women perform poorly in math is that they prime them with gender ahead of time so anytime you get a group of people together and you say okay you know women tend to do bad on this exam and they take that exam they do poorly if you go ahead and you say you know actually there's been studies that's trying to say this but that's actually false they did that study and suddenly the difference in their performance was the complete same there was identical performance so this priming with gender and basically telling them you know this is what your your gender does and or actually they even did this you know with African-Americans because for a while there's standard I tests and it was actually 1992 when they did this study and they found that the moment you said you know your group of people does poorly they perform poorly and it's because when you say that you're putting their mind in sort of like this anxiety state you know they're not gonna perform as well anyway because they're stressed out they're like you know I'm you know my type of person does poorly oh no I have to prove this wrong you know this isn't true about me and you know the moment you put someone in that they're not gonna perform as well and yeah definitely because societies has a sort of idea that women you know aren't good at math it or it just you know the moment you bring it up again and say here take this math test now it's gonna stress them out and their performance is actually hinder from that here's one of my favorite things that programmers say that are terrible I can't be sexist because I love women so much and I love looking at them all the time that's not the variant of this is like my slides couldn't be sexist my wife helped me pick out the pictures so you know these are kinds of things that you may like run into that yeah we can like laugh about but they're often you know way more subtle right like this is the most blatant form of this argument but people do make them in more and more subtle ways as well one of the things that is really important and this has come up a lot in discussions about like conference talks gone wrong etc. is that this stuff is really hard and you should apologize honestly when you get it wrong like I don't think that there's value in making people give fake apologies due to demanding to the you know the witch hunt like if you are being a sexist jerk then you shouldn't pretend to not be a sexist jerk you should just say yeah I'm a sexist jerk I'm not gonna apologize for it I don't think it's really productive to fake me apologize I also think it's important to apologize if you do something wrong even if the other person doesn't feel wronged so one example of how I have been oppressive in the past I went to a conference and the night before somebody tweeted like I'm excited to see so and so so and so so and so and at C Plabnik or somebody had never met before I'd never been in this particular city and so I saw her in the crowd before like in you know the social event like morning coffee social before the conference so I walked up to her and said hey are you you know so and so on Twitter and she's like yeah and I was really nervous because it's weird to like talk to people on that you've never met before on Twitter and so I made some sort of like in my nervousness I made some sort of joke about like yeah I mean I didn't know if it was you or not I didn't want to be like that dude but how many blonde women are there here really and then I felt really terrible about it afterwards as I should but like even though I care and think about this stuff all the time you know it's tremendously easy to slip up and be a jerk to people and so I didn't apologize immediately even though I felt immediately bad because it already was super awkward enough for me to have this interaction and that was the reason I screwed up in the first place but later in the conference I went back and I was like hey I really wanted to apologize for what I did earlier and she's like what do you mean and I was like well I singled you out as being like you know a woman here and like that's really wrong and she was like well I don't really feel particularly wrong by this and I was like well that's fine but I just wanted you to know that like I feel bad about it and I wanted to apologize and so that's one way you know that like it helps because you never know if someone maybe she in this particular instance she didn't feel wrong but what if she'd actually got her feelings really hurt right and especially since I was speaking at that conference right like I have an extra amount of privilege from being on the stage too that I have to acknowledge yeah so micro aggressions are demeaning implications or other subtle insults against minorities these sort of happen a lot it's sort of like that everyday reminder that you are a minority and you're of deviation from the norm and that you're sort of you know outside of that and like my basic example is that like doing dishes is woman's work there's a my favorite one is Obama is so articulate right which is just like straight up racism but like is not it's like people don't think it is for some reason well like backhanded compliments are one of the common like most common forms of microaggression and just for a note there is a website called microaggressions.com where you can see a huge listing of these and anytime someone is like you know give me an example of like something where you've been wrong I was like you can go to the site and most of these have probably happened to like one of the women that you know okay so frown power was basically Stetson's Kennedy's solution to racism in the 1960s he was infiltrating the KKK and kind of trying to bring them down a bit but we really need to stop kind of being silent when someone is doing something wrong and I've noticed this increasingly especially on Twitter right now which is really cool despite the fact that we're all being called like you know we're doing a witch hunt apparently when we call people out on being assholes but we should call people out on being assholes because the moment our community is basically accepting of people being dicks we're gonna end up with a community full of dicks we need to stop that and I hate to use genitalia as a pejorative but I'm gonna do it I apologize but we really really need to let someone know when they're doing something wrong because sometimes they might not know and yeah I we all make mistakes I've done it Steve has done it like probably everyone here at some point has said something that was you know inappropriate for a situation and if you just let someone know that they're doing something wrong you know they'll think about that and that's really really really important and if you know they continue it keep calling them out and then call in the Twitter army all right so we're gonna speed these last ones up a little bit because we're running a little low on time but this is a common thing from film actually that is hard for us to notice as dudes the male gaze so it's anytime the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual male so my favorite example of this from recent times is there was an article in a newspaper paper about like what if other sports in the Olympics were filmed like we film women's volleyball and like so like every women's volleyball photo is you know basically just like ass right like that's it like disembodied like nothing from like here to here from behind like that's in this women's volleyball I even saw one article where the it was like an unattributed woman is playing beach volleyball and it's like you don't even like deserve to have a name let at all like regardless about the textbook agenda objectification involved in that photo and so one of the women that I'm friends with said like yeah you can literally be the best in the world at your chosen field of endeavor and yet you're still nothing more than your body to most people and so this is awesome this particular photo had like men's basketball with just like you know butts in shorts and like diving and they were just pointing to you can see obviously how ridiculous it is when you're taken out of that context but yeah so now it is so I have a Francis the Allen clue and because we're short on time I'm definitely not going to read it but the key point is that technology is sort of shaping the world and it's really important that it's accessible to absolutely everyone so that everyone can be able to use this interact with it and actually create it so what we create is color directly by who we are there have been situations where you know because someone didn't take in the considerations of other people there you know have been technologies created that you know there there's the you know the face tracking stuff it didn't work with dark-skinned people that was a huge problem because you know that's a massive part of the population HP camera yeah you didn't see that story or the Nikon camera and anyone who is Asian it was like saying did you blink like clearly you did not test this with anyone that wasn't you know the people were just working on it so it's really really really important that we're a diverse community the people creating this technology so it's able to help those in the entire world because the world is not all white dudes it's a really really diverse community and we need to make sure that like no one saw that Pinterest was really popular right like everyone on hacker news is like Pinterest whatever and then all of a sudden it blew up in a huge and that's because it has certain demographical you know interests that aren't the dudes on hacker news so it's important and we don't want to give off this you know image the problem if we create all technology from the perspective of me then we tell people like Lindsay or everybody else that they don't belong here because it's a boys club or you know all that kind of stuff so it's really important to note that even the few women that were able to get into the tech field we're losing them they're dropping life fries because once they enter in there you know this sort of oppression stuff continues you know offensive sexist jokes in the office I know it seems like hey this is just a joke but these things actually seriously actually caused mental stress to people and they have you know studied basically putting you know these helmets on people to track the brain waves and then telling them sexist jokes and noticing that there's a mental stress response every time that's told so the tech field we have a really high rate of attrition for women it's actually 41% of women within the range of 10 years they will leave the tech community and 17% of men and so simply by reducing the female attrition is done by 25% we can add 220,000 people to the talent pool which is massive considering that all the companies are starved right now for talent everyone's always saying we can't find talented people we're trying to hire like crazy and it's extremely difficult it's at the base we just need to get more people in and we need to be more opening open to other people and here's another quote I'm not going to read but same general sentiment yeah yeah so ultimately we need to do better about this stuff right and like we are all working on it as Rubius especially like it's I'm really glad that we've been able to have this conversation and in general like we are discussing it and you know whatever but it is really really important I think that for all these informed mentioned reasons especially about shaping the technology of the future and so here's a couple things briefly that we can undo to continue to help in this way so the first one is to encourage anybody who has any interest at all to continue with that you know interest in computing or math or science whatever it is because often again this process of weeding out people drop out even before they go into degree programs right like little girls playing with their science kits but told they need to get played with Barbies right like that she could be a scientist someday but instead you know is not because we quashed this interest of a young age I mean I started programming and I was seven right so and you're even more impressionable then than before so contributing to projects that help learners is extremely important and Steve sort of started maintaining hack-to-hack after really a loss of why and it's really really important that we have these tools out there for learners to actually learn a lot easier I remember when I first started I was downloading code and copying and pasting it and changing things until I got it to do what I wanted it to but it's much easier now and we can make it even easier for everyone to continue to learn on their own and it's also really important to mentor those who need help getting started it it's really difficult to start programming I'm sure some of you remember it I was 12 when I started so I asked a bunch of hackers what my first language to be and they said see I was like okay so I had fun learning about pointers when I was really young and didn't quite understand what was going on but you know if I had somebody there basically helping me along the way that process would have been way smoother I didn't really understand fully what was going on until I started working on robots and that was like three years after I started programming obviously eliminating bias and stereotyping as much as possible when you grow up in like sexist white supremacists America you can't ever eliminate all of your bias like we've been indoctrinated with this stuff from a young age so it's it's not so much that we can all instantly tomorrow be totally you know oppression-free but it's important that we continue to like sharpen the sharpen the saw and continue to work on these things so like for instance my current project is to eliminate bitch from my vocabulary which has been really hard I have managed to already eliminate saying things like retarded for example like I used to say that a lot when I was in 10th grade or whatever and that's really terrible but I managed to cut it out by persistently paying attention to the things that I say and I'm a better person for it so like keeping this cycle going as like a lifelong project will help and then also we need to create ultimately a culture that makes people want to stay so not that I think that everything needs to be perfect before we bring more women into tech but if we're all a bunch of sexist assholes then why do I want to bring more women into this unsafe space right or if we're all going to do and say terrible things like I don't want to bring little kids into a programming world where we're going to treat them poorly so it's also important that we make sure that we're creating the world that we want to live in and that so that that way someday we can get there it won't be easy and it won't be tomorrow but I would like to you know someday have that world exist and so I'm a woman of my world word I'm doing this I'm trying to help and so me and Julie if she will stand up or wave her arm somewhere are starting girl develop at Pittsburgh and keep in mind that this is open to everyone it's focused on women but we definitely want everyone to be involved because both me and Julie care a lot about this intersectionality issue and so we're trying to help we're trying to bring women in we want to start up mentoring programs and everything and so hopefully we can help you know try and turn this you know downward you know trend around and get more people into the program world because programming is the best thing I do it's awesome and I wish more people could experience that so yeah thanks for listening and we're now out of time but yeah it's been awesome