 It's 230, so I'll go ahead and get started. Hi, my name is Tess Griffin, and I am at Griffin Tess on Twitter. And yes, all variations of at Tess Griffin were already taken, including underscores and multiple underscores. So I decided to flip it, and just that would be fine. And this is myself and my daughter Ruby. She's 15 months old. You might know her if you're a speaker, and you are working in the speakers lounge today because she was the baby that was crying for most of the time, specifically when I left the room. And yes, her name is Ruby because naming is hard. Specifically, legend has it that I was six months pregnant. My husband dragged me to Russia with him to a conference he was speaking at. That mass was at. And he goes up to me at a party afterwards, and he says, did you really name your daughter Ruby? Like, are you really going with Ruby? Because that's a little bit weird. And when the creator of the language that you're naming your daughter after says that, yeah, it's a little weird. And now here is my hot take for today's talk. Being a mom in tech sucks. And I do feel bad about saying that, but when you're a mom, you have to learn to embrace guilt from all different angles. Like, right now I feel kind of guilty that my baby might be crying, and we might all hear it right now because they moved the babysitting to right next door. So if we hear some crying, that will be her. And now Ruby's saying, you know, with this expression, really, like it sucks, that's a little bit blunt. But, you know, that's okay. I'm gonna be blunt today. Being a mom in tech does suck, but the more people know about the issues that moms face, the more we can help it make it not suck. Diverse teams create better products. The more we empathize with moms, the better chance we have them keeping them around for the long term. You might be asking, but why does it suck? Here in the US, especially, it's parental leave here in the US. It won't blow anyone's mind to say that parental leave sucks here. Even calling it parental leave is for sure a misnomer. The reality in the US is that it's maternity leave, a bit of background on me and my family. This is my husband, Sean. He's been a developer for a long time, and I got in the industry about three years ago. We actually waited to start trying to conceive after I got my first job, and we had her actually in Canada. When we lived in Canada, parents get a year of paid parental leave. That can be split up however that we want. We decided to both take six months off. Contrast this to my sister here in the US who only got 12 weeks, which is three months of unpaid time off because she had a C-section. If she had given a vaginal birth, that would have been only eight weeks, which is crazy to me to think that a two-month-old baby would be putting in daycare. We put her in daycare at six months, and even that seemed she was so small. She was actually the smallest at her daycare because most people in Canada, the mother takes the full year, and so most children were like 15 months before they went to daycare. They were surprised to see such a small baby at daycare there. The time to spend with your new baby is so important. It was just incredibly hard to leave at such a young age, and I think the culture here in the US is definitely a big problem. As I dug more into this topic, I realized that the company you work for has a much bigger impact on your leave benefits rather than your country, which was surprising to me. For example, in Canada, you do get the year that's paid, but it's through a program called EI, which is unemployment insurance. It's similar to unemployment here in the US, and so it only covers up to 50K, no matter how high your salary actually is. And so we both work for Shopify at the time, and they actually topped up our salary to 85%. That was the only way that we felt comfortable for both of us to take that six months off, because Sean got five months of that, topped up to 85% of the salary. So on the whole, it was the company, rather than the country that we lived in, that gave us the most benefits. Yes, parental leave here in the US does suck, but employers make such a much bigger difference, because if we had worked for any other company in Canada, we would not both have been able to take that time off. I probably would have just taken that time off because we couldn't afford for Sean not to work for that long. The point is, just because you're a company that's based in the US, doesn't mean you can't provide parental leave benefits. The culture here in the US doesn't value that time with a young baby and the parents taking that time off, but that doesn't mean your company shouldn't. When companies provide these kinds of benefits, it allows parents to actually stay at the company and to feel valued, and if we want moms to stick around, we want them to feel valued. One thing they don't tell you about having a newborn is that they have very sharp talons that we call fingernails, and you think it's just her like waving, but it's actually the move that is gonna call your face off because she basically has talons at this point. So life after baby doesn't, according to plan. When you have a baby, the life that you thought you would doesn't always turn out that way. I remember before we had Ruby, we thought that it would be so simple as to, well, if we ever just get tired, wanna go out, we just call a babysitter, and our life literally won't change at all. That was our thinking at the time. So one of the biggest things that an employer can do for you is to offer a flexible schedule. When companies offer a flexible schedule, it allows for all of the different things that happen when you have a kid for you to still have your job and still do a good job, but if you have that flexibility, it just allows for the realities of your new life to not interrupt your job. Ruby was born six weeks early. This was her in the NICU. This is my favorite picture because she's a little leopard mittens. They're so cute. And this is Sean and Ruby at the NICU. And so the kind of point of that is life, we didn't plan for Ruby being six weeks early. We didn't plan to have to spend two weeks going back and forth to the hospital multiple times a day to do feedings and to change your diaper and to learn how to be a parent. When you're a parent, you have changing schedules, taking the kids to the doctor, waking up in the middle of the night. Basically the first six months you don't sleep. These are just new realities after having children. After you have a child, things like this happen all the time and you have to change your life to fit around their needs. The other most important thing an employer can do is having sick paid time off. It's so much better to have sick paid time off rather than a lot of vacation days, especially when you have kids. It's also important with a company to have a culture that doesn't penalizing having to leave suddenly. Having a strict nine to five schedule just doesn't work when you have a kid unless you have a partner who is able to have that flexibility. But when you're mom, you're often the primary caregiver and it's sometimes your responsibility to do those things. And when you have a strict nine to five schedule that just doesn't work out. One of the biggest worries I have right now is not having enough sick days at work. I am the primary caregiver and so my sick days are not just my sick days. Her sick days are also my sick days. And if you didn't know this, kids in daycare get sick a lot. They're basically little germ factories. This happened about two months ago. I took my feverish 103 degree fever baby to the ER at 2 a.m. and we weren't actually seen until 6 a.m. So I was literally up all night just to be told to give her Tylenol, which was a little bit really, you couldn't have just told me that when I got here. I unfortunately had to convince myself to take the next day off because I just didn't have that much sick time left. If I had unlimited sick time, I wouldn't have to worry about that. If you've ever wondered what day one looks like when bringing home your baby, I think this picture perfectly encapsulates that. Just like it screams, oh God, what have I done? Oh God, oh God, what have I done? And now work. Children add complexity to everything you do, especially that look Sean just gave kind of rocked my world. So one thing that employers don't consider with parents and their realities is organizing after-hours events. So many places have happy hours at four or five p.m. after work for company bonding and things like that. And sorry, if I have to pick up my kid at six and I have to commute half an hour each way, I just don't have time to go. A lot of daycare is actually charged by the minute if you're late. And so it's like, no, sorry, I can't make it. If there is a work event and you would like to include parents and not have them feel excluded, the most impactful thing you can do is either to arrange childcare or just ask the parents if they need childcare. One of the worst things is just to not be thought about in these situations. Back in February, my company was, it was the first company retreat that they were organizing. It was the first chance of those of us who were remote to get together and have a team bonding. Long story short, having kids complicates travel and I'm the primary caregiver and so I wasn't able to make it out. This was taken yesterday on the plane. It perfectly captures what traveling is like with children. This was her at the end of the three hour flight falling asleep as we were landing because she's a troll baby and decided that was the perfect time to fall asleep was that when we were landing after a three hour flight. So with the company retreat, I did feel left out because I was the only one not able to make it and that sucked. Ultimately, there was no malice in the decision to have the retreat in a cabin in the middle of the woods but yeah, the company retreat was in a cabin in the middle of the woods so the traveling to there was even more complicated. If you're somebody who's organizing these kinds of events, the best thing to do to help parents feel included is just consider them, consider their needs. I had a very nice meeting with my lead afterwards and we talked about what they could do better in the future and I thought that was a very productive meeting. If you have employees with kids, especially if they're remote, just ask them if they need childcare. Even just researching companies before they ask as a huge help because even if you don't use them, you know for the future what options you have in your area. The last time I was interviewing for a job last year, they asked me if I would be able to make it out for quarterly get-togethers. I asked if they had childcare options. They couldn't answer the question though I personally know a lot of moms who work for this company, I thought that they would have, already have something in place for that. If you're giving an interview and you're going to ask this question, make sure that you know this answer. After I brought this up to somebody, they were like, oh, why did you feel comfortable asking about childcare? Because legally an employer can't discriminate you if you are a parent, but they can't discriminate based solely off the fact that you have kids. The reality is they will and it's basically impossible to prove after the fact. I feel comfortable because I personally know moms who work there and have enjoyed working there, but this is a valid question. The sad fact is that I probably shouldn't have felt comfortable asking that question because that just opened VF to basically be discriminated against. One of the startup companies where I live actually asks somebody if they were married, if they had planned to have kids or if they were having kids in the future. And luckily my friend didn't go work for this company, but it just shows how blatant some people are about discriminating against parents, so I probably shouldn't have asked that question in hindsight, which sucks. If you're researching potential companies to work for, one of the things to look out for as positives for if they value parents being on their, as part of them, is to see if they have something like a childcare stipend. If they partner with a daycare at Shopify, they actually partner with a local childcare company and that saves spots for Shopify because it's so hard in Canada to actually find daycare. And Sean and I thought that was a huge indicator as to that they valued parents having that as a benefit. Other things to look out for are flexible time and unlimited PTO. Specifically in tech, there's a culture of learning and doing side projects to advance your career outside of work hours, like hacking away at night on that side project to be able to show off the next day or working weekends and nights on open source. And I think it's great if you have time for that to learn outside of work hours, but I think that's great. What needs to change is the expectation that this is the best way, the only way to advance your career. Employers need to build this into their culture and create time for it during work hours. Frankly, I don't have the time to learn on nights and weekends when that's the time that I have to spend with my daughter or my family. I also have to keep a household running, which also takes time. Some companies preach work-life balance as selling points to future employees, but for this to be a reality, it actually needs to be built in to your company. Having things like weekly lunch and learns or having a 80% regular hours and 20% doing like contributing to open source or learning new things, that's a huge help to be able to advance your career and to help your employees become better developers. If you want to see your mom, your mom employees grow and stick around, making learning during work hours is a priority. I have seen some positive things, some things that have been changing and are improving. So one of my friends was breastfeeding and she was traveling and she was complaining about TSA because the TSA sucks and especially with breast milk and all that and the company actually paid to overnight ship her breast milk to her destination. So she wouldn't even have to worry about that, which was fantastic. So this is Ruby last year at RailsConf. She is the youngest attendee ever. Shout out to Abby when the conference organizers who actually got her own badge printed, which I think was totally amazing. One of the great things about Ruby Central Conferences is that they make it a point to offer onsite childcare. That's the only way that Sean and I are able to come to these conferences. At the conferences that Sean has looked into going to, he's asked them if they provide childcare and 8% of them have out of all the conferences he went to that he thought about going to, which is just, that really sucks. I also heard a story of a different conference in Wisconsin called That Conference and they are family friendly too, because they actually have activities that can be for all members of the family. So they have family friendly activities built in, not just childcare, which I think is fantastic. Some of the ways to help. For employers, specifically having flexible hours, sick paytime off, unlimited paytime off, one of the simplest things that a company can do is to change the language. If they have maternity leave benefits, it's to just change that to parental leave benefits and allow fathers to take that time. The more fathers are able to take that time off and it's not thought of that the kid comes and they have to come back to work in a week after taking a week vacation time. The more that moms will feel comfortable doing it too, the less of the more moms will feel comfortable taking that time and the more equal it will be. Other things employers can do are having a real pumping room when mothers are breastfeeding. A lot of times when you're a mom who's breast pumping, you have to go into a bathroom and you wouldn't have prepared your meals in a bathroom, so it sucks that some people are forced to prepare their baby's food in a bathroom. One of the ways that some of the things that everybody can do to help are just if you have friends who are moms, just listen to their stories. One of the best ways to help a mom feel better is just listen to her story and empathize with her and the more we get these kinds of stories out there, the more that it will suck a lot less. Also, if you're at a company and there's an event going on, even if you don't have kids, ask if they have childcare available or where the childcare options are because even if it's not for you, like it'll be such a great surprise if you have a parent friend and they're like, hey, oh, that's awesome, there's already childcare, it'll just make them feel so much better. So why should you care? Diverse companies develop better products. Diverse teams think of solutions to problems that non-diverse teams just don't think of. If you want to help moms become senior developers and eventually leads and CTOs and help them to not leave the industry, just make them feel included and thought about and they'll stick around. Shout out to my company, Hedway, where a consultancy based out of DePierre, Wisconsin specializes in Rails and React Native apps and they allowed me to be here today and speak to you guys. So thank you.