Inside Out: My Journey of Understanding Inclusion with Natalia Bidart

So first of all sorry for the delay. I tested my laptop on Tuesday morning. It worked okay, of course. And now is there is no way for it to pick up the HDMI uh signal. So Paolo is kindly helping me, but the network is not collaborating, but right now it seems like we are almost ready. As I was presented, I'm Natalia. I will talk about my personal journey in trying to understand inclusion. I think the topic can be difficult to discuss, to uh approach and perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you. So I will have to rush through uh through um through a few slides, but uh let's try to make the best out of this

So who am I? I'm going to present I have a few slides presenting me because I'm recently been appointed a Diango Fellow since April this year. So I feel um I I consider that I needed to give you like a proper presentation because it's of my role in the community, but I will rush a little bit through this. I have been talking to a lot of you and I have been sharing who I am, what I do, what did I do. As I say, I'm a Django Fellow. I have studied computer science where I was born. I consider myself a Python adjango expert to the extent that you can consider yourself an expert, right? There is always things to learn I'm passionate about tests. I will be looking for Andrew to talk about the test. I have many things to discuss

in a good way. Um a very expressive speaker, as you can see. Uh according to JPT, this can be described as gesturing enthusiast. I have an extensive experience presenting in Spanish, but this is my first time presenting in English to a large audience. So I'm nervous. Thank you. I'm nervous. Uh I'm worried that you might not understand my accent, but the captioners will surely help with this. So thank you very much for your work. Then uh what else about me? I was born in Argentina in the middle of Argentina, what that arrow is pointing to. I'm currently living in Uruguay, which is a very small country between Brazil and Argentina. It's an amazing country.

And I'm also a fan of drinking mati, which is a local beverage for that is very common in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Uh I attended my first PyCon. This is uh uh the image is a little bit uh on top of the uh text, I think because of the different of the version of the software, but we can work with that Uh I attended for the first time to a PyCon in 2009 uh in Argentina, then I went to PyCon OES in Atlanta, and that was my first Dyango sprint. There was a Dyango Sprint occurring during PyCon. And I got to be with the mascot recently appointed at that time. And it was super fun. I probably met some of you there, but I really don't remember. Sorry And this is my first YangoCon in 2023.

I'm super excited to be here. Who was I? I studied in Cordoba. I was a student and a teacher assistant. I did work for a startup with soap plon. twisted a flask. I also work with EFEL, which is a programming language. EFEL, sorry. We are Eiffel, actually, I think that that's a better pronunciation. Which is an object-oriented programming language, which is very cool, but not very known. I have also done my first year of C programming. My first job was in 275 and I've been working before being a fellow. I took a sabbatical, but before that I was at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu for 13 years. I did a little bit of everything, always Python related and web service related.

Well, uh so this slide is very important for me because the topic diversity, equity, and inclusion is It's delicate. So I want to be very open that this is not about recipes, this is not about hard, this is not about me telling you what to do or what not to do. This is not the the talk. We can have the talk eventually, but this is not what I want to talk. What I do want to talk is sharing things that I have been through, uh sharing a little bit of a theory that I've been reading about, and I'm trying to connect the two. experiences, I mean sharing with you actual experiences that I had and trying to to link that to some not theoretical concept but more like concept taken from black by

bibliography and and and things that will help us try to I I hope Will help us try to think about this topic, reflect, and raise questions. I have a lot of questions and maybe you might have two, and maybe together we might find we might find Some answers or answers that are good enough for us as a community. So I'm going to start sharing some recent experiences. What you can see in that image is an image of my backyard. It's very tight, very tidy in that image. That's the image of the result after getting at an arborist. gardener working in the backyard. I had very tall uh trees and and and very overgrown bushes.

It was a mess. So we hired someone to to to clean it up a little bit. So at the end of the war of the work of the arborist, the airborne said, Well, I mean, we're saying yes, goodbye. Thank you for being here Uh he said it's just it's a shame that your trees go out so out of control. He said like, I mean, this should have been fixed before by the person that moans your loan. So he was like, uh, well but that that is okay. I mean I'm paying you. This is the work that you're doing. That that that's fine. I mean it's and he said, but no, no, no. Because that person should be taking care of this. So I said, yeah, well, it's Maria, the last name of Maria. And he said

, Wait, a woman? It's like he literally say like this face a woman moves your loan? And I took that as a completely inappropriate But you will think that's the worst of the experience that I'm sharing, but no, I that took me by surprise And one of the concepts that I want to share with you is this thing that we have deep down fried in our brains, you know, baked in our brains. I've been raised by an Italian family and my grandmother was very traditionalist and was very um favorism of male. And I don't know why I answered this, but she worked with her husband. I like I felt the need to justify why a woman was

moving alone I hated myself. So as you can see, that was me. Very uh conscious of diversity and inclusion. And I'm very uh I think about this a lot. I try to do things about it And I got this answer. So this is an example not only about the things that we have baked in the brain, but also about um how we may say how we have things that are very difficult to change and how Me, I make a lot of mistakes. I'm terrified of saying something here that might play against. this topic, but some some some things are are very uh deep down uh coded in in in in in in in our structure in in in our brain The other

uh experience that I want to share, that's me using an electric sander on a piece of wood. I really love woodwork. I am an amateur. I've I don't really know what I'm doing, but I've tried to do some would work when I have some time. And I've been trying to buy some tooling and in order to make that a little bit easier. So for Mother's Day this year, am I speaking too fast? Like, okay. So for Mother's Day this year I went to the hardware store and I said, hello, I'm here to buy my Mother's Day present. I want to buy an electric sander. So declare say hi, how are you? Yeah. I mean this is I live in a very small uh town. People no it's not like they know me because I'm new to the city. I've live I've been living there for nine years

But they they have seen me buy a lot of wood related things in in in that store and it's always me that that the one doing the purchases. And I'm like hello, I need uh you Which tool do you recommend? You know, um there is this uh cut that we do with a jigsaw, and sometimes we have errors, two, three millimeters that we need to fix. Do you have an electric sound there that will that will work for that? Yeah, he showed me a product and then he said, okay, so this is for, I was in the store with my partner and my child. My partner was there in order just to keep my child into not touching everything. He couldn't care less about tools. And he was like, oh, this is for when he cuts the wood. And I'm like, I'm right here, I'm doing the purchase. It's me that I cut the wood. So He realized uh his mistake

and he then gave me a free or free stuff like the t-shirt in a bag, I don't know. But uh And and and and I mean this is this is people with good intentions, just like me when I answered that awful thing in in the previous slide. And um So that was weird and that was I mean I laughed and but I figured it will be a good example to share with you how There are things that are uh usually described as part of being unconscious biases. Things that we have baked into her brains like the arborist shock that a woman was moaning my loan or that the clear assumed that I'm not operating the jigsaw which is I mean Why not? And as I said, uh uh there are things that even uh we got you know uh taught implicitly or explicitly since we're

we're little. So it's difficult to fight, to fight or to mold those things. So in general, when we talk about unconscious bias, we are talking about things that we are not aware that we are being biased toward us. That's those are prejudices that we have that are like they they they flow from within And there is nothing that we do uh rationally to to to to to have them. It's something that just just just flows th through through or brain. So one of the things that I think we can do is not to be ashamed, not to hate ourselves like I did with the response. But to try to be aware of that, try to be um

try to pay uh pay attention to when this is happening, either from us, from other people that we see Be forgiving about that but try to notice it and do something about it. Like uh the very the very uh fact of noticing is is just an step forward or towards a solution. So I think it's good that we talked about this. And particularly it's I think it's good to list a non-extensive list of things that could you could ponder on whether this this is something that you relate to. Biases, unconscious biases can come from appearances. you know, age, body size, race. I don't know. Then uh it can also come from data.

I don't know. You are um I've been doing a lot of interviews when I work at canonican and I and I will I will um uh screen resumes and there will be things in the resume that will make me feel that a candidate was uh better than another candidate. Like if they will say I love test-driven development. I was like, yes, this is the candidate that I want, and I will put it like it at the top of the pile. And that's just a bias for me, not just because someone likes uh test-driven development or do not mention test-driven development, it's fair to make an assumption about the quality of of the engineering or of the quality of the education of that person So sometimes you know title education or the language that that person speaks can have

uh can make us have like an unconscious bias about how we see someone, how we ponder about some someone. The same with opinion. If we know that someone is the creator of something, we might think, oh that's that must be a great person. That must be a cool person. So those are things that it's okay to have, but I think it's important that we think about them to see how that might affect what we how we relate to other people. So basically that's the conclusion. I think that particularly as a Django community, it will be good for us to think about this and to think about how we treat other people or how we assume things of other people based on these biases and try to a little bit. Make them a little bit more conscious

because once they are conscious, we can do explicit things about them. More experiences. I'm trying to mix a little bit of Experiences and then a little bit of what I call theory, but I'm not sure if that's the right concept. The work chat phase one. This is a very old workshop, uh, but uh originally in Canonical I was the Technical lead of the one-to-one file sync uh team. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the tool. It was a file syncing service. There will be like a demo running in your desktop. There will be a server and there will be a control panel, which is a UI originally built in GTK and then in in Qt. Anyway, I was a tech league, I was in charge. My job was making technical decisions for that team So we had a situation, we made a decision, we needed to build something.

So there is this uh IRC chat work with a teammate. If he said I did this thing, he will he will uh Uh sorry, I didn't mean to say he, but it was a he. He will tell me. And uh I will say, okay, but wait, that's not what we agree. We had a a different plan So he said, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I decided it was better. And I'm like, no, no, wait. This is not what we decided. For many reasons, because I'm the I am the person that needs to make the decision, we need to do this differently. And I was very uh explicit and very uh determined that we needed to change this. And I had my reasons, but what did he say? You sound like my mom. I mean, how many of you

male having told you sound like my dad when you're telling someone what to do? Anyone? No? Okay, so this was at the time, I mean this is my co-worker, uh, is a really good person. We had fun together and it was you know another laughing experience Well when you look at it from from you know from from above let's say or from from further away, uh this is not so a combination uh Not woman, we'll kid. And it's I would say frustrating, or at least something to highlight and and try to ponder. A similar uh experience, uh also a canonical, we got this 360 review process where you would get reviews From above, from your size, from

your direct reports and from yourself. So this is why it's called 360. Your manager, your colleagues, your direct reports, your peers, and yourself will do a review Pas a review that I got one year. I did a very good job. I was uh working really well. Sorry, modesty. And um But this is part of the point that I'm trying to prove. So this reading process also allows to enter a free form, optional free form text where it's uh it's not anonymous Right. So people might write something or might not write something. But the expectation, I mean my expectation if they if they do write something, maybe something, you know, performance review related. So at the time as I was technical lead of the Snap Store team, which is another team, um

I was making decisions, dealing with a lot of customers, other teams, doing a lot of things. Successfully, I will say. I was also seven months pregnant. So what did I got in the freeform text? I was going to be a great mother. So as you see, I nailed the great mom performance review quadrant or um extant, I don't know what it is So, I mean again the person writing that had the best intention. I honestly think that and know that, you know, they were trying to be to give a positive message, to to to be supportive of my situation. And I understand I appreciate that. I still think that Well, we don't know, but I don't I don't think that a male will have had

you'll be a great father on a review, on a performance review comment. I mean we we could never be sure because that's the the thing with adversity and inclusion You don't have any proof, you don't have any any way of measuring or or being certain that this wouldn't have happened, you know, to uh a person of the other gender Still, I don't think it's appropriate for our work review, but it's I will say fun to share, or it's it's helping me being here, giving this talk to you and using it as a as an example. So uh these two concepts, you sound like my mom and you'll be a great mom. This is something that I think is uh a pattern that is uh that gets repeated in in in the I would say business industry, tech industry, or when you have

an industry where you have different roles and you have like like manager roles, leadership roles. When there is a woman, there is this double mind, that is called, you know, this mix, this this this this uh um confusing roles that are being uh expected from the other people that women sometimes are associated with moms So there are some conflicting expectation or stereotypes that come from that. the set of assumptions about how a mom is caring or looks out for the people or makes sure that everyone feels okay

or gets attended or get you know if someone is upset what is the problem with you and try to do things about it which is what I also like like ability criteria how how warm you are sometimes plays against being able to have a um a career uh uh advancing your career because When you when you start being uh a person that is suitable for leadership, like you need to make tough decisions, you need to tell someone no or tell someone what to do. then you're starting to be mean or bossy or I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say that it's bitchy and uh it's you know it's it's a conflict because There is an expectation, an implicit expectation that we are

soft, I will say. This is what leads to talk about the paradoxes when talking about the double bind, which is We need to juggle. I would say we because I felt I have need the the need to needed to juggle, you know. being determined and and telling people what to do because of my role, but trying to be you know uh putting some flowers around the message saying please do you think that I think it's a good idea if we uh what do you think give and and and that's cumbersome and that's tiring and that's exhausting and i think it's unfair because i don't think that Male, and this is a j perhaps an unfair generalization, but I've I've been going through this.

I don't think this is expected from uh male people, uh male persons in in leadership positions And in order to exemplify the paradoxes, I three days before uh traveling here, I saw uh the Barbie movie for the first time. I'm not making any judgment about whether if it is good, if it is bad, if it is correct, if it is incorrect. That is not up for discussion right here. But there is this monologue from America Ferrera about what it takes to be a woman. And I took this fragment, I it's not like I'm endorsing necessarily, but it's an example of the double bind, you know, is how You are expected to be to do things, but at the same time you're expected to do it in a way that sometimes it's not compatible with the role.

And I found it delighting. I wanted to share it here, but even though if you don't agree whether if it is delighting or not, this is like an example of the concept that I'm trying to share with you today. You can read it afterward in the slides. I have another set of experiences. I think that we are uh I think that I don't have the 45 minutes, right? That I usually have. I should be uh Okay, I have five minutes. Okay, okay. So I have two slides. I'm going to skip one. This is about uh how I went to a resort and I needed to have gluten -free food. Many of you have know the anecdote of of the food in the hotel. I had a lot of challenges and I have a situation with the Mexican staff.

Which I'm not going to share right now for the intro in the interest of time, but I'm going to share this other experience, which is, I'm not sure if you recognize the person in the picture. Try Mate for the first time in Argentina in 2009. And I basically well I feel I asked uh I I I asked him whether he felt pushed. He he said no, but I think he was being polite. I basically pushed him into trimaty And the mate uh is is something that is uh a social norm and a cultural tradition in Argentina, so I was really trying to have him uh uh Tasting a little bit of the culture that he was visiting. And uh but but then after the pandemics, I have started thinking a lot about uh

sharing the matter and the mat involves you know having this the thing that has in his hand which is a uh um pumpkin like uh thing that you will put some some some specific gerba matter which is like a green tea leaves and then you have a metal straw and when you share matte with with someone everyone seeps from the same straw Which is completely and non-hygienic, you know. I don't know why we do that. And I mean with the pandemic that stopped a little bit, but now uh in Uruguay, everyone is sharing mati again. That is not something that I'm doing right now, but it feels a little bit uh Unsanitary. So uh my point with these two experiences, how I have this issue with the Mexican staff at the resort

and how um I try to impose drinking mate to someone when visiting Argentina is this thing that has been mentioned in a few talks, uh, the cultural differences that we have. There are different cultures in the world, that's a fact. There is nothing that we can do. And each culture might have different customs, different ways of doing things. different expectations about what it is to be, you know, a good person or what it is to be polite or what it is to have good manners And I think that we as a global community we need to be aware of that because many times We might find someone I don't know being unpolite or being rude or or being too forward. And

I think that the first, not the first, well, one of the things that we need to think about is That's another culture. What does that culture look like? What are the uh the traditions in the culture? Is that person trying to be friendly? But um it's it's it's different for me because I come from another culture So um this is also something that uh I wanna link with the uh keynote that Ned Bachelor uh presented on PyCon this year. That's an amazing keynote. I will recommend it for everyone to watch it. But he he talks about being a good person and a good communicator. But there are key uh a few key points about it being a good person and a good communicator.

And now my my proposal is well but this is not as simple because what is a good person and what is a good communicator depends on the culture. So I think that we need to look a little bit beyond being good person, a good communicator, and consider the cultures. I have a few slides now that it might take uh a bit uh uh of extra time, so I will try to I can okay. Okay, I'm telling you that I can keep in going. So I want to talk a little bit about cultures. And to do that, I did some research. There is a book that I have no affiliation with, but I asked permission from the author to share a few passages from it with you. It's called the culture map. It's not about specific about technology. It's about

how cultures can influence doing business in general globally. It presents eight scales about you know being aware of in order to to be successful of at making businesses, um providing uh negative feedback or having um direct reports respect for the leadership and a few of the keys. But there are two of those scales that the author presents, which are about communicating and persuading in the context of a global war, in the context of different cultures, that I think are very relevant for us, for the Diango community. I'm going to try to present those in in a in fourth slides actually. The communication skills describes this is something completely new to me.

When I read this, I was like, oh wow, that's why. There are cultures that They tend to convey the messages in a very implicit manner. They will not spell out everything for you, and that's just part of the culture. that there are historic reasons for that, you know, there are geographical reasons for that, and you can read a about that in the book. But that's just how the way it is. There are some cultures that will not say everything, that will leave a lot of things out of interpretation of the person hearing the message. And then there are other cultures that are called low context because they don't need a lot of context to understand the message. They will be a lot more direct, explicit, and there will not be a message between the line.

If you try to read something between the line, you might get the wrong message because This type of culture are very forward, very uh what I'm telling you is what I mean. There is nothing behind the scenes So this is a fact. There is nothing good or bad about each culture, but what happens when you have different persons from a different cultures communicating? There might be, you know, a clash in there Why, for example, if you have someone speaking between the lines to someone that expects a very explicit and very clear and complete message , The the that person might feel like they're being sneaky or that they are living things not not spoken intentionally so they can change things afterwards. That's not the case, they're just different cultures.

Or the other way around. If you have someone that is used to not get everything said out loud, when there is someone from the other culture saying everything and spelling everything out for them They might feel I'm being treated like a child. They're being patronizing or condescending to me. They don't feel like I'm capable of understanding what uh the message. So What can we do? We're not going to change cultures. Each culture is what it is. I mean eventually time might unify us a little bit. I don't know But we can be aware of this and when we're talking with someone think that maybe it's felling everything out might make them feel uh um silly or or childish or not saying everything might give room to misinterpretation.

So I think that one of the things that the author presents is that if you have people from different cultures having communication, which is exactly our case as a Diango community, we should need We should try to be a little bit more explicit about what we said and and and and and and but also being explicit that We are being explicit because we want to avoid misinterpretation if we are a global community, not because I think that you are not understanding me and I'm being patronizing. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay The other point in the scale that the author present, as I say, there are eight eight scales, but this is the other one that I that I wanna um talk to um with you today is Persuasiveness.

maybe a little bit of a of a negative intention in there but I don't think that's the case in s en in English but I like better saying being convincing And why am I raising this with you, with the Django community? You know how we have the framework and there have been talks about dinosaurs and the change is inevitable, but sometimes within the community or within the fellowship, I won't say. We try to stop change a lot for many reasons. And sometimes when someone wants a new feature in Django, we say, okay, this needs to be discussed with the community You need to go uh to the forum, create a post, explain why this will be a good idea, and if there is consensus, come back and we will push this forward. So at that point, you need to be convincing.

You need to have the tools in order to explain to the rest of the community why your idea is a good idea. It will be a good feature for Django. So I think this point is relevant for us. Basically, there are two uh types of of of of cultures regarding uh being convincing. One is When you want to convince someone of a principle-first culture, you need to explain why. You need to explain the whole process from the theoretical concept To the specifics. So you need to start with some theory and then you need to take the reader of that forum post up to the conclusion so they can work with you in the reasoning of why that would be a good idea.

But there are other cultures that will get bored in that explanation. They will see a lot of text, like a lot of theory, a lot of words, and they will say, nah, I will not read this. This is too too long. This is boring. I will not read it. This is another type of culture. These cultures are more like action first, like the practical facts first. And then maybe once I understand how this work, like the tangible things, let's say. They will perhaps read a little bit of the theory and understand why that's that way. So these are two different cultures that we need to consider when trying to have someone be on board with our idea. An example of this, this is a piece of the documentation of the Django documentation, the Django tutorial, the part

four. That sentence, you should know basic basic math before you start using a calculator. That's like a sentence that is making an uh a strong uh affirmation about that. But that's really one of the cultures, you know, the culture that will be principle first. Like first you study math, then you use a calculator But there is another set of people from another culture that will first use the calculator and then they might go and understand math. I mean this is not right or wrong. This is just an example of how sometimes we think something naturally and we cannot see another way of doing things, but that there is actually another way of doing things. So

um it's it's great to think about this. Um particularly I'm super verbose. My manager always told me less is more and I tend to do always more and more and more. Uh for the angle particular the things that uh I think that we can do is try to mix a little bit of both, which is what I have tried to do in this talk, which is A little bit of practical examples, my experience, a little bit of theory and going back and forth. So hopefully I keep you all the cultures entertained and attentive to what I'm what I'm sharing because I don't wanna to get bored. I don't want you to get bored or to get sleepy or or you to get lost in the theory. Hopefully that worked So we can try to do that, you know, we're writing emails and we're writing forum posts, trying to, you know, that back and forth between concrete things, perhaps a little bit of theory, concrete things, and that will keep the attention of everyone reading.

I have a few slides about language and how some languages, not English. I really like English because you can uh genuinely speak neutrally in the language, but there are other languages like Spanish. which the norm, the documented norm, is that you need to use the male form of the nouns and the and the adjectives to refer to group of people. And particularly when talking in Spanish, all these roles are easily referred to as a male group of doctors, medical doctors, construction workers, sport players, engineers, president, VP, senators, and all that When you say it in Spanish, is you use the male form of those. You would say, okay, well, that follows the rule, right? But something that is very frustrating for me, people

refer to these groups Even in the plural form, in feminine. So it's the nurses, secretaries, teachers, cook. There is nothing wrong with this, I mean, being the female. But why do they generally use the female form to refer to those groups when the rule is that the male form should be used for the for the for the plural form. And I think this conditions our brain since we're very little About what can a female do when they are grown up and one what can a male uh aspire to when they are grown up. So this is something that very conflicted with because I have a small child, she's uh a a girl. She identifies as a girl so far and she's five and I I want her to not think that she can only aspire to be a given set of profession, that

she can be anything she wants. So I think the language plays a an im an important role in that in that front. And is uh I think it's important to be aware of that And then there is also also sorry uh things about inclusive naming. There are some initiatives in the web that if you're interested you can read about. I will not go into details There are some words that we can try we can try to avoid in our coding, in our documentation, in order to be a little bit more inclusive. And also, you know, I'll talk about being inclusive in the context of our conversation. Sometimes we refer to autumn, spring , next autumn, next spring. That only applies to half of the world. There is a South Hemisphere that has the opposite or well not the opposite deed, other

other other season than the North Hemisphere So I think that uh this is something that erasing Google Summer of Go and I was completely dismissed. Um but you know when there is summer in North Ember There is winter in the South Hemisphere and the students do not have any time off to participate. So that's literally leaving half of the world out of the possibility of participating. There is also this acronym that we that we use that is super useful, but I think it's important for us to the first time that we refer to an acronym to spell it out Because otherwise when we see crude MTI DTL DTL D D T what the f is that? And particularly for me DDL, if you look DDL when you are in like in Argentina, Google is

dulce de leche. Because it is it is a sweet. You don't need to read that, it's not readable. But it's it's it's a sweet which is amazing and I love it. But every time that I saw DDL in the tickets, I was like, Dulce de Lechi, what has to do with databases? Then I learned what it was. Anyway, be mindful of that Try the first time that you mention uh spell it out and then and then you can of course use the acronyms afterwards in your post, in your ticket or whatever. Uh I'm almost on time, right? Yeah. Five minutes. Great. I we get to talk a little bit about allies with you. This is something that I wanted to present the concept with an experience, but the experiences that I have when analyze was very important to me are very um I cannot ex uh

cannot share that with you in an anonymized way. So uh and the people involved it's might retaliate so I will not share an experience uh with that but I want to talk about allies and how all of you, particularly the privileged groups in this community and and in in any community can help marginalize and minority groups. Allies are usually people from the privileged groups, let's say male in in in the tech industry that uh try to understand the the problems that the com that minority face and try to help from the pre from their privileged position and to enable and facilitate

things for the minority groups This is something that um Rachel and Don talk about about sponsorship like saying some someone come on be uh give a talk or or or or um sharing social media and social media something or I don't know advocating for grants or I don't know or if you see you know someone is violating the code of conduct you will say That's not what we do, but you know, someone in the privileged position, not someone from the minority. That kind of voice, uh I will say sadly, it's not necessarily sadly the word, but still that that voice I feel like still has more strength than the minority voice

So being in a privileged position, I will invite you to take on the responsibility to be an ally of minorities by uh learning a little bit more about the challenges around diversity, equity and inclusion and being active against it and you know, uh reaching out to someone and saying, you know, that thing that happened that wasn't right, it's not your fault. uh you shouldn't uh going through that and trying you know to to to to provide support and to act actively whatever is within your reach uh to do about it I'm happy to talk about allies a little bit more afterwards. Um I think they are very important. And I have had allies in in my in my career that have been crucial uh for me to keep going.

So I'm very thankful for them. Sorry, um uh very important point allies are not self-appointed. I have met people self uh think uh thinking that they are allies and they are the opposite of that, and particularly because they are you know saying I'm an ally. I know everything about diversity and inclusion. You know Daniele who I'm talking about. So conclusions Uh sorry that I rushed the talk. Uh hopefully uh this was useful, but basically my conclusions are that this is very difficult. There are a lot of factors consider, you know, there is no magic formula. I don't have I don't have answers. I have experiences and I have thoughts about this. So

uh I guess if I can ask anything from you is to acknowledge the problem and think about it. Reflect and then I mean that that would be like the zero step, the first step. I think that a lot of people have already done that, which is great. I've seen a lot of great things. I had a great problem yesterday, which is I had to stand in line in the bathroom, the women's bathroom. I never had to do that before in a tech conference. That was amazing. Yeah. I mean I I was so happy to be standing in line. I didn't really need to be, but I had to wait. So that was great. And uh then, well, of course Try to do whatever you can uh when it is reaching out to someone, do it something at your company, do it something uh

organizing events. So I don't know. There are many things that can be done. And well provide support, you know, allies are extremely important. I cannot uh stress that enough. At least to me, they have been key for me to be here today Thank you.