 Hey folks, I am a little over-cafidated because I get like four hours of sleep broken up so bear with me, I'm a little bit shaky. Good morning. Yes, good morning. So I'm going to like expose myself as a geek a little bit. Last week I actually went to my local symphony. They played the full score of Star Trek to the Star Trek movie, the 2009 one. It was freaking amazing. But it reminded me, I don't know if you know who Gene Roddenberry is, but he's the creator, producer or whatever of the Star Trek TV series. And he had a few good comments about that's really relevant to diversity. So I kind of wanted to start off with one since I'm still in the mood of Star Trek right now. So one obstacle to adulthood needs to be solved immediately. We must learn not just to accept the differences between ourselves and our ideas, but to enthusiastically welcome and enjoy them. Diversity contains as many treasures as those waiting for us in other worlds. And we will find it impossible to fear diversity and to enter into the future at the same time. So it's very comforting to hear someone that's so prominent in the geek culture to say something like this, right? I actually grew up with my father always watching reruns of Star Trek. I think my favorite is Next Generation. But I did not expect that. But my father, you probably no one here knows of him because he's in Seattle, but he's like a real doppelganger for data. He actually dressed up as him for one Halloween. He couldn't get the black hair dye out, but that's okay. But I have a suspicion that Star Trek, being in the background of my adolescence, like it really shaped me when I was growing up. Looking at the TV series as an adult, they're very diplomatic. The characters had very altruistic views. And they applied to them to very difficult situations. I mean the whole premise of the Starfleet, right, was purely humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts. And the series itself was used to reflect current cultures, racism, sexism, class warfare, among others. Roddenberry himself even said by creating a new world with new rules, I can make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam politics, and intercontinental missiles. It was very novel to have a show like this in the 60s. Right, so I've outed myself as a Trekkie, but a little bit more about me. I am a back-in engineer for Spotify. I'm based in San Francisco. I'm also a vice chair of the PSF with Naomi. And I lead the San Francisco Pi Ladies as well as a lot of the global Pi Ladies efforts. So perhaps you're new to Python, or maybe this is your first Python conference, but to get everyone up to speed, in the past few years, there's been a huge movement to improve the community's diversity. Four years ago, or four Python conferences ago, three years ago, 2012, basically. I gave a keynote as a complete Python noob, like I had just started to learn Python, and how I was working to help increase the amount of women within the Python community. And so I only found it appropriate to give an update. So I do want to know that this talk is mainly focused on women, because that's what I'm closely familiar with. But the ideals and the premise should be translated to other minority groups within the Python community and with the tech community as a whole. So also, please sit back, close your computers. I have a link to everything at the end, so I'd really just love you to enjoy. So to give you some context, I could try to explain why something like this is important, but I actually did some research, and there's some really great quotes that I want to share instead. So the first one from Harvard Business Review. There is little correlation between a group's collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members, but if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises. The next one from the National Academy of Engineering. Creativity depends on our life experiences. Without diversity, the life experiences we bring to an engineering problem are limited. As a consequence, we might not find the best engineering solution. And from Scientific American, when groups of intelligent individuals are working to solve hard problems, the diversity of the problem solvers matter more than their individual ability. This diversity is not distinct from enhancing overall quality, it is integral into achieving it. Another one from the same article. Chronic and woeful underrepresentation of a workforce leads to the inescapable conclusion that we are missing critical contributors to our talent pool. It is hard to grow a workforce, let alone the best workforce. When there is broad underrepresentation of up to 75% of the potential talent pool. One last one from a different Harvard Business Review case. After 10 years of work experience, 41% of women in tech leave the industry compared to 17% of men, but they are not more likely to leave than the women in other industries because of having families. Now when you look at the actual data, numbers help a lot, you can see the lack of women across tech fields across the board. Now I want you to take note of this group that I actually chose myself, that Yahoo is the only one that allows employees to self-report, not identifying as male or female. I mentioned earlier that there has been a large initiative within the Python community to increase diversity, so what exactly have we been doing? I mentioned I was on the board, I've been on the board for the past two years and this is my third term. In those years, I've seen a large influx of grant requests that specifically target diversity initiatives. Just a month ago, we approved three Django Girls funding requests, two grants to PyCon UK that specifically target kids and teachers to get to the conference, and two grants for workshops in low economic areas or areas that would otherwise have difficulty accessing a computer or resources. Just from some quick back of the envelope calculations, so Django Girls, I guess today is celebrating their one-year anniversary, that's awesome, and within that one year, we've given 19 grants to them tolling over $22,000. We're also trying to be a bit more introspective as well. This past elections, maybe you're on the PSF members list, we made a call out to the members pleading to take diversity into consideration for nominating and voting for the new board. And because of those efforts out of 11 directors, we now have seven women up from three this past term. All right, so within Python-centric conference network, you may have noticed an influx of code of conducts. There's definitely a loud opinion that seems to think code of conducts are not needed for conferences, yet a COC is not for those folks, right? Those most likely to be affected by harassment or assaulting behavior are often the minority in the event, most likely to be visible. There's even a timeline of events on the geek feminism wiki, I think, and it's not exhaustive, but it collects and it's actively maintaining incidences, so to show you that these do happen. And when we do, we, as a community, need to show those that are affected that we care and support them. We want them to be here and to feel safe. And relatedly, as of November 2012, the Python Software Foundation Pass initiative that states it will only sponsor conferences that have a code of conduct in place. As well, in the past few years, conferences have been organizing or supporting women-only events, including PyLady's lunches, Jenga Girls tutorials, women-only cocktail hours, and the like. I've led a few of these myself. At the annual PyLady's lunch at PyCon North America, I pull women up on a little stage to talk about themselves, what talks they're giving, the posters, tutorial sessions, lighting talks, whatever, to talk about themselves. And women, we may be a bit embarrassed to talk about ourselves, so having a forum that explicitly deems okay and encourages them does have a tremendous effect on confidence. I've heard regular praise that it's super awesome to be in a room full of smart, inspiring women. So I think you wore this yesterday. Guido wore the Python is for girls shirt. We're all familiar with that t-shirt because he wears it so often. I'm surprised there's not more coffee stains and holes in it. But having the creator of Python talk publicly about the need for diversity within the community, a community that wouldn't exist without him has had a significant impact. I am so very lucky that he lives in the Bay Area, and I certainly abuse his close proximity. I first met him in 2012. I cold emailed him and invited him in to start off a study group for women to win Python. And of course you wore that Python is for girls shirt because he always does. But since then, he's been a regular speaker for PyLady's of San Francisco. Let's see. If you take a look at other communities, though, you can see a lack of support from leadership. It really affecting them. Like the Linux community. I don't have to say much, I'm sure. But Linus himself has said, quote, all that diversity stuff is just details and not really important. It's also well-known that Flame Wars are a part of the community. And therefore, leadership and the tone that they set, it has to affect the diversity make-up. 4.4% of Ubuntu community are women. And 1.8% of the developer of the Debian developer community are women. When looking at the Ruby community, you can even see a lack of leadership support there as well. A conversation in response to RubyConf announcing their 2013 talk lineup, they pointed out that they have a lack of diversity in their talk lineup. And Max, the creator of Ruby, said in response to that, giving bias to minority does not solve the problem. It creates reverse discrimination. Ruby centric conferences have been public about their lack of speaker diversity. One even canceled their conference over it. And one very well-known outspoken Ruby developer, Ash Dryden, she once tweeted that she's continually impressed by the Python community, and she's not even a Python community member, or she doesn't think that she is, but she is. The Ruby community certainly has done a lot of work for gender diversity within the community, including Rails Girls, Rails Bridge, and similar things. And the fact that these conversations over speaker diversity says that the efforts are taking place, are taking effect. I can't help imagine that if Max was more supportive of the movement, or even if they had a similar organization behind the Ruby language that we do with the PSF supporting diversity, it may be a little bit better. Now, something that I'm deeply involved with, PyLadies, it started in 2012, mid-2012 in Los Angeles with a few women Python developers. They essentially said, wouldn't this be awesome if we got together regularly? And it really is. And so from there, PyLadies expanded to over 70 locations. Each year, we raised tens of thousands of dollars to send women to PyCon of North America. And of those 70 locations, 44 on Meetup, so I can use the Meetup API and get all the information. And so we have over 12,000 members, and we hold regular events, including beginners workshops, talk proposal brainstorming, conference-speaking preparation, speaking preparation, sprints, hack nights, coughing code, lots of events. I even found some fellow knitters through PyLadies. But I used the Meetup API to kind of do some data mining on these 44 Meetup groups that are PyLadies. So I was able to get the amount of new PyLadies joining every month, so this represents every month how many new members have actually joined. And I was super scientific linear regression right here. Just slapped an arrow. But you can definitely see like a linear trend going up month over month. And taking this into context, you can see the annual PyCon in North America may have some effect on inspiring folks joining PyLadies with those immediate spikes right after. And then you can see some effect when actually looking at the largest 17 chapters. I don't know why I chose 17, but I did. But you can see some kind of spikes right after some of them started. And so what's the effect of PyLadies? So a bit of a forewarning. I am not a statistician. I like to play one on stage. So bear with me, humor me. For PyCon 2013 or since PyCon 2013, PyLadies has held workshops for women to help brainstorm talk proposals with the help of past committee members as well as give them an opportunity to practice their talks once they're accepted. We've been doing that since or for 2013, 14, 15. And I'm sure you can relate to this. Perhaps we've all wanted to propose a talk somewhere. And you're like, I have a month to go. I'll just write it later. But then suddenly the deadlines passed. So having like a dedicated time like really helps. But I found that a lot of PyLadies do want to talk, but they don't have an idea about what topic to speak on. Or actually they do have an idea, but they don't think it's that great of an idea. So having a sounding board of other women accompanied by people who've selected talks for PyCon in the past really have given women confidence to submit a proposal. So then the talks get accepted. And we all know when they're accepted, you have that, oh shit, I have to prepare. But it's really confidence boosting, right? You have a group of your peers that selected you and your idea to allow you time, you specifically to speak. We want to hear you. And so it's a brilliant feeling. So I'd like to think that giving that resource and time to PyLadies has had an effect on the percentage of speakers at PyCon. On a more regional level, I took three cities. I looked at their meetup presence, their Python meetup presence. I looked at New York, Boston, and San Francisco to see if the community reflects any difference with the addition of PyLadies. So this graph, it shows a number of new members every month for two main meetups in New York, the NYC Python and Django NYC. So certainly some of these communities' growth is attributable to the popularity of Python language overall as well as the growth of the startup scene in New York over that timeline. But when we see PyLadies that started mid-2012 for New York, the respective meetups saw sharper growth of new members and my super scientific linear regression stuff. So moving to Boston, Boston is also a great hub for Python. It has a very active Django meetup in Python user group. However, we don't see much difference, at least within the Python user group, in the growth of new members after PyLadies Boston started. But perhaps you're familiar, some of PyLadies' inspiration actually came from the women-only workshops that Python user groups started back in early 2011. So you can see a large growth rate once the region introduced women-focused events. Onto San Francisco, my home, and home of the largest PyLadies location. I'm sure no coincidence. We have a bunch of Python-centric meetup groups. And I chose the most active, largest ones that were around when PyLadies SF started. So the growth rate of the membership of these meetup groups can be pretty noticeable when we started in April 2012. And again, super scientific linear regression. But what I saw, what's interesting is when switching this graph to a line graph, you can see that when PyLadies and SF started, that the rate of new membership specifically for SF Python pub night meetup was not affected at all. And I suspect it has something to do with the promise of the presence of alcohol or the environment that might not attract PyLadies. Anyways, this is just me trying to quantify the regional effect of PyLadies on local meetups. If you want the data, I have a lot of data. Once I get a breather, I will publish the IPython notebooks on my blog, which I will link at the end. All right. So we're doing pretty good, maybe. But we're not done yet. There's so much more to do and more than just throwing money at PyLadies. But please continue giving us money. So a lot of people, recruiters and developers alike, come to me to complain about not hiring women or about the lack of their corporate diversity in general. I've heard the same excuses all the time when trying to hire more diversely. I couldn't find them or where meritocracy gender doesn't matter. But I'm going to introduce a super slick scientific term. Maybe you've heard it. It's bullshit. These excuses are bullshit. And I'm going to show you why. Gender equality. That's not a problem here. These things don't matter. What you're actually saying is it's not a problem for me. And this really shouldn't be said anymore. And it essentially questions the person's belief. If it's someone's concern to increase the gender ratio, it should be treated as a legitimate problem. If you don't think it's a problem, then ask questions. Oh, really? How so? What do you think could be done? Trying to understand why it's a problem, because why else would someone say something about it? Another classic one, we focus on quality, not gender, or the similar excuse, we're meritocracy. That's bullshit. What you're saying to me is you find a quality to mean software written by men. But the quality is not an objective word. Do we encourage bug-free code, test coverage, elegant and simplistic code? What other values do we add to quality? So this excuse is essentially saying we don't want to change what we're doing here. So I've heard this one for girls too. Women aren't interested in this. And that's implying that it's women's fault. Are they really not that interested? That is complete. Yes, thank you. Okay, you're listening. So at Spotify, we participated an event called Tecla. It was meant for secondary school girls where sponsoring companies held workshops to give a sampling of what the future has to offer for technology. So it included robots, computers, 3D printing, awesomely geeky things. And it proved that it is something girls are interested in. We had so many people there at the event, crowded, like the max amount of seeds were taken. And so it proved that girls are interested in stuff like this. And so long as they're invited, right? And Pilates is proof of that too. It proves that an invitation for women to join the Python community actually works. And the classic. I hear this so often, we couldn't find the women's. Yet what I actually hear is you don't put enough effort into it. I put out a single job ad once for Spotify to my local Pilates mailing list. And I got 40 responses from women. And I'm not sure if there's more than 200 people in that mailing list, so that's a super awesome response rate. So I challenge folks to take a look at your own professional network. For instance, LinkedIn. How diverse are your connections? How many people look like you? And how many people don't? If you reach out to the same network of yours, you're only going to get the same people applying. I will take work, but the women's are out there. This one, I see this one a lot on Twitter and Reddit. Quotas are bad. Reverse discrimination. And that is bullshit. What it sounds to me is that you just want to recruit your friends who I'm sure look like you. It doesn't help that we have a referral bonus culture that encourages us to hire our friends. And I get the reason why, to hire good people like you. But that has consequences. So what if we turn it around and said, okay, let's be sure to hire 90% white men. There's this incorrect thinking that there's some sacrifice to be made that you are lowering your standards. But that's bullshit. I just quoted a bunch of research in the beginning that proves the opposite. So we have all seen, I'm sure we've all seen studies, that when removing gender identifiers from resumes, more women get through the recruitment process. So you need to make sure that everyone that is qualified is being considered. So yeah, lowering standards, that's bullshit. You can say it with me. All right, so yes, tech industry is hiring like crazy. We need more devs now, like whoa. I kind of get it. But what this means is that you don't actually care enough to put thought in about your diversity in your hiring process. And it's as simple as that. Do the work once to ensure that you have the appropriate practices in place, diverse networks, maybe remove gender identifying words in your application process. It certainly doesn't take much effort to Google for local communities to reach out to. So basically what this is, is all thinly veiled bullshit. And I'm sure I'm not the only one to pick up on it either. But this hints at a larger issue. The fallacy that there's a bad guy. And certainly you get why diversity is important. And we see so many people trying with all those excuses. But there's a notion that there is a bad guy behind the lack of diversity in tech. A lot of attention is given to someone who says something bad. And everyone's like, aha, there's the bad guy. Let's go get them. But we didn't get here because of one bad guy. We're all the bad guy. We're all complacent. We hire our friends. We have uniform looking networks. This is something that everyone has to consciously and actively work towards. So there's a lot of bullshit, right? Perhaps you agree, a lot of thinly veiled bullshit, and that we need to do more. So what can we do? You've heard of Google, right? Numerous of times people come to me to educate them. I am not your teacher. Yeah, I speak a lot about it, but I'm not going to hold your hand. If you want to learn more about feminism, unconscious bias, about privilege, that's super fantastic. And I want to give like two thumbs up. But I'm not going to do the work for you. I don't have time for that. Nor the patient that is needed for the debates that come with it. I'm also not your network for women. There are mailing lists, meetups, events. Go to them. Join them. Reach out. Get your engineers involved, right? Build those relationships. But I will not do your legwork for you. Use Google. It's a fantastic, untapped resource. I promise. But for this one time only, I have actually made a set of readings that I want you to memorize this link. I'll show it at the end again. But I've collected a lot of resources to help kind of kick start the learning process. All right. So after some self-education, some googling, hopefully, there are micro-actions that we all can take. The first is super simple. Programmers should like it. Switch any use of the word female to women. For example, female attendees to women attendees. And why may you ask? The first reason is they mean different things. Female is a scientific term for the, and refers to the ability to produce offspring. The term woman refers to human while female refers to any species. The second reason, it's quite humanizing to be reduced to my reproductive abilities and to ignore that I'm a human. You also exclude folks that while identify as a woman may not have the physical ability to bear children. Not all women are biologically female. When used as a noun, it can imply inferiority. It's often used, when used as a noun, it's often used with a negative tone. For instance, I made the mistake of searching on Twitter and I found a quote, female should stop wearing makeup so we all know the truth. Or I can't trust females anymore. So with the use of the word females, we are reduced to a species. We are separate. We are othered. You can see what I mean if you go on Twitter, but please take some wine with you before you search on Twitter. And you don't really see any people referring to males, right? So along those lines, I really want you to think that if you need a gendered identifier, more often than not, you probably don't. For instance, at work, I get introduced a lot as this is Lynn. She's our female developer. There's no need for that. There's already a word for what I am. I'm a fucking engineer. I might be crappy. I might be lazy. Stubborn, you can call me that. It's fine. But please, I'm not a female or a woman developer. Only when gender is really relevant should you specify it, like an event specifically for women. Another example just happened last week, so I had to include it. I received a recruitment spam on LinkedIn, even though I had this big banner saying, please don't contact me for jobs. And the recruiter said this. I'm really impressed with your profile, and I'm especially impressed because you're a woman. Just like, like, face palm. Yeah. Anyways, another micro-action is assume knowledge. Assume that everyone has a reason to be at this conference, at this meetup, at this workshop, whatever. No one's a plus one. They're not a beginner. They're not a recruiter until they tell you so, right? Allow them to reveal whatever they is that they want to, but assume their reason for attending is the same as yours. This will probably sound better if it was female first design for the alliteration, but there's no other reason than for the alliteration, so women first design. I love this. So make the default pronouns in imagery reflect a woman. So all your documentation or products that you make, user profiles, form default values, whatever. The reason that this is so impactful is that it's signaling. It signals to women that as a developer, you've thought about them. It does not mean patronizing women by painting flowers across your product or making, like, pink everywhere. And I doubt that Apple considered how women would react when they first introduced the iPad. I don't know if it's American thing, but a pad means, like, a sanitary napkin. So that was my first instinct. Anyways, the last microaction. This is a novel thing I know, but reach out. A couple months ago, Donald Stuff, one of the maintainers of PyPI, he pinged me on IRC. He asked for help for PyPI, both with maintenance slash bug fixing, as well as more Greenfield projects. And he actually thought that he recognized there were no women in PyPI behind the scenes, so he wanted to fix that. So get this. He asked us. He asked PyLays to help alleviate the workload. To be honest, Donald didn't really think that he would get many responses, but to his disbelief, and I knew this would happen, he got four volunteers within the first hour of that email. So this shit actually works. I know it's mind-blowing. I know, but it works. All right, so microactions are for the low-hanging fruit, small actions that we can all do to really help welcome women into Python, but now on to the more difficult shit. It's very comfortable hiring, working with, hanging out with, or co-founding businesses with people like you. But we must be prepared to be uncomfortable. And one way to take, one take on this is intentional curiosity. So remember that let me Google that for you thing. I hope you remember. Well, I find it annoying. It is indeed commendable to want to educate yourself, but it actually takes work. And again, I'm not going to do it for you, but self-education is the key. And so yeah, one thing that's very admirable is curiosity. Curiosity when meeting people and not like yourself within social workplaces, whatever. Curiosity about what makes a team work well together, how to make that team better, and essentially going beyond your comfort zone. Another point, technologies, technology companies have been super good at being introspective. It's certainly embarrassing and uncomfortable to admit mistakes and fuck ups, right? If a service goes down, though, a company is often very transparent and apologetic to it. We tend to share what we learn. But there isn't that same transparency among the lack of diversity. We should have post mortems on the subject, like here were our numbers for 2010, here's what we're doing, and here's where we are now. We need to reflect on diversity as a similar problem when a service goes down, or our fail whale, and then document it for the world, open source or diversity. And it's definitely scary. It's definitely, it's not comfortable to admit fault, but it certainly be awesome to see that, see what companies are doing, how they're doing it so we can learn from them. The last bit, for the women here, if you're the only woman in the room, say what you really think, and I mean that seriously. I spent a few meetings at work noticing how often I would be interrupted, un-acknowledged, or just talked over, and, god damn it, it really made me mad. With this one meeting in particular, I was actually leading it. I was being perpetually talked over and interrupted, and I just got fed up, and I literally said, for fuck's sake, let me fucking speak. And it felt really good, and they just, they just shut up. But in all honesty, say what you think. Rage quit the meeting if you have to, because otherwise it will continue, and it will probably get worse. I mean, your company may be super into diversity, but if you don't have a fucking voice at the table, what is the fucking point? All right, so enough swearing. This talk is turning into a bit of a rage-induced monologue, I'm sorry, but I wanted to finish on a positive note. So, from the Star Trek philosophy, Gene Ronberry, he says, humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but to take special delight in the differences in ideas and differences in life forms. The worst possible thing that can happen to all of us is for the future to somehow press us into a common mold, where we begin to act and talk and look and think alike. If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take positive delight in those small differences between our own kind here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there. Thank you. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you, Lynn. We still have time for possibly one or two questions. If you're too shy, we can go out for wine. Hi. We had recently a discussion about ladies in France, and the problem is that some people say, as you said, it's bullshit, but they hear about reverse discrimination, and we haven't found a way to explain them that that's not discrimination per se. It's more about bringing people. Do you have an example to convince such people that it's not something we should exclude? Right. Well, I mean, the whole industry has been exclusionary to begin with, right? And that's what we're doing to counteract that. So they're only propagating being exclusionary when they don't allow groups like pie ladies. But I would suggest going like, Auntie, let me Google that for you, like I actually have a couple of really good articles that I often send, and a lot of pie ladies often send to people that have that reaction to help kind of convert them. Maybe convert is not the right word, but push them over the edge to accept us. But yeah, I encourage to find those resources that I linked through this link. That makes sense. Yeah, awesome. Okay, the last question. It's kind of the same question, because I'm organizing pie ladies Paris. So what do you recommend if the association, the most important association of Python in France, decided that they don't want to change? Do you do anything like, I'm tired of explaining to them that why it's important? Do you think that just let them on the road and hit the motorbike? Yeah, well, like, I mean, you can only talk to a wall for like so long, right? So if they're going to like not listen, then fuck them, right? I mean, this is not something new, like other pie ladies have encountered this, and I can connect you with them. I don't want to like call out any groups, but essentially they said, well, if you're not going to be welcoming, then I'm just going to fucking do it on my own kind of thing. I mean, what's what's holding you back, right? Like, fucking do it. Maybe, yeah, I don't know if you have time for maybe one more, or no, okay. All right, so if you want to talk, I'll just be right out there. Thank you so much.