Coding Like a Girl by Gabriela D'Ávila

Speaker 1: Hello, I'm Gabi. Actually, it's Gabriella, but it's kind of hard to speak my name in English, so Gabi's fine. I'm Brazilian. I came from São Paulo. I was the only dot on the world map from Jackie Stock from Brazil there, so that's me. I would like first to thank the organizers for being so aware of the of diversity that they bring me here to help you to to improve the discussion I must say I'm pretty impressed about the amount of women that I saw on this conference. I'm used to I used to see 10 women out of 200 in some conference that I went to. Jeff just showed me that we have almost 21%

Speaker 1: of women. I think it's almost 90 women here, so that's nice, nice to see there Uh so thank you thank you again and congratulations for the effort. A little about me, you don't know me. I'm not a jungle developer, not a Python developer. I am a PHP developer. I work sometimes with node to. I also don't have a degree in women's studies or anthropology. All of this is my own interest in the subject I have a passion for tech in technology. I major in digital game development, but I don't work with that. I'm a web developer, as I said And I usually in my spare time I play with Legos. I have like 25,000 pieces.

Speaker 1: So yeah. Yeah, that's a lot. I know I a little overboard on that. But there 's this new Lego set, there's a QIK e-mart from Simpsons. I wanna buy it, but trying not to. It's hard. But let's see So, what do we expect from this talk? I want to talk about diversity and how bias can influentiate our decisions and what do I mean like a girl? some companies diversity reports and how diversity is important to a company and some initiatives that are that are made and to some or sponsored by other companies.

Speaker 1: I don't want to talk about how one gender is different from another. That's not what this is about. And this is about how both genders working together can make a better better workplace. So diversity. When I was a teenager in my biology class, one of the few things I learned because I'm not really going in biology was that uh about diet DNA diversity. You see species that have the most diverse DNA have better chance of survival. We can see that in bacteria for instance where they uh can appropriate other DNA from other bacteria to improve their own survivability

Speaker 1: Although this is not 100% uh analogy, I think the idea is the same. The more diverse you are, the more chance you have to do something great. You have different types of diversity. You have gender diversity, you have racial. In gender, I don't just mean male or female, you have a lot of transgender transgender people too. and ethnic diversity, also sexual orientation diversity. I was at Apple Store Last year and I saw a girl working there. I I think she was musling. She was using the hijabeth. I think is that's the name And I thought that's awesome because they're not discriminating her because she's female and not and not because of her religion.

Speaker 1: She's just working there like anyone else. I think that's that's great because you're not limitating limitating someone in what they believe or what they are, but in what they can do to help you. That's I think that's the the thing that people should look for. What you can do to a team to help you improve Bias is the we all we all have it. It's it's the no notion that what we believe that people shouldn't or shouldn't do We have this set of parameters that we built through our life experience and sometimes this up if a person doesn't feed the parameters

Speaker 1: you get like confrontation and or even get anger towards someone or get some kind of hatred. This and it it is in a fundamental level what prejudice is like. You get your bias can cause you prejudice. And these preconcept concepts determine your act your actions. So even though you think you have any Any prejudice you may be discriminating someone because they are fat or because they are old and you don't even notice it. You just do it without noticing Uh some some time ago someone I noticed that people wouldn't sit down to me on the train. At the time it was way way more than I do today.

Speaker 1: But because I was fat, nobody would sit down next to me on the train. And I noticed when I lost weight that people now sit down next to me But I don't think they were like I'm not going to sit next to the fat girl. I think maybe they did but okay some people don't even think and you can maybe do that people of color or people from other religions for instance. And it's sometimes it's so deep inside us that it may be disguised as a compliment. You know you're pretty competent for a developer girl. The person who said that I was trying to make a compliment, but why? Because I'm a developer girl or I can you are you implying that I'm I'm not good enough to be competent?

Speaker 1: What do you mean? So, because of that, there is this project from Harvard University called Project Implicity. They research the gap between intentions and actions. by measure the response time between proposed situations. For instance, they have a test that you can tell you can measure the Gender versus the science to see where your align your inclinations are. So they put a couple words that are female or male and a couple words that are science or liberal arts. And you have to associate them. And according to your time response, you want they will see you they will tell you how

Speaker 1: aligned you are. For instance These are the kind of tests they have. They have a lot more. I just this is the one that fits the slides. And I did this last one and did this talk last year and I did this test today again. And these were my results. Last year I I were more inclined to the 6% of the population that did this test. I had more associate I associated more women to science than female with than male There is some explanation for that. In my case, for instance, I study in some since I was 12

Speaker 1: in a school who our STEM area were more focused. So we had a lot of women there. So for me it's more natural to have more women, but for the majority of people it isn't. to the 26 and 28 % of the majority that associates men with science than women. And today I did the test again and I was like, yay, I got the neutral position. That's what Usually should be everyone should be that one. You shouldn't have any kind of association between gender or and academic domains But I think that's more because I am more involved in community now, more aware of people 's needs. So you kind of get sensitive to to what people can say and you you change that.

Speaker 1: I think if you care you're you'll you start to change So why like a girl? This has something to do with uh with a story that happened to me two years ago I was working in a company. That's why I bought so many Legos. I they made me work like 16 hours a day. And when I got home, I didn't want even to look at a computer. I just wanted to do something that had enough to do with computers, so Legos And we are having this problem. It affects about sixty percent of our Customer base and the problem involved money. So every time that a problem involves money, a lot of people get

Speaker 1: running after you for you to solve And my colleague was working, he was responsible for fixing because this was a part of the project that only he had work. I didn't have any knowledge of it So every five minutes someone would go through the door and ask, did you solve it yet? And every time, every five minutes, people from financial, from HR, from every single part of the company. So we close the conference room, turn on the big TV. And we started debugging the code. After eight hours debugging together, we fixed the problem, tested, patched.

Speaker 1: and deploy it to the to the production servers. Everything was working good as new. I was tired, I couldn't see more code in my in front of me for like two days would you it it wouldn't be enough if I had to see it again. But he stops, looks, looks at me seriously and says, you know, you're pretty intelligent for a girl. And I was like, I beg your pardon And he was serious, he wasn't joking, he he really thought it was a compliment. Because he's my friend, I had some liberties

Speaker 1: with him. I could say some stuff. But it's I can't tell now because of the time. But I wasn't mad at him because um I knew he he meant well. I I knew I knew what his intentions were. I like him very much and many cases he stood up for me, helped me. So I didn't take offense, but it really stunned me Nobody had it was the first time that anybody had said that to me. People had called me stupid before, but like they weren't trying to compliment me they were just trying to offend me this was just the first time that someone tried to compliment me and they offended me so

Speaker 1: and that got me thinking Uh as as women, we can't fail. We don't have the luxury of fail. We do fail. Everybody notices because you made the mistake because you're a woman. You're because you're a woman. That's why you made a mistake. How many times have you got like so worried about doing something so wrong and you after just just paranoid? You notice they were just paranoia And how many times have you heard women can drive? Like, I'm Brazilian. People that just scream on the street all the time, women can drive, like

Speaker 1: horn. Yeah that's they're they're pretty vocal about that and they're pretty vocal about this too in the IT industry there. So If you're women you can't fail. So you get paranoid because you can't fail you is you work harder And other times you hear, oh you're a woman and you work with IT. That's cool. What do you do? Testing or customer support? Okay. There's a lot of uh quality assurance people that I know they're really really good on they do. I I can't do what they do. I'm not like discriminating them, but you have more racial

Speaker 1: women working there. Same goes to front end. A guy once when I told him I was a developer, the first thing he asked me, are you a front-end developer? Like It was his the fastest response I ever seen. Because you know design and stuff. Oh, let's see I think that he doesn't know Angular or React. js because I don't know that stuff. I wish I knew, but I don't So we have these associations just because you're women, you have all these expectations because you are women. That really can have a uh a weight on your shoulders for

Speaker 1: working in this field And I think that for the past three years you see more companies worrying about that. And they started to release this diversity reports. I'm going to talk next. And I I think this culture is more common here in America. Everything is like a girl. You punch like a girl, drive like a girl, and Brazil you just call someone a fag even though you're they're female you just call them a fag and it's the same same thing as calling someone like a girl here it's that's the same effect here And as a matter of fact, I do everything like a girl

Speaker 1: because I am a girl. I eat like a girl, I work like a girl, I call like a girl. Because I am a girl. I me I mean I'm twenty-eight, I'm not a girl, but you get the jest But another impact here is whereas the male lead developer in our industry can be demanding or perfectionists. We women if we are demanding or perfectionists, we are bossy. And to put it mildly, I heard other stuff, but usually bossy they tell. And I was working at this company, I was the only female in 30 developers And she said, I had a coach and she said to me, you know, you have a great responsibility here. I always said, how so?

Speaker 1: As the only female on the team, you need to become part of it without losing your identity. So they can learn how to work with women without treating you like a man. And how many times have you heard a sexist joke and just ignored it because if you bring that Try attention for your boss or someone else, he will say to you, Ah, quit complaining and just suck it up Or you don't want to be that girl, the girl that complains, the girl that makes everything for a case, but this isn't healthy. So what she was saying to me is I need to make my colleagues respect me because I'm a woman and treat me like a woman

Speaker 1: And I said to her, this is a lot of responsibility. I can't do that. It's more easy for me to just let it go. And now she you have to do that. And I mean I like to think that I succeeded. They they treat me very well. Sometimes they do one joke or not another that's out of place, but I I don't know, they are too young. I think that's more because of their age but then because of their gender. Yeah, like 20, 21, they don't know And most of the diversity reports I'm going to show here are from Google, Apple. Google, Apple, Facebook, and

Speaker 1: Two year I forgot it. I had Yahoo, but they didn't he release their ch 2015 diversity reports. Funny thing about Yahoo, they don't they count transgender people separately because that's not just binary. I find that cool because you have a different statistic there You can see that nothing changed, really. But the good news is nothing got worse, so that's okay. Yeah. It's no worse, so that's uh that's improvement. Um you see that Twitter has four points more and percentage it's such real relative

Speaker 1: measure measurement because if you have one person and you have got two persons you get 10% improvement. So It's hard to to tell how how many how much relevant is this. But let's say it is, just for the sake of argument And so in all areas, most companies are have the same. You can grab these reports directly from their company 's web pages. It will have not only gender reports but uh race and um ethnicity too so it's nice to see. In fact, things got worse it's worse Twitter had 10% before

Speaker 1: and they got 13%. Now I I just read an article today From Intel they doubled the number of minority hired there. But they got a program where if you refer someone that is from a minority and that person gets hired, you get four thousand dollars. So money is a good incentive. And but okay, it it it it they had results and I think that's this companies in general have really hard uh process of admission. I I mean I try Amazon a few times and every time I fail, so that's okay. From the

Speaker 1: the Apple perspective, the number is curious because Apple counts a little differently. Every female saleswoman Every sales woman on the Apple Store is counted as a tech hire. I'm not going to discuss if it is or is not a tech hire because for I try to see here as a software engineer, database , specialist, stuff like that, not like salesperson, but It's their right to count as that, I think. But that's why their number it's higher than the others Notec it's more balanced except for Apple. You see Facebook got five percent more hires from

Speaker 1: This year last year for this year. And to be honest, I don't think the 50-50% it's tangible. I think you should aim at that, but You won't be able to get that and if you do, it's like more of a casual casuality than like a result of your efforts because it's just such a magical number And I think if you aim it between 45 to 55 ratio, I think it's a good thing because 5% it's not that 10% is not a high of difference from one another. And about high level. High level it's uh they call senior hires or people managers, uh CEOs, CTOs, people like that.

Speaker 1: A study for Anita Borg shows that companies that have more women on the t on on top positions, they have better uh better work environment for women on entry levels because women that are managers know how hard it is to to be uh uh new at the company or be inexperienced so they try to create a better path for women to follow Not as a mentor, but just in general, because they went through that. They know how that works. And you can see that from Google and Twitter have 1% more and the others have that same amount.

Speaker 1: The bottom line is it's It's more the same from one company to another. It doesn't change much. You don't have a company with 50% women and another with 10%. So you could say this is a problem in your company. But what company usually do is to blame on the pipeline Because you don't have enough women doing uh STEM courses at college. I mean it may be true, but You can't only blame on that. You know, there are women there that are available for hire to be promoted and you're not promoting them and you're not hiring them You can't maybe achieve 50% from one year to another, but you can achieve 55

Speaker 1: to 30. It's not impossible. But you I only see company complaining about that. I don't see company doing anything to further that to make it w better But why why women don't aren't As much promoted as men are. You see, men have 2. 7 more chances to be promoted to a high-level position than women. Because of that, I I can I can see that I am one of these persons. I don't see IT as a meritocracy Women usually don't, according to the to the study.

Speaker 1: That's not me that I'm saying that's this the study, but I agree with that because I don't see as a meritocracy either. I see much about nepotism and favoritism. I saw someone before being Offer a lead position because he plays soccer with the boss. And I I I'm a girl, I don't play soccer, I don't like it. And so since it was an all -boys activity on the company and I don't like soccer, and they said to me, Oh, you can go to the soccer game, you can bring, you can make a barbecue Just because I'm the women again. Yeah. But

Speaker 1: he was hired. I mean, and I got mad and just left the company because It we wouldn't make it better. And I would be so frustrated to continue to work there. It's just better to leave. Companies that already have women benefit from the fact that more women want to come to work for them. Because when I see a company that has uh someone that I respect from the community work working there, I see they are friendly. I want to work there also Are you hiring? It's the first thing I I ask. And so they have this advantage from other companies because of that.

Speaker 1: And the lack of role models that was found in the study, it's not like we don't have female female developers that are aren't whole role models. We do. I can't say about the Python jungle community, but I know a lot of good female developers in the PHP community and they are my role models, but what they study means it's inside the company. You don't have a whole model inside your company So if you don't have a home model inside your company, you don't know how far you can get. If it is possible for you to get there and to improve your path and improve your your technical education because as IT we never stop studying. We are always learning something

Speaker 1: And in this case, the the study shows that the lack of role model as are seen as a problem from men and women also agrees that is a problem. But companies itself don't see that as a problem. Also they don't see the lack of mentoring as a problem. But both male and female people see Women values more flexibility than men. That has an explanation pretty obvious. This may fall under that category that women have two jobs. You work at your regular job and you work at home. And there I heard that it's a third job that is where you make yourself pretty because you need to be pretty.

Speaker 1: So you have three jobs It th there is a book on that, I don't remember the name. A friend of my side. But this report shows the Majority of women that work in tech have a partner that also works in tech. And I think that it's like when you see a doctor dating another doctor. It's because the other doctor knows how crazy their hours are, how you have to pick up the phone and run away to attend a patient. And I think as we are developers are also like doctors If the something fails you need to stop what you're doing and go there and fix it because it's not people's lives but are people's monies

Speaker 1: and you know capitalism But the same men that work in IT have four times more chances of having women. having their partner being responsible for the primary responsibility for child care. So The male here that here have four times more chances to have their female or male partners, I don't know, taking care of their child. So if the majority of females have a male partner in IT, so you yes, you have two jobs there. So that's why women value more flexibility than men and men

Speaker 1: value more money than women And this leads to a factor that's women leaving the workforce because of that. Not just because of that, but this is a contributing factor. You don't have flexibility, you have a job that's hard to be successful because you have less chance than a man to get a better position. And you also have the responsibility of taking care of your family at the same time Another article I read today, it was about Apple and Facebook. They were offering to freeze women's eggs.

Speaker 1: Yeah So they can work now and get word to be pregnant later? I was like, okay, I don't know what to think about it But I think this is more a reflection of America culture because you have uh Lacey was talking to me, you have 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave In Brazil, you can have to four to six months of paid maternity leave. And you can be fired if you are pregnant. If you are, company has to rehire you or to restitute you with money. For all the months are losing from jobs. And when you come back, you have five months of stability. They can't fire you.

Speaker 1: So I think that's why they offer these kind of things because you don't have uh a good working law for f mothers to take care of their child. So the more time you put off to have a child, more successful you'll be in the company and more indispensable you will be so you can have a child later and don't have your career um Don't have your career I forgot the name. Don't have your career stain from that. And but I think it's one of those those ideas that are there are a good idea in the soap

Speaker 1: on the surface, but usually it's not In the inside like it's like someone's trying to take make you a compliment and in actuality they're offending you. I think it falls the same category because this is my choice. I I mean I okay it's a benefit you do what if you want but it's like if is everyone is doing it why sh why sh you you get pregnant now Some expectations come. If all your female colleagues do it and you decide to get pregnant pregnant, they will judge you. You will judge you because you are you're going to to Demand yourself to be better, that's why.

Speaker 1: And I don't think that it's a good idea on the long run because of that. The same study shows that you have twice as many men in the proportionally, of course, in the high-level positions than women. Because of this family and because of work frustration, women tend to leave when they're at the mid-level. And you have more women on the entry level than men. Women leave mid-level positions as twice as much as the men. What does this mean if it's if you have five men leaving the company every month, you

Speaker 1: have ten women living leaving the company every month? Because Another symptom of that can be the tokenism. That means I don't know if you heard that word It means to have every women stereotype embedded into you and have people expect expecting you to behave like that For instance, um I don't that workplace where I said about the guy playing soccer. They had uh we were doing e-commerce magento and every time the phone phone was ringing, I had

Speaker 1: I had to be the one to pick it up because I was the female. And my boss told me once because the custom customers like talking to you. I was like, okay, but I don't like talking to them I don't wanna talk to them. I work in IT, I don't like to talk to people. I don't like people So that's wasn't the only time, but it was only of one of the contributing factors for me to leave the the company tokenism. And if that happened to me, I probably happens to any other women there Since I have a low patience, so it doesn't need much for me to do to just live it at it and go do everything

Speaker 1: anything that I want I I just don't get confrontational it it isn't worth it usually. So why diversity matters? Uh I said before about DNA diversity, and some studies show that women that have The companies that have women in the board of directions directors get the return of equity or return of investment as high as 35 %. Yeah, it's a lot, 35% is a lot. Again, depends how much you're investing, but it's a huge number, 35%. This study was made at Carnegie Mallon

Speaker 1: University and another study was made to See how groups reacted when solving puzzles and doing collaborative tasks. They created groups from three to five people. Often they are all males or all females, and they put only one male or one female in each group to see how people would respond. And every time a test was done, they would measure their IQs separately and sum it up to see how much the collective IQ from the group was They discovered that diversity increases group performance. How?

Speaker 1: The How the collective intelligence is increased and because of that and when they increase you have a team that are more effective And they come with better problem solving and find better innovative solutions. How they did that So groups were supposed to talk about a problem or interact during the solve the puzzle solving. And they saw that groups were one person dominated. That group was less intelligent than the group where people were more collaborative to solve the problem. So groups with a better conversation turn taking perform better than groups

Speaker 1: where individuals were the majority of the problem. This is what they got. They're not saying that because there are women there they are dumber. That's not what what this is Please don't interpret no way. What this means is it's the following. They got a group with all males. And they measure the collective intelligence and they sum it up for four fifteen. And the same another group with only one woman, and they sum it up to 405 If you're like, oh okay, they're dumber than the other. But the group of the only one women perform better than the group with

Speaker 1: all males there. That's because Women have something called social sensitivity. It's higher than men 's. So the better If you get the group that had the better score from all males and the group that had at least one woman with the worst score, that group was even better than the one with the best scores all males. So you you only need one woman to make things change there. This social sensitivity is a trigger for uh The number of speaking members. What this means is not because women talk more, that's not what they are meaning. They're saying that women are more engaged to have other people participating in this problem

Speaker 1: solving. So as women women we tend to have more if ha we see six people and only one is talking we oh go there say something. We we usually are more preoccupied with that. Well men are not that preoccupied usually. That's what They are saying on their study. So more ideas were exchanges, so they got a better problem solve skills. They also discovered the diversity powers innovation. In your field, innovation is like key for success. You see a lot of IT companies when they don't innovate, they get Like behind, you see, for instance, Blackberry.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But um many think many people think there is a link between women and Innovation. There is there is no I I I think they don't know the cause yet, but they think there is a link. There is the Center of Talent for Innovation, they found this correlation. But some things they can that can be said are competitive advantage because uh diversity trumps individual ability. Companies that are more diverse, they have they are ahead of other companies. Diverse groups have outstanding performance and for instance in the academic field since this is an university, patents

Speaker 1: and Other studies that have mixed gender on it are cited 30 to 40 percent more often than only all males or all female studies And Scott Pache from the University of Michigan said, if people think alike, then no matter how smart they are, they are most likely will get stuck at the same locally optimal solutions. Innovating requires thinking differently. That's why diversity powers innovation. And makes sense. If you're all women, you're going to think that way. If you're all black males are going to think away, if all white males are going to think away. So The more diverse group of people you have, the more out of the box ideas you have.

Speaker 1: It makes sense, so but people usually choose to ignore it. Another study from London Business School concluded that the optional representation is 50-50. But it depends on the task you are doing. For knowledge transfer, experimentation, and task performance it's fifty-fifty percent. But for Self-confidence and it's 60%. I mean that I think, and this is me thinking, that's not on the study, just mean conjecturing something. That's uh When you're out on a crowd and there are more women there, you make you feel more safe.

Speaker 1: Because as I I don't know where I saw this, but like men are the first cause of women's death. if you if you caught count like domestic violence and stuff like that. I think it's more about Olympic system that is made to protect us. And Olympic system is more like are you you run Or you attack. It only has two responses. And if you have more females, the Olympic system responds, you don't need to attack. You can't be there cool. It's more like a primitive response than a uh conscious response. That's what I think, but you can dispute that. That's okay And I want to talk about this guy.

Speaker 1: Um, black size dude, or the guy who does Cosmos, the web series. He has seventeen honorary doctorates. That means he's no his shit And uh there is a conference in New York where people were talking, I don't know about what, but someone asked what about chicken science? And the mediator said, oh someone here wants to talk about the generic difference between women and men. And he was like, hi, I want to talk I never been female, but I have been black all my life, he starts. And he starts to say that

Speaker 1: working as an astrophysicist was the path of most resistance to him And I can relate relate to that because when I told my mom I would like to do electrical engineering, I did two years of electrical engineering. And my family were all like, don't you want to do business administration or nursing school? I was like, no, I don't. And he he was told the same. So every time people would uh take you down to to they were trying to minimize your dream to say it's not possible and This is so true for him as a black male and as for us as women in science.

Speaker 1: And there is a link I'm going to left there. You're going to see And he ends with that. Before we start talking about generic differences, you got to come up with a system that seek opportunity. Then we can have that conversation. So it doesn't matter we are generically different. We have different opportunities. uh a guy has two point seven more chances to be promoted and we don't have the same chance so we can't talk about generic difference if you don't offer me the same chance as you do the other guy So, how can we as a community help to improve diversity? I want to talk about this. This is a project from

Speaker 1: a female cloud developer in at the PHP community, Kayla Daniels. But it's pretty generic. It's not just for women. It's for everything. I think it's a ecosystem to empower developers. And you have like discrimination. You shouldn't discriminate someone because of what they believe or what they are. uh boundaries it's like your comfort levels is are different than mine so you need to re-learn to respect that We are our biggest assets. None of us learn when was born knowing everything. We all learn from

Speaker 1: during our lives. So because of that, we are biggest assets. So return the favor. Teach someone. Respect the finance. Treat others like you wish uh like you you wish to be treated. That's like everyone Think should think like that. I don't want to be mistreated, so I want to mistreat others. Just simple as that. Respect the uh reactions require grace Um as I heard my male colleague saying that I was pretty intelligent for a guy I wanted to punch him but it wouldn't service anything. It wasn't worth it.

Speaker 1: So To be to think better how to respond to stuff like that. And opinions are just that opinions. If you respect your own opinions, you should respect the opinion of others So even though you don't agree, you should respect their opinion. And sure is human. So you need to tolerate human mistake honest mistakes. Sometimes people will say something they don't mean and you should learn to not take offense on it Because you're probably going to do it sometime at some point. So that's my description there on the website and you can help. Last year we only had seven items the the tour is human, it's new.

Speaker 1: So you can always contribute not only for PHP developers, it's for the whole developer community. The other one is this one. I saw people talk about mentoring. This is the example we have in the PHP community. So people who have time available are listed there to help someone that it's n doesn't know much. And this is not only for for Minorities it is for everyone so everyone can help someone and there is a IRC channel on three nodes at the case for PHP mentoring, it's the same name So I think you you can take this as like a

Speaker 1: an example and took what is best and fit it on in your community. It's it's just for that. It works. Uh I have a mentor and it he helped me a lot to improve my performance, to improve my code, and I think people should and I am mentoring someone else, so it's like it's you learn when you teach. So you should give back to others. And other programs that's more focusing on women. Uh I can talk about the other ones, only from PHP women. But we only we don't only have women there, we have a lot of men there too. That's it's all inclusive everyone can participate we don't discriminate anyone there's a lot of white males there too and they help us

Speaker 1: and we we accept any help there is there's any help is uh welcome And I think I don't know about the others, but I think the idea is the same. It's to be inclusive, not exclusive. And Questions

Speaker 2: Can the women who have had that question that she brought up a couple times, the or this compliment, um you are like very talented for a woman Can you raise your hands?

Speaker 3: Like a lot.

Speaker 2: Just to summarize, I think that was every woman in the room.

Speaker 4: I would um I I could uh encourage that discussion and we could just keep going with our experiences as women. But I I would love to hear more about um positive forward specific steps that you've experienced. You said that you left a company. Have you had to confront anyone and what was that like for you Or something along those lines.

Speaker 1: Um I actually have a very confrontational spirit But I learned that at work it doesn't bode well to do that. But um at the beginning of my career I would like to say that for people 's face And it would would mean usually me getting fired or people not talking to me for a while. Because I had a lot of anger because I didn't understand why people were that way And after a while I learned why people are the way. And how can I and I learned that being confrontational it doesn't help. You need to be more And I don't mean for you to run away from it, but you need to show some

Speaker 1: Thought about it. You need to show some data because all all of the stuff I I told you here are from studies. Some stuff or another were my opinions, but because usually f from people from our uh industry. People rely on data and much less on the opinion. So if you confront people with facts and not just opinions, it it may be a little go better than just why did you tell that to me, you know? Maybe that I think it works better. But uh usually Me getting away from a company it was my me running away from it, from the problem, because I couldn't deal with it.

Speaker 1: And now I know a little more how to deal with that But it's it's still hard because it's easier to run away and get another job. I live in São Paulo, it's the biggest city city in Brazil, so there's a lot of jobs there. So Okay, you do you are you going to treat me that way? There's another company I can go. And that was more that way. In this is hard because when you go to job interviews, why did you change jobs? Yeah, you know, I wasn't feeling like it. It's hard to explain because usually the people from HR doesn't don't know how it is to be a woman in the industry and they just have to say Oh they were uh downsizing and you have to lie because if you tell the truth that you left

Speaker 1: the there because you were treated badly, they didn't treat you with respect, they are going to say this girl is problematic. People don't get that. Usually, unfortunately, I mean there in my in Brazil it's like that. So I had to say, yeah, it it the crisis, I don't know, the economy It's it's something like that. Unfortunately you have to go with that because everybody goes with that, so they won't dispute that. But that's okay.

Speaker 4: Well, Red Hat has an office in Sao Paulo and we would love to have you.

Speaker 1: I just got a job I got now, I can't change it.

Speaker 2: Well, uh, thank you again, and then we'll be right back.