 Everyone can hear me, right? Yep. Just a note, so I am wearing an orange bracelet, but if you would like to tweet or take my photo or just write quotes, feel free to do so. You have my explicit permission. And I want to start off by talking about feelings, because this is open source of feelings, and the first feeling that I want to talk about is the feeling in my shins and glutes when I walk up your hills, Seattle. It is a negative feeling, and a feeling I don't like very much, so I thought I should share it. You guys really should come with a disclaimer. Like, you have hills, and Google doesn't have a fastest route option, and ain't nobody got time for that, but I'm a hills option, which is the option I would have taken, certainly. My name is Stephanie Morillo. I'm a copywriter at Digital Ocean, and I am here to talk to you about feelings and emotions, but particularly the feelings and emotions that act as drivers for positive change, so feelings and emotions that are catalysts for change, and all of these feelings and emotions aren't necessarily positive in and of themselves, even though they do lead to positive change. So this past spring, late this spring, earlier this summer, I co-founded Women of Color in Tech Chat with my friend, Christina Morillo, and that was the result of longing, anger, and frustration. Longing for a community to belong to that was for people like us. Anger and frustration at the fact that there's so many things wrong with tech, and I was sick and tired of being sick and tired of all the things that are wrong in tech, which generally affected groups that I was a member of, and also being sick and tired of being upset about diversity in tech efforts that were partly right, and the parts that they got wrong affected the groups that I was a member of. So the things that were wrong and kind of right were kind of wrong for people like me. So I've been in tech for over two and a half years now, and when I got my first full-time job in tech, I was one of the few women of color in the office, which says a lot, because I'm from New York City, New York City native, and you would assume that the demographics in the tech industry in New York City would kind of look like New York City, but it doesn't look like New York City, that's not much of a surprise, I'm sure to some folks in this room. Nevertheless, the first three months that I was there, the closest person that I was to at this particular company was a member of the cleaning staff, and she is also a Latina from New York City. So I remember feeling for quite some time that I had to separate the need for a community of professional women of color from the fact that I wanted to work in the tech industry. I consider myself really lucky after I graduated from college, I went into communications and marketing, and a lot of the people that became my mentors, a lot of the people that I befriended were women of color who were more established in their careers. Now, they weren't all C-level executives, but nonetheless, they were moving up the ladder, and it was essential for me to have those friendships and those mentorships, because not only did they help me cope, they helped me navigate the workplace, they were also essential for inspiring me, for motivating me and teaching the skills that I needed to succeed in the workplace in New York City. So when I went into tech, I realized that I needed to find that community, which I was not finding in the tech industry, for one, tech skews young, right? So all of a sudden, the mentors that were older than me were no longer there, and of course, there weren't many people of color that I could look to as peers and just talk to things, just talk to them about. So I started going into online spaces, Twitter in particular, and started participating in online conversations with feminists of color, primarily, that were not involved in the tech industry. They were artists, they were writers, and they were social workers. And I actually wrote a tweet from that time that I'd like to share. In December 2013, I wrote, Twitter feminism gave me access to a community of like-minded women of color that I so desperately needed. It kindled a fire with me, a fire in me, I'm sorry. So they were the folks that I felt that I could share my grievances with. They were the people that I came to depend on, and I didn't actually have a community in tech. I saw tech as very much like nine to five, you go in, you go out, but I wasn't really able to meld those two lives. But interestingly enough, in early 2014, when the online platform Model View Culture first came onto the scene, I discovered this platform not through the tech community, which I had no inroads in yet, I discovered them through the feminist writers of color that I was speaking with a lot online. Speaking of Model View Culture, in October of last year, I pitched an article, an idea for an article, which would eventually become an article that I wrote called How Blacks and Latinos Are Left Outside of Tech Hiring. And as I was doing research for this particular article, two things jumped out at me. One, a statistic that said, Black and Latino students graduating top CS programs are graduating at twice the rate they're being hired. So there are few Blacks and Latinos in top CS programs, but of those who are graduating, half of those are not getting hired. The second point was Black women and Latinos working in STEM fields reported getting confused as members of the janitorial staff. So you could be a scientist, a physicist, but by virtue of being a Black woman or a Latina, chances are people would confuse you as a member of the custodial staff. So these particular points hit me really hard and they made me angry with reason because the entire time I was in tech, I felt like I was being told in not so many words that Blacks and Latinos and other people of color are just not interested in tech. We can't find any qualified candidates and they're not coming through the pipeline. But there is the system, there is the fact that there's an over reliance on referrals to get jobs and interviews in tech companies and also unconscious bias, which I don't know that I need to discuss at length here, but if anybody's interested, you can definitely come up to me and discuss afterwards. And there's also the fact that yes, some people self-select out and they choose not to go and working companies that are mostly white and mostly male. So there are stories of course of microaggressions, et cetera in the back channels in tech, which a lot of, I wonder if a lot of people here have tapped into, but I certainly have. One story in particular happened to a friend of mine from my old company. She's a black woman. She approached her boss and asked him for a title change and a promotion, which she was entitled to at the time. And the man, young white man by virtue of being said, oh yeah, we'll just change your title to boss bitch. Nothing in her interactions with him professionally would have indicated that using that kind of terminology was okay, but that's probably not the term that he would have used with someone else. I had another friend, also a black woman, interviewed for a job at a tech company. She was interviewing for an office coordinator front desk position. She made it all the way through and she didn't get the job. Later she found out that at this particular company, they had hired a younger white woman. She's in her, my friend is in her late 20s. And my friend looked to me and she found also that most of the company was white. And she said, it doesn't surprise me that I wasn't hired here because if I was an investor coming into the office and the person that you, the first person that you would see is a black woman, you don't want the face of the company to be a black woman. And that hurts to hear. And that hurts to hear for various reasons. There was a recent study that McKinsey published called Women in the Workplace and it says the following. Black, Hispanic and Asian women are more interested in being promoted than white employees of both genders. On average, they are 43% more interested in becoming a top executive than white women and 16% more interested than white men. In short, the ambition is there but not access to the opportunities for women of color to live up to our potential. So as I started getting more and more involved in the tech industry, and this happened around the time that I was writing that article for Model View Culture, I started attending tech conferences for the first time on scholarship. And I could be, and she found also that most of the company was, and what I recognized was that there is a huge opportunity in tech conferences to establish meaningful relationships with people, not just networking for the sake of having friends on LinkedIn but actually making meaningful friendships. And for the first time, I was able to interact with people in the tech industry that are socially aware, that care about diversity in tech and that more often than not, were willing to hear me out and hear my story. But nonetheless, I felt that a lot of the diversity, pardon me, a lot of the diversity efforts in conferences fell hollow. Every conference I went to, it was we have more women speakers this year than last year. We have more women attendees this year than last year. And I was like, okay, that's great. I tweeted it in October, 2014. I'm not going to scream with joy because tech's trying to do right by women when I'm still one of like two or three women of color at a tech event. And it was true. I could count the women of color at a tech event. So it wasn't enough for me. It felt like only half of my identity was being acknowledged and certainly being a person of color in the tech industry, people of color in general, I don't think get enough love in tech. I feel like it's still a word that we're not allowed to say. But nonetheless, it is a part of my identity and I wish that it was recognized and acknowledged as such. In fact, the one conference that I think has done an excellent job on this, I'm sure there are other examples, but the one that I can think of the most is a conference for women software engineers called RightSpeak Code. It took place this past March in New York City and RightSpeak Code offered scholarships according to intersections and identity. So there was an LGBTQ scholarship and there was a scholarship for women of color. And in the two years, the then two years that I was working in tech, it was the first time that I'd ever seen women of color called out specifically at a tech event. I was one of the recipients of the women of color scholarship. And when I went, I was really surprised to learn that some of the organizers in RightSpeak Code are women of color themselves. And a lot of the attendees were women of color. And for the first time, I felt that my form of womanhood, my totality was acknowledged and that I was able to then just concentrate about communing with other women in the space, but without feeling that part of my identity was being erased. And that's extremely, extremely important. Calling out specific groups gives them a form of acknowledgement, a form of visibility and not saying anything is, I find can be harmful. So that's my take on it. And I thank RightSpeak Code very much for doing what they did. So a few weeks after the conference, I decided to take to Twitter again as I usually do. And I posed a question to my followers and I wanted to know, do women of color feel included under the women banner in tech? From my experience, not really. Anyone else? Well, we had a few women, we had a lot of, I had a lot of responses, a variety of responses. And I learned that there were women who were able to find community with, you know, Latinas in computing or black women in technology and more niche organizations. But what I wasn't seeing was a way to commune with women of color as a whole, which for me was extremely important because the women of color that mentored me were black women and I'm a Latina and I thought that it would be absolutely fantastic to have women of color along different racial and ethnic lines, acknowledge privilege that we have, even, you know, as people of color, there are axes of privilege and also be able to share experiences and networks with people that weren't necessarily like me and didn't have my particular experience. So in May of this year, I sat down with my friend, Christina. Christina is in her mid-30s. She's super awesome. She has almost 15 years of experience in tech. She does infosec and access management. Not many women in that field, certainly not many women of color. And I sat down with her and I told her, well, I'd love to create something where I can see where the other women of color are. We're here in New York City and we only found each other on Twitter. Imagine the women of color, but what I, well, politics and areas in the country who don't have access to women of color in tech and in other industries to really learn from and grow from and further their careers. So we decided to create a chat, a Twitter chat. We had a list of eight, nine questions. Christina had done Twitter chats in the past. She's a community manager for the online community, Code Newby. And we put a date and we tweeted for about two weeks. A few things that I really was adamant about was setting guidelines for this particular community. I put tweets that I called out trans women of color in particular. I called out different, I called out black women, Latinas. I called out native women. I called out different groups so that everyone knew that they were welcome in the space. And I also included a caveat in there saying, if you are not a woman of color, please don't participate in the chat. You can retweet and you can observe, but please don't participate. And I think this is extremely important for folks who identify as allies. Sometimes allies get super excited and they want to participate and show people that they have resources too, that they'd like to share. But doing so at the expense of drowning out, the very people that we're trying to serve in this community is not a good thing. So, and that was actually something that we enforced in our first chat. We found there were people that weren't women of color that were participating and we just gently remind them, please amplify, retweet, observe. We're gonna have this storified later and feel free to share it, but we would like this space to be for women of color only because there are very few spaces for people like us. And what ended up happening after that first Twitter chat, for one, I thought only four to five people would show up. We had 25 to 30 and after the hour was over, aside from the fact that my mentions died, they were just like completely broken. We had a lot of women ask when the next chat was gonna be and the funny thing was there wasn't gonna be a next chat. I just wanted, it was more like a call to see if you were out there, you know, just like, hello, hello, hello. And they were like, hey, and I was like, oh my God, this is kinda stressful. So, we actually sent out a feedback form afterwards and one of the cool things that we learned was that there was also a group of non-binary people of color, some of them identify as femme, some of them don't, but they really wanted to participate in the chat and they wanted us to make it more inclusive so we amended a lot of our language to be women of color and non-binary people of color in tech. So that was really cool, but we then decided to have another chat and about a week after our first chat happened, something really cool happened, Ash Dryden of AlterConf and Shanley Kane of Model View Culture sent us an email telling us about Fund Club, which was this organization that they had just started, this initiative that they had jump-started. The idea being that people subscribe to Fund Club and you donate $100 and your $100 will go to an organization that's led by underrepresented people working basically to help underrepresented people in the tech industry. And this was the first Fund Club and they chose us. We had no lander page, we had no nothing. So in three days, Christina and I managed to get a website up, we got some copy, we got a mailing list going, the nine and a week after that. So two weeks after the first Twitter chat, we got $6,000 for stuff that we now had to do, which was kinda cool, right? It's more like, it's more the response. We weren't anticipating the response to be what it was. I'll tell you that I was really shocked about it. First of all, I was wondering why it hadn't been done before. That's the huge thing. Look, look, people just gave us $6,300 and we did one Twitter chat. How is it that nobody was able to do this on a larger scale? And also that meant that we could then do the things that were extremely important to us, so bringing in marginalized people into the tech industry. So we focused, we decided to use that money to focus on a few initiatives. One of the initiatives is tech conferences. So offering scholarships to tech conferences. The second one, create a stock image photo shoot that highlights women of color working in tech. An event in New York City. And then basically just money if we wanted to throw at other initiatives and things like that, which we have been doing. In July, we created a special hiring newsletter where we invited tech startups and companies to basically give us listings if they wanted diverse talent. And we did this twice in July and in August. In each newsletter, we had around 10 companies and we sent it to a highly engaged list of 300 people, the majority of whom were women of color, which is extremely important because this demographic hadn't been targeted quite that way before in tech. I know people like numbers, so I have numbers for you guys. Women of color in tech chat has been around for four months and to date we've done five Twitter chats. We've sponsored three conferences. We've awarded seven free tickets to four conferences. We've awarded four free tickets to the Brooklyn JS Meetup. We've awarded two free tickets to an online content marketing workshop. We held a free all day event in New York City this past August. We had our first women of color in tech stock photo shoot in New York City. We paid for two women of color to receive coaching on their conference proposals. We sent out two hiring newsletters to a list of over 300 people. Recently we partnered with Galvanize and Lesbians Who Tech here in Seattle for a Python workshop and we were also involved with planning the jQuery developer summit which is happening in a few weeks in New York City. It's a three day workshop event where people who are from marginalized backgrounds, only people who come from underrepresented groups will be able to work on actual open source projects for the jQuery foundation. They're gonna be mentored by people from the jQuery foundation and there's gonna be different tracks. We're gonna have a documentation track, a coding track, et cetera, et cetera. Something that I'm extremely passionate about is bringing more underrepresented people into open source, especially non-coders. I think it's extremely important. And lastly, we are participating in the first digital conference for women of color in the world, women's freedom conference at the end of the month. And I think the reason why we were able to do so much for two people was because we leveraged our personal networks, which was important. So over the time that Christina and I have been working in tech, we've been fortunate to amass a network of people and these people really believed in what we were doing and through our personal networks get more women of color in the pipeline, in open source, going to conferences, attending conferences and hopefully speaking at conferences. We are not interested in growing this initiative. We're trying to keep it very much grassroots and I think that's something that's really important because something that I've observed with diversity in tech efforts is when people do something that a lot of people are excited about, there tend to be an issue with expectations, et cetera. Something that Christina's a married mother of three kids. I am neither of those things, but I got a job and I got bills to pay too. And it would be nice to focus on the bill paying part of life. So definitely making sure that we have boundaries set up has been extremely crucial for us and taking things a day at a time and a moment at a time. So the one thing that I would like to say is for people who come from underrepresented backgrounds, it is definitely not easy, but whatever emotions you have, emotions can propel you places. I'll tell you right now, I'm not angry, I'm not frustrated, which is nice. But the result of emotions that we consider negative, that we consider not productive can be productive and I think it's important for us to take ownership of whatever it is that we're feeling and create something to make ourselves not feel that way anymore. So thank you very much.