(light music)
- As she said, this is a
personal story about me.
This is what I experienced, and this is,
you know, it's something that,
everything that you hear about here
happened to me or was experienced by me,
so you need to understand
a little bit about me.
So yes, I've been in the
Portland area my entire career,
so I've been very lucky in the fact that
I've worked many different places,
I've worked for startups,
I've worked for major corporations,
and currently work for Intel.
I have a hobby, which
is my Irish wolfhounds,
and that's kind of easy to see here.
I also do a lot of volunteer work,
so I do work with the
Women Who Code Portland,
I work with, I'm a
TrevorChat crisis counselor,
and I also do board of
directors on our fire district
up in Vernonia, Oregon,
where I used to be a fireman.
So anyway.
The engineer in me
likes to break this down
into the problem statement,
the data and information,
and then onto what the
possible solutions may be.
So, our problem is the intersection
of diversity and inclusion
and how it can affect
privacy and anonymity,
and why, what happens when
we create those goals?
We actually become blind to the people
that we are going to be affecting.
We tend to look at the goal as a number,
we look at the goal as a point to get to,
and yet we never stop to ask
the question: at what cost?
We tend to affect people
that we have no idea.
As we know, diversity and inclusion
is a huge industry buzzword right now,
and it's, you know, there's
not a corporation around
that you don't see a
news article about it,
a blog post, a tweet, something about
their diversity and inclusion program,
and the data that they've
put out showing you
how well they're doing.
What is diversity?
Well, I really don't
need to tell this crowd
what diversity is because
we already know that
if you walk, talk, and look
like everybody you work with,
you're going to make your decisions
based on those inherent biases.
Well, one of the things that
we really need to look at is
we need that perspective,
and without diversity,
you can't get any perspective.
So, what's inclusivity?
Right.
Once again, this is a crowd that
I really don't need to talk to about this,
but this is where, you know,
you've actually made a policy
or a conscious decision
to include people who may
otherwise be excluded.
And this could be anybody, right?
This can be any underrepresented minority.
This can be, you know, sexually based,
racially based, you know,
you want these people to share
their perspective with you,
and without embracing diversity,
not just accepting it,
without embracing diversity,
you cannot have inclusivity.
So now, privacy and anonymity.
Now, as I said, since
this is my personal story,
the reason that I'm giving
you these definitions
is how I experience
this and how I see this,
so I wanted everyone to
make sure that they see
how I define these terms,
because these are defined
by people in different ways.
So, privacy being I have the right to give
my information out to whoever
I want at any point in time,
but I also have the right to say,
"No, I don't want you to
use my information anymore."
And anonymity, much like my shadow,
means that when you're looking
at me, or if I do something,
I'm untraceable,
untrackable, and not visible.
This becomes very important
when you're talking about DNI programs.
Self-identification.
This is a big word that a lot of people
have been throwing around lately,
and it's the type of thing
that, if you don't realize,
there's many, many
underrepresented minorities
that need to self-identify,
or you don't know that they're
there and in existence.
And if they choose not to self-identify,
you've ruined your DNI program.
How do you get them to self-identify?
You create a safe environment for them
to where they feel comfortable
sharing that information.
If they don't feel comfortable
sharing that information,
you can't hold that against them.
Once again, it's privacy and
anonymity versus your goals.
One of the things that came up is
Pew Research did a study here,
I think it was two years ago in 2015,
and I didn't wanna throw the graphs up
because I didn't want this
to be a technical-type talk,
so I took the graph out.
But it's very important.
They found that, of LGBTQ
people who would self-identify,
that the ones from 18 to 36
were the most likely to self-identify.
The ones from 37 to 71 were
the least likely to identify,
and when you look at my age group,
we are by far the least
likely to identify,
to self-identify as LGBTQ
and we're talking about less than 50%.
So, if you say 50% of the
people that work at Intel
who are over 50 don't
self-identify, right?
So, we now have a common
set of definitions.
We all know how I saw this,
and so you can experience
this in my context, okay.
So anyway.
This became the good,
the bad, and the ugly,
because there are really good things
(cowboy music)
that occur.
(laughing)
So I want you to know that
I'm not bashing anybody here,
this is purely my experience.
There were many good things,
and things continue to
improve to this day.
And a lot of what I experienced,
because I worked with HR,
I worked with everybody,
won't be experienced by the
next people down the road.
So, the good things.
They have world-class benefits.
My employer, I mean, I feel so privileged
to work for an employer
who has embraced this,
and I mean, they've given
us some world-class benefits
when it comes to trans healthcare.
They have an employee code
of conduct that is enforced,
and when I say enforced, I mean
they take it very seriously.
They also have very nice
inclusive amenities.
We have all-gender restrooms
in every single building,
but because of the way they wrote their
employee code of conduct,
it's not required.
You may use any restroom you want,
and people cannot complain about it.
If they have a complaint,
they're to take it to HR.
So, with all of these,
great stuff,
but then we move on to bad things.
When I first started looking into
the trans healthcare benefits because
I was in the process of transitioning,
and I tried to locate, they advertised it
on the employee website.
So, I said, oh, great, let's
go see how we use these.
No information.
All I could find was the little news blurb
that they had put out to the entire world
that we have these benefits, and that
inside the company, we
couldn't get any information.
So,
I said okay, what do I have to do here?
So I said okay, I will out myself.
I am not out at work
at this point in time,
and I didn't feel comfortable being out.
I'm, you know, my age,
my history, my career,
I was not ready for this.
I decided, okay, one person was fine.
I filed the HR ticket.
72 hours later, I got my response.
"I don't know anything about this.
"Here, let me forward this onto my boss."
I wasn't asked if this
information could be forwarded on.
It was automatically forwarded,
and this was the response that I got back.
Okay, well, it was about
four or five days later
that the second response came.
The second response comes back saying,
"I don't know anything about this either,
"but when you do find
out, please let me know,
"because I would like to know about this."
Well finally, after I got through HR,
my final response from HR was,
"Sorry, you have to talk
to your insurance company."
So, you can see where this is going.
10 people, 60 days later, I finally have
the answer to my question
that was a very simple one:
how do I use these benefits?
So, once again, DNI goals
didn't look at the big picture
and say, "At what cost?"
Right, they were so busy
getting this information
out to the world, they didn't
look at the people inside.
The ugly.
Less than a couple of months after I
went through all of this
and got through this,
we decided that they were going to do
an LGBTQ self-identification survey.
In fairness, they were doing
it for the right reasons.
They wanted to see how
best they could serve
the LGBTQ community inside.
They also wanted to see what
the landscape was because,
once again, if you don't
self-identify, you're not visible.
So, they were doing this
for the right reasons,
but you know you're in
for a really wild ride
when you open up the survey
and the very first question is.
Now, in all fairness, they actually did
have somebody scheduled,
who was a trans person
to go over all the
trans-related questions.
She wasn't available,
and through oversight,
(laughing)
they just didn't ask.
But it wasn't just the
trans-related questions
that were a problem here.
Remember now, we're talking about
diversity and inclusion goals.
This was a self-identification survey.
The next one was these questions.
Who do you know on your team?
And they actually had numbers on there,
zero to one, one to five, seven to 10.
This is not self-identifying,
this is saying,
all of these people here, I'm outing,
whether they want to be or not.
And once again, the DNI
goals need to match,
they need to be clarified.
You need to understand
who you are talking to
and who you can possibly
hurt on the other side.
The irony is in their
frequently asked questions
under the additional information,
was the Human Rights Council,
that when you click on the link,
it took you to this page.
So our takeaways here,
and this is something
that everybody needs
to really think about.
This conversation needs to
be started with, you know,
every DNI team that exists.
Clarify the goals up front.
Ask the question, at what cost?
Look at the teams and look at the people
you're going to be affecting
that you may not realize
that you're affecting.
Make sure you have a safe environment,
because if you don't have a
safe and inclusive environment
from the very get-go, they're
not going to self-identify,
they're going to find a reason not to.
Transparency.
Make all of the information available.
If you're advertising
this out to the world,
make sure that the
information is available,
not just internally,
because you're looking to
try to attract a diverse
and inclusive workforce.
Make sure that this information
is available externally also.
If you're advertising it, make
sure everybody can find it.
And last but not least, make sure that you
ask the people you are affecting,
because I guarantee you
they will have perspective
that you will not have thought of.
And it was last year,
just about this time,
that at AlterConf in DC, Emily
Gorcenski said, in her talk,
"I want to be safe, not strong."
I thought about that for a little bit,
and safe having a meaning of
being free from harm or risk,
you know,
secure from threat or danger,
I realized that the third meaning of safe
that is in the dictionary
really played out to me,
and that is "unlikely to produce
"controversy or contradiction."
I wrote this originally as
directed towards me, how I felt.
And after I was here today, I changed
the way that this was and tried to make it
exactly what I've been saying.
I want everybody's existence to be safe,
because we are not a contradiction,
and we should never be controversial.
I have to give a shout
out to my team mates,
Tiberius Hefflan, Constanza
Heath, Caroline Heath,
'cause there the ones
that actually pushed me
to change this from an internal blog post
to an actual presentation.
Kathleen Huggins, whose
actually here today,
she did all of my illustrations for me,
and my team mate extraordinaire.
And, of course, Bee,
because I like puppy
pictures, pre-transition.
And, I thank you.
(audience applause)
(harsh music)
(piercing ring)
(whooshing)
