Translator: David DeRuwe Reviewer: Raissa Mendes
"I'm a problem."
Or at least this belief
was what made me go through three great frontiers in my life,
and I will tell you a little about each one.
As a child, I was very sensitive.
I was very shy, the shyest kid at my school,
at least early on in my childhood.
The world hurt me.
I worried about global warming, world hunger ...
You know that scene with the skinny polar bear
on top of an almost totally melted polar ice cap?
I'd look at a thing like that and start to cry.
The world hurt me a lot.
Being sensitive, I also really liked poetry,
and I wrote poetry in school.
Once, I participated in a contest
and the theme I chose was the drought in Northeast Brazil.
During much of my life, I also sang in a choir,
especially in my childhood,
at a university that is well-known to us here.
When I sang in the choir,
I sang with a group of women.
I had one of the shrillest voices in the choir,
but I thought it was incredible.
I had great pride in my super-powerful voice,
and I thought it was sensational
when my voice mixed with other voices,
with women, with men,
and we formed one body, only happening in that moment,
and in that moment, I felt a part of something much bigger
which resonated for all the world.
With time and my childhood passing by,
I was understanding exactly what it was to be me
in the world I was living in.
Entering into another school,
they told me that poetry and choir weren't "a man thing."
Going through adolescence, I was losing my voice,
or at least, this voice I thought was just so incredible
and had so much pride about.
I was understanding what it was to "be a man" in the society we live in.
I was understanding, and I was hearing that phrase echo
over and over through my head.
It was then that I met bullying,
exclusion,
fear,
and physical aggression -
things that only happen in schools to students who are different.
Seventy percent of all LGBT children ...
because a child, also, may be LGBT -
lesbian, gay, transsexual, bisexual ...
if we don't talk about it,
it won't change ...
Seventy percent of these children,
in school, suffer some kind of physical aggression,
bullying,
some kind of humiliating situation,
and they end up feeling ashamed of themselves.
This is what I felt.
Many times, in my life, I've felt ashamed,
but, mainly,
I felt the shame that my parents would one day feel
if they found out I was gay -
that I am gay.
Many times, I planned escape routes in my head,
and I tried to make up excuses for what they would one day find out.
I remember, at that time, if someone had asked me
if I'd prefer to run away from home or have my parents find out,
I'd have preferred to run away.
That was how great the shame I felt,
and the pain of one day being an embarrassment to my parents,
even though my parents were always incredible people.
This has been proven over time.
One day, while I was away, my mother went into my room
and discovered without a doubt -
we think that our parents don't know, but they always know -
without a doubt that I am gay.
I'm not going to say how!
(Laughter)
Over the following months, what she did with this information
totally changed the future of my life.
Before talking with me,
she spent time talking about it with a psychotherapist.
She wanted to better understand what it was,
how to deal with the situation and how to talk with me.
After this, one day, she came into my room and said,
"Mano, I need to talk with you."
She told me what she discovered
and what she knew.
While I had tears already in my eyes
and a ready excuse on the tip of my tongue,
she came toward me, gave me a hug, and said,
"Everything is fine. I love you, and I'm your mother."
How incredible it would be
if all the parents in the world did this -
looked for information before becoming part of the statistics
of families that exclude their children from home simply for being different,
or families that turn their children into refugees inside their own home -
and it happens a lot.
So, I went through the first great frontier of my life -
the acceptance from the people most important to me -
and it was then I understood that, maybe, I wasn't a problem.
Perhaps, at least for the people I loved,
I could be something good.
Then I entered the job market,
and, in the job market, even knowing this,
even knowing that my family was my base of support,
that I had support at home,
I knew ... "I knew" ... to be successful in life,
I would have to leave a part of me behind,
that even if it wasn't a problem in my family,
it was a problem in the world
and a problem in the work world.
And that's why, every day,
when I went through the company door, I left a part of me behind,
I left a part of Filipe behind.
And that's when I understood how work is for people who are different,
and it was then, too, that I experienced prejudice at work -
those jokes that apparently don't hurt anyone,
that constant male need for self-assertion,
to show that they belong
to a pattern, to a situation,
and that makes us, who are different, always think of excuses,
or of the best way to talk about yesterday's football game ...
I was sure that, if some day they asked me about football,
they would discover immediately
since I wouldn't know what to say.
I would read the newspaper just to come up with something.
Because of this, I don't need to tell you how very unhappy I was
for much of my work life.
Also, because of this,
I thought that my field of work was the problem.
Maybe I wasn't happy doing that work,
so I left a steady job, a career,
and a nice salary for someone my age.
I took one step back to be a trainee with a technology company,
a company very different from where I was working.
It was then that I took two steps forward.
I changed companies,
and the first year working for this company,
I was invited to participate
in an LGBT diversity and inclusion group.
Can you understand what I felt?
Validation!
I was someone who believed there was a problem,
who believed there was something wrong in being different,
but now at work, there is a space
and, in this space, they tell you that not only is there no problem,
but you can be a solution.
Diversity is good.
Diversity brings profits for business, but, more importantly,
makes people more productive and happier.
People want to be there.
We start to like and love Mondays.
When we include
and we think about diversity and inclusion inside the business,
everything gets better.
There is a survey that says
that when gender equity is attained in the work environment,
we get up to a 48% better operational margin for the company.
Diversity and the creation of safe places
are totally tied to people being happier,
and this is totally tied to having more innovative spaces.
It was then that I passed through my life's second big frontier:
the validation of being who I am during the daily eight hours of work,
in that space we always think of as just a series of tasks,
where we only go to do what we're asked to do,
that we think our imagination and our creativity
must also not cross through the door of the company,
and it requires us to be 100% there.
It was in this moment,
going through this frontier,
that I went from thinking I was a problem for being different,
to being proud of it,
understanding and feeling it,
that I went after this information.
I was trying to understand better what was happening
because you know when we have that sensation,
or we experience something,
or we see a movie, or hear some music that is so incredible
that we can't even sleep for wanting the whole world to hear,
or the whole world to see?
This was how I felt.
This was how I felt when I looked and thought
of all I'd gone through in the process of validation,
and I wanted other people to feel this also,
that those who had felt some kind of prejudice,
or had felt diminished in their work,
could be able to have a space where they could feel this pride.
Then I was introduced to a chart from a study
that is very meaningful to me because it tells me a lot
about the number of ideas with relation to time
created by diverse and non-diverse groups.
Basically, you see, from this graph,
that more diverse groups, over time,
create many more ideas for different problems.
Less diverse groups, fewer ideas.
It's easy to understand why
when we try to compare, for example, this audience
of people so thirsty for knowledge, wanting to learn,
so different, women, men,
LGBTs or not,
and we compare with, for example, our federal government,
where we have people who are very much alike
wanting to resolve the problems of a country so pluralistic,
where we don't have all the innovation that we need.
Diversity generates innovation, wherever we are.
Being who you are generates results mainly for yourself.
I looked again at this graph and it told me a second thing.
I could see
that these two groups also represent something very important:
the company
and the world.
I also found this second main part very interesting,
where we see there is a time difference
between the creation of ideas and the start of the creation of ideas
of a diverse group and a non-diverse group,
and it was here researching, I realized about
the second most important part related to diversity.
Using a survey of a big technology company,
I discovered that, inside your most productive groups,
of your most productive teams,
what was the main characteristic of these teams ...
The main characteristic of most successful teams is psychological security,
and, from there, everything makes sense
because it's no use having diversity in the workplace
if we don't have a safe place for people to be who they are.
Inclusion,
psychological security, and safe space
are what make us really able to express ourselves,
and to be really able to assume risk
without fear of being judged,
and, if we make a mistake,
to have the problem put on top of our diversity,
"Ah, she's a woman, so she did that."
"He made a mistake because he's gay."
This happens all the time.
They are places with less prejudice, more inclusive environments,
more horizontal relationships, collaboration,
diversity, and inclusion.
It was then that I also understood this gap between the two groups,
diverse and non-diverse,
and the path that we still must take to change the world
that is so pluralistic, but so little inclusive,
and the power and potential we have
when we are able to make and have an inclusive world,
of innovation and everything else.
Prejudice is here in the middle,
and it is the grand frontier we must pass through.
Other important information
is that, only because of structural machismo,
we lose 12 trillion US dollars per year in underdeveloped countries
for the simple fact that women can't enter the labor market
because they are placed in informal employment situations,
or simply are only inside the house.
Then I looked at this reality
and went through my third big frontier:
my privileges.
I understood that, even having gone through all that I had,
I was still a man, white, cisgender -
in other words, not trans -
I have family and friends,
I don't have apparent physical deficiencies,
and, because of this,
I looked at the world and I understood
that my place in the world was to use all that I had learned,
recognize my privileges,
and from this point, create groups, bring people together,
and use all my efforts and all my passion
to really create safe environments for everybody,
to really give a voice back to people who have forgotten theirs.
I learned and rediscovered my own voice,
and I understood I would be really ashamed -
the only shame that I could have -
if I sat by with my privileges and didn't do anything.
So I did totally the opposite.
Because of this,
I soon turned into a leader in this LGBT diversity group at my company.
I created and led other groups,
but, mainly,
I created other leaders and brought together people,
and I did nothing alone.
In the world, we don't do anything alone;
the big things are conquered together.
More than this, I was recognized,
but this global recognition is not as important
as the recognition of the story I want to bring to you,
the recognition that diversity and inclusion are important,
the recognition of our own voice,
the recognition that this isn't a problem,
that being colorful, being different isn't a problem -
it's the solution.
The world still hurts me,
and it's still full of prejudice,
but prejudice is a big barrier, and it's a big frontier
that we have to go across,
and we only go across if we all do it together.
Thank you.
(Applause)