It's my distinct pleasure this morning to introduce our third keynote speaker, Janice Levenhagen Sealy.

Janice is the founder and CEO of Chick Tech, which is a national nonprofit dedicated to empowering girls and women in the technology industry and creating a more inclusive technology culture. And we know that here at DjangoCon we are all about inclusivity. This is not the first keynote that we've had about this topic, and it's not at all the first non-keynote talk that we've had at this conference about that.

She holds a BS in computer engineering and an MBA, and her passion lies in creating change to improve women's lives. To that end, she founded Chick Tech in 2012 based on her experiences as a woman in technology and is driven to provide a more positive experience in the technology industry for others. So please help me welcome Janice.

Can everyone hear me okay? Good. Thanks, everyone. It's great to meet you all, and good morning. Before we get started, I would like to have each of you for two minutes introduce yourself

to someone you haven't talked to yet and tell them how you got into technology, specifically who was most influential in your life. I'd love to hear who has an interesting story about how they got into tech that they just

told somebody else. Somebody's got it. I know you do. I would say when I was about nine years old, a friend of my mom's gave me a Mac 512. I don't know if it was Apple or Mac back then. It had a SCSI ribbon sticking out of the back of it, hooked up to a 40-megabyte hard drive, and I started playing with it, and here we are today.

Nice. Who else? I flunked out of college the first time because I had to take a math course. It was a programming course, and I didn't want to do political science anymore. Awesome. Okay, one more.

Those TI calculators, you can program games on those. Yes, you can. That is very true. So my talk today is about the glass walls of technology and why we haven't been making as much progress bringing more people, especially diverse people, into technology.

So when I say the glass walls of technology, what do you think of? The glass ceiling, right? What else? What do you think is building those walls? What different kinds of things are keeping people out?

Yep, the status quo, time, money, education, stereotypes, sexism. What was the... Yup, not-so-healthy culture. Yeah, so basically the glass walls are a lot like the glass ceiling.

They're keeping certain people out. They're allowing certain people in. It's not that great for anybody. And it's not that great for the industry. And the interesting thing about both is that if you're not one of the groups that's being kept out, it's very hard to see as well.

So today what I'm going to be talking to you about is, first, I'm going to talk about my organization, Chick Tech. I'm going to tell you the Chick Tech origin story. I'm going to talk about my life and how different things in my life made me decide to start Chick Tech. And some interesting things that I got out of that.

I'm also going to be talking about the top three issues that I think are holding us back from making more progress on the diversity issue. I have three different activities. I'm hoping we'll be able to get to all three of them today because they somewhat build on each other. And then if we have some time afterwards, we'll be able to do some Q&A.

So Chick Tech is my favorite subject, and not just because I'm the world's foremost expert on it. Luckily for you, there's a time limit to this talk. So I'll only be giving you a very quick rundown.

Like I said, there'll be time at the Q&A. If you have more in-depth questions, I'm happy to answer them. Again, I do know literally everything about Chick Tech. If there's not something I don't know, I actually make it up and then make it true so that then it's still true. I'm also planning on being around afterwards so that you can connect with me.

I believe we have a half-hour break after the keynote, and I'm happy to have more discussions. So Chick Tech is a 501c3. We're a national nonprofit. Our mission, put simply, is to get and keep girls and women in high tech. We've been operating for about four and a half years. We are in 13 cities, actually including Toronto.

I keep saying national, but someday, once we get all the paperwork in order, I'll be able to officially say international. We have thousands of volunteers across the country. We have two sides to our mission, as you heard. We have the pipeline side, where we're trying to get more girls and women into technology,

and we have the retention side, where we're trying to keep the women who are in technology in technology. On the pipeline side, we've been really focusing so far on the K-12 aspect. We've been branching out into elementary and middle school camps in the summer. But our signature program is our year-long high school program.

We bring in 100 high school girls, specifically focusing on girls who aren't yet engaged in technology, but who have the aptitude to do well and get them excited about technology and thinking about themselves as technical. We do monthly workshops for these girls. Our goal with the workshops is to expand their idea of what a technology career looks like.

Rather than just do coding or rather than just do robotics, we do those, plus drones, plus Internet of Things, plus green energy, plus filmmaking. They get really creative on what they want to do in each chapter, which is really exciting.

We also do a one-on-one mentoring program for our participants, where we pair up our girls with men and women in the industry who can help them to look at their different options and understand where they might be able to fit into tech.

On the retention side, we run events through Meetup in a little over half of our cities. And we run a conference called ACTW, which stands for Advancing the Careers of Technical Women. Our goal with all of our events and programs is not just to educate, but to create community, provide a sense of belonging,

and create opportunities for women and girls to get together and learn together. We also do culture consulting for technologies who are looking to become more inclusive. This is a map of the United States.

It's also a map of all of 13 of our chapters. So check this out. If you're in one of these cities, definitely feel free to connect. Our goal is actually to be in 24 different cities by this time next year. And we're always looking for diverse volunteers to help us create those chapters,

lead those chapters, run workshops in those chapters. Our goal is to have all of the volunteers reflect how we want the world to look. So we want everyone, regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of background, working together to solve problems, rather than having this just be a women's issue that women are solving.

Are you still counting them? If you look on our website, you'll see chicktech.org slash locations. And then you might be a little confused, because I believe we only have 10 of the chapters up there right now. We have three really brand new chapters,

and they're not allowed to have their locations up until they get their website up to date. It can't be talking about other cities still. It's just not cool. So there are a lot of different ways that you can get involved in Chick Tech. Volunteering is a big one. We are almost completely volunteer-run at this point.

All of the chapters are volunteer-run. I'm actually the only full-time employee, but we're trying to work on that. As you can see, we have a program director position open. And again, that is open to everyone. We do not discriminate based on gender, because that would be somewhat anathema to what we're trying to do.

We are looking for not just technical volunteers, although technical volunteers are very important. If you have skills in project management, program management, marketing, fundraising, just helping to inspire people and get them excited about the mission, definitely let us know.

As you saw on here, any email for the locations is basically cityname at chicktech.org. So if you're in Atlanta, it's atlanta.chicktech.org. Feel free to reach out to them and see what help they're looking for. Also, funding, of course, as a nonprofit,

most of our donations at this point come from corporations and individuals, especially to run the local programs. We're also looking for hosts. So if you're working at a company that has a space, and you love having people come into those spaces,

we need space for both our high school events and our career events. So now, of course, you're clearly wondering how such an amazing and glorious organization came to be. So Chick Tech is based on my experiences and the barriers that I ran into

as I was growing up and as a young woman doing computer engineering in college. It's basically what I wish I had had at both of those times. So this is where I grew up. This is the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin. And yes, we did have a dairy farm.

We lived about 15 miles out of town, which was the thriving metropolis of Medford, Wisconsin. They currently actually have just over 2,200 people there and we actually lived closer to a town of 500. Medford is actually where I went to high school.

As dairy farmers, especially independent dairy farmers, we were on the verge of bankruptcy almost the entire time. And between that and living in a really rural area, there were very, very few opportunities

for me to get involved in. Even just living so far out and having my parents and I be so busy working on the farm, just driving back and forth was almost too much to ask. I still remember getting these really shiny brochures about these summer camps for gifted youth

that they were inviting me to and I almost didn't even talk about it with my parents because I knew it wasn't going to be possible. Even though they offered scholarships, we still wouldn't be able to pay for the plane ticket and my parents wouldn't be able to deal with the farm without me there during the summer.

So this is one of the lessons that I learned growing up is that even small things can get in the way of your success or of trying new things. And my experience has helped me to create a program that works to lower those barriers and open the door in that glass wall

to youth that might otherwise not be able to join. Our Chicktack High School program is free. We provide all meals that we possibly can. We feed them a lot. I really like food. We provide childcare stipends for teen parents. We provide transportation help as needed

so we either pick up the girls at their school or we provide transit passes that we send to them in advance because the girls that we really want to reach and the girls that can really do something with the programs that we're offering, to them, a $5 transit pass may be a barrier

that they're not able to get over. In 2001, I graduated from high school. Somewhere around there, there was a tech boom and then tech bust. I was not aware of it at the time. Being in a rural public school,

we were not necessarily on the cutting edge of technology in any way, shape, or form. I had no programming experience until I started my first but not my last C programming class in college. As a teenager, you can go through your teen years completely oblivious.

You're basically, of course now we have the internet and I understand that, but a lot of what you're exposed to is what the adults around you expose you to. If you don't know to search for something on the internet or you don't know that something's interesting, you're still not going to find it. The same thing, if you have a library of books,

you can go and you can browse that library, but if you only have Amazon and you just have a search box and you don't know what to search for, the chances of you finding things that are outside what you've been exposed to are much slimmer. Our goal with Chick Tech is to expose the girls in our program to opportunities

that they haven't thought to try yet. We work with high schools and we get high school teachers to nominate girls to our program, again specifically focusing on the girls they wouldn't usually nominate to a technology program but who they feel have an aptitude to succeed in it because the unusual suspects, the girls who aren't choosing to opt in,

aren't going to look at our program usually and say, oh, well I've obliviously managed to avoid all other technology programs, I'm going to magically choose this one now. And so we provide that encouragement through our relationships with the teachers

because it's always really, no matter how old you are, you can be 60 and if you're nominated for something, you still feel pretty special. It's not a thing that just teenagers get. So I'm assuming you all remember how it felt to be, you know, sophomores

and juniors and seniors freaking out about what you're going to do with your life, right? Also, I have a teenage son. That's something I don't really talk about in this but I was actually a teen parent. I had my son when I was 16 and he got me addicted to iFunny and that's both wonderful and really terrible. So I actually found this one like five days ago

and I saved it to my phone just in case I wanted to use it in this talk. So by now you're probably wondering how did I end up in technology when all the signs pointed to me not going in? So it was actually a pretty random comment by my grandma. I was talking on the phone with her one time and she's like, you know, you're pretty good at engineering,

sorry, you're pretty good at math, why don't you try engineering? And I was like, oh, I had never thought of that. And she probably doesn't even remember saying that comment because as an adult you say random things and they make sense at the time but they're not important to you. But to a teenager, especially when you're

freaking out and having no idea because you think you're supposed to choose a career and stick with it for the rest of your life, those kinds of comments can change your path. So one of the things that we see with our participants especially the more at-risk youth

that we serve is that they don't have a lot of adult mentors. And we really make it part of our mission to provide those both formally and informally. We work to have a student to volunteer ratio of three to one because we want every

young woman in our program to have the opportunity to talk to as many people in technology as possible because you don't know when one person that that girl may really identify with or really look up to will say that one random thing that puts them on this amazing path.

So I started college the summer that I graduated from high school. So I knew very little about technology. I didn't know anything about what programming was or even really what it was used for. I had read like, do you remember in guidance counselors or career counselors offices

they had like these books and they had like one page on each career. Anyway, so that's what I had read about computer engineering when I chose it. So that's all I knew. I knew so little about technology and engineering that I didn't realize until I started that I didn't belong as a woman. I had no idea that that

gender gap existed. So my electrical and computer engineering department had eight percent women at the time. I think they've actually gone down a little bit in the last ten years. I graduated in 2006. And I looked around at all the, pretty much all guys and they all seemed so

confident. They had been programming for much longer than I had which was zero so it wasn't really that hard. But I knew that I didn't feel confident. And the way that they were solving problems or looking at problems were different than I wanted to solve them. And I just assumed that how they were trying to solve the

problems must be the right way because they seemed so sure of what they were doing. And the classes were done in a way that wasn't really conducive to my learning. For me personally I have to know the big picture. I need to know what the entire system does and how the parts work

together before I learn the step by step instructions on how to build this particular module. And how they teach engineering is you learn step by step how to create this little module and then you move to the next little module. And then you learn step by step how to create that. And without that big umbrella of knowledge

over how all of that worked together that was pretty lost on me. I mean I still got really good grades but I don't have that, I don't have the knowledge that I feel like I would have had otherwise. And that was very stressful to me. So it felt like I wasn't as good at it as what other people were even though it was really just

how things were taught. On top of all of that it felt like everyone was watching and waiting for me to make a mistake to show that women didn't actually belong in engineering. And it's amazing how important that sense of belonging is to all of us.

It really drives our lives and we don't notice it until we don't have it. And that's a very uncomfortable and stressful feeling. So there's different ways that we search for that community and that sense of belonging. They can be negative where kids bully and tease others to try to fit in. Or

gangs, people are willing to literally kill to get that sense of belonging. Or community and that sense of belonging can be found in really positive ways. And that's obviously what we're trying to create with Chick Tech. Less killing, more community. We're really working to create an empowering and supportive

community that can help combat the discouragement and negativity that the women and girls who are going into technology or looking to go into technology may be dealing with. So I'd like to say that that's all of a sudden where I created Chick Tech but that would make

for way too clean in need of a story. So what actually happened was that I gave in to my imposter syndrome. I had been dealing with some sexual harassment and discrimination issues in the technology industry during college and during my internships. And I chose to leave technology instead. I went back and I got my MBA. And

then I worked for what we will fondly call the worst company ever. And that company showed me the great and useful fact that technology is not actually the worst place for sexual harassment and discrimination. So that's, I guess, good.

I ended up quitting. I did consulting for a year or so. And then I ended up volunteering at a program that was working to get more minority youth into technology. And I left that experience really excited about the ideas that I came up with on how to get more

girls into technology as well. And I used those ideas to create Chick Tech. And that was late 2011 when I started talking a lot about it, which is how I start things. And then in 2012 I managed to get a group of volunteers and we started planning for our first event, which was January of 2013

with 99 girls in Portland. I do really miss coding. It's something I really enjoyed. Especially embedded programming, being able to code something over here and have it change something over here was pretty awesome. But I really like being able to open

the doors to technology to those people who are running into that glass wall. So let's briefly look at why organizations like Chick Tech exist. So here is the state of the industry in two statistics. The pipeline, 18% of computer science majors are women. And in retention

we lose 56% of computer science women by mid-career. So this has been a problem for a while. Right? Like we know, or a lot of us know that the number or percentage of women in computer science peaked in about 87,

88 at 37%. And it's been going down since. And we have a lot of organizations working on this. Why is this problem not solved? Right? It seems like we should just get more women in and then not get rid of them. And then it will magically all be fixed. Right? So I have three

different main reasons that I believe that this is that progress has been that progress has been slower than we would really like to see. One is, and this is a pretty big one, the root of the problem is a global societal issue that has nothing to do with technology.

Two, a majority of people still don't see gender equity as an issue in technology. And three, people have a hard time taking responsibility for the part that they play. So let's break down the idea that this is not a tech issue. We're going to start at a micro level and then go to more global.

So one, we see this issue in way more places than just technology. This is an interesting phenomenon that I had not heard of, but I appreciated that it used the word glass so that it would fit very nicely into my talk. So the glass escalator.

The glass escalator is a phenomenon where men who are in women- dominated fields get paid more than the women co-workers, their women co-workers, and get promoted more quickly. And you can look at that and you can be like, well that's kind of fair. There's not very many of them.

The hospitals are probably looking for diversity as well. It's just supply and demand, right? Except that we don't see that in male-dominated careers for women. If you look at construction, women construction workers aren't paid more. If you look at tech, female tech workers are also not paid more. We still have

a wage gap. And if you look at all of the data, what we actually have is an implicit bias that values men's contributions over women's contributions pretty much across the board. I have not found an exception in this. And it's really interesting because you look at nursing and you think, wow,

that should be in our stereotype of a perfect hospital nurse. You look at them and you think, okay, this is definitely going to be a woman, right? Our stereotype says women are caregivers. Women are nurturers. They're so empathetic. That's who I want taking care of me.

And if that's true, in a career like nursing where we have those really strong stereotypes, how much harder is it like somewhere in technology where we have the stereotype that that's not how women's brains work? As another example,

women represent 53% of new hires and then basically get funneled out of going up the ladder until we get having only 5% of CEOs be women in the Fortune 500.

It's also bigger than just business. When we look at the state legislation, in the U.S., 51% of the population is women and 20% of the population is women of color. But when you look at our legislators, only 25% of legislators are women and only

5% are women of color. That means that women do not have a representative say on issues that affect their lives. So we know we have a problem globally when this map exists. The fact that we have to have a map

that shows us where women are most threatened and least threatened in terms of physical safety really shows this is not just a technology issue. Attitudes towards women across the globe place women in second class citizen status.

They're educated less, paid less, have fewer opportunities and in general are just not valued as humans as much as men are. We live in a world where women are basically sold to older men in marriage as children where there are places that women are not allowed to drive

and there are places where women aren't allowed to show their faces in public. That tells me that women being treated and paid less than men in technology is not just an isolated incident. So I'm not telling you all of this to discourage you and tell you that whatever you're

doing in technology is not worth it. My goal is really to show you that when you're looking for root causes if you only look in technology and at processes and procedures in the tech industry you're going to miss the main root causes and it's going to make it harder for you to have an impact. So just remember

technology does not exist in a bubble and our society supersedes all bounds between these different industries and our communities and our our communities and our society will always affect your industry no matter what it is.

So issue number two. People still aren't seeing the issue. There was a study that came out in March that showed

that 66 percent of men and 30 percent of women in the technology industry believe men and women have equal opportunities in technology despite all evidence and anecdotes to the contrary. I was actually this sounds kind of weird I was kind of excited about this these statistics because I had been talking for a while

about the sense that I got that we had this silent majority of people that are making it so much harder for us to create change. And it's not that they're bad people. They just don't believe there's an issue. And so they're not pulling us back into the Stone Ages but they're anchoring us down and making it harder to make change.

So part of this issue is the meritocracy myth. The meritocracy myth is very inviting right. We all want to believe that we got to where we're at because of how great we are as people right or how how talented we are.

And a lot of that's true right. We all have help you know we all have family members or mentors who helped us along the way and that's great. The problem is is the inequality in who gets those mentors and who gets that help and who has somebody showing them the way to that door in that glass wall.

We have all these people who are different than the norm or different in technology or different than the stereotype who are still outside that glass wall and they can't find their way in to compete on a level playing field. They may have more qualifications. They may have the same qualifications

but those are viewed as less because of unconscious bias. But overall treating technology like a meritocracy keeps people on the out excuse me keeps diverse people on the outside and that makes for a less than great workplace not as great of a product and not the society

that we want. So this is kind of a hard one right because the mentality that this is someone else's problem is really pervasive and a lot of it's because we just don't know how to fix it right. It's a really complex issue it's an issue that goes back

since the dawn of time in terms of gender and inequity and we only have so much emotional bandwidth right. I actually got a book and I was going to put it on this slide but it's the life changing magic of not giving a you know

because we really can only care about so many things before we get emotionally overwhelmed and aren't able to affect change in anything. However regardless of how much emotional energy you feel that you have or don't have to fight for gender equity in tech remember that your actions are what build or pull

down that glass wall every day for others. Unconscious bias is a very real thing and if you don't work to control it it will control your actions and have real consequences for those around you. It may be the system it may be society but those aren't static things created by

someone else. They're created by us and us includes everyone in this room. So who's taken an implicit bias test online through Harvard or whatever? Okay. Who's done a implicit bias or unconscious bias training in person?

Anybody? A couple? Okay. So that's great. I strongly encourage all of you to do so. I'm planning on sending out these slides later so feel free to grab these links or look for them on the internet. The links right there.

So implicit bias is very important in terms of looking at how we can improve our how we can improve our workplace and in general our society.

It's a taking the implicit bias test and looking for different trainings and learning more are really important and essential first steps. It will help you to set yourself up for examining your thinking and understanding how that might be playing into your life so that you can start changing

it and in general being able to create change. Once you take it don't stop there. What they've actually found is that people who take an implicit bias test or do just a one hour unconscious bias training are actually less likely to make a change because they think that since

everybody has it and it's something that they can't control they don't have to change and that's not true. Just one person choosing to stand up in their company or at a conference or in their neighborhood will create change. You may not change the world but you may change the world for one

person and in doing so you can start breaking down your part of that glass wall. Okay so this is our first activity. We're going to be looking at stereotypes in tech and in general in your life. I'd like to have all of you

get together in groups of three or four depending on what works out best for your area and take about five, seven minutes to talk about what stereotypes you see in technology and business and how do you think that these are negatively affecting people and the business or

tech industry. So does anyone have any interesting stereotypes that may not have been typical ones that people thought about or that other people may have thought about that you'd like to share in the dark?

We're apparently keeping this anonymous. So I definitely there's a lot of ageism in tech so like there's a lot of companies in the tech industry that think that just young people are smarter or better and they possibly don't want to hire people who are older because maybe

they're set in their ways or they're not culture fit. So I think that's that's something kind of prevalent that we have to watch out for. Yeah definitely. I was reading something that said that you basically are over the hill in technology once you reach 30. Which is crazy.

We have several people who are not too old right now. So my current company which I actually like a lot despite this complaint a lot of the folks who were there when I was originally hired were big into sports and going

out drinking and they would just get blasted a lot. And that's not my thing. And they weren't really into board games or RPGs or you know sorts of stereotypical geeky things that I think a lot of the people who showed up at board game night at least are into. And

it's actually been quite nice as more people have come on to the company being able to find people who are geeks. So I realize that's odd in a tech thing that I couldn't find geeks. But a lot of them really were you know sports bros kind of guys.

The converse of that I guess actually. So definitely programmer culture is a thing. But also the stereotype that being nerdy makes you a better programmer. I don't think it does. All right.

One that we discussed was around paternity and maternity leave and the assumptions that the mother is going to want to stay home or the father is going to be useless during that time and therefore shouldn't get as much paternity leave or just everything in our culture around what happens when you have a child. Yeah definitely.

One more. We were saying about when you you're expected as a programmer to work and code at your job but if you're really into it if you're one

top programmer you also have to have side projects related to coding. I mean you can have hobbies outside of it. You're a really good programmer. Thanks everyone for doing that exercise. Our next one

is around micro affirmations. Has anyone heard of micro affirmations or micro inequities or microaggressions? Yeah a pretty good majority of you. So micro affirmations in general I found that people have heard of microaggressions but possibly not micro affirmations. So microaggressions

or micro inequities are often subconscious things that you're doing to tell other people that they're not as valuable or not as not worth as much or that they don't belong and you don't even realize that you're doing it. Micro affirmations are a way that you can

change how you're behaving but not through policing yourself until you can't do anything around anyone but rather changing it by doing something really positive. So what I'd like to have you all do probably in your same groups feel free to mix it up if you really want to is look at some of these

interesting situations where negative stereotypes might come into play and say you had the opportunity you know you're standing in the line at a grocery store or you're at a tech event or you're at you know helping you work at a hardware store I don't know but

what you know you had the opportunity to engage in a really brief conversation with that with these people and what how could you give them micro affirmations that acknowledge their value or accomplishments or their ability to belong as you know rightfully in that group and promote feelings of inclusion and caring

and then how can you use this concept in your workplace to fight the stereotypes such as what we just talked about in the last exercise. Thank you. So we are almost out of time but I'd like to hear from just two people really quick on

if if in your group there was a really interesting micro affirmation and or how you might want to use that in the workplace. Can we please stop saying guys just say y'all instead.

One thing that got brought up in our group that I think applies to multiple of these is if you see someone in a non-stereotypical situation right you see a woman at a hardware store or a woman at a meetup don't ask if you can help them but ask what they're doing. Oh what project are you working on or you know what are you building not

hey can I help you with that. So I don't think we have enough time to do activity number three but I'd love for everyone to think about this and you know just in general

keep in mind what you've learned today and see what kinds of just little changes you know even those little micro affirmations if you could do one of those a day and help people feel more welcome that would be a pretty big change especially for that person who received that.

I do have some interesting resources a couple different terms misrepresentation has anyone heard of this film has anybody watched it. Yeah it's a really good it's also really angering but in a good like righteous way I think so keep that in mind but it's on Netflix

as everything should be. But that will definitely change the way you look at our media and how women and girls are portrayed in it and especially if you have children of the girl variety you'll want to watch this because you'll these are things that you'll need to counteract as as parents.

And this is the last thing that I would like to leave you all with let us make our future now and let us make our dreams tomorrow reality. This is actually on the back of our last year's t-shirts which was awesome. Thank you.