 Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thank you all for coming to this talk, which is called feeling at home in tech on creating a welcoming culture. I'm Nana and I will spend the most of the following 30, 40 minutes talking. What is very important to me is that if you have any questions, if you have anything you would like to discuss, anything you would like to add, please do so immediately if you would like to, so you don't have to wait until the end to ask questions or anything. So I call this talk feeling at home in tech on creating a welcoming culture, but it could also be called why programming for girls is a good thing, but not the answer to our problems. I say we now because I feel that I'm part of the tech community and its extensions, more or less, and me being here at this event might be a kind of pointer into that direction, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I can't be unhappy with the culture here, that I can't be unhappy with calling myself a part of it because there are certain things that I'm unhappy with. I'm unhappy with parts of the culture. I'm unhappy with normalized discrimination. I'm unhappy with sometimes questionable ethics and with some or sometimes even many people that call themselves part of tech. Actually, I've talked about the whole ethics dilemma last year in two different talks, so if you're interested in that, I can recommend those. I didn't do it alone, so you just don't have to listen to me for another two hours talking. So this year it's about culture, and sometimes it's about lack of culture actually. So let's die right in. But before I do that, before I start on the actual content, I want to give you two things. First, I want to give you a content notion because I will give examples of sexism, of racism, of ableism, and other discriminatory behavior. I will give examples of abuse. I will talk about occurrences of violence, and I will not go into too much detail. I'm not trying to focus on what people did wrong, but still these will be topics that come up in some form, so please take care of yourselves if you have trouble with that. If that is a sensitive subject for you, please, please deal with that. Don't feel obligated to stay here just because you came in the first place. Of course, I will be happy if you stay, but not if it makes you uncomfortable. The second thing I want to give you is a disclaimer, because I'm not an expert on cultural studies. I'm not an expert on sociological matters. I'm a computer science student, and I will be talking a lot about my experiences, about what other people have told me about, about stories that I've heard, about things that I've observed. I have read studies on the subject. I have looked at statistics, but this is still more of a personal report than a scientific study, so please keep that in mind. I will do my very best to never tell you anything that can be proven wrong, to not put too much of my own biases into this talk, but there will definitely be biases because we're all biased, and I can't avoid that. I always encourage you to critically reflect everything I say in my talks, because that's how thinking works. And I also want to point out that my recommendations are ideas, can be food for thought, can be inspiration, but they're not kind of the one and only step-by-step solution that we have, so please don't understand it as that. Today I will be talking a lot about sexism and gender-related issues, because that is what is personally important to me, because that is what I have experienced, because that is the area where I know most people personally who can tell me about these things, who can tell me stories and experiences, but that does not at all mean that any other discriminatory behavior, any other area, is any less relevant to this topic. It's just what I can talk about most. All right, now we can get started. So there were three lead questions that I considered when I was creating this talk, and even when I was first thinking about entering this talk into any kind of event, and the first one of that is why do people not feel at home in tech? I would like to discuss why people who are very, very different in all types of ways, but who are also in every type of position and everywhere around the world, do not currently feel at home in the field and in the culture that we have created. I would like to have a look at why it is so important that we create a space where all kinds of people can feel welcome, where all kinds of people can feel at home, even as a matter of fact, if that does not mean that every individual is equally welcome. Lastly, we'll be some points concerning what can and more importantly what has to be done about all of this. The thing is, before we can possibly talk about how to create welcoming culture, we need to talk about what welcoming culture is. And actually in German there's a word for that which is called the Komskultur, a word that has even been adapted into English because there's just no exact equivalent. And I've taken this definition of Wikipedia, of course, where else. But I've shortened it a bit, so I've cut out all the parts that are just right now not important. And this way it says, Willkomskultur bezeichnet positive Einstellung, den Wunsch, dass sie allen Menschen, denen sie beginnen Willkommen sein mögen, die Gesamtheit aller Maßnahmen durch die eine positive Erhaltung anderer gefördert werden soll. So basically this means a welcoming culture, means that we have positive attitude, that everybody you meet is welcoming towards you, and that we have a general positive attitude towards people that we don't know yet and towards groups of people. The term was actually coined in a bit of a different context. It was coined with regard to refugees and with regard to migrants. But the underlying thought is relevant to all kinds of people. It means be positive, make everyone feel appreciated and welcome, have a positive attitude towards people you meet. The thing is, if you turn this around, this means that nobody actually has a right to feel superior in being here or that has a superior right to feel good about where they are and what they do. Just because of where they were born, what they look like, how their mind works, their gender or sexual preference, or anything else. It means that none of that can give you the superior right to be in this field. And the idea that I want to express with that is an idea that I've talked about a lot in recent years. It's that everybody, no matter what their background is, no matter what their knowledge is, no matter what they like to do, whether they're more the analytical type or the creative type of both, it doesn't matter. If you want to, you should have a place in tech, you should feel welcome, and you should be able to do what you want to do. Nobody is less valid because they do something that people don't regard to be traditionally techie. This is how it should be, and nobody should be permitted to make you feel bad about yourself or that you are in tech or what you do just because of who you are. I will talk about this later, but the important part is that we're talking about groups of people, about what people are born like, about who they are, but not necessarily about their behavior. Of course, there are things that you can do that people actively perpetrate that can be critical, that can be bad, and that can lead to you being excluded from a group. But this is about behavior, this is about action, this is about being discriminatory, for example. The thing about this idea of mine that everybody should feel welcome and that everybody should have a place in tech is not what we're currently seeing. We're currently seeing something different. So I'm trying to answer the question of why I started asking whether people feel welcome in tech. Because something has to prompt you to even ask about this per default, we all assume that everybody is happy where they are because they wouldn't be there otherwise, right? I can only partly answer this question, but it is directly related to a metaphor that is often used to explain why there's such a male dominance in tech-related fields, and this metaphor is called the leaky pipeline. Who of you has heard of the leaky pipeline? It's them. Okay. The leaky pipeline model basically states that the reason for having not many non-binary or female people in tech is that, A, not a lot of them go into the system, and B, some leave the system at different points in their careers. Like, for example, it's often the case at universities that you have more female lecture students in computer science studies than you have master students, that you have more female master students than you have PhD students, that you have more PhD students than professors and so on. This illustration was taken from a sociological paper that was published at a university that tries to explain why there are not enough women in the sciences, sciences in general, not just computer science. Basically, in the end, it concludes that the reasons are A, small percentages in earlier generations, so like 20 years ago, fewer female students started studying science than now, and B, the leaky pipeline, because obviously at every point in time where something major changes, we lose people, so they get less. I don't particularly like this metaphor, to be honest, because it doesn't usually compensate for a lot of things. Often it doesn't talk about how many people of what kind of group leave a stage, so am I losing more female students than I'm losing male students relative to how many started, but even if we do that, it still looks like people dropping out of the pipeline is just something that happens. It's unpreventable, it's stable, it's not really anyone's fault. I personally disagree. It seems a bit like people leaving are a trickle, a small thing, a passive thing that kind of, you know, can be disregarded. I personally disagree, because sometimes it can feel a lot like being pushed by a lot of people at once, and I don't think a trickling stream of water droplets is a good metaphor for that. And then finally, it somehow manages to give people the impression that if you just push more people into the pipeline, we'll get more out of it, and that will fix everything. Everything will be fine. If we just motivate more girls to start careers in STEM, then we will have more that finish their careers, and everything will be great. Will it? I don't think so. So, spoiler alert, it won't. What we're seeing that is being done about this is this. Many, many projects that try to encourage girls to go into STEM. To start coding, to start liking mathematics, to be interested in biology, chemistry, and all the other sciences that are out there. That's great. I'm personally a big fan of any kind of way to get children in contact with what they're not usually seeing in their everyday lives. Sorry. I've organized the goals, they hear myself and several other kind of activities, but that's not the solution. Because if we push girls to be in that direction, to go into STEM, and then lose them along the way, then we've gained nothing. All we've done is given them a kind of frustrating experience of starting something and not feeling to be able to finish it. That's not helping anybody. The idea, of course, that we need people to start a Korean STEM for them to pursue it is not entirely wrong. But the presumption that it is necessary to actively motivate girls to go into the sciences is equally wrong. Because the thing is, it's not like they're naturally uninterested. It's the fact that our culture, our society, the things they interact with discourages them from going into STEM. So maybe sometimes we need to regard more the sources of the problem than actively try to alleviate the symptoms. So these are all a good thing, and we should keep doing that for the time being, but it doesn't just fix the problem. Because we have a situation like this. A situation where climbing the ladder up to the top is not the same thing for every person. Then pushing them to start won't help. This picture is not exactly my favorite for the situation, because it doesn't represent the diversity of people very well. This could also be about the fact that someone with a mobility age can't climb stairs the same way someone else can. Maybe. Maybe they can. I don't know. Have I asked them? Not until this point. But it's still a symbol to show you that the way that we pursue to get to the same place is not the same thing for everybody. That's mainly what I'm trying to say. So as an example of why it's not about getting people in there, but rather keeping them there, I'm going to start with what feels like the most discussed, but also most criticized statistic that comes out when you try to talk about gender imbalance and tech. The wage gap. Or pay gap. Who's heard of that? Yeah, I expected that. I have already tried to choose a statistic that takes most of the criticism of this model into account. There's always people saying that the reason women earn less money is that they choose jobs that just pay less, or that they take breaks from work, or that they work half-time, any of that kind of thing. So this particular statistic tries to show you what different groups earn compared to white men that are at the same company doing the same job and have the same number of years in experience in doing their job. I find two things very, very sad about this image. First of all, there is absolutely no mention about non-binary people at all. And the thing is, it's very, very hard to find any kind of numbers on their presence in tech, let alone their pay. And I don't blame them at all, not even the fact that they're probably statistically a lot less of them than binary people. But I blame the fact that tech is still trying to erase them and not talking about them and not taking them into account when building their models, their systems, their structures. The industry is not only intolerant, but also simply tries to erase any kind of thing that does not fit their system. And we can't keep doing that because people don't fit artificial systems. People are different, people are diverse, and we need to take that into account. The second thing that I find very sad is the fact that after all these corrections, to try to make the numbers look nicer, which is basically what these corrections are, we still see a very, very clear tendency when comparing men and women and when regarding ethnic minorities. If I would go to any white male CEO of a tech company and trust me, there's enough of them and take 10% of their pay and tell them it's just because they're a white male, they're not going to like that. I'm not going to have any kind of support and nobody's going to find that tolerable. So I don't quite understand why people find this tolerable. And to be honest, the white male CEO belongs to a much more privileged group and needs the money much less than many different people in tech. The second problem is that all of this happening and what is currently one of the largest business sectors around the world, which is currently the largest business sector in the US as an example of a very industry-based nation and the one that is growing most, the growing the fastest. And it is also one that has a comparatively high pay rate. So if you compare the tech sector with, I don't know, yeah, I still love English. I'm sorry. I don't know the word right now. The idea is that the average wage in tech is just a lot higher and this goes for a lot of industries. So we have an industry that's just going to grow in the future and that tries to help people to get to a wage that can live off, that gives them a good standing in society and we're already discriminating women at this point and non-binary people as well, then it's not going to get better in the future. So what's the effect? The effect of this pay gap, the effect is that women are leaving. They're leaving the companies, they're leaving the industry. Today it's at this point that one in three women that learn about a gender pay gap at their place of work will leave. And they don't always leave to a tech company that's nice and friendly and open-minded that will pay them fairly and have all kind of advantages because these positions are very, very, very hard to find and they're even harder to identify from the outside. So what happens is that way too often they leave the industry. So we're having an industry that's actively looking for as many people as possible, for as many qualified people as possible and we're giving more than half the population no way to stay in there, to do what they want to do. So please tell me again how are women at fault for the pay gap just because they're choosing low-paying careers because it might not have been their first choice. At the same time this means that companies as much as they're telling you they're trying to hire the best qualified person they're not necessarily because of their hire at someone because of their qualities and lose them because of gender discrimination. They're not overall getting the best performance, absolutely not. All right so we have different kind of issues in tech and the ones most talked about are similar to the one I just talked about just now, they're statistics. They're numbers, they're well founded, they're what some people call provable, they're what are called the big issues, the ones that affect many, many people, they're kind of material to be honest. But I'm currently posing the question whether these are the issues that we most need to talk about. The question that I ask myself is what influences people every day, day to day. What makes their life tolerable, what makes it pleasant, what makes work something that you enjoy going to. And it's not necessarily the pay, it can be a big part of it, it's not necessarily statistics. There are much more hard to grasp things going on in tech. As an example, what were to happen if you cannot follow presentations at your workplace or use forms because of who you are, because of things you don't have control over. Colorblindness is something that we address in education, is something that we know about, that we actually know about, that a lot of people struggle with and still we see things like this, so we see accessibility not being addressed things we see templates, times we see that people have no idea how they make their presentations friendly for someone who does not have the same kind of visual perception that they do. I would have trouble reading that chart on the right, on the very, very right, and I think a lot of people deal the same way. And there are very, very easy ways to fix this, but we're still relying on everyone being the same as we are ourselves, and that's not working. This also means that I have to kind of be preemptive because I can't fix my presentation once I started it. If I started my presentation now and it was unreadable to a lot of you and you would tell me so, I couldn't change it right this moment. I could try to counterbalance by reading things aloud, by telling you about what we see here, but I can't fix it, and that's an important part of it. So what if you could not access meeting rooms, you could not access infrastructure, there's a lot of people out there who are dependent on mobility aids, but also a lot of different physical issues that can simply keep you from being able to access a building. So this building here is what's called barrier free by our university. Well, we do have an entrance that's level to street ground. We do have elevators which in the past got shut off at 7pm at night. We also have very, very heavy fire protection doors that you cannot open electrically. So if you're trying to enter the building via some level entrance, you still have the doors to struggle with, you still have very high handles to struggle with, you still have very, very narrow staircases, and you still have the fact that there's simply some parts of the building that cannot around the clock be accessed via an elevator, and that's what's called barrier free. Now try to imagine what those buildings that are not called barrier free look like. It's not nice. So what if you're working as an engineer, you're working in tech, you're producing software, whatever, and you would not be able to use your own company's products. That means, for example, maybe you're a vision impaired, and the product does not support screen readers, or it does not support haptic feedback, or it does not support alternative text on images, or maybe your hearing is impaired and you would need subtitles, but you can't enter them. These are all kinds of things that demotivate people if not actually hindering them a lot in their work, which means they can't keep working on this product. What if you are never taken seriously at work? What if you face the same reality that lots of people do around the world where they're constantly questions, they're constantly assumed to be an assistant or a help and not the expert, where they look too young or too hip or too colorful or too female or to whatever the fuck is going on at the time? And simply because of that, people didn't take their opinion seriously, didn't consider their ideas, didn't read their reports. That's what's happening at the moment. And honestly, I couldn't keep working under those conditions. I can't constantly be questions and not be taken seriously, because then I can't do my work. What if every day you were visible as the odd one out? What if you're the only person over 15 at your company? What if you're the only non-binary person at your company? What if you're the only female? What if you're the only person of color? I'm sorry. What if you're just known as the odd one out? It's annoying. It's exhausting. And sometimes it's strictly a cause for violence or abuse, because sometimes, I'm sorry, people suck. And you can't keep working under those conditions. You can't produce quality work if you're constantly feeling like you're being disregarded, if you're constantly harassed. What if you heard jokes about your identity, about who you are on an hourly basis? Things that other people laugh about, things that everyone agrees with, all these kinds of things. We have recently had a complaint by a student at this university not at our department, but at a different one, which doesn't make the case any less relevant, who said she did her thesis here, and she had weekly meetings, and her supervisor was all right, but there was this other dude at the department that constantly kept coming to the meetings, that kept making sexist remarks, that kept making her feel uncomfortable by doing sexual innuendos, by physically performing sexualized jokes constantly every week. As she told this to the person in charge, I wasn't personally there, but she burst into tears because she couldn't deal with it anymore, and she didn't know how to handle it. And the person in charge also didn't know how to handle it, because there's really not enough that you can do about it if you don't have any witnesses, if you're not willing to publicly declare yourself, etc. So I'm quite glad that in this particular case, I wasn't the one responsible, but I know that there are enough people at this department who have similar problems that I can't help. Can't help because they're not, they don't feel capable of coming forward, I can't help them because they don't feel like this is unnormal, or this is some kind of punishable, because they're afraid that this happens to a lot of people, and it's normal they just have to deal with it, but they shouldn't. They shouldn't have to deal with this kind of harassment. What if you were abused, harassed, or worse, and nobody fucking cared? That's actually what happens to a lot of people, especially in big companies, that kind of keep an anonymized culture, where it's a very, very big hurdle to actually file a complaint about something, and usually the person that you're filing the complaint to is more on the side of the company than yours. There are, of course, structures that could keep this from happening, that should keep this from happening. This should not be happening, but it does, and we read reports about this in the news, like on a weekly basis, if you read the right news sources. How can you keep working under those circumstances? No matter how brilliant you are, no matter how good your education was, no matter how right you are on the field, no matter how cliche your workways are, it doesn't matter. You can't keep working like that. What if those that abused you were protected, were praised, were well paid, particularly invited, supported by the whole community, and you were not? So I'm going to give you a content notion again, because this next slide is about a scandal that happened very, very recently, and it will not include pleasant things up to child abuse. Recently, Richard Storman wrote an email at MIT to a department white mailing list, in which he was talking about the Marvin Minsky scandal. He wrote, the accusation quoted as a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's harem. The word assaulting presumes that he applied force of violence in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing, only that they had sex. We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willingly. Basically, he says, let's assume that Marvin Minsky had sex with an underage girl who was a victim of child sex trafficking. And then he says that an enslaved child could somehow be willing, could somehow consent to this happening. Aside from the fact that choosing the word herring here to talk about this is a catastrophe, is absolutely not appropriate, but this is someone who is respected by the technological community, who is a visiting professor at MIT, who has paid extremely well, whose name is known all across TAC, and he feels comfortable to make these statements in all but a public forum. That's horrible. And the way people are dealing with it is not exactly reputable, especially at MIT. As long as these things keep happening, how can we ask why victims do not speak up? How can we criticize them for not coming forward? So for those that are more into statistics, I also brought some numbers. Within the TAC community, 76% say ageism is a thing. It's a problem. People are being discriminated against because of their age. That's more than three quarters, three out of four people. 40% of queer people within the TAC community are aware that sexual discrimination is a problem. 38% of women say sexualized comments are a problem for them on a daily basis. 60% of women say that unwanted advances, sexual advances have been a problem in their career, and of those, 65% reported it happening from a superior, from a person who was in charge of them, who had power over them in the workplace. 90% of non-males report sexism at work in some form. And if anybody tries to tell me that these statistics do not show that we have a serious problem, I can't take seriously, I'm sorry. I will discuss this very openly, but this is something that we have to act upon. Coming to the next question, why should people feel at home in TAC? Why is it that we need to change all of this? Why is it important that people of all kinds feel welcome and at home in TAC? And honestly, I have been astonished about how often I have been asked these questions since I started talking about these issues openly. I did not expect this to be a point of discussion. I did not expect so many people to think that things are okay the way they are and that it's not necessary for everyone to feel welcome. So why should we do something about this? One, because everybody should always be treated fairly and has a right to be in TAC comfortably, safely and unprejudiced. That's it. It doesn't need any more reason than that. It's not necessary for any individual to have a personal advantage because someone else is not being discriminated against. We don't have to justify equality by saying that it gives us profit or any kind of capitalistic success or any kind of career boost. That's not the point. The point is that everybody deserves to be treated fairly. Period. No other reason necessary. I still want to talk about some of the reasons that are usually given when this topic comes up because I'm trying to show that it's not an exclusive choice. We don't have to make a choice between being able to compete against our competitors and being for gender equality or for any other kind of equality. It's not a choice between being productive, between having success and standing up for other people's rights. It doesn't have to be a choice because diversity is not a liability, especially not nowadays. There have been plenty of studies that show that a diverse team will have a better productivity, will in the long term have better harmony, more creative ideas, produce more innovation. This is not a topic of discussion anymore. It also means that we will have less product scandals, to be honest. I've talked about a lot of them last year and I talked about ethics and AI and it's about, I don't know, Google Photos labelling people, photos of people of color as gorillas, which should also not be happening. Now the thing is, if there were more engineers testing these systems that were people of color, that were queer, that were physically disabled, that have a look that is in any way not what we consider to be the ordinary, then these people would be testing the products, they would be raising issues, they would be talking about what's important to them, they would find these mistakes before they go live. It's the same with facial recognition software, with engineers who work on the systems having to wear white masks for them to work. These things tend to happen a lot less often if we have a diverse team that's working on them. It also means that you're way closer to your target market because diverse people of any kind exist. No two people are exactly the same and there's so many groups of people that we just can't cover them in unit tests. But the more diverse people in tech are, the closer they are to their target audience. To raising the issues that are important to them, to being aware of what are the questions right now, to being aware of the want. We also always have the plus of representation because it's been shown in way more studies than I can count that people do look at role models as whether they represent them or not, that children even from a very, very young age kind of inherit from our culture the prejudices of what people that look like this or that are supposed to do or not to do that representation in all kinds of careers and personal matters is very, very important. So what this means is that we enable more people of any kind of origin to grow up what they are meant to be, what they want to be, what they can do. That means that we have better people. That actually means that we're utilizing our society and the people that live on earth in a better way. If we don't discriminate against them and keep them from doing what they're good at. But enough of that. I want to raise one more point before I talk about the actions that we can take which is about intolerance that happens because of tolerance. And I've brought another quote for this which is about the paradox of tolerance and the states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Which basically means if I tolerate people who discriminate, who are intolerant, who abuse other people I'm causing my tolerance to collapse. It won't hold. Or Karl Popper mentioned that in order to maintain a tolerant society, society must be intolerant of intolerance which sounds really weird and which makes it linguistically difficult to explain but the point is if I include in my society a person who discriminates against others I'm causing those people to leave my group. So if I have any kind of event or gathering our group and I'm inviting everybody in, people will automatically be kept out by those people who are intolerant of them. This means that based on personal action on individual intolerance we can choose not to integrate them into our events, into our groups, into our spaces and that will allow other groups of people to come towards us. This is the difference between individuals behaving in a certain way and people belonging to a certain group. It's just not the same thing and we have to be aware of this. We have to be aware that tolerance is not including everybody no matter what they do. All right, so the interesting question is what can we do about all of this? Where to get started? How do we take this from kind of an abstract general level to something that we can actually influence? And I wanted to look at this on several different levels first on the individual level. Every person in this room, every person in the world actually can do a lot of things to advance these issues. And the first thing is maybe the most important. It's about listening. Don't assume. This applies more strongly the more privilege you have about assuming things of people that do not have the same privileges. Don't say if I were a non-binary, I were on this or that. Ask people who actually are non-binary what they would like. Listen to them. Listen to stories told by the people who are actually affected. That's a very, very important point. This also means if somebody speaks up, listen to them. Don't dismiss it as one individual experience. Don't dismiss it as not important. Don't dismiss it as whining. If people have to say something, if they have the courage to speak up, which is hard enough, it's worth listening to. This goes basically for all levels, all kinds of situations. If in doubt, ask. Don't say none of my Indian colleagues have ever complained to me about this so they mustn't have experienced it. Ask them about it. And even if they don't tell you about the issue, ask yourself, would they? Do I know them well enough? Can they trust me? Is it culturally appropriate for them to tell me about this? It might not be. It might be very, very hard for them. It might be a question of trust. It might be a question about your behavior. It might be a question about anything. Just because people don't openly talk about something doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't happen. This also includes not saying there's nothing I can do about this. It's out of my power. It includes saying how can I help? Have you any pointers of me how I can help this situation? Because currently I don't know what to do. And there's a very, very big difference in the way you phrase these things. Now, the third one, offer help. It sounds fairly straightforward, but apparently it's not. Because this also implies don't do things that you presume are right in the way of don't feel you can invade people's personal space without invitation. Don't patronize people. If you see someone who's physically disabled struggling with a situation, that doesn't mean that you're necessarily allowed to touch them or invited to touch them. It's a different case if someone is actively falling if something's happened very, very quickly. But if you see someone struggling with stairs, don't just touch them. Ask them whether they want help. And if they say no, accept that. Same thing about explaining things to people that don't look the way you would expect an expert to look like. I have a friend very recently who studied computer science, who studied networks, who's very into cryptography, and she was watching a movie with her husband. And he was like, ooh, I'm going to explain to you what that is. And he held a 10-minute monologue. And she was like, yes, of course I know what that is. I studied it. Dude, don't be that person, please. Ask people whether they want an explanation if they say no, accept that. These are also aspects of offering help. But most importantly, please be aware. Be aware that there are issues out there that we can observe them every day. And if you start being aware, you start observing them. You start seeing them. You start understanding how they happen. The more you interact with such a subject, the more often you will observe it every day. More on a peer level, it's important that every one of us notices when any kind of discriminatory behavior happens and speaks up. Because usually, people tend to listen more closely to the people who are like them than to those that they perceive to be different. So another situation that I've already experienced here, if there's a group of guys standing around and people are making sex jokes, and the one woman in the group speaks up, she's going to be labeled as suck up, she's going to be labeled as the one who disturbs their fun, and she's going to be treated badly. This works a lot better if one of the other 10 guys standing around will say something and will say that they also don't think this is appropriate, because they won't hear, oh, what you're being a bitch again. This is important that those people that perceive you to be their peers hear from you that you don't find this kind of behavior acceptable. This also can mean actively counterbalancing, working against the biases you see happening, and this is a difficult subject, because being active against discrimination is always difficult. It can mean putting yourself in a position where you can get hurt or where you can get treated poorly, where you might be afraid to intervene, especially if physical contact is involved. But there's usually always one way to get out of that, and if it's just calling for people who can watch and who can be witnesses and who can keep people from doing something they wouldn't do in public, but feel safe doing it because there's just a couple of people around. And then emphasize, try to put yourself in the position of others and see why things bother them a lot, even if you consider them to be minor issues. This is very, very important, explaining also to other people why things are not perceived the same by everyone. Why that one joke that everyone found funny is not funny when you hear it every day. On more of an organizer level, please be preemptive. Don't wait for people to tell you that they're attending your event and have trouble because they need help in some way. Be preemptive in thinking about what your slides look like and thinking about whether your location is barrier free and thinking about what kind of other help people might need and giving them a way to communicate what they need. This can also be establishing a code of conduct, which communicates to people that you're actively thinking about their well-being and that can state what kind of things you tolerate and won't tolerate at your event, all these kinds of things. Do this before it becomes necessary. Show people and communicate clearly that you thought of them, that you thought of diversity and that you want to help. Offer them a way to contact you and don't wait until it becomes an issue. So communication is basically the main theme about all of this. Finally, on leadership level, intervene. Absolutely. If people are your responsibility and they show discriminatory behavior, you have to intervene. This is not a personal issue. This is not inviting the personal space. It's about protecting others. Also, communicate. Tell people that you're not accepting of ableism, of sexism, of any kind of discriminatory behavior. Tell them upfront and then follow through. Provide role models. Look at how representative the list of your invited talkers is. Are there diverse people on this? Are you showing people that you can be successful no matter who you are? You have the power if you have any kind of leadership position to do this. And finally, actively get rid of biases. Become aware that every one of us has some form of bias. That even though I've been dealing with sexism and tech, there's still some part of me that sometimes make comments in my head where I think, no, absolutely not. This is not acceptable. And I'm trying to get aware of when I do this and try to counterbalances. But there are biases in every one of us because of how we were raised, because of where we live, because of everything around us. And as soon as we stop denying this, we can actively work on it. On a structural level, this can include supporting structures and support groups, other kind of organizations working on this call for change, actively be loud, be heard, read up on the subject, read up on what can be done. This is not new territory. Not every company has this cover on their own. That diversity is interesting and how to get there. But there is literature out there. There are experiences out there and so on. And finally, act. And on that verb, I'm going to finish. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for caring. Let me know if you have any questions, whether it be now or later at some point. That's my Twitter handle if you want to contact me. If you see me at the conference, just talk to me, please. And I hope there was something in here that you can take with you and that you didn't just remember the horrible examples. Thank you.