Subject: Postgres Women talk at pgconfeu

From: Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 May 2019 07:51:35 +0200

Hi all,

What would you think about a talk in Milan about : what is postgres women,
why it matters and what everyone can do about it?

Anyone interested to do it (with or without me)?

Cheers,

Lætitia

---

From: Francis Santiago <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 May 2019 09:36:25 +0200

Hi *,
I think the idea is great, but my English is very bad (but I'm studying, to
improve it). When it's in Spanish I'll sign

El vie., 17 may. 2019 7:51, Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]>
escribió:

> Hi all,
>
> What would you think about a talk in Milan about : what is postgres
> women,  why it matters and what everyone can do about it?
>

---

From: Renee <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 May 2019 08:54:34 -0400

Louise and I did a lightning talk on the topic that was well received. I would be interested in doing a talk of any length. I’m also submitting my Paris talk, which is all about diversity and inclusion but only briefly mentions postgres women. 

> On May 17, 2019, at 3:36 AM, Francis Santiago <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Hi *, 
> I think the idea is great, but my English is very bad (but I'm studying, to improve it). When it's in Spanish I'll sign
> 
> El vie., 17 may. 2019 7:51, Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]> escribió:
>> Hi all, 
>> 
>> What would you think about a talk in Milan about : what is postgres women,  why it matters and what everyone can do about it? 
>>

---

From: Francis Santiago <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 May 2019 16:11:48 +0200

That's great, I love giving talks on those topics. In fact, I have already
given  talks about these topics but outside the community

El vie., 17 de may. de 2019 a la(s) 14:54, Renee ([email-masked])
escribió:

> Louise and I did a lightning talk on the topic that was well received. I
> would be interested in doing a talk of any length. I’m also submitting my
> Paris talk, which is all about diversity and inclusion but only briefly
> mentions postgres women.
>
> I think the idea is great, but my English is very bad (but I'm studying,
> to improve it). When it's in Spanish I'll sign
>

---

From: Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 15:17:23 +0200

Hi all,

During a brainstorming session about conf talk ideas with Ilaria, we had
this idea: how about having a lot of people (majority of women, but some
other genders too) on stage to show how diverse and numerous we are ?

Who would come ?

Cheers,

Lætitia

Le ven. 17 mai 2019 à 07:51, Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]> a

-- 
*Paper doesn’t grow on trees. Please print responsibly.*

---

From: Valeria Kaplan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 15:07:35 +0100

Hi Lætitia and Ilaria / All,

Sounds like a great idea.
I think maybe it would be even more impactful to do an online survey to see
how *actually* diverse we are in numbers?

You might have planned this anyway, but here just an idea. You could do a
few pools through the Postgres Women Twitter handle for example to ask the
community questions:
1. which sex you relate to? (you'll need to think about how to phrase it
correctly);
2. where where you born?;
3. where do you live?
4. would you consider yourself having a disability?
...and other diversity questions)
and then visualise it in your presentation alongside statistics about IT
community as a whole (or whatever stats on IT community you will be able to
find.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/5-eye-opening-statistics-about-minorities-in-tech/
might
be useful as a starting point.) I think this will help to see whether
PostgreSQL community is reflective of a broader IT groups etc.
Of course, it would only be a sample and not everyone is on Twitter etc.
However, that will be a relatively painless way to get good number of
responses and get an idea what we are dealing with. 8)

Would be glad to hear what you think.
I'll be in Milano btw.

Valeria

*Valeria Kaplan*Marketing Director

*Data Egret*

---

From: Ilaria <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 17:39:26 +0200

Hello everyone,

I really like Valeria’s idea! I’m an analyst, so I’m a bit biased :) but I already have some possible ways to present in mind. 

I can start preparing/proposing concrete subjects by the beginning of July, so there is still time for brainstorming - and channels need to be considered carefully, it would be nice to target specifically people who are going to attend PGConf, but of course everyone in the community should be involved. 

Have a great day!
Ilaria

> Am 10.06.2019 um 16:07 schrieb Valeria Kaplan <[email-masked]>:
> 
> I think maybe it would be even more impactful to do an online survey to see how actually diverse we are in numbers?
> 
> You might have planned this anyway, but here just an idea. You could do a few pools through the Postgres Women Twitter handle for example to ask the community questions:
> 1. which sex you relate to? (you'll need to think about how to phrase it correctly); 
> and then visualise it in your presentation alongside statistics about IT community as a whole (or whatever stats on IT community you will be able to find. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/5-eye-opening-statistics-about-minorities-in-tech/ might be useful as a starting point.) I think this will help to see whether PostgreSQL community is reflective of a broader IT groups etc. 
> Of course, it would only be a sample and not everyone is on Twitter etc. However, that will be a relatively painless way to get good number of responses and get an idea what we are dealing with. 8) 
> 
> Valeria Kaplan
> Marketing Director
> Data Egret
>> On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 2:17 PM Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> During a brainstorming session about conf talk ideas with Ilaria, we had this idea: how about having a lot of people (majority of women, but some other genders too) on stage to show how diverse and numerous we are ?
>> 
>> Who would come ?
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Lætitia
>> 
>>> Le ven. 17 mai 2019 à 07:51, Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]> a écrit :
>>> Hi all, 
>>> 
>> Paper doesn’t grow on trees. Please print responsibly.

---

From: Valeria Kaplan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 21:02:45 +0100

Glad it was useful.
Shout if you need more thoughts :)

On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 4:39 PM Ilaria <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I really like Valeria’s idea! I’m an analyst, so I’m a bit biased :) but I
> already have some possible ways to present in mind.
>
> I can start preparing/proposing concrete subjects by the beginning of
> July, so there is still time for brainstorming - and channels need to be
> considered carefully, it would be nice to target specifically people who
> are going to attend PGConf, but of course everyone in the community should
> be involved.
>
> Have a great day!
> Ilaria
>
> I think maybe it would be even more impactful to do an online survey to
> see how *actually* diverse we are in numbers?
>
> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/5-eye-opening-statistics-about-minorities-in-tech/ might

---

From: Renee Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 16:10:46 -0400

I would add a question about first language (because the assumption of
English as default is understandable but there may be some bias in events
as a result)

On Jun 10, 2019, at 10:07 AM, Valeria Kaplan <[email-masked]> wrote:

Valeria

*Data Egret*

---

From: Debra Cerda <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 16:53:39 -0500

Here's a great article on the topic of how to ask questions appropriately
regarding gender identity:

https://www.hrc.org/resources/collecting-transgender-inclusive-gender-data-in-workplace-and-other-surveys

The most critical point is never make that a required question -- it should
be optional, as not everyone wants to share this personal information.

Sincerely,
Debbie

---

From: Renee Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2019 22:45:58 -0400

I think it could be a great idea to do a panel! Four or five women on the
panel and a woman moderator?

Goodness knows we have seen enough all male panels. We could have it not
even be noticeably a woman only panel by the title....

---

From: Katherine Mcmillan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2019 23:00:32 -0400

This is a fantastic idea, let me know if there's anything I can do to help!

No more manels!

Cheers,
Katie

---

From: Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2019 15:02:21 +0200

Hi all,

I like the idea and I like it more if it's a panel about a technical
subject.
We've seen a lot of panels about diversity and gender in IT. I'd like to do
a panel on a technical subject with women. We kind of did that last year in
Paris meetup: https://twitter.com/l_avrot/status/954098531488366592

A guy came to the organizer, asking if this was "a diversity thing" and the
organizer answered "No, it's a skill thing".

Cheers,

Lætitia

Le dim. 16 juin 2019 à 04:46, Renee Phillips <[email-masked]> a

---

From: Renee <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2019 09:24:10 -0400

Yes. It should absolutely be a technical topic. There are plenty of places for men to go to hear what it’s like to be a woman in tech. We don’t need to spend the time of five or six women to keep telling them it’s hard and here’s one weird trick we use to make our days easier (argh, I give a D&I talk, I would never ask anyone to give a D&I talk, it’s really quite stressful and a lot of vulnerability) 

So now the questions are what technical topics do we want to be on a panel about? 

My work experience is with QA and for fun I’m building a selenium scraper to get some public data from New York City which I will then put into Postgres and clean and then hopefully combine with other data and then learn something. 

> On Jun 20, 2019, at 9:02 AM, Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I like the idea and I like it more if it's a panel about a technical subject.
> We've seen a lot of panels about diversity and gender in IT. I'd like to do a panel on a technical subject with women. We kind of did that last year in Paris meetup: https://twitter.com/l_avrot/status/954098531488366592
> 
> A guy came to the organizer, asking if this was "a diversity thing" and the organizer answered "No, it's a skill thing".
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Lætitia
> 
>> Le dim. 16 juin 2019 à 04:46, Renee Phillips <[email-masked]> a écrit :
>> I think it could be a great idea to do a panel! Four or five women on the panel and a woman moderator? 
>> 
>> Goodness knows we have seen enough all male panels. We could have it not even be noticeably a woman only panel by the title....
>> 
>>> On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 9:17 AM Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>

---

From: Ilaria <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2019 15:33:47 +0200

Just to clarify, a panel is something different from a talk, is it? Are we still having a pgwomen-focussed paper submission as a community?

I use PG for exploratory analysis, if you need anything, I’m available :)

Ilaria

> Am 20.06.2019 um 15:24 schrieb Renee <[email-masked]>:
>

---

From: Magnus Hagander <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2019 15:34:13 +0200

> even be noticeably a woman only panel by the title....

I'll just throw in a quick note -- we have tried out having panels in the
past at some of our events. I have personally yet to see a single panel at
*any* postgres event that wasn't completely crap. Regardless of who's on
it. So prepare yourselves for having to do some pretty hard convincing work
to get around that :) There's a reason we stopped even trying. (That said,
I'm not on the talk committee, so it's not *me* you have to convince, but
there are most likely others with similar experiences)

//Magnus

---

From: Lætitia Avrot <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2019 14:27:34 +0200

Hi Ilaria,

A panel is quite different from a talk as :

- there are several people on stage
- there is (normally) no slide
- a moderator/leader is asking questions to the panel (people on stage)
- it lasts around 20 minutes and for the 20-30 minutes that come after, the
audience is asking questions

I hope this is helpful.

Lætitia

Le jeu. 20 juin 2019 à 15:33, Ilaria <[email-masked]> a écrit :

> Just to clarify, a panel is something different from a talk, is it? Are we
> still having a pgwomen-focussed paper submission as a community?
>
> Yes. It should absolutely be a technical topic. There are plenty of places
> for men to go to hear what it’s like to be a woman in tech. We don’t need
> to spend the time of five or six women to keep telling them it’s hard and
> here’s one weird trick we use to make our days easier (argh, I give a D&I
> talk, I would never ask anyone to give a D&I talk, it’s really quite
> stressful and a lot of vulnerability)
>
> My work experience is with QA and for fun I’m building a selenium scraper
> to get some public data from New York City which I will then put into
> Postgres and clean and then hopefully combine with other data and then
> learn something.
>
> We've seen a lot of panels about diversity and gender in IT. I'd like to
> do a panel on a technical subject with women. We kind of did that last year
> in Paris meetup: https://twitter.com/l_avrot/status/954098531488366592
>
> A guy came to the organizer, asking if this was "a diversity thing" and
> the organizer answered "No, it's a skill thing".
>
> Cheers,
>
> Lætitia
>