 Everyone, Taryn Elmendars, I work at Pantheon, but I am the lead of the Drupal Diversity Inclusion Initiative. Thank you so much for coming out today for the session in Equity and Isolation. It's about inclusive practices for remote teams. And thank you again for giving me the space to wear all the hats. This is me. You can follow me on Drupal.org. My name's Nine Lives Black Cat. I did not know at my first DrupalCon that they would be printing my gamer tag on my badge, but it's all right. Yes, my name is Taryn. So it's like Karen, but with a T. And what's the letter? Yeah, two extra letters. My name on GitHub is actually Karen with a T. So it helps people learn how to pronounce it. All of the fiascoes today. So the slide that was up previously was discussing how the old workplace is dead. We'll get this slide back up for y'all here in a moment. But the old model in which we used to work, where folks were not allowed necessarily to work remotely, pre-COVID-19 has gone away, just like my presentation just said. Can I have some help? Maybe. Sorry. It's not wanting to cooperate. No, it doesn't. It's helping out. Maybe I can hold it. Oh, gosh. And then for some reason, I am not on the Wi-Fi. That is not one of the same one. OK. Now it's asking me for the password, triple com? Yes, all our case. Yes. One day we're going to get this up. Also, if you would like to ask me about anything that we are able to talk about in the next 15 minutes, I will be in the ballroom, table permitting. And I know we just had 25 minutes for this. But we're going to get through it together, because we're a community. So the old workplace is dead. We are no longer selling people, hey, city employee who works for the city of Dallas who will not be named, your job as a web developer cannot be done from home. That entire department had to shift from work from home because people still needed to retire, services that the city still needed to be rendered, and we had a job to do. Employees are very eager to continue working remotely, or hybrid. Thank you. This is what I get for being five foot nine. According to FlexJobs' 10th annual survey, 58% of the respondents reported that they want to be full-time. They want to be remote employees. We keep seeing all the thin pieces about quiet quitting, and the return to office is now. Employees aren't having it. So it was all for remote work. However, there are some stipulations to that. You can't just say, hey, here's a laptop. Here's maybe a mouse. Have at it. Do your job, especially when you're working with diverse groups of people. You never know the types of situations that they're in. I work for Pantheon, but I volunteer with a group called the Texas Organizing Project. And one of the things that they had to do was recognize that the internet that their employees might have had at home to check emails was not strong enough, in the United States at least, to be able to support Zoom conversations going on with dozens and dozens of people trying to make sure that they had their voting rights. Something that is important for us to consider, especially when you're looking at diversity and inclusion, is that remote work impacts the careers of different genders in different ways. There's a decorative picture on the right-hand side of the slide with people in different colors and illustrating a rudimentary concept of the gender spectrum. Men and women who work remotely do agree that they are more productive, and they tend to work more hours. Women reported that they feel more productive than men do. Female remote workers said that they are most concerned about having to work longer hours and having fewer opportunities to network and form relationships. Now, for men, that impact is different. They felt, and these are generalizations, broad generalizations talking to people about a lot of the ways that they are socialized and accepted in their workplaces. Men feel that their managers will view them negatively about working from home, that they're not as much of a team player, that they're not contributing, which would result in poor performance evaluations. This slide shows the ways that folks differ. They both feel that their productivity increase, that remote work allows them to stay in the workforce. Women who are in the darker shade on the left-hand side of the middle graph, apologies. This graph did not have very much contrast. Women feel like they had 13% more. That's a different number, 7% more opportunity to stay in the workforce, especially with how care responsibilities generally get put onto people who are socialized as women. And there are more women who feel like they will not have the opportunity to form strong work relationships. Now, this slide has a bunch of different colors. I'm trying to get better at how we put this into words just to talk about it. This is about people from different race groups. So these are some generalized groups of folks where we're looking at how people look at different opportunities. For Asian-Americans and Asian folks, they feel like 39% of that group will have fewer networking opportunities. Now, for Hispanic and Latino people, that number is as low as 12%. I will make sure that these slides are available so that we can talk about data in other conversations, because I know that y'all are wanting to know how can we make sure that we're more inclusive. Now, one thing that is interesting about these numbers, on the right-hand side, we're seeing that for Caucasian, Black, and mixed ethnicity groups, they feel that they have the most productivity. There was actually a study that came forward from Bloomberg and it said over the past year, Black workers who are in knowledge roles, like graphic design, data analysts, they feel like they're treated more fairly and value their coworkers more when they're able to do remote work. Anybody wanna take a quick guess at why that might be? It's okay. So what happens is that when you're in a workplace, sometimes you have to deal with unnecessary microaggressions and it can be from any group, right? This one is just in particular about Black workers, but they felt like they had to deal with more things that were more about the in-group that they belong to, that they were born in and not able to focus on their work. I don't have to answer nearly as many questions about why my hair is different today. I have raids today, y'all saw my other pictures. Some days I don't wanna put on a wig, but I can still get my job done. So many groups are benefiting from work from home arrangements. A lot of people think about people in wheelchairs when we think about disabilities. However, there are a lot of people that have invisible disabilities that are able to take the time to rest, relax, refresh themselves and still get their jobs done. One thing that is important to note is that with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing increased numbers of people that are diagnosed with things like long COVID, long-term disabilities, and being able to work from home allows us to have more accommodations, embrace people for who they are, what they can do in the moment that they can and be human beings, honestly. Now, I did a talk at a nonprofit summit. One thing that is a particular note is that in the nonprofit workforce, women actually make up the majority of the nonprofit workforce. They are also generally classist caregivers. This group is often tasked with lots of mentally taxing labor, and in the nonprofit industry, we're paid less. Coming from a government worker formerly, that paychecks a lot less, especially in America, at least when they take your pension out, but at least we got a pension at that job. We won't talk about American retirement. I've got about nine minutes. However, like I said, you can't just send someone a laptop or say, hey, we got a women's group at work, at virtual work. Just granting someone access is not inclusion or equity. How can we do better? How can we make sure that we're supporting people? One thing to note is that not everyone has an equal opportunity to participate in remote work, at least in the United States where I'm from, and I looked up some stats, but I'm not gonna be able to do them because I was five minutes late to my own talk. In the United States, because of the nature of how work is distributed amongst different classes of people, people who are not college educated, who are black and Latino, are less likely to work jobs that can be done remotely. Personal share, my husband at the beginning of the pandemic worked for a ride share operator, high-scale ride share operator, but he has high blood pressure. So when it was disproportionately killing Latino men, we decided, hey, it's probably safe for you to work from home, and by that I meant make cool food. He didn't have to work for a while because I'd rather him be at home and pay extra bills than for him to be dead. But how do we do better as a society? So this challenge, number one, the home work environment might not be suited for work from home. This could be for any number of reasons. We've talked about the internet. Some people have roommates or family members that they're living with. People are feeling less connected from their coworkers. You might have someone that's less technologically savvy. Now when I was working in the office, no matter where I was, whether it was at the city or in a financial district, I'm a web developer, but sometimes my stuff breaks and I don't know how to fix it. What is it, Star Trek? I'm a web developer, not a computer operator, Jim. Star Trek, sorry, I'm also a nerd. You don't have Gary down the hall to say, hey, my iPhone, which I really don't understand, or thank you so much for the assistance of moderated folks, two minutes, all right, cool. I don't have somebody to say, hey, my MacBook's not working correctly. Can you look at it? Because I can't do a Zoom call if I can't get into my MacBook, right? The groups that are particularly hit by this particular challenge, particular twice, three times now, are low-income workers and workers in rural areas. I have seen some beautiful images of the rural areas in the EU. I'm not sure how the internet connectivity situation is out here. Maybe y'all have better satellite internet than we do. That would be very cool. I tend to think that Europe is just like internet and trains and amazing opportunities, sorry. This is my first time in the EU, so I'm just very excited to see everything. The impact of this challenge is having poor meeting quality, people are unable to work remotely. You can mitigate this by having tech stipends that allows your workers to pay for your workers' teammates. Your teammates, you pay for better internet access, you can get them equipment stipends so they can have the laptops that they need. A lot of folks do not have a computer in the home in impoverished groups, so expecting them to wait for their first check to be able to buy the system that they need to work on your sites, not happening. Also, these are tax deductible, those distributions for the tech stipends, we can talk more about that. Another challenge is onboarding and culture and social norms. You can pick that up a lot when you're in office, but when it's just you and your dog, Mojo, hanging out, doing Zoom calls, not so much. There are not as many opportunities to just run into people in hallways and sometimes employers don't promote this. What you can do, this impacts your new hires, right? They're part of your diverse groups and people who have not previously worked remotely. Jan might be very good at their job when they're in an office setting, but if they hadn't worked remotely before, they're not sure how often should I check in. For this mitigation, you create mentorship and networking programs. You can have some mandatory programs and I see that because if it's optional, people might be afraid to opt into that worrying that they're wasting time, that they're not being productive, that they're not doing their work, learning how to do your work is part of your work. And a lot of people that are in marginalized groups need to hear that message, they need to hear it often, they need to have it repeated. You're not lodging in them with it, you're just pushing the impact and support. Most importantly, it cannot just be talked about, it has to be understood by everybody in the company culture why that's important and why it's critical to organizational culture and success. And finally, this challenge, having less chances of incidental mentorship and growth opportunities, just like how I can't run down the hall and ask, it was scary, I can't ask Gary how to fix my iPhone. Well, I can't run into Stu in the coffee area and ask her, hey, Stu, how did you get this report done? I'm working on mine and it's very difficult or even hear about new opportunities that way. Impacted groups, as we saw earlier, lots of Asian women experience this and are worried about this. This is especially troublesome for people from marginalized backgrounds, especially from if you are the first person in your generation to go to college or university, you don't have that model to copy, you don't have a peer group to be able to ask. To mitigate this, you can create mentorship and networking programs. Again, these can be mandatory programs, I really think that they should be promoted and encouraged and there's a lot of research that has it, I can send out things about that, but it makes sure that folks know, yes, we need to get a website out and we need to get a website launched, but as we say at Pantheon, web operations is a team sport, we're all gonna achieve this by working together and supporting each other and it's part of the job. So those are the talking points that I had for this at the other DrupalCon, we had some time to have discussions, but I will be here as long as y'all need me to and if somebody else is here, I'll leave the room and we can go on to a buff, so thank you so much.