 Hello everyone, how's everybody doing? Welcome to where I camp Philly. I moved to Philadelphia in 1988 and I love this city with all of my heart. Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Pan. The name Philadelphia itself contains one of the ancient Greek words for love. Silla, love, friendship, or affection. Adelphos, brotherly, or sisterly. Philadelphia has a long and pretty decent relationship with love. In 1780, Pennsylvania was the first state to repeal its anti-interracial marriage law. And that is 187 years before loving versus Virginia made interracial marriage legal nationwide. In 1965, Philadelphia opened John F. Kennedy Plaza, but we all know it as Love Park. In 2009, West Philly native Steve Powers created an art installation called A Love Letter For You. It is a series of 50 rooftop murals from 45th to 63rd Street along Market Street. And you can see all of the murals while riding the L. SEPTA even had a Valentine's Day Love Train for a number of years. They don't do it anymore, but hopefully it'll bring it back one day. And the Valentine's Day Love Train will go slowly down Market Street by all these murals. And you could even have your wedding on the train. I don't know if that's having your wedding on the L is either the most amazing thing or the grossest thing you can do. Just a few weeks ago on the 30th anniversary for National Coming Out Day, the mayor's office of LGBTQ affairs held an out for love wedding event at City Hall. This event is extra special because of another famous Philadelphia activist, Edie Windsor. Edie was born in 1950 and she grew up in Philadelphia attending Philly Public Schools and she graduated from Temple University in 1950. And later she worked for IBM for 16 years. She started there as a mainframe programmer. She left with the highest level technical position at IBM of senior systems programmer. In 1965, Edie began her career as a psychologist, the Aspire. In 1977, Edie was diagnosed with professional colsorosis. In 2002, she suffered a heart attack. And in 2007, Dr. Colsdia, that she only had a year left to live. So with that news, after 42 years together, they got legally married and married. The around of dying in 2009, she paid over $150,000 in state taxes after a third of her state. And she wouldn't have had to pay that money if their marriage was legally recognized. She got a lawsuit that went all the way to the United States. And in 2013, because of beauty tenacity, the Supreme Court found the Defensive Marriage Act unconstitutional and same sex marriage became legal across the United States. In 1988, and just a few weeks ago, Philly renamed the block 13th Street between Walnut and Locust, Edie Windsor Way. The lady gained millions of lives, including mine, with the power of love. Build up your self love. We have an independent get along with others. Sometimes a task calls for independence. Even if people sometimes you need to take risks and approach the town with a strategy that is independent of what is considered safe. When we take big risks, sometimes you can attain great rewards. I believe we watch that like a hundred times. On September 24th, 2018, Philadelphia took what may have been one of its biggest risks in its entire history. It's new official mascot. And the backlash was swift and brutal. There was a national TV shows were making fun of Gritty. John Oliver went on a really long rant, Trashing Gritty. And Twitter complained about Philly getting it wrong again. And then the meme start, the meme start rolling in. Had the flyers made a huge mistake? Should they have listened to the criticisms and revised the new mascot to be less scary? But then something else happened. People started to understand Gritty. Gritty got a fairer name back for them, which is a very filling thing to do. A couple had a Gritty wedding cake for their wedding. Gritty went from frightening Muppet Show reject to lovable monster. Philly was teen Gritty. Restaurants started making Gritty themed foods like cupcakes. People were dressing their kids up as Gritty. And we had the inevitable Gritty tattoo. The flyers nailed it. Gritty captured the independent bold thinking of Philadelphia. They took a risk, powered through the backlash, and rewarded with a big success. Right now, the WordPress is going through its own Gritty moment. Gutenberg. Since WordPress 2.0, Tiny MC has been the default WordPress editor. That was 13 years ago. It's one big editor with a visual and a text mode and some formatting buttons to insert HTML tags around content. For those of you not familiar with Gutenberg, it is a new block style editor coming to WordPress 5, along with a completely redesigned post and page editing screen. Gutenberg is over two years in the making and will be released as early as November 19. Instead of one big editor for everything, each piece of content is placed to its own block with its own settings. Change is hard, right? But sometimes, you have to make a dramatic change to evolve. This is me and my friend, Mika Estin. You may know her from numerous WordPress campaigns around the world or her involvement with the WordPress plugin directory. Her and I built a site called LesWatchTV, which is a database of queer, female, non-binary, and transgender television characters and their shows. Right now, our database has over 3,000 characters and 1,000 shows. We love television. In addition to keeping the database up to date, we also write about TV for the website. One year ago, in this very building, at this very event, I came up with the idea to start a weekly column where I would recap all the shows I saw the previous week that had LGBT content. And on Monday, to mark one year of writing weekly, I have filled, but to be honest, I have never before written all the Gutenberg plugin on the site. And I, a person who didn't even use the visual tab in the editor to write content, decided to start using Gutenberg for my weekly posts. I'll be honest with you. It went from this to this. It was cursing whenever my wife, Mia, heard me yelling at my laptop. She knew I was working on my posts in Gutenberg. I have always formatted my content, but therein lies the problem. I believe I'm doing a good job by building well-crafted tools for people to use by focusing on code and fact-end efficiency. But I was not doing enough to experience managing a site from the user's perspective. Our users never see our beautiful code. They only see the admin interface day after day, as they manage the content on their site. As the week passed, Gutenberg, and it itself got better with average content, I absolutely felt in love with the redesigned editing system in general. It was much more organized. And I really believe in my writing workflow. Mika also made us a really cool custom blocks for things like musicals, spoiler warnings, and other content that we used repeatedly on the site. Those custom blocks made the code behind our content better. Because to get things looked correctly in 10MCE, you have to make some hacky HTML. And even though at this point, I was on board the Gutenberg train, I've been teaching, and I benefit from it as well because it exposes me to the new user experience. I've had the privilege of seeing groups of people who have never used WordPress before, people who are brand new to WordPress, experienced both the classic editor in Gutenberg, and they overwhelmingly prefer the blocks. I get to meet somebody who prefers the classic editor. They'll be bumps in the road. But now, I'm a fan. I'm really excited to see a Gutenberg feature. Billy has a lot of firsts. First library, the first public protest against slavery, the first hospital. And this picture was taken inside the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which is the first. In 1946, the University of Pennsylvania introduced EMEAC, the electronic numerical integrator and computer. It was in 1946 unveiled to the public. The first programmers for EMEAC were a group of six women chosen from 200 women employed as computers at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The job of being a computer was to produce mathematical formulas with mechanical calculators needed for engineering studies and projects. Their names were Betty Holberson, Francis Spence, Gene Bartick, Kay Antonelli, Marilyn Meltzer, and Ruth Tildown. By the way, Francis, Kay, Betty, and Marilyn were all Philadelphians. There were no programming languages or guides at the time, so they just had to figure it out. These women got to know the machine so well that they could troubleshoot bugs faster than the engineers who built them. The women program EMEAC performed complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines. And these are like the first programmers in the world. John Locke and Prespa Eckert were the inventors of EMEAC, and they planned this big grand public unveiling of this machine, which was previously top secret up until this time, because it was used for the military. And they planned this for February 15th. They wanted to do a live demo of a missile trajectory calculator, and they knew they needed the women's help to figure it out. Two weeks before the event, they talked to the women, told them what they wanted to do, and asked them if they could pull it off in time. And they were like, yes, they stepped up to the challenge, and they made it happen. They worked nonstop for those two weeks. In after demonstration, EMEAC was able to generate a set of missile trajectory calculations in 15 seconds, something that would have taken humans several weeks to reproduce. The event was a huge success. The unveiling of EMEAC made the front page of the New York Times, and the press was calling it a giant brain. That night, in U Pen's Houston Hall, they held a big celebratory dinner. But the EMEAC program was not even invited. And following the event, the people who got credit for EMEAC's success were these two. Nowadays, programmers were seen as people who make the mess, right? But that then was considered a fair task. People who designed and built the hardware. We felt as if we'd been playing parts in a fascinating movie that suddenly took a bad turn, in which we had worked like dogs for two weeks to produce something really spectacular, and then were written out of the script. The programmers were essentially erased from the story for decades. Historians mistakenly identified the women in the photos as refrigerator ladies, meaning they were models in front of the equipment to make the product of it. Women were never publicly recognized by the residual effects of erasing the team of women who were the programmers to the world's first electronic digital computer of history. It's likely that men could see, and the numbers get worse when you look at women in color. When you don't see yourself represented in an industry, you don't know it's a career you can have. Even if there is zero correlation between the ability to perform well in tech and who you are as a person. Both programs for women to learn web and software development through in-person classes. And we're lucky here in Philadelphia because Philly is one of the most active chapters of girl development. It has helped launch careers of dozens of women who were not involved in tech at all before. We developed the curriculum for and teach a series of classes at the Baylor Women's Correctional Institution in Delaware. From intro to web concepts to HTML and CSF, I just finished my last class for this second cohort. Oh, and by the way, the students they have a person. Now, I want to issue a challenge to you all. Some things you can try to do in the next 12 months to help make the WordPress community better. I offer you to take the Philadelphia Love Independence First challenge. Operate from a place of fun. Fear keeps us from moving forward. When we want to be proactive and then do nothing because we're afraid of what people may think, that keeps the status quo, which is worse than trying. There is no such thing as perfection. We all make mistakes. Getting out of your comfort zone, meeting people unlike you and making new friends is fun. Taking risks can be beneficial. Make your next 20 footer followers people not like you. Here's a place to start. These are 10 national organizations teaching people who are underrepresented in tech to code. Follow their executive directors and tune into the conversations they're having. Show support without inserting yourself into the conversation. You can all stand to listen more and talk less. When someone who is not likely gives you a view of their life from their perspective, it is a gift. Take it in and if it moves you, show your support with a repeat or the like button. And if you are used to regularly being the only person likely in the room, you can find an event with folks that are new to you. You can try going to an open captioned movie or attend a presentation or performance of a person. In Philadelphia, we have multiple diverse tech networking groups. Meetup.com is a great resource to find groups in your area. Go to their networking events or public events. Groups want their events to be well attended. Don't let the fear of not being welcome prevent you from expanding your network. Liam went to a lesbian's tech event and had a great time. I don't want to out you, but you're not a lesbian. In Philadelphia, we have an assortment of diverse chambers of commerce and membership is open to allies. People go to chamber events because they want to find people they can potentially do business with. And all of these organizations have sponsorship opportunities where you can help the diverse business community and get involved with their networks. Try to make sincere, real connections with people. TA, a girl developed a class. Multiple times I've heard I would hire women if there were any. And non-binary folks make up 51% of the population. So just because someone doesn't know any women in tech doesn't mean they don't exist. Anyone has their gender orientation. It's fun, rewarding, and you will be exposed to a wealth of amazingly talented people. Don't only be the speaker or writer, refers to hypothetical, fictitious programmers, developers, hires, and clients as he, him, and guys. When referring to hypothetical people, use gender-neutral pronouns or switch back and forth equally. It is so simple to do, and it'll really help change this default association of people and tech equally included. And non-sismal folks will notice that you're doing it, and it telegraphs a value of an inclusive culture. Don't accept homogeneity as normal. This is one of my heroes, Shonda Hines. She is an award-winning creator of many television shows like Raise Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, Station 19, and many others. Shonda is a very successful woman. She has a net worth of over $120 million dollars. What has been one of the keys to Shonda's success? Taming an addictive, Shonda's program also incredibly diverse and appealed to the widest audience possible. Almost everyone will see a person from their demographic demographic reflected back to them as a character on one of her shows. Ironically, Shonda doesn't like the word diversity. She says, I have a different word, normalizing. I am making TV look like the world books. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people equal way more than 50 percent of the population, which means it ain't out of the ordinary. Diversity for diversity's sake implies you are assembling an artificial group of people just for the look of diversity. Instead of diversity for diversity's sake, it should be diversity for normalizing sake. Reality is diverse. Homogeneity is a world like the Smurfs, and that is not. Reality, some examples are slide decks, examples, hypothetical people, photos, panels. If you are ever in the position of putting together one of these things, make sure the people involved reflect the reality we live in. And if you are ever invited to a panel, it's just like you. Because the organizers may not even realize that they created it. Research proves all of us grew up learning bias. It's okay. It's not something to spend time feeling bad about, but instead spend time consciously working on it. Professors from the Chicago sent pictitious resumes to 1300 health-wanted ads in the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribunal. And they measured the success of these resumes by the number of callbacks that they received. The resumes were all identical, except for one thing. Half the resumes had a white-sounding name, and the other half had an ad. The applicants with the white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called in for an interview. In a Yale University randomized double-blind study, 127 U.S. STEM professors asked to evaluate resumes. Again, the resumes were identical, except for one thing. Half had the name John, and the other half had the name Jennifer. Participants rated John significantly higher than Jennifer, and the ones that would hire Jennifer offered her 13 percent less in salary per year than John. Now, the most disturbing part of this study is that it did not matter the gender of the person reviewing the resumes. Both women and men rated John higher than Jennifer, which means that we all have bias, no matter who we are. The next time you're in position to hire a previous speaker for a conference or any situation where you are reviewing people, meet hard while your fist's first impulse may be to turn someone down and strive for a true meritocracy. Nearly a third of all websites use WordPress, and with that comes a huge responsibility. Who is participating in the creation of the software, and who feels comfortable joining this community? We can't fall into the homogeneity creating for a reality trap. We all have a responsibility to make the community better. Use the loving, independent, and pioneering spirit of Philadelphia with all its good and bad to guide people who help make a better internet. Thank you very much. I found that one of the questions asked which one of the higher people used to be asking first-of-the-media both of them, because I wanted to see a little bit more about them, now that this is actually a terrible mistake to do. So many of these biases were unconsciously made. Is there any kind of a ggf for, like, trying to keep it going to an entire hiring process without even knowing someone's name? Like, keep it unbiased? That may be extremely extreme, but I'm all in for a little bit of bias that's affecting it. So are there any kind of strategies for really minimizing that bias and kind of hide some of that bias, first one that's possible through that process? Coincidentally, I've given a diversity talk a lot of different conferences, and I've done so much research on unconscious bias that I think that is such a big key to the problem with the lack of diversity in the tech community because of research that has been done on unconscious bias. So for the past, gosh, over a year, we've actually been working on a plugin called Level Playing Field that will allow people to post job listings and have anonymized job applications come in. So you're not looking at names, you're not looking at when a person graduated, you're not looking at their zip code, or anything that would be a tell of who they are as a person. You're only looking at qualifications, skills, and things like that because I really think that that is one piece of the puzzle for fighting bias. So that should be, we're looking for January to launch that in the directory. We're working hard to get that done. But yeah, I think right now what people do is they have someone go through and actually cross out all the identifying names and things, and then hand it to the hiring managers. But that takes a lot of time, so it would be great if you just have them all come in. And what the plugin will do is allow you to message back and forth with the person and then once an appointment is made for an interview, that's when the names are revealed. Because it's getting people to the door. Once they're in the door, I can't help at that point, but I just want to get people their foot in the door. I didn't mean for that to be an infomercial for our plugin, but yes, I'm going to I'll tweet them out a link to them after I'm done. I don't always think they know how sexist they come off as. We have this thing called an ownership program. Not one woman, not my solider, my partner corporate was invited, and I actually had my like her boss literally told her, oh, they didn't pick you. And she is like a superhero. She works with me. She's not marketing, but she's like there. So I just want to know from my standpoint of marketing and corporate what I can do I don't want to cut off such sexist that none of the girls feel like they can achieve anything. But I want to fill them to, yes, or make her a general manager so that, you know, we're not dumb, you know how, I mean you trust us to sell yourself, but you don't trust us to do anything else. I just wanted to know if you had any ideas on how I can kind of push them to work towards just letting us be as successful as we can. Right. And that's hard because it's falling on you to be the advocates for yourself to make this better, which is unfair, right, because that's the inclusion piece. It's like you can hire diverse folks, but if there is no inclusion happening, they're going to leave and they're not going to feel like part of the team. I mean, I don't know about your particular situation, but is there any of the people there that you would consider any of the men there you consider to be an ally? I mean, is there any way that you could approach the president who you feel is an ally and talk to them? I have it on his conversation and say, because you have people get really defensive and if he ends, unfortunately, and this is the, this is the thing about allies. It's like allies are so important. I would not have the rights I have today without allies, without straight allies, right? So the work that allies do, unfortunately, if they're not going to listen to you, they may listen to him. So if he can be on your side and you can just, you know, instead of like, you know, yelling at the other guys who will then get defensive and then maybe not listen to you and just dismiss you, if you can have an honest conversation with the president and get him on your side and work together to make things better, because he has to understand that his business is suffering with a homogeneous workforce. It's like he could be making more money. He could be more productive. He could make better products if he had a more diverse team. So it's in their best interest to have more women working there and more people of all kinds working there and have everyone feel included and happy. That's how I would approach it. I'm sorry. That stinks.