Episode transcript

Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a brand new episode of the front end happier podcast. In today's episode, we are excited to have Karen Catlin joining us to talk with us about allyship. And how we can show up as better allies for our teams, colleagues, whatever it may be. I've personally been a huge fan of Karen's work. So I'm so excited to have her on. In past episodes, you've probably heard me pick some of her work in the better allies newsletter, or her book on better allies. So with that being said, Karen, can you give us a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your favorite Happy Hour beverages?

Karen Catlin
Sure. Well, it's pleasure to be joining all of you today. So thank you for having me on this show. I'm Karen Catlin, and I am an advocate for inclusive workplaces. And the way I got to this work, sort of funny, it just didn't just happen overnight. But it started with a 25 year career working in tech. And so I used to write code for a living. And let me tell you, I started well, before anyone differentiated writing code in terms of front end or back end or full stack those terms were not in use back when I started my career. But I worked in tech 25 years, most recently, I was a vice president of engineering at Adobe. And during that time, I noticed a decline happening in gender diversity in the industry. People who weren't around back then may not know this, but there used to be a lot more women getting computer science degrees, and frankly, sitting side by side with me in conference rooms, as well as in the cubes that we all resided in, and to change over time. So while I was at Adobe, I started our women's employee resource group, I started mentoring a lot of women, and looking out for just gender diversity and representation in meetings and on stage and that type of thing. And I have to tell you, over over time, I loved doing that work so much, and the VP of engineering work not so much that I decided I wanted to change what I was doing professionally. And so I pivoted, I pivoted my own career to leave behind making software products and move to helping women who were in the industry. So I started a leadership coaching practice, mostly for women who work in tech. Now, I've soon realized though, I had a big problem with my leadership coaching practice for women in tech. And it's not with my clients. They're amazing. They were growing, they were learning they were no quote unquote, leaning in. But they were all working for tech companies that just the closer you got to the C suite to the CEO, the mailer, and paler it got, and with all due respect to anyone who's listening, who's male and or pale, I am pale myself, I'm white. That's just what the demographics were, you know, it's just like, that's, that's, um, it's just the demographic. So I'm not here to shame and blame anyone just pointing out the facts. So that's when I started to realize that I wanted to help make all of tech more inclusive. And of course, the first thing you do when you have a big mission like that, if you want to change the world, the first thing you do is you start a Twitter handle, right, so I started the Twitter handle at better allies and spec in 2014. So it goes back a while. And my goal with Twitter was to share simple everyday actions anyone could take to be more inclusive just in their daily work. So what were some things that you could do well look out for interruptions that happen in the meetings we attend, and redirect the conversation back to the person who was interrupted with a simple Hey, I I'd like to hear surely finish what she was saying something like that. So anyway, I'm tweeting or tweeting all anonymous, by the way. And many people thought it was a man behind this Twitter handle, I have to tell you, because I was first person acting as though I was you know, taking these actions, and most people thought it was a man. Um, at any rate, I started to get anonymous requests, or excuse me request to this anonymous twitter handle just asking like, Hey, does anyone from the better allies initiative do any public speaking? And I would get that message. And I'd be like, the initiative like it's just me tweeting a couple of times a day. And but I wanted to share more and speak more about this. And so I would say, Well, yes, one of our contributors does some public speaking. Sorry, a little white lie there. And then I go over to my personal Twitter account and respond and say, Hey, I'm here. You're looking for a speaker. I contribute to better allies. What do you have in mind? So I started speaking, and every time I gave a talk someone in the audience would ask, Hey, Karen, do you have a book? Because we want more of this, this talk wasn't quite enough. And for a few years, I kept saying, Well, no, I don't have a book, sorry, No book, no book. And I did finally write my book. And it's also called better allies. And earlier this year, in January 2021, I did publish a second edition of the book. So I revised it fully revised it based on everything I learned in those two years. Anyway, and then just one other thing I'll mention about my work before I will mention my happy hour beverage is that my focus initially was gender. As a woman who was working in tech. That, of course, is my lens that I was approaching the work from, but I quickly expanded to be thinking about how to be inclusive of anyone from an underrepresented group, gender, of course, but also race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and identity, abilities, ages and so forth. So I do my best to think about inclusion with all of those intersection intersectional and demographics. And then my happy hour beverage, because I want to just say, I believe you can have a happy hour with a non alcoholic beverage. So I have a cup of mint tea here, and it's just delicious.

Ryan Burgess
Right on, I'm so happy to that you said the like, non alcoholic beverage too, because I think that that's something even as we've been doing this for five years, and it's something that I've been thinking about over time, like I love the whole point of this podcast was like, over drinks or or, you know, beverages, whatever it is, is we've had these great conversations. But I've even realized, like, Wow, is that the most inclusive thing? If it's like alcoholic related, it's like no, but it's beverages of choice. And so yes, I love that you even called that out because that's even something that I've reflected on. All right, well, let's also give quick introductions of today's panelists. Stacy want to start it off?

Stacy London
Sure. I'm Stacy London. I'm a senior front end engineer at Atlassian and Trello.

Shirley Wu
I'm Shirley Woo, I am a data visualization designer and developer.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. In each episode, the front end happier podcast, we'd like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, we'll all take a drink of our beverage of choice. And what do we decide today's keyword is?

All
Action

Ryan Burgess
All right, so if we say the word action, which I'm pretty sure we will be saying in this episode, we've all take a drink? Well, let's jump right in. I think to start with, I'm pretty sure some I'm sure our audience is aware of allyship. But, you know, I think it means a lot of different things to different people or even in different contexts. So what does allyship mean to each of you?

Stacy London
That's a big question, I think, for me, it means showing up and being there for four. So even though I'm part of an underrepresented group, in tech, being a woman, there are also people that there's you know, Karen mentioned the intersectionality of things, there's but there's people that are even less represented. And it's, I think, to make sure that I show up for people, if I hear someone say something that's, you know, offensive or not inclusive, that, that I say something that I do the work for them, because I'm even more represented than that. That other group, that's kind of that's kind of how I think about it.

Shirley Wu
So I'm mostly here to learn today. I really appreciated what Karen was saying about in a conversation when someone is interrupted, and that we bring the conversation back to that person because I, I noticed that that's something I tend to like to do in normal conversation with friends. And I guess, even though I haven't thought too much about ally ship, and what that means for me, and that's why I'm here, like trying to learn in this episode. But it kind of reminds me of something that I really like to do in my day to day interactions with friends, or if I'm trying to, like bring a new friend into a friend group. Like I really want to make sure that they're incorporated well into the friend group that they don't feel left out that they feel comfortable. And I would imagine that that's perhaps something similar to what Karen was describing. Well put Shirley, and I love that even said learning because it's constantly learning. Like, it's like this, this journey where you could be like, I just learned what allyship is, and I'm gonna start diving in now or it's I've been doing this for years, and I'm still learning. It's like, there's all these different spectrums of it. So I love that you shared that.

Karen Catlin
Oh, and I love the answers. It is about taking action.

All
Oh, cheers. Cheers. Cheers

Karen Catlin
Taking action when you see non inclusive behavior. It also means paying more attention to when non inclusive behavior happens. It also means understanding how you might experience the workplace differently than people from under other underrepresented groups or from underrepresented groups that will impact how they're navigating the day to day work in a different way than you are and that might, by opening your eyes see help you see how you can be supportive. You can sponsor people you can open your doors, you can just open opportunities to talk in a meeting, for example, all sorts of different things. I'll also say that I, in my book, I talk about this, there are one off actions we can take. And we should take in the moment, like if we see someone with non inclusive, you know, language that we actually, you know, call them out and pointed out or whatever. But we should also look for systemic change that we can have in the workplace. And in some ways, this is, you know, if you want to think about it's like, being a knight in shining armor, I'm going to save the the one damsel in distress in this moment, I'm going to save that one person who was just interrupted. I don't want you to not do that, because I think it's important, but you should do the work to not just save the one Damsel, but to save, basically, and help anyone who might be impacted. So an example of like, let's look at language, maybe you're noticing that there are people who are using the industry standard terms of master slave configurations of databases, or server rooms or something like that. And you could call the one person on it like, Hey, can we choose a different kind of language here? Yet to have more systemic changes, maybe you install a Slack bot that will actually catch that every time it's used, so that everyone across the organization is reminded to use more inclusive language?

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I love that. That's so good. Another one I was gonna add to that I kind of like my thinking around it, too, is mainly because, you know, being a white man in tech, I, I'm probably in the more majority of people in tech. And so I always think about it is, you know, how can I show up as an ally, it's, you know, standing beside or behind a group as a friend, as an advocate, as a supporter, champion, mentor, whatever that is, but the keywords there being beside or behind, you know, it's not like showing up in front of them to almost maybe care into that your point of being that like Knight shielding is there as your more of a support, and that, to me, has always kind of really stuck out for me as an allyship aspect.

Karen Catlin
I have a friend Cory ponder who works in tech, and also does diversity and inclusion speaking. And he has a wonderful article where he calls ally ship, the, the sidekick, basically, you know, it's you serve as a sidekick to the hero and the hero is the person who you are trying to make sure that they can be thriving, be part of that friend group be part of feel like they're included in the meeting culture, the corporate culture, whatever is going on.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, that was better said I like that my response.

Karen Catlin
Your response was great. And I just want to give it another another term.

Ryan Burgess
Love it. It's good. It's great.

Shirley Wu
I appreciate both of what you said, Say cake standing beside and actually reminds me of this one time. And I think this goes back to what Stacey was saying about like, I am a woman of color in tech. But like Stacy was saying there are some things that I have more of a benefit for. And it reminds me of the time that I used to work out a full time job, which is now years ago, but I had a co worker, a colleague, and she had grown up in China. And she had come here for her PhD. And so her English wasn't as fluent as mine. And so I remember that, for the longest time I am meetings, like when she was struggling to express herself, I would try to help her, I would try to speak for her. I didn't realize until much later on, that what I thought was me helping her was actually damaging to her. And it wasn't until like she had received a feedback from our VP. And she told me that and I was like, Oh, I didn't realize because in me trying to speak for her, I was robbing her of the chances of improving on her own self expression in English. So that's like a lesson that has really stuck in my mind to this day. And I really appreciate both of your stories about being a psychic or standing behind instead of like kind of taking I was essentially taking the spotlight from her in what I thought was trying to help her.

Karen Catlin
Yeah, thank you for sharing that surely? Um, oh, yes. Here's the thing. I think many of us who are on this journey to be better allies, we do make mistakes along the way. And I think we should get comfortable acknowledging that as part of being an ally is is making these mistakes, learning from them, and if it is appropriate sharing with others so that we can all learn together. So thank you for doing that.

Shirley Wu
Thank you.

Ryan Burgess
I love that aspect of like you we're going to make mistakes. I think it's like with being an ally as you're doing something that's a little more uncomfortable. There's there's not a right answer either. I think that's another thing is there's not one way to be an ally and show up well, and even with your best intentions, you can make mistakes. And I think it's just like how do you own them and learn from them. I love that. Karen, you said that it's like that's what you're doing is learning from them. And Shirley I've made similar mistakes. I think when I think of that, that Karen mentioned being a knight is there's often times where I thought about it as like, Oh, I'm helping this person. And it probably was. But it wasn't necessarily being an ally to improve more like, if it was someone's salary, you know, I do hiring at Netflix and say you're adjusting a woman salary, who's typically underpaid. We all know that. And so if it's one woman that is underpaid, and you're just in salary, great, that feels great. And we've made we've made a difference well done. But really, why was she underpaid? And like, what's the bigger problem? And how do we, how do we stop that from happening in the future? And and I think that that's like a bit of the difference. There are two is where I thought I was, I wasn't doing the wrong thing. But it's like, Wait, could I take a step back and maybe do something bigger and more broader and thinking about a problem in that way. And that that's something that it took me a while to learn that one too.

Shirley Wu
And I think adding on to that I really appreciated Karen's comments about trying to approach it from a systemic perspective, which I think is what Ryan also just touched on. Because I think as one individual, one of the, one of the big reasons why I left my full time job and went into freelancing and working for myself was because I felt kind of helpless. In corporations, I felt like there was a certain amount of support, but not not enough to make me feel comfortable. And, and I think one of the things that I've always felt kind of helpless in is, as an individual, I can control my own actions, but I don't know, like, when we talk about systemic issues, it just feels so huge, that I feel so helpless, and I don't know where to start. And so I really appreciated what Karen, like you were suggesting of like making a Slack bot, like, that's something I can do. And I really, and I would be curious as to like, if there is a lot more of these, you know, challenging the system, but from a at a scale that like we as individuals can do, because that feels really empowering. And I think that like it reminds me of when I learned about how GitHub was changing their main branch from master to mean, and I and at first, I didn't really understand the implications of that. And then when I started to understand that, that that was really cool. And I don't know how that came about, I heard that it was a giant effort. But those kinds of actions, it feels like it could be anyone suggesting and I think that's really empowering.

Karen Catlin
Yes, yeah. So I want to share my most favorite like Soto so simple, everyone can do. Everyone can take action, action.

All
Cheers.

Karen Catlin
Just recently, someone told me about this, and I get emails from people now. It's just so lovely. People send me ideas for my newsletter. But someone told me about name, drop IO. And name drop. Io is a super simple service where you can go and record how to pronounce your name. And you then it'll link, the personalized link to your recording. And it's usually like four seconds long, it's real short. And you can put that link in like your email signature, or somewhere else like on social media. And what I've done like I think my name is pretty easy to pronounce, but people do mispronounce it a lot. So anyway, it's now there. It's also like on my speaker brochures so that people can just click on that and learn how to pronounce my name. But it also is normalizing it for people who maybe are from a different culture living here in the States, and everyone says their name incorrectly because we were not familiar with the pronunciation of the name. So I think it's inclusive to try to learn how to say someone's name. But I must admit, when I'm meeting someone new, and the name is unfamiliar, I don't always hear it the first time I've heard a few times, even if I'm taking notes on how to pronounce it, which I do, because I want to be inclusive. It's still it's something I I work on, but it's hard for me. And if I had a link to everybody's recording of how to pronounce their name in their own voice, it would really help me then be more inclusive. So that's another thing surely everyone, we all can do that.

Ryan Burgess
Even interviewing people on a podcast like I do not want to mess up someone's name. People even mess up mine, which is like not that hard either. But I get it often, my last name will get messed up. And it's fine. It's not the end of the world. But you never want to be that one that messes up on it. Karen another one that I noticed was LinkedIn doing that where you can actually record your saying on LinkedIn like of how you pronounce your name, I love it. I was like, that is the greatest feature. So that even if I'm talking to a candidate who might be a potential coming to work at Netflix, it's like I can hear how to actually pronounce their name. That's amazing.

Shirley Wu
I was gonna say This actually reminds me of I've been seeing this on Twitter and it actually really warms my heart which is all of the people in my like that I follow on Twitter that are Chinese. And I don't know if you've like if anybody else has noticed, butpeople have started to put their Chinese name alongside their like English name in actual Chinese characters. And this is because of a lot of the recent anti Asian hate crimes that have been happening. And I think it's the, like, as far as I know, cuz I don't know who started it, but it seems like kind of like the Chinese community on Twitter trying to band together to have like, I'm not sure if this was on their ally ship or like to just kind of have like a sense of community and the sense of like, holding each other up. And it just warms my heart to be able to like, read, like my friends, my Twitter, friends, like Chinese names, it just makes me feel like I'm like one step closer to them. And I don't know if it's exactly the same thing. But that's what it reminds me of?

Karen Catlin
Well, I think that's important. And unfortunately, in workplaces, we probably have all seen this where someone with, let's say, a Chinese name joins the team. And they're like, I don't I can't see your name. Can I just call you John, like, and we give people nicknames. It's fine. If someone wants to identify a Western or Anglo name for themselves, that they want people to use for other people to just say, like, yeah, I want to call you, John, or whatever it was, I don't think that's very inclusive. And we can take the step to learn to pronounce someone's name, or celebrate the fact that they have a Chinese name, even like, I can't read Chinese characters, but I can appreciate that. That's what that's all about.

Stacy London
Sometimes I like if I meet a new person who's like, their name is is somewhat complicated to pronounce, and I'm learning how to do it. And they say, Oh, just just say this and be like, I push them on the back. So I'm like, You're just saying that because you're trying to like, you're getting annoyed that people are constantly mispronouncing your name? And like, no, I really want to try and I really want to do it well, so please, please tell me, how do you actually want someone to pronounce your name? And I will do I will do that work and like, kind of push it because it's like, all these other people have been, you know, terrible about it, like you've given in in some way or whatever. And that's not fair. That's not That's not cool.

Ryan Burgess
So I think this brings up I think, Karen, you already kind of had us down this road, which I love is like, how can we be allies? Like how do we show up as an ally for others? Like I said, there's so many different ways. And I think there's a lot of great ideas out there. I'd love to open it up to all of you to have that part of the conversation.

Karen Catlin
We could talk about maybe some different topics, so to speak, you know, we could talk about more things that happen in meetings. That's not that aren't inclusive behavior. We could do that or events, we could talk about the hiring process. I don't know, where do you want to take this?

Ryan Burgess
All of the above? I mean, I think it's like, I mean, the hiring aspect is always one I think that can be done. There's so many things that are broken in the interview process, or even just from that single email to ask someone if they want to come work for you, or reviewing resumes. There's all this bias that comes into that. But I also think about it is like, some of the action items, as us as engineers can be doing today is literally just making it more inclusive for ourselves and our team. How can we be better allies for in those meetings? I think a meetings is a great one, especially in this virtual world. Some some things, there's been benefits were like, we get the virtual hand raised, like I love that, like where it's actually making it easier to be like, Oh, surely I saw your hand there. You know, love to hear you speak. So there has been some benefits to it. But it has also been difficult. So I think let's start in the meeting area. I think that's something that we're all very much familiar with. And I think there's a lot of little things that go a long way.

Karen Catlin
I will ask all of you. Have you seen non inclusive behavior in virtual meetings? Like, what's an example of that?

Ryan Burgess
I mean, talking over each other, it does happen, sometimes not even on purpose. And we'll even have seen this in our podcast recording, because we're now doing this virtually, is there's a little bit of a leg delay, right. And so you do accidentally speak over someone. And so just being aware of that, and maybe maybe stopping or or bringing it back. Hey, Stacey, I saw that you were about to speak. Did you have something else to add? That happens often? I'm sure there's many other things that people are noticing in virtual meetings,

Stacy London
Even paying attention to the mic, the muting, you'll see some maybe unmute, they may not even make a facial expression, but they unmute and you're like, I think they were gonna say something and thentrying to be like, Hey, I saw you unmuted. Did you have a thought?

Karen Catlin
Yeah. Love that. So with interruptions, like in speaking over people, it's going to happen? Absolutely. Because of the lag. And some people are just, you know, fast talkers. And they just heard, you know, very enthusiastic about any subject. And so what is what I love about virtual meetings is we're all online, which means we can direct message someone very easily whether that's through a Slack message, or through the chat in zoom or something like that. But we can direct message someone and say, Hey, I don't know if you realize this, but you're talking a lot. And I think that we both maybe could listen more, talk less, just a little nudge in the right direction there. So a nice way to do it no shaming and blaming, it's not public humiliation or anything, but just like, hey, let's let's listen more than the rest of the meeting. Another thing that's more inclusive is we can, if we want to hear from someone, we can direct message them ahead of time and say, you know, when this person wraps up speaking, I would love to hear about the data you told me about last week, and give them a little bit of a heads up that you are going to be calling on them, which is more inclusive, because many people early in their career or introverts just need some time to get ready to actually speak. So we can again, use that tool, the fact that we are all virtual to our benefit. And another thing that I love about the virtual meeting is our names are present, our names are right with our faces. And so you probably heard the classic thing of the only two black people on a team get confused or that only two Asian guys get confused. People call him the wrong thing. And so this actually is this reminder constantly that this is their name, and we should be using it and don't get them mixed up with the other person is who is from their demographic. I put my pronouns in my profile name to just as a reminder that if you want to refer to me by she heard that's my go by. And I know I've been in zooms where there are people who go by evey. And to have it right there is such a good reminder for me who otherwise I might misgendered them just based on their appearance and how I think that they are gendered, which isn't always right. So just a couple of like benefits to how we can navigate all of this. Yeah. Oh, one other benefit, because so many of our meetings are recorded. Now. Someone I just heard about this last night. If you have one of those chronic interrupters, you could actually say, hey, let's and maybe for the whole team, let's review one of our most recent recordings, and just we'll all talk you know, to kind of do a retro just on the meeting and point out anything you're noticing it's working really well or needs to improve next time. And the interrupters I hear I want to go and do this with a recording some time. But the interrupters, it's kind of obvious once you're watching the recording. And so it's a great way to not just focus on them. Maybe there are other behaviors that will surface but because we have recordings of so many of our meetings, we can leverage them that way.

Stacy London
I love that what a great idea.

Ryan Burgess
It's a play by play, let's go back and review that meeting. How did it go? One thing I found useful too is like in those situations, virtual or not, if someone is being interrupted in you're noticing it so say I'm constantly interrupting. Surely Stacy could go like Hey, Ryan, can you stop for a sec? I just wanted to hear surely how to point it's not rude to anyone and it's not even really putting surely too much on the spot. But it's like just it's a nudge to me to to say like hey Ryan Shut up. Like we you're talking lots and I think there's little ways in which you can do that as an ally to is just watching for that and just calling attention to it.

Karen Catlin
So one thing I've heard that people say is not getting better in the virtual environment is meeting housework, what comes to mind when I say meeting housework?

All
Note taking!

Ryan Burgess
And guess who ends up always being the one taking the notes? Women.

Karen Catlin
Yes. And women of color. They based on studies, women of color are asked to do even more than their white counterparts. So notetaking is a great one whose pay we're missing these three people who can go ping them, you know, send them a message. That's, that's meeting housework. Another one will be, hey, we are having these virtual happy hours every Friday, you can plan the next one another kind of meeting housework, these things like they have to happen for the health of an organization and so forth. But if they aren't actually part of your job description, they become this housework tasks that you are then doing in service of everyone else, and you become subservient to your peers. So you're seeing a different light at times when you're doing this, this kind of work. It's also busy work, busy work that keeps you from participating maybe in the meeting, to you know, making the killer points you wanted to make and so forth. And it also is potentially if it's other kind of busy work, like planning the happy hour, then we just take you half an hour to figure out some fun virtual game, but that's half an hour you're not working on something new are going to be evaluated on on that next quarterly basis. Right. So we want to look out for this meeting house work and make sure we're disrupting it and setting up like rotations or sharing the load especially if we are a white man we can offer to do our fair share and those types of tasks.

Stacy London
There's a great article glue. I'm forgetting right now who wrote that but it was a wonder is so wonderful, exactly the points that you were just saying like they're not the things that you get promoted for but they are so essential for the team to be healthy.feel cohesive, but yet are not recognized.

Karen Catlin
Yep. So tell you a quick story or side note here. I was doing a consulting job a few years ago for a tech company in Silicon Valley. And I was attending a meeting that was a standing meeting, it was going on monthly, and they needed someone to take the notes. And so they had set up a rotation ahead of time, like once every month, everyone took a turn, basically. And so the meeting I was attending, the organizer opened her laptop and said, let me see whose turn it is to take the notes. So she looked through her list. And she announced, Brian, it's your turn. Now, Brian was the only man on this. This working group was committee. And then Brian said, I can't make this up. Brian said, you know, I'm not that good at taking notes. I think someone else should do it. And yeah, I was word I couldn't believe it was happening. Now. I think all of us have those days where we get home at the end of the day, May we're working out cooking, falling asleep at night. And we're replaying the day and thinking about hot fight only had said this when that happened. You know, we think of the perfect thing to say later. Well, good news, my friends. In that moment, when Brian said he wasn't good at taking minutes and someone else should do it. I thought of the best thing to say right then in there. And I said, Hey, Brian, practice makes perfect. And this is the perfect place to practice. Because there was no way I was letting him get out of his doing. Housework.

Shirley Wu
Oh, my God, yes.

Karen Catlin
And the notes, he was fine. Everything worked out. So we if we set up rotation, let's hold people accountable for actually doing their job. They're right.

Ryan Burgess
I love that in the moment thinking too, that was on point. So good. And it held someone accountable, which is great. Karen, I also talk a lot about in the book, or even it shows up in the newsletter privilege. And privilege is something that we all have some form of privilege and can be using and understanding that privilege and what that is, how its benefited us and how we can maybe leverage it to be an ally to and I think that that could be something worthwhile sharing. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Karen Catlin
Yeah, sure. Privilege. So in my book, I actually call it the P word. Because I think a lot of people don't actually like to talk about privilege. And at the heart of it privilege is it's just an unearned benefit. It's an advantage we have because of either our gender, or race or something else in social standing, we're part of a group, we get some advantage that we haven't had to do anything to do to get yet. Most of us when our privilege is pointed out, we can easily get defensive, we can get defensive because it feels like someone's calling me lazy, like I've never had to work hard, you know, day to day of my life to get where I am, or I've had a big trust funds supporting me. So I have been able to take certain risks, or whatever it is, but we get a little defensive because we're feeling like someone's calling us like, you know, a lazy, whatever. But that's not what's going on. It really is just like our society lets you because of certain membership and certain social standings and social groups, you get certain affordances and advantages. So in my book, as I was writing it, I curated a list of 50 ways you might have more privileged in the workplace than some of your coworkers, top of the list of the 50 is definitely you are white, and you are male. I mean, those are the top two. But then it gets more nuanced. It gets nuanced in terms of, well, if you're working in the United States, you either have citizenship, or or you were born here, but you have citizenship. Now, why is that a privilege? Well, if you don't have citizenship and you're on a visa, that means that you are tied to your employer to stay in this country. And so you're not going to be taking risks with your career, you are going to look for a safe spot to correct yourself, do good work, but you want to stay somewhere safe, so that you get this visa sponsorship that will lead to you being a citizen. And so that's privileged if you don't have to worry about navigating that. Another sense of privileges, you actually have enough money in the bank that you can say yes to the fun activities that aren't necessarily company sanctioned, but your team is doing, you know, pre COVID It might be simply going out for drinks after work or let's all go to whatever sporting event, you know, next month together and get tickets and you know, let's have some fun or let's go whitewater rafting, you know, next weekend, which all cost money, right? And so if you're someone who is living paycheck to paycheck, or perhaps supporting a large family or a sibling or parents, you might not be able to do all those things on so again, privilege means you have money to be spending on doing this fun activities with team members, and so forth. I don't want to put anyone on the spot. But I don't know if you have taken a look at that list of 50 privileges and even remember it. But I don't know if there are any surprises there as you thought about it. And we could put maybe a link to it in the show notes. Do you do show notes?

Ryan Burgess
Absolutely. Yes. It's online on my website. Yeah. I've definitely thought about them. And you know, even reading your book, I was like, you go through them in the book. And it's like, it's almost like a checklist. I'm like, yep, yep, yep. Yep. Which, for one, when you say the visa part, I was like, Oh, yes, that is one. I'm not American born. I do have citizenship now. And that actually did change for me. Like I've even noticed myself being more confident, is like, I'm not going to get booted out of the country in my home that I am now here. But it's a little things and so that one's I think that was one I that was a surprise to me. Like, I didn't really think about it. And I was like, Well, yeah, that's that's actually affected the way I show up at work when being on a visa definitely held me back in some ways. So that was an interesting one. But a lot of the other ones being like it, you said that first one have been like a white male, I'm very aware of that, that like just society, society that's privileged right there for me. And so I'm aware of that. And so it's not news to me, I like that you call it the P word. It doesn't bother me, I can't change what I look like. Or if I was born into money, which I wasn't. But if I was like, I can't change that. And so I think, I think it's good to think about these, it's not a bad thing to have these privileges. It's just But recognizing them, and knowing them can be really helpful. You all sitting on this panel today don't have that white male privilege. We're born differently, and that there's nothing we can do about that. But recognizing that there's a difference can be really helpful.

Karen Catlin
You know, we cannot change the privilege we have. But what we can do is change how we are using our privilege, we that is within our control, how are you using privilege to take action, action.

All
Cheers, cheers, cheers.

Karen Catlin
Taking action based on that privilege.

Ryan Burgess
Once you start recognizing and understanding that it's there, I think that's where you can start to identify and in ways in which you can show up as an ally and take action. Cheers I had thrown in.

All
Cheers.

Stacy London
I don't know if this is part of that list. But I've been in tech 20 some years now. And I think I've seen some of the same things that you've mentioned caring for the demographic shift. And but one of the privileges I think I had as a teenager is that my family was not wealthy, but they were well off enough to afford a computer. And at that time, like computers were extremely expensive. They're less expensive now. But they're still expensive. And so like for that that in of itself is a privilege that you had access to it at maybe a younger age, or before it was available to you at a school setting or those kinds of things. And now it's less of an issue. Like it's computers are more pervasive, but there still can be expensive. And that can be a reason that people aren't as represented because they don't have access to these kinds of things.

Shirley Wu
Yeah, that's not on the list, but maybe that should be 51.

Ryan Burgess
I like it.

Shirley Wu
So I actually have a question. That is I know, this episode is about ally ship. And I think it's about, you know, helping someone if they're in a tough spot, or if, but, um, or helping someone else that might be more under represented, if they're in a tough spot. But the question I have is, I'm often the one that's in the tough spot, and I, you know, don't always have someone to be able to rely on to help me. And so what I wanted to ask is, what are the tactics tactics to use if I am the one constantly being interrupted, thankfully, I don't get that these days, because I get to choose who I work with. And I just choose not to work with us. But when I didn't get to choose, like, and I think something else that maybe we hadn't really touched on as much is like, when when we're like more junior, and when we're younger, like, I just remember when I was at a full time job, I was more junior and I just whenever I got interrupted, I didn't know how to handle that. Or there was an instance where we try to, I suggested putting in a rotation for note taking, and it was shot down and like and the rotation. Sorry, that's going to go into an angry rant. So I'm not going to go there. But what could I have done? You know, as the person that was like, we should have meeting notes, but then be made responsible for taking the notes or feeling like as the youngest one as a woman, like I should appeal to the others on my team by trying to be more helpful by trying to take the notes by trying to do the like, you know, the basically the unglamorous jobs.

Karen Catlin
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my focus is definitely ally ship because when we advocate on behalf of ourselves, we can come across as seeming, it can think of all sorts of different adjectives, but you know, demanding and angry and so forth. So we we want allies to be the ones noticing his behavior and advocating for more intuitive behavior. That said, I get it you get, and we all want those strategies that we can use to support ourselves. I'm one that I like that specific, specifically around like, you know, to an office housework or something like that, is asking the question, tell me why I'm the best. Tell me why I'm the most qualified to do this job. Something along those lines, tell me, I'm curious to know why you think I'm the right person to be doing this. I remember a woman I was coaching, who was, I think she was an SRE and on a team of like eight SRS, and they were growing, and the manager decided they needed a program manager to help manage all the work. And he asked my client to take on the program management job for this SRE team. She was the only woman and she didn't want to be a program manager. She liked doing SRE work, right? So she had to push back when she was angry when he asked her to do this. And but she pushed back in a more measured way by asking exactly that question. And what it did is it helped her manager kind of understand the bias that was at play. It's like, oh, women tend to be better at multitasking and organizing things, or whatever the bias was. They ended up hiring someone instead.

Stacy London
Yeah, I did exactly that. I was asked, I was asked to do additional responsibilities that sounded very much to me, like a product manager. And I was like, what? I'm an engineer. I'm like, No, I'm not sure. That's really, you know, especially for, you know, a company of particular size that has this role, and definitely hires for it. It's not like you're scrappy startup or something and you need to wear multiple hats. It was like, No. And so I did something very similar. I put a pro and con list page together that it was like it was a private page. And I shared it, it was like, these are the reasons that I do and do not want to do this. And here's what I think we should do. And that helped. To me, it helped me to say no, in a very like thorough, thorough way.

Karen Catlin
Yeah, wonderful.

Ryan Burgess
Its reasoning, right? It's not just a no, it's like, here's how I'm thinking about it just to like, bring people along that journey a little bit, you made their decision easier for them. In each episode, we'd like to choose pics and share them. But before we dive into pics, I'd be curious to as you know, we've talked about even being in in different journey points of being an ally. And I know our audience, like it could be sporadic of like someone has been doing this for years, someone who's just heard of it. What are some pieces of advice that you give someone who's you know, wanting to be an ally or growing as an ally?

Karen Catlin
So first is Be curious. Be curious about what is happening, listen to other people, believe them, when it when they share some experience about something that is not good, right feels off, whatever. So be curious. Definitely, you want to get comfortable with making mistakes, because we've already talked about that that is going to help. There's no one who can be the perfect ally, because we can't, I don't think we can really understand the experience of people who are different from us really, truly deeply. And so we are going to make mistakes, and I make them all the time. I share them in my newsletter when I do when people correct me on different things and so forth. I'm very comfortable doing that. But we have to get come from making our own mistakes, apologize when we make that learn from them move on. The other thing I'll say is don't shy away from these conversations. My book, one of my goals is to provide awareness but also the actions, actions, actions you can take, oh, yes.

All
Cheers.

Karen Catlin
Actions you can take, even to the point of having phrases in your back pocket that you can pull out when otherwise you might be pulling back from a conversation. I'm gonna give you two examples of those phrases, which are my favorite one is it's basically seek common ground and then educate someone with a phrase like, I used to think that too, but I have since learned, so let's let's make that real. Let's put it into action. I used it with a friend who I was in a book club with last year and we were reading me and white supremacy by Leila Saad. And Leo sod is a black woman author, and she has some YouTube videos that go along with her book. And in our book club discussion, we were talking about one of the videos and my white friend said, I really enjoyed the video. The author is so articulate. And what if anyone isn't cringing at that? Many black people do not take it as a compliment when you call them articulate because it's like, well, what are you comparing them? To like, you know, what level of education do you think she's an author? Why wouldn't she be articulate? You know, it's like, why is that standout? It could have been another she could have chosen another complements such as it was really engaging. It was she I was mesmerized by listening to her message, you know, something else, but it's just articulate. So after our book club discussion wrapped up, I texted my friend, do you have a minute for a call, and I asked her, she'd be able to get some feedback. So ended up saying to her, you know, I heard you say the author was so articulate. I used to think that was a compliment. So I'm seeking common ground with my friend. But I have since learned and then I went on to share that many people don't just Just what I share it with all of you. So that's a great thing to do in so many situations to seek that common ground and then educate a second one, I'll leave it at that just, there are many more in my book. But a second one I'll share is something that I think is very relevant right now, when we see so many communities dealing with very traumatic high profile events, such as Black Lives Matter. And all the continued deaths that we're seeing of black people in the hands of police, but also the hate crimes against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities here in the United States. As well as even violence against women, there was a very high profile incident in the UK about two months ago, Sarah Everhart, who was brutally killed by a police officer. So anyway, there are going to be high profile traumatic events that happen. And when those happen, I think many of us shy away from bringing it up at work maybe with a colleague who might be of that demographic that might be impacted. But that's mean, in some ways, the worst thing you can do instead, as allies, we should recognize this is happening and realize that our colleague may be distracted and not doing their best work, right. So what does it look like in action? Action? Cheers, cheers, love it. I heard from a software engineer after the murders in Atlanta of the Asian spa workers. I heard from her and she said I did this and it felt felt good. She's telling me about it. And she had she has one Asian American coworker on her team of like six people back into engineers. And the person, the Asian American woman was holding pager duty that week. So she reached out to her friend, her co worker and said, Hey, I was reading what was happening, what happened in Atlanta yesterday. And I'm thinking about you, no need to respond. But if you'd like me to take over pager duty for today, I'd be happy to do that. What a beautiful gesture that is really meaningful. I mean, how many times have you want to take on our pager duty when it really hasn't been your job, or your turn, but also that notion of like, no need to respond? The here's an offer, because some people might not want to deal with it. They might want to compartmentalize, they might not want to have the emotions brought back to the forefront for them. And they can step away from it if you give them that option. So anyway, I'll stop there. There's there's just two of my favorite phrases to keep in our back pockets, when we should be forcing yourself to take action.

Ryan Burgess
Those are great.

Stacy London
If you have ability to do something like let's say at work, you have some freedom to make a small change without asking anybody's approval or getting consensus, you can just do something, just do it. So I made a very small change to some wording and BitBucket. Once I changed the word blame to annotate and just did it, it did not ask for pm approval for like all the things because I was like, this is just a good thing. I got some backlash for it on Twitter. But like if you can just accumulate those little things and do them over time. That two things that are bigger.

Karen Catlin
Stacey, I love that. And I think they can become a ripple effect for other change where people notice Stacy's got agency over her work. She's making these positive changes, I can too. So you become a role model in the moment.

Ryan Burgess
So I think one thing that I'll add to is that I've always found good is educate yourself about it, especially, you know, if you're not an underrepresented group, like you don't know all these things. And I say educate yourself because you don't want to rely on someone who is in that underrepresented group to be the person to teach you. There's so many great material online, that it does not take long or a quick Google search, you will find a ton of material to learn and better empathize and understand. So I think that to me is always a great start and to learn and jump into that journey of an ally. All right, well, let's jump right into pics. In each episode of the front end happier podcast. We like to share pics of things that we found interesting and want to share with all of you Shirley do you want to start?

Shirley Wu
Sure. So there's I have two picks today, the first one I actually thought of as we were having this conversation, and I think it was particularly the conversation actually, it was, I think, around when Karen was talking about, like phrases to have ready for certain situations. And I was like, really quickly trying to Google for it, I can't quite find the exact project I'm thinking of. But the studio that's responsible for it is called Ellery studio, E, Ll, er y. And, and they're based in Berlin, Germany, and they had this project, they had told me about it maybe like two years ago, and I hope they'll publish it someday. And it is this multi part project. And one of the parts that stuck out to me the most, this was a project about kind of like, like feminism. And there were like posters about the different waves of feminism. But the part that really stuck out to me was, they were making this game about where the central theme was having ready phrases to combat difficult situations, or uncomfortable situations, like if you're put in a situation where you're being catcalled. Like, a lot of times, when we're like in that sort of a situation we like, just don't know how to react, because we're so shocked usually, but like, just having like this phrase that's like, and through this game, the concept was like, you would just developed the instinct to just like respond right away. And that being able to respond is kind of like Karen's, like anecdote about like thinking at the end of the day, this is how I should have responded, but like, you get to, you get to, like, build the instinct on how to respond to it, I tried to look up their portfolio, and I can't find the project. So I'm just gonna mention the studio name. And hopefully, we'll like keep an eye on it. And hopefully, they'll, they'll publish it sometime. So that's my first pick. And the second pick I have is, um, I feel like for the last few episodes, I've just been trying to highlight more like Asian or Asian American or Chinese picks, I feel like at this point, I should just like have a name for it, like gems Valley Silicon where I'm just trying to highlight different parts of our culture to be liking to try in my small part combat, the anti Asian hate. And for this times, pig, and I have a studio called continental list, and that's continental US with a K. And they are a Singapore based of visual storytelling, or data, visual storytelling studio. Um, if anybody's familiar with the pudding, and their visual essays, I think continental is does very similar style work, very high quality, they like, you know, curate their own datasets and tell stories based on those. And the reason why I want to highlight them is because I feel like the stories that they're telling is all very, like Asian centric. And I think it's a lot of stories about Asian culture that I've been really enjoying, and I hope, like if anybody's interested, I hope you'll check it out, too.

Ryan Burgess
Very good. Stacy, what do you have for us?

Stacy London
I have one music pack and one non music pitch, which is rare, but I do in the in the time of recording this podcast. I mentioned that glue article, and I thought that would make a good kind of relevant pick. So that is, the link will be in the show notes for that it's by a woman, Tanya Riley. She's a I don't know. She's currently a principal software engineer. But that was her title at the time. Squarespace and it's just a really good blog post about, I'll just read a snippet of it. It says your job title says software engineer but you seem to spend your time in meetings you'd have you'd like to have time to code but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers updating the roadmap, talking to the users noticing things that got dropped, asking questions, understand documents, making sure everyone's going roughly in the same direction. If you start doing those things, the team will be successful, but not someone suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. So it goes on from there. And I think it's just it does a really great job of describing that. I think earlier in this episode, we talked about doing rotations with meetings and making sure everyone will take responsibility for those quote, glue, actions or work so I thought that was a relevant article to reference. And the second pick is a sovereign called foxglove by an artist named Tor. And he describes this piece as a vibrant exploration of melody and rhythm featuring bittersweet piano and warped keys alone sliding bass and clattering hi hats so that's a great I've been listening to that on repeat so it's good song right on Karen what what do you have to share with us?

Karen Catlin
Yeah, I want to share a show that and I know Ryan You're at Netflix, but this is a Hulu show. So anyway, bear with me. And the show my partner Tim and I were just looking for something to watch kind of relax, you know, and Something new and we were looking for something that would do like women jazz singers. And this show popped up called genius that listed Aretha Franklin. I'm like, Huh, what's this about? Well, genius. And this goes back a few years. I don't know if anyone here has seen it. I think it first came out in 2017. But it starts out with Einstein in his life. And then it's going to go on to Picasso, and then Aretha Franklin. So we're still on the Einstein years. It's fascinating. It is, you know, a kind of a drama of many episodes of his life. But there's so much and I didn't realize I thought we were watching this just to like, have some fun, put our feet up at the end of the day. But there's so much ally shift in there are mistakes, not inclusive behavior, just in his relationship with his first wife, who was his equal scientifically, but he ended up having her do a lot of the research work for him and writing of his papers that allowed him to get a name out there and start building his reputation. And He then started excluding her. So he totally hijacked her work didn't give her credit. And I think they're about to get divorced. So anyway, good for her for leaving that relationship. So anyway, it's been so interesting, there's overlap in all the work, I'm doing an ally ship, as well as it being a very interesting well done enjoyable show.

Ryan Burgess
A great one I love Yeah, it's overlap, but also good drama to watch, that sounds really good. I have two picks. One is definitely really relevant. Actually. The second one is a bit too. But I have started pulling together resources for inclusion ally ship is in there as well. But it's a GitHub repo that I just have videos, articles, books, newsletters, which you know, better allyship has listed their podcasts, but things that you can just go and there's all these materials there. And I find like, there's the education. So I want to make it easier for people to kind of just jump in on that. And then my second pick is device that I got a few weeks, maybe it's been a month now, I don't know. But for meetings, it's called stream deck. And you can use it for a bunch of different things. But I'm using it for meetings, is it's physical buttons for raising your hand hanging up a meeting, jumping to a meeting, and it's just right in front of me. And I love it. Because you can just raise your hand or unmute really easily. I'm not fumbling trying to find certain buttons. So it makes the virtual meeting a little better for me. So that has been really cool. So that was my second pick before we end the episode. Thank you, Karen, so much for joining us. This was amazing topic. I really enjoyed it. And thank you for sharing so many great insights. Where can people get in touch with you? Where can people find you online?

Karen Catlin
Yeah. Well, thank you. It was just a pleasure talking with all of you. So thank you again, for having me. I am on line. I have a couple different personas. But I think the best is better allies. So better. allies.com is my URL. And then I'm at better allies on Twitter and Instagram medium so you can find me in all of those places. And I do want to give myself a shout out for my newsletter. You've mentioned it a few times. Ryan Thank you, but it is called Five ally actions and you can find it on better allies.com. Literally, I share what I have learned actions. There you go. Cheers. I share what I've learned during the course of the week. And my what I love doing is taking something and simplifying it down to what is someone supposed to do with that, that being some research that was published in Harvard Business Review article that was came across my desk, or some cautionary tale at times. So it's it's what I've learned during the course of the week. I love sharing it with other people. So please check it out and see if it wouldn't be helpful to to you as you're navigating how to be a better ally.

Ryan Burgess
It is my favorite email every Friday morning and I think it shows up and it's one of it's like one of my first emails I read because it is very quick and easy to read. And like you're walking away with five tips that are just like whoa, this is amazing. So yes, I have picked it on previous episodes but it can't say enough how great it is. So please keep up the amazing work. Thank you all for listening today's episode you can find find us on front end happy hour.com Subscribe to front end Happy Hour wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can follow us on Twitter at @frontendhh any last words,

Stacy London
Actions are better than words.

Ryan Burgess
Oh, I love it Stacy.

Karen Catlin
Cheers. Cheers.