Oh, wow.
Good morning, everyone.
Before I start, I have to warn you that my slides have an a lot of flashing content.
As usual, if you've seen any of my talks before.
If you're sensitive to that, please take extra care.
I am a site reliability engineer.
I work for the Financial Times.
We are a news organisation.
One of the best.
And if you haven't guessed from the title, and Meri's introduction, I will be talking
about the enduringly hot topics of diversity and inclusion today.
Right now, some of you going, oh, here's another straight white able-bodied cis-gendered random
with an EU passport trying to preach, but I beg you to hear me out, because this is
my hill to die on.
Around the time I started as an engineer, at the FT two years ago, at tech Twitter and
mass media were arguing about the fact whether I'm a woman makes me a worse engineer.
Two years on and a lot of - from sexual harassment to balancing a binary research tree as an
immigration tree only if you're black, tech is still a hostile place for a lot of people.
By the way, this keeps happening, by coincidence, and this only ever happens by design.
So, in tech, in 2019, someone's gender, their skin colour, religion, disability, sexual
orientation, social class, geography, and age can give them more opportunities for access
been in 2019, some people in tech have to work ten times harder to get in the same place.
This is a horrible state of affairs.
Latency get asking why is that and how can I - let's get asking how can I help?
I started by listening to all sides of the argument.
First of all, I notice that people talk about numbers a lot.
Every year, the Financial Times release s internal diversity and inclusion report to
the public.
The FT globally employs slightly more women than men.
This balance has shifted since I started in 2017.
At the senior management group level, female representation is 45 per cent.
And this brings us closer to our gender parity target for 2022.
So companies love talking about targets.
People love hating on them.
Because some say that diversity quotas are anti-meritocratic because it is unfair to
have numerical requirements for hiring people based on attributes like ender or race.
Have you heard the words she's only hired because she was a woman or I was hired because
I'm a token person.
I have two problems with quotas.
First of all, having them can make it seem like fixing diversity is your HR team's responsibility,
nobody else's.
That is clearly false.
But secondly, quotas can trick us into thinking that our work is done once we've hit this
magical number, and then boom we fix inequality.
This is obviously false.
Let me illustrate.
One of my favourite TV shows is Madmen, about an ad agency called Stirling Cooper in the
late 1950s in New York City and they have perfect gender parity.
Every ad man has a secretary.
You can't take company's diversity stats at face value.
You have to ask extra questions about what the balance really looks like, like what about
the pay gap?
In the UK, nine out of ten women work for a company that pays them less for the same
job, and half of men work with companies with a gender pay gap of more than ten per cent
in their favour.
That's not quite fairness and equality.
Before we get rid of all our diversity quotas, you have to ask: do we live in a society where
privilege plays no part in opportunity?
No.
Does merit today truly equal effort plus ability?
Also no.
And as long as this is true, diversity quotas are necessary, and they may also be our own
way of achieving a world where they're obsolete.
Something else I noticed that we tend to talk a lot about men and women in gender balances
and this is because we spent thousands of years shaping and rationalising these gender
roles.
It's 2019 now, and this conversation needs to shift, because demographics are not binary.
They're a spectrum.
If you argue about diversity along one dimension or another, it's like fighting for a diversity
that unequally benefits one group.
This diversity will disregard the challenges at, say, being a person of colour, and a non-gender
conforming or a woman with a disability.
The kind of diversity worth fighting for is intersectional so that more of us can hope
to lead lives free of discrimination and stigma, and it's all about people from different races,
cultures, walks of life, and abilities rubbing shoulders from boot camps to space programmes.
The problem is intersectionality is hard to quantify.
What is easier to measure is money.
We could know this because we have research from major consultancies like BCG and Deloitte
which shows that ethnically and gender diverse companies are more productive and innovative.
This is great to get buy-in but it's good for business and also the line you give to
people who are still interested in making a world better for anyone but themselves and
it's good for business is all you have.
It's good for business is just a bit uninspiring.
It doesn't help us to build diverse work places from the ground up, and we are still lacking
a workable grassroots approach to our problem.
On the ground, we have systemic inequality: access to education employment, and stereotypes
around wealth, gender, and class.
Diversity stats like minorities in the workplace or in public life are a good social barometer
for social justice and inequality, and no-one's going to argue with this because that's basically
admitting you're a bad person.
What do we do when we perceive injustice?
Often, we do nothing.
Often we don't say and do things not for their intrinsic value but what it says about us.
There's a lot of this going on in Twitter, called virtue-signalling.
Don't do.
This comes from a position of privilege and it's unhelpful and sometimes it's so noisy
that we don't notice the progress we've made is not enough and maybe our implementation
is slipping.
Remember the space between caring and not giving a damn is a follow-up and you need
more than a follow-up to create this change.
Most of us strive for self-development when invested in enriching our own lives, and this
comes from the world around us, from gaining something we call diversity of thought and
experience, cognitive diversity.
And we spend most of our lives at work interacting with our colleagues, sharing ideas, making
decisions, solving problems together, socialising.
In other words, we self-organise into networks.
And there's a scientific method of studying just how we interact at work in these networks.
It's called organisational network analysis.
Unsurprisingly, it builds on graph theory.
I'm going to do a quick thought experiment here.
So you're looking at a random simulated graphic model of communication network.
Imagine it represents the senior leadership of the FT.
The nodes are color-coded by gender.
I generated this using our 45-55 gender split statistic.
Now imagine these people have to make an important decision.
Pick any orange node as our CTO.
How many women are likely to be involved in this decision-making process?
I got the idea from a study in the hard avant-garde Business Review, and they analysed in a large
company a lot of these networks.
The study found, for example, in the innovation network, that there were 22 per cent more
ties between members of the same gender than would be expected without give consideration
to gender.
So women are less central than than men, absent in some areas, have fewer ties, so fewer people
seek them out to discuss ideas.
This is obvious if - even if you have as many, you would still a disproportionate ratio of
same-gender ties, because if diversity is bricks, then ... we have biases, and blind
spots which lead to exclusion, and also self-exclusion.
Minority groups, they try to conform often just to cope but to avoid being stereotyped.
They de-emphasise their otherness and dump the traits of - and people in the majority
group put up resistance because they feel favouritism.
Under represented groups face all sorts of things - bias, threats, ambition gaps - these
things wear you down.
That's why for minorities, minorities doesn't translate into professional achievement, because
if diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being glad you're there.
We haven't got the first bit right in tech.
Last year, Stack Overflow tech survey asked 100,000 developers how they valued jobs and
30.40 per cent said diversity was their lowest priority.
They reworded the question this year and it came out by bottom by quite a margin.
Gender minorities continue to rank culture and office environment as a top priority when
considering jobs.
The others of those surveyed cared most about how much they're getting paid.
This survey makes me sad.
I hope it's an eye-opener, but before we all emigrate to the moon, let's resolve that we
are going to take down the barriers, and let's resolve that we are going to make a truly
diversive tech industry.
There's no quick fix.
Here's what you can do.
Start by doing no harm.
Be kinder.
Be more compassionate.
Understand your own bias.
Size up your privilege and keep it in check.
You can use a website called Project Implicit to find out your implicit assumptions about
race or gender.
People who - hire people who care about diversity and inclusion, and hire from under represented
groups.
This is super hard and you will meet with opposition and people will say diversity is
important and we can't lower the bar.
This bar is a super arbitrary consensus reached by a privileged majority and an internal study
at Google found zero - so that means that no-one in tech actually has a working bar
that works at determining whether someone is good, or a bad hire regardless of ethnicity
or gender or any other diversity variables.
Someone will say not minorities are applying.
Ask why and fix it.
Good place to leave out is things like rock star developer and beer pong.
Text.io helps you find out - surely, you will have a long list of bullet-point requirements
but understand that this list selects for the majority who will apply when they meet
a much smaller portion of your criteria.
Minorities will only apply when they meet most or all of your requirements.
Don't have job descriptions with bullet points.
How many under employed single mothers will you hire?
Your job is to build the best team.
You can choose a lot of ways to get there.
If your strategy is to hire the best can date for the role without the consideration of
the wider impact on the team and leaving you with a weaker, less diverse team, then your
strategy is failing.
You need to change it.
You have to reach out to under represented groups.
You can't just expected people to show up.
No-one owes you anything.
Remember that minorities have to prove themselves to a far greater extent than everybody else.
Studies show that men are promoted based on potential, women are promoted based on past
accomplishments.
You can't leave people to it.
You have to support and nurture your people and be there for them throughout their career
and give them opportunities as they grow.
You have to advocate further and remember to give recognition.
Become an ally.
All of us can be allies for each other.
Start by getting comfortable with tampons and pronouns and learn the language to describe
ethnicity, or sexual orientation because this is what matters to people.
Ask and listen.
You can help normalise allyship, especially if you're in a position of privilege.
Look around the room when you're starting something new and making a decision, and make
sure not everybody looks like you.
It goes without saying but treat everyone with the same respect and compassion, without
prejudice, no matter their gender, race, ability or class.
You have to work actively to build and maintain inclusive work places, meet-ups, panels, working
groups, use inclusive language, don't say "guys", respect pronouns, and putting female,
male, other and radio buttons in form.
Speak up.
Maybe they lack the seniority or confidence to demand that a problem be fixed.
Don't be afraid to make some noise and get into good trouble, necessary trouble.
Just do what you do if you weren't afraid.
But stay true to yourself and be true to be someone you're not because you have the power
to foster psychological safety for shows around you, so make it your duty, and take responsibility
for your words, especially as you get further in your career and gain more influence because
people will listen, so use that privilege to support and boost people who need it most.
Listen to people.
Don't interrupt.
Just echo and attribute what you hear.
Make sure you have access to a broad range of views.
Diversify your social media or social circles.
Do it with intention and compassion.
Make the effort to get to know what others are going through.
Don't make assumptions.
You're not a saviour.
Go ahead and join support groups or sort some.
Hold yourself and your team accountable for creating this change.
Because tolerating a difference is not the same as embracing it.
Thank you very much.
That was all from me.
[Applause]
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