Want More Women in Tech? Start with Django Girls

Hi everyone. I'm here to talk about how we can get more women into tech and why Django Girls is a really good tool for doing that. So to start off, if you want to see my slides after the talk, if you are convinced that Django Girls is something you want to bring to your community, check out my slides at sheinz. github. io slash Django. I'll share them again at the end. Um so a little bit about me. I'm a self-talk developer. I've been doing this for about five years. For three of those years, I've been really involved with Django Girls Kansas City. as the program director for two of them and as the lead mentor for one. And I'm from Kansas City, Missouri. It's right there in the middle of the US. Maybe you haven't heard of it, maybe you have, but there are a couple of cool things about Kansas City. First of all, uh

Lawrence, Kansas is about 30 minutes away. That's where Django was born, so that's pretty cool. Um and the second cool thing. Is that we have been voted the number two city for women in tech in all of the United States for about four years in a row. And this is based off a couple different factors such as um the gender pay gap and how many women are filling roles um in technical positions. So that's pretty cool for being a small to mid-sized city. And I don't know the exact reasons for this, but I do have some ideas of my own of, you know, why um R City is so good for women in tech. A big part of that is a grassroots organization called Kansas City Women in Technology. They run a bunch of monthly um uh events uh for women, and one of them is coding and cut.

That's for moms and daughters to learn how to build websites together. There's also coding and cocktails. That's for the slightly older crowd. We have a bartender that comes in while women learn front-end technologies. And then there's also tech talks where we just talk about trending tech topics. But the one that I'm most excited about, the one that I'm going to talk to you today about, and the one that's most relevant obviously to this conference is Django Girls. Um actually let's go back. Uh who all was at Django Girls Heidelberg? Is that anyone? Awesome. Okay, so not that many people. So for this talk, I'm going to go over what Django Girls is and really why we need it. Then we're going to go over why any one of you can bring this back to your community. And then once you decide that you are the right person for the job,

I'll kind of walk you through how I run my workshop. So first I want to talk about why Django Girls is important before we kind of get into the what. There's a really good tech talk by a woman named Rajma Sajani, and she's the founder of Girls Who Code, and she talks about why coding helps girls take risks. And she says that we're teaching girls to be brave or sorry we're teaching our girls to be perfect, but we're teaching our boys to be brave. And that might not sound so bad, but it it does have lasting effects on these women For instance, when applying for a job, women will only apply statistically if they meet 100% of the requirements, whereas men will apply for a job if they only meet 60% of the requirements.

And so, you know, men are obviously still getting jobs, so there's kind of a disconnect between how qualified you actually need to be based on what they're listing on the job ad. So Women are automatically disqualifying themselves from jobs that they're fully qualified for, and this is obviously an issue. But she argues that learning the program can really teach girls to take more risks. And you may think, why is that? And it's really because it tea it makes girls fail, um, and something that we're not always comfortable with doing. Um and that's because programming, you just can't really write a perfect line of code. It's very hard to do, or especially a a block of code, for instance. There's always going to be something in Python, whether you accidentally forgot to indent something, you're going to run into mistakes along the way.

Um it's impossible not to, but you are going to fix your mistakes and you're going to eventually figure it out as long as you stick with it. And that's just a really important lesson that we need to be teaching our girls So if programming makes girls brave, then how do we get more girls coding? That's where Django Girls comes in. So, what is this thing I've been talking about for the last few minutes? Well, it's a really fun and welcoming um event that is free to attend. There is a tutorial that's already pre-made. It's very thorough. There are mentors around to help these women work through the problems in the tutorial. And most importantly, it's available worldwide. So you can kind of bootstrap

this event and kind of put your own spin to it and bring it to your own community. So here's some photos from our event. We had about 110 attendees last year, 35 mentors , 5 organizers. So here's our really awesome venue. It's at a startup accelerator. Here's a really happy attendee. I'm assuming she just solved the problem because that's usually not my face when I'm programming. Usually I'm much grumpier. We had really cool giveaways like mugs, beautiful centerpieces. We even had dogs, I'll talk more about that later. Mentor shirts, lots of different food options for people with special preferences. So if you can see by the pictures, it's

just looks like a place where you want to hang out. Alright, so you may not think that you're the right person to bring this to your community, but I'm telling you you already have everything you already you need to run an event like this. So there's some qualifications first that you don't need. You think you might need them, but you definitely don't. Um and for instance My only qualification to run this event is I had like six months of Django experience. I think I might have been one of the few female Django programmers in Kansas City. So I just kind of got like roped into it. Um I had never planned an event before, so I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was able to figure it out. So the first qualification you don't need is obviously you don't need to be perfect. You just need to be brave.

And that's if you can't see yeah, it's a little oxen. He's so brave. Uh you don't need to be a savvy event planner. Like I mentioned before, I had no experience. They actually have a lot of this stuff um already out there for you. Their GitHub repository has a lot of different Illustrator and Photoshop files that you can tweak for colors. You can add those to mugs, t-shirts, flyers, presentations, everything you need. They also will give you um a Django website to use, so you really don't have to like build anything like that. And there's a lot of blogs and other resources. So everything you could possibly think of, there's something available for you. You also don't need to have a large budget. So the event that I showed, we did it for about 7,000 US dollars, which might seem like a lot

or not. That covered about 110 people. But you can definitely scale it up or down. For instance, we have some friends in Omaha, Nebraska, which is about three hours away from Kansas City. They only had 18 attendees and 10 mentors, and it was still a really valuable event. So maybe 100 people just isn't a reality for your community, but as small as you have it, it will still make a big impact. So there are some qualifications you do need to run an event though, but you probably already have them since you're programmers. You need to be able to solve problems. you're gonna run into a lot of issues like how am I gonna pay for this? Or you know how am I going to attract mentors? Um and just like any other problem that you deal with, you just have to break it down into smaller chunks and you'll be able to figure it out.

And I'll talk a little bit more about how to solve those two specific problems later on in the talk. You need to be open to learning new things. For instance, I had no idea how to you know go get money for sponsors or you know ask people for that. So That's definitely something I've learned or how to effectively teach a junior programmer how to code without being condescending. So there's just lots of things to learn. You also have to kind of need to want to constantly improve. So you kind of have to leave your ego behind. You're going to put a lot of energy and pretty much six months of your life into planning this event. And then no matter what, someone's gonna come to you with some negative feedback and you should kind of embrace that because that's how you're gonna make your event perfect

um or not perfect, sorry. You're gonna make your event better. So you're never gonna have a perfect event, especially year one. You're not gonna have a perfect event after doing it for five years. But if you embrace that negative feedback um over time, you're going to have a really great event. Okay, so now we'll talk a little bit about actually running the workshop. Um so I'm a little type A. I do a lot of planning. So this is how I have structured it. But it is a very flexible event. You can definitely do it however you want, but feel free to kind of follow my steps if that is helpful to you. So um the first part that I do is I start planning. And this is where I'll just sit down kind of by myself and make goals and set a kind of budget. And then I figure out what other organizers do I need to bring on my team

and figure out like who's going to sponsor this thing. So as far as finding other organizers, um you kind of just want like a diverse group of people so that they all don't think like you because there are definitely some weak spots that I have that you know other people can help fill. So this is how our kind of hierarchy is set up. We have a coach and attendee coordinator, two different roles, but do kind of the same thing. They manage all the communications between coaches and attendees respectively, kind of before, during, and after the event. Um this year we added a diversity and inclusion coordinator to make sure you know we're marketing our event to all women and making sure that once they get to our event they feel welcome and safe. We also have vendor and sponsor coordinators to handle kind of those third-party

Communications as well as the marketing coordinator who does the social media, talking to the press, etc. And attracting sponsors. And as you can see, Revsys is actually up there. They've been a big supporter, I think. They're in Lawrence, Kansas. But uh yeah, thank you, Revsys. So you have to pay for this event somehow. Um one of the few um requirements of running a Django Girls is that it is a free event for attendees. So someone's gotta pay for it. It's time to start asking people for money. So the number one thing I can recommend is to just use your network. For instance, I have a good friend named Justin. He works at a big tech company in Kansas City. Um he was a mentor last year and I just texted him one morning when I was trying to find out people to sponsor and I was like, hey

Can you put me in touch with your HR person? And I was just expecting to get like an email back, but um within about six hours they were writing me a check for like $900. So um I they probably would have just ignored me had I just blindly emailed her. So um, you know, making those connections at companies that will give you money is absolutely the best way to go. Once you have that contact, you want to create something like a sponsorship prospectus. Um it's got different levels of sponsors like platinum, gold, silver, and then we have line items, so you know you can sponsor the t-shirt for $700. And this really helps because It kind of tells them exactly where their money is going, which is very helpful. And for instance, the t-shirt sponsor knows they're gonna get their logo on the t-shirt, so they're pretty happy about that.

You also need to kind of polish your sponsorship ask. And when I say ask, I really just mean an email. And so when you send it to an HR person or someone else, you want to make sure you send um like your most specific line at the beginning of the email since HR people are very busy and they will probably skim through your email. So make sure to ask it as soon as possible so they don't ignore it. You'll also want to include statistics and then bold your items to make sure they stand out. It's kind of using UIUX in email format. You don't want to go too crazy here, but here's an example of that. So we've grown from 76 attendees and 19 mentors in 2016 to 110 attendees and 35 mentors in 2017. So

the most important numbers stand out, and I've also shown that we are able to take this event from point A to point B. We're using our money well. We're also making the event better every year. And then finally just personalize the email. Just it has it only have to be like a line, but um I hate getting templated emails. I tend to just ignore them and send them straight to the trash. So if there's, you know, that person from your network that's involved, um just, you know. Say hi. Okay, uh step number two is recruitment, and this is recruiting mentors and attendees. So for finding mentors, they don't need to be Django Art Python experts. They just need to understand basic programming concepts

And this is good because we just don't have very many Django experts in Kansas City. So the tutorial is really thorough and very easy to understand. Maybe not for beginners, but as long as you kind of understand programming and maybe go through the tutorial beforehand, you're going to do just fine. They can also be any gender, and this is good because since only women identifying as female can attend, this is a really great opportunity for men to get involved. You can aim for a mix of junior and senior programmers. It's a good opportunity for junior programmers to, you know, kind of solidify their knowledge by helping others. gets rid of that imposter syndrome that sometimes we have when we're first starting out.

And then you'll also want the senior programmers though because things will inevitably go wrong. Someone maybe didn't up update their computer for the four last four years. So having that senior programmer step in and fix things quickly is very helpful. And then as far as attracting attendees, we have a couple of recruitment ideas that we use. Press releases are a big one, reaching out to newspapers, magazines, etc. Um doing guest blog posts on local tech blogs. For instance, there's like a Girl Geek blog that's all about comic books, so she let us do a guest blog post. Um we have I've been on the local news a couple of times, which is really fun. We sometimes reach out to universities or local high schools, go to meetups and events. And this, they don't have to be tech meetups.

Actually, it's probably better if they're not, just kind of any meetup where women meet. And then also flyers, just posting them in community spaces like coffee shops, libraries, those things can help. All right, so once you've done recruitment, then you accept and reject attendees. Usually you just kind of decide on a set of criteria like how much effort did this person put into their application or how much can this person benefit? Does this person seem like they're going to be um to actually enjoy this and like continue learning to program after the fact. And then you don't want to outright reject anyone. Put them on a wait list because you know people that you accept will inevitably drop out. After you accept or reject, um there's kind of this awkward time of about a month and a half between um letting everyone know that they're allowed to come and the actual day.

And this is a great time to do all those last minute ordering things like um Doing t-shirts now that you have everyone's t-shirt sizes, confirming with the caterers that you know you have this many vegans, that's a great time to take care of those things. Then on the day of, this is kind of our schedule of what we do. We have a separate Friday night install party. This is pretty crucial in my opinion because I don't know about you guys, but I hate setting up my computer, like my dev environment. It's just a pain. It's not fun. Um you only do it every once in a while, so I don't know, I never really got that great at it, but um kind of playing off the fact that it's not fun for attendees either. We try and keep that on Friday night.

They have the mentors help them work through that. And then Saturday morning they can start with the fun like hello world stuff. So that's a good way to do it. And then on Saturday we do a breakfast and check-in. We have an opening presentation where we kind of I like to bring in former Django girls and kind of do a where are they now? A lot of them do get jobs as programmers or at least are continuing to learn. So it really sets a really cool mood for the day. Then we do a tutorial session, we break for lunch, we do more tutorials. And then in the afternoon, that's kind of when we like to have our breaks. And so we brought in some dogs from the local rescue project, which was really fun. Everyone loves dogs for the most part, so it was a a nice way to step away from your programming and just hang out with some dogs.

And we also had um a yoga teacher come in and donate her time. She was able to do about four sessions and it was just very relaxing. And it kind of taught all these women that they can step away from their code. go do something, take a mental break, and then come back at it and you can tackle the problem and maybe see it in a new light. And then after we wrap up, we usually get some feedback and then we want to show our mentors that we really appreciate them. They dedicated almost all of their weekend to us and their energy. And so we uh last year we just got them some Chipotle and had a bartender, gave them some free drinks, and uh uh just played some board games and had a a really fun time. And then the last stage after the event, this is something we're trying to do better this year, just kind of staying engaged with the attendees and really giving them the resources they need

to be successful if they choose to pursue programming. So hopefully what you've learned today is that now you know what Django Girls is if you didn't know before and kind of why we need this. You know that you personally can run Django Girls. And you know how to survive running the workshop, or at least you know how to plan one and get it from point A to point B. So if I've convinced you that this is the thing you need to bring to your community, the next steps would be finding a venue. I would personally say great Wi-Fi is a must, but um I guess if you have really good network people who are willing to dedicate eleven hours, like this wonderful venue, um That's also an option. Um but if it has great Wi-Fi, that's obviously better.

Um then once you have that That's really all they require for you to fill out their form. It's only about five questions long. It's really short. And they'll usually accept within the Django Girls organization will accept your application in about a week. And then you can get started planning. So hopefully everyone is ready to go and bring Django Girls to your community because if you don't do it, um no one might. So That's really it. And I'm not taking questions, but I would like to um take a minute. Um hopefully you know how much work goes into organizing an event. So I wanted to give a shout out to our organizers because this has been a really awesome event. So if we can give them a round of applause, that'd be great.