Dogs and Shoes

Putting an End to Conferences Dominated by White Men

[This article ran originally on the Harvard Business Review site, January 20, 2013.]

Many business conferences are notable not only for the prominent people on stage, but also for those who are missing. For instance, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week, fewer than 18% of the speakers are women. Women’s under-representation at such events gets a lot of attention, but people of color are also relatively rare on conference stages. For conference hosts, however, past performance need not be an indicator of future results.

Since 2012, I’ve co-hosted The Lean Startup Conference with Eric Ries. Eric ran the event with another host for two years before that, and the speakers they drew, though good presenters, were almost all white men. When I began co-hosting, we put an emphasis on finding high-quality speakers who better represented the business world.  In 2012 and 2013, not only did our speaker rosters comprise more than 50% women and people of color, but the number of conference attendees doubled each year.

We use the same methods all conferences use to find speakers: We invite people we know or know of, and we have an open call for proposals. But because those processes reliably over-represent white male candidates, we approach them differently than most conference hosts. Below are nine key steps we’ve taken to reduce bias in our selection cycle, convince people we’re serious and thus draw a more diverse group of outstanding speakers. Our conference in December 2013 had roughly 43% as many speakers as Davos does this month, but these ideas apply to events of any size. They also apply to almost any gated decision with a pipeline of applicants, including hiring, venture capital funding, school admissions, and awards.

1. As a leader, commit yourself to improving your selection process. Studies show that bringing in decision-makers from under-represented groups will help your organization attract more similar people. While doing so will likely improve your team and undoubtedly sends a positive signal, it’s not a magic bullet. First, people from under-represented groups can have professional networks like yours and the same selection biases you do. Second, if you make it the job of the under-represented person to draw in others like them, you’ll ensure that person’s priorities for choosing candidates are different than yours—thus inviting conflict and likely marginalizing their work.

The top leaders of your event, regardless of their own identities, need to share a commitment to changing your systems. By way of example, Eric and I are both white, and we have successfully drawn dozens of people of color to give excellent talks at our conferences.

2. Be deeply transparent. Of course, you need to have a sentence saying that you welcome people from groups under-represented in your community. But that statement will do nothing to surface good speaking candidates. Because people can either see that you have a record of excluding speakers like them or will assume, if your event is new, that it will behave like most others, they’ll logically decide not to apply—and a single sentence is not going to convince them otherwise.

Go much further than the sentence, writing in depth about how you’ve contributed to the problem in the past (or if your event is new, showing your understanding of how imbalances arise), and concrete things you’re doing to make change.

3. Look beyond the usual suspects. And tell people that’s what you’re doing. Many potential candidates assume that they have to either know you personally or be on the speaking circuit for you to pick them. If they’re right, you’re simply tapping the existing pool of speakers, and you’re missing opportunities to introduce fresh perspectives to your event.

Most conferences need at least a few marquee names to spark attendee registration. But as a curator, you can provide unique value by finding sharp people that everyone doesn’t already know. To attract those candidates, advertise that you’re seeking new voices and use thoughtful language.

For instance, if you say that you’re looking for people with “advice and expertise to share” rather than “experts,” you avoid suggesting that you’re interested only in people already recognized in the field. (Anecdotally, women are less likely than men to refer to themselves as experts, so as a bonus, you also avoid accidentally excluding them.)

4. Offer speaker training.  If you’re trying to attract new speakers, you may well need to provide guidance to help them perform at the level your attendees expect. Even just offering it can draw proposals from strong candidates who are new to public speaking and can prompt managers to encourage promising stars to apply.  For efficiency, you can deliver the actual training online and in groups.  You can also pair experienced speakers with beginners for coaching sessions.

5. Request help.  Once you have a call for proposals with a strong public statement about your process, you can point to it and ask other people to help you find great candidates. Indeed, simply asking people to recommend speakers from under-represented groups often turns up surprising candidates—including people your connectors wouldn’t have thought to mention if you hadn’t made a specific request. In addition, you can ask professional associations that have networks unlike yours to circulate your unusual call for proposals among their members. If your conference includes panels, require that panel organizers include at least one and preferably two people from your under-represented groups.

6. Approach individual people in your under-represented groups. Developing relationships with candidates is a long game, but it’s important, particularly because people who haven’t envisioned themselves at your event may realize they’re a fit only if you brainstorm talk ideas together. Be systematic and, for instance, every quarter, approach two people you want to get to know better and invite them for coffee.

7. Have a farm system. Hold more casual events where you can try out speakers you don’t already know and work with them to develop content and style appropriate for your audience. TEDx events have served this purpose for the flagship TED conference.

8. Save slots — as many as half — for people you find later in the process. The old ways of finding candidates generate good speakers more quickly than the new ways—but, as I noted above, the traditional methods will lead you to traditional candidates. So you have to sequence your decision-making, or you’ll inadvertently recreate the status quo.

One pitfall to avoid is announcing an initial, homogeneous list of speakers. Such an announcement can lead historically under-represented candidates to reasonably question your commitment to giving them fair review and prompt them to steer clear. Convincing people you’re committed is critical; don’t undermine yourself by asking them to trust you despite the evidence.

9. Take chances. Often speakers from under-represented groups don’t behave quite like the established pros you’re used to. They may seem less confident, which you interpret as less authoritative. Or they may use language differently, which you interpret as less professional.  In those cases, your gut will often tell you they aren’t a fit for your event. Override your gut.  Provide training and set them up to succeed.

After you’ve had a conference with a more diverse lineup of strong speakers, not only will you find it easier to repeat that success, you’ll also be in a better position to expand your attendee base. At Davos this year, just 15% of the participants are women. We can and should do better. Starting with your next event.

Five Ways White Feminists Can Address Our Own Racism

(This post was originally published on the Huffington Post, September 24, 2013.)

Last month, the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen erupted on Twitter. Started by Mikki Kendall, it immediately became a channel for women of color to call out how implicit racial bias, double standards for women of different races and overt racism are all baked into mainstream white feminism. If you've been following feminism for the past 150 years, you probably weren't surprised by the range of grievances. But if you're a white feminist and you were surprised or you felt defensive or you think you're not part of the problem, then now is the time to woman up, rethink your own role and help reshape feminism.

While there are many reasons white feminists have to do this work, Kendall's hashtag highlighted an important one: we cannot credibly or successfully seek societal change when we ourselves create the same injustices we rail against. In other words, the problems we face as women are often the problems we create as white people.

Since #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen trended, I have seen excellent pieces by women of color, many suggesting steps white women can take to be better allies. Their insights are leading us toward a more conscious feminism. White women, however, need to take responsibility for educating ourselves, too. So, here are five steps white feminists--myself included--can take to check ourselves, connect more genuinely with women of color and improve feminist outcomes for people of all races. As a test of the need for these actions, consider whether you'd want the men in your life to try each step in confronting their own sexism.

1. Recognize that even when your good intentions are truly good, that's totally meaningless. This idea is hard to accept, because our culture suggests that we should feel like heroes just for wanting not to be racist. (Plus, it's maddening to be misunderstood.) I have gotten hung up on those two horns frequently. But what matters is your impact, not your intentions, and you don't get credit for thinking good thoughts.

Try this on for size: when you accidentally step on somebody else's foot, you do not make your good intentions the focus of the episode. Instead, you check to make sure the other person is OK, you apologize, and you watch where you're going. You don't get annoyed with the person you stepped on because you caused her pain or declare that she is too sensitive or defend yourself by explaining that you meant to step to the left of her foot. When you crush another person's toes, as Franchesca Ramsey has pointed out, everyone recognizes that your impact, not your intention, is what's important.

Why isn't that the standard for saying something when you didn't intend to cause harm? For white women interacting with women of color, we may reflexively, unwittingly assume our experience -- and therefore our intentions -- are (or should be) primary. I'd argue that's rooted in our internalizing cultural messages. But whatever the root, we have to get wise if we expect women of color to take us seriously.

So, when somebody points out that you've said or done something racist, perhaps something that hurt them personally, the game-changing response is first to understand that your intentions are not the centerpiece of the interaction. In other words: it's not about you, which can be a genuinely hard to see. Once you let your intentions fall away, you can focus on what the other person is saying (recommended: assume she has a very valid point and try to understand where you went wrong). It changes no games to insist that you meant to be perfectly graceful.

2. If you feel defensive when talking about race with a woman of color or reading about race in a piece written by a woman of color, assume the other person is saying something especially true. That is: use your defensiveness as a Bat Signal, alerting you to your own biases. Sure, yes, of course, the other person may have said something insensitive or unreasonable. But if you want to change the dynamics of the world (reminder: you're a feminist, so you do), assume your discomfort is telling you something about you, not about the other person. Then use those moments to listen more carefully.

Here's a personal example. Writing on The Toast in July, Jessie-Lane Metz, a black woman, called out supposed white allies for a number of harmful behaviors, including writing about episodes in which a white author describes racism they have perpetrated or witnessed:

My first critique is that this [writing] re-centres whiteness. When a person of colour speaks to their own experiences of racism, they are speaking to a collective pain, and speaking truth to power. When a person with white skin privilege gives an anecdote about racism, whether their own or someone else's, they are exposing more racialized people to this discrimination, and reasserting their own privilege. The narrative is no longer about Black victims of racist crimes and a deeply flawed justice system, it is about white feelings about Black bodies and their experiences. This is not helpful to intersectional practice, as it implies that only by making an oppression about the oppressor can power-holders work towards becoming allies. Secondly, it disregards the feelings of Black people by exposing them to further racism in an effort to work on white privilege. I do not consent to being confronted with racism in the hopes that white folks can maybe start to exorcise their own internalized issues. Allies need to do this work on their own.

The first time I read Metz's piece, I shifted in my chair a few times, recognizing things I'd done (writing about my own racism -- which I won't link to here, out of respect for Metz's point) and trying to justify those actions (I think I've helped other white people become more aware of their privilege, which is good, right?). I felt distinctly defensive. Which made me want to dismiss what she was saying. Which made me realize I should leave the tab open and re-read the post when I could do so with a focus on her experience of white allies, not mine. (Obviously, I'm made my story of reading Metz central here; I realize there's some irony and risk in that.)

I will admit that like many would-be allies, I'd like to be recognized for my open-mindedness -- however minimal it may be (in this case, I left a tab open, hello) -- when I feel put off. But getting rewarded is seriously, seriously not the goal, and you have to play through that desire for a cookie. Identifying a moment when you're shutting down, and you instead shift to listening harder, with deeper empathy, and likely with quiet self-reflection -- that's the goal.

3. Look for ways that you are racist, rather than ways to prove you're not. There are two key ideas here. First, you can't change behaviors you're not aware of, and if you're constantly trying to assure yourself you're not racist, you're going to miss the ways you are. Second, once you've accepted that you are, in fact, racist some of the time, it's a lot easier to drop the barrier of good intentions, let go of the defensiveness and take responsibility for your actions.

For most of us, identifying our own racism dredges up shame, which is a seriously unpleasant feeling and something we want to avoid. Plus which, assuming you're not cavorting around your neighborhood in a white hood and sheet, it may not be that obvious to you that you are racist. But the thing is: you can't avoid it. Everyone is born with the potential for racial bias and most children acquire it very early in life, so even if you do not identify as a racist, racism is baked into you. And then it's reinforced by our culture. No point in feeling guilty because you're a human and the product of a racist society. But, by all means, feel bad about yourself if you choose not to identify and work against your racial bias.

As I said earlier, you're going to have a hard time challenging your own bias if you're not even aware of it. So, seek out ideas and people that help you see yourself more clearly. If you need a place to start, diversify your media -- consume articles, books, podcasts, radio, video and TV shows made by people of color -- and when white folks are portrayed critically, find ways to identify with them rather than assume that you're different than they are. The point here isn't to take kick off a miasma of self-flagellation, but rather to gain perspective on yourself.

For example, I was recently reading, Our Black Year: One Family's Quest to Buy Black in America's Racially Divided Economy. In it, Maggie Anderson, a black corporate strategy consultant, talks about the experience she and her husband, a black financial adviser, often have at dinner parties and office gatherings, as white people approach them:

People flock to us, asking about our backgrounds, where we live, even why my hair is "different" from most African-American women's hair. (White folks never say "not kinky" or "more Black." They say, "Wow, your hair is so thin!")

At some point, they tell us every detail about the lovely Black couple who attends their church or lives in their neighborhood. They want to introduce us. The logic goes something like this: They're nice Black people. The Andersons are nice Black people. Nice people will like each other. And if both husbands play basketball, as I'm sure they must, we're working up the Black friendship of a lifetime.

As I read, my first impulse was to think, "I've never mentioned (or touched) a black person's hair! Thank god I'm not one of those white people!" But when I let myself dwell for a minute in the scene Anderson describes, it's clear I've done several of the things she rightly calls "clueless." Centering my own behavior again: I've been awkwardly too friendly when introduced to black folks at parties (see above on good intentions). When I meet people, I almost always ask where they live, without considering that my questions might come off as an investigation rather than as a way to connect (Ibid). I have definitely considered introducing black folks in the tech sector just because they're both black (this, despite the fact that I really hate being introduced to women in business when the only things we obviously have in common are that we're both women, and we both work).

These actions aren't horribly destructive and virulently racist. But don't be fooled by subtlety: small acts of bias make it harder to build genuine relationships. And maintaining personal distance helps white feminists stay disconnected from the concerns of people of color. So, accept that you'll likely feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, but consider that you are like the other white folks that people of color describe.

4. Listen to people of color, even if you don't know many. A common suggestion for white people who want to get a clue is to simply listen. Which is a critical step, and it's especially important in your direct interactions with people of color. But what if none of your best friends are black and you don't work with many people of color either? As I mentioned earlier, you can make sure you're taking in media created by people of color. You can also do a ton of thoughtful listening on Twitter -- a medium that gives you legitimate access to the thoughts and conversations of people you may not know.

I've written before about how you can -- and should -- follow people of color in a respectful way on Twitter. You can also seek out some of the stellar women mentioned in the recent campaign kicked off by Feminista Jones that identified #SmartBlackWomenOfTwitter, #SmartLatinaWomenofTwitter, #SmartAAPIWomenOfTwitter, etc. If you're already overloaded on Twitter, try a swap: for every new woman of color you follow, unfollow a white guy. You might be surprised by the effect such a simple step can have on your perspective.

5. Use your feminist powers to identify instances when people of color are under-represented or misrepresented, and speak out about it. You're already in the habit of noticing when lists and groups include few or no women. Tweak your internal algorithm to notice when people of color are missing, too. Then say something.

Women of color don't need us to speak for them, and there are times when standing quietly in solidarity is important. But very often, speaking up is important -- not only because it may influence others, but also because it will likely influence you. As a recent Guardianpiece noted: "when you're confronted by prejudice and you don't object to it, your own attitudes shift in a more prejudiced direction, to maintain consistency between your behaviour and your beliefs."

Of course, there is a chance that raising an issue as a white person may help other white people see it more clearly or see it in the first place. (Indeed, if you've read this far, ask yourself: "Would I have stayed with the piece if it had been written by a woman of color -- or might I have dismissed it early on as 'too angry'?") And you may wonder if inserting yourself is really progress. Instead, wonder this: If white feminists don't strive to see what women of color see and don't consider those perspectives as central as our own, are we truly interested in challenging injustice at all?

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A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousnes. 

Make More Meritocratic Decisions, Improve Diversity

I’ve hosted many high-profile business conferences, and my events now have more really good speakers who are women and/or people of color than most such gatherings. It wasn’t always that way. I work primarily on events that are affiliated with the tech sector, and although the community prides itself on being meritocratic, conference rosters—including some of the events I’ve worked on in the past—tend to be surprisingly homogenous. Conference hosts like to say that that’s because most of the prominent people they can think of to invite and most of the people who apply to speak are white men. Both of those things are perfectly true, but they’ll define your event only if you’re willing to take the easy path and accept conventional, non-disruptive thinking about how to find speakers. Indeed, I’ve found a number of other methods that work well to find stellar speakers from under-represented groups of all kinds. Although I’m focusing here on conference speaker selection, most of these ideas apply to hiring and other business decisions, too, and will work with under-represented groups of all kinds.

Other conference hosts should care about over-representing particular groups for several reasons. 1) Many people will find your event irrelevant or hard to distinguish if all of the speakers look the same to them. A slate with sharp speakers from different communities will draw attendees from different communities. 2) If your event is trying to promote innovation, you yourself should use forward-looking techniques to find speakers—and you will show yourself in the best light when you discover people who have terrific ideas but who are not already stale on the conference circuit. 3) If you believe that the tech sector is meritocratic and that you have benefited from this condition, the righteous thing to do is to perpetuate the meritocracy.

What I’m concerned with isn’t choosing speakers because they’re from under-represented groups. Instead, I care about finding great candidates that you’ll likely miss because people from those groups don’t show up when you use only the traditional systems for finding speakers. The approaches you use make all the difference.

Conference hosts usually use two primary methods to find speakers: 1) you brainstorm a list of prominent people you know or know of, and you invite those folks; 2) you hold a public call for speakers, and you sift through the applications to find the most promising candidates. Both of these methods generate some high-quality speakers. And it will feel like you’ve run a fair process—it was open, and it yielded good presentations—but thanks to deep cultural practices and hidden biases we all carry, white men will be overwhelmingly over-represented, not only among the speakers you brainstorm, but also among those who apply and the people you pick from that pool.

Think of it this way: for any conference, there are many more excellent speakers than there are available speaking slots—and there are a lot of women and people of color who would be great speakers for your event, but you won’t be as aware of them (they are less prominent), and they are unlikely to apply through your call for proposals (for reasons I’ll discuss in a minute). So when you use the two methods described above, which nearly all conference hosts do, you will have missed a very big swath of great candidates in your community, people who simply won’t appear in those processes. In other words, the traditional means for finding speakers are good at identifying white men who are solid speakers, but they are broken for finding other people, and they are thus not meritocratic overall. Because they naturally limit the pool of people you see, they also prevent you from discovering many of the truly best speakers you could have.

It’s a solvable problem. The Lean Startup Conference started in 2009 with a slate that was quite homogenous. Last year, when the conference founder, Eric Ries, and I started talking about my joining as co-host, I said I was willing to work together only if we changed the roster. Eric was totally on board. He was quite aware of the issue and had been writing for a while about hiring decisions in tech in particular. We thought that together, in an area we both cared about a lot and had written about publicly, we could do things differently. For both last year and this year’s Lean Startup Conference, we’ve created rosters comprising just over 50% women and people of color, the quality has remained high or has increased, and event attendance has at least quadrupled since the first year. (Our conference is now medium-sized: the 2013 event takes place in early December with more than 90 speakers and 1,600 attendees over three days.)

Improving the diversity of our speaker roster last year led to a few specific benefits. Because we wrote about what we were doing, we raised the profile of the conference in 2012 and 2013 among other people who care about how speakers are chosen. In both years, many new speaker applicants and a number of attendees from under-represented groups mentioned our efforts as a positive factor in their decisions to participate. And because our speakers include a lot of folks who aren’t regulars on the conference circuit, we’ve been able to distinguish our event from other entrepreneurship gatherings based partly on the lineup.

So I’m here to testify: the techniques below—many that buck conventional wisdom—will help you improve your event by finding better speakers in a more meritocratic manner. These approaches will often take more time and more persistence than you’re used to now, but you aren’t lazy, and you do want to have an impact in your industry. Here are the secrets to game-changing badassery as a conference host.

1. You don’t need to hire a woman or person of color to find women and people of color. You do need to commit to working on the problem. It’s commonly thought that if you want people from an under-represented group to join you, you need at least one person from that group on your team. Think again: there is nothing magical about having more estrogen than testosterone or a particular skin color or eyes of a certain shape that will help you locate speakers with those same physical attributes. You absolutely need to connect with the networks of those people, which I’ll talk about shortly, but you do not have be one.

Everyone in our culture carries hidden biases, including the people who are diminished by them. For instance, a widely circulated study last year found that male and female scientists alike were likely to discriminate significantly against female students. Scientists—people whose careers are based on supposed objectivity—are all subject to bias. You are, too, and so are the people you hire or who are on your selection committee, if you have one, even if they are all women and people of color. People from these groups may be more sensitive to the fact that your conference under-represents them, and you should seek them out as employees because diversity of thought creates the sharpest teams. But they are not inherently better at solving this particular problem. In fact, if white people and men do not take on these issues with equal interest as our colleagues, we will never see the ratios changed.

Eric and I are both white; we didn’t hire anyone to work on the Lean Startup program and find more great candidates who are people of color. We changed our outcomes by committing to finding processes that would lead us to people we weren’t previously aware of. To find speakers beyond the usual suspects, you, too, need to commit using different methods, many of which will take more time than those you’ve been using. You cannot expect people from under-represented groups to change the way they behave to meet your needs for familiarity or quickness. You have to change the way you behave. Happily, doing so pays off.

2. Do have quotas. Oh. My. God. Quotas??!? Are you kidding me? Everyone knows they ensure mediocrity and bias! Consider this: Your normal methods for finding speakers will generate good candidates more quickly than your new methods, so if you don’t designate slots for each stage, you will fill them all with people from the over-represented groups, and you will not have any slots to offer to the people from under-represented groups who appear later in the cycle. When you create quotas, you put in place both a measure and a mechanism for a successful, more meritocratic outcome.

If it makes you more comfortable, we can call these reverse quotas—i.e., limiting the number of people you accept up front as a way of compensating for known imbalances in the selection process and sequencing your decision making to ensure that it’s fairer. (You might also start by using quotas for just the widest part of the funnel; that is, you make sure that you simply consider a certain percentage of people from under-represented groups. The NFL calls this the Rooney Rule and uses it for hiring head coaches and senior football operations staff.)

For this year’s Lean Startup Conference, my goal was to have no more than 50% white male speakers—a number that reflects the business communities our attendees work in. We have just a few more speakers to add, but the final count looks like it’ll come in around 47% folks who are both white and male. I’m proud to shine a light on those guys—they’re deserving—and equally proud to have saved room for the terrific candidates from under-represented groups whom we found later.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes—whose show tackles political topics and has among its hundreds of guests annually only 43% white men (many fewer than the industry standard)—has a good take on quotas:

You have to say, “We give ourselves this rule,” and that’s going to force us to just be more resourceful. Because I genuinely don’t think there’s another way to do it. If you don’t do that then the inertia and the tide are so strong, unless you are committed as a priority to actively fight against it, you’re going to end up reproducing what everyone else does.

I know of no conference hosts who are in this game to reproduce what everyone else does. Use quotas, or reverse quotas, to help guide yourself toward a roster with amazing speakers whom you’ve drawn from a better pool of serious candidates.

3. Be transparent. If you assume that people are rational, it’s no surprise when women and people of color ignore your call for proposals (actually, what I and a whole lot of organizers find is that about 10% of your proposals will come from women, and maybe 2% from people of color). After all, if you’ve held your conference before, and you fielded a lot of white male speakers, people from under-represented groups can see that they’re not likely to be picked. If your conference is new, and you have no track record, they have no reason to think your event will be any different from others. And while you don’t need a diverse team to find diversity, as I explained earlier, you are sending a signal if your conference hosts and/or selection/advisory committee include no folks from the under-represented groups you’re trying to reach.

There’s a reasonably easy fix for this: write thoughtfully on the conference site and speaker application form. If your conference has a history of homogeneity, own up to what you’ve done in the past, talk about why you want to change it, and lay out the steps you’re taking to change your results. If your conference is new, demonstrate that there’s a problem in your sector, and then describe what you’re doing to ensure that you won’t over-represent particular groups (bonus: this is a good chance to differentiate yourself from your competitors). Then do the stuff you say you’re going to do.

Last year, when I joined Eric to co-host The Lean Startup Conference, the event was already two years old and had, as I said earlier, a clear bias toward white male speakers. To introduce a new era, we opened the 2012 call for proposals and asked people to nominate speakers, noting that we were particularly keen on finding women and people of color. That approach failed completely, drawing the normal ratios of 10% women and almost no people of color. In other words, we didn’t convince anyone that we were doing anything other than paying lip service to the idea of a meritocratic approach. We may even have made things worse by suggesting that we would favor under-represented groups, thus undermining our credibility (for the reasons cited above), could well have come across as insulting (nobody wants to be picked for anything other than their great ideas), and may have triggered stereotype threat (thus deterring people in under-represented groups from applying at all).

So we retrenched and tried to see things more from the perspective of people who were not already in our address books. That lead us to run another call, this time co-writing a longer post explaining why the event had had a lot of people on stage who looked like Eric, what we were doing differently now, and inviting people to apply especially if we did not already know them. In the second round, more than half of our applicants were women and nearly a quarter were from people of color. That wasn’t the only thing we did, as you’ll see below. But our honesty, we learned from applicants, was a key part of why many people submitted proposals who wouldn’t otherwise have done so.

(Btw, if you’re thinking, “See, you do need to have a woman on the team to get women to apply,” consider: Eric’s previous partner for the conference was a black man, and the roster then was almost completely white. I respect that partner a lot, and there are very good reasons the conference looked the way it did then. By the same token, I have worked on conferences that drew few women. There is no pixie dust generated by women or people of color that attracts more of us.)

4. When you seek speakers, either in writing or in discussion, the language you use matters a lot. If you say that you’re looking for “experts,” “best practices” or if you’re vague, you might as well instead say, “Men only need apply, and better if you’re a white guy.” Thanks to cultural pressure for women not to brag and to imposter syndrome, a well-documented phenomenon in which an accomplished person feels like a fraud, many potentially great candidates won’t consider themselves experts or qualified to speak at your conference.

I’m far from the only conference host to notice that men will often offer to speak publicly about things they know little about, while women tend to be hesitant to speak unless they’re certain that they’re the world’s primary expert on a topic. Back in 2009, I was at an Ignite event in San Francisco where a guy got up and said, “I learned last week about this thing called Lean Startup,” and then proceeded to give a weak talk on it. I’ve been working since 2008 with the man who created the Lean Startup movement, last year and this year co-hosting the conference he founded. If Eric weren’t available, and a group of total novices needed a talk on Lean Startup, I might feel qualified. I would not give a random Ignite presentation on it, because Eric is the world’s primary expert, not me.

Happily, there’s an easy way to tear down this barrier: simply say that you’re seeking people who have “advice or expertise to share.” You can go farther and clarify with a phrase like, “advice or expertise to share that other people can learn from” or “advice or expertise to share on how to repair any kind of toilet”—or on whatever the focus of your event is. Nearly everyone has advice, and many people consider themselves to have expertise. (I would give an Ignite presentation any time offering advice on how you can apply Lean Startup thinking in young media companies, because I have scads of personal experience with that challenge.) Tap those veins to good effect.

5. Do blind reviews where you can, but don’t stop there. The study I mentioned above is not the only one to find that in reviewing resumes and other work, people often discriminate against women and applicants with racially or ethnically distinct names. Conversely, when people review work without any clues about the sex or race of a candidate, they’re more likely to rate women and people of color more favorably. So, yes, if you have a call for proposals, you will automatically make your process more meritocratic if you ensure you have a way to review the ideas without knowing the applicants’ names. Set that up and do it.

But assessing speakers, like assessing job applicants, doesn’t end with written materials. You cannot rely on blind review alone, as you will eventually wind up watching video, talking on the phone, or meeting for an interview to continue your decision-making process.

For conference hosts, the first thing you’ll hit is likely to be video, as that’s increasingly required in applications. This is for good reason: bad writers can be great speakers, and decent writing can be submitted by a PR agent. Video can make a huge difference in helping you figure out who is or could be a terrific presenter. But it can make the playing field far steeper for people who are new speakers, and who, because the conventional processes don’t get them into the pipeline in the first place, are more likely to be women and people of color. So first, rather than ask people to submit video of themselves speaking at another event (as I used to do), require that everyone create a very short video specifically for applying to your event. This not only helps level the playing field, but it also weeds out PR agents, because the candidates cannot apply without being part of the process. Second, know that once you see the videos, your biases will kick in, and you’ll have to compensate with additional tactics. The fact that you’ve just outmaneuvered the PR flacks will give you extra energy for this work.

6. Ask groups to help spread the word about your call for proposals. You’ve announced your call for proposals, it’s transparent, and it uses inviting language. If the only people who know about it are people you already know, it may well draw very few new candidates. This is why, as I suggested earlier, you have to build alliances with people in other networks. You can—and should—reach out to groups like Women 2.0 and NewME Accelerator (or the equivalents in your sector), and see if they’ll tweet a link to your call for proposals or run it on their blog or newsletter. But you have to play the long game, too. Look for leaders in those networks and develop relationships with them, occasionally inviting them for coffee so you can learn what they’re working on and see if you can offer support over time.

Most of you know this already, but it bears emphasis: Building a variety of acquaintances in your sector is a basic business skill, and a crucial one for conference hosts.

7. Ask individuals to help find new speakers. Beyond your call for proposals, you’ll talk to a number of individuals who want to suggest speakers. Like you, most of these people will be most aware of white men—both among people they know and those they don’t—who could fit your needs. But if you ask them for help in identifying strong candidates from under-represented groups, these individuals often realize they have additional people to recommend. If your event includes panels, you can institutionalize this practice by requesting or requiring that panel organizers include at least one woman and one person of color in the group.

I’ve been holding these conversations regularly for more than five years, particularly with leaders, investors or otherwise influential and well-connected folks. At first, I felt awkward bringing up the fact that my conferences were trying to create something different. But over time, the conversations became much easier, and I’ve very rarely met silence or resistance. I just state matter of factly what we’re looking for, and people almost always say, “Of course! Good idea.” And then they come back later with at least one good recommendation, or they encourage a different employee to apply, and they ask me to look out for that proposal. I have once cancelled a panel, because the moderator insisted he didn’t know or couldn’t find any women. Given that dozens of other moderators had been able to find very strong panelists from under-represented groups, his inability or unwillingness to do so was a strong signal that he wasn’t of the caliber we needed for that conference. (I have once refused to participate in a panel that didn’t include any people of color.)You will not only draw in other people, but you’ll also get the added benefit of becoming more comfortable bringing up potentially tricky topics.

8. Seek out individual people from under-represented groups in your sector and brainstorm talk ideas with them. After you announce your conference, whether you have a call for proposals or not, you’ll almost certainly get a steady stream of emails from white men suggesting themselves as speakers. While many of them will be good candidates, you will not get a commensurate stream from awesome women and people of color, who may not see themselves as part of your community or who don’t know that they have advice relevant to your community or who are not in the habit of recommending themselves for public speaking roles.

The good news is that taking the time to talk individually with people from your under-represented groups and brainstorming talk possibilities together unearths very good ideas. I’ve found the rate is high, and about three-quarters of them turn out to be solid prospects. Not gonna pretend: this process is time-consuming. It requires finding people, some of whom you already know, some of whom you don’t (for instance, you have to attend other conferences, keep an eye on your industry press for names you don’t know, ask around, and so forth); reaching out to explain why you want to schedule a call or coffee; holding the conversation; and then possibly following up. It’s another play in the long game, but it has very high return, as those people not only become speakers, but also help spread the word about your event.

Bonus suggestion: Offer speaker training. This year, in The Lean Startup Conference call for proposals, we emphasized that we were looking for people we didn’t already know, including first-time speakers. To help encourage people not already on the conference circuit, we offered speaker training. We’re still in the throes of this training, and I don’t yet have advice on how to do it well. But I do know that a significant number of people mentioned in their proposals that the offer had motivated them to apply. Nearly all of those people were women. (Interestingly, the people who have participated in the training sessions we’ve had so far have been a very mixed group, and many of our most accomplished speakers have tuned in.)

Oh, and also: have a published code of conduct, talk about why it’s important and what else you’re doing to create a lively learning atmosphere for everyone who attends, speakers included. A lot of conferences have reputations for their intense party scenes. While that might be fun, people from under-represented groups may not feel included in that kind of socializing, and many women in particular may not feel safe in a crowded room with free-flowing alcohol and a majority of men. If you’ve put together your conference in order to help people learn, rather than to replicate Tailhook, think about the conditions you’ll need to foster to make learning really happen. Then do those things, and talk about them, and let people tell you how awesome you are for focusing on them. Potential speakers will take note.

At this point, I’m beginning to feel like one of the world’s experts on using more meritocratic processes to discover great speaking candidates you wouldn’t otherwise have found. Indeed, conference organizers, take note: I’m willing to speak on the topic. 

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A shorter version of this piece was published on Pando Daily. 

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A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousnes.

 

Fear Will Not Protect Us, But Empathy Might

A couple of weeks ago, Questlove wrote a piece about his feelings in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict. It was mostly focused on the pain he’s felt as a person who, in being black and big, is constantly thought by white people to be a physical threat. He tells one particular story to illustrate the point: in an elevator in his high-end, high-security Manhattan apartment building, he was alone with a white woman, and she wouldn’t tell him what button to push for her floor—because, he realized as he stepped out of the elevator, she was likely afraid of him. In the context of his piece, it was a powerful and moving story.

A few days ago, Kim Foster wrote a post challenging the gender dynamics in Questlove’s story. Her piece was grounded in racist thinking (which she doesn’t seem to have recognized when she wrote it). To her credit, after a number of people called her out, most notably Jamilah Lemieux of Ebony, Foster updated her post with a recant. I would have liked to see Foster explore her own thinking a little more. But admitting public mistakes is hard, and I appreciate that she did it quickly and graciously.

Before we put this episode behind us, I want to revisit the argument Foster was making, because I think it bears examination. I’m also going suggest another way we can look at the elevator story.

Fear Will Not Protect Us

Part of Foster’s point was that women need to protect themselves from sexual assault and must be able to do so unapologetically:

I imagine a young woman reading the exchange that happened between Questlove and the woman in the elevator, taking it in and, not wanting to be racist, shifting how she reacts to men in public. Maybe she smiles more, acts less freaked out when alone in an elevator with a strange man, maybe she walks down that dark isolated street and doesn’t worry that someone is walking behind her, or lets down her guard and tries to let the man know she isn’t intimidated, that she doesn’t find him scary. Maybe she lets concern for others — offending that stranger, appearing racist, or sexist — over-ride her instincts to take care of herself.

Later she adds: “It is dangerous for us to teach our children not to protect themselves…or ignore someone.”

I agree to my core that women should not have to justify our unsmiling silence in public places. And I believe we have to speak out about it continually if we are to ever hope for peace on the streets. But we cannot conflate fear and unfriendliness with protection from sexual violence. Indeed, the way women act won’t protect us at all. Not what we wear, not what we drink, not whether we refuse to smile. We are no less likely to be raped if we don’t smile at a man in an elevator than if we do. Put another way: smiling is not asking for it, and it will not make us less safe. Fear is not a shield.

We need other ways of protecting ourselves.

Oppression Olympics vs Empathy Olympics

As others have explained in response to Foster, white women’s safety, purity and rights have for centuries been used to justify brutality against men of color. Emmett Till is an archetype, not an anomaly. George Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury that was 5/6ths white women in part because the defense took a number of steps to demonstrate that Zimmerman was a defender of the neighborhood’s white women against black intruders. While Zimmerman’s attorneys were able to successfully argue that his record of abusing female partners was irrelevant, our national narratives about the need to protect white women against black men are so ingrained in our culture, they were barely noticed as an admissible underpinning of the case.

When you engage in Oppression Olympics and pit one group’s travails against another’s, you not only diminish the very real experiences of other people who are suffering, but you also miss the chance to make connections between the bigger forces that oppress us: Zimmerman operates in a world that lets him—even encourages him to—assault women and kill black boys.

What if, instead of medaling in Oppression Olympics, we tried to become contenders in Empathy Olympics? What if we put some true effort into trying to understand the validity of each other's emotions? On the elevator with the black man and the white woman, how does the ride go differently? In responding to Foster’s piece, @deluxvixens tweeted, “what @KimFosterNYC said about having to ‘be nice, placate, share’ is stuff that Black women have to do to be safe around many white women.” What if white women used our basic human empathy (to say nothing of our trained-as-women empathy) to feel the weight of that observation, recognize our roles in it and work to change the dynamic?

Jamelle Bouie wrote earlier this year about the time he sold a used tv to a friend who lived three blocks away. He’s black, and because he was afraid that cops might automatically assume he was a criminal if he was walking down the street carrying a large, late-model tv at night, he asked the white, female buyer to walk with him. He tells the story to point out that were he a white guy, it would probably never have had to occur to him to have that fear. Not to appropriate for my own purposes the story, which he shared as a counter-example of privilege, but it’s worth noting that it also serves as a point of familiarity for untold women of all colors who also feel unsafe walking three blocks alone in their own neighborhoods.

That parallel experience of threat is not coincidental, and the millions harmed by the dynamic of fear are nearly all women and people of color. If we can see the connections between our experiences, we can gain greater empathy for each other, which might help us work together to understand who is served by a system of pervasive fear, how we each perpetuate it, and how we can combat it. We can be effective in creating social change only when our approaches are intersectional.

Empathy After the Zimmerman Verdict

Foster’s piece would have been problematic at any moment in history to date. After all, there really never is a good time to: make white women’s experiences the center of discussion while all but ignoring the experiences of women of color; pit white women against black men; and co-opt people of color’s pain to advance a white person’s agenda. But those actions are especially hurtful coming right after a white man who killed a black child was found not-guilty by a jury that was 5/6ths white. Not to mention that that verdict came just after the Supreme Court dismantled the Voting Right Act, which will make it appreciably harder to vote for millions of people of color in this country. Oh, and by the way, jury pools are drawn from the rolls of registered voters.

If you’re white and you’ve been have paying close attention since the Zimmerman verdict--not just to Questlove, but to a torrent of stories and tweets and and tv segments and videos and press conferences—it’s stunningly clear that people of color are feeling an intense, personal pain right now that we white folks can’t quite experience. It’s awing, really.

I appreciate that submissions to sites like WeAreNotTrayvonMartin help white people recognize our privilege. But this outpouring of pain calls for more; it calls for new depths of empathy and serious inquiry into where that can take us together.

Fear will not protect us. Indeed empathy that lets us work together for change may be the only thing that ultimately does.

PS. White folks, if you’re wondering how to improve your empathy for people of color starting right this minute, check out this post.

Thanks to Johanna Foster (no relation to Kim) for talking through many of these issues—and more—together this week. 

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A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness.  

What's Race Got to Do with It?

Over the weekend, something rare happened: Tony and I saw a movie we both liked a lot, "20 Feet from Stardom." A documentary about rock backup singers, it features almost entirely women of color, ranging in age from 20-something to at least 70-something. If you can't find enough--or any--movies celebrating middle- and upper-middle-class black women, go see this one today. But go with your eyes open.

The movie comprises interviews with accomplished backup singers, uber-famous solo artists, producers and music historians. It focuses in particular on Darlene Love, Merry Clayton--both of whom I realized I'd been listening to my entire life and had never known--Lisa Fischer and Judith Hill, along with Claudia Lennear and Tata Vega. A formidable lineup, all of whom have or had ambitions of becoming solo artists. 

These women are astonishing singers and terrific performers with top-flight music-industry connections. So why no breakout successes among them? The movie opens with Bruce Springsteen talking about what it means to shift from a backup singer to a solo star. "That walk to the front [of the stage] is, is complicated," he says, explaining the ego and narcissism needed. I don't doubt that's true, and a number of other people in the film weigh in with similar observations about the monster drive and particular personality required to break out. The movie implies--and in some cases, people in it state directly--that these women could really sing, but they just didn't have what it takes. Or maybe, as Sting suggests during it, they weren't lucky enough.

You could come away thinking the filmmakers are simply shining a light on some extraordinary women while showing us the inevitable disappointments of backup singing.

But just beneath the surface of "20 Feet from Stardom" lurks a question the movie doesn't ask: what role did race play in shaping the backup singers' careers? The U.S. music industry--in which white people were, until recently, the primary producers and distributors--has a long history of repackaging music made by black people to sell in paler versions for white people, without giving credit or payment to its originators. 

Given that backdrop--and the facts that in this movie nearly all the solo artists interviewed are white men and nearly all the backup singers women of color, the one former female backup singer who is now a big star is white (Sheryl Crow), there are no black female solo successes featured, and much of the action takes place during a period of racial upheaval in the U.S.--it's curious that race is mentioned just in passing. And although there's an extended look at the way Phil Spector used Darlene Love and her group, The Blossoms, to record hit songs uncredited for The Crystals (both groups were black), his actions aren't shown as part of a fraught legacy. 

Instead, "20 Feet" creates its drama in large part by relying on one of our favorite American narratives: the personal achievement or failure of individuals. In this telling, Phil Spector wasn't part of a systematic mistreatment of women and people of color in the music industry; he was a solo villain. Darlene Love wasn't subject to those systematic forces; she just didn't want success quite badly enough, and so she had to spend time--after voicing huge hits for other artists--working as a housecleaner. (She later returned to music, when she decided she really did want it after all, and she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. Her bio on their site ends with the quote, "'I never pushed to be a star,' she told writer David Hinckley in 1992. 'I didn’t want to. I had my home, my family. Session work let you do the music and leave.'” This is dead opposite the way she describes her career aspirations in "20 Feet.")

I don't know exactly what role race played in the careers of backup singers like Love and Clayton. But I very much wanted the movie to ask. As a documentary that explores a number of themes, it could have folded in race as one of the threads. Indeed, its multi-part structure gives it particularly good opportunity to look at race as one of many factors that affected its subjects' careers. 

So why doesn't the movie address race directly? It's possible the filmmakers simply weren't aware of the issue. But that's unlikely. Director Morgan Neville has made dozens of films about musicians and the music business; he could hardly have failed to encounter discussions of racism in the industry. Even if he had, it's difficult to imagine that among the dozens of people he interviewed for "20 Feet," nobody mentioned it. More likely is that he and his producers (who are also white) didn't perceive race as a compelling force in the women's stories, or, more cynically, they didn't perceive it as an element that would help sell "20 Feet." There are other possibilities, of course (for instance, questioning race could have undermined the narratives of personal ambition). But no matter how you look at it, they left out a conversation about race. 

What difference does it make when we can't or don't talk about race?

In late May, Tony and I went to see an exhibit at the Getty Museum, "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940 - 1990," which describes itself as "an engaging view of the region's diverse urban landscape." Fifty years is a lot to cover, but it's a meticulously presented show, opening with a series of beautifully animated infographics examining things like the development of the road system, water usage, and the radically changing racial and ethnic demographics of the county (in 1940 it was fairly diverse; by 1990, awesomely so). The exhibit then goes on to tell its story through historical photographs, film clips*, books, pamphlets, models and quotes. 

You could come away thinking the museum is simply shining a light on the some extraordinary aspects of L.A.'s development in the 20th century.

Except that in five sections (Car Culture, Urban Networks, Engines of Innovation, Community Magnets and Residential Fabric), it fails to mention race again after that intriguing first wall, save once. In the final room, in a panel on planned communities, the exhibit notes, "Restrictive housing covenants, ruled unconstitutional in 1953, prevented minority groups from purchasing property in many new neighborhoods." A book displayed nearby says the post-war Aliso Village development was intended as a racially integrated project, and it shows a black couple. That's it. That's the entire treatment of race in the exhibit.

Even the segment on Dodger Stadium, which describes the struggle of Chavez Ravine homeowners to retain their properties after the city sold the land under them to the team, manages not to mention that the area was predominantly Spanish-speaking. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the photographs, films and illustrations show almost nothing but white people, and the politicians, planners, architects and businesspeople are all white (and nearly all men, at that). 

In a way, it's easy to miss the deracination, because a lot of the images are of buildings and highways. Indeed, I wonder if the curators themselves were aware of the particular angle they chose. But either way, for a show that focuses quite a bit on the way people lived, I found my breath quietly taken away as I realized that it is, in fact, an exhibit about a white L.A.--though it sets up a different story.

So again: what difference does it make?

The trial of George Zimmerman is being held right now. As a reminder, he's the white neighborhood watch leader who shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in Florida last year. Both the killing and the trial itself are riven with racial overtones (to say nothing of racism). Yet the judge has sharply limited discussions of race and has barred the term "racial profiling" from the proceedings. She believes race is such an overloaded topic, so prejudicial in conversation, she's chosen to excise it as an explicit part of discussion in the trial. In other words, an aspect of the episode that may be central, that may have led to Martin's death, cannot even be mentioned in court. You could come away from the trial thinking that Zimmerman behaved in nothing less than a reasonable way. 

Truth in our legal system, not to mention safety for our black and brown teenagers, may rest in our ability to discuss race in an open and informed way. So what would it take to make it a less charged, more approachable topic? What if more of us better understood the roles race has played in U.S. history? What if our movies and museums that investigate our histories didn't sidestep race? Could they help us be more comfortable with issues of race in our society today? Could they help us be more conversant? Let's go with: hell, yes.

Here's a bit of hope to round this out. Over the weekend, Tony and my parents and I went to the Brooklyn Museum, and among the exhibits we saw was a small show about American quilts held in the museum's collection. Although there's a rich tradition of quilting in black American communities, the exhibit includes almost all Anglo-European pieces. So the curators talk about why that's the case(!), both at the beginning and end of the exhibit. I've resisted the urge to copy-edit:

The Brooklyn Museum's collection largely originates from and reflects Anglo-European traditions of making and collecting. However, contemporary scholarship confirms that enslaved Africans and, later, African American domestic workers and seamstresses would have labored on quilts attributed to white households. 

Museum collections evolve over time, revealing the priorities and prejudices of their time and place. Reflecting the acquisition history of the of the Brooklyn Museum's collections in general and the Decorative Arts collection in particular, both of which initially privileged Anglo-European culture and patrimony, quilts were collected based on their ability to serve as superlative examples from this dominant lineage. Since the 1980s, significant work has been done by scholars and practitioners to make visible the remarkable and historically important quilt-making traditions that flourished alongside those here but are not yet well represented within the Museum's collection.

This, folks, is how you take a small step to acknowledge and talk about race, and I admit that this is a small step indeed. But it makes a difference. It opens our eyes. 

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 * Both "20 Feet" and "Overdrive" include film clips from the Prelinger Archives, an amazing collection through which you--yes, you--can access films, too.

A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness. 

 

I Have a Few Things to Say About Adria

I host conferences that are prominent in the tech sector, and I've had Adria Richards speak at two of them. I could write a book about what went down last week, but none of us is in the mood for that, so I'm going to highlight just a few angles that have been overlooked or underplayed in this episode. (Incredibly, there are such angles.)

I. First off, what happened? At PyCon last week, during a keynote session, Adria heard some guys behind her making jokes that involved sexual language. The PyCon code of conduct states clearly, "Sexual language...is not appropriate for any conference venue." Adria was bothered by the jokes, and referring to the code, she tweeted to the conference organizers, asking for help. They pulled aside the guys, who apolgized, and returned to the conference. Subsequently, PlayHaven, the guys' employer and a sponsor of the conference, fired one of them. Adria then received a stream of virulent attacks and threats online. Her employer, SendGrid, was later subject to DDoS attacks demanding that she be fired, and they did so. 

Although this is entirely factual, it will be controversial when I say that everyone directly involved in the incident agrees the guys were in the wrong. Adria, obviously, agrees. PyCon addressed the guys in person and, in a blog post, called out their "inappopriate comments." PlayHaven, they guys' employer agrees and also blogged about it. And at least one of the guys agrees--the one who was fired apoligized to Adria in a post on Hacker News: "She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position."

II. Because I'm skipping a bunch of chapters in exploring the miasma of responses to this episode, I want to point you to some other posts that give important context or offer excellent analysis:

In "A Woman Walks Into a Tech Conference," Courtney Stanton opens with this story: 

A woman in the tech community identified people violating the stated Code of Conduct of the group. She was summarily run out of the community. 

That could have describe what Adria experienced. Turns out it was an example from six years ago. Although I don't agree with all of Stanton's views here, she give a very good rundown  of how common and deep harrasment is in the tech sector and how infrequently these problems end in anything other than humiliation for the women involved.

In "Why Asking What Adria Richards Could Have Done Differently Is The Wrong Question," Deanna Zandt calls out the many people saying Adria should have behaved more decorously in identifying inappopriate behavior, and notes that their request is akin to asking rape victims to dress differently. It absolutely puts the onus on the wrong people. Deanna also goes farther, making the critical point that many white women are telling Adria, a black woman, how she should have acted, adding an unwelcome layer of privileged perspective to the situation. That the privilege is likely unconscious makes it worse, not better.

It's also worth pointing out here that Adria's actions had the effect she desired: PyCon pulled aside the guys she identified and resolved the issue to mutual satisfaction. The undesired effects--receiving rape and death threats, getting doxxed, having her employer taken down by DDoS attacks with demands from the attackers that she be fired, getting fired--happened only because she was willing to identify herself. As Coda Hale tweeted, "If only you had challenged the hegemony in a slightly different way we wouldn’t have to harass and threaten you. Better luck next time." 

(One of the things I'm not going to discuss here is the issue of "public shaming," which is how many people, including SendGrid's CEO, have characterized Adria's original tweets and berated her for. I have seen no efforts to define what "public shaming" might mean in this context. But I hope it goes without saying that I find it a bullshit excuse for lazy, craven and violent responses to any human interaction, let alone a situation in which there's actually no disagreement among the parties involved that the guys making jokes were behaving inappropriately.)

Matt LeMay, in "On PyCon," not only goes deeper on why it's the wrong tack to question Adria's choices, he also explains why another common refrain--that Adria shouldn't have been offended by the jokes in the first place--is irrelevant. And he provides some excellent thinking on why we continue to have these problems in the tech sector. His is the most compassionate and clear-headed piece I've read to date, two qualities notably missing from discussions on this episode. If you read nothing else--including the rest of this post--read that. 

Finally, Rachel Sklar, in "The Firing Of Adria Richards Looks Like Kneejerk Appeasement To The Troll Armies," looks at why SendGrid--an infrastructure company that effectively just told us all they don't know how to guarantee uptime--was both insincere and cowardly in  its decision to fire Adria. I hope others take even harder looks at their actions.

III. With all of that said and linked, I want to talk about PlayHaven (reminder: they're the employer of the guys who were making jokes behind Adria during the PyCon keynotes, and a sponsor of the conference). Sometime after Adria's complaint was resolved to the satisfaction of PyCon, PlayHaven fired one of the guys--the event that seems to have triggered the shitstorm of attacks on Adria. Now, we can't know what would have happened if they hadn't taken that step. But we can look at the history of conference kerfuffles, note that the guys' behaving inappropriately have rarely been sanctioned by their employers (or the conferences involved) and see that none of the incidents has exploded to the degree this one did. 

So there's a way you could view last week and say that PlayHaven shouldn't have fired the guy. And, indeed, there are many people saying exactly that, for a variety of reasons. But here's the thing: PlayHaven acted precisely as we'd like a company with conscience to behave. In his blog post about firing the employee, PlayHaven CEO Andy Yang wrote:

PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go. We value and protect the privacy of our employees, both past and present, and we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways.

In other words, PlayHaven is serious about their employees' behaving respectfully toward people in their community, the company cares about how its employees represent it at conferences where it has an official presence, and this employee was not meeting their standards. For legal reasons, most companies will not talk publicly about the circumstances that lead to their firing somebody. In this case, PlayHaven says it won't discuss "all the factors," suggesting there may have been a pattern of problems with this employee (perhpas of this nature, perhaps not--it doesn't really matter here).

If more companies acted with the sort of leadership PlayHaven has shown in making clear that disrepectful behavior has no place in business, we'd have a much smaller problem to start with. 

IV. Here's another surprising note: not only did PlayHaven act admirably in the face of inappropriate behavior, the PyCon organizers showed perhaps the most clear and thoughtful approach to the issue that any conference in the sector has. They have a supremely direct and well-thought-out code of conduct, and they back it up with publicly posted guidlines for how attendees can report violations and how staff should respond. They appear to have made sure staff are aware of these directions, and they acted quickly when a violation was reported, apparently resolving it to the satisfaction of the people involved. Again, this is precisely the way we want accountable, credible organizations to behave. 

I find it more than a bit damning of the tech sector and SendGrid that PlayHaven and PyCon, two of the several players in this episode with considerable power, acted with great respectability, and yet Adria--a player without much power--was attacked at a level we don't see often, with intent to harm and silence her. 

V. In a post that has circulated widely, Amanda Blum calls this whole episode "a tragedy" and shows some empathy for Adria. But Amanda opens the post by saying that she doesn't like Adria, and then spends a chunk of time on "an established pattern of action," describing ways in which she believes Adria has acted dishonorably for publicly identifying things she found problematic at other conferences. "When Adria is offended," writes Amanda, "she doesn’t work within the community to resolve the problem."

I have seen and heard a lot of comments from people about Amanda's post, including people I find smart and thoughtful, nearly all of them saying something like, "Interesting backstory." Two startup CEOs I know have said that they'd be open to interviewing Adria for their companies were it not for the history they read about in this post. Amanda makes some good points about the systemic problems in tech, but for those of you who are tempted to focus on the personal attacks, consider the following: 

• As I mentioned earlier, I've had Adria speak at two different, high-profile conferences I've co-hosted. She has been a model speaker, seeking and taking feedback on her presentation, showing flexibility in the logistics around her talks, and on one occasion, giving a high-pressure talk as she was still recovering from a bout of food poisoning (a condition that would cause many speakers to bail). I would have her as a speaker again, without question. 


• Although Amanda says that Adria "doesn't work within the community to resolve the problem," Adria did, in fact, do exactly that at PyCon. She observed behavior that clearely violated the conferences posted code of conduct; the behavior bothered her; she reported it to PyCon via their Twitter account; they responded via Twitter; she thanked them via Twitter; PyCon talked in person to the guys who violated the code; the issue was resolved, apparently to the satisfaction of PyCon, Adria and the guys. That is pretty much the definition of "working within the community." (Adria subsequently chose to blog about the sequence of events, I believe to describe why she'd chosen to report this particular violation and to make the point that doing so can be important in these cases, but that was after the issue was closed within PyCon.)


• As Deanna points out, there's an obvious parallel to be drawn between saying that women should dress differently if they don't want to get raped and saying that Adria should have acted differently if she didn't want to get attacked and fired. There's also a clear comparison around sharing somebody's "history," which is a common tactic people use to discredit rape victims. Whether Adria acted previously in a way you understand or agree with has no bearing on the validity of her actions in this case. Oh, and by the way, she doesn't have to have been a perfect person in the past to be perfectly within her rights here to report a problem and do so without drawing a torrent of hatred or getting fired.


• UPDATE: See also "Digging Beneath the Surface: That Amanda Blum Article on Adria Richards Is Not What it Seems." Gayle Laakmann McDowell does a great job debunking the "facts" of Amanda's post. 

VI. On our conference site, I'll write more about what I'm doing as a leader of that event, in the wake of all this (hint: look for a more robust code of conduct and training for our staff and volunteers on how to help uphold it). Meantime, I want to talk about why conferences might have and adhere to any such policy at all.

While reasonable people can disagree about what's funny, the PyCon code of conduct is dead clear that sexual language isn't appropriate at a conference. Codes like that exist because a large number of people can't tell where the line is between funny and offensive, but also because not everyone agrees. The code says, in effect: "Some language will cause some people to be uncomfortable and will thereby shut down the kinds of conversations we're trying to foster at this event." Guidelines that draw a broad fence around iffy language at an event privilege professional discussions--which is what people are ostensibly paying to be there for. This is a case in which we want privilege as a conscious act of prioritizing ideas to build community.

When she and I both worked for Boing Boing, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden--who is not only the foremost expert on managing online comments, but who also runs a blog with the best discussions perhaps on the whole internet--once pointed out to me that if you create an atmosphere in which anyone can say anything, you will necessarily give prominence to offensive comments and hateful behavior, because people who don't like or can't tolerate that sort of thing won't participate. In other words, there's a tradeoff when you have no rules. If there's a tradeoff in having rules, and it's that some of us will have to speak thoughtfully when in the public areas of events and, perhaps, apologize if we offend people, I'm all in favor of that exchange. 

VII. Now what? One of the truisms about social change is that takes a lot of different kinds of battles, over a long period of time. Some of those fights are personal, some of them are private, some of them are public, some of them are at the policy level, some of them are at the legislative level. Whatever the arena, the people who stand up for change often do so at enormous personal risk. Adria, in asking for a very, very small measure of respect has paid a huge price, at least in the short term. I believe that it will pay off, though, far beyond conferences like ours putting in place stronger support for professional discussions. I believe that asking for a fair environment helps lead to one, and that we'll see the benefits in small ways as thoughtful people make real attempts to improve our communities. Perhaps next time, the person identifying men behaving badly will be a man.

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A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race--and in keeping with the themes of this post--I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousnes.

UPDATE: I'm no longer accepting comments on this post about whether Adria behaved appropriately by she tweeting about the guys behind her. I firmly believe she did, and the issue is not up for debate here, so I'll delete further comments trying to argue that she "went nuclear" or otherwise was in the wrong by using a common channel of communication to report a violation of PyCon's code of conduct. 

 

Can Twitter Make White People Less Racist?

I'm going to assume that you're not a KKK-type racist. You are on the internet, so I'm taking a bit of a risk, but you are probably not looking for lynchings to cheer and demanding that black nurses at the hospital stay away from your white newborn. You're not a racist in the sense that you're not actively advocating for white supremacy. But you are racist.

The distinction between the noun (a racist) and the adjective (racist) makes all the difference. Because you don't have to be a racist to have racist thoughts. In fact, you don't even have to be white. Truckloads of research have shown that we all have hidden biases--including biases against groups to which we belong. So I am going to assume that if you're reading this, you're either a search-engine bot or a human, and if you're human, like me, you're racist. (Actually, if you're a search-engine bot, it turns out you're probably racist, too. This shit is pernicious.)

Let's be clear: hidden biases aren't benign just because they're hidden. Rather the opposite. Let's say you're white, and you think you're being a good citizen because you would never call anybody the n-word--but you're not even aware that race is a factor when you think a white job candidate is more qualified than a black candidate with the same or stronger credentials. In other words, your hidden biases are hidden from you. Which means you that you can hire the white person without recognizing that you favored her for her race, and you won't be prompted to examine your role in a system of racial inequality you probably say you deplore. 

If you're white,* you have a special obligation to understand these patterns, because you're the passive beneficiary of them. Not only did you get more favorably reviewed if you were the candidate above, but--to name just a very few of the many well-documented benefits of whiteness in the U.S.--you're also more likely to be approved for a mortgage, more likely to survive cancer, and way less likely to be stopped randomly by the police. And, of course, if you're white, you're a lot less likely to be aware of the role race plays in your life on a daily basis.

So if you're white, you're benefitting from racism, you're likely perpetuating it--let's say unintentionally-and it's a problem. The question is: What are you doing about it? Last week, writing for the Nation, Mychal Denzel Smith put it plainly:

"Not every white person is a racist, but the genius of racism is that you don’t have to participate to enjoy the spoils. If you’re white, you can be completely oblivious, passively accepting the status quo, and reap the rewards....So my solution? White people have to let go of racism....Your next question is probably, 'How?' Listening to people of color, earnestly, is a start. "

Here's a concrete way you can listen--even if none of your best friends is black: on Twitter, follow and read a significant number of people of color who sometimes talk about race and link to relevant media. People like Michele Norris, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb, Melissa Harris-Perry, Jamil Smith, Jay Smooth, Baratunde Thurston, Elon James White, Adam Serwer, Rinku Sen, Ai-jen Poo.

How many people of color should you follow? It depends on how you use Twitter, but enough so that every day you're on the service, you catch at least one or two conversations about race. Note that most singers, actors and athletes of any color don't fit the bill; with rare exceptions like Spike Lee and Chuck D, celebrities don't tend to talk about race in public; it's part of the gig.

This is not a fairy-dust approach. As Smith says, you have to listen earnestly. Over a period of time, you have to regularly read people's tweets, and check out some of the things they link to, do a deeper dive with some real-talk books they discuss, and try to understand where they're coming from. You do not get a gold star for following Blair LM Kelley or Jamelle Bouie and then ignoring them. You also cannot follow a sole person of color, deem them sexy, and then congratulate yourself for combating racism. That's the exact opposite of the point, not to mention just gross.

If you do work the plan, here's what you'll likely find: many people of color care about important stories and angles that white people are largely unaware of. When the USPS announced that it was planning to stop Saturday delivery, how many of your white friends made snarky comments about being pleased to get junk mail less frequently and how many expressed concern about job cutbacks at an institution that has for decades provided a path to middle class life particularly for black Americans? How many of your white friends have been reading up on the prospects for immigration reform? How many of your white friends talked about Hadiya Pendleton when she was killed earlier this year? 

At the same time, you'll find that people of color do not all--brace yourself--feel the same way about everything. Not about Obama's policies. Not about the racial dynamics of Django Unchained. Not about the US media's coverage of rape in India. Not about the whiteness of Girls. Not about Marco Rubio's background. Not about "Tiger Moms." Not about affirmative action. Not about Cory Booker's record. Not even about Beyonce. (Possible exception: there's a lotta love for Little Known Black History Facts.) 

The point is that when you tune into a group that has experiences different from your own, you'll gain perspective. And possibly empathy. In other words, tools to help you overcome your hidden bias.   

I've been  on Twitter since it started (no, really), and for about two years, I've been intentional about following and paying attention to people of color. I didn't just have a sudden "OMGblackpeople!" moment--I've had pretty standard white progressive semi-awareness of race since grooving as a kid to Free To Be You and Me and taking a lot of Black Studies classes in college. But as I say, I decided a while back to devote some headspace to better understanding racism. 

A couple of years in, here's what I've observed in myself: I'm more aware of the role race plays in a lot of public issues, and I'm more aware of the prejudices I carry. I'm not free of bias by any means. For instance, reading this article recently, I had no problem picturing a black welfare recipient with a poor work ethic yet was challenged to imagine a white one--despite my having known, in actual real life, people with the dead-opposite virtues. Still, my growing awareness has a tangible impact: I'm increasingly better at connecting with people of color. I wasn't consciously cold before, but I was a little afraid of saying the wrong thing or being seen first for my race (I get it: IRONY), espcially around black people. Lately, I'm probably a little too wink-wink-nudge-nudge-I'm-a-White-Person-Who-Thinks-About-Race, so there's still work to do. And I don't want to suggest that my black neighbors were waiting for me to bestow my white-person friendliness. But being less guarded is a key outcome here. A) It's more fun; and B) it's a way to take the benefits of listening beyond Twitter. 

A small data point: Coincidentally, around the time I started listening more carefully to people of color on Twitter, I also took the Project Implicit hidden bias test. It showed me to have "moderate" preference for white people. Out of curiosity, I took it again recently. This time, I was rated "neutral," showing no preference one way or the other. The test isn't a perfect indicator, but I don't think the results are a matter of chance, either. 

So go boldly forth from your sofa and seriously follow some people of color on Twitter. It won't be the last step in recognizing and addressing your own baked-in racism. It will be the first step. But you can make it an effective place to start when you want to be neither a racist nor racist.  

* No question that for race, the labels "black" and "white" are murky. Indeed, they're anything but black and white. First, there are questions of how race is socially constructed. Second, a really lot of people are multiracial. For the purposes of this post, I assume that enough readers identify as white, whatever that may mean, to make the label meaningful in context. 

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A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness. 

 

 

Solving the Pipeline Problem

This post was co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The LeanStartup Conference, and cross-posted from Startup Lessons Learned.

It’s well-known—and we ourselves have been publicly frustrated—that white men tend to dominate the speaker rosters for tech and entrepreneurship conferences, not to mention the portfolios of many entrepreneurship programs. Conference hosts, VC’s, and others often attribute this to a "pipeline problem," the idea that there simply aren’t enough qualified women or people of color who wanted to or were qualified to participate. So we were proud earlier this week to announce our program for The Lean Startup Conference, which comprises approximately 40% women and 25% people of color. We still have room to grow, but this is a significant improvement over last year’s conference, which had almost none of either. Our approach was deliberate, and we want to share it with you, in the hopes that you can replicate it for other conferences and for processes like hiring where equity is important.

We have argued previously that the pipeline problem may be caused by the selection process itself. If under-represented groups have a reasonable expectation of not being selected, it’s perfectly reasonable that they therefore don’t apply. After all, if you were thinking of submitting a proposal to present at a conference that had a record of not choosing people like you—if you weren’t sure that your proposal would be assessed on its merits or that you’d be welcome at the event—why would you spend the time applying? The problem compounds itself: because women and people of color are not often speakers, we’re less aware of them, and we’re less likely to think of them for our own events.

There’s a solution that addresses these issues: meritocratic selection. It’s not a game of quotas; it’s quite the opposite. Indeed, we picked the speakers we thought had the best stories and would be the most engaging presenters. We didn’t rule out any candidates for being white or men, and we didn’t favor women or people of color. Instead, we used a handful of principles to guide us: transparent process,  blind selection, proactive outreach and enlisting help. Here’s how they played out.

Transparent process. Over the summer, we made a big deal about how we wanted to find speakers based on merit (i.e., the great stories they had to share) rather than on their proximity to us. In August, we posted a call for speakers, asking people to apply. We explained that we were looking for speakers based on what they knew rather than who they knew. We also noted that in the past, Eric had mostly drawn from a pool of people he had worked with directly, which meant that in 2010 and 2011, this conference had had almost no speakers typically under-represented at tech events. We received nearly 200 applications, more than half from women and about a quarter from people of color. That included a notable number of black people, which we call out because we’ve received very few applications from black speakers at other conferences we’ve run. Similarly, quite a few men and women over the age of about 50 applied to speak. One person talked about the importance of representing people with disabilities. In addition to being pleased by the demographic range, we were stunned by the consistently high quality of the proposed talk ideas across groups, as the previous open calls we’ve run have brought in relatively few great speakers.

Here’s what resulted from that call for speakers: from the pool of applicants whom we chose for the December 3 conference program, more than half were women. From the pool of applicants whom we chose for the December 2 Ignite: Lean Startup program, more than a third were people of color. And we had to make some heartbreaking decisions to pass on a number of speakers just because we didn’t have enough time on stage for everyone. Taken together, this shows that when you have a broader group from which to draw, there’s a good distribution of speakers; not all—not even most—of the good speakers are white men. The common conference organizer’s argument that we don’t know any black people in tech or that women didn’t apply to speak just doesn’t hold up.

Did employing a transparent process make a difference? The August call for proposals described above was actually our second attempt to change the makeup of our applicant pool; the first attempt failed. In June, we posted our first call for speakers, asking people to nominate others they thought would be good speakers. We noted that we were particularly keen on learning about women and people of color who might be great speakers but weren’t on our radar yet, but we didn’t say anything about what had happened in the past or how we were trying to change it. We received about 35 nominations. Although some were very good, just about 10% were women and almost none were people of color. Every piece of data we have been able to gather on conferences says that 10% is the standard rate at which women will apply or be nominated and that very few people of color will be among these pools.

Let’s dwell on this for a moment. By using principles of meritocratic selection—i.e., being explicit about our desire to find great speakers whom we didn’t know, and by being honest about the process we’d used in the past—we created an atmosphere in which a much broader range of strong speakers felt invited to participate.

It’s also worth mentioning that we knew we’d hit on something important not just because we got such different results in the second round, but also because applicants told us so. We got a lot of comments like this:

“I LAUGH when you say, ‘under-represented at a tech conference,’ because had you not presented such a compelling invitation, I would have never even dreamed of applying for a position of a speaker.”

“The main reason I'm applying is because I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for your efforts to reach out to a new circle of contributors. Anything I can do to support you, whether it's speaking or just behind the scenes, is personally very worthwhile to me.”

“Thanks for opening this up to the non-famous. I think there are lots of great stories out there to be told.”

Blind review. It’s well documented that when people know the sex or race of a job applicant or the main character in a story, they generally assess the person’s qualifications and performance more favorably if the person is male or white. Because we all have internal biases, everybody does it, including women and people of color. We wanted to eliminate that bias as best we could. So we asked applicants to submit some written information, along with a video, and we made the first cut based on the write-ups, which we read without checking names or other identifying info. 

Did using blind review make a difference? By reading the applications, we quickly eliminated people who weren’t a fit for the conference because their topic clearly wasn’t on point for our audience. That was a small group of people, but the distribution was broad. Beyond that, blind review didn’t make a big difference. Why? We asked for relatively little info in writing, both because we wanted to hear directly from speakers (not their PR people) and because video much better represents the medium we’re trying to assess (often, people who can write a nice description of their talk can’t deliver the presentation well, and vice versa). So video was much more important to us than writing, but we couldn’t assess it blind. It’s worth considering whether there’s more we can do with this tool in the future.

Proactive outreach. A very common way that conferences build a program is to brainstorm speakers, come up with a bunch of familiar names, and then notice late in the game that you have almost no women or people of color (at which point, you might scramble to find some or just complain that you don’t know any). Our initial brainstorm wasn’t magically diverse; in fact, it included an overwhelming percentage of young white men. But we immediately—during the same meeting—started digging deeper to think of people we’d left out, and when we came up with less-top-of-mind candidates from under-represented groups, we reached out to them early and often. We kept that up throughout the whole cycle.

Did proactive outreach make a difference? As we noted earlier, Eric’s previous conferences rosters were based almost entirely on people who were top of mind, and they skewed heavily toward white and male.

Enlisting help. There were two primary ways we asked other people to help us. First, when we had a call for participation, we posted it to mailing lists with lots of women and/or people of color, we asked our friends to do the same, and we approached organizations like Women 2.0 to publish or cross-post our info on their blogs and Twitter accounts. Second, when we asked other people for speaker ideas or when we formed our few panels with moderators, we told them about our search for under-represented speakers, and we said that we’d appreciate their support.

Did enlisting help make a difference? It can be scary to ask for this kind of help, because you don’t want to suggest that you’re interested in diversity over quality. But we found that people were consistently, surprising open to working with us on this issue. And it did make a difference: When we forgot to mention to people that we were looking for speakers we didn’t already know, we almost always got back suggestions for more white men who’d be great presenters. When we included a note about our efforts to reach farther, we almost always got back suggestions for women and people of color who’d be great presenters. In addition, we heard regularly from people who’d found out about our call for speakers through Women 2.0 and other mailing lists we worked with.

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Our four-pronged approached generated really encouraging, even exciting, results. We’re further encouraged by the fact that we didn’t execute this plan perfectly, so there’s still room for improvement. Here’s what we we’ll work on next time out.

Coordinating our approaches. As noted above, in addition to our public call for speakers, we also reached out to people we did already know in the Lean Startup community whom we thought would have really compelling stories. Although this group included some women and people of color, it had a big percentage of white men. Because we started this process before the public call, and because we didn’t know if our public call would work, we quickly filled a number of speaking slots with these great candidates from the group we did know, and we didn’t leave as much room as we could have for terrific speakers new to us. We’ll use a hybrid approach again, but next time, we’ll trust the open-call process and be more deliberate about the distribution of speakers.

Getting beyond the easy wins. Related to the issue above, it’s just plain easier to put people onstage when you know them personally or by reputation. There are a few reasons for this. First, like most conferences, we want to put well-known people onstage, because they’re a draw. So when somebody has a big name and is available, we we’re more likely to consider them for our program, even if their story is only tangential to our angle. For instance, we were interested in having some well-known entrepreneurs join us, and we were willing to let them talk about their experiences generally rather than have them focus on Lean Startup principles. Unsurprisingly, all of the people who fit into this category were white men; women and people of color with comparable stories but less prominence didn’t get this kind of consideration. Correspondingly, we had much stricter standards for people who were less well known, insisting that they have a direct Lean Startup story—and if we didn’t already know them, we were less trusting that their stories were really good examples of Lean Startup methods. (For the record, we had so many good Lean Startup speakers, we didn’t wind up taking anybody with a general entrepreneurship story. But we definitely considered a bunch of them.)

Additionally, we found that when we already knew a speaker, it was easier to find good slots for them in the program because we were more aware of how they were using Lean Startup principles. For instance, if we were looking for somebody from a hardware startup to tell a great pivot story, we might have had six candidates…but it just so happened that the one guy we knew from that group had an even better story about innovation accounting. Because we were familiar with his company generally, we knew his other areas of expertise, and it was therefore easier to put him in the program. It was harder to find the various angles that would work from people we didn’t know.

In other words, between knowing their stories less well and bringing our biases to bear in trusting them, we had a harder time green-lighting the people we didn’t know. Again, that’s human. But if we don’t make conscious decisions to account for it, we’ll never change the dynamics of these events. 

Finding people in other under-represented groups. Our program has almost no people of our parents’ generation, and we don’t think we have any speakers with disabilities. In the future, we can apply the approach above to find more great speakers from these groups.

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Pulling together a conference program that highlights deservedly well-known people in your field *and* reveals compelling new stories is a challenge. But it’s one you can take on—and that, frankly, not enough conferences do.  As we’ve found, meritocratic selection isn’t just a phrase you can mull or a fantasy for the future. These tools, used thoughtfully and in combination, can help you achieve it: transparent process, blind selection, proactive outreach and enlisting help. And we hope this post will help spark this question: if you’re not using these tools, is your selection process susceptible to unconscious biases that could be making it work less well? Is it really as merit-based as it could be? 

Getting Women to Speak at Your Conference is Hard. So?

Ok, so you love tech, or some aspect of it, and you decide to throw a conference to gather like-minded tech-lovers and people who want to learn from them. Maybe you want to make money from your event, maybe not--whatever. Maybe you’re doing this on your own, or maybe you’re working with an organization—again, whatever. You secure a space, you invite people to speak, you throw open registration. It feels good.

And then people start to point out that nearly all of your speakers are men. Or perhaps 100% of your speakers are men. Even if your event has a focus on women, somebody might mention that nearly all of your speakers are white. 

Now, you don't want to appear sexist or racist (bonus points if you don’t want to be sexist or racist). So you take a look at how you arrived at your speaker roster, and you realize that no women applied to speak, and you can't think of a single black programmer or CEO to invite. Thank god--it's not really your fault that white guys are over-represented on your program! You pretty much had no choice!

I’ve employed that tempting, crappy logic myself, and I’ve got a secret to share: Getting women and other under-represented groups to speak at your tech event is hard. Now here's something to think about: So?

You didn't get into tech because you hate solving problems. Indeed, having a "hard problem" to solve is considered an enticement in job descriptions for engineers, designers and tech businesspeople.

Which is where this conference thing gets interesting. Rather than throw up your hands and say it’s the nature of the business, you can embrace this challenge. You can read about what other people have done in this realm, and you can apply your considerable problem-solving skills to come up with new solutions that will benefit us all.

Of course, you can try to ignore the problem. You cannot, however, claim to have tried but failed ("the call for speakers was open, but no women applied") or pretend that the issue is intractable ("there aren't any black programmers or CEOs") and expect everyone to accept that. Think about it like test-driven development. When your test of the login form fails, you don’t delete the test. You fix the code.

For test-driven conference development, consider these three tests necessary as you create your program: 1) Are the speakers good communicators? 2) Are they going to cover topics relevant to your audience? 3) Do they reflect your community—beyond the people you know personally—or even have the potential to enhance your community? Either all of your tests pass or you find, debug, and fix the failing ones; you don't want women who give lousy presentations.

Here are some bugs you’re likely to encounter:

• When you brainstorm speakers, you don’t come up with any women or people of color who are knowledgeable about your topics.
• You want prominent people on the stage, and you can’t think of any women or people of color who are big names. Except maybe Sheryl Sandberg, and you don’t know how to reach her anyway.
• You have a call for proposals or a call for speakers, and very few or no women or people of color apply.
• Your call for proposals allows folks to suggest panels, and none of the suggested panelists are women or people of color.
• You invite some women, and they all say no.
• You get some women and people of color on the program, and then they all cancel.
• The bigger your event, the harder it will be to acheive any sort of parity.

By now you’re probably wondering why, given all these bugs, you should care whether you appear sexist or racist. I've talked about that before; many others have done it better. What I'm really interested in today is new approaches that you--because you're smart and resourceful and creative--will come up with for solving these problems. 

So this isn’t a post about how you tackle the issue or even why you should; this is a post challenging you to try. I will readily acknowledge that your initial approaches will likely be imperfect and slow and socially uncomfortable. That's why this is a hard problem. I’m excited to hear your solutions.

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A few notes on comments:

1) I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness. 

2)  Remember, this is not a post about why speaker diversity is important. That’s not a debate we’re entertaining today, so save those comments for another time (or for 4chan or whatever).

I Am George Zimmerman

In the weeks since Trayvon Martin’s execution, we’ve seen many, many people of color identifying with Trayvon and his parents, speaking up about the pain and danger of living in a country where there’s widespread perception that brown skin is threatening.

Here’s what we haven’t seen: a lot of white people examining their own perceptions about brown skin. 

Given that much of the discussion so far has focused on the history and patterns of racism that Trayvon’s death appears to fit into--and that a lot of us white folks have decried those patterns--it’s striking that so many people have come forward to identify with Martin and so few with George Zimmerman. If we aren’t the ones perpetuating racism, who is?

It would be easy here to say that old-school Southern whites, white cops, white gun proponents and Geraldo Rivera fans (not to mention white people who own hoodie companies) are the ones responsible for a toxic environment. Indeed, if we’re to be anti-racist allies, it’s important that we recognize whites’ racist behaviors and that we call them out.

But by presuming that they--including Zimmerman, and the cops who failed to arrest him, and the legislators and NRA/ALEC supporters who championed “Stand Your Ground”-- are some other, evil brand of white people, those of us who say we want a truly equitable society miss the opportunity to look at ourselves and see how our behaviors contribute to a world where few are surprised when an unarmed child is killed on a residential street.

It’s uncomfortable to consider, but it’s not just the other white people whose attitudes and actions draw forward the American legacy of racism.

Personally, I gained a nice sense of self-satisfaction by joining a lot of other people, white and of color, in condemning Zimmerman’s apparent racism and the laws and police behavior that backed him up. After all, I don’t own a gun, I’m generally suspicious of police, I wouldn’t vote for a politician who supported pro-gun or SYG laws. I mean, c’mon, I give money to incredible organizations that fight for equal justice. I prefer a racially diverse Hunger Games! I tweeted about Doug Shipman’s terrific TEDx talk on community and diversity--which I found because I follow black men on Twitter! I’m. A. Good. Person. A good white person, at that.

And yet, as Tim Wise pointed out this past Sunday on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show, the research on hidden bias reveals that we all, regardless of skin color, carry innate biases. Whether we become aware of them is often a matter of privilege. How we choose to act is another question altogether.

So there I was a few evenings ago, in a part of my neighborhood that’s pretty far from the trains and the cute shops, on a block near the BQE that has some well-maintained buildings but also a handful of empty lots and abandoned buildings. I was with a lost dog that some other neighbors had found wandering on its own earlier in the day, and I was asking around, looking for its people. Miraculously, I found the owners--which meant that I was walking home alone at dusk.

I had my phone out to text a neighbor about the dog. It’s a new phone, about two weeks old, flat and flashy. As I leaned on a building to type, a young black man walked by me. I noticed that he was a lot bigger than I am and that he was wearing a hoodie. Here’s what I thought: he could have been Trayvon. And then: oh, there’s been a rash of phone thefts in the neighborhood. And then I put my phone in my pocket until he passed. Two minutes earlier, when a young white woman in a hoodie had passed, I thought: cute shoes! And I continued texting. (NB: Although I’ve read that Fort Greene has had a mini-epidemic of phone thefts, I haven’t read a word describing the thieves.)

A quiz: In a mixed-race, gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood at 6p in the evening, with a bunch of people of all kinds around, who feels safer on the street: the 40-something white woman or the 20-something black man?

Ok, ok, false dichotomy, trick question. Everyone needs to stay aware and stay safe, yadda yadda. Point is, if we’re paying attention to Trayvon’s death, rather than to, say, The Wire, we could reasonably conclude that the young black man was not a phone thief or any kind of predator and that he might have felt threatened by my likely ability to draw sympathy from nearby cops (if he’d noticed me at all, which, honestly, I have no idea--but narcissism being what it is, I’m going to go with his having been aware of me).

It was the smallest of interactions, which means this isn’t a big risk for me to admit, but in it, I could have been the George Zimmerman.

Now I’m wondering: What are the more significant interactions where I overinterpret race, and how else can I behave?

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I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this blog. Seeing as the internet tends to draw vile comments on race, however, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness.