Diversity: We're Not Done Yet

Awesome. Can you hear me okay? Yeah? Great. I'm going to actually take one of those conference pictures. 'Cause I love pictures. Um you can like act all crazy. Um all right, so this is a panel, right? You ready? Alright, I am scanning. You can take a picture of me too if you'd like. I'm totally okay with that. Alright, almost done. Yeah. Alright, great. Thank you. So yes, I am super excited to be here. This is a confession, this is actually my first Django Con. um in the US and um it's I feel like I've kind of peaked in my life to like to like keynote here. It's kind of pretty awesome. Um So yeah, I was definitely really excited

that that Jeff emailed me. I was just like, oh my God. So thank you for inviting me and thank you for the conference organizers for having me as well So yeah, first um DjangoCon US and what best um how best to start off with, I think is um uh a quote from Star Trek. So humor me. So I um actually a couple months ago with uh my fiance, we went um to the San Francisco Symphony. um to see the symphony play like the whole score to the 2009 movie. And if you ever have an opportunity to do that, it is freaking awesome. But it reminded me that um Gene Roddenberry, the creator, um producer, writer of Star Trek, he said a few um quotes um about like the diversity of the show, but it's actually very um relatable to um

diversity as a whole. So one in particular he said one obstacle to adulthood needs to be solved immediately. That we must learn not to accept differences between ourselves and our ideas but to enthusiastically welcome and enjoy them. Diversity contains many treasures as those waiting for us in other worlds We will find it impossible to fear diversity and to enter into the future at the same time. So it was very comforting when I first heard this quote from someone so prominent in the geek culture Um, I actually grew up with my father watching like The Next Generation, uh Deep Space Nine, Voyager, all the uh series. I think the next generation is my favorite one.

He's actually like the legit, my father's like the legit doppelganger of data. Which uh he actually dressed for uh one Halloween, he even dyed his hair black, and I don't think he could get it out after a while. Um but I think I have a suspicion that growing up with um With Star Trek in the background kind of subliminally influenced me. So looking at the the TV series as an adult, the discourse that they have, it's very diplomatic, right? The characters have very altruistic personal views and they apply them to very difficult situations. And the whole premise of like the Starfleet is purely humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts. And then the series itself was used to reflect on a lot of current

then current cultural issues, including racism, sexism, class warfare. um among others. Gene Roddenberry himself even said that by creating a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, intercontinental missiles Um it was very novel to have a show like this, especially in the the 1960s. But anyways, now that I have um outed myself as a trekkie um on uh a little bit about me. As uh Jeff said, I um I work for Spotify, I'm a backend engineer and I'm based in San Francisco. I'm also one of the two vice chairs of the Python Software Foundation board, and I'm a part of the Code of Conduct Committee and the Grants Committee for the DSF.

I also lead San Francisco Pyladies and do a lot or am involved in a lot of the global Pyladies efforts. I also have a lot of stickers with me. So if you want to come find me afterwards, I got plenty for you Anyways, uh real quick, perhaps um I I know like what 70% of you um this is your first Django con, but perhaps like this is your first Python conference, Django conference ever. Um or maybe um you just started to learn Python or Django. But to get everyone up to speed, um the past few years there's been a huge movement to improve the diversity makeup of our community Four years ago, uh 2012, um Django Khan EU in Zurich is actually um my second conference ever in my first time speaking.

And I actually talked about how what I was doing to affect diversity in the Python community using a lot of Django resources. And I kind of turned more into a conversation/slash rant that talk, but uh I only found it appropriate to like four years later to give sort of an update of uh of how we're doing. I do want to note that this talk, while it's focused on women, and it's because I um that's what I work closely with, the ideals and premise of um this should be translated to other minority groups as well um within the Python community and the tech industry. I also um I swear a couple of times in this talk I'm not like a sailor or anything like that, but uh just to emphasize a point, um I get kind of heated, um, you know, very enthusiastic about

certain conversation points. So um Please feel free if if I start kind of saying some words and it makes you feel uncomfortable, you can go ahead and leave. I don't mind. But um I promise I won't swear like a sailor sailor. Um maybe um give me um Like a a glass of wine or something. Um anyways, um just please sit back and relax. I have a link to the the the slides and the blog post that I wrote up for this at the end. So I just kinda want you to to relax a little bit Alright, so caffeine, I need that. The two-hour flight difference is huge. To give some context, I could try my best to explain um uh why having a lack of diversity is a problem.

And that we should all care about. But in reading some research and some scient a few scientific papers, I found a few really good highlights that does a better job than I ever could One is from uh the first one's from the Harvard Business Review. Um there's little correlation between a group's collective intelligence and IQ. um of its individual members. But when but if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises Next one from National Academy of Engineering. Creativity depends on our life experiences. Without diversity, the life experiences we bring to an engineering problem are limited. As a consequence, we may not find the best engineering solution. From Scientific American, um

When groups of intelligent individuals are working to solve hard problems, the diversity of the problem solvers matters more than their individual ability. Thus, diversity is not distinct from enhancing overall quality. It is integral to achieving it. And from the same article Chronic and woeful underrepresentation in the workforce leads to the inescapable conclusion that we are missing critical contributors to our talent pool. It is hard to grow a workforce workforce, let alone the best workforce, when there is a broad underrepresentation of up to 75% of the talent of the potential talent pool One last one from a different Harvard Business Review case. After 10 years of work experience, 41% of women in tech leave the industry compared to 17%

of men. But they are not more likely to leave than the women in other industries because of having families. And so when you look at actual data, you can see the lack of women across the board. There's no major tech company here that has more than 20% women in tech. I want you to take note that of this group, Yahoo is the only one that allows an employee to self-report not identifying with the male or female gender. I mentioned earlier that there has been a large initiative within the Python and Django communities to increase diversity. So what exactly are we doing? Now I'll follow in the list that I'm about to go over. Not um exhaustive, and if it were, I'd probably be up here for a while, which is kind of nice to say.

But um so I've only picked a few highlights So I've been on the board, this is my third term on the PSF board, and in those years I've seen a large influx of grant requests specifically targeted for diversity initiatives. Just last month, or maybe a month or two ago, we approved three Django Girls funding requests, two grants to PyCon UK specifically targeting to get kids and teachers to the conference. And two grants for workshops in low economic areas or areas that would otherwise have difficulty accessing computers. And some back of the envelope calculations. We've given grants to over or over 20 grants to uh Django Girls, totaling over about $22,000 just in the past year.

We're also trying to be a bit introspective as well. The past elections, a call was made to like the members list pleading to take diversity into account when voting for the next board. And I would like to think that it had some effect because out of the 11 positions on the board, seven of them are women, up from three per three women last year and two women the year before. So it's pretty awesome Within the Python-centric conference network, you may have noticed an influx of the code of conduct adaptation. There's certainly been a loud opinion that a a code of conduct is not needed for conferences. And I'm not here to to explain why they are important.

But a a code of conduct isn't necessarily for those folks, right? Those who are more likely to be affected by harassment or assaulting behavior are often the minority in an event, right? They are less likely to be visible. There's even a timeline on the Geek Feminism wiki of like of uh uh public events um that has that have happened. Um and certainly not an exhaustive exhaustive list, but it is actively maintained. And it just shows that these incidents do happen. And and when they do We as a community, we need to show those that are affected that we care and that we support them and that we're here, we want them here to feel safe. Relatedly,

November 2012, the Python Software Foundation board passed a resolution that will only sponsor conferences that has a code of conduct in place. As well, in the past few years, um conferences have also been organizing or supporting women-only um events, including like Pie Ladies Lunches. or um gen girl tutorials or women attendee cocktail hours the like. I've led many of these events myself. It's super fun. And every single time I get a lot of praise, um, but um uh for for being in a room full of women, and it's pretty awesome. At the annual um PyCon launch or PyLadies lunch at PyCon. Women are encouraged to stand up and basically promote and brag about themselves, about the talks and tutorials, lightning talks, posters that they're given.

giving and um so it might be a little bit embarrassing for um women to talk about themselves but to have like um a space for them to deemed okay and encourage um gives a lot of confidence for those women Moving on, the BDFL in terms of like Python BDFL and Django BDFL, both uh Guido Van Rossum and um Jake Kaplan Moss. They have been using their voice to enthusiastically support and be very active in the diversity movement. And I think that that has quite an impact on our community. Having the creators of Python and Django actively or publicly talk about the need for diversity within a community, a community that wouldn't exist without them.

has had a significant impact. And I've been very lucky that Guido is actually in the Bay Area because I certainly make use of his close proximity and invite him to a lot of Piley's events. If you take a look at other tech communities, you can see the lack of support from leadership really affecting them. Take the Linux community, for example. I don't think I have to explain much, but Linus himself has said that all that diversity stuff is just details and not that important. It's also well known that flame wars are a part of the Linux community, and therefore leadership, the tone that they set, it has to affect the diversity makeup in some way. The um Ubuntu

community um is 4. 4% women. Um the Debian developer community is 1. 8 % women And um looking at the Ruby community, um you can see a lack of leadership support there as well. Um a conversation in response to uh RubyConf announcing uh their uh 2013 talk lineup and the lack of like uh devers speakers. Matt's the uh creator of Ruby um had said um Giving bias to minority does not solve a problem. It just creates reverse discrimination. Now Ruby centric conferences have been very public about their lack of diversity. One even canceled their conference over it. Ash Dryden, um very well-known Ruby developer and speaker about diversity, once tweeted that um I am continually impressed by the Python community and I'm not even uh a community member.

And I think that she she is a community member if she wants to be. But the um the Ruby community certainly has done a lot of work, right? Um they have uh Rails Girls, Rails Bridge, and the like. And the fact that these sort of conversations over uh speaker diversity exists says that like uh these efforts are actually um taking effect in some way. But I can't help um imagine um If if Mats were was a little bit more supportive of diversity, or if like Ruby com the Ruby language had something like the PSF behind it, if it may be a little bit better. So moving on to something that I'm deeply involved with myself, Pylades. Pylades has started in mid-2012 in Los Angeles. And it was basically a group of women getting together

and saying, why don't we just do this more regularly? And so from there, Pilates expanded to uh probably over 80 locations by now. Um haven't calculated it yet. 70 locations a couple months ago. Um but each year we've raised about um tens of thousands of dollars to help women get to PyCon, both speakers and attendees And of those 70 or 80 locations, about 50 of them are on Meetup. And from Meetup, I can see that there are over 12,000 members a part of PyLadies. And um these Pie Ladies, the groups we hold um events like um beginners workshops, um talk proposal brainstorming, uh conference speaking preparations, sprants, hack nights, code and coffee nights

A lot of fun stuff. And I actually did, because you know I'm a programmer, I did some data mining on those 50 meetup groups thanks to the meetup API. And I was able to get the amount of new Pi ladies joining every month. And this is my super scientific uh regression analysis. I just slap an arrow pointing up. But you can see that there's a definitely like a linear trend going upwards. When you take it into context of the annual PyCon in North America, it may have some effect inspiring folks to join PyLadies with those immediate spikes right afterwards. And you can see some effect when looking at the largest 17 chapters starting. I don't know why I chose 17, I just did.

And you can see some spiking after or with along with these new chapters. So what's the effect of pylladies exactly? Now a bit of a forewarning, you might have noticed I'm not a statistician, but I like to play one on stage, so humor me. So for PyCon 2013, PyLadies led workshops for women to help brainstorm talk sessions or talk proposals with the help of PASC committee members or program committee members. As well as we gave folks an opportunity to actually practice their talks before the conference. And we've been doing that ever since, 2013, 2014, 15, and we'll definitely do that again for our next PyCon. And um so I'm sure that you can relate to this. Um there's a CFP that was announced and the deadline's like in a month and you're like, oh

yeah, I want to talk, I want to do a talk, but I'll I'll submit later. And then procrastination gets the best of you and you don't actually end up submitting a talk. But I found that a lot um a lot of ladies um like appreciate that time to sit down and actually think about a talk A lot of them feel like they don't have an idea or a good idea. And having that sounding board of of previous uh program committee members of of um pylities around them really helps um firm up the proposal and and press like that green submit button to go ahead and submit it And so then talks get accepted, and I'm sure um other speakers can relate that little like oh shit moment that your talk is accepted, now you actually have to prepare or actually like write all the content. I I personally do a lot of conference-driven development where I don't do anything until it gets accepted.

But to have someone or have a a committee kind of like uh a committee of your peers really like select you and your idea and allot time for you to speak. It's really confidence boosting. It's very brilliant. It's a nice feeling. And so I like to think that giving that resource, that time to Pylaus has had effect on the percentage of speakers at PyCon. And you can also see that the effect of pylades on a more regional level as well. So I took three cities that have a large Python media group. uh New York, Boston, and San Francisco to see if the community reflects any difference with the addition of their local Pylades. So this graph shows the number of new members every month for two meetups for New York City Python and Django New York City. Certainly, some of the community's growth is attributable to the popularity of Python

as a language overall, as well as the growth of the startup industry there. But when you can see that Pylates started in mid-2012 , and the respective meetups saw a much larger, sharper growth. My super scientific regression analysis right there. And so moving on to New England, Boston is also a very great hub for Python, has a very active uh Django meetup in a Python user group. However, you don't see much difference, at least with the Python user group, and the growth of new members after PyLadies Boston started. But perhaps you're familiar. Some of Piloty's inspiration was actually from the women-only workshops that the Blossom Python user group

started back in early 2011. So you can see the large growth rate once a region introduces women-focused events. Now onto San Francisco, my home and the home of the largest organ Pilates location. We have a bunch of Python-centric meetup groups, and I chose specifically like the largest, most active ones. The growth rate from the membership of these meetups is pretty noticeable when SF Pilates started in April 2012. Um again super scientific regression. Um but what's interesting here is when I switch this to like a line non-stacking line graph. You can see that when SF Pylades started, that the rate of new membership

specifically for the SF Python Pub Night meetup was not at all affected. And I suspect that this has to do something with the presence of alcohol and/or the environment that may not attract Py ladies. Anyways This is just trying uh this is me just trying to quantify a bit the effect of um the regional effect of pylades on local meetups And if you if you want the data, I have everything in iPython notebooks that I link in my blog post, which you'll see at the end. Alright, so we're doing pretty good, don't you think? We've done a lot. We can see some effect. But we're not done yet. There's so much more that we can do. And just throwing money at PyLades isn't gonna help it But please give us money. We appreciate it.

So a lot of people, recruiters and developers alike, come to me complaining about not hiring women or the lack of their corporate diversity in general. I've heard the same excuses all the time when trying to hear diversity. I couldn't find them or that we're a meritocracy and gender doesn't matter. So I'm gonna introduce uh my super slick scientific term. Um maybe you know it. It's called bullshit. These excuses that I hear are bullshit, and I want to show you why. So what is said, gender equality, it's not a problem here. These things don't matter. But what I actually hear is it's not a problem to me And so this really shouldn't be said anymore. It's complete nutter bullshit to me. It essentially questions the person's beliefs.

If it's a problem or if it's a someone's concern to increase the genders and gender ratio, it should be treated as a legitimate problem. If you don't think it's a problem, perhaps ask some questions, trying to figure out why, like how so, what do you think should be done? And try to understand the problem. Because why would anything like this be said to begin with, right? So another classic one that I hear is we focus on quality, not gender. Or similar similarly, we are a meritocracy. That's bullshit. Um so what you're saying to me is that you find quality to mean software written by men. But quality is an objective word, right? Do we encourage bug-free code or test coverage

or elegant and simplistic code? What other values do we add to quality? And I'm hoping not a gender kind of identifier to quality. So this excuse is essentially saying to me, we don't want to change what we're doing here. Alright, so I've heard this one about girls too. Women just aren't interested in this. And this is implying that it's women's fault. Are women not really that interested? And it's complete, you want you can say it with me. Bullshit. Come on, it'll wake you up a little bit. So at Spotify, um, we participated in an event in Stockholm called Tecla. It's meant for secondary girls, where our sponsoring companies held workshops

to give a sampling of what the future holds for technology. And um it had like robots, computers, 3D printing, um awesomely geeky stuff that we're all like excited about. Um and so this proved that proves that this is something that girls um are interested in um so long as they're invited. And Pylladies itself is proof of that too. It provides an invitation to women to join the Python community. So this one's a classic. I hear it so often. We couldn't find the woman. Yeah, what I actually hear is that you didn't really put enough effort into it And so what I have to say to that is that's complete. Bullshit. So a little while ago I put out

a single job ad for Spotify once to my local PyLaders group I got 40 responses within the first week. 40 responses out of probably not more than 200 people on that mailing list. And 40 women actually responded. And so that's a super awesome response rate. So I challenge folks to actually look at your professional network. Like look at your LinkedIn profile. How diverse are your connections? How many actually look like you? Or what's the agenda or ethnicity or race or whatever? Like what's the distribution among your contacts? So if you reach out to the same network that you always reach out to, you're gonna get the same people applying. So yes, it will take work, but the women, we're out there. So this this one, I've seen a lot of

this on the Twitter sphere and on Reddit. Quotas are bad, that's reverse discrimination. And this is actually one I get a lot of contention on And what this sounds to me is you just want to recruit your friends, who I'm sure also look like you. It doesn't help that we have like this referral bonus culture to hire our friends. And I get the reason. We want to hire people like you that are good like you, right? But it has consequences. So if we turn this around, maybe, um, so Twitter recently um said that they want to increase their um ethnic minority among their work first from 8% to 9% So what if they said, all right, so let's um only hire 91% white people? I mean that kind of sounds weird, right? Um

but it it's in it's incorrect to think that there is some sacrifice that will be made. uh that you're lowering some standards. And I have to say that that is bullshit. So I just quoted a bunch of research in the beginning that says that that's quite the opposite, that diversity adds to the quality. It is indeed illegal in the US to make hiring decisions based off of gender, race, ethnicity, etc. Saying something like we must hire 20% women in the next quarter definitely puts that legality into question. But a lot of us nerds are very data-driven, right? So how our latency, how we can improve that, our uptime usage statistics, we want to measure things so we can deliver our product better. So why not measure how diverse our hiring is?

Set goals like increase the number of women candidates by 20%. The goal shouldn't be to hire 20% women, but it should be to make sure that everyone who is qualified is being considered. All right, the last one, I'm sure we're all familiar with this, the tech industry is hiring like crazy. Um and they need we need devs now, pretty much. And what this means to me is that you didn't actually care enough to put um thought into diversity in into your hiring process. And that, last one, say it with me, that's bullshit. Oh come on. Come on, wake up a little bit. That's there you go. It's as simple as that, right? Do the work once to ensure that you have the appropriate practices in place, the diverse networks,

maybe remove and gender-identifying words in your application process, consistent metrics in place to see how you're doing. It certainly doesn't take much effort to Google for local communities to reach out to. So what I hear is thinly failed thinly veiled bullshit and actual bullshit. And I'm sure I'm not the only one to pick up on that as well. But this this actually hints at a larger issue. These excuses hint at a larger issue. There's a fallacy that there's a bad guy. Certainly you get why diversity is important. You're trying for goodness sakes. But there's a notion that there's a bad guy behind the lack of diversity in the in tech. And there's certainly a lot of tension um given to someone when they say something bad

like, oh, I don't understand why it's bad to have booth babes at a conference And then everyone's like, oh, there's the bad guy, like I found him, right? But we didn't get here because of one bad guy. Um we're all the bad guy. We're all complacent We hire our friends, we have we have very uniform looking uh network. This is something that everyone has to consciously and actively work towards. Alright, so there's a lot of bullshit. Perhaps you agree on the thinly veiled bullshit and that we need to do more. So what actually can we do? All right. So have you heard of Google? Yeah? I hope so. So if you if you've heard of it, actually use it, okay? Numerous amount of times um

people come to me to educate them. Um I'm not your teacher. If you want to learn more about feminism, about unconscious bias, about your privilege, that's super awesome and fantastic, and thumbs up to you. But I'm not going to do the research for you. I don't have the time nor the patience, especially for the debates that usually happens afterwards. But I'm also not your network for women. I'm not the gatekeeper to women There are a lot of mailing lists. There's meetups, events, go join them, get your engineers involved to build relationships. I'm not going to do the legwork for you. use Google. It's a very it's a fantastic untapped resource. Um but this one time only um I made you a set of like of readings to help you kind of um

If you're interested for the self-education, so memorize this link. I'm only gonna give this once. Actually, it's it's in my blog post too, so you'll see it again at the end. So after some self-education and some Googling, there are some micro actions that you can take. At first is super simple. Um programmers should like this. Um switch any use of the word female to women. For example, female attendees to women attendees. And you might ask why First, they mean different things. Female is often said in a scientific context, frequently referring to the ability to produce offspring. The term woman specifically refers to a human, while female could refer to any species any species.

Second reason is it's it's kind of dehumanizing. Um to be reduced to my productive abilities, you kind of ignore that I'm a human. It also excludes folks that while identifying as a woman may not have the physical ability to bear children, not all women were born biologically female. Lastly, when used as a noun, it can imply inferiority. It's often used in a negative tone. You can see this if you search Twitter for females I found a couple of interesting quotes. Females should stop wearing makeup so we all know the truth. Or I can't trust females anymore. So when we use the word females, we are reduced to a species. We are separate and we are othered.

You can see what I mean if you want to go search on Twitter for the word females, but I would highly suggest getting a drink first. And so along those lines, actually really think if you need a gendered identifier. More often than that, you probably don't need to. For instance, at work, um I am frequently introduced as this is Lynn, our female developer. And there there's no need for that, right? There's already a word for what I am. I'm a fucking engineer You can call me crappy, lazy, stubborn, whatever, but please. I'm not a female or woman developer. When when only when gender is really relevant to the context should you specify it like like an event specifically for women. So another example, a few weeks ago, I received a message on LinkedIn,

recruitment spam. Um, the recruiter said exactly this. I am really impressed with your profile. I am especially impressed because you're a woman. I don't think my hand hit my forehead as fast as it did ever Alright, so another microaction is to assume knowledge. Assume everyone has a reason to be at this conference or at a meetup or a workshop wherever. Not a plus one of someone else, not a beginner, not a recruiter. Allow them to re reveal whatever it is that they want to, but assume their reason for attending is the same as yours This probably sounds better, this one is specifically, it sounds better as female first design for the alliteration, but there's no reason to use female other than for the alliteration.

So women first design Make the default pronouns in imagery reflect a woman. For instance, like documentation, products, user profiles, form values, whatever. And the reason that this is so impactful is that it's signaling. It signals to women that as a developer you have thought about them. It does not mean patronizing women by painting painting your product pink or having flowers across everywhere To see how striking a difference it is, I encourage you to find one of those browser extensions for whatever browser that you use that switches male pronouns to female or gender-neutral pronouns. It's not as funny as like the cloud to butt one, but um still very impactful nonetheless.

All right, so last microaction, it's very novel, I know, but it's to reach out. A couple months ago, um Donald Steff, he is one of the maintainers of PyPI. He pinged me on IRC. Um he needed help with PyPI. um both um maintenance and bug fixing um as well as a lot of uh greenfield projects and he actually thought he had a thought he he recognized that um there were no women behind um the scenes up of PyPI So so get this. He asked us. He asked Pyles to help alleviate his workload. And to be honest, Donald didn't think he would get much um many takers to help him out. But to his disbelief, and I totally knew this what would happen, within the first hour of the email he got four volunteers to help him out. So this shit actually works.

Like actually reaching out, it it works So micro actions are like the low-hanging fruit, small actions that we can all do to help welcome women to the Python and to the tech industry as well as your home workplace. But now on to the difficult stuff It's very comfortable hiring, working, hanging out, or co-founding a business with people like you, with your friends. But we must be prepared to get uncomfortable. One way is to take is to take on a sense of intentional curiosity Okay, so remember um that let me Google that for you a bit. While I find it annoying, it is indeed commendable to want to know more about something. It's fantastic. But it actually takes work. And again, I'm not going to do that for you, but self-education is key

here. One thing that's admirable is a sense of curiosity. Curiosity when meeting people not like you in social or workplace situations. Curiosity about what makes a team better, how they work together. And how to make it better from where you are now. And it's essentially going beyond your comfort zone. And another point, um, technology companies have been super good um at being introspective. It's embarrassing and uncomfortable to admit mistakes, but perhaps you've seen it a lot. When a service goes down, a company is often very transparent. um and very apologetic about it and we tend to share what we've learned in that process. But there isn't that same level of transparency among the lack of diversity

We should have postmortems about the subject. Like, for instance, here are our numbers for 2014 and here's our action plan for this coming quarter. We need to reflect on diversity as a similar problem to when a service goes down or failed well, and then document it for the rest of the world and basically open up our diversity. This data isn't exactly like a trade secret. It's not like Google's like search algorithm or Yelp's business rankings And it's definitely scary to admit fault and it's uncomfortable, but but wouldn't it be awesome to essentially see that, to have a lot of companies being introspective about their diversity? The last bit, and this is specifically for women and other minorities, is to say what you really think. And I mean this very seriously.

Um I spent a few meetings at work and noticing how often I would be interrupted, unacknowledged, or just talked over Um and it really made me mad. One time I was actually leading a meeting. Uh there's only two other people there. They kept interrupting me and I just got fed up. I literally said, for fuck's sake, let me fucking speak They did. They kind of showed up after that. And they c totally like understood because they could see that behavior. Um but it it felt really good to finally speak up So in all honesty, say what you really think. Rage quit the meeting if you have to, because otherwise it will continue and it will get worse. Your company may be super behind diversity with hiring, but if you don't have a voice at the table, what's the point?

Alright, so enough swearing. I swear it a lot. Turn into a bit of a rage-inducing monologue. But I want to finish on a more positive note. Another Star Trek quote for you So from Star Trek philosophy, and Jean Runberry said, humility will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but to take special delight in the differences in ideas and the differences in life forms. The worst possible thing that can happen to all of us is for the future to somehow press us into a common mold where we begin to act and talk and look and think alike. If we cannot learn to actually enjoy these small differences, to take positive delight in the small differences between our own kind

and here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out in space and meet the diversity that is certainly, almost certainly, out there. Thank you.