Transcription

WENDIE: All right, is our audience ready, I will start with the audience, are you ready for this final talk of the day?  This is our beautiful beautiful Panel.  I didn’t write down what they are talking about!

All right.  This improvisation thing is not mine, not my specialty.  Okay, word powerment in this room we talk today about this afternoon know your users accessibility and then the last talk was about inclusion and now it is about word powerment.  So it is a great follow up for all the talks we had this afternoon.  I would like to give the word to Elizabeth.  She is going to be our chair.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: I am yes.  I accept.

WENDIE: Thank god!

You are going the have 20 minutes as a Panel then we are going to invite the audience to join in, please stay awake and prepare questions for our beautiful Panel and have a great time.  Give them applause.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks for joining us this afternoon, my name is Elizabeth Barker, a senior project manager, the intention of this Panel to discuss practical approaches to inclusivity and tech organisations, representatives from many different areas within tech from product, agency, community organisations, and so I think we will be able to have a great discussion about what that means I would like the panelists if they could, quickly introduce themselves to you as well.

MERI WILLIAMS: I am CTO of Moo and mostly run fairly big tech organisations at this point I suppose.  So the teams just kind of 300, 400 people in size.  South African originally.  I am literally the one the Daily Mail warned you about, I am a woman who works in tech, an immigrant with a job  — I am gay and disabled and I am godless and my wife is British, I am over here stealing your women and jobs.  I know a lot about undeserved and unasked for privilege as well.

JESSICA ROSE: I work in developer relations which is this fantastic job I am not sure whether it should exist.  I do a lot of sort of outreach to technical communities, trying to reach them with projects.  Before I did this, I did a lot of consultancy, around diversifying teams and trying to balance out and fix where possible toxic culture in different teams.  So a real lay wide experience of seeing some really fantastic things, some really beautiful community activity and also being called in when things have gone wrong.

CEDRIC KISEMA: I am a software developer, I am also instructor and mentor and I give talks at these kind of events so I, 101 mentoring which I do part time, trying to get more and more diversity into tech.  That is me.

JENNY WONG: I I work at Human Made and I am the community engineer, do a lot of organising of WordCamps and events across the board just general community cheer leading in the WordPress Community and the php community.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thanks, so, to get us start I mean, inclusivity is a big conversation in the tech world as we know.  It is very broad conversation.  So, to make sure we are all on the same page for this particular Panel I would like to ask the panelists if they could speak a little bit about what practically inclusivity means for them in their organisations and in their experience.

MERI WILLIAMS: I get called in by companies who want to do better at this stuff.  When somebody is deciding to join a community or organisation, they are trying to answer 3 questions, am I expected here?  Will I be respected here?  Can I be myself and be respected here?

Those 3 things I think are fairly decent framing for diversity and inclusion.  So are you signaling well enough all different kinds of people are welcome, do they know from the information you share up front you never know other people who didn’t apply or didn’t get involved because you put them off before you even engaged, when you interact with people, whether that is in a community setting or interview, do they feel expected or not getting microaggression, telling different boys they are smart and girls are pretty.  You are reinforcing.

People tell me my English is good, speaking it since I was born, not like, I am not like a prodigy or anything! Since I learned to talk, but yes.

Like those things reinforce all the time, oh you are different, you don’t belong here, there is a really  — then people need to be a I believe to see, if they join and part of somewhere that somebody like them can succeed, that might be, somebody they view as a mentor or role model.  There are people who succeed are different from each other and you don’t have to have, I will be honest, every time looking for a queer immigrant woman on the executive of every company I worked at.  I would be struggling, so you look for people you can see some part of yourself in.

JESSICA ROSE: Looking at the people who never surface in your community, that is difficult to measure and plan for.  For me, in inclusion and really making people aware that they can come participate in the space, I always think that the most important thing is about perspectives.  When I first got started in technology my manager had a important thing to tell me, took me into the board room.  Have you seen the Father Ted sketch with the cows?

Showed the sketch, Dougal, this cow is small but that cow is far away, didn’t tell me why.  Okay, all of your problems in technology are going to be about this.! (LAUGHTER).

Just like oh okay, that is fine, all of this is fine, this is not a weird first day!

And I came back several months later, I finally get it.  There are errors, mistakes choices in tooling that you make is not helpful.  But all the big problems, it is a matter of perspective right?

Yes yes, that is it.

I think that with inclusion one of the big challenges is that moving beyond our own perspective to design a hiring process or to build community outreach, or to try and find speakers so difficult to do that without really engaging in multiple thought exercises, what would it mean not the be me, what is life like for people who are not like me?  That is one of the most challenging and interesting things about inclusion.

CEDRIC KISEMA: I need the question to be repeated.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: The question is essentially when we talk about inclusivity, what we mean, what is our frame of reference?

CEDRIC KISEMA: The way I like to think about inclusivity is, is, will every different types of people, will they feel comfortable within this culture?  Lesser about and is accompanied by the culture, I think that is what a lot of people seem to forget is, they, they all give out this mandate and say we need to reach X number of people.  But forget they need to change themselves.  So, I think culture is really big thing and I am thinking about from, how do you interview and thinking, how is your website?  How does your website look?  There is some websites where I am thinking, some people might not be able to use the website and comes from being inclusive.  Looking at your organisational chart, and seeing who are the people who are in, in what influential positions; what kind of people are there?  I got, I remember looking through one organisation and feeling very much like, yes, I am never going to progress in this company.  That was a bit, that was a bit difficult to take and I think it is it is because I was included, wasn’t included in the … company.  It is very much from the cultural standpoint, are they inclusive and do I feel like I am included in that?

JENNY WONG: I think for me, inclusivity means there is a choice for everyone like everyone gets to choose and have a choice to be in tech you know, like, a lot of people talk about like diversity and like oh we want to get 50/50 people.  Well those people probably have a job, not like they are just going to snap your fingers and press, hay, people, 9 months and bla, bla, and many years of learning to talk and whatnot.

So it is not as simple like snapping your fingers and say it is going to be 50/50 now.  Even working at an agency like, when we talk about oh who are we going to hire and stuff?  I am very acutely aware, if you are hiring from other companies you are just moving the problem like, like that is not going help the whole industry as a whole moving people from location to location.  Like it is all about adding people.  One of the ways to add people is making it easier for people to make the choice and given them the opportunity to make that choice.

So that to me, when we are talking about inclusivity, it is ensuring that people have a choice the be able to do what they want.

MERI WILLIAMS: And the choice to stay, I think a lot of people are like, well, we can accept slow movement on this problem, it takes a long time for the pipeline.  The pipeline is not the problem.

JENNY WONG: It is the drop out rate.

MERI WILLIAMS: When we look at technology as the industry, we lose people in certain demographics and certain, from certain backgrounds and at a very alarming rate compared to others.

Obviously it is not only for those who have computer science degrees as engineers and for those who graduate with a science degree, not men, 40% of them are gone within 5 years from the industry.  That is a industry problem.

JENNY WONG: When I did my computer science degree, I did a particular type called multimedia internet technology, specifically aimed at becoming a web developer, so it was the perfect job, perfect degree to move into web development.  Out of the, the minorities in that group, I would probably say I am the only minority still in the industry.  Most of them have moved on, some of them are administrators, gone into law, they have like different people moved on.  They didn’t even bother trying.  When I talked to student Panels a lot of the questions I get after the Panels are like, so tell me, what is it really like?  I am like well, it is going to be whatever you make it.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: So the drop out rate is an interesting point I think speaks to something that I am really interested in hearing things about too.  Which is, company culture and how that signals to people as Meri raised earlier, whether or not they feel like it is a potential place for them to work for the long term and feel and engaged part of the company as Cedric also raised in one of his points seeing hiring charter and feeling based on that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to feel engaged in the company for the long term.

Also, so, I would like to hear a little bit about that and since so much of company culture also revolves around the hiring process, how specifically the hiring process might provide some roadblocks as well for a company that is trying to become more inclusive.

MERI WILLIAMS: The question, is how hiring process gets in the way?

ELIZABETH S BARKER: And how it informs the organisational and how it is adapted to be a little bit more inclusive.

JESSICA ROSE: … I wasn’t but I have a lot of things to say.  …

MERI WILLIAMS: …

JESSICA ROSE: Absolutely data is not unbiased but I am very, very into using ways, using technology and using data to minimise human bias in hiring processes.

There maybe a couple of people here and there who are genuinely just terrible people, they maybe involved in the hiring process, I don’t sincerely managers going, yeah, I am hiring and I really need some engineers but can’t to reject like all of the different candidates.  That is now how this works.  Unconscious bias is people viewing talent that doesn’t see seem like, that doesn’t seem familiar, that doesn’t read as skilled to them as less valuable.  A lot of people in technology talk about the way that orchestras worked throughout the 90’s and 2,000s, it is all about how well you play.  Who you are, what you look like, doesn’t have anything to do with that.

But, up until the 90’s orchestras were overwhelmingly white and male because of merit ocarcy, you would do your practices behind a screen, so people were judging.

NEW SPEAKER: This is my profession?

FROM THE FLOOR: American orchestras do this and it started in the 80’s and the best ones will take you from taking your audition and signing before they see you, there is a huge change in the percentage starting in the early 80’s.  Germany doesn’t do that, that looks different.

JESSICA ROSE: Oh, don’t boo Germany.

FROM THE FLOOR: Good in any other way.

JESSICA ROSE: A lot of the hiring processes I am interested in, do similar things in tech tolling, I really like competency based hiring practices, there is a fantastic book called:  What works.  It is very, very focused on gender, I think that in technology when we talk about diversifying companies projects, it tends to be focused on gender, often to the detriment of white inclusion.  But this is a book by Iris, I forgotten her last name, about organisational design for diversity, not tech focused but it is fantastic.

Talks quite a bit about how competency based evaluations can be valuable.  Looked a at study where they found, you can give someone 2 CV’s, male and female.  Have a female CV with a bit more practical experience and the male CV more training.  They found the male CV was overwhelmingly picked employers said we were looking for the training.

But when they did the same thing and swapped the genders, got the opposite.  This guy, really been in industry and knows his stuff.  So people found, the research found that people were using reasoning to sort of justify the biases that existed, that justified the choices the biases informed.  Competency based hiring, literally go through a form, can you do this thing, a point, this thing, gap jumpers that do screening based on tests are fantastic.

There is a lot of tech focused solutions to sort of taking this squishy human feelings out of it.

MERI WILLIAMS: It is important point that unconscious bias seems rational, because when you believe something and somebody questions why, whether you know you are doing it or not, you make shit up to justify your opinion and I think it is, everybody always has a rational explanation as to why they think this, even, that is the unconscious bit of the bias part, that is a really important point.

CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add, perhaps might touch on this later, is interviewing is really hard enough in terms of technically in terms of do we give them an assignment that they take home and come back, like how do you take points and say okay I like that method, it’s 2 lines long, that’s one point.  I’m not sure if that’s possible in terms of under hiring programme is.  How would you…?

JESSICA ROSE: So it is, but it is difficult.  I do recommend programmes like gap jumpers because they work with us as a test then you only see answers with people you’ve passed as a test, so you make your interview decisions based on that; and I really like competency based interviews as well: “tell me about a time when you…” Then you have a point out of 5. There is still bias in the process but it’s much lighter.  Often it’s a test.  It’s a take home assignment.  You’ve to build a thing.  This feels like a really bias free way to get something done and it’s absolutely not.  If you are an employer giving somebody a test or a project and it takes more than 2 or 3 hours you should probably pay them.  So, often times if somebody is responsible for family care, if somebody has a life outside of technology, if somebody already has a demanding job; that can put a bar in place.  A really dear friend of mine who is a fantastic engineer just passed on an interview process because it would have taken 20, 30 hours of work when that was never going to work for them.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: So we talk about these things and gap jumpers is one kind of solution for removing these bars.  Others that, Meri, you have encountered, Cedric, Jenny?

CEDRIC KISEMA: There is one company that has a really interesting way, they always have a free member Panel when hiring because what they found out, you might be aware of this perhaps, yesterday always have 3 member Panel and that Panel they try and diversify that Panel as much as possible and they try to ask – not ask the same questions but in terms of have the same interview for different candidates.  And what they also try and do is during negotiation they have bands and they try to, in some cases, actually increase another persons offer if they find out that they went too low on their offer. I found it interesting they always have that 3 member Panel and it worked quite well for them.

JESSICA ROSE: {Inaudible}.

MERI WILLIAMS: I think there is broadly 2 approaches, right, you try and understand as broadly as possible in order to take account of bias or you try and negate it by removing information so you can remove names, photos on CVs and remove all that information.  I personally worry about that because I think we still judge a lot by peoples word choice.  Someone from a really individualistic culture will describe their role in a team as their individual achievement much more than someone from a much less individualistic culture.  I find it useful to be interviewing someone I know you are from a culture where it’s a really big deal and you told me just give to that and give all credit to the team whereas someone from a individualistic culture tells me they did something my bullshit counter goes off and it’s like having more context in order to account for {inaudible} for instance and sometimes it’s useful to have less.  I also really believe in lowering the absolute requirements for roles as much as possible.  So, there are very few jobs that require a computer science degree.  There are very few jobs that require you to have done hardly any of those things.  Think about what the role is about and what skills and experience someone needs to succeed in it and don’t make a laundry risk of requirements because you are putting people off who never think of applying or getting involved because it looks like they won’t meet that and there is some research that shows people in different back grounds will interpret those requirements very differently so they’re people unless they have evidence for 100 per cent of those 10 bullet point they will be like oh I’m under qualified I shouldn’t apply and there are people who have 3 out of 10 go I can go for this it’s fine and there is some evidence it’s culture and all of those things combine.

JESSICA ROSE: I’ve got a citation for that so the study round bullet points; I really recommend people not use bullet points.  If you can help it, don’t use bullet points in your job descriptions, please, thank you.  And the data comes out of an internal HP study where they looked at people putting themselves forward for internal promotions and they found well represented candidates would go ahead and apply when they met 50 to 60 per cent of the bullet point requirements and that candidate from less well represented backgrounds wouldn’t jump in unless they met more than 100 per cent of the requirements.

Are we allowed to mention individual companies?

JENNY WONG: I’ve been doing it anyway.

JESSICA ROSE: I really like Xapiers, does fantastic job descriptions and I’ve been shamelessly copying their style.  Sorry.  {Inaudible} often does a good job.  When you are developing a job description think about what is this person actually going to be doing?  And what I really like to do is I like to think about what does this person need to do within the first 2 weeks?  What do I need them to do within the first 2 months?  What do I want them to be able to do after 6 months, after a year?  So people talk all the time in technology, oh you not we’re not hiring for a skill set, we’re hiring for the ability to learn and we do a bad job at that.  Ask these questions, let people know from day 1 you have to do this, can you do this?

JENNY WONG: I think it hard, working at an agency you’ve got and client coming to you and usually you’ve got projects in coming and you don’t have the amount of people to do the work in the workforce and so you’re retro actively hiring at that point so I find it really hard to switch round that problem and I think it’s one of the hardest things, because I’ve always worked in agencies and every agency I’ve worked for always have been retro hiring otherwise you don’t have the money in the pot and when you are retro actively hiring you are constantly just looking at your own network and that’s one of the hardest things to do and like we’re discussing at work trying to debate how we’re going to change this to be pro-active about it because we can’t be doing like a more inclusive places and getting more people on board and even just out reaching into those places if we don’t be pro-active and it’s really hard to switch for I think a lot of businesses especially small medium businesses to do that.

JESSICA ROSE: That’s entirely fair but you said something that’s brilliant that I want to touch on where you said you’re almost always hiring retro actively hiring and it’s a lot of looking at your own networks.  So who here has got a job your current or former job based on your social contact?  If you are a hiring manager or you are running your own company you are highly placed.  If your friend group isn’t representative then your hiring practices aren’t going to be.  If your friend group isn’t diverse – in doing consulting work I chat to a lot of people who say we can’t get any female candidates in it’s not possible for this kind of role, where I see other teams which have folks who have really diverse friendship groups, really diverse peer groups and they’re like it’s fine we’ve got an all female team it’s great.  It’s rare.

MERI WILLIAMS: Diversity is not just about gender and inclusion is not just about gender, like here we’re not evenly distributed.  It’s allowance the belief that folks of under presented groups are less likely to have skills is bull shit.  We’re just as likely to have the skill and be able to do that role but if the way we are A attracted to those roles excludes people from applying we’re inefficient and wasting time.  It’s just a thing you have to stop doing in order to succeed in these communities.

JENNY WONG: I think that’s partly why like as a conference organiser and an event organiser for like lots of community events I think representation like are making like even if it’s just a call to speakers, accessible for more people is really important.  We see a lot of – and even work in London is shamefully bad at this we see a lot of call for speakers which are purely written based call for speakers and I’ve been in conversations with people who say we don’t submit because my writing is really bad and I would really prefer to do a pod cast or video and even having that like sense of like people who find writing really hard but could be great speakers and let’s face it if you are speaking you’re going to be talking so why isn’t the call for speakers a speaking application but then you put them through a Dalek voice so you don’t know who they are – it’s one of those things where you start thinking about it and you think hang on I’m going down a rabbit hole and oh it’s going deeper!  And you never know where to go and I don’t know how much community work can you do to try and bring more of that in play then bring it back to the company.

MERI WILLIAMS: Just to add to that specifically so I curate and co-curate and host the lead DEV which is a conference for tech leads and lead developers and we over the last 3 years have got to the point where our CFP gets 50 per cent of folks from index groups and we’ve done a load of stuff published about how we did it and I think one of the important things is to make really clear that everybody is welcome then to do active outreach and then to make sure there is an initial shift about just how people apply, that representation matters and it matters the following year.  The first year we invited and it meant immediately the following year we were a conference that cared about having representation on stage and making sure it was there.  I’ll tweet out the list of what we did but you’ll see CFP results in a fully representative set of proposals.

WENDIE: Time is up.  We have 10 minutes but the last 10 minutes is questions from the audience.  10 minutes for the Panel or are we going to use it for questions from the audience?

ELIZABETH S BARKER: Questions for sure.

WENDIE: Are there any questions?

FROM THE FLOOR: I think I can easily fill 10 minute with questions.  I’ve got load’s so I’m the founder of see {inaudible} human made so I make a lot of hiring decisions.  It has been very in vogue to talk about hiring for cultural fit, something I used to say a few years ago, until I started to feel that that just often means pervading your existing culture.  So I wonder how do you think about cultural fit and the importance of that?

MERI WILLIAMS: You don’t hire for culture fit, you hire for culture add; what is this person going to bring to your culture and add to what you – I feel like give me the mic!  You are completely right.  What people interpret when you say are they going to be a fit with our culture, is would I like to drink a beer with them on a Friday afternoon?  If they’re from a culture that – that’s often how it is interpreted – you are shaking your head but it’s how people interpret it, but it’s very wrong.  So if somebody doesn’t like to drink or chooses their social time – there are a lot of different reasons.  The university I went to was brilliant like this.  You were not allowed to hold anything university related in the bar because there are people who can’t be where alcohol is served so you have to change the mindset from will this person be easy for us.  Diversity is valuable – not because it’s easy but because it’s hard because the simple act of making different view points different demographics and experiences par of your decision making part of the things you create together makes it better so it’s mostly about getting people to change the question from culture fit to culture add; how is this person going to make us better than we are today, how are the arguments we’re going to have about whether accessibility comes ahead of performance or how do we get to have {inaudible}? At the same time those are valuable conversations, not because we’re arguing or dissension is valuable but diversity of perspective and experience leads to better decision making solutions more innovative solutions as well.

CEDRIC KISEMA: I was going to add to that so I don’t drink so every Friday night is oh and I’m lactose intolerance so meet ups with pizza really suck, and quite a few of my friends are too –

MERI WILLIAMS: Cheese haters!

JENNY WONG: I don’t hate cheese it’s just my stomach doesn’t like it.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, we’ve talked about interviewing but you’ve mentioned it and something I’ve seen as well that the problem really is the culture of the companies, so it doesn’t matter if you hire you have better interviews if then people are going to leave work because they’re not happy there and they don’t feel they’re valued.  So how would you solve that or how would you start changing it especially I think a lot of – I don’t know if it’s a lot.  Some themes and some people and some companies don’t even realise they have a problem.

CEDRIC KISEMA: Yes I actually – one idea I got from another company was reverse mentoring where seniors would pair up with juniors and all learn from the juniors, for example let’s say someone who is very much not a programmer but they’re in a managerial role and they actually prepare a programme with that junior and what came out of one discussion someone told me was the senior who was – quite – I’ll say senior – they asked the juniors “why are you finding it so hard, why are you living with housemates, why don’t you just buy your own house?”  London!  {Laughter} So there was this disconnect and I feel like that that is so – so when you do reverse mentoring they learn more about the junior positions and other people who aren’t like them and they can emphasise more and hopefully that can educate them to lead them to making more decisions that care about inclusion.

JENNY WONG: One of the things I do quite often, I am well-known in the PHP community but one thing I really like doing is every 3 to 4 months is picking a random conference I’ve never been to and going to it just as an attendee.  It’s always really interesting because it reminds me what it’s like to be a new attendee at a conference.  It’s what makes me really aware of how new people feel at my conference.  And experiencing that and reminding yourself of that is really important and also listening to other people’s stories and not just like listening but paying attention to what they’re saying and also not just the words they’re saying but the emotions that it brings up.  So I spoke at alter conference in Dublin and I think it was last August now and I went there and it was really cool because I met so many different people who actually explained the situations that tech puts them in and they’ve heard about this stuff on blogs, on web-sites, I’ve read about it, I’ve seen them on twitter talking about it but when you hear them talk and hear the emotion in their voice it’s a completely different experience and because they’re talking from their own personal experiences you can really feel the pain that they’ve already been through and it makes you more empathetic as a person to – decisions that me make in tech that you are just not aware of, for example today a lot of people came up to me and said you know you’ve got those boxes in the men’s bathrooms and I’m like yeah, yeah I know, are they meant to be there?  Yeah, yeah they are.  And they look at me for 5 seconds.  And it say trans.  And that’s the only way I say.  Then hey yeah of course.  Then they carry on and move on.  It’s breaking that assumption, breaking that mentality.

JESSICA ROSE: So were you interested in what as talent you can do if you are coming into a team where there is either not the awareness that change needs to happen or not the will?

FROM THE FLOOR: I’ve studied engineering and I’ve been in IT for a long time, different roles, support and all sorts of different things, and I haven’t actually seen any change in 20 years.  And I’m worried at the moment my daughter is very good in IT.  She is only 13 and she is good at science as well and I am thinking she would be good at a job like this but what’s it going to be like for her?  I’m okay because I’ve grown a thick skin and I use the fact that I’m different to my advantage because I think people will remember me, so for me I have learned to turn it into a positive.  But I don’t think it’s good enough to improve the interview system or to try to get more girls into stem or more minorities if then when they get to a job the same attitude persists and so I think that is the important thing because you can make a big effort to get them there but if they’re unhappy they won’t stay and so it is going to be a wasted effort.

JESSICA ROSE: So yes this is not the most positive point but it’s a really valuable point that if we were just to look at gender which is very, very cheap it’s not the best way to do it but it’s the access I have the most data on numbers of women in technology the past 30 years have gone down quite a bit.  It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse and yes for those of us who stayed in oh I’ve just learned to manage this or – and it is not something that’s optimistic.  For individual talent where they say do you know what I don’t see people in management, people in my company don’t think this is a problem and there is no will to change.  Leave those jobs if you can.  Not everybody can.  That’s a huge privilege to be able to say I’m just going to get another job.  It’s massive. And it’s such a huge luxury and it’s unreasonable – if you can leave a job and change to a job where there is meaningful change and everything is okay those places are so rare.  I would love to tell you this are going to be better but I’ve got a back up burn out career waiting for me.  Almost everybody I know who’s been doing this a while has a “am I going to keep doing this?”  Moment.  And when I talk to people especially when I mentor one on one I don’t think I’ve said this on camera before, I try and tell folks who are under-represented in tech that they don’t need to stay, when you are ready to go you should go.  But it doesn’t fix anything for the industry but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of under-represented folks to fix the whole industry.

FROM THE FLOOR: That’s why I asked what do you do in the companies?

MERI WILLIAMS: As someone leading an organisation let me speak to that.  It is getting better because I originally helped run a summit for director and above women in engineering and there were a whole – like we, ran out of space, there are increasingly folks who are, who are from less, from underindex background who is are starting to leave these organisations, you bet your fucking life I am having conversations about inclusion, audited every company I have joined to assess pay gap problems and to try and fix it.  I agree it is not, nobody has to do emotional labour for the sake of the industry and you should not burn yourself out because you feel like you are alone and that you are fighting.  But, there are places that are getting better, there are place that is are better and finding an opportunity to be somewhere, where they are working on these things and it is a becoming a better environment.  It is possible.  Yes it is possible to leave somewhere and find better places but these places exist and look for them and try and find if you are in a place when I was a lot more junior, a lot of way I made change happen was part of a employee network, adding fresh pressure to fix it, I help runed a LGBT … in Proctor and Gamble, for my career to proposal progress, I had to move to Cincinnati or Singapore.  If I had to move to Cincinnati, … if I had to move to Singapore they had … I had a difficult conversation with the company; choosing between my life and my wife was not a positive career change for me.  There are people who have the conversations, they don’t require people in IT to progress in the company, one thing I did while I was there, to help that to be true.

JENNY WONG: One thing, I went to FOSDEM two years ago, thousands of people, a lot of people and brain pain so much information you take it in.  One of the keynotes by a lady called Karen.  I don’t remember most of the talk, I remember a part where she says, if you see something wrong, just say that is not cool.  Or ask why did you say that?

When you do that, when you question people for the snarky comments they say, they don’t realise, say, how can you say that?  I am being curious, then people double check themselves, oh I didn’t mean that.  It is something that just not minorities have to do, it is something everyone can do and support each other on.  I think there is a lot of people who want the best for their companies and for the tech industry as a whole.  But a lot of us stay silent, a lot of us don’t make actions about how we feel.

I am lucky that I am blunt, I am lucky that I am never going to change that because my parents tried that and and I failed, I am loud.  My company accepts that, it can get me in a lot of trouble all the time.  What I have learned is that when you are bold and when you just ask questions to why people have said something or written something in a particular way, either you are going to understand the reasoning behind it.  And you are going to accept that because you think it is okay, or have a discussion about that and starting that conversation is going to trigger change, triggering change in the way people think.  That is one of the major things that we need to do as a whole at least.

WENDIE: I have one final question from this sir at the front row we have to wrap it up, we are far over time.  I will give him the mic and one of you the chance to respond, then we are going to finish.  Please, have a good question or a good remark because otherwise I am looking really stupid!

FROM THE FLOOR: Yes okay.  I have 3 points and they are not really questions.  But they are 3 practical things that any of us can do or influence or ask for at our companies.

NEW SPEAKER: stand at the front.  Come on John.

FROM THE FLOOR: Our companies from certain roles collected data about peoples, how they were personality type and so on, on metrics against their performance in the jobs, then started reselection for interrues based on the characteristics and interviewed them in a mixed gender, mixed diverse Panel and hiring moved to 51% on the gender scale.  That really works.  So objective metrix for jobs.

First a friend of mine runs an agency, decent, represent, very he has a total revelation about this.  Unconscious bias training is something that you can ask for, that you can do, that you should suggest that your country leadership does and it is having a tremendous effect and points out things like on your hiring page, not only should you write a a good job description, not have a photo of 20 something’s as company culture, if you are a mother, parent, older that is not fun or interesting.

I had a third point  — which I think I forgot but that is good enough.

There is practical things we can do.

(APPLAUSE).

WENDIE: I am taking everyone’s mics.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: I would like to thank all the panelists, I felt we could talk about this for  —

WENDIE: We have hours at socials to talk about this.

ELIZABETH S BARKER: Thank you very much to all of you, thank you for attending and thanks to WordCamp London for having us.  (APPLAUSE).

Thank you Wendie for MC’sing.

MERI WILLIAMS: I won’t be able to go to the social.  …

NEW SPEAKER: Do you have Moo card discounts.

MERI WILLIAMS: Of course I do!

WENDIE: Thank you, drinks are in the other building please, join us.  It was great.  Having you here all day.  Thank you and good night.