The Testing Show: Women In Tech

Panelists:

References:

• Women in Agile
• Anonyome Labs Returnship
• Faulty Generalization
• Shine Theory
• Microagression
• Microagressions as Mosquito Bites
• Big Five Personality Traits
• Meritocracy Doesn’t Exist and Believing it Does is Bad For You
• Julia Evans ZInes
• Let’s Pair by Marlena Compton
• SpeakEasy

Transcript:

Michael Larsen: Hello everybody and welcome to the testing show. This is August, 2019 and we have gathered together a dynamic panel today and we’re going to have a much broader conversation than we normally do, so to that end I would like to welcome our following guests. First off, y’all know who I am. I’m Michael Larsen and everybody knows Matt who is our normal emcee for these events. Say Hi Matt.

Matthew Heusser: Hello.

Michael Larsen: We’d also like to welcome Claire Moss.

Claire Moss: Hi, this is Claire Moss. I’m a senior software engineer and Agile technologist and I’m heavily involved in the technology community.

Michael Larsen: We’d also like to welcome Elle Gee.

Elle Gee: Hi, thanks for having me back on the podcast. It’s good to be here. I work with Qualitest group as VP of Delivery and I am very engaged in testing activities.

Michael Larsen: I also like to welcome back a long time regular for the testing show. Ms Jessica Ingrassellino.

Jessica I: Hey everybody. I’m Jess Ingrassellino, the director of Quality Engineering for the Salesforce nonprofit and education clouds.

Michael Larsen: We’d also like to welcome Rachel Kibler.

Rachel Kibler: , I’m Rachel. I’m so excited to be here. I’m a test lead for Anonyome Labs based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Michael Larsen: And we would also like to welcome Lihi Segev

Lihi Segev: Thanks. So I’m Lihi, VP of sales of Israel in Qualitest, also taking care of directly one of our strategic clients, Google global accounting and different sites.

Michael Larsen: And also one additional change that we’d like to mention is that for this show we have asked for Claire to be our MC. So Claire we’re going to hand it over to you.

Claire Moss: Thanks Michael. So it’s great to be here. Back on The Testing Show. it’s been a minute. This is a great group of people to discuss what can be a more sensitive question of women in technology. And I think some people ask why would you single out a particular group? And we on the panel have actually had a lot of different conversations about where is this panel trying to focus on women in technology. I think my personal experiences have been centered in the Agile community and there’s actually a separate half day of workshops and conversations before the big Agile conference that I usually go to called Women in Agile. And so I’ve seen more discussion of women as an underrepresented group and agile software development in that context. But I’m really interested in hearing from the other folks who haven’t been on the podcast before. So Lihi, I think this is my first time being on the podcast with you. I’d love to hear your perspective on women in Tech.

Lihi Segev: My perspective is there’s definitely a lot of work to do from what I see in the software position or if it’s in more management position, in each project that I’m working with, today’s certainty there are more men than women. The question is of course, if they had problem to go to those position or are they not accepted as other men? So I’m not sure about it. I think that the present is changing all the time, but in order to focus and to change it, it to become 50% in the hi-tech, which I don’t see any reason that. So we’re still under 30% the women. So, at least from my hand when I am looking for a person, of course it would be according to experience and performance, but sometimes you would like to change the demography in all kinds of groups because we have more men in this group.

Claire Moss: Yeah, that matches my experience. When I was in college, at least at the engineering school I went to, at Georgia Tech at the time, there were only 25% women. So I was accustomed to an environment where it was primarily male and I found that that actually matched the experience going into the technology teams that I worked with throughout my career. But I know that hasn’t been everyone’s experience.

Elle Gee: So I’ve had a mixed background in terms of the diversity of women in the technology environment. For myself throughout my career in Australia, I was very lucky to find myself on teams that were heavily inclusive of women. I’ve worked on at least a couple of test teams where we’ve had five or more people in the test team, all female. Coming to the U.S., I have been lucky enough to find myself working for a company that’s been incredibly inclusive of women in the industry. My own team in San Diego, myself who is the VP of delivery, so I have a very big influence on the technical aspects of our test teams. My next in command is another female who is driving technology solutions for our test teams and our projects and we have, I’m not going to say equal numbers, but we have a very good number of female participants in the testing teams and I’ve been lucky to find that it’s not about, they’re not being women who are promoted into these positions or capable of these positions. My experience is there’s not enough women applying for them.

Claire Moss: That totally fits with something that I experienced. I guess a few years ago I was looking at like a dream job description and thinking, oh man, I do not check all these boxes. And then I closed that tab and went to Twitter and sure enough, right there in my feed, someone had posted, women tend to only apply for jobs when they have completed the list of expectations. I just laughed at myself because I totally did that and I hadn’t realized that I was having this unrealistic expectation that I had to completely fulfill all of the requirements in order to be a good candidate. There was definitely an aspect of self-selection in our pipeline problem as people tend to call it. But I think there’s also that systematic bias that you mentioned, there aren’t as many women joining the field or continuing to pursue in the field. And so that tends to be attributed to many different sources and I think that gets us kind of in the right direction for where we want to go with this conversation of whether our experiences are generalized in our minds. So I have always assumed that there are few women in technology because that’s been the case with the teams that I’m on and I may be looking at confirmation bias and the experiences that other people have shared. So I’m pretty excited to hear that other people have had quite different experiences with more equally represented groups. So I’d like to invite Rachel to kind of jump in here and share a bit of your own experiences.

Rachel Kibler: So my current company and Anonyome, we have pretty much our entire leadership is male, but we had this program called the Returnship, where we actually go out and recruit people who’ve been out of the workforce for awhile. So in Utah, this is particularly prevalent among women who take time off to raise families. We put out a call for resumes and we make it as broad as we can to invite as many people to apply as we can. And we’ve ended up hiring a lot of them to start out in testing to get their skills back in their hands. We help build their resumes and we help teach them career skills and then they have something on their resume that’s more than just four years ago. It’s been a really successful program at our company and it’s gotten women back on their feet, which has just been amazing.

Claire Moss: Thanks so much for that. I’d love to hear Jessica, I think you have different experiences in trying to help to resolve these pipeline concerns.

Jessica I: Yeah. Something that I’ve learned from talking with a lot of people is that there’s a need for us who are in more privileged positions or in the majority positions to be very intentional about reaching out into those spaces. It’s one thing to say, well we welcome women or we welcome people with diverse perspectives, but it’s another thing to take that next step further and reach out to those different communities and say, “Hi, these are our jobs. These are the qualifications that are very important to us.” And highlighting those things through editing job descriptions to make sure that the communication is clear about what are the actual requirements versus, “Hey, this would be really nice to have and if you don’t have it, that’s okay. We can work with you to help you get it.” To be intentional about communications through multiple channels. So having blog posts that feature different team members and what they’ve done on the team, how they function, their background, so that way that there’s a place where people who are applying, you can go to see, okay, this is what your company is actually about. Then in interviews, really trying to dig into people’s experiences and treating it as almost a research project. Learning as much about them and the things that are different or don’t fit into the “Team Culture” are things that might actually be helpful to you or to the team. How can people with different perspectives provides strength by doing all these things? I’m really happy that I have a team that’s over half female and that’s over half people of color because I feel it’s a lot more representative of our culture and society, so if anybody is looking at that and thinking, “Oh, people aren’t applying”, maybe think about how you might reach out to invite those people to apply in ways that are more active.

Claire Moss: Thank you. That’s really helpful insight. It’s something we can act on to make those opportunities visible and help to find candidates who can improve our culture, not just fit in. I think that what we really want overall is to have a healthy culture of inclusion and diversity. The difference someone recently told me was “diversity is being invited to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance” Really actively pursuing, bringing people in and including them in the activity of the group. So I think these are very different experiences that we’ve had and they’re all valid, but it’s hard to relate to something that you’ve never heard of or never encountered before. So how do we get over that hump of the temptation to say, well, my experience is valid and probably explains the world around me?

Elle Gee: For me, I try not to let my experiences influence my hiring techniques in that particular direction. When I’m focusing on bringing people onto my team or setting up project teams for testing services, I’m looking at skills, I’m looking to make sure that we have diversity on our teams, yes , but ultimately it doesn’t matter. Your race, your color, your sex, it comes down to your ability to do the job and I find that when I am blind to certain aspects of that, I can set up a team. I’ve noticed that inherently that tends to be a team that is quite diverse. Skills are not just about do they have security skills, do they have whatever, but also the skills of communication, prioritization, all of these things come together.

Claire Moss: I think that’s really helpful insight that the communication, being able to prioritize our key skills that we don’t necessarily emphasize when we’re doing that encouragement of people to join as I think we have a lot of, if you have the right so-called technical skills, but the interpersonal skills aren’t brought to the fore as much. That is something that I heard tackled in this “Shine Theory”. I think it’s kind of a classic by now. The women in the Obama White House were highlighted in this article about in a meeting where the communication was lacking, that a woman had brought forward an idea and had not been recognized for bringing forward that idea by the other people in the room. Another woman noticed and shone a light on that contribution by not just repeating it, but also making sure it was attributed correctly to the original source, the other women in the room, so that they could reinforce each other’s contributions and bring more visibility to not only are women in the room, but they’re also key contributors.

Rachel Kibler: So at a company that I was at before, there had been a couple of times where I would say something and it would just kind of go by and then a couple minutes later a guy would say the same thing and get credit for the idea, and it was maddening. So I enlisted the women on my team to try the Shine Theory and it worked a little bit. They weren’t fully committed to it, but at my current company, I’ve made that a point of when someone on my team says something great or even just something to add to the conversation, I make sure that I say, “As Laura said”, and that’s been effective because then our voices don’t get drowned out. Just that early experience of having my ideas be credited to someone else made it more important for me personally.

Elle Gee: Yeah, that’s a great tip. It’s not something that I’ve done to make a point of calling out who on my team has come up with the idea, but I can totally see how by calling it out and saying, “hey, this was Rachel’s idea” or “let’s give credit to Jess for thinking and taking us in this direction”. It not only is an immediate recognition for the individual, but it is an empowerment that is an opportunity we can all take to empower all members of our team, but particularly give voice to some of the women who are not being heard and having their ideas stolen by the male voice that speaks up shortly thereafter and might be louder or more easily heard just as a tip in life. I think that’s a great tip.

Claire Moss: I love that. And I think one of those things that allies can do to help move the conversation forward.

Lihi Segev: I also agree. Yeah,.

Claire Moss: And I think that gives us a transition into this concept that not be familiar of microaggressions. Somebody recently shared a great video about how microaggressions are like mosquito bites and as a person from the south, I can tell you that I apparently am very tasty to mosquitoes. Mosquito bites are the bane of my existence. They don’t make me want to go outside during the summer. So I empathize deeply with the idea of every time someone does something that is slighting, commenting on your differences in a way that isn’t positive, even if it is positive language, if it’s calling it out in a way that is aggressive or rude without necessarily being the intention of being aggressive or rude, it feels like a mosquito bite and can cause a lot of irritation. And then as that irritation builds up over time, it becomes intolerable.

Elle Gee: As an Australian working on a U.S. team, I often joke that I keep time every day until somebody corrects me. I consider myself incredibly lucky if I get to 2:00 PM and nobody’s corrected me. And I mentioned it because I think it might seat in here because quite often I’m not corrected on anything meaningful. It’s not that I’m saying something incorrectly, it’s because I’m saying something using my background, which is Australian. So I might use terminology that’s a little bit more reflective of Australia than of the U.S. So I’ll get corrected with how it should be said in the U.S. and this happens to me every day. I love my team and I’ve learned to just deal with this and to laugh it off as just a part of the norm. But there is another day that goes by that at some point I go, “oh, it got to two o’clock today”. When you talk about microaggressions, in my case, these are mostly good hearted type comments. And I think too, I’ve let people think it’s okay to do that. So they continue it on and it’s somewhat of a game. But I can totally understand how this same thing to somebody else could almost be harassment. It could undermine what they’re doing.

Claire Moss: I think there’s a parallel here for the testing community with the testing versus checking terminology. There are some members of the community who are very aggressive about correcting the way people use words. As a person who’s worked with Agilists, who care a lot about testing, but who used this word totally differently. I hear testing and I think big umbrella of things to do, but not everyone hears it that way and so I’ve had people encourage me to correct the language of others. I don’t feel okay with taking people’s words from them. I think that devalues their contribution and I think it also makes it harder to get their insights.

Rachel Kibler: at a company that I was at before, I was working with a test automation script and figuring out the job through vim. It was unfamiliar, but I caught on , I took good notes and our automation guy was leaving and talk to the devs saying, “You’re going to need to help Rachel because vim is over her head”. And what he meant was not that, but it came off as very patronizing and I corrected him immediately saying, “it’s unfamiliar to me, but it’s not over my head. It’s something that I can figure out. Thank you very much”. I’m not sure if that’s a microaggression or it’s a straight up aggression, but it was pretty awful at the time.

Claire Moss: I think that’s a good point though. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the perception is of the action you’ve taken because it’s not only about what you do and your intention in what you do. It’s also about how the person who hears it is impacted so it’s not contained solely within you.

Lihi Segev: I totally relate to the testing and checking examples because by managing different projects I do find that sometimes the same approach can be said in different ways and no need to correct any manager that said it differently. But as my current position, more in the sales and sometimes to be involved in more strategic meetings that are exploring the numbers or the approaches for client and so on. So a lot of the time I can say something and then another person, exactly as you said, it was like a mosquito bite, We’ll say the same thing, but I want to, can I jump in into the conversation and say the same thing in another way? Sometimes people are used to hear what they’re used to hearing, and this is one of the concept we need to change, to say things a bit differently and really to understand what we have meant and not to interrupt and to understand what is the meaning and the target of what we are saying.

Claire Moss: That’s a really good point. So what is a microaggression? The technical definition that I have found, is it a statement action or incident that is indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination. The intention is good or trying to be good, but the action has an impact that was unintended. And I think that’s a really important example that you shared about being interrupted. I’m a person who gets really excited and I share my thoughts and sometimes I interrupt so I’m not as conscious of that. But I have heard from other women that they are consistently interrupted by male colleagues and find that exclusionary. So that’s where we get back to bringing people back in and inviting them back into the conversation.

Rachel Kibler: I totally see that too. Claire. Interruptions can be awful, but again, if you are accustomed to just speaking over other people, it becomes very easy to not see that.

Claire Moss: And I’ve been on teams where the team norm was, you just speak your mind, you’re very assertive. Someone put it strong ideas held loosely. The expectation was you’re going to engage with us in a semi-aggressive way because that’s how you express ideas here. That’s how you show passion is to be strong in the presentation of that and you don’t give in because it’s important. Then if you don’t have that habit of engaging or if you feel uncomfortable with this more aggressive style, then you are not a culture fit. And if you get upset about being interrupted, then this is a personal problem and not a team culture issue. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that.

Matthew Heusser: So the big five personality test is a broad assessment of human personality. You can Google it and one of the elements is agreeableness. Women tend to be more agreeable. Some other forum might be the place to talk about why that is or whether it’s nature or nurture, but I think when you have a group of men who in general tend to be more disagreeable. That’s just the statistics. They’re more comfortable with argument. They’re more comfortable with what Claire is talking about. So statistically when you put women in that environment, they’re not going to like it. They’re unlikely to speak up. They’re going to feel like they’re being stepped on, so they’re going to speak less and they’re going to feel excluded. That’s just natural. I would blame the men in that environment for a lack of awareness of diversity. It’s, “Oh, this is our cultural norm as a team, which by the way, it happens to only fit people that are almost exactly like us”. That’s very difficult. I wanted to mention the microaggression when I hear that term, correct me if you disagree. It’s the evil eye. It’s the ugly look. It’s the crossed arms, it’s the, “I can’t believe she’s still talking”, right? Not Literally said out loud. That would be an actual aggression, but all of the minor literal things to say, “I really wish you weren’t here”. It can be done entirely unintentionally. It can be very destructive to any sense of inclusion and team norming. It can also be done to control people, to get them to stop talking.

Claire Moss: I think there’s an element of emotional intelligence in that. The way that body language is intended is not necessarily the way it’s received and I think that kind of goes toward the assumption of women having a stronger emotional skillset or core. I think I get stereotypically pulled in this taking care of people direction, like I’m going to live tweet things, so I’m a really fast typist and I’m going to take notes in a meeting, but it’s not because I’m a care giver of my work team.

Rachel Kibler: For me it’s been the guys are really sensitive to how I’m feeling and it’s just weird. They seem to pay less attention to how each other are feeling, but if I’m in a bad mood or whatever, they check in with me a lot. I mean it’s great to have supportive colleagues, but it just feels like I’m being singled out because I may show more emotion than others. One funny story that I have about this, I was in a really terrible mood and… I’m just going to go here. My period had started and I was dealing with cramps. One of the guys asked me how I was feeling and I just kind of snapped and I stood up and said, “My periods started. I’m having a rough day. All I want to do is go home, sit on my couch and eat ice cream, so I’m going to go ahead and do that”. And there was just a moment of stunned silence as the seven men in the room just stared at me. And then one said, “You go girl!” And that was uplifting. Yeah. That hyper-focus on my emotions is just rough.

Claire Moss: Yeah.

Elle Gee: I wish I had your courage. I totally would go girl. Yeah, you go girl.

Claire Moss: I think that’s a really good point. That being treated exactly the same isn’t the goal because all people are different. Everybody’s body is different. All people have different preferences, but to be treated in a way that is a peer and is more equal. So if you’re not going to ask how is everyone feeling? And I do think that’s valuable actually. I love a team temperature checkin like how are things going? Why would you single out one person on a team to get that kind of feedback?

Elle Gee: Probably saying the same thing where it’s very normal to the guys in the office to note when the women are down a little bit and to one-on-one understand that that when one of their male coworkers is quiet or in the corner, they’re less likely to say something.

Claire Moss: I think you’re right there that it’s not bringing emotions to work seems to be a prompt or a rule in people’s heads that I should not feel things that’s at odds with “We are all humans”, whether we are engaging in logical activities or interpersonal activities or structured technological implementations, were always people. So feelings are normal to have. I can be frustrated with my code where I’ve been working on a validation of a form for three days and it’s not directed at any people around me. It’s directed at “why don’t we have a solution yet? This is okay”. This kind of goes back to how are we contributing to the work. It’s not just being robots who execute the task. There’s an element of meritocracy in that idea that we can just let all the ideas speak for themselves and there’s no interpersonal element in which thing is best. I think that’s a really difficult argument to make. I think you see this more often in things like open source or inner source as I’ve been getting to know these communities more. Those are remote communities, so these are primarily groups who are communicating through text or social media or occasional calls like this where you don’t have as much experience of individuals in person. And I think Michael has some good insight into that distributed team dynamic.

Michael Larsen: Well, at least I think I do. For the job that I’ve been working on now for the past seven years, I have worked almost predominantly and for the last two years exclusively with a distributed mode of operation and engagement. Because of that, I’m not in the same room. I’m frequently on calls. We frequently have chat sessions and everything else, so I don’t see body language. I don’t see people with their hands crossed or the potential microaggressions. In that sense, those don’t come across because we’re not there, so we do have to be very aware of what people are saying or what people aren’t saying and that actually is one of the things that I try to focus on with my team. The current team that I’m on right now and that has been stable for a number of years, our engineering team is dead on equal. There is the exact number of testers to developers and there is the exact number of men to women. It’s a 50/50 team across the board. I think it just happened. I don’t think it was something that was conscientiously put together. I think it’s just we happen to be the group that worked well together and we’ve stuck around and that’s helped us. That’s not to say that we haven’t had challenges in communications or that we haven’t sometimes felt like there’s been situations to where somebody has been excluded or hasn’t had a chance to contribute the same way. So I think shine is important and I think it’s something that we all need to actively use in our day to day efforts.

Claire Moss: That’s really good. It’s not just gender differences that separate us, but also you and I are being really pronouncedly extrovert.

Michael Larsen: True (laughter).

Claire Moss: tend to engage verbally and that’s one of the fun things about podcasting with you is that we just have this witty repartee that just keeps going. I like to think it’s witty, but I’ve found that I have introvert colleagues who prefer to have written communication and so there’s this helpful pause that you can have in engaging with someone who has a different preference where a good friend from the testing community said that it really helps her to have the moment to prepare her thoughts ahead of time. And sometimes you can do that in real time by producing sticky notes as a group. If you want to make a contribution, then you have to put it on in writing and then you can look at the affinity maps of all of these different ideas and if you are in that situation, you could invite someone to speak about it, who now may have had their introvert time to prepare and then could be very comfortable speaking to that point. I think we tend to interact in this community a lot through social media and electronic formats and as someone who shares a lot of tech information through social media, I try to make my visual content more. I’ve been actively seeking out images and links to be more representative of the community and in my own contributions to the community. As a blogger, I want to bring in different metaphors so that we can speak to a broader audience. I’ve written about my hobbies and nerdy interests all the way from Ash and the Evil Dead to getting a haircut to scrapbooking and I want to see that variety of metaphors. One of the things that I see coming up online that I think is really helpful in that direction is these hand drawn zines and sketch notes that people are creating. I really liked the work the Julie Evans and Marlena Compton have done with their scenes and making technology more accessible to more people. I think that is going in the right direction of helping to bring people in who might have that different preference and helping to improve that pipeline that we’ve talked about, getting that technology information more relatable to more people. Where do I want to go from here? Um…

Elle Gee: Takeaways. What are your takeaways from this?

Claire Moss: Good idea, Jess. I’d love to hear your takeaways from this conversation.

Jessica I: I think there are a few. One, the work never stops. Getting to halfway, 50 50 representation, equal, like what is equal? What does that even mean? So I do feel that the work never stops and we always need to be vigilant and paying attention, especially for any of us who are in positions where we can influence what’s happening. Another actionable takeaway is when we’re in a situation and we’re not sure what’s happening and I try to do this myself as much as I can, instead of focusing on just my own point of view, I try to ask myself, what am I not seeing? What might I not be understanding about this? If I imagine that this person who I am talking with or who maybe I’m having difficulty understanding, how is it that I might not be understanding this person and then finding the resources if I don’t feel courageous enough to have a conversation, get resources, and if I do feel courageous enough to start a conversation, say, “hey, I know that this is an uncomfortable conversation for me to have and I have some questions. Is this something that you might be willing to talk about? It’s okay to say no. I totally understand”. I’ve actually learned a lot by starting difficult conversations and just asking myself what I don’t know.

Claire Moss: Thank you. I think Lihi had some insights to share as well,

Lihi Segev: So I was thinking of two things from our conversation. What I like is a lot of the question marks that we have from all sides. We’re saying something and then we’re doubting it, but in a good way, like Jess said, how can we progress it? What can we do differently? So this is a really good question. Not to stick to what we have currently, but all the time thinking forward and ask yourself question like if someone is interrupting you, was it the right thing for him to do? Am I supposed to say something? Or if someone was taking credit of others, all the time asking questions, I think it’s important. And there was something else I was thinking about, you have the sentence right of “if you are in Rome, you act like in Rome”. I do feel that sometimes you need to be different than what you’re used to in order to make yourself present and it’s fine. But on the other hand, not to let other, to take advantage of you being a bit less aggressive, try to be more present in each way you can. So again, the differences between people doesn’t matter woman, man or other diversity will be less impact.

Claire Moss: Thank you so much. Rachel. I’d love to invite you to share your thoughts.

Rachel Kibler: I think the biggest thing that I take away from this, just hearing the different experiences, sometimes it can be so easy to get wrapped up in my experience and assuming that what I’ve experienced is generally what women everywhere experience, and hearing Elle’s stories and Jess’ stories about how they’ve made this change and actually contributed to the advancement of women in tech. That’s amazing. I really enjoyed that.

Claire Moss: I think that’s a great transition to bring in Elle.

Elle Gee: like Rachel, coming out of this podcast, it’s given me an opportunity to reflect that my experiences are very different to the experiences of other people on this call and in the industry and it’s given me an opportunity to think about how maybe I have influenced that. How the people around me have influenced the directions that the teams I’ve worked on and it’s really inspired me to want to keep looking at our recruitment processes and our talent acquisition to make sure that we stay focused on aptitude but keep in the back of my mind that diversity, I don’t want it to shift and shape everything that we do, but I do want it to influence and keep influencing so that I could do my part to encourage women in tech because I know the value they bring. I’m so proud to have worked on a number of teams that have been incredibly inclusive both through cultural diversity and through making sure that there is a good combination of men and women on the teams. I personally would like to thank everybody for giving me this opportunity to reflect today.

Claire Moss: Thank you for that. For me, a takeaway is certainly that there are technology teams that are more equally balanced among the genders. And I find that to be quite astonishing since my experience hasn’t shown that. So I am happy to know that our industry is growing in a way that is more diverse and inclusive. And I really enjoyed getting to know new people. I’m a sucker for that. So I hope that we can all keep in touch online and I’d love to know what’s the best way to do that for everyone. Should we go in the same order? Go for it.

Jessica I: Jess underscore ingrass on Twitter.

Jessica I: I’m Rachel joy pretty much everywhere. R A C H e l. J o. I like an Igloo on Twitter, linkedin. And my website is Rachel joy.com.

Claire Moss: Lihi?

Lihi Segev: So Twitter is not that strong a site in Israel. I think. Linkedin definitely. So Lihi Segev on LinkedIn. I also, I was thinking maybe if we can have kind of a, I dunno, a group that even other people can join and you know, just to highlight some terms, something important that happened, like even a woman that had a new role or something that was really exciting in one of your team to establish or something. But this is something like the kind of a blog, right? Maybe in Qualitest channels.

Elle Gee: This is Ellie. I can be found on linkedin with my name Elle Gee, that’s “g e e” for anyone who is wondering if there’s more to it. Interestingly enough, I’m not really on Twitter. I do however, have the good old Pinterest and Instagram accounts, but I don’t know if we want to go into that whole scrapbooking side on the women in tech conversation. But.

Claire Moss: I’m here for it. I’m here for the scrap.

Elle Gee: Okay.

Claire Moss: Claire, I’m going to be looking you up. Yes. Well you can find me online at “aclairefication”, which is cute because it’s Claire, c, l a, I. R. E I’m the all inclusive Claire and have those three vowels. So that’s the easiest way to find me. You can often find me on Twitter, although I have not been live tweeting my usual events this fall. But I do look forward to following up on this conversation there and I neglected to get parting thoughts from Michael. So you are my partner in crime on these podcasts a lot of times. So [inaudible] what was this conversation? What did it bring up for you?

Michael Larsen: Well, the nice thing is is that I want to say thank you to Claire because usually I’m the one that stage manages and drives a lot of the conversations for these shows and it was nice to be able to just step back and listen and be able to hear some different perspectives. Too often, and I’m guilty of this as well, we tend to think that *our* experience is *the* experience and if we’re seeing things that are great and awesome, we don’t quite understand that others aren’t. Or if we do, we think, well they’re just backwards and it’s getting better. It’s taken me time to realize that no, that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve been lucky in some of the work environments that I’ve been in. I enjoy the opportunities to have diverse ranges of opinions. I like to experience things from different perspectives where I can, and so I actively seek environments that let me do that. Again, that’s also part of where I have to be careful to not think that just because I do that that everybody else is going to, and even that because I want to do that, that I’m necessarily doing a really good job at it. I appreciate everybody’s comments today because you’ve given me a lot to think about and I greatly appreciate that. For those who do want to get involved, we say this in the outro for the show. We do have a slack channel. We want to encourage people to participate. If you liked things about this particular episode or any episode and you want to share your opinions about them, we’d like to be able to highlight that and talk about those and in addition to that, also be able to encourage other topics you’d like to hear. So with that, I’m going to say thank you so much to everybody for participating today, and hey, we will see you next month for the next episode of the testing show. Thanks very much everybody.

Rachel Kibler: Thank you.

Elle Gee: Bye Bye.

Claire Moss: Bye everyone.

Lihi Segev: Thank you. Yeah.