 What do you say we get started? I was like, okay, cool. Hey, I'm Tony, via Chorek. I'm here to talk today about practical ways to advocate for diversity at work. I've been A-B testing the title of this talk, so sometimes I call it straight white men should advocate for diversity at work. Like any good A-B test, I only had very few sample size, so it's been accepted in both ways. But I think diversity is something that we should all care about, not just people of color and women. It's very important for our businesses. So I'll talk today about why I think that. So here's my husband and I, my husband's in the front row right here, at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. Does anybody recognize the guy with the arrow pointing to him? Yes, I heard Tantorum. That's Pennsylvania Senator Rick Tantorum, who is particularly vitriolic and hateful in his speech, before Trump was Trump, he was Trump. And we do what you do at an airport, which is you grab your Starbucks or your coffee, and you wander in a haze at the airport. You find a seat next to someone, you sit down, and we just happen to sit down next to Tantorum. And he was giving a radio interview on the phone. So I don't know to who. But he was being really hateful that day, saying things about gay families with an earshot of my husband and I, and our nephews, saying how we're destroying America, that women's place is in the home. I mean, all these really ridiculous things. And I'm just getting angrier and angrier. I'm getting angry just talking about it, thinking about it right now. And I wait for him to finish, and he gets off the phone and I say, how dare you? Like I walk up to him, he's right behind me. How dare you talk about me and my family that way? We're not destroying America, we're not hurting you. I'm an American just like you are. Why are you talking about us this way? He gives me a very political answer. He says, thanks for your vote and gives me a thumbs up, which only makes me more and more mad. He starts walking away, and I notice the people around us have gotten up and are moving away from us. They're afraid of what's gonna happen. They're not gonna be able to get on their flight. They're scared of what we might do. So I, in a moment of anger, I remind him of the meme, the internet meme that made his name so very, very famous. Don't look it up right now. And I like to think that that got him. I don't know, we'll see. But I like telling the story because this is the kind of America that I live in. A lot of people live in, right? I live in Boston, Massachusetts right now, a very progressive city in a very, very liberal state. We had marriage equality way before. A lot of other states did. And we're constantly on the forefront of social issues. But I travel and I meet people like Santorum in an airport randomly. I turn on the television and I hear Trump talking some about families, about people that I care about in certain ways, it's awful. So how much more awful do you think it would be to have this in your day life and then go to work and hear the same kinds of jokes? Maybe not quite in such a hateful way, but they constantly dig at you day after day, right? That's the experience a lot of people of color and women have at work and during culture. And I want to change that. So this is my attempt at doing that. A little bit about me, I went to undergraduate school at WPI in Worcester, Massachusetts. And then went to graduate school at Tufts, all right. So I got my graduate degree from Tufts University in engineering management. I interned at NASA in high school. My first job out of college was at the Free Software Foundation, where I was the personal assistant for Richard Stallman. So after they has come talk to me, I have lots of great stories about that. And then I really got my education in engineering from Zipcar, where I was for four and a half years. How many people here have driven in a Zipcar or knows what it is? Okay, good, you've used my software, that's great. I was there while we were growing. I was one of the first eight engineers, a small team there, and then we grew to 50 engineers. We acquired two companies, we went IPO, and then we ourselves were acquired by Avis all in that time that I was there and I learned a lot about engineering at Zipcar. Currently I work at a company called Locallytics. We build software that's in all of your phones right now. It's an SDK that companies can install to see what users in aggregate are doing in their apps to build better apps, build better features. We work with companies from the New York Times to HBO, SoundCloud, and our software is installed in over two and a half billion with a B devices around the world, processing terabyte to data a day coming into our systems. And we work across Ruby, Scala, JavaScript, and a few other languages. And I manage a team of 11 engineers who are across all those languages there, and I hire a lot for our company. And I found that the single biggest challenge of building a company, especially in Boston, is hiring the best people. And everyone says this, right, but what's that word best? That's the word I wanna concentrate on. And for me, best means hiring a diverse workforce. People from different educational backgrounds, people of different genders, people of different colors, races, ethnicities. And I think that way, here's a demonstration of why I think that way. Kate Hedelston has this fantastic series of blogs where she talks about this, that the productivity of your team is a product of how well they work together and the sum of the individual talent of the team. I think all too often engineering groups focus just on the sum of the talent part of that. They talk about 10 X engineers and that's why they talk about it that way. But I like talking, as other people do, about 10 X teams. And this is why, right? The better the team works together, the more productivity I'm gonna get out of everyone. And for me, a diverse team is a team that works better together and there's research that backs this up. Here's some research from the Scientific American that teams, diverse teams prepare better, anticipate alternative viewpoints, and they know that reaching consensus is gonna take work to achieve. That to me is the process of developing a product of engineers getting together to build software that helps people and helps companies build better apps. That's the essence of why diversity for me is important. But I mentioned I manage 11 engineers, right? And that means every week I have a 30 minute one-on-one with each one of them. Where I give them on the right, I try to give them, and here's one, he's right in the front row too, so tell me if I don't do this for you. But I give you clear, frequent, and tough feedback. That's how you grow as an engineer, but the way that you're gonna best receive that is if you also believe that I care about you as a person. I'm not just telling you that tough feedback because you're replaceable and if you don't achieve that, I can replace the cognitive machine, right? I mean, that's a lot of engineering departments operate that way or people feel like they do. So I celebrate everyone on my team as a whole and diverse person. Does that make sense to people? I wanna lead you through five ways that I've found are practical ways you can advocate at work for diversity. Measure, fund, raise, call out, and recruit. And I'll preface this by saying I'm not an expert in this. I wanted to share my experiences because that's how I think we all learn better that way. I work for a company who's one of our major products is analytics. We tell people what you do in their apps, and so I'm used to using data to make the problem clear. You can see at the top, the gray bars at the top is the US population distribution. This is from a few years ago. And how the major tech companies in America are lined up with those gender and ethnic distributions. So you can see the gender distribution, and we know that it's not a secret, right? That the gender distribution in all of our companies is out of whack. As are the representation of Latino and black employees, especially. And companies these days from Google, Yahoo, Pinterest, Etsy, right, they released their gender and ethnicity breakdowns. So I said, oh, this is great. I wanna do this at Localytics. But our company's 250 people, now we're near the size where we have an HR department who knows how to conduct a survey. How do I conduct a survey with some really sensitive questions in it, right? Where are some techniques? I couldn't really find a lot of information. So I pieced together a survey for our company and I open sourced it so people can run these kinds of surveys at their own companies. Our first decision was how do we ask people what ethnicity and race you are? It's a very complex question. A lot of people identify as many of these or several of these. And it's also a very personal question. So we settled on a government form called the EEO-1, very official sounding, right? But any company of a certain size has to fill this form out of their employee makeup. And we thought that using the same categorizations for ethnicity and race would give us at least a benchmark that we could use. We also wanted to be cognizant that people identify as in gender in different ways, right? So we wanted to not have it be a binary choice and have it be a right in field but people identify however they wanted. On the back end, when we got the data in an anonymized fashion, this did mean we had to massage the data a little bit, right? And because people would put an M when they meant mail. So we had to assume and guess what they meant. But it turned out not to be a big deal. And because we're only 250 people, and we wanted to release the data in an anonymous fashion, we didn't want to have it be super identifiable. We didn't want people to look at it and say, oh, I guess that that's that person answering that question. And so when it came to GLBT affiliation, we chose just do identify with any of these terms or not. Because we thought if we dove down into it, it would be too identifying. I really wish that this next slide that I showed you was a result of how we're doing awesome, right? How the gender breakdown of localitics is world-class, matches the US population. Same thing for ethnicity. And unfortunately, that's not the case. We look just like this slide from Google. We suffer, we struggle with the same problems a lot of companies do, except we're trying to do something about it and that's really what this talks about. But I feel like at a tech conference I should show, okay, here's the result we got, right? We're spectacular for this reason. We also, we fund local groups at localitics in an effort to raise awareness for it. I'm used to getting in my inbox every week, Ruby Weekly, DB Weekly. Anybody subscribed to these weekly tech email newsletters? Yeah. There wasn't one for diversity that I found. There's Model View Culture, which is a fantastic publication. I think they're actually print and online. But what I started was diversityhackers.com. This is every Tuesday morning, you sign up, you go to diversityhackers.com. I will send you a curated list of five articles from that week. That week's news in diversity. Practical tips that you can use in your company, how other companies are pushing this problem. We recently were sponsored by Buffer, the social media app. They wrote about us on their blog. And so it's been growing every week. And I encourage all of you to sign up for it and give me some feedback of what kind of articles you wanna hear about. So we also support local women's groups in Boston. This one is called She Geeks Out. You can see on the bottom right there we made little shot glasses for everyone to take home. We bought dinner for this group. It's about 150 women. This is the offices, our old offices in Boston. They showed up and we had a speaker present. On the left, that's Sarah Rakowitz. She was the senior product manager at Localytics. She talked about techniques to build a product and how we build it at Localytics. And on the right, that's Diane Hesson. She's the CEO of the Startup Institute. She talked about founding your own company as a woman, especially in Boston, techniques and trips she's found. You know, it was a feel-good event. Everyone had a great time. We had some fantastic barbecue. Although now I'm in Kansas City, I can't really compare, I guess. But more than just a feel-good event, I put my recruiter hat on and I'd say that was 150 women who came into our offices, saw what it was like to work at Localytics. And we got several warm leads of people reaching out to us afterwards saying, how can I come work for your company? And that to me is, if I'm not doing that every week, I'm not doing my job as a manager really, encouraging people to come work for our company. Another thing I tried was starting my own monthly meetup in Boston. There weren't any groups for gay engineers, LGBT engineers to meet up, so I started one called Code Pride. Again, if I don't hear this from people about Localytics, that I was interested in Localytics before, but I'm way more excited now that you host Code Pride, that's part of my job as an engineering manager is to want people to want to work for us. So another practical way that you can advocate for diversity is by letting other people know that it's important to you. So I started at Localytics about a year and a half ago and the second week on the job, I didn't know anybody, they bust us all two hours away from Boston to a casino for an offsite, a company offsite for three days. Very, very nervous. And the whole thing started off with a three hour event where the CEO laid out the vision for the company for the next three years and then we had an open question and answer period. So you can imagine all 250 people in a room, people are sort of lobbing softballs at the CEO, that's what you do in a big company organization like that. And then I let a few people ask some questions and then I ask the CEO, what are you doing to increase diversity among the management at Localytics and among the company as a whole? And I don't think he was expecting that kind of question. He's a person of color himself, he's of Indian descent. So he said, obviously I care personally about this issue and it's important for our company to hire a diverse workforce. But then he did something very unexpected. He turned the microphone back on me and said, Tony, what are you gonna do about it? And I paused and I stammered my way through an answer and I said, you know what, that's, Raj, thanks for giving me that opportunity. He did what all good leaders do, which is he didn't have an answer but he wanted me to take leadership position at Localytics to show them how diversity could be different here at the company. It was nerve-wracking, I gotta tell you, and it probably would be for a lot of people in this room to stand up and say like, this is important to me, especially in front of the whole company. But the best leaders, the companies you wanna work for, the companies that accept that and want to help you change the culture. But it's also important to talk about this because the perception among engineers is not equal to the reality that a lot of women and people of color face. This is research from Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg's Foundation. 72% of men responded that they think women have the same opportunities as men in the workplace. And this doesn't sound right, right? Because women on the whole in the United States make less than men. What I was surprising to me that 16% of people said they have more opportunities than men. We hear this daily from engineers not just leaving your company, but leaving the industry as a whole. There's a problem here and there's a perception gap. So it's important that you talk about this to your fellow engineers and to your management, that this is a problem. An easy way that you could raise awareness for diversity at work is something like your conference room names. We recently moved to a brand new beautiful office in downtown Boston that was built out specifically for our company. So we had to rename all the conference rooms. What an easy opportunity for us to name them after women and LGBT engineers who made a fantastic contribution to the industry. These are names familiar to a lot of us here, Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, Alan Turing. But think about other departments who also book these conference rooms who don't know who these people are. Every time they book a conference in Grace Hopper, it's an opportunity to talk about why she's important to our industry and to engineering in general. You can even include it in the description of the room name. I mean, it's not hard to sort of subtly reinforce that people of all stripes and colors and backgrounds are accepted here at Localytics. So another thing that happens at work is people tell jokes or they say things that make people feel uncomfortable. And so I can talk through some techniques I use to call that out when they hear that happen at work. Growing up, I thought mayonnaise came with tuna fish in the jar. I'm the oldest of six kids. We grew up in a small house in Baltimore City. Tuna fish sandwiches were a popular snack of ours. So we would get out the can of tuna fish, get out the mayonnaise, put it between two slices of bread. And I thought, why do I have to make this when the mayonnaise jar comes to the tuna fish inside the jar already? And of course it doesn't, right? But that's because the laziness of my brothers and sisters and I, that every time we would double dip and add more mayonnaise, we would leave tuna fish behind in the jar, okay? What a great metaphor for our engineering cultures, that things that seem like that's, oh, they've always been that way but that's how it has to be, right? It's actually a result of people not expanding their world view or being lazy about certain things, right? When I was making the slide, you can't find a stock photo of tuna fish in a mayonnaise jar so I had a little photo shoot. And I bought a jar of mayonnaise and I bought some tuna fish and my husband had this disgusted look on his face as I was doing it. It's kind of gross, right? And I said, good, we should all be so disgusted at the current state of our engineering cultures when it comes to diversity. How many people are familiar with this tool, this SBI tool? Anybody heard this before? One person, two people, three of them. It's a technique when talking about sensitive subjects or subjects that people can get really offended at or defensive with, giving them feedback in a way that still makes you heard. So there's this thing that happened at work where we have a pull-up bar, like you can do pull-ups on it which is a very macho thing in the first place. Probably doesn't have any room in our company anymore but a couple of people from a different department came over and it was right next to my desk and they start doing pull-ups and then they, based on where their bodies were positioned they made a joke that I took as offensive towards gay people. And I'm out at work, it's not a secret so I know that they know better than the state of those kinds of things at work but it could be hard to speak up and say that that was not an okay joke to say. So the technique I use is 20 minutes ago when you were at the pull-up bar, I overheard a joke about gay people that made me feel really embarrassed for you and didn't make me feel good about working here. Do you mind not saying those kinds of jokes at work? So that's two sentences and when I did that first sentence was talk about a specific situation. I didn't call them out as homophobic, I said 20 minutes ago at the pull-up bar, specific situation, the behavior I witnessed was you told a joke and here's what the joke was and the impact on it, the impact it had on me. And that has a way of diffusing the situation so I didn't call them homophobic, it's not defensive, they can't really argue with the facts, especially they can't really argue with how it made me feel and I provided them what I wanted them to do which was stop telling those kinds of jokes at work. This tool, I encourage you to read more about it if you're interested, it's from the center for creative leadership, they have a little booklet on it that you can practice and it's a great tool for giving general purpose feedback that might be hard to give. And finally, recruiting and retaining the best employees. This was from a few months ago, the front page, top article of the Boston Globe, shortage of tech workers worries mass companies. How many of you have trouble hiring people? Yeah, right, there's a lot of jobs, a lot of qualified people out there, there's a culture of switching jobs often so you wanna attract and retain the best talent and I mentioned earlier how some women aren't just leaving your company sometimes when they hear these jokes or they feel that they're not really welcome, they're leaving the entire industry and that's a shame. I wanna do everything I can to attract the best talent to come work at localitics. You know, and I hear sometimes people talk about, Tony, we obviously want more women, we want more people of color to work here but we don't wanna lower the bar. How many people have heard that before? This notion that there's a bar that you don't wanna lower for other people. Etsy, actually there's this fantastic metaphor that they have for this where they say people are like potatoes. We all have areas of us that are more well rounded than other areas, maybe some technologies where we have a divot like the eye of the potato. We have this shape about us, right? It's not about a line, we're not throwing that potato over a bar, we're hiring the entire potato, the entire person. And so I would much rather take a candidate, offer them a position, a candidate who maybe didn't do as well on our coding test or as well in our whiteboard test but has a proven track record of leading teams through quick iteration and being a visionary leader on their team. That person to me is much more valuable than a so-called rock star or superstar who is used to only working by themselves. A funny thing happens when you start talking about diversity at work, you get emails like this. Two months ago from a female coworker of mine, below is the perfect example of patronization in the workplace. This is from a male coworker of hers who had given her a to-do list about a job that she had been doing for many, many months. Somebody who felt like she wasn't doing according to him what she should be. And she said this, how patronizing is that to get a to-do list of what you should do every day? And so this was an opportunity, we talked in person about this too, this was an opportunity for me to go teach her about the SBI tool and say, well, here's my technique. Whenever I get an email like this, here's how I approach it and here's maybe, here's a tool set, some things you can do and try with this person. But it's difficult, I get people a few times a month send me emails like this or pull me aside and say, this just happened, what can I do about it? And sometimes all people want is a sympathetic ear, somebody to listen to and talk to about it. Do you have a question? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. There's about 10 minutes at the end for questions. If I can just finish, is that okay? And then we can talk about that, sounds good. And finally, you can work with your HR departments to provide inclusive healthcare, trans-inclusive healthcare, generous OBGYN and paternity and maternity leave. And by the way, these things aren't just for the people that they directly affect, right? It's not just for women who are currently having a baby. It's also a signal to people that it's okay to have a work-life balance here at Localytics or my company, right? It's okay to want to have a family, we want you here, and we're signaling that by giving you as much time as you need after you have a kid, right, to bond with them. So we've talked about five ways today, measure, fund, raise, call out and recruit to advocate for diversity. And I wanna leave you with a few thoughts that a lot of people think about diversity efforts like this, like it's a binary thing. Either I'm fantastic at it, I'm on, or I'm not good at it, so I shouldn't even try. I'm off, right? We're engineers, this is a way a lot of us think, myself included, sometimes about things that if I can't be the best at it, I'm not gonna try. But I wanna encourage you to use some of the tactics we talked today to think more about your diversity journey like this. But over time, you'll have low points and you'll have high points. Maybe a low point is you didn't call out speech that was derogatory, or you said a joke yourself. You slipped up and you said something you probably shouldn't have. The next day, maybe you talk through it with your team and you apologize, or the next time you hear that speech or that behavior in a meeting, you call it out. But over time, you're getting better at it, right? I love Nidagrass Tyson. He has this quote, I love being wrong because that means in that instant I learned something new that day. And I have this in my head every time I try to talk about diversity at work. What we've really talked about today is an agile or iterative approach to being an ally for diversity. Okay, back to the airplane real quick. I did get on the flight, I was not kicked off, thank goodness. And in that great equalizer of American society, both Senator Santorum and I and my husband were all three seated in a coach together. Luckily not in the same row or near each other. But we land in Omaha, Nebraska, legally unmarried. We left Boston married, legally unmarried in Omaha, Nebraska. And it's something that's on our mind. If you or I went to the hospital, would we have as many rights as we do in Boston? No, we wouldn't. And you can't make this up. That very same weekend was the weekend that the Supreme Court handed down the ruling that legalized our marriage in Omaha. We left Omaha that weekend married again. It was a great feeling, right? A full citizen. I finally felt like a full American for the first time in my life. Things can change. We can change our cultures. All it takes is people like you and me to try. Thank you. So the question was in this case, the to-do list coming off as patronizing, how did I work with the individual in this scenario? Both individuals? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like everything in life, this is a super complicated example because the person in question was senior to me even. And I don't look at this like I need to go solve it. It's not my, sorry, that it's not, I don't look at this like it's my problem to solve necessarily, because that's also a way of patronizing, like, oh, you can't solve it yourself. I'm the man, I'll step in and solve it for you. I'm sensitive to that. I don't want to have that come across that way. So this particular employee and I had a conversation about that SBI tool and practiced it with her. You know, it's one of those things that you can help somebody practice on you as an ally, somebody who won't judge them for wanting to feel this way. And honestly, I think it helped her to hear from somebody, you know, I'm a manager at work. I deal with some of these issues sometimes. It helped to hear from her that her feelings were valid. And yes, I do think that this was a case where that he had some, he could have worked on how he communicated to her. My approach for her was not to do a reply email, to go talk to the person face to face because a lot's lost in that translation. So the question was, make sure I heard you correctly. The question was, have I kept measurement on which one of these techniques works best? Was that the whole question? Okay, I haven't. But one of the ways we've started to measure this is we use a recruiting tool called Greenhouse. It keeps track of resumes coming in and it helps us facilitate our hiring process. It was a point of pride of mine when I didn't have to say anything when people assumed that we would keep track of the number of women candidates and people of color that we talked to and asked the candidates to self-identify. It could be tricky. You don't want to get into this game of guessing. But even that was a, when somebody interviews with you and you say, hey, we have this optional thing where you can self-identify, it's important to us because we want to make sure, because diversity is important to our company. It's a way to open the conversation about diversity being important. That make sense? I will be out in the hallway. Please come talk to me. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you, everyone.