Do we have a diversity problem in Python community?
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Ho, Cheuk
The diversity statement quoted as follows: “The Python Software Foundation and the global Python community welcome and encourage participation by everyone. Our community is based on mutual respect, tolerance, and encouragement, and we are working to help each other live up to these principles. We want our community to be more diverse: whoever you are, and whatever your background, we welcome you.” Diversity, big deal! As an active members and event organisers (and also on the minority side of the gender) in the Python community, we have alway been concern by the question of: Do we truly have a problem in diversity? Especially, gender diversity. We would like to find out the truth, by data science, and see if we can find a clue why and how we can fix it. First, we will show the research others did regarding the representation of women in the R and Python communities. Then, we will show the research that we did based on our experience and statistic. Including static analysis of the speakers diversity (regarding gender) at major PyCon and PyData conferences. Finally, as we all care about diversity and want improvements, we would like to find out the reason and what we can do about it. We would propose what we, the minorities and allies, could do against this seemingly unbalance situation and make the community better. This talk is for all that who cares about diversity in our community.
 Thank you very much. Yeah, so thank you for coming in this room. I think I can assume that everybody in this room and also if you are watching the live stream, you care about diversity, especially in the Python community. That's why you are here with me. So thank you so much for that. You can keep the discussion with me on Twitter. It's welcome. I would talk a little bit about me. So thanks for introducing me. I currently live in London as a data scientist. In London, I'm very active in doing a lot of stuff. I try to, because I love the community, I want to contribute more. So I co-organize some meetups, including the AI Club for Gender Minorities. I'm so glad that I have two co-organizers here with me in Europe, Python. I'm so happy. I love them. Also I organize some sprints, which is mainly focusing on contributing to open source. So far we have sprints once per month, so almost once per month. So it's a fun time. I love doing it. And also I myself contribute to a lot of open source libraries. It's a small contribution, but I think everybody can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. Also I created this PIX and MIX. Thank you so much. I'm a designer. I hope I've pronounced his or her name correct. This designer created this logo for me. Thank you so much. That's about open source, right? It's like everybody contributes. So okay, enough for open source. So a couple of months ago, I found this blog post which kind of get my attention. My women are flourishing in our community but lagging in Python. So myself, my background as a data scientist, I started when I started to, you know, doing data science. I was using RL, but for different reasons I switched to Python. And from there I know that the Python community is lovely. And that comes to my, like I think about why we have this problem. Because the Python community is lovely. Why we, like women are not enjoying Python as much as ours. So I need to have a look. So we see that actually we have more than, like six times more Python users than our users according to the Stack Overflow survey last year in 2018. So but there's a lot of people using Python. It's lovely, you know, the community is lovely. But we only have 1.25 times more members in PyLadies than our ladies. So what happened? Is it really like we don't have that much, you know, female Python users or female Python users are not active in the community? It's like, hmm. Why the number doesn't match? And then also something worrying is like for contributors. Again, like I contribute to open source, I would love to do more. But why? Our has four times more female contributors than Python. I was like, oh, we are lacking in presence in contribution to open source in Python communities. Oh, no, it's not good. Also for networks, so as a organizer, there's like our ladies, there's 120 chapters in 40 countries. But in PyLadies, we have less, we have only 45 chapters, active chapters in 12 countries. So I'm very lucky. I'm in one of the biggest cities in Europe, in London, we have PyLadies. And I know that like there's also PyLadies remote, which is, you know, a remote is for everybody who's like in the city that is, you know, like smaller city that doesn't have a PyLadies, they can join. But still like it's lacking. It would be great if like we have more and more PyLadies chapters for women to network, to, you know, feel that they are not the minorities, they are not alone, they are also important in the Python community. So it's like, hmm, there are problems there. Also it could be the problem is not like a problem that, you know, that somebody would want to make, right? Because there may be a fundamental problem that, you know, the users, if you think about all the users, right, for R, I keep, you know, having different people, they have like maybe their statisticians, they come from academic background, they say, oh, R is amazing, it's so easy to use. And all these, I was like, hmm, Python is also amazing and easy to use, have you heard about that? So there is actually statistic that is showing that actually most Python users, they are actually maybe from a more engineering, computer science background, maybe, you know, most students in computer science, maybe when they were in university, they learned, you know, using C++, my first computer course that, you know, I attend in university was actually using C++. And also Python, now it's getting more and more popular this morning, you know, Martin mentioned that in Basel, there's Python in education, now they're teaching Python in schools. So, yeah, maybe computer science students, they have a lot of exposure in using Python. But for students that, you know, maybe they're disciplined, it's like more like, you know, math or social science or even like economies, economics or even like journalism, because now data journalism is a thing, right, they may be using R instead of Python. So yeah, that's really like a difference demographic in the two language users. And we can also see that because, yeah, because for different disciplines, we can see that computer science, computer science graduates, especially in the western world, is mainly mal-dominated. They're like, you know, you can see like, for these like statistic majors, they are like more or less, you know, there's like half and half, there's like 44% women, but for computer science, it's only 19%, it's like, oh, maybe we should think about getting more girls to study computer science, maybe that's the thing. So yeah, there's also like million questions that we have to attack, have to answer to help the diversity. Also I have seen this Jupyter Notebook, actually I can show you the notebook. Here, okay. The internet is slow at the moment. Okay. Can you see that? Yeah. Right. So, if I assume, so this notebook is very, very good. Actually the first time I came across it was in kind of, I joined the non-focus DISC, you know, mailing list and then they were circulating this Jupyter Notebook because what we talk about is about the inequality in the leadership in non-focus projects. Yeah. So, data leadership is like, oh, it's like an inequality of, you know, underrepresented groups and then they use a very scientific way. I won't show you the details, I will upload the slides so you can, you know, check it out yourself and they made this notebook, you know, and I'm thinking about maybe I could change this data.json and I can do different research on it as well. So this is the result, right? And maybe I should switch back to the slides so it's easier to see. So they use that scientific method to show that it's how diverse is each project. So these are non-focus projects. I think this statistic is done last year. So there's some new ones that is not updated, but anyway. So you can see that the inequalities, like, is going to be, actually how to look at this is like, if it's lower, if you have a lower score. Like, and direct, they are very, they are more diverse. So you can see that NumPy, PyMC3, they are not very diverse. I think these ones are the ones that, yeah, they got a score that's one. So the uniqueness is one. So they have only one gender as the main, you know, contributor. So, so which gender I think is quite obvious and easy to guess. So you can see, like, from these, from the bottom ones, a more, more equal one. And you can see, like, arms, size, you know, like, some, you know, open journals, they are like, oh, you can see that there's actually like a domain difference as well. Like, maybe things that are more numeric, more, you know, maybe physics related, they are less, you know, diverse. So yeah, that's very interesting. And also in that, you mentioned one idea, which I think is very, very good, is called active and passive diversity problems. So active diversity problem means that there are people or group of members that they are toxic. They don't want the community to be diverse. And passive means that actually nobody wants it, but if nobody's do anything to it, then it's the fundamental bias in it, in the inequality. So I think, is my opinion, that the Python community is having a passive problem. I haven't encountered any active problem in the Python community, very luckily. Yeah, I think that's even worse. Maybe so, so like, the other thing is like, maybe in workspace, we could, we have a chance to, you know, face some active diversity problem. But in the community, I think so far, my experience may be passive problem. So yeah, so that means that we have to do something to improve it. Okay, so the previous information that I gave you is mainly based on the blog post that I see and also like, and also a notebook that somebody did, which is amazing. So I tried to do something myself. This is a research that I did, referred last year. So I'm thinking about, because I've been to 10 conferences last year, very luckily, I enjoy every single one of them. But is there imbalance of gender ratio in Python conferences? Because you can, like, I think it's quite obvious if you have a coffee break, if you go to the toilets, here the venue is lovely, you know, it's very big, so maybe there's less obvious, but if you go to a smaller venue, you can see that usually, you know, outside the male toilet, there belong queue and a female toilet is like, I can go in, like, then there's an empty and, oh, it's good in that sense. But maybe it means that it's not good in diversity. So yeah, so I tried to do something. I tried to see, is there like an imbalance? Like, how, like, it was obviously, they made, there's obviously an imbalance, but how imbalanced is this? It's difficult to count the participant, because I talk to people, but I can't talk to every single one of the participants. So okay, it was the easiest way to count. Or maybe I should count the speakers, because autocs are recorded. So it's very easy. And but I have to really say that this is not very accurate reason being, not all talks are recorded, because some speakers, they may prefer it not to be recorded. Also, for the gender of the speaker, I didn't really do a research of like, you know, researching on every single speaker, are they male or female or non-binary? I just based on the pronoun that maybe the chair used to describe them. So it's, yeah, if I made a mistake, that's difficult to avoid. But I hope this gives a general idea of how imbalanced it is. So this is the statistic I hope is clear enough. So you can see that, ooh, like, the blue bars are male, the red bars are non-male, so including female and non-binary speakers. So except by going to UK, there is 75% of speakers are male. They are doing very well. But which means that there isn't enough non-male speakers. And why is it? Is it because when the call for proposal open, there's a lot of male submission? Because this year, I'm in the programming work group of Europe, Python. And I can see that there's a really imbalance. And then I think conference organizers, they put into an account, they have the diversity mission in their mind. But still, this is difficult to achieve because in the submission, there's already a very, very imbalanced demographic. So how can we improve that? How can we encourage more diverse speaker, maybe not just gender, maybe speaker with different backgrounds to speak? So I will also talk about that later. But before I specifically talk about some suggestion that we could do in the Python community, I would like to talk about the diversity problem in theatre. Because as a person living in London, I love going to theatre. I'm very lucky that London is a theatre city. So it's also a hot topic in London, theatre goal critics, they really notice that there's diversity problem in theatres. So maybe from learning from them, we have some idea of how we can improve. So I also read a lot about news and blog posts in theatres. So this is one of the posts that I come across. It's talking about the best way to address the theatre's lack of diversity. So yeah, there's a problem. So what's the problem specifically? Who is on the stage? It's kind of similar to my problem about conference speakers. So people on the stage are actually attracting people who will be participating. But for example, in London theatre, there's a problem because some productions, they have a whole cast of 22 white actors on stage. So for them, the more diversity questions they're addressing is maybe ethnicity of the actors. So sometimes, you know, a play could be a modern play, could be the race of the actors, not the most important thing, but still it's very white dominating on business. And who is in the audience? Also in London, I love London being such a diverse city. It's like 44% of the people in London, they are classified as BAME, which is kind of, we can say they are ethnic minorities, they are Asian or black. So yeah, but still, if you are like a London theatre goer like me, you can see that if you go to the Royal Court Theatre in London, you can see most audience, because my experience, I go to see a play, there's an Asian play, almost all the cast are Asian girls. But still because the Royal Court Theatre is located in the very prestigious location in London, in the audience, it's still very white middle class dominating. And also there's a problem in the influencer, it's kind of like the leaders of theatre, like who is making the decision, who are the artistic director of theatre, who decided what production to put on stage, and all the critics, their identity may kind of change the way they, how they judge whether this play is a good play or not a good play. So this influencer, there's also not very much of them are from ethnic minority groups. So in that blog post, also talk about the chicken and egg situation, because the writer, he mentioned that one time there's a play called Fella happening in London, and it's Fella, it's actually about a Nigerian singer, so he's very popular in Nigeria I guess. So when this writer at that time, he was like traveling in the cab, and a lot of the cab drivers in London, they are from Nigeria, and they mentioned to him that, oh I love this play, I went to see that again and again and again. You can imagine a cab driver, they are not earning a lot of money, but they may be ready to go to the theatre, but because they are from Nigeria, their identity kind of give them like attraction to this show about Nigerian singer, so they love the show, they go to see it again and again and again. So what's being on stage actually affect who is watching it or who is participating, but sometimes the problem is like if your audience is mainly, you know, I said before, if your audience is mainly wise, then maybe you want to have white actors on stage, because you have to attract people to watch it, but then it's become a loop, a healthy loop that it will really stay into only one majority group and ignoring the minority groups, which is not very good. So also there's another article which is very, very interesting, it's about how to improve this situation, like how to make it more accessible for people from different backgrounds. So for example, I mentioned about the inference of the people who make the decision, the gatekeeper, so nowadays in London you can see that there's like in some kind of very famous theatre, the artistic director of those theatres, there's like more and more people from the minority groups there being the artistic directors. I've met one lady, I think she is not white, but she is the artistic director of one of these famous theatre, I think she, I really can't remember, but yeah, she's an artistic director and I'm sure that there's a lot of artists that they are like talented artists in the minority group and it's just like it's taking them like quite a long time, if we like kind of discover them, they may become you know, driving these you know, big will to go to different directions. So it's a good thing that they kind of change it now in London and also in the theatre itself there's accessibility, for example in London now there, I kind of enjoyed that as well because there's always some kind of cheaper tickets like £10 to watch a play in the west end which is very, very good, so if you book early enough you'll be able to enjoy some cheap tickets, so theatres kind of become accessible for all, even though for people who don't have a lot of budget. So the theatre, you know, sometimes you know, the bar and the restaurant, they try to not always have expensive stuff, maybe some kind of, still more expensive than you know, buying from a corner shop, but they try to make it not super fancy and not for people who are like in a dress and a suit to enjoy, which is good. Also some accessibility measures was implied, for example they have, they have some sign language performance, so it's for people, you know, hearing impaired they have, they can enjoy the performance even though they can't hear. I've been to a production with one of the famous drama school in London and they have two cars, one car is their student, very talented student and the other car which is performing with them side by side, they are actors that you know, they use sign language, they may be deaf, but they use sign language to perform, which I think is amazing, it's amazing production because it's accessible for everybody and also sometimes there's like audio described performance, including the one that I went to, for some stage direction they would describe it, they would say it out because for people maybe they have, it's like impaired, they could still enjoy the performance and also for example accessible toilet and all these is for people who maybe have mobility problems. Also and it's this one thing that a lot of places overlook, I think it's more popular in movies, it's a relaxed performance so the light won't be totally there, people will come to come in and out because maybe they are parents with kids so like they can bring kids into the movie or bring the baby to movie, if the baby have needs they need to care for the baby, they can go in and out and everybody go to that screening, they understand that is for parents with the baby, which I think is a good thing, I mean like parents shouldn't be pinned down to not enjoy this. So okay I will spend the rest of the talk talking about what we could do in Python community, can we learn something from the theater, how they are improved? So in the blog post I mentioned in the beginning, I also mentioned that PyCon now is having a great improvement because you can see that by doing like encouraging women to come to the conference, they have talks by women starting from a very low percentage towards 40%, which is really, really good and this is PyCon in the US so I think in Europe we are doing that as well, which is very, very good, we need to carry on the momentum. Also non-focused, you can see that they are both outside, they are an organization that is like helping this, funding this PyData community, so you can see that they have also measures, they have this DIC committee and they have all these mailing lists and discussion, I joined the mailing list so that's why I receive information and also they are giving diversity scholarship so for people from the minority group if they kind of have a struggling to get a ticket and they could maybe apply for scholarships to attend the conferences. Also Jungle Girl is amazing, we had the Jungle Girl day on Monday which has been like recurring thing for Europe, Python now, every year they have this Jungle kind of like a beginner's day to encourage women especially to start using Python and do something about Jungle, to build blog posts using Jungle and it's translated to 12 languages, it's blooming and then also my friend mentioned it's very empowering for women because Jungle Girl prefer, of course like they also have male mentors but they prefer girls who have been, women who have been to the, to be participate before come back to become the mentor because well it shouldn't be always men teaching women, it should be, you know, we shouldn't care about the genders like who have experienced, teach the people who don't have experience. So in my opinion for conferences, I'm now involved in conferences a lot so I have a lot of ideas, for example childcare facilities, I think Python UK is doing it, Pardator is doing it, Pardator London is doing it, so yeah I think maybe Europe, Python maybe we should consider as well because yeah because you can, it's like those theater thing, right, like parents shouldn't be, you know, they shouldn't have these mind that oh I have to care about my baby so I can't go to the conference. Also diversity in topics, again you know, how we can make this call for proposal more diverse is like maybe we encourage different topics so like the academic you know diversity, you know, maybe people from a journalist background or a statistic background, they could also talk about their work so we are not limited to one kind of profession, one domain or one topic so people from a different background like a different you know professions, they can also, if they work related to Python in some way then they could also present. And also we should also put some emphasis on education, again you know we see from the university example, maybe we have to inspire more young girls to be you know doing a more you know computer science or engineering subject so yeah. Also I think we should go beyond the jungle girl workshop, jungle girl workshop is amazing as I said but I think it shouldn't be limited to one topic like jungle, one framework jungle, maybe we should expand it to other topics because now Python is not just used for web you know web development, it could be used in all different types of stuff so maybe because I am data scientist, I am involved in data science and also Python is very popular in data science now so maybe we should have something similar in data science to you know have a workshop to encourage gender minority especially women to start their careers you know in data science and also we should fear free gender barrier for example we have people who are like you know we have trans code which in Palindinium they have the trans code workshop that is for people identify as trans or you know it's more for people who have certain you know identity they could you know feel that they are not alone, they are not minorities they got support from the community as well. Also this one I love it, non-gender labelled toilets, so my last year in Python UK and they did a lot of work in this non-gender labelled toilets so the toilets is labelled whether you have a urino or not so it doesn't matter what gender is like what facility you are using and also the t-shirts it should like my friend just told me in the non-focus guide if you are organised a part data conference your t-shirt should be not gender labelled should be whether it's like a straight cut or it's fitted so it's also about your body shape it's not about your gender which I think is amazing and this is mainly for conference but also we have other problems in the community and we have to try to solve it for example maybe we need more female leadership and contributors so for me my idea is like maybe I organise some sprints meet up maybe I should have some you know again it's like jungle girl you know some meet up that is mainly for encouraging people in a minority that you are not alone you are not you got support from the community let's do it together so again I'm started to get them you know work their way towards the leadership or become a maintainer in the contributions also yeah in you know for young people and in academia or even not just young people maybe for researchers we have to maybe do some outreach to tell them Python is a good tool let's use Python instead of our so yeah I only got one minute left so I don't think I could take a lot of questions now here but I have this survey which you can give me some feedback I remember there's some like free text that you could type whatever you like please be kind to me and please give me feedback because I hope this talk I could keep giving it and maybe I can add more and more like for example some things like some opinions from my friend or information from my friend which I can improve this presentation so I could keep raising awareness and I hope we can work together and make the community more diverse and better so thank you so much yep so I think we can like if anyone has one question I think we can have a minute to spare you can talk after that yeah you can grab me in the conference or yeah the surface always there so please your feedback I value a lot so thank you so much
 Thank you very much.  Yeah, so thank you for coming in this room.  I think I can assume that everybody in this room and also if you are watching the live  stream, you care about diversity, especially in the Python community.  That's why you are here with me.  So thank you so much for that.  You can keep the discussion with me on Twitter.  It's welcome.  I would talk a little bit about me.  So thanks for introducing me.  I currently live in London as a data scientist.  In London, I'm very active in doing a lot of stuff.  I try to, because I love the community, I want to contribute more.  So I co-organize some meetups, including the AI Club for Gender Minorities.  I'm so glad that I have two co-organizers here with me in Europe, Python.  I'm so happy.  I love them.  Also I organize some sprints, which is mainly focusing on contributing to open source.  So far we have sprints once per month, so almost once per month.  So it's a fun time.  I love doing it.  And also I myself contribute to a lot of open source libraries.  It's a small contribution, but I think everybody can do it.  If I can do it, you can do it.  Also I created this PIX and MIX.  Thank you so much.  I'm a designer.  I hope I've pronounced his or her name correct.  This designer created this logo for me.  Thank you so much.  That's about open source, right?  It's like everybody contributes.  So okay, enough for open source.  So a couple of months ago, I found this blog post which kind of get my attention.  My women are flourishing in our community but lagging in Python.  So myself, my background as a data scientist, I started when I started to, you know, doing  data science.  I was using RL, but for different reasons I switched to Python.  And from there I know that the Python community is lovely.  And that comes to my, like I think about why we have this problem.  Because the Python community is lovely.  Why we, like women are not enjoying Python as much as ours.  So I need to have a look.  So we see that actually we have more than, like six times more Python users than our  users according to the Stack Overflow survey last year in 2018.  So but there's a lot of people using Python.  It's lovely, you know, the community is lovely.  But we only have 1.25 times more members in PyLadies than our ladies.  So what happened?  Is it really like we don't have that much, you know, female Python users or female Python  users are not active in the community?  It's like, hmm.  Why the number doesn't match?  And then also something worrying is like for contributors.  Again, like I contribute to open source, I would love to do more.  But why?  Our has four times more female contributors than Python.  I was like, oh, we are lacking in presence in contribution to open source in Python communities.  Oh, no, it's not good.  Also for networks, so as a organizer, there's like our ladies, there's 120 chapters in 40  countries.  But in PyLadies, we have less, we have only 45 chapters, active chapters in 12 countries.  So I'm very lucky.  I'm in one of the biggest cities in Europe, in London, we have PyLadies.  And I know that like there's also PyLadies remote, which is, you know, a remote is for  everybody who's like in the city that is, you know, like smaller city that doesn't have  a PyLadies, they can join.  But still like it's lacking.  It would be great if like we have more and more PyLadies chapters for women to network,  to, you know, feel that they are not the minorities, they are not alone, they are also important  in the Python community.  So it's like, hmm, there are problems there.  Also it could be the problem is not like a problem that, you know, that somebody would  want to make, right?  Because there may be a fundamental problem that, you know, the users, if you think about  all the users, right, for R, I keep, you know, having different people, they have like maybe  their statisticians, they come from academic background, they say, oh, R is amazing, it's  so easy to use.  And all these, I was like, hmm, Python is also amazing and easy to use, have you heard  about that?  So there is actually statistic that is showing that actually most Python users, they are  actually maybe from a more engineering, computer science background, maybe, you know, most  students in computer science, maybe when they were in university, they learned, you know,  using C++, my first computer course that, you know, I attend in university was actually  using C++.  And also Python, now it's getting more and more popular this morning, you know, Martin  mentioned that in Basel, there's Python in education, now they're teaching Python in  schools.  So, yeah, maybe computer science students, they have a lot of exposure in using Python.  But for students that, you know, maybe they're disciplined, it's like more like, you know,  math or social science or even like economies, economics or even like journalism, because  now data journalism is a thing, right, they may be using R instead of Python.  So yeah, that's really like a difference demographic in the two language users.  And we can also see that because, yeah, because for different disciplines, we can see that  computer science, computer science graduates, especially in the western world, is mainly  mal-dominated.  They're like, you know, you can see like, for these like statistic majors, they are  like more or less, you know, there's like half and half, there's like 44% women, but  for computer science, it's only 19%, it's like, oh, maybe we should think about getting  more girls to study computer science, maybe that's the thing.  So yeah, there's also like million questions that we have to attack, have to answer to  help the diversity.  Also I have seen this Jupyter Notebook, actually I can show you the notebook.  Here, okay.  The internet is slow at the moment.  Okay.  Can you see that?  Yeah.  Right.  So, if I assume, so this notebook is very, very good.  Actually the first time I came across it was in kind of, I joined the non-focus DISC, you  know, mailing list and then they were circulating this Jupyter Notebook because what we talk  about is about the inequality in the leadership in non-focus projects.  Yeah.  So, data leadership is like, oh, it's like an inequality of, you know, underrepresented  groups and then they use a very scientific way.  I won't show you the details, I will upload the slides so you can, you know, check it  out yourself and they made this notebook, you know, and I'm thinking about maybe I could  change this data.json and I can do different research on it as well.  So this is the result, right?  And maybe I should switch back to the slides so it's easier to see.  So they use that scientific method to show that it's how diverse is each project.  So these are non-focus projects.  I think this statistic is done last year.  So there's some new ones that is not updated, but anyway.  So you can see that the inequalities, like, is going to be, actually how to look at this  is like, if it's lower, if you have a lower score.  Like, and direct, they are very, they are more diverse.  So you can see that NumPy, PyMC3, they are not very diverse.  I think these ones are the ones that, yeah, they got a score that's one.  So the uniqueness is one.  So they have only one gender as the main, you know, contributor.  So, so which gender I think is quite obvious and easy to guess.  So you can see, like, from these, from the bottom ones, a more, more equal one.  And you can see, like, arms, size, you know, like, some, you know, open journals, they  are like, oh, you can see that there's actually like a domain difference as well.  Like, maybe things that are more numeric, more, you know, maybe physics related, they  are less, you know, diverse.  So yeah, that's very interesting.  And also in that, you mentioned one idea, which I think is very, very good, is called  active and passive diversity problems.  So active diversity problem means that there are people or group of members that they are  toxic.  They don't want the community to be diverse.  And passive means that actually nobody wants it, but if nobody's do anything to it, then  it's the fundamental bias in it, in the inequality.  So I think, is my opinion, that the Python community is having a passive problem.  I haven't encountered any active problem in the Python community, very luckily.  Yeah, I think that's even worse.  Maybe so, so like, the other thing is like, maybe in workspace, we could, we have a chance  to, you know, face some active diversity problem.  But in the community, I think so far, my experience may be passive problem.  So yeah, so that means that we have to do something to improve it.  Okay, so the previous information that I gave you is mainly based on the blog post that  I see and also like, and also a notebook that somebody did, which is amazing.  So I tried to do something myself.  This is a research that I did, referred last year.  So I'm thinking about, because I've been to 10 conferences last year, very luckily, I  enjoy every single one of them.  But is there imbalance of gender ratio in Python conferences?  Because you can, like, I think it's quite obvious if you have a coffee break, if you  go to the toilets, here the venue is lovely, you know, it's very big, so maybe there's  less obvious, but if you go to a smaller venue, you can see that usually, you know, outside  the male toilet, there belong queue and a female toilet is like, I can go in, like,  then there's an empty and, oh, it's good in that sense.  But maybe it means that it's not good in diversity.  So yeah, so I tried to do something.  I tried to see, is there like an imbalance?  Like, how, like, it was obviously, they made, there's obviously an imbalance, but how imbalanced  is this?  It's difficult to count the participant, because I talk to people, but I can't talk to every  single one of the participants.  So okay, it was the easiest way to count.  Or maybe I should count the speakers, because autocs are recorded.  So it's very easy.  And but I have to really say that this is not very accurate reason being, not all talks  are recorded, because some speakers, they may prefer it not to be recorded.  Also, for the gender of the speaker, I didn't really do a research of like, you know, researching  on every single speaker, are they male or female or non-binary?  I just based on the pronoun that maybe the chair used to describe them.  So it's, yeah, if I made a mistake, that's difficult to avoid.  But I hope this gives a general idea of how imbalanced it is.  So this is the statistic I hope is clear enough.  So you can see that, ooh, like, the blue bars are male, the red bars are non-male, so including  female and non-binary speakers.  So except by going to UK, there is 75% of speakers are male.  They are doing very well.  But which means that there isn't enough non-male speakers.  And why is it?  Is it because when the call for proposal open, there's a lot of male submission?  Because this year, I'm in the programming work group of Europe, Python.  And I can see that there's a really imbalance.  And then I think conference organizers, they put into an account, they have the diversity  mission in their mind.  But still, this is difficult to achieve because in the submission, there's already a very,  very imbalanced demographic.  So how can we improve that?  How can we encourage more diverse speaker, maybe not just gender, maybe speaker with  different backgrounds to speak?  So I will also talk about that later.  But before I specifically talk about some suggestion that we could do in the Python  community, I would like to talk about the diversity problem in theatre.  Because as a person living in London, I love going to theatre.  I'm very lucky that London is a theatre city.  So it's also a hot topic in London, theatre goal critics, they really notice that there's  diversity problem in theatres.  So maybe from learning from them, we have some idea of how we can improve.  So I also read a lot about news and blog posts in theatres.  So this is one of the posts that I come across.  It's talking about the best way to address the theatre's lack of diversity.  So yeah, there's a problem.  So what's the problem specifically?  Who is on the stage?  It's kind of similar to my problem about conference speakers.  So people on the stage are actually attracting people who will be participating.  But for example, in London theatre, there's a problem because some productions, they  have a whole cast of 22 white actors on stage.  So for them, the more diversity questions they're addressing is maybe ethnicity of the  actors.  So sometimes, you know, a play could be a modern play, could be the race of the actors, not  the most important thing, but still it's very white dominating on business.  And who is in the audience?  Also in London, I love London being such a diverse city.  It's like 44% of the people in London, they are classified as BAME, which is kind of,  we can say they are ethnic minorities, they are Asian or black.  So yeah, but still, if you are like a London theatre goer like me, you can see that if  you go to the Royal Court Theatre in London, you can see most audience, because my experience,  I go to see a play, there's an Asian play, almost all the cast are Asian girls.  But still because the Royal Court Theatre is located in the very prestigious location  in London, in the audience, it's still very white middle class dominating.  And also there's a problem in the influencer, it's kind of like the leaders of theatre,  like who is making the decision, who are the artistic director of theatre, who decided  what production to put on stage, and all the critics, their identity may kind of change  the way they, how they judge whether this play is a good play or not a good play.  So this influencer, there's also not very much of them are from ethnic minority groups.  So in that blog post, also talk about the chicken and egg situation, because the writer,  he mentioned that one time there's a play called Fella happening in London, and it's  Fella, it's actually about a Nigerian singer, so he's very popular in Nigeria I guess.  So when this writer at that time, he was like traveling in the cab, and a lot of the cab  drivers in London, they are from Nigeria, and they mentioned to him that, oh I love  this play, I went to see that again and again and again.  You can imagine a cab driver, they are not earning a lot of money, but they may be ready  to go to the theatre, but because they are from Nigeria, their identity kind of give  them like attraction to this show about Nigerian singer, so they love the show, they go to  see it again and again and again.  So what's being on stage actually affect who is watching it or who is participating,  but sometimes the problem is like if your audience is mainly, you know, I said before,  if your audience is mainly wise, then maybe you want to have white actors on stage, because  you have to attract people to watch it, but then it's become a loop, a healthy loop that  it will really stay into only one majority group and ignoring the minority groups, which  is not very good.  So also there's another article which is very, very interesting, it's about how to improve  this situation, like how to make it more accessible for people from different backgrounds.  So for example, I mentioned about the inference of the people who make the decision, the gatekeeper,  so nowadays in London you can see that there's like in some kind of very famous theatre,  the artistic director of those theatres, there's like more and more people from the  minority groups there being the artistic directors.  I've met one lady, I think she is not white, but she is the artistic director of one of  these famous theatre, I think she, I really can't remember, but yeah, she's an artistic  director and I'm sure that there's a lot of artists that they are like talented artists  in the minority group and it's just like it's taking them like quite a long time, if we  like kind of discover them, they may become you know, driving these you know, big will  to go to different directions.  So it's a good thing that they kind of change it now in London and also in the theatre itself  there's accessibility, for example in London now there, I kind of enjoyed that as well  because there's always some kind of cheaper tickets like £10 to watch a play in the west  end which is very, very good, so if you book early enough you'll be able to enjoy some  cheap tickets, so theatres kind of become accessible for all, even though for people  who don't have a lot of budget.  So the theatre, you know, sometimes you know, the bar and the restaurant, they try to not  always have expensive stuff, maybe some kind of, still more expensive than you know, buying  from a corner shop, but they try to make it not super fancy and not for people who are  like in a dress and a suit to enjoy, which is good.  Also some accessibility measures was implied, for example they have, they have some sign  language performance, so it's for people, you know, hearing impaired they have, they  can enjoy the performance even though they can't hear.  I've been to a production with one of the famous drama school in London and they have  two cars, one car is their student, very talented student and the other car which is performing  with them side by side, they are actors that you know, they use sign language, they may  be deaf, but they use sign language to perform, which I think is amazing, it's amazing production  because it's accessible for everybody and also sometimes there's like audio described  performance, including the one that I went to, for some stage direction they would describe  it, they would say it out because for people maybe they have, it's like impaired, they  could still enjoy the performance and also for example accessible toilet and all these  is for people who maybe have mobility problems.  Also and it's this one thing that a lot of places overlook, I think it's more popular  in movies, it's a relaxed performance so the light won't be totally there, people will  come to come in and out because maybe they are parents with kids so like they can bring  kids into the movie or bring the baby to movie, if the baby have needs they need to care for  the baby, they can go in and out and everybody go to that screening, they understand that  is for parents with the baby, which I think is a good thing, I mean like parents shouldn't  be pinned down to not enjoy this.  So okay I will spend the rest of the talk talking about what we could do in Python community,  can we learn something from the theater, how they are improved?  So in the blog post I mentioned in the beginning, I also mentioned that PyCon now is having a  great improvement because you can see that by doing like encouraging women to come to  the conference, they have talks by women starting from a very low percentage towards 40%, which  is really, really good and this is PyCon in the US so I think in Europe we are doing that  as well, which is very, very good, we need to carry on the momentum.  Also non-focused, you can see that they are both outside, they are an organization that  is like helping this, funding this PyData community, so you can see that they have also  measures, they have this DIC committee and they have all these mailing lists and discussion,  I joined the mailing list so that's why I receive information and also they are giving  diversity scholarship so for people from the minority group if they kind of have a struggling  to get a ticket and they could maybe apply for scholarships to attend the conferences.  Also Jungle Girl is amazing, we had the Jungle Girl day on Monday which has been like recurring  thing for Europe, Python now, every year they have this Jungle kind of like a beginner's  day to encourage women especially to start using Python and do something about Jungle,  to build blog posts using Jungle and it's translated to 12 languages, it's blooming and then also  my friend mentioned it's very empowering for women because Jungle Girl prefer, of course  like they also have male mentors but they prefer girls who have been, women who have  been to the, to be participate before come back to become the mentor because well it  shouldn't be always men teaching women, it should be, you know, we shouldn't care about  the genders like who have experienced, teach the people who don't have experience.  So in my opinion for conferences, I'm now involved in conferences a lot so I have a  lot of ideas, for example childcare facilities, I think Python UK is doing it, Pardator is  doing it, Pardator London is doing it, so yeah I think maybe Europe, Python maybe we  should consider as well because yeah because you can, it's like those theater thing, right,  like parents shouldn't be, you know, they shouldn't have these mind that oh I have to  care about my baby so I can't go to the conference.  Also diversity in topics, again you know, how we can make this call for proposal more  diverse is like maybe we encourage different topics so like the academic you know diversity,  you know, maybe people from a journalist background or a statistic background, they could also  talk about their work so we are not limited to one kind of profession, one domain or one  topic so people from a different background like a different you know professions, they  can also, if they work related to Python in some way then they could also present.  And also we should also put some emphasis on education, again you know we see from the  university example, maybe we have to inspire more young girls to be you know doing a more  you know computer science or engineering subject so yeah.  Also I think we should go beyond the jungle girl workshop, jungle girl workshop is amazing  as I said but I think it shouldn't be limited to one topic like jungle, one framework jungle,  maybe we should expand it to other topics because now Python is not just used for web  you know web development, it could be used in all different types of stuff so maybe because  I am data scientist, I am involved in data science and also Python is very popular in  data science now so maybe we should have something similar in data science to you know have a  workshop to encourage gender minority especially women to start their careers you know in data  science and also we should fear free gender barrier for example we have people who are  like you know we have trans code which in Palindinium they have the trans code workshop  that is for people identify as trans or you know it's more for people who have certain  you know identity they could you know feel that they are not alone, they are not minorities  they got support from the community as well.  Also this one I love it, non-gender labelled toilets, so my last year in Python UK and  they did a lot of work in this non-gender labelled toilets so the toilets is labelled  whether you have a urino or not so it doesn't matter what gender is like what facility you  are using and also the t-shirts it should like my friend just told me in the non-focus  guide if you are organised a part data conference your t-shirt should be not gender labelled  should be whether it's like a straight cut or it's fitted so it's also about your body  shape it's not about your gender which I think is amazing and this is mainly for conference  but also we have other problems in the community and we have to try to solve it for example  maybe we need more female leadership and contributors so for me my idea is like maybe  I organise some sprints meet up maybe I should have some you know again it's like jungle  girl you know some meet up that is mainly for encouraging people in a minority that  you are not alone you are not you got support from the community let's do it together so  again I'm started to get them you know work their way towards the leadership or become  a maintainer in the contributions also yeah in you know for young people and in academia  or even not just young people maybe for researchers we have to maybe do some outreach to tell them  Python is a good tool let's use Python instead of our so yeah I only got one minute left  so I don't think I could take a lot of questions now here but I have this survey which you  can give me some feedback I remember there's some like free text that you could type whatever  you like please be kind to me and please give me feedback because I hope this talk I could  keep giving it and maybe I can add more and more like for example some things like some  opinions from my friend or information from my friend which I can improve this presentation  so I could keep raising awareness and I hope we can work together and make the community  more diverse and better so thank you so much  yep so I think we can like if anyone has one question I think we can have a minute to  spare you can talk after that yeah you can grab me in the conference or yeah the surface  always there so please your feedback I value a lot so thank you so much
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