 My name's Marnie. I didn't put a trigger warning. I feel like maybe I should have, but there's brief nudity in one slide, not total nudity, just suggestive. And also, there's two instances of microaggressions. And what else? Oh, I might curse. I didn't realize that there were little kids. I'll try not to curse. You can probably tell by my face when I'm thinking about cursing. OK, now, really. This is Riot Girl in the tech world. First off, raise your hand if you know what Riot Girl is. Cool. It's a lot more than when I was practicing. Uh, for those of you that don't know, Riot Girl was a movement in the 90s. It was all about punk rock feminism, empowerment through music, even if you didn't know how to play, just picking up an instrument and going at it, and being loud, and promoting each other through zines and community. A lot of bands from that era are like Bikini Kill, Slater Kinney, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy. There's some good stuff. But what can we learn from Riot Girl? You know, I'm going to talk about the similarities that we face, that women in music face, that women in tech face, that also women in music. I'm just going to say the same words over and over again. You know, look at the parallels between our obstacles, how we overcome those obstacles, and what the next steps are. First off, what do women in tech and women in music have in common? This is the very tiny, hard to read, lineup for the Pitchfork Music Festival. It's next month. There's some cool bands. This is all of those bands that have at least one woman in them. That's 13 out of 46. And other big music festivals are pretty similar. I mean, Lollapalooza has 38 bands playing that have at least one woman in them out of 138. Bonnaroo has 33. At a 215, Coachella has 26 out of 166. I know, it's, yeah. So it's kind of brutal. And we see this trend somewhere else. This is the top tech industry contenders and the percentage of women that work at them. It ranges from 10 to 30% roughly, which is the same percentage as the music festival numbers that I was giving you. So it's pretty brutal. Both of us are up against similar odds against the generally white male industry. So what do we do with that? What can Raya Girl teach us? First off, that's Bikini Kill. The front singer is Kathleen Hannah. She is one of the co-founders of the Raya Girl movement. And in 1991, she helped put out a zine called Bikini Kill zine number two. And in it had the Raya Girl manifesto, which is like 10 to 20 points, all starting with the word because. Nothing prefixes it. So you kind of have to use your imagination, like we need Raya Girl because this or we need to play music because this. And so I'm gonna go over three of the points that I picked because I only have so much time to talk about it. Because we are angry at society that tells us girl equals dumb, girl equals bad, girl equals weak. So Raya Girl did a great job of reassigning these variables. They said, no, we're not dumb. We play music and we write lyrics that are meaningful. We're not bad, we're bad ass. We're not weak, we're strong. And we hear this message all the time in tech. This year on Mother's Day, Spotify was like, oh, hey, how would you explain Spotify to your mom? There could be free Spotify premium in it for her. Their example being it's music that's in the cloud. No, not that kind of cloud. Because Spotify is so much more complicated than raising a kid. Twitter isn't safe. Conferences aren't necessary to say, this is so small. This was an Atlassian camp last year where the Schmuck was talking about software called Maven comparing it to his girlfriend. He says, looks beautiful, complains a lot, demands my attention, interrupts me when I'm working, doesn't play well with my other friends. We know that this is bull. We know that he's acting like a Norton antivirus. We know that, that joke did not land with my friends at all. That's really, I feel better. We know that this is nonsense. We're above that, we're better than that. So what do we do? We hear this message, we hear all this bull. How do we turn it upside down? This is Bratmobile, brings me to my next point. Because we are unwilling to let our real and valid anger be diffused and or turned against us via the internalization of sexism as witnessed in girl-girl jealousism and self-defeating girl-type behaviors. This means that we take this bull and we flip it on its head. We don't turn against each other. No, we make something greater out of it. For example, in the music industry this year, The Stranger put out Men Who Rock. This is their second one. They did one in like 2012 also. And they interview male musicians with the same kind of obnoxious questions that female musicians get. Like, what do you take in your beauty bag when you're on tour? And asking about relationship status. And women in music face the same sort of bull that we face where we have to be women in tech, not just people in tech, because of things way out of my reach. We have to be both. We have to be women in tech as well as people in tech. Female musicians have to be female musicians as well as musicians. But it mocked the crap that we get all the time. And we see this fun reversal in the tech industry too. In 2010, this book came out called Engineer Barbie. Engineer Barbie was not a very good engineer, unfortunately. She had a tendency to spread viruses and well, on this one, says, I'm only creating the design ideas, Barbie says, laughing. Only Steven and Brian's helped to turn them into a real game. So, thanks to the wit of the feminist community, in 2014, someone scanned these pictures, took out the text, created a Heroku app, a website that's called Feminist Hacker Barbie where anyone can put what Barbie's saying. Here she's talking about JavaScript implementations while of course smiling and eating or frozen yogurt. Another really good example is like all of the Tim Hunt stuff in the science community, which I feel like I shouldn't go into, but it's so funny. It's such another great example of just turning the nonsense upside down and pointing out how absurd it is. Brings me to my last point. So we get, this is Slater Kenny, we get all of this nonsense, we turn it on its head, but we have to do more than that. There's always, always more to do. Because doing, reading, seeing, hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit, like racism, able-bodiedism, ageism, speciism, classism, finism, sexism, antisemitism and heterosexism figures into our own lives. I wanna start by saying the Riot Girl movement was criticized for being a very white girl movement. And the 90s are over, Riot Girl is over. We need to learn from their strengths and from their weaknesses. We need to have intersectionality in our feminism because otherwise it's just hypocrisy. I mean, we know this, hopefully. Else it's not really equality. But, so what does this look like? What are these rad, cool things that we do and see and hear? What do they look like in Riot Girl? It looked like zines and music. And in tech, it looks like all sorts of different things, like various apps. Hollaback, it's a website where if you are a cat called on the street, harassed on the street, you can type the story up, put it on Hollaback. Other people can read it and say, hey, I hear you, I've got your back. Another example is the Purple Pocket Book. It is an app designed to look like a shopping website, but it actually is full of resources for the state of Georgia for domestic violence resources. There's also fly rights. TSA is giving you crap. It makes it significantly easier to report a TSA, file an official TSA complaint if you feel discriminated against for any reason. So there's really cool stuff out there. We see all this cool stuff out there. What do we do? We write zines about it. Well, we don't write zines about it. We write blogs about it. It's our new age scene. Way cheaper than the photocopier. So we have to blog about these things. If you need a starting point for finding cool stuff, geek feminism wiki is a great resource for just getting your feet wet with how many cool things are out there and buy women, buy a minority class, people, everyone. Just cool stuff. I zoned out for a second and this is the wrong place to do that. So we need to make the cool stuff that we want to see. We want to promote each other through community, through blogs, tweeting. We don't have a cool thing. We don't have a cool phrase like riot girl. Like we can't claim that as like the women in tech have tech world, it just doesn't, it falls flat. But we don't need that. Cause we have this great community. We have our own language as feminists. We have our own amazing spunk that is indescribable but so funny. And we are just awesome. We're kicking ass and we need to keep kicking ass. We need to keep picking up the instrument and playing music that we want to hear and we need to make the games and the technology that we want to see. And I swear I wrote it down. We need to take space for when we do have these accomplishments and make these accomplishments and when we play music even if it's not good. We need to keep doing it. And no one gives you the title of punk rock star. You have to take it. You have to claim it as yourself. It's not something on LinkedIn that you can sign up for. You have to own it and share it with each other and with ourselves. So that's all I've got. If you want playlists, more reading, any of the sources for these slides and the facts that I just kind of spat out at you all, you can email me. I'll send you this PowerPoint. All the notes are full of every piece of information you could maybe ask me about probably not realistically but it's a start. Thanks.