The Ada Initiative, supporting women in Open technology and culture - Mary Gardiner

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[Offscreen voice] All good!
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OK I was about to start humming
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hold music for everyone
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but alas, all right
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I am Mary Gardiner
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I am co-founder and director of operations of a
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relatively new non profit
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US based non profit,
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the Ada Initiative, founded in January 2011
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[title slide: The Ada Initiative]
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[title slide: supporting women in open technology and culture]
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There is a little postcard in your pack as well.
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So, our mission
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statement is supporting women
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in open technology and culture
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and basically I'm going to
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tell you tonight a little bit about
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what that means,
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what our history is and
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where we are going from here.
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[slide: Open technology and culture]
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[slide: listing many open technology and culture communities]
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So open technology and culture
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is what we've tried to turn a fairly short phrase
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from everything from Wikipedia
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at the start through to
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open social networking at the end,
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with a little bit of fandom in the middle,
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open mapping, Creative Commons,
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transformative works fandom
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is the term they use now
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for people who are in the fandom of
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television shows and movies.
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Maker culture, open education.
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So just out of curiosity,
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who in this room would regard themselves
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as part of open technology and culture
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in one of these kind of areas?
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People who have edited Wikipedia
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who use open source
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ok running at maybe a third of the room.
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Ok, people who know what
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at least one of these things is?
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At least one?
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[laughter from the floor]
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Ok, always good to know that
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you don't have to start explaining
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open source from the beginning.
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Ok, so we're talking about
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an advisor of ours, Kirrily Robert
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— Skud, some of you probably know —
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calls this 'Open Stuff'
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but we couldn't use 'Open Stuff'
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in a mission statement for the
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internal review service
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so Open Technology and Culture it is.
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So we're talking about
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women's participation in all of these things
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probably starting with open source
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because famously women have
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pretty low participation in open source.
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But we will find that not
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universally across these things
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but it's like most of geekdom;
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women are not highly represented in
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open technology and culture
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and there are structural barriers
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and women’s history involved in that.
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So our mission statement is two-fold,
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we are talking about increasing
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women’s numbers numerically
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but also increasing the friendliness
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of the environment to women.
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So more than just exhorting women to do this stuff
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because it's cool
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but telling these communities
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that they need to be more friendly to women
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and more open to women participating
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because women are cool."
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[Slide: "Who we are" with Ada Lovelace portrait]
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Ok, so who we are;
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so we are not Ada Lovelace,
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this is the Countess of Lovelace,
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many people will recognise her,
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we are of course named after her,
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she died aged thirty six of ovarian cancer
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nearly two hundred years ago.
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We think of her as the first open source programmer
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because she publicly wrote down algorithms
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for the analytical engine,
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she is also probably the first programmer full stop.
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This is a portrait here by Colin Adams,
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who is a friend to one of our founders,
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we have released this new portrait of Ada
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into the public domain
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if anyone is interested in Ada Lovelace remixes.
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Ok, that is the countess of Lovelace,
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now who are we?
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[Slide change: "Who we are" with photo portraits]
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On the left we have Valerie Aurora
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who some people who follow Linux
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might know better as Valerie Henson
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which was her former name.
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She was for ten years a Linux kernel developer,
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specializing in file systems.
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On the right we have me, I am —
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I suppose you might say a geek-of-all-trades
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but less kindly you might say a computing Ph.D. student.
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Valerie and I together have been involved
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both in open source development
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and also in advocating for women in open source
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for ten years now,
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mostly in the LinuxChix organisation.
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We have been working and talking closely
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to each other for about five years
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where we both happen to have come to a
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point in our lives,
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both due to external and internal forces
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where we thought
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"Ok, this time we're really going to do something about it
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and what we're going to do is the Ada Initiative."
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[Slide change: "Why are we here?"]
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So why are we doing this?
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Some people will have seen these statistics;
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in 2002 one of the best
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in terms of research methods,
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one of the best studies of
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the open source culture for women’s participation
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measured about a 1.5% contribution rate for women,
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as in in terms of head count of open source contributors,
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about one and a half percent of them are women.
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There are similar numbers coming out of other surveys
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with varyingly good methodology.
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So an Ubuntu community census
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had 2.4% women in 2006,
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the Perl community seems to
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have about 3% women,
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Ubuntu Members — which is a formal process —
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currently comprises slightly less than 5% women.
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This compares with industry numbers
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of probably in the United States about
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25% of IT professionals are women.
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[Slide change: 98 "male" stick figures, 2 "female"]
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So that's kind of what it looks like, pictorially,
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taking I guess one of the more aggressive numbers
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we have, rounding 1.5% up to
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a whole two women in this picture
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of one hundred people.
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That is what open source development
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looked like in 2002.
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Broadly speaking, those numbers
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roughly are reflected in open source conferences even today.
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Ok so we said open technology and culture in general
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rather than open source in particular.
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[Slide change: Why are we here?]
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Even this year about 13% of wikipedia contributions
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appear to have been made by women,
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that is higher than open source
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but it's not 51% by a long way.
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[Slide change: "Does this matter"]
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Ok, so the obvious question is,
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and this gets asked a lot when you talk to people
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like "Does it matter?"
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This is a picture of the
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Ubuntu Developer Summit earlier this year,
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a little bit hard to see
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but you get a sense of the demographic
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of the Ubuntu developers there.
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They are largely men,
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they are largely young,
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they are largely white people.
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Does that matter?
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So it matters in two senses,
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one of them is that open technology
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and open culture
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is changing the world,
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and it will change the world better
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the more people are involved in it
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and the more it reflects the community demographics.
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So in order to serve the needs of women,
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or of people who are not young, white and male,
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it helps to have those people involved.
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Secondly open technology and culture is
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changing the world and that means
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that it is a really good place to be in some respects,
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it is a good career,
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it is somewhere that you really have a chance
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to make a difference —
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and women aren’t involved,
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so that means that women are missing out
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on this particular chance to make a difference.
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[Slide change: "What's been done", with organisational logos]
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So people who have been around this area
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probably know that we're —
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that the Ada Initiative are not the first people
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to say by a long way
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"Hey, there don't seem to be a lot of women around
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in open technology and culture,"
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quite the reverse.
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There's been LinuxChix,
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the penguin up the top left from 1999 onwards.
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Debian Women I think was founded in 2003,
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we've got the Ubuntu Women logo,
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I think they've been around since 2005 or so.
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DrupalChix down the bottom left,
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DevChix which is a more general group for women programmers.
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So yep, there have been people doing this.
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So why the Ada Initiative? Why do a new thing?
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Why not wait for the work that these groups are doing
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to be successful?
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[Slide change: "How are we different?" with a picture of money.]
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So basically, I guess to put it baldly,
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one of the ways that
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the Ada Initiative is different
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is that we intend to do this
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and be paid for it.
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We, Valerie and I are trying to
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raise money to work on this full time.
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What tends to happen with
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almost all of these groups at the moment
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is that they are run by volunteers,
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which is great;
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they do a lot of good things.
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They are limited by burn out,
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people's spare time,
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people having babies,
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people having lives
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in the way that volunteer groups are.
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[Slide change: "How are we different" with picture of a clock.]
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So we are hoping that by declaring
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that we want to be paid to do this full-time
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that we will be able to make a disproportionate
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amount of difference
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simply by having time.
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Another aspect of this,
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of the volunteering nature of previous work
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in women in open source particularly,
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is that people burn out on it
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pretty quickly.
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So it's not just a question of
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encouraging people and people being receptive to
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the message and not knowing what to do.
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There is actually a great deal of hostility
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to the idea that there should be
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any active methods to increase
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women's participation in technology in general
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or in open technology and culture in particular.
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So there is a really strong history,
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in fact Valerie has been through it at least once,
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more recently Kirrily Robert who gave a keynote at OSCON
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in the United States in 2009
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and then went on to give four keynotes
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in a year explaining that
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"Yes there really aren't
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a lot of women in open source"
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basically succumbed to vicious online trolling,
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to the point where Kirrily is leaving the coding industry entirely
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for a music career —
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a music tech career.
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Which is cool —
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but we really don't want this any more
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to have to be the kind of thing
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where a small number of women
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put their entire lives on the line,
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having fights on the Internet
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that date back to 1960 about
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how women shouldn't be sexually harassed at conferences any more,
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and then a year later find that they have absolutely no energy
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for this any more and run off
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into an entirely new career where nobody knows their name
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and they hope they never have to
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hear the words "open technology" ever again.
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[Slide change: "What are we going to do?" listing activities]
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OK, so, the kind of stuff we're thinking of
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doing therefore is a little bit different
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from the kind of thing that LinuxChix and
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DrupalChix and WikiChix and Ubuntu Women
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and Debian Women and so on have done in the past —
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which is largely creating a network for women to meet each other.
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Which is really great — here we are at
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a network for women to meet each other.
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It's a crucial part of the battle, if you like,
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to get women more involved in this
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but it's only part of it
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and the reason that volunteer groups
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tend to focus on that is that it's
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less battle-y, to create a women's group
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and say "women come here, we'll talk among ourselves
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we'll get to know each other
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we won't get trolled constantly
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because we'll be creating our own safer space."
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That absolutely needs to be done
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but what the Ada Initiative is hoping
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we have the energy to do is to
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reach out to the wider culture
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especially to the areas of the culture
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who are starting to agree that they
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have a gender representation problem, and
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to help them out.
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So the idea is basically that we will be
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offering free services to conferences,
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to corporations who work on open technology in particular
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and open culture in general
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so we're talking about doing that for free
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with funded sponsorship so that
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we'll apply the model that we receive donations
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from people who — from organisations who've made
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a lot of money from open technology and culture
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and we'll use that money to give advice where
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it is most obviously needed and wanted.
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So there's straightforward consulting on policies
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and culture, in particular one success we've had already
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that happened even prior to the formal creation
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of the organization is the creation of
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an anti-harassment policy since in open source
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people might or might not have heard but it is
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becoming increasingly well-known that women
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are experiencing sexual harassment and assault
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a lot at open source conferences.
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Possibly there are open source conferences
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that don't want me to say that in case
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women stop going.
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But our argument is that rather than keep that quiet
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we're hoping to put policies in place
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that will make these really basic
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expectations of safety a integral part of
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the conference experience.
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So the anti-harassment policy has already been
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pretty widely adopted by open source conferences
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including linux.conf.au and
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the Open Source Developers Conference in Australia
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and the OSBridge conference in the United States
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and its being rolled out across more conferences now.
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We're talking about — we call it AdaCamp
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at the moment but the idea is that
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there are heaps of people working in open
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technology and culture, working to make
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women more welcome and women more active
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and that they're not really talking to each other.
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They're talking to people inside Ubuntu
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they're talking to people inside Debian
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they're talking to people inside Linux.
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For one of the first times we'd
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really like to get those people together
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in various countries
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and develop programs with them.
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There's definitely a need even for basic research.
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So, as I said, the really good number on
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women's participation in open source
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dates from 2002. Wikipedia has a much more
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recent number for their community.
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But when people come and they say
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"OK what's the size of this problem?"
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at the moment it's actually hard to
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point at concrete numbers.
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And we'd also like to examine the effect
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of programs on women.
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And another example of what we're proposing to do
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is training and mentoring programs.
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Again, we're hoping to develop these
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and make them publicly available
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in the Creative Commons sense
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so that they can spread way out beyond
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the Ada Initiative.
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Examples of — an example of what we've already done
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is Valerie's ally training workshops where
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[cough] she helps interested men to understand
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how they can react when they see anti-women
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sentiment expressed in their communities.
15:07 - 15:08

Another program we're talking about doing
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when we have our funding secure
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is a program called First Patch Week
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which is based on a process inside the Ubuntu community
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called the Patch Pilot, the idea being
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that when you contribute to an open technology thing
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there is often a whole lot of technical structure
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that you need to understand.
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You need to understand bugtrackers,
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you need to understand source control,
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you need to understand who to propose a patch to
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and how to persuade people on IRC to merge that patch.
15:43 - 15:45

The idea is to take a bunch of women and
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get them to — all the way through that
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process on a fairly major open source project
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through to submitting their first patch.
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Our aim at the moment is women — we say women in
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early to mid career, so women in their
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final years of university through to say
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their first ten years in the tech industry
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or in related industries, helping them
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get involved in open technology and open culture.
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[Slide change: "Our support", showing sponsor logos]
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Ok, so we already have a little bit
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of support from the community.
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We're pleased to announce several months ago now
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Linux Australia, which is the peak Linux body in Australia
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became our first sponsor
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shortly joined by Puppet Labs who are a US software firm
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and Dreamhost a US hosting provider.
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Very recently Google became our first
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sponsor at the Venture Philanthropist level
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which is the new introductory sponsorship level.
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[Slide change: "Our support" showing the Seed 100 campaign]
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More importantly, it's just finished in the last few days
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we reached out to the community
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particularly in the United States
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and we said
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people who want to help out
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in a financial sense,
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the type of people who've been coming to
17:06 - 17:08

people like myself and Valerie and Kirrily Robert
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for years and saying "I want to do something
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about this but I can't figure out what to do"
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We organised a fundraising campaign aimed at them.
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We raised just over $80 000 from 103 donors.
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103 because we didn't shut down
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the donation button in time.
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[laughter]
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So what we're doing here is
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trying to demonstrate support so that
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we can have larger sponsors come on board
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in order to fund us to work on this
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in a more full-time way.
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Presently Valerie and I are both volunteers
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during the — essentially the startup phase
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in the way that a business might have a startup phase.
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[Slide: "How to help" http://adainitiative.org/contact-us/]
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Ok, so, if you're interested in helping out
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the first thing to do if you're interested
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in staying in contact with us
18:04 - 18:06

or eventually volunteering for us
18:06 - 18:09

or contributing to our program development
18:09 - 18:11

or asking us to work with your community
18:11 - 18:14

is simply to get in touch.
18:14 - 18:16

We have a mailing list for active supporters.
18:16 - 18:19

We have the usual announcement lists for
18:19 - 18:22

other folks.
18:22 - 18:24

If you're interested in following us on Twitter —
18:24 - 18:27

I didn't realise how tweety this evening
18:27 - 18:28

would be, foolishly —
18:28 - 18:32

we're just @adainitiative.
18:32 - 18:33

[Slide change: "How to help" Sponsor the Ada Initiative]
18:33 - 18:38

If — for organizations in particular
18:38 - 18:41

— you're interested in becoming a sponsor
18:41 - 18:46

we are seeking sponsorship at the moment.
18:46 - 18:49

And finally if you're interested in simply
18:49 - 18:50

following what we're doing
18:50 - 18:51

or you have any questions
18:51 - 18:54

or you want to follow our news
18:54 - 18:56

we have a blog at http://adainitiative.org/
18:56 - 19:00

You can email us at any time at contact@adainitiative.org
19:00 - 19:02

and yes you can follow us on Twitter
19:02 - 19:06

simply @adainitiative.
19:06 - 19:07

Thanks very much for that and
19:07 - 19:09

I'm happy to take any questions
19:09 - 19:11

if people are interested in more information.
19:11 - 19:17

[applause]
19:17 - 19:18

[reverse through slides]
19:18 - 19:19

I'm just going to go back up and
19:19 - 19:21

put our nice picture of Ada Lovelace.
19:21 - 19:22

There we go.
19:22 - 19:24

[inaudible speech]
19:24 - 19:29

Yep. Yep. OK. I'll be repeating questions back
19:29 - 19:32

for the benefit of our online audience.
19:32 - 19:35

So do people have live questions?
19:35 - 19:36

Please stand up if you have a question.
19:36 - 19:40

[silence]
19:40 - 19:43

Hi. Great talk, thank you.
19:43 - 19:54

[silence]
19:54 - 19:55

Hello?
19:55 - 19:57

[silence]
19:57 - 19:59

Great talk, thank you.
19:59 - 20:01

Um, quick question
20:01 - 20:04

how are you linked to the Ada Initiative in the US?
20:04 - 20:06

Are you the one organization
20:06 - 20:09

or how is the Ada Initiative structured?
20:09 - 20:13

Ah yes, so we're a United States organization
20:13 - 20:15

we're a 501(c)3 organization there
20:15 - 20:17

which is the charity status in the US
20:17 - 20:22

and I'm going to be paid out of the US organization.
20:22 - 20:24

I have a lot of very uninteresting
20:24 - 20:26

opinions and knowledge now about
20:26 - 20:29

international US tax law that I won't share with you.
20:29 - 20:31

But yes the short answer is that
20:31 - 20:33

I'm an employee of the US organization.
20:33 - 20:42

[silence]
20:42 - 20:43

What's the type of volunteer work
20:43 - 20:48

that's available?
20:48 - 20:49

At present —
20:49 - 20:51

so the question is what's the type of
20:51 - 20:53

volunteer work that's available?
20:53 - 20:55

At present mostly what we're going to be
20:55 - 20:58

looking for in the next say three or four months
20:58 - 21:00

is feedback on our programs.
21:00 - 21:04

So for everything I listed there in the consulting section
21:04 - 21:07

we need to flesh them out
21:07 - 21:08

which is the aim for the rest of the year essentially
21:08 - 21:12

is to come up with multiple page prospectuses
21:12 - 21:17

and plans for the projects and to build contacts.
21:17 - 21:19

So the largest volunteering in the medium term
21:19 - 21:21

is joining our supporters mailing list
21:21 - 21:23

where we'll be sending drafts of that sort of thing,
21:23 - 21:26

soliciting ideas, finding out about new communities
21:26 - 21:28

that we haven't even heard of
21:28 - 21:29

and women in them already
21:29 - 21:32

who we haven't heard of.
21:32 - 21:34

Because we'd really like to have
21:34 - 21:36

programs that actually work
21:36 - 21:38

that actually make sense to as many people
21:38 - 21:40

and particularly women but not only women
21:40 - 21:41

as possible.
21:41 - 21:43

So that's the medium term.
21:43 - 21:46

In the longer term I think the main volunteering will be
21:46 - 21:50

things like taking our allies training workshop
21:50 - 21:52

and actually giving it at conferences
21:52 - 21:54

and things like that.
21:54 - 21:55

But we won't have developed the materials
21:55 - 21:57

in the next few months.
21:57 - 22:00

But yeah, that's the longer term plan.
22:00 - 22:04

[silence]
22:04 - 22:07

This might be a really difficult question
22:07 - 22:10

to answer in a kind of quick way
22:10 - 22:11

but why do you think this is?
22:11 - 22:13

I mean, why do you think that there's
22:13 - 22:17

such a gender divide still in the industry?
22:17 - 22:19

The question's why do I think there is the
22:19 - 22:23

gender divide in the tech industry in general?
22:23 - 22:27

Or in open tech and culture particularly? Or?
22:27 - 22:33

So thinking about, I guess talking about, the gender differences
22:33 - 22:35

between the tech industry in general
22:35 - 22:39

and open tech and culture in particular
22:39 - 22:41

it's a bit — I don't know what I'd actually
22:41 - 22:42

say is the primary reason
22:42 - 22:46

but there's sort of a huge kettle of factors involved.
22:46 - 22:50

One of them is that socially it's harder for women
22:50 - 22:51

to be geeks.
22:51 - 22:53

A lot of this is spare time stuff
22:53 - 22:55

at least when you're ramping up.
22:55 - 22:58

You're expected to have done a bit of volunteering
22:58 - 23:00

in the community: volunteer conference presentations,
23:00 - 23:04

volunteer coding, that sort of thing.
23:04 - 23:07

Spending time on that kind of stuff is
23:07 - 23:09

something that girls and women are penalised
23:09 - 23:10

more heavily for
23:10 - 23:13

both because we don't get our other work done
23:13 - 23:17

and because our parents don't necessarily like it all that much.
23:17 - 23:19

Did anyone else have my experience as a kid
23:19 - 23:20

where your parents were like
23:20 - 23:22

"stop mucking around with that computer,
23:22 - 23:24

you've broken the computer."
23:24 - 23:25

My sister's looking at me like
23:25 - 23:28

"you did break the computer!"
23:28 - 23:30

I don't have any brothers
23:30 - 23:31

so I can't say what my parents
23:31 - 23:32

would have done with brothers.
23:32 - 23:36

But there's a lot of that in a lot of women's pasts.
23:36 - 23:39

I mean there's the overt nasty stuff
23:39 - 23:42

of harassment, that has been increasingly
23:42 - 23:44

coming to light as women
23:44 - 23:48

feel slightly more comfortable talking about it.
23:48 - 23:52

There have been conferences in Australia
23:52 - 23:54

in the last sort of four or five years
23:54 - 23:55

where something has happened and
23:55 - 23:56

women are sort of like
23:56 - 23:59

"well, I could have done something else with this week
23:59 - 24:01

other than look at some man's porn collection"
24:01 - 24:02

kind of thing.
24:02 - 24:05

So there's still some quite overt, if not
24:05 - 24:09

anti-women, explicitly anti-women stuff, then
24:09 - 24:13

you know pro-men, men-only kind of signs.
24:13 - 24:15

So there's a little bit of that.
24:15 - 24:17

There is the general tech industry stuff
24:17 - 24:19

that right through school and
24:19 - 24:21

right through university there are less women
24:21 - 24:24

who start mathematics and science and computing
24:24 - 24:25

and the women who are in there
24:25 - 24:27

drop out faster.
24:27 - 24:31

So that's definitely a real problem as well.
24:31 - 24:34

Erm, just people tend to move into —
24:34 - 24:39

people often — I don't have the citations to mind —
24:39 - 24:41

but people really do seek out role models
24:41 - 24:44

who resemble them as closely as they can
24:44 - 24:45

possibly find.
24:45 - 24:47

So women enter these communities
24:47 - 24:50

and they find people who are, I mean, many of us
24:50 - 24:52

in this room have stuck around.
24:52 - 24:54

But you find people there who aren't like you
24:54 - 24:56

in that they're not women.
24:56 - 24:58

And that's just one little sign
24:58 - 25:01

saying "maybe this is not quite the exact
25:01 - 25:05

friendliest place in the world for you."
25:05 - 25:08

So, yeah, it's a bit — I wouldn't be able to
25:08 - 25:10

identify which of those is the primary factor
25:10 - 25:13

but there are a bunch.
25:13 - 25:17

And most of our activities I think will be
25:17 - 25:21

focused around removing the really more overt
25:21 - 25:23

"this is a men's space" kind of signals.
25:23 - 25:25

Letting people know that that is a problem
25:25 - 25:27

because a lot of people in these communities
25:27 - 25:30

don't necessarily think that is a problem.
25:30 - 25:31

That they don't realise what messages
25:31 - 25:35

that having porn in your tech talk sends
25:35 - 25:36

to some of the women in the audience.
25:36 - 25:40

And even a number of men in the audience as well.
25:40 - 25:42

So yeah our actual direction mostly
25:42 - 25:44

at least initially is getting rid of some
25:44 - 25:47

of the more overt signalling saying
25:47 - 25:50

"this is not really a women's, a woman's, place."
25:50 - 25:55

[silence]
25:55 - 25:57

[inaudible speech]
25:57 - 25:59

[laughter]
25:59 - 26:01

[inaudible speech]
26:01 - 26:04

Um going off the back of what you were just talking about
26:04 - 26:07

a couple of bloggers that I've read in the last few months
26:07 - 26:08

have said that the reason that there aren't
26:08 - 26:10

more women in IT is because they're not
26:10 - 26:13

pardon my French, arseholes.
26:13 - 26:16

That that is somehow an intrinsic trait
26:16 - 26:18

that you need to succeed in that field
26:18 - 26:22

and I've found myself that in the times when
26:22 - 26:24

I've gotten along with my male co-workers
26:24 - 26:26

it's because I've become one of the boys
26:26 - 26:29

and do you, I mean the Ada Initiative,
26:29 - 26:33

is it about advocating, I'm guessing not,
26:33 - 26:34

that we fit into that role
26:34 - 26:36

or whether we try and change it so
26:36 - 26:38

that we don't have to be like that?
26:38 - 26:42

Right. Uh, so, uh, for the benefit of the stream
26:42 - 26:45

the question is are we trying to help women
26:45 - 26:49

fit into the existing arguably arsehole culture,
26:49 - 26:51

or to change the culture?
26:51 - 26:53

And our goal is the much harder one:
26:53 - 26:55

to change the culture.
26:55 - 26:57

It's really really, it's a very difficult thing
26:57 - 27:02

with any culture to say you know "you —"
27:02 - 27:05

because people will be there because they enjoy it
27:05 - 27:09

and it's important to note carefully that
27:09 - 27:12

I mean I certainly enjoy a lot of aspects of geek culture
27:12 - 27:15

as well, I'm still here.
27:15 - 27:17

And there's always some concern
27:17 - 27:20

some of it is masked hostility to women
27:20 - 27:22

and some of it is genuine concern
27:22 - 27:24

that if women come in in great numbers
27:24 - 27:28

that the community will use much of its charm.
27:28 - 27:31

So we're not trying de-charm the geek community
27:31 - 27:34

[laughter]
27:34 - 27:38

Well, yeah, I think it's—
27:38 - 27:44

[inaudible speech]
27:44 - 27:45

Right.
27:45 - 27:52

[inaudible speech]
27:52 - 27:53

Yep.
27:53 - 28:05

[inaudible speech]
28:05 - 28:07

It's reasonable for them to fear that
28:07 - 28:09

and if you just laugh at them
28:09 - 28:10

you're not going to get anywhere.
28:10 - 28:11

Yeah.
28:11 - 28:17

I agree that, so uh, for the benefit of the Internet,
28:17 - 28:23

the point is that largely men have created geek culture
28:23 - 28:26

because they don't fit into mainstream models
28:26 - 28:28

of being a man either.
28:28 - 28:32

And they've created a safe place for themselves
28:32 - 28:36

so you have the challenge of preserving that
28:36 - 28:40

or, but, expanding it in a way that it is
28:40 - 28:42

more welcoming to general diversity
28:42 - 28:46

but not turning it into something that is
28:46 - 28:49

identical to mainstream culture.
28:49 - 28:51

Which again is so—
28:51 - 28:53

So again we're attempting this really hard problem
28:53 - 28:56

of identifying what it is that about the lack of diversity
28:56 - 28:59

that can be changed without necessarily saying
28:59 - 29:03

"OK, this needs to become, you know,
29:03 - 29:09

this needs to become everyday normal culture",
29:09 - 29:13

with its own problems, I mean mainstream culture
29:13 - 29:14

as opposed to geek culture
29:14 - 29:19

is in some ways less desirable than geek culture.
29:19 - 29:20

So, yeah, so, yeah.
29:20 - 29:23

The answer to the original question is
29:23 - 29:25

we're hoping to change the culture
29:25 - 29:26

rather than change women.
29:26 - 29:29

There's a little bit of practical change in
29:29 - 29:33

women's negotiation skills that you need
29:33 - 29:34

and that sort of thing that
29:34 - 29:36

we'd like to help people with.
29:36 - 29:39

But we think the answer is not telling women
29:39 - 29:43

to become as much like their male colleagues as they can
29:43 - 29:46

even to the point of denying that they are
29:46 - 29:49

which is advice that is not unheard of
29:49 - 29:53

in the women in tech space.
29:53 - 29:56

All right, I had at least one more question?
29:56 - 30:00

What you're talking about with universities and schools
30:00 - 30:03

this is something I've actually heard from many podcasts
30:03 - 30:06

where they've interviewed women, design and the web,
30:06 - 30:08

project managers like myself,
30:08 - 30:11

you know, what is it that, we kind of fall into it,
30:11 - 30:14

we've started somewhere else and we kind of fall into it.
30:14 - 30:16

And when you talk to developers
30:16 - 30:18

they've actually had to really stick at it
30:18 - 30:21

like you've said, they've had to beat themselves up.
30:21 - 30:24

What is your approach to schools and universities?
30:24 - 30:27

Will you be speaking to lecturers and helping
30:27 - 30:30

them to not, to realise that there are women there
30:30 - 30:32

and they need to be nurtured,
30:32 - 30:33

talking to schools and their mathematics and
30:33 - 30:35

scientific classes, is that part of
30:35 - 30:36

what you're hoping to do as part of
30:36 - 30:38

your Initiative?
30:38 - 30:40

The Initiative is, the question is are we
30:40 - 30:42

going to be talking to schools and universities,
30:42 - 30:46

particularly targeting lecturers and teachers there?
30:46 - 30:51

Uh, so we at the moment we're hoping to focus more
30:51 - 30:52

[inaudible speech] yeah yeah.
30:52 - 30:57

So [inaudible speech]. Yeah. [inaudible speech] Yeah.
30:57 - 31:00

So there's quite, uh, there can probably never be,
31:00 - 31:01

I'm not saying by any means that there's
31:01 - 31:03

enough work on this.
31:03 - 31:04

There's quite a lot of initiatives already that
31:04 - 31:07

work with school-aged girls.
31:07 - 31:13

So our work at the moment is going to be
31:13 - 31:17

I haven't actually been following the Twitter.
31:17 - 31:21

It's behind my head, it could be, um.
31:21 - 31:26

So yeah we're going to be trying to work with universities.
31:26 - 31:28

In particular because that's a time when
31:28 - 31:33

for a lot of these things that's a really key, uh,
31:33 - 31:35

the phrase that Open Source sometimes uses is
31:35 - 31:36

a "larval phase".
31:36 - 31:38

A really key time when people get to grips
31:38 - 31:41

with the technology and get confident with it.
31:41 - 31:43

And certainly we don't want to say that women
31:43 - 31:45

who've graduated from university are incapable
31:45 - 31:49

of getting involved, we'll be working with them a lot as well.
31:49 - 31:53

But university aged women are a really key market
31:53 - 31:58

for having the time to learn about these things
31:58 - 32:00

and feel comfortable with them
32:00 - 32:02

in time to get into them and actually start a
32:02 - 32:05

career from the beginning rather than transition.
32:05 - 32:06

So yeah, part of our aim will be
32:06 - 32:10

working with universities.

Title:: The Ada Initiative, supporting women in Open technology and culture - Mary Gardiner
Description:: Talk at Geek Girl Dinner Sydney - http://www.girlgeeksydney.com/

Mary Gardiner, co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a new non-profit advocating for women in open technology and culture, will give a sneak preview of the Ada Initiative's plans for 2011-12.

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Video Language:: English
Duration:: 43:32

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The Ada Initiative, supporting women in Open technology and culture - Mary Gardiner

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