Jill Binder: Why do we careabout diversity in WordPress?
So, the WordPress community isputting more and more effort
into diversity. Why? And why isthe community asking you to get
on board with this vision aswell? At all tech events, and
WordPress is no exception,diversity is a point of concern.
Even if your event already seemslike it's diverse, too, there's
always more that you can do tomake sure that people from all
walks of life not only feelincluded, but valued. There may
even be members of otherunderrepresented groups that you
hadn't considered yet who couldbenefit from your event. Let's
talk now about seven reasons whydiversity in WordPress events is
beneficial to WordPress and toyour local community. And you
can probably tell I'm readingoff these notes. This is from an
article that I published a fewyears ago, on a Tuesday training
posted on the community blog. Ican send out a link to that in
the follow up email after thisworkshop.
So point number one is diverseevents reflect the diversity of
the WordPress users. Asdevelopers, designers,
marketers, business owners, andcontent creators, we're not
building WordPress and WordPressproducts just for ourselves. The
group of people buildingWordPress must reflect the group
of people who use it. When it'smainly one kind of person
building it, we fail to includethe voices and perspectives of
other types of users. Just likehow new designers who are
unaware of color visiondeficiencies may not consider
adding other forms of visualcues while creating a user
interface, there's also allkinds of things that we may be
overlooking for our users.
Number Oh, and a little quote,WordPress can be used by
anybody, so it should also bebuilt by anybody. Josepha
Hayden, who's our WordPressExecutive Director.
Number two, diversity makesWordPress more innovative.
People from underrepresentedgroups in technology have a wide
range of history, lifeexperiences, and knowledge to
share. When you have a diversearray of life experiences, you
approach problems differently.Just as a developer's point of
view is going to be differentfrom a user's point of view, so
are our overall viewpoints. Andby inviting more people to the
table, more people's needs willbe included. It'll be frank,
it'll bring in fresh ideas thatwill benefit everyone. Think of
how video captions wereoriginally created for people
with limited hearing and nowthey also benefit people who
don't want to wake a sleepingbaby or pet or person nearby, or
who prefer reading along whilewatching your video.
Number three, diversity createsspace for unique perspectives.
More diversity means a betterchance of bringing in
contributors who are straddlingseveral roles, and thus creating
unique things with uniqueperspectives. For example,
consider power users who useWordPress in interesting ways,
front end developers, businesspeople who use plugins to make
specific kinds of sites ortypographers, who use WordPress
to do creative things withtypography. It's also important
to include people who can talkabout running a business in
WordPress, how developers cancommunicate with designers,
different things you can do withWordPress, etc. And people who
come from different backgroundshave different life experiences
that bring in all thesedifferent skills that overlap
and create their uniqueperspectives.
Number four, fostering a moreinteresting, creative, and
engaged community. A diverse setof people are more creative.
They're also more productive andmotivated and overall,
everything becomes far moreinteresting. In fact, diversity
and inclusiveness help peoplestay, invite others, and be far
more engaged than a grouplacking in diversity and
inclusiveness. And this makes alot of sense. If people feel
welcome, safe, and don't feellike the odd man out, they're
more likely to enjoy themselvesand to contribute more. And just
like a colorful, colorful mosaicwall is more fun to look at, a
variety of people makes for amore fun and interesting
experience.
Number five, growing yourcommunity. As event organizers,
we care about how many peopleare coming out to our WordPress
meetups and WordCamps. The morepeople the better. Diversity
efforts are a great way to growyour community and have even
more people with differentbackgrounds and skills attend
your events. Especially if yousee the same faces all the time,
it's always nice to have freshfaces and perspectives.
Attendees who come to events fornetworking or job opportunities
will find immense value in theprospect of always meeting new
people at each event.
Number six is creating diversityin leadership. More and more
people are recognizing theimportance of having a diverse
group of leaders for theirmeetups and WordCamps. When
leadership... when theleadership team is diverse, the
events will benefit from havingmultiple perspectives and
attendees and volunteers willfeel more comfortable
participating. Invite people ofunderrepresented groups who
already attend and love yourevents to be leaders in order to
empower them and encourage themto grow your event. In
Vancouver, after Louisa andAndrina took our diverse speaker
workshop, they created and led anew initiative in the community,
a monthly WordPress users meetup and it was very popular.
And number seven, and this isthis is this is why I do it. The
things that happen for peoplewhen through through this work:
Unlocking new opportunities.Bringing in more people with
different opinions, viewpointsand experiences can unlock more
opportunities for them. Forexample, when Kiersten
contributed at our localVancouver WordCamp, she got
spotted by a local agency becametheir first female developer and
quickly became the seniordeveloper and team lead. Simply
by being at the event, she wasintroduced to an opportunity
that she may not have discoveredotherwise. Another example is
because there's a lack oflearner advocacy, TC aka Koch
brother created a businesshelping black men learn
JavaScript for WordPress. Hecreated a community to support
and enable men of color to earna living in tech. And he had his
own podcast for a while on theDo the Woo Podcast Network. And
I know that for me, WordPresshas changed my life twice, once
getting out of debt by becominga WordPress developer
freelancer. And then a secondtime when I started doing this
community work full time.
And lastly, bonus PS, it's justthe right thing to do. Although
I've pointed out some goodreasons above, you don't need an
objective reason to make yourevents more diverse. Creating a
more inclusive and welcomingenvironment is also just the
right thing to do. I love thisquote from somebody who posted
on Twitter, John Cutler,"'Diversity is good for
business' is not the point. Evenif it is true. It's almost like
people are afraid of taking anideological stand. It's okay to
want to just address systemicinequality. You don't need a
business case."
Yay. Okay. So now let's get intowhat does diversity look like in
your part of the world. Thissection, this whole section is
an experiment. We're going totry it and see how this goes.
And I would love feedbackafterwards. So first, I want to
make an important distinction. Aperson themselves cannot be
diverse. Diversity refers to amix, a variety. A person can
however be from one or moreunderrepresented groups. So when
we talk about diversity, this isfor groups and underrepresented
is for individuals. We usediversity to refer to a group
that has a mix of differentidentities, both well and
underrepresented. And we useunderrepresented to talk about
groups that aren't part of thewell represented majority. So
for example, where I live inCanada, the well represented are
the straight, able bodied, whitemen, and the underrepresented
are basically everybody else.Now, when I say everyone else,
here in North America, generallythat's genders, races,
ethnicities, sexualities,physical abilities, neurological
abilities, age, etc. And I havesince learned that other parts
of the world have differentunderrepresented groups than we
do in North America, such asspoken languages, countries,
cultures, class, caste,religion, and more. You're
probably thinking of some otherones for your region right now
as well. And it's important toensure that each event's lineup
is diverse for where it islocated. What does diversity
look like in your part of theworld? So this is the experiment
part. We're going to do twoexercises now. Both of them will
be individually and silently.You can share in the chat if you
want to, but it is you don'tneed to. The first one is we're
going to look at first of all,what do you think think your
diversity is. And then for thesecond one, we're going to look
at data and facts. So first, thequestion is, what are the
demographics of where you live?In a moment, we're going to take
one minute and write down whatyou think are the
underrepresented groups of yourarea. When you're doing this
exercise, don't worry for thisif you don't know, or you just
don't have the right terminologyyet, just try and write
something down. For example,completely guessing for
Vancouver, I would say genders,all genders, people who are
quite out about their genders,such as women, gender, neutral,
non binary, agender, two spirit,pangender, etc. And we're also
very multicultural here so Iimagine there'll be a lot of
Black and Asian, maybe some EastAsian in our mix as well that we
should be paying attention to.So take one minute now. Pop in
the chat if you have anyquestions about this exercise. I
haven't been reading anything inthe chat so if there's anything
important... Nope! Great. Okay.So I'll give you a minute now to
do this.
Unknown: Jill, just wanted tolet you know there's a question
chat.
Jill Binder: Got it.
Unknown: Thank you.
Jill Binder: About 10 moreseconds
Doesn't matter how much you'vewritten or not written at this
point. So one of the argumentsthat I hear from people is, but
there's no da-da-da people in mycity. For example, I hear, "But
there's no black people in mycity." Well, let's find out if
that's true. Let's find outexactly what are the groups in
your area. And not only that,but what are their percentages.
And the reason that we want todo this is so that you have some
facts to work off of, and alsocan help you when you're
creating a guidelines for whatdiversity that you're working
towards, for your event. And apossible one ideal version of
your event could be making itlike a miniature version of your
region, or better. So if I have,say, 70% white people and 30%
black people, it'd be great ifmy event had 30% or more black
people in at my in, say in myspeaker lineup, or my Organizing
Committee, whatever thing thatwe're looking at at the time.
And, of course, you might bethinking, "That's hard. I can't
do that." Don't worry right nowabout the how, we'll cover that
later. Right now, we're justgathering information. So what
we're going to do is we're goingto pull up the demographic
information for your region. Ifyou already have a great site to
use, use that. And if you don't,then pull up your Wikipedia
page, which actually usuallypulls from a great source
anyway. If the information onthe page is overwhelming, you
can use a tool like chatGPT tosummarize it. I will give an
example. So for example, I'llshow you the process for
Vancouver. Please note that I'mnot on the Vancouver organizing
team anymore, nor have I talkedto our organizers about this
material. So this is all anexample, hypothetical. So I
would look up my Wikipedia pagefor Vancouver. And then I do a
search on the page fordemographics. And I get this
information plus a whole lotmore information when I scroll
down. Personally, I find this abit too overwhelming to
understand how to apply this ina simple way for my events
needs. So the magic of our AItools chatGPT. In order to get a
quick snapshot for myself, Icopy and paste all of that
information into chatGPT with aprompt, "Can you please
summarize this demographic dataand give me a percent breakdown
of each type of group ofperson." And then I gave it
examples so it would understandwhat I mean, let's say
ethnicity, religion, etc. Sothis is how I put it in an a
copy and pasted all of thedemographics that it gave me.
And then it popped back with asimplified breakdown on
ethnicity, religion, language,immigrants, and our LGBTQIA
community. So this tells me whatthe people who collect data in
the world, the census takers,what information they think is
most important about ourdemographics. And then, and then
I can pick which groups areimportant, and which ones do I
want to actually look atfurther. So for example, for
mine, the most important for mypretend event is going to be
ethnicities, because in in myregion, language and religion
aren't part of the culture here;they're not things that I want
to focus on for my event.Immigrants is already covered by
the same data on ethnicities.LGBTQIA is actually very
important, but it's an invisiblegroup. And I don't quite have
the resources to know how toinclude it just yet. So great if
I can have some people from thatcommunity at my event, but I
don't quite know, you know,invisible minorities are harder
to do. I'll talk through that abit more in a moment. So what I
would do is I would focus mostlyhere on the fact that,
surprisingly, to me, this wasactually some new information.
We have fewer white people thanpeople of color. We have our
white Europeans are 43%. And wehave 57% people of color, which
actually isn't that surprisingwhen I think about it. We have
East Asian 29%, Southeast Asian9%, South Asian 7%, black
community was way down the listat like, 1%. It didn't even show
up in the top numbers, which wasalso very surprising to me. But
this is a great reason to havedata to know, okay, if I'm
finding it harder to get peopleout from that community, oh,
there's a reason there's just soso many fewer of them here,
maybe maybe there's actuallynone here, it's great to know
what it is. And before you askedme, if 43% White means that the
white, white people here areunderrepresented, it's all in
the lens that you look at it. Weare still over represented in
technology. So there's thegroups of my region, but there's
also the groups of technologyand my WordPress events. So you
can think about that, once youhave the data, it gives you a
better idea of how to thinkabout it. And then you can still
use your common sense and go,white people are still over
represented even though there'sthere's fewer in my region,
still, at my events, almost allwhite people. So I want to work
on that; there's obviously adiscrepancy there.
So this gives me... this couldbe an ideal to strive for based
on these demographics, or it canjust be data that I use to to
work, you know, to figure out myguidelines. It's just more
information to use to help withthat. In my case, in my
hypothetical event, I would alsoadd in gender, even though it
wasn't included in my wiki page.And also, if there's anyone else
of other groups that are notincluded here, who are a great
fit for the event, as well, suchas people from the black
community, from the LGBTQIAcommunity, people with vision
impairment, people inwheelchairs, etc. I'm definitely
still going to include them. I'mnot going to say they didn't
show up in my, in mypercentages, you know, I'm still
trying to include as many peopleas different kinds of identities
as I can. I'll give you a momentto try doing this now and ask
them any questions on it. And ifyou want to spend more time...
if you want to spend more timeon it, you can always take more
time on it later.