Umbraco community inclusion efforts

Welcome. How was that lunch? I thought it was fantastic. I'm just gonna jump in here. Questions and comments are encouraged as we're talking about the community today. My best friend is a beer drinker and her boyfriend is a wine drinker. Whenever they go out to dinner together, the server will inevitably place the wine in front of her and the beer in front of her boyfriend. This is a simple illustration of an unconscious bias or prejudice we have that we're unaware of. It's a mental shortcut based on social norms and stereotypes. Biases can be based on skin color, gender, age, height, weight, introversion versus extroversion, marital status and parental status, disability status, foreign accents, where someone went to college, if they even went to college, and more. If you can name it, there's probably an unconscious bias. Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, states that we're faced with around 11 million bits of information at any given moment. But we can only process about 40 bits of that. So it creates these shortcuts, using our past knowledge and experiences to make assumptions. So yes, a server's experience might lean towards women ordering more wine than beer, or maybe it's a vegetarian meal over a meat meal. And they filed that away as one of these shortcuts. There's no way they could cope with that information without it. But the problem is, is this also creeps into our workplace. A study by Queensland University, for example, found that blonde women's salaries were 7% higher than women who were brunettes and redheads. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that for every 1% increase in a woman's body mass, there's a 6% decrease in family income. And a Yale University study found that male and female scientists, scientists who are trained to reject the subjective, were more likely to be hired, the men were more likely to be hired, ranked them higher in competency than women, and paid them $4,000 more a year than women. As Harvard researcher Mazaran Bananji wrote in a Harvard Business Review, Most of us believe we are ethical and unbiased. We imagine we're good decision makers, able to objectively size up a job candidate or a venture deal and reach a fair and rational conclusion. That's in our and our organization's best interests. But more than two decades of research confirms, in reality, most of us fall woefully short of our inflated self-perception. Unconscious bias can explain why women struggle to climb the ladder to the C-suite. It can also explain why the tech industry is still so male-dominated today. And because of that, we are inadvertently sabotaging our own growth and creativity, and therefore it's holding us back from reaching a higher potential. Before we go any further, let me back up a little bit and tell you a bit about myself, what I do, and how I am involved in the community. This is me. My name is Erica. My day job is as a freelance UX UI designer. I do pick up occasional front-end jobs. And I am Umbraco 1 and 2 certified. I've been working with the platform for the last six or so years. And I've been in the design world for eight. I was chief marketing officer, brand strategist, co-organizer, and all-around advocate for U-West Fest, the North American, not U.S., festival. I like to clarify that. We're trying to embrace an entire continent. For the first two years that it's been around, I got handed off to Scandia last year. And it was really hard for me to give that up. But they did a fantastic job with it, and I'm really excited to see where it's going. I'm also co-founder, along with Janae and Kyle, of Scrift, the Umbraco community magazine, found at Scrift.io. People have told me they've never heard of it, so we're doing a bad job marketing ourselves, apparently. We are the unofficial, official Umbraco community magazine. As a minority in my industry, diversity is a topic I'm pretty passionate about. And we at Scrift actually spend a lot of time talking about it, as we try to figure out how to get more diversity in our authors. So how do we find the authors from around the world to contribute to the magazine? It's also a topic that HQ is interested in, as well, as they're trying to draw more women into the community to participate, speak at events, possibly hire as developers. I didn't really understand the value of community and how it relates to personal and professional growth until I started coming to CoGarden five years ago. It's taken me a lot of years to get myself plugged in, and it wasn't easy to put myself out there, I'm going to be honest. But now that I've found it, I love it. I love it here. This is my second family. And I like to try to get as many people involved as I can, so they can have that same experience, as well. So the impetus for this talk was concern over the lack of women participating in the community. So this afternoon I want to open the discussion by presenting some reasons why we should be striving for more women. Some things that women and minorities face on a daily basis to try to get some empathy and some understanding. To maybe change how we think about the issue. And hang with me, I got a little feedback on my presentation earlier from a friend, and they were saying it was maybe a little negative. But it's also reality, and I want you guys to understand that as well. But hang with me, because at the end we're going to wrap it up with some ideas on where we can go here. To start changing our biases and building a better community. Okay, so let's first talk about why we should care about diversity. What's in it for me, essentially. So there's this concept of lowering the bar. And it's often used as an excuse not to look for talent outside of what you're used to. Right? So I've heard it a lot about Twitter, about Google, Pinterest, the big companies. Why they're not going out and hiring more women. More minorities. More whatever. So in 2004, a professor of complex systems at the University of Michigan, he researched how teams perform. And he published an experiment called lowering the bar. And he wanted to look at when to hire the best individuals, and when to just hire random good people. Because he's a professor of complex systems, he did this with mathematical algorithms for stand-in for people. And he'd give these algorithms really difficult math problems to solve. And then he made two teams. One with highly efficient algorithms, all programmed to solve problems in a similar manner. Like how a group of smart people who all graduated from the same university might attack a problem. And then he filled the other side of the model with less expert equations. All of which approach a problem from different directions. So I have a little sound clip to what he found, so he can tell you himself. So my name is Scott Page. I'm a professor of complex systems at the University of Michigan. And an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. And so I was writing all these computer models and mathematical models. And in almost every model I wrote, what was happening is the team of the best individuals was not doing best. The team consisting of the best individuals was getting beaten by just randomly picking people. So in other words, the experts were losing, right? If anything, they were the ones that needed the bar lowered. Scott was noticing that when you put groups of experts with similar strategies together, they were all getting lost at the same point in time. Whereas the randomly picked people, whenever they got stumped by something, they had all these different ways to come at a problem. And they were successful. And they won time and time again. So Scott says the same thing happens with real people. When faced with hard problems, a diverse team gets better results. So he gives us an example of where we keep our ketchup. I found this kind of fascinating. Turns out, if you're British or African American from the South, supposedly, generally speaking, you're likely to keep your ketchup in the cupboard. If you're not one of those people, you tend to keep your ketchup in the fridge. And you're probably thinking, hmm, who cares, right? But say you run out of ketchup. If you keep it in the fridge, what are you going to think of next to use as a replacement? You might think of mayonnaise or mustard, or my personal favorite is barbecue sauce. I would do that over ketchup anyway. So those are the things that are going to be next to ketchup in your fridge, right? But if you keep ketchup in the cupboard and you run out, what are you going to go to next? Malt vinegar. So when you have people from more diverse backgrounds, the more associations you're going to get on how to come out a problem. So the more paths you have to solving that hard problem, the better products and solutions you're going to come up with. Which means for you, happier clients, more work, more money in your pocket. Think Tank McKinsey Global Institute took a stab at estimating the loss of economic activity. They reckon if gender gaps in participation, hours worked, and productivity were all bridged, the world economy would be $28.4 trillion, or 26% richer. And then the potential gains from countries like India, for example, when there aren't very many women in paid work, they could be 60% richer if all that was evened out. They also found in their research that gender diverse companies are more likely to outperform by 15%, and ethnically diverse companies are more likely to outperform by 35%. So this doesn't actually mean that if you have a gender balance or a good diversity balance, this doesn't automatically translate into more money. But they found that more diverse companies, when they commit themselves to being more diverse, they are usually more successful. More diverse companies, they believe, are better able to win top talent, improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making. And all of that is what leads to the virtuous cycle of increasing returns. According to Intel's Genevieve Bell, she did a little research in 2012, women are the lead adopters of technology. In Western countries, they use the internet 17% more than men. They use their mobile phones, location-based services more. They have the largest growing number of Skype users, and they use most social media sites more often. They're also the majority owners of tech devices. So when there are no women represented on teams that are developing these products, or the software for the products, it's opportunities lost for greater gains. You will never convince me that an all-male team can make a better product for a woman. You take the Apple Health app, for example. Didn't hear the backstory of that one? Let's chat about that later. Despite women being at the forefront of tech users, the number of computer science graduates has been on the decline. In the 1980s, 40% of computer science graduates in the US were women. Today, it's around 18%. In Europe, the percentage of women pursuing STEM, science, engineering, science technology, engineering, math degrees, is less than 10%. Currently, there are around 600,000 jobs open in the US alone and competing in tech, and it's estimated to be up to 1.4 million by 2012. If women were fully represented in the computer and science workforce, we'd have about 1.8 million more computer scientists available. Think of all the amazing things we could come up with. Half the women who did end up in the tech industry today, if they do end up in it, they leave within 10 years. It's twice the quit rate of men. Most of them cite workplace culture as their reason. So what's going on? A few weeks ago, I sent out a survey to see if I could gather any data. I sent it out to the Maraco community. A few of the respondents seemed to immediately go on the defense, citing that this is already a friendly community, and women in minorities are welcome to join if they want. And while I do agree with that to some extent, the fact of the matter is they're not really joining, or not that quickly. And that should bother us. It also means the problem is perhaps a little deeper-seated. It is a systemic issue to the tech industry. And if we in the community are not recognizing that, and we're not hiring and promoting women and minorities in our organizations, we're not going to see it turn around and grow in the community either. So I want to take a step back and look at a couple of things that women face, just to build that awareness I was talking about. Stereotype threats. When there's a stereotype, there's a stereotype that multiple people believe. Even if you don't believe it yourself, if you're the person who's potentially at the receiving end of it, it affects your behavior in such a way that you become more likely to make the stereotype come true. So a classic example of this. We live in a culture that bombards girls and women with the notion that math isn't for them. It's too hard. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. And that means when we hear that continually, we're going to start believing it. We're not good at something, we start underperforming, and it's very unconsciously done. So there's a famous study of black and white participants asked to take a test. Black and white students performed equally well when the test wasn't framed about measuring their intellectual ability. But when the black students were aware that their intellect was being judged, they did significantly worse, just because they were asked about race. In the same vein, a report by the American Association of University Women, researchers compiled and analyzed several studies for students that were primed with directions that men were better than women at certain skills. The results? The men outperformed the women on the subsequent tests of that skill. But when the test takers were told that men and women performed equally well, the results evened out. Sometimes the women even outperformed the men. So in that survey that I sent out, I was trying to capture what were some of the biases that women face in the Umbraco community, so we could address that as a community. So here are a few statistics for you. So first of all, the respondent breakdown, 73.6% were male, and 26.4% were female. So based on a gut feeling, and the percentage of women I know, and that I've met the last five years in the Umbraco community, that was actually a much larger percentage of women who responded than I anticipated. So I thought that was awesome. But it also indicates to me it's probably the lowest percentage that we should be seeing at Coe Garden, the regional festivals, and the trainings as well, because they're out there. And I do say lowest because there is some science, and it's not really accurate, so grain of salt on this one, but it suggests that women in underrepresented groups, they're less inclined to take an online survey specifically if they know they're in the underrepresented group. So again, grain of salt. There could be more women out there. And I only have anecdotal data for events and trainings, since no one's really tracked that before, but just a quick rundown. Coe Garden's been averaging about 2%, though looking around this year, it's pretty awesome. It seems like the numbers went up, so yay! The UK Fest has been steady at about 5% the last few years. The Danish Festival, between 9% and 12%. I didn't hear back from any of the other European groups, so I don't know. But the UK and European regions are averaging 5% to 10% for the fundamentals trainings, and less than 5% in the boot camps. So that's not great that there's a drop there. The South Pacific region doesn't have a regional festival yet. I don't know if there's one coming. I could start a rumor, CG rumors. But their training courses are averaging 10% to 20% in fundamentals and less than, again, less than 5% in the boot camps. The North American Festival is coming in, I would say, 15% to 20% with around 20% to 30% in the fundamentals courses and less than 5% in the boot camps. So we're seeing a pattern here. They're not following all the way through to the boot camps. So next I wanted to look at is a role breakdown by gender. Again, I was, this is my own bias coming in, so I learned from this as well. The percentage of women and men for back-end developers is the same. I think that's amazing. In the next tier, women were more likely to identify as both front-end and back-end, while the men were more likely to identify as full-stack. To me, that encompasses kind of the same things. So if we add that together, it's 21% for both. So again, we're equal here. And then if we add that back into the back-end development, that's 74% of men and women who responded do some kind of back-end coding. Now, we add in front-end development, and that's 95%. So 95% of women who responded identify as a developer of some sort. For men, it was 85%. The other includes things like project manager or business developer or something like that. But the major thing that I want to point out here, no one who responded, no one identified as a designer. Which goes to my next point. When asked the question, when I see women at Umbraco events slash meetups, do they automatically assume they are, 50% of men answered that they assumed a woman was a designer. And if not a designer, then a front-ender. Women, though over 50% of them identified as back-end developers, they were more likely to look at another woman and assume front-end developer. There was a Twitter conversation recently around this, actually, where men were asking, like, why is this such a big deal? And I said, well, because designers are awesome too, we need them. And I think that's great. But let's turn it around, men. Let's assume that every time I look at you, you're a content writer, you're a project manager. If you have to combat that day in and day out, you feel like you have to justify what you do. It's not cool. It's tiring. And we're perpetuating that stereotype, and we're continuing to view women, when we're continuing to view women as anything but developers, we're undermining them. We're undermining them as professionals, as people, as intellectuals, and as contributors. We're sending them the signal, however soft it might be, that they can't do it. They don't belong. Until they either prove that stereotype threat true, and they underperform, or they get tired of it, and they leave. Hence, most women leave 10 years into the tech industry. That's not the image that we want to portray, I don't think, as the Umbraco community. I recently heard this TED talk by Reshma Sajjani. She's the founder of Girls Who Code. In it, she posits this theory that we as a society are socializing our girls to be perfect, and our boys to be brave. And therefore, we're perpetuating this gender stereotype. So most girls, she says, are taught to avoid risk and failure. They're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get L.A.'s, and most importantly, follow the rules. And they're rewarded for it accordingly. In other words, be overly cautious. Don't do anything unless you're sure you'll succeed, or you're going to reinforce that stereotype. You're not good enough. You shouldn't have a seat at the table. You can't hang with the guys. So I have a clip from her as well I want to play where she shares an example from Girls Who Code. We immediately see in our program our girls' fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect. Every Girls Who Code teacher tells me the same story. During the first week when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she'll say, I don't know what code to write. The teacher will look at her screen, and she'll see a blank text editor. She didn't know any better. She'll think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen. But if she presses undo a few times, she'll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried. She came close. But she didn't get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress that she made, she'd rather show nothing at all. Perfection or bust. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, climb trees, break rules, climb to the top of the monkey bars, and just jump off head first. And by the time that they're adults and it comes to negotiating for a raise, even asking somebody out on a date, they are habituated to take risk after risk, and they're rewarded for it. These differences have been reinforced time and time again, and they influence how we think about ourselves. So Reshma goes on to share a story from a professor of Java. She knows, and he related this to her. My friend Lev Bree, who's a professor at the University of Columbia and teaches intro to Java, tells me about his office hours with computer science students. When the guys are struggling with an assignment, they'll come in and they'll say, Professor, there's something wrong with my code. The girls will come in and say, Professor, there's something wrong with me. A recent US news article stated that women drop out of STEM programs with higher average grades than men who stay in the STEM programs. And in a white male dominated environment, they think there's something wrong with them. But really, what we're seeing, there's something wrong with the environment. And since girls were found to outperform boys routinely in every subject, including math and science, at the fifth grade level, it's not a question of ability. And it also doesn't end in fifth grade. So an HP report found that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60% of the qualifications. Women won't apply for a job unless she meets 100%. 100%. Tara Moore followed up on this study. She found the number one reason both men and women didn't apply is that they didn't want to waste their time and energy if they didn't meet the requirements. It makes sense. But women are looking at it at a 100% level. Men are looking at it at a 60% level. So there's still men that are applying for that job, way more than women. The second reason women didn't is they were afraid to put themselves out there and then failing. There's some evidence to suggest that women's failures are often remembered much longer than men's. It also indicates how much more likely women are to follow the rules as they've been socialized. All three of these barriers, which together account for 78% of women's reasons for not applying, have to do with the job qualifications being real requirements and seeing the hiring process as more by the book and true to the on-paper guidelines than it really is. Women also are held to a different standard than men when it comes to hiring. Another McKinsey report found that men are often hired or promoted based on potential. And women are hired or promoted for their experience and track record. So if women have watched that occur in their workplaces, it makes sense for them that they wouldn't go after a job because they don't have the history to do it. They don't have the history to prove that they've done it. So when I hear people out there saying that they want to be more diverse but there are just no candidates, women and minorities aren't interested, I counter with, whatever group you're looking for will have just as many qualified people in whatever percent exists out there. So maybe instead of saying there aren't candidates, it's time we look internally to see what we're doing in our job advertisements, in our offices, in our communities, in our cultures, and what our biases are to see what sort of image we're portraying that's causing people to self-select out before applying or getting involved. Because if we don't, again, we're missing out on top talent. So where do we go from here? There's a lot of information out here in the internet about this topic, but I wanted to talk about a couple that stood out to me as being actionable things that we can change. At a company level, we can make some changes to our recruitment, some changes to our recruiting processes to make it more open to women. Lottie actually turned me on to a podcast from Stack Overflow where developer Roberta Arcaverde talks about how she really likes Stack Overflow, wanted to apply for a job there, until she looked at the company About page and she read their job advertisements. And I have a clip of her telling her story and then also an aha moment from the executive team. It's a little on the long side, I want to warn you, but it's really good, and I think it's better if you hear her telling it firsthand than me trying to sum it up. But then as I started to see our company page and our team page, I felt a bit reticent about applying because, well, again, it was July 2013, and it looked like a boys' club in the sense of we had like 30 developers at a time and none of them were female. This is the sort of the who works here page, basically. So it's a picture of kind of all the employees, and you're looking at what the dev team looks like, and you see a bunch of mostly white dudes. That's right. And as I said, at the time, Anna, who's also a developer here, was a commuter manager, so she wasn't in the development team as well. And that's why I was like, hmm, maybe I actually wouldn't fit here. Or, you know, it looked like it was hard enough to get in here in terms of, you know, the bar, the technical skills that are required and everything. And I was like, as the woman, it just sounds impossible. I don't know if there's an unconscious bias going on or if it's just that I didn't know what was going on. I just felt uncomfortable about that situation, and I refrained from applying for a while. What I think was cool about Roberta's story is what she talked about was like, I'm just not sure that's a place that would be sort of welcoming and comfortable for me. And whether you would feel that way or not, the fact that there was a super talented person out there, and we can say that as a fact because we've hired them, and we know who might not have applied because of some soft signals that she was seeing or just concerns, unanswered questions, is a gap that we want to fix. And I think everyone should want to fix it if you think you might have that problem. It looked like it was hard to get in. In terms of the bar of technical skills, as a woman, it just feels impossible. In looking at their job descriptions, they found that they were using this bravado. They said startups use this as well, that it's causing candidates to self-select out. So they're saying things like, we only hire the best of the best of the best, or we need some monster coders, or blah, blah, blah, language like that type of thing. Thinking it would be inspiring for people to want to work with other smart people. But in reality, it was turning people away. It was intimidating. It just sounded exhausting. And it didn't, in fact, weed out the bad applicants. They said if anything, they got more delusional candidates applying. So it backfired on them. Also, people who were not what we thought, who we would term as non-traditional, weren't applying, because they were the ones self-selecting out. They discovered after hearing Roberta's story that they really shot themselves in the foot on that one. So they've done some work to change that. The American Psychological Association published a study along these lines as well. They looked at language used in job advertisements and how it influenced women over men. They gave an example for an engineering job. So let's just break that down for a sec. We have feminine-themed words, such as committed, connected, cooperative, dependable, interpersonal, loyal, responsible, supportive, trust, etc. And then there are masculine-themed words, such as active, ambitious, analytical, competitive, dominant, challenging, confident, decisive, determined, independent, leader, objective, etc. So they found that while women and men may equally desire this engineering job, women looked at it, and it didn't appeal to them. They said, hmm, not for me, and so they didn't apply. So using more gender-inclusive words netted better results in their study. The tipping point actually for Roberta is that she actually heard another Stack Exchange podcast where they were talking about how they wanted to be more diverse and they had no idea how to go about it. And so then she thought, oh, maybe I can fit in, because they're trying. So the more we continue this conversation, maybe we'll net better results that way as well. She ended up applying, she said, the day after she heard that other podcast. So I thought that was pretty cool. And they love her. So auditing how we go about searching for new talent can open additional pipelines for us, and that translates into diversity in the Umbraco community. Okay. I am missing a slide. Where can we go from here? Um... Sorry, let me just... Maybe I'm not missing a slide. Okay. So watching our words, actually, is another point that I want to bring up. Be careful how we talk to each other. There are quite a few people that told me in the survey that they didn't want to get involved because they feared judgment, either on their code or them as a person, and that they've seen the judgment in the community, so it's made them step back a little bit. So people of both genders actually told me this, although it was more women than men, unfortunately. So let's cover some words that we should never, ever say to each other, because they're not good. It's invalidating and condescending. Actually... This is so abused, it's cliché. To well actually somebody. So what it does is it... It... It says that there's no alternative perspective. So preceding a normally neutral statement with a phrase well actually negates somebody else's perspective. You're making something that's objective into subjective, and you're leaving no room for discussion. But you have a perspective. You have a perspective. Neither one of them's wrong. So an example of this. There were five beers left. Well, actually, there were only three beers left. Try instead. I remember seeing three beers. The second category is just obvious, simple, and easy. They're all benign words, right? But this is similar to actually, in that it discounts your intended target's perspective. However, it's more specific in that it relates to amount, significance, complexity, or difficulty. For example... I'm having trouble with this problem. Don't say. It's simple. If it was simple, they wouldn't be admitting they had a problem, right? Try instead. Yep, that was a problem for me originally, too. When I broke it down into smaller steps, it made all the difference. Validate and help. Negating someone's perspective or feelings, it doesn't foster a learning environment, right? So when we're sharing our perspectives and offering ideas, like we're substituting for ketchup, barbecue sauce, malt vinegar. And if we're not striving to learn, we're failing. We're failing ourselves, our companies, and this community. Think outside your group. For me, it's the Caucasian group. I'm putting myself in that group. And men, I really, really hate to say this, because you are all very, very valuable assets to this community, and I am picking on you a little bit in this talk. But because you're the majority party here in the community, you may need to be a little bit more sensitive about the issue. Then it seems fair. So I received another comment from a woman in the UK who noticed on a recent You Hangout episode with HQ. I'll admit I didn't actually watch it. But I thought it was interesting to hear her perspective, because I don't know that I actually would have picked up on it. So what she saw was a bunch of men sitting around a table, talking about a beard club. I thought, cool, what a way to relate to each other and grow beards for a co-garden. But she pointed out to me she felt left out. She felt alienated. She is not here at a co-garden. Unfortunately, she wouldn't respond to my emails that I sent back to her, but that's okay. I don't know who she is. So my point is, though, when you're in the majority group, in this case, men, and you foster and promote further exclusivity, it's another soft signal to people, women who can't grow beards, some men maybe can't grow beards. I don't really know that much about facial hair. You're signaling to them that they don't belong. They don't have a seat at that table. They can't join in. They can't joke about it with you. And it's something to be aware of. And this is one I struggle with, because I don't really have a good answer for, like, I don't want to say, men, you can't have an exclusive beards club, because, again, I think it's fun. It's something that you can relate to, and it fosters community within your group. But not everything has to be equal, either. So we don't have to have a group that's inclusive. A group within a group. Anyway, now I'm rambling. But if there's a way that we could tweak it somehow to include women to counterbalance that, I don't know. It's just a point that I wanted to bring up for you guys to be thinking about as those soft signals that we send out as a community. Last February, the Guardian highlighted a study by a group of computer science students who hypothesized that coders are prejudiced against code written by women. The survey, they surveyed a poll request on GitHub, and to their surprise, they were proven false, with a big caveat of sort of. Code written by women was more likely to be approved by their peers at 78.6% than code written by men at 74.6%. As long as their peers didn't know it was written by a woman. Our results, they say, suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless. There's an oft-quoted study from the Clayman Institute on gender studies at Stanford that found that the number of women musicians in orchestras went up from 5% to 25% since the 1970s. That is when they shifted to doing blind study. The study showed that women were more likely And that helped them bring up their numbers to balance. But what I propose to you is, that's not okay. It's not okay that we have to do blind hiring or blind whatever to get our numbers higher for equaling out the gender. So alternately, they found that if clear criteria is created before going into an interview, or before looking at their qualifications, they had a higher success rate for balancing that out. So they looked at choosing between a male and female candidate for a police chief position. And when they had this clear criteria set up before reviewing the applications, they came to a better decision. I believe they hired the woman. Actually. Actually. See? I do it too. I'm not a woman. I'm not immune to these things either. So just to reiterate, most of us believe that we're ethical and unbiased. Remember that we're not. I'm not. I just messed up. Janae, I didn't okay this with her, but I think she'd be okay, publicly called herself out on Twitter when she was at a conference in Paris because she assumed another developer was a man and it turned out to be a woman. And she was horrified because she's a woman. So just remember that we all struggle with this. Help to navigate it together, I guess, and call each other out for it. Assume that everyone you talk to in this community is smarter than you is a good way to approach it. So you're making sure you're not talking down to anybody. And if we all approach it that way, we're going to learn more, and we're going to be better people, and we're going to foster more innovations. So I ask you this. What kind of community do we want to be? Do we want to go along with status quo, where we keep saying, we're friendly, anybody can join? Or do we want to take ownership of it and look around and see who's not here and what soft signals are we sending out that we can change, think about, mix up to get those people in here and figure out ways that they'll feel more comfortable and that they can belong here as well? How can we lower those barriers to entry? Again, based on feedback I got back from that survey, I came up with some ideas. They might not all be good ones. I don't know. I'm going to throw them all out there, though, so we can talk about them. Some would be easier to do out of the gate. Some might take more logistics and definitely more people involved to get them up and running. But like I said, I'm going to share this list with you, and hopefully it will trigger some ideas of your own. And I believe we're going to continue the conversation on Friday in an open circle. So if you do have ideas, we would love to share them, or love to have you share them. And also, we don't want to dump effort into things that aren't going to work. So if they are bad ideas, constructively criticize them and not just tell me they're dumb. I'd appreciate that. And ideas board. So a lot of you ladies in particular said that you would be open to talking at events, but you don't have good ideas. And I totally get that. It's hard to come up with something like that. So what I propose is, an ideas board. But the hiccup in that one is, we all need to contribute to it. Because if it's a blank board, that doesn't help anybody for that. And then ladies, you need to actually follow through if that happens, for what you told me. Having a mentorship program. Or pairing up experienced speakers with those who are new. This one actually got some really great feedback from both the men and the women for that. I don't know what a mentorship program would look like. I think it would be more successful if it was something more formal. Doug actually told me he's volunteered to do it. And nobody's taken him up on it. So I'll volunteer to do it. If somebody wants to speak and they want a helping hand, hit me up. Also consider speaking at a smaller meetup or a regional festival first. It's a softer entry. On a personal note, I know that speaking is not easy. Writing a presentation, not easy. I'm 80 hours into this one. It's hard. I almost threw up the first time I did this. But I made myself do it. And I made myself do it again. I don't know. It's still hard. But I did it because I wanted to put international speaker on my resume. That was my motivation. I wanted people, insert men, to take me seriously. I'm really good at my job. But I have to defend myself. So I said, do it. Side note, also, Martin Luther King didn't set out to become the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. And Michelangelo really did not want to paint the Sistine Chapel. They were volunteered for these jobs. And they ended up stepping up and accepting them. And they figured out that they could do amazing things. So maybe that's you. Newbie buddy system. A lot of people told me that they were just plain intimidated to come. Whether it was a meetup or a regional festival. But especially a coke garden. I'm actually an introvert. And so these types of things terrify me. Until I learned some coping skills. Like how to talk to strangers. That's still one I'm working on. So I started thinking about my first year at university. Actually my first two years. Because I was a freshman and then a transfer student. And they had an orientation system where at least all the freshmen or transfer students could meet each other. And there was a veteran available with them. Here for coke garden especially. Something like that. But since we don't have that in place this year. Or maybe ever. I do have these gold stickers that I would like to pass around. Are any of you guys first timers? Yay! Welcome. So it's totally up to you. This is optional. But I'm going to pass them around. If you want to add them to your badge. Yes I know that singles you out and that could suck too. But the point being that veterans can single you out easier and will come talk to you. So if you're a veteran. I just volunteered you. Okay so I'm just going to pass these around. Take one if you want them. Even actually if you're not a first year. If you're having trouble getting involved and you want people to come up and talk to you. Feel free to take a sticker to put on your badge. And I will be looking for you specifically. And I hope other veterans will as well. Thank you. Another idea was having a formal networking or mentoring opportunities. Again I don't know what this would look like. But something maybe virtual hangouts. Because we're all over the world. Whatever your time zone is. It could be having a virtual meeting. Or having a cocktail. Or having breakfast together. So we get to know each other more on a personal level. This one's not really thought through. But a lot of different conferences that I looked up had specific networking events. For women or something like that. I'm not super keen on this idea. As there's a lot of men out there who do like to promote women. At these things. And again I don't want to be exclusive. But some way to mentor women to get more involved. So. Thank you. Another idea. Having a diversity fund. Surprisingly there weren't many people that told me cost was an issue for getting to these events. But it would surprise me if it's not. So setting up some kind of diversity fund. That anybody can contribute to. To help get people here that normally wouldn't come. I think we would see a change in our landscape of faces. For that. And finally. Pick up the torch. Come alongside and help us get through this. Help us continue to advocate for diversity. In the industry. In the community as well. Get involved in your own communities. Promote it. With your kids, your nieces, your schools. Your friends who have kids. Challenge the status quo. Otherwise we're not going to change. So if you are interested in getting involved. And don't know where to start. That was another thing that a lot of people told me. Feel free to come ask me. Or ask anyone. Really. How do I get involved? And somebody will always point you in the right direction for that. So. That's all I have today. So if you have any questions or thoughts. I'd love to see you all in an open circle. So we can continue it. But if anyone wants to chime in. Or anything. I really like to drink beer. So we can chat over a beer later as well. No questions? Thank you. It's a hard topic. And I will admit. I don't want to offend anybody. Because I love you all. But in reality. We need to all change. Me included. Change our perspectives on this. It's a sensitive issue for sure. Yes? I'm supposed to give you this? I think this is a good question. So. I totally agree with everything you're saying. And it's really amazing to actually bring that up in this setting. One of the things that I find kind of a bit cringe worthy sometimes though. Is when male dominated communities go out of their way to be very inclusive. I guess be very inclusive. And almost make it like they've singled out the women. Saying. Come along. You're more than welcome. Or free tickets for women. Those sort of things. I find that kind of. I mean even though. I don't know how you feel as a female. When you're at that end of it. Whether or not that makes you feel. Like. Does it. Is that. Like ladies night. Yeah. Exactly. Ladies night. Free drinks for ladies at the bar. It will never pass up a free drink. Yeah I know. But you know what I'm saying though. Yeah I do. I do. And how do you combat that without it being a thing. That is a really good question that I don't have an answer for personally. Because. I don't know. Does anybody else want to. No. We have to do something. Right. Sometimes the awkwardness is just part of the process. Right. Sorry. As the HQ. And I'm not speaking from my own personal. Not the HQ here. But we have to do something. I mean. Because we don't have unlimited resources. So what we can do is promote directly to women. Right. Discounted and free tickets and things. We're totally welcome to. I mean we're willing to do that. And we want to keep doing that. As a way to increase diversity. Granted. Diversity in tech is tough. I mean that's your whole talk. It was brilliantly done by the way. Thank you. Actually I think alcohol as well. I mean don't get me wrong. We all drink. Well I know we drink beer. But we have a problem at the London meet up. The only place we can host them are pubs for free. And there are people who don't come because they don't go to pubs. Yeah. And it's like the whole buy you a beer type thing. And it's like if you don't drink. It does make it tough too. And I think that it can alienate women as well. And depending on what their history is with men. And we have no idea. Of how to know that. But showing up to an event. Where there's 500 men. And you're one of 10 or 20. And they're getting drunk. And they're hitting on you. It's yeah. Some people know how to handle that. And some people don't know how to handle that. I won't actually say out loud what I would do. It is intimidating. We do struggle. Just to find a venue that is a safe space. For lots of people. And it's something we struggle with in London. So if you're a business in London. And you want to host a meet up. That would be really helpful. Sorry. No, no. You can promote. I'm going to put a plug. If you want to write for Scrift. We really need authors. Because the obvious place that a girl would go at this point. I already feel pretty visible. So it's kind of one of those. But I'm really glad that I did. I think just. Almost an answer to. You know this kind of. How do we target women. How do we without seeming to trivialize them. I think visibility is key. I think just to look down the list of speakers. And see. There's a woman speaking. Three, four of the most valuable players. Yeah. Three women. And I just. I believe one was you. I found that really encouraging. And then the courage of the Umbrella community. To actually have a talk on inclusion. When it's something that we could just leave. Unspoken about. It certainly makes me feel. Lots more comfortable. And the fact that there are so many women here this year. Like number one it's just really exciting. Compared to previous years. There's a lot. But I think that's. That's going to come across in the photos. You know when people look at the photos from this year. They'll see oh there's more women here. So the more we can gather together. And the more people. More women in the community that see that. I think they'll start naturally coming out. So thank you for coming. So you touched on a little bit about. It's a risk for women. To kind of put themselves out there. I think it's also a risk for men. Oh definitely. Right. It's all about risk for both people. And you just sometimes have to just jump in. Yeah. The more that you are a risk taker. Like I'm a risk taker. So I just need to probably embrace some women. That are not as much. And encouraging them to come. So I think that's true of men too. And just as a reminder too. This is my fifth year. And I am terrible at walking up to random people. And saying hey. And it still makes me nervous too. And I can only imagine from a first timer. Looking in. Like when I do see people I know. We get all like oh my god. Hey. And that's intimidating to see. But also remember it's hard on the other side around. It is hard to approach people. And it's a learned skill for me. It's one I'm still working on. So challenge yourself. Challenge yourself to go up and interrupt a crowd. That looks like they're having a good time. I mean 90% of the people that you walk up to. Probably more than that will embrace you. So. You say that it's intimidating for a female to be in this environment. I actually also think it's the other way around as well. Having females in the environment. Is intimidating for guys. That's a fair point. To actually approach a female without it seeming like a pick up. Yep. That is a very fair point. Yeah. Thinking about it. I don't know if there is such a thing as a code of conduct. You know. In this environment that's unwritten. You know. It is unwritten. But I'm just saying. It's like it's. Maybe that would make females feel safer. If there was such a thing. There is a blurb on the bottom of the website this year. Yeah. Okay. Which I was very excited to see. Yeah. I guess that intimidation factor. I think it goes both ways. It definitely does. And actually a lot of the comments I got. Were coming from both men and women. So it is. It is for sure. But I focused on women. I don't want to invalidate the men. Fair enough. Because it's fair to that as well. Just on that point. We would just really like it. If you come up and spoke about techy things. Because we are all here for techy stuff. Maybe I'm just naive. But I wouldn't think you were hitting on me. I would just think. This guy wants to talk about Umbraco. Or this guy knows I'm a .net developer. Something like that. You guys don't need to be intimidated either. Because that's our language. Right? It's tech. So it's what brings us together. It's what we have in common.