- Judith's intro to the topic: did a lot of work on Google's unconscious bias training
- Know who your audience is
- out of a desire to connect, we tell stories, but that can then end up increasing the disconnect with the audience
- ex. speaker told a story about her triumph over blindness, but for visually impaired member of the audience, exhausting to hear her life articulate as the worst thing to ever happen to someone
- Imagine ways in which what you say might be received differently by people different from you
- Know yourself--know your biases
- we normalize our own experience, have a hard time imagining a different way
- proactively seek out other ways of knowing
- try to understand the stories that aren't being told
- What the goals of your presentation?
- might be to convey knowledge, but can dig deeper at your goals too--maybe to persuade?
- all stories have positive and negative manifestations in them--so you can reproduce or undermine common biases in stories
- think about who's included or excluded
- think about metaphors used in the story
- Recognize our limitations
- Can't be all things to everyone
- Be transparent about who is excluded and why, can highlight others better equipped for those stories
- Q: how to prepare a talk for an audience in a different country/culture from your own?
- You can ask conference organizers for a list of where people are from
- Make the presentation more accessible to everyone
- give handouts ahead of time
- Get people to be more physical, with low stakes ways to participate (raise hands, then raise hands higher, then have people stand up if they can relate)
- Giving speakers feedback
- "I think you had good intentions, but here's how this resonated for me"
- "Hey, that wasn't cool"
- Q: what to think about when prepping slides?
- Accessibility: consider those who can't see or can see very little
- videos: have captions
- images: describe verbally what's in them
- text should be big enough, high enough contrast
- (these are universal design principles anyway!)
- Use a variety of examples and photos: gender, ethnicities, ages, etc.
- are you reproducing inequities? are there patterns?
- show people of all different abilities
- ok to use aspirational photos of what you want your workplace to look like
- applies in writing too: pronoun usage
- Don't want ideas about inclusion to becomes weapons of exclusion
- Create a checklist for yourself, like the Bechdel test -- @judithmwilliams's version!
- Are you showing people that are different from you?
- Are you showing different people doing different things?
- Are you actively challenging biases and the mainstream narratives?
- Q: sources for images?
- Getty images
- search for "free"/"open source" + image you want, then check attribution
- ask individuals to be models in your own photos--don't have to use glossy stock photography! Don't be afraid to be unpolished
- Geography: try paying attention to how we talk about geography and spaces
- at Grace Hopper Conference last week, supposed to be for all women in tech, but lots of talks/data from North America -- rhetoric that tech only happens in San Francisco, not anywhere else, but then if it's in a developing countries, then given an award for it
- Discourses of safety => discourses of race and exclusion (some discussion around stereotypes people have of neighborhoods/countries that are "safe" or not, and people evaluating safety based on people's skin color in those areas
- Q: how to show people different from yourself but not get into cultural appropriation?
- In photos, if using them as examples of an idea--just an example
- When telling stories: whose story is it?
- ok to tell other people's stories!
- but do your research
- be honest about who you are, why this story, or this culture, for illustrating your point
- is it a convenient stereotype that we use vs. an illustrative story?
- surprising stories, that against the common narrative, are actually more interesting anyway!
- make sure you're not using a trope as an excuse
- Kind of like recruiting--diversify your network ahead of time, so don't have to default to an undiverse pool to draw from
- We could do a lot more for more age-based inclusiveness.
- Example: using an older woman programmer in your story, without having to comment about it
- Ask yourself: am I representing a different point of view?
- Q: how can you tell if you're being funny?
- see if your jokes land
- be careful who the joke is on
(I think they went on for a bit longer after this point but we needed to leave the meeting room I'd booked at work for us)
