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- Hello, good morning. How is everyone? The keynote was good? I heard it was awesome. Didn't get to go, but. I'm going to go ahead and get started so we're not in here forever. Today I'm talking about Code, Culture and the Pursuit of Happiness. Not really talking about any code, but I'm Kinsey Ann Durham, you can find me on twitter here, and I'm from Denver, Colorado.
Yeah, Denver's awesome I hear some cheers. I work for a company called Go Spot Check. It's an awesome startup, we're in downtown Denver, about 45 people. We have about nine engineers and I also have a non-profit that I work on on the side called kubmo, so if you want to check that out that would be awesome.
We build technology curriculum for women's empowerment programs around the world, so a lot of times these empowerment programs don't have a technology component and we think it's important, so we build and teach that curriculum. And we're actually headed to Peru in January to teach, so I don't know if anyone is ever interested in doing that type of volunteer work, but it's awesome, so, you know, visit kubmo on twitter or the website is kubmo.
builders, if you want more information. So two years ago, actually, in Miami at Ruby Conf, how many people were at the Miami Ruby Conf a couple years ago? A couple hands. I very nervously gave one of my first talks, talking about breaking down the barriers to entry and alternative paths to becoming a software engineer.
But I guess as time goes on I've kind of realized that there's a bigger issue that our industry is facing. I'm sure a lot of you have seen this statistic, that 56% of women are actually leaving the industry, compared to the 17% percent of men that leave the industry, just to kinda show that.
And then, 97% of these women claim that they're not ever going to come back, which, you know, I think is a big shame. So we have all of these awesome, important organizations that are really trying to solve the problem of getting women and minorities into tech, as well as bootcamps and awesome code schools that've popped up all over the place that are amazing.
But we have very few organizations that are trying to get women or minorities to stay. And when I was doing research for this I started taking screenshots of all the articles that were out there because I thought it was really depressing. This is just all over the place, and if I had seen these three years ago when I was first getting into the industry I probably would've been really discouraged after reading these.
So, I feel like we have an issue of a leaky bucket. We're doing all this awesome work to get people in, but we're not doing the work to keep people there, to people happy. So I am curious why, like why are people so unhappy? Why are they leaving? So I did a bunch of research, you'll see my citation slide at the end, it's cram full of stuff.
I also got to interview a bunch of awesome people to understand why they left, or why they had felt like they should leave. Most of the people I interviewed said at one point or another they did want to in fact leave the tech industry to pursue something else, which I thought was super interesting.
So, I'm going to kind of dive into a couple of the trends that I found, and then really get into why I'm up here talking to you all today. So the first trend that I found was, you know, lack of flexibility in the workplace. So, lack of progressive maternity leave policies, obviously.
Also paternity leave policies. A lot of times people tell me, "oh, we have a really "progressive maternity leave policy," and I'm like, what about paternity leave? They'll say, "oh, well women get three months off. " I'm like, what about men? "Two weeks," and I'm like well that's not really progressive cause that's not equal.
So I think that's important to mention. But, also, a lot of the times women didn't say that the lack of maternity leave was the problem, just the lack of having a flexible work environment in the first place. Also, the tech industry is really notorious for maintaining crazy working hours, and recently, I don't know if you all read this article by DHH, but I thought, I know he has a really bad rap, but, I really liked this blog post that he put out, and he talked a lot about how he wanted to have a life beyond work, and he wanted more hobbies and intellectual stimulation than Hacker News, which I thought was funny.
So, yeah. And also, having familial responsibilities makes it really hard to have a job in the tech industry. A lot of times you have to choose between a career or a family, and if you have both, you know, I really applaud you, it's a hard thing to do. So, yeah, this is a quote from Anita Borg Institute, that basically, "Flexible scheduling is essential "for retaining women in the workplace, "who often face "work/life challenges.
" The second trend that I found were biased evaluations. "They just kept asking me to prove myself over and over again. " Like now, I kind of feel like that a lot. A lot of times when people ask what I'm speaking about and I say what I'm speaking about, I get really embarrassed because I feel like I should be giving a hardcore technical talk, because people might not take me quite as seriously as a software engineer, you know, which is unfortunate, but, that's how I feel.
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