Lending Privilege
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Ruby Conference 201735 / 69
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Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:11
All right. Good morning everyone. Welcome to Lending Privilege. My name is Anjuan Simmons and I'm really great to see everyone here. You know, I've worked in software development
00:20
for 20 years and I always think that diversity and inclusion is just going to go away. I'm like, are we still talking about this? But something always happens. You have maybe a woman who works at a software company right about the horrible misogyny and sexism that she experienced. Or you have someone on the other side who works
00:40
for another software company who writes a manifesto claiming that diversity and inclusion is really not worth investing a lot of time in. And no matter where you are on that spectrum, I hope that we can all agree that there are real problems. Technology as an industry has a lack of balance and we see that women and people of color are not represented
01:05
in technology to the same level you would expect based on their percentage of the population. And I think that this is something that we should be concerned about because not only do we have an equal representation, but there are also an unequal distribution of
01:22
benefits like pay, promotions, and positions of power. But this really is not a new problem. A few years ago, back in the 60s, there was this television show that wasn't doing all that well in the ratings. And so there was a lead actor on that show who was, I'm sure,
01:42
concerned about the ratings, but he was also concerned about something else. This actor realized that one of the actresses on the show was not being paid as much as the male actors. And so this actor, because he was one of the stars of the show and was beloved by
02:02
the fans of that show, decided to act. He went to the studio executives and he demanded equal pay for this actress. And he was successful. The actress's salary was adjusted to be equal to her male peers. The television show was Star Trek. The actor was Lillard
02:23
Nimoy, who of course played Spock. And the actress was Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura. Nimoy lent Nichols his privilege. He lent her his male privilege as an actor, but also his influence privilege with the fans. And let's note that also Lillard Nimoy was
02:43
down with equal pay for equal work way before he was called. And I think that Nimoy, by lending her his privilege, he furthered her position as an actress by giving her access to better pay. Now, I'm sure that many of you are wondering, well, what does this
03:03
have to do with Ruby? Well, not unlike the media industry, our industry also suffers from a lack of equality. We suffer from a lack of representation of women, not only in tech companies, but also in leadership positions. And we see that whether we're developing
03:22
code or deploying code, the people working in software don't reflect the world. And there are real consequences to this. And we face the reality that a woman working on a Ruby project today possibly has less access to equal pay to someone who worked
03:42
on a failed TV show in the 1960s. Now, I think that diversity and inclusion can really help a lot of the problems that we see in the technology industry. And the stakes are even higher than ever before. As we work on next generation technology
04:01
like self-driving vehicles and artificial intelligence, we're going to see the negative ramifications of the lack of inclusion in our industry. We all know that technology can be used for great good. We also know that it can be used also for great evil. What happens when
04:21
you weaponize artificial intelligence to possibly influence an election? What happens when you create technology that can be used to attack the power grid of a city? And so we really need to have everyone, as many people as possible, coming and joining software development because we're going to be architecting the future with the code that we build and
04:44
deploy. But if we want to change the world, we first have to change ourselves. And I think that Leonard Nimoy provided a model for how we can address this problem. Keep in mind that Nimoy didn't wait for Paramount to roll out a salary equality program. He
05:06
didn't wait for Paramount to create some kind of diversity group. Nimoy acted. He acted based on his sense of fairness. And I think that that's a great model for how we can help make our industry even more inclusive and diverse than what we're getting
05:25
to today. So I think Nimoy foresaw equal pay for equal work, but he also foresaw a few other things. I think maybe he foresaw this study by ASA in 2009 which showed that based on an academic study that there's a positive relationship between racial and
05:46
gender diversity and the high functioning of a business. So there are real business benefits to diversity inclusion, not just some hippie fantasy where we dance around the campfire singing Kumbaya. Or maybe he foresaw this study by Peterson that showed
06:04
that there is profit in gender diversity. Actually that if you move the number of female leaders to 30 percent from 15 percent to 30 percent, then there's a 15 percent increase in net revenue margin. And I think that the business case for diversity and inclusion
06:25
is very clear. There are multiple articles. I just pulled two to illustrate that there are business benefits to diversity and inclusion. But often we cannot access these benefits because we block people without privilege from coming into our organizations,
06:44
coming into our open source projects and contributing to them. But before we go further, I've been using diversity and inclusion somewhat synonymously, but we have to understand the difference. Let's say you're throwing a party. Diversity is like sending out invitations.
07:05
You get the envelopes, you write down the names of the people you want to come, you might have some friends from high school, you might have some friends from college, you might have your weed guy. Oh, I'm sorry. I got this in Seattle last. Don't invite
07:20
your weed guy in New Orleans. Invite your pharmacist. So you send out all these invitations and you're done. Right? Hey, I sent out the invitations. Well, inclusion goes further. Inclusion is making sure that people feel welcome at your party. It's recognizing
07:44
that certain people had to journey a lot farther than others and therefore you're a little bit more appreciative that they're there. Or it's recognizing that some people at your party don't drink alcohol, so you make sure that there are non-alcoholic options
08:00
available to those guests. Inclusion goes further than diversity. Inclusion requires empathy. Diversity, you just need a stamp. Now, the good news about working in Ruby is that we're all so nice. I mean, Maz is nice, so we are nice. And so that's
08:22
a great advantage if you're working in Ruby and you care about diversity and inclusion. But I really think that we need to weaponize niceness. We need to put that niceness to work and actually figure out how we can allow it to become something that is a reality
08:41
in our everyday lives. Because the sad truth is that we really can't trust companies to solve this problem for us. I think we've seen them try. We've seen big companies with massive resources. They published the diversity numbers year after year after year and there's been almost no change. In fact, there are often changes in a negative direction.
09:04
And I think that often companies put diversity in the HR function. And so often we see these HR departments or maybe even marketing involved in diversity and inclusion. But I think as what we saw with Uber, the sad fact is that the HR department does not
09:23
exist to protect the employees. The HR department exists to protect the company because the company pays for that department. And I think that there are a few exceptions to this, but I think that if we're really going to see change, if we're going to really see diversity and inclusion really happen in technology, if it's more than just a numbers
09:44
game that we publish every year, then it's going to take a grassroots movement. It's going to take people who are like Leonard Nimoy, and I think that there are a lot of Leonard Nimoys here this morning, to go out and act based on our sense of fairness.
10:01
Now the good news is that working in tech, we know about grassroots movements. The open source software phenomenon, this was written several years ago, and so we're all many of you also contribute to it, but Eric S. Raymond was one of the first people to
10:24
actually write a book about open source. And so he saw the miracle of Linux, and so again this is an old story to us, but during the time it was this crazy disruptive project where you took this complicated kernel, you allowed a whole bunch of people to work
10:41
on it, and to get it to become a functioning operating system. And it actually worked. And so Eric S. Raymond compared the open source model to a cathedral, I'm sorry, he compared the closed source model to a cathedral, like a company, where there's top down control,
11:00
all the stitches are centralized, and the people at the bottom have very little power. So he compared that to open source, which is like a bazaar, which is loud, and it's noisy, and it can be kind of messy, but everyone has a voice. Everyone has the ability to make changes, and to contribute to the success of the software. And actually
11:23
he found that the bazaar model actually produced better results. And this book is known for a lot of different quotes, but one of the most popular ones is this one. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But I like the more detailed formulation of
11:42
this, which is this. Given a large enough beta tester and co-developer base, almost every problem can be characterized quickly, and the fix obvious to someone. Now this is written kind of 1980s, so what he's saying is this. He's linking the size of the people working on the problem with the ability to solve the problems that come
12:03
up in the project. And what else is software development but the ability to solve problems? You all exist, you all probably got into software development because you wanted to solve problems. And while I don't think that Eric S. Redman would agree with me, and in fact I've been told he would not agree with me, but this is a statement of
12:24
inclusion. It means that if we make software development, if we make tech this big open and bizarre, where everyone's welcome to come in and help lend their talents to technology, then there's no problem that we can't solve. But the set reality is
12:42
that just like our repositories are protected by passwords, we often keep people out of our companies, we keep people out of our projects, because they lack privilege. And so we often deny people access to our companies, and we deny our ability to access their talent
13:01
and their abilities to help make software the meritocracy that I think we all want it to be. And I think that lending privilege can be a powerful concept to help us spike this, to help us make things better. But before I go further, I want to be very clear about what privilege is not. Having privilege does not mean that you haven't worked
13:22
hard. It doesn't mean that you haven't had the struggle to be successful in your chosen field. But it's kind of like riding a bike up a hill, right? You're pedaling hard, you're sweating because it's hot like today in New Orleans, you got a little cramp in your right leg that you're trying to work through, you're working
13:41
hard. But there are other people also riding up that hill who have obstacles that you don't have to even deal with. In fact, you don't even notice these obstacles because they don't really affect you. And so not only does having privilege give you the
14:00
opportunity to operate without dealing with these obstacles, it also gives you benefits. So let's define privilege. Privilege is access to benefits based on traits that you can possess. And those benefits can be education, it could be getting a job, it could be having
14:20
an area of town to live in where you feel safe. Those are all the benefits of having privilege. You know, it's benefits like when you're being pulled over by a police officer, not having to worry if your life could end because of the color of your skin. It's not worrying about if your hearing aids battery goes out right before you get
14:44
to work if people think you can't do the job because you can't hear. It's not having to worry about being seen late at night at a bar with your partner and then wondering if the people who stumbled across you at that bar the next day may look at you a
15:02
certain way, may question your fitness for working at the company. It's the benefit of not having to change your outfit multiple times in the morning because you're worried about will this skirt make someone doubt my ability to code? Is this shirt, is there too much cleavage? Will that maybe make someone not want to work with me or be afraid
15:25
of me? Those are the benefits of privilege. And I want to harp on that last one because so many women have shared with me that when they are hired for a job, they're really hired to fill two roles. Right? There's one that's the role that they were hired
15:41
for, maybe it's developer, maybe it's QA tester, maybe it's DevOps, but then there's the role of finding all the stereotypes that people have about women in tech. It's
16:01
the biases that people operate in and project upon the women in tech. And so wouldn't it be so much better if instead of doing that, if we let women simply do the jobs that they were hired to do, let's remove that role from, that secondary role from women and let's save them the exhaustion of dealing with these issues.
16:25
Now there are two major categories of privilege. There's what I call birth privilege and these are the privileges that come from the two people who made you. And those are things like your race and your gender, your base level of physical ability, and really everything
16:42
we use to discriminate against other people. So those are your birth privileges. The second category are what I call your selected privileges. And those are things that you choose as you grow. You choose maybe your religion or your education, maybe where you want to work, basically everything that is a lot easier to get if you have access to
17:01
a trust fund. So what I call your portfolio privilege are the combination of your birth privileges and your selected privileges. Now I want everyone to look up here and identify at least one privilege that you have. Maybe some of you have all of them, but
17:20
I think that everyone has at least one. Now if you think about your career, writing Ruby code, how much harder would it be if you didn't have your gender privilege? Or if you didn't have your racial privilege? Or if you didn't have the privilege of going to a good school like MIT or Stanford? Or maybe if you didn't have the privilege
17:42
of being able to hear or to walk around if you were confined to a wheelchair? How much harder would your career in tech be without those privileges? And then think about that. There are people who you probably work with every day who don't have your privilege, but they have to labor under the weight of not being as privileged as you. And
18:06
I really believe that having privilege does not remove from you the responsibility of understanding that others don't have your privilege. And I think that there's a lot of power in lending your privilege to others. Now how can this work? Now these
18:22
are three women. They're real women. I'm going to make up names just to make it easy to describe. Let's call them B, L, and M. And I'm going to go through a couple of explanations of three types of privileged lending. I'm going to give you an example from maybe popular culture, and then I'm going to help you understand how this can
18:41
work at your company. So the first type of privilege that I want to describe is what I call credibility lending. And that's providing visibility to someone without privilege. And you know, LGBTQ people, I've been very privileged to work with many from that community, have shared that it's so hard often to work in tech because we're really a cisgendered
19:04
heteronormative industry. And sometimes members of this community feel like they're not able to fully operate in tech because of the nature of the industry. But I think that credibility lending can really help this. So here's an example. Stephen Colbert
19:20
had a show. You may have remembered it. And so he invited an activist named DeRay McKesson to the show. Now this was before DeRay was really well known. And Colbert switched seats with DeRay as an example of credibility lending. And so by getting the platform, the powerful platform of the Colbert Report, DeRay's profile was lifted.
19:44
He was able to ride that on to be more effective in what he cared about. Now how can this work at your company? Let's take Bea. So let's say Bea is the person in your team who finished that killer feature in your last release. She finished it way
20:00
before anyone thought was possible. It was a bit of a challenge though. No one on the executive team even knows her name. In fact, they often think that since she works late at night that she's one of the janitors. You know, she's had people kind of hold their trash can up for her to empty out. This has happened to me. And so Bea doesn't
20:21
have the visibility that someone of her talents really deserves. So why not the next time you, who have the privilege of often talking to the executive team, why not let her, the next time you have to present to that team, let her join you in the presentation. Why not give her a chance to shine in your company and show the
20:41
benefit that she brings to the organization and let her feel that she has a place in tech. So that's credibility lending. The next type of privileged lending is what I call access lending. And that's providing entry for someone without privilege. You know, women in tech have often expressed to me and they've expressed outwardly that there's a lot of
21:03
sexism in the industry. And so this sexism and even outright misogyny, we've seen very powerful venture capitalists be outed as being horrible harassers of women. And so that feeling of lack of power, that feeling of lacking gender privilege often makes women doubt their place in our industry. And
21:25
that's really tragic because women have so much to offer to technology that we really need to make sure that they stay in our industry. And I think that access lending is a powerful way to do this. So here's the example. So Tracy Chow, the very noted activist for diversity and inclusion, and
21:41
she once told the story of how when she was a student at Stanford studying computer science that she was, you know, struggling a little bit. And she would hear the male students brag about, oh that assignment was so easy and oh I did that lab in 30 minutes and it took her two hours. And so she
22:00
began to wonder about her ability to compete. Well one of her professors said, I want you to be a TA for this class. And she was like, oh look there's no way I'm not going to do it. But this professor persisted and so Tracy became the TA for these CS classes. And that allowed her to see that the
22:21
grades of these male students weren't any different from her grades. And in fact she found that she was actually better in a lot of the classes than they were. And so by becoming a TA, by getting that access, she began to see that she could be successful in tech. So how can you lend access at your
22:41
company? How can you lend access in the orgs that you work for? Well when your company decides who's going to come to a conference like this, why don't you let someone come who doesn't share your privilege? For example Elle spent the last few weeks implementing a better debugger for for your team. Well why not send someone like her to RubyConf because
23:05
isn't this like your third or fourth RubyConf? Maybe you should let someone who doesn't have your privilege come and by doing that they have the opportunity to feel like okay I have a place in tech. I'm seeing all these people who do what I do, who love the things that I love, maybe I do have
23:21
a place here. So that is access lending. The next category of privilege is what I call expertise lending. And that's providing a voice to someone without privilege. You know people of color we often question our ability to work in tech. You know we often don't see ourselves represented on magazine covers, for technology publications, and when you look at the the leadership
23:44
teams of a lot of tech companies, we really don't see ourselves being represented. And we often don't find a lot of us at conferences like RubyConf. And I think that expertise lending can also help fix this. So here's the example. Former first lady Michelle Obama spoke at a conference
24:04
called South by Southwest a couple years ago. I actually saw her husband give the keynote at the interactive part of South by and she spoke at the music part of South by. And so she gave this great quote that I think perfectly explains expertise lending. She said that the next time you're at
24:23
a table, look around the table and see are there voices that aren't like yours? Are there people who don't like you, don't look like you at the table with you? And if not, find those voices and invite them to the table. So how can you do this at your company? Let's say here's M.
24:43
And M is just a great developer. I mean she rocks Ruby code. She is beloved by everyone on the team. People love working with her. She's always in slack answering questions and you know she's like a one person onboarding team. And when people join your organization she's there to
25:02
help them understand okay here's where the bathrooms are and here's where we you know hide the bodies and this is the backlog and here's where the technical debt is and we're working on that. But everyone really enjoys working with M. Well why not the next time your boss has this really plus project that you know that if you can get
25:22
this project done like that's what you want on your resume during performance review time, why not let M have the ability to lead that project? And by lending her expertise you allow her to not only see a place in your company but possibly progress in your
25:40
company. Now those are three examples of lending privilege and it's really easy. It just takes practice. It takes daily practice of doing it and I hope that many of you while I've been talking have thought about other ways that you can lend privilege. And I just want to be clear that lending privilege is really
26:03
counterintuitive but it doesn't mean that you actually lose anything. You just make the benefits that naturally come to you because of your privilege available to other people. And by doing so I think that by spreading privilege we help make
26:21
tech the meritocracy that we all want it to be. We make sure that talent no matter how it's packaged feels welcome in our industry and is able to lend those talents to our companies, to our projects, to everything that we work on in software. You know I think of it almost like investing. I know a lot of
26:41
you probably took finance in college or maybe you have read books on it and one key rule of investing is diversification. That you don't want to put all of your investments in one asset class because if there are problems in that asset class then everything goes down. But if you spread your investments across multiple asset class across stocks and
27:03
bonds and maybe some futures and maybe some international stocks and some domestic stocks then you make your overall portfolio that much stronger because it's more resistant to shocks in the financial industry. And I think that there is diversity diversification that we can bring
27:20
to tech by lending privilege. Now I went to a conference in San Diego a few years ago, no San Francisco, and Common, does everyone know who Common is? I thought that might be my black privilege that I know who Common is. So Common is a well-known performer. I love Common. I love a
27:41
lot of his songs. He's made a lot of bangers. But one of the songs that I like so much from Common is one he co-wrote with John Legend for a movie called Selma. And the course for this song goes like this. One day when the glory comes it will be ours. It will be
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ours. And I think this really summarizes the benefits of diversity and inclusion in tech and why I really believe in this work. You know we had an election last year. A lot of people may have forgotten about that. And during the election the father of a fallen soldier
28:23
offered one of the candidates a copy of his constitution for reasons. And the ACLU offered to anyone who wanted to, and I normally have it with me on stage, I keep it in my bag, but anyone who wanted a copy of the constitution could fill out a form and
28:43
get one. So I did that. I filled out the form and I got a copy of the constitution. And maybe like you I haven't really read it since maybe seventh grade, but it really holds up pretty well. You know you got Article One which established Congress and Congress is always interesting. But Article One
29:03
describes Congress. Article Two describes the executive branch which is different right now. Article Three describes the Supreme Court which most people forget about until something bad happens. But then I got to the amendments. And I realized that
29:21
the founding fathers had built a pull request system into the nation by these amendments. Because you can propose a change and you can get it merged into production. And it becomes part of the constitution. This is cool. This is a cool pull request system.
29:40
And just like a lot of our code, there's a lot of meat in the pull request. And so as I read through the amendments, I saw that well the 13th amendment was there. And a lot of people just think of that amendment as the one that ended slavery. Slavery of black people. But when you read the amendment, you see that it doesn't just make it illegal to own
30:03
black people. It makes it illegal to own anyone. And so as the descendant of black slaves, I'm sure my ancestors rejoiced when that amendment was ratified. But really all Americans could rejoice because they now live in a country where everyone was truly free. And the 17th amendment which
30:24
gave women the right to vote, I'm sure that many women celebrated being let into the franchise. But really everyone should have celebrated that their gender would not be held against them at the ballot box. And just leaving the amendments for a little bit when the Supreme Court a few years ago ruled that
30:42
same-sex marriage is just marriage, I think that everyone could rejoice because there was no longer a legal limit of who you could love. And so our nation has tried over the years to make our union a little more perfect and has tried to address the injustices done
31:02
against women and people of color and LGBTQ people and the handicapped and so many groups that have been historically disadvantaged. I think that we've made progress and I think that we can make the same progress in tech. And I want to caution you that lending privilege is not a silver bullet.
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It's not something that you try once and you're like ah that didn't work or ah that was awkward, I'm done. It's really something that you have to invest in. It's something that you have to put time in to make it real, to really make it work. One day when the glory comes it will be
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ours. It will be ours. Now I'm sure that there are many people in here who hear what I'm saying and you're saying you know what, that sounds really cool but I'm just here to ship my coat, just here to write Ruby code and make sure that it's clean and you know production ready and I'm
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really into all this D&I work and you know this has a lot to do with what I care about on a day-to-day basis. And I get that. I get that sentiment. But I would hope that, and I have no proof of this, that when Leonard Nimoy walked into the offices of Paramount to
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talk about Nichelle Nichols and her salary situation, that if he was asked by one of the executives what does paying a black woman have to do with making a sci-fi TV show, I would hope that Nimoy would say it has everything to do with making a sci-fi TV show. Because I have to believe that the man
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who played a character who represented the power of infinite diversity and infinite combinations that he would know that we have to make our industry one that everyone is welcome regardless of how they look, who they love, their ability to move around. I would hope that he said that. I hope that you believe the same
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thing about tech. So if we want technology to be this great industry, if we want this technology to be truly the final frontier in human development, if we want women and LGBTQ people and the disabled and everyone else feel that
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they can come into our industry and make it better because we're going to break down the barriers that keep them out, if we want that babbling bazaar that Raymond described where no bug is deep, if we want to make our technology companies better by making them diverse and inclusive then we all have a role to play,
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all of you have a role to play by lending your privilege. Thank you.