The WP Includes Gender Equality in WordPress Businesses Survey

Rae:
Hello, I am Rae Morey and I am excited to be hosting this episode of Do the WordPress Way. Today I’m known in the WordPress community for publishing the Repository Weekly newsletter about WordPress. But today in this instance, I am guest hosting this episode as I am collaborating with two very impressive women in the WordPress community. And I’m delighted to introduce Siobhan McKeown and Francesca Marano, who are the co-founders of WP Includes. Welcome Siobhan and Francesca. Siobhan, would you like to introduce yourself?

Siobhan:
Yes. Hello. Thanks Rae. And for anyone who’s listening, you should definitely sign up for Rae’s newsletter. It’s definitely one of the most insightful newsletters in WordPress. So go and sign up if you haven’t signed up already. I am Chief Operating Officer at Human Made. We’re an enterprise WordPress development agency, and I’ve been involved with WordPress for surprisingly long time, since about 20 10, 20 11. I was involved with setting up WordCamp Europe, led the documentation project and wrote a book about the history of WordPress. But more recently, I set up WP Includes with Francesca, which is a mentorship scheme to get more women into leadership in WordPress businesses. Francesca?

Francesca:
Yes. Hello. My name is Francesca Murano. As you can tell from my accent, I’m extremely Italian. I’m the director of learning and Development at XWP with a focus specifically on engineers. We too are a WordPress enterprise WordPress development agency, but Siobhan and I have been collaborating for years, even though we work for competing agencies. So that’s really cool. I have been working for a long time in different industries, and I stumbled upon WordPress in 2008 when I was building my mommy blog, and it reminded me how much I loved building websites and coding. So I started doing that as a job, and then I started getting involved with the WordPress community. I co-led three releases of WordPress without writing a single line of code. I love teaching, I love coaching, I love mentoring. I love, well, a bit less because I don’t love traveling anymore, public speaking. And yeah, I’m excited. I was very excited when Siobhan came up with the idea of WP Includes and we’ll tell you more about it, but yeah, that’s more or less it about me.

Rae:
That’s a lot. So Shivonne and Francesca, you’d launched, WP Includes last year, September. I was looking back at old issues of The Repository to work that out. What is it and why did you decide to start this initiative?

Siobhan:
Sure. So it’s a mentorship scheme for women in WordPress, and we match women who are in leadership roles in WordPress businesses with people who want to go get further in their career and get into leadership roles and WordPress businesses. So the reason that we started it, it came from a place of frustration in that Francesca and I, our senior women in WordPress businesses, and when we get into spaces with other senior people in WordPress businesses, they’re almost always men. And this is particularly true of the agency space. I think some of the bigger companies like Newfold and WPEngine have got extremely diverse leadership teams and it’s amazing, and I just envy them and think they’re an amazing job. But for a lot of the smaller organizations, they’re led by men primarily. And so Francesca and I would get, we would go to things, events, online things, and then we would just talk afterwards and be like, oh my God, we feel like we’re the only woman in the room and why are there not more women here?

And I’m a great believer that if you’re like, there’s only so much you can complain and be annoyed about something. Either you just accept the reality of it or you try and do something about it. And so I thought, well, maybe there’s a way that we can help other women to get into leadership roles by sharing what we’ve learned through what we have done over the years in terms of navigating our way into senior roles and just clear the pathway a little bit. I mean, I think there is, there’s a limit to what we can do external to companies, but we can prepare women for leadership roles by supporting them. So that’s where it came from. Do you have anything to add, Francesca?

Francesca:
Yeah, I think you’re always good at summarizing for the situation and being very subtle and diplomatic about it.

Siobhan:
Part of being a leader, you’ve got to be diplomatic a lot of the time.

Francesca:
The time. Yeah, yeah, it is. This has become very more visible, I think when we both stepped into more leadership roles inside our companies. And companies, of course get to meet at work and we organize events together. And then the struggle is real to find, for example, women who can speak at those events or can represent their company at a leadership event. But I think, and we’ve been talking about this for years, we met through WordCamps and that was, I think what we started being frustrated about the situation because in 2017 we worked together in the content team of WordCamp Europe in Paris. And that’s, I think when we really started talking about this and being very, very intentional about the steps we take to do something about it and not just moan about it when we meet for drinks, which we also do, by the way.

Rae:
I guess one of the reasons that we’re here today having this conversation is because WP Includes recently launched the Gender Equality in WordPress Businesses Survey. It’s the first of its kind in WordPress. Can you tell us about the survey and why are you doing it? Francesca, do you want to answer this one?

Francesca:
No, ask Siobhan. I can always add a bit of color to the things, but the reality, and I really want to take a moment to recognize this, the brain behind the operation is shivonne. She has all the bright ideas, and I come along for the ride with enthusiasm.

Siobhan:
Well, I mean you needed Thelma and Louise didn’t, you couldn’t just refer to them.

Francesca:
Yes, yes. That’s the dynamic here. So the survey was Siobhan’s idea and I was like, yeah, let’s do it. That’s my contribution to it.

Siobhan:
So the reason for doing it is, I guess something that I really push at work is if you have got a opinion or a feeling or a gut, people often talk about that, validate the gut feelings or whatever is you’ve got to validate that and you can validate that using data. So Francesca and I, as I said, we moan and we feel this way and our experience anecdotally is that we are in a minority and that potentially there could be more opportunities for women to be in those spaces, but we haven’t validated that beyond our own bias or perceptions of it. So we really wanted to run a survey to validate that and to understand is it really the case that there are fewer women in WordPress business outside of the sort of immediate space that we’re in, which is very agency focused, to be honest.

And also well in understanding that to learn the experiences of women who work in these businesses, if they feel got enough opportunities to get into leadership roles, if they feel that they work in workplaces that are inclusive and supportive, and also to understand the experience of men within those spaces as well, and to compare the different experiences of different groups of people. And so that’s why we did the survey because I just think you’ve got to back up what you’re saying with a bit more than just like I think this. So yeah, that’s why we did it.

Rae:
And that’s a good point as well. It’s not just about we not just surveying women. We also want to hear about everybody’s experiences in WordPress to paint that picture of what’s happening across WordPress businesses.

Siobhan:
Yeah, absolutely. The WP Includes is focused on women, but we definitely are using this opportunity to create a bigger picture of different genders within the space as well.

Rae:
So you’re both scheduled to give a talk at WordCamp Europe titled Fixing the Ladder, Getting More Women into Leadership at WordPress Businesses. The plan is to share early insights from the data collected, the gender equality survey. What no doubt you’ve both peaked at the data so far. What are you planning to talk about in your presentation? What should people expect from this talk that’s coming up in a couple of weeks?

Francesca:
So obviously the topic lends itself to a week long conference, right? Because as we are looking at this from the length of the women in leadership in WordPress businesses, but WordPress is not in a silo. It’s part of a larger industry, tech industry if you want the STEM industry to put it even bigger. So I won’t lie, it’s hard to condense this in 30 minutes. We have a lot to say about the topic, but what we are planning to do is obviously we want to give the data we collected so far a prominent space because that’s, that’s a driven talk and not just, oh my God, I’m the only one in the room when other women might be experiencing something else. And we also want to offer some advice based on the data we collected and based on our personal experiences, I think we are in a good place now to offer some advice to the people who will come to listen, who hopefully is going to be a lot of people because they put us in the big room as like 1500 people.

So please come and offer some, and again, 30 minutes, we could talk about this for a week, but kind of focusing on some advice for companies that are bringing more women into the leadership group and advice for women that are climbing the ladder, hopefully. So those are more or less the main points that we’re going to touch on. And then hopefully people will ask insightful questions and there’s going to be more conversation around it. Maybe there’s going to be a good place than to start our blog. I don’t know. I still want to over commit blog.

Siobhan:
What blog?

Francesca:
I don’t know. I created one in our website. Let’s see what happens.

Rae:
You mentioned, Francesca, your personal experiences as women in WordPress and sharing those as part of this talk. You’ve both been involved with WordPress for a very long time. What was it like contributing in the early days of when you started as a woman in WordPress? What was that like way back when compared to the experience today for both of you as women? Siobhan in particular, you’ve written the history of WordPress. How do you reflect on being a woman in WordPress today compared to when you first started?

Siobhan:
Yeah, good question. It’s funny because I’m not mega involved with the project anymore because I have children and a job and open source contributing privileges, those who either don’t have any care and responsibilities and can just throw themselves into it or people who are sponsored to do it. So it’s tricky for me to find time outside of all of the other things I have on. And so really probably about 2017, 2018, I started doing a lot less. But I was for the research, for the talk that we’re doing, I was just looking back on some of the early days and reflecting on how things have changed within the project itself. And I was at the first community summit in Tybee and there was 122 men there and 14 women. And I was like, wow. And I don’t remember feeling at the time, although it was like 12 years ago and memory is terrible.

I don’t remember feeling at the time in a minority, but I definitely was. And I think that’s one of the things that is important to me about WP Includes is that so many of the people who were involved in the WordPress project in the early days were men, and they started plugin businesses or theme businesses or agencies, and they rode the PHP wave, which WordPress itself did. WordPress was right place, right time, just like many of these men were in the right place at the right time. And there just wasn’t as many women there.

That’s not to say I always felt very welcomed by the project. There were definitely times where I felt, what’s the right word? There were times when I felt like marginalized and discriminated against, not by the project, but by individuals who are just encounter sexist people in any community. You encounter misogyny in every community and you just, I think as a woman you sadly, you kind of accept that as part of your life. And so you figure out ways to negotiate your way through that. But I would say that my background was in philosophy prior to WordPress and I found the WordPress community way more welcoming than say, communities of academic philosophers, for example. And I think it’s great to have seen the work that’s been done over the past 10 years to make the project itself more diverse than it’s got non-binary releases. And really the project feels itself very diverse. But I don’t think that WordPress businesses, hence why we’re doing the survey. I want to validate it. I don’t feel that they have caught up or I don’t feel they’re as far along as the project itself.

Rae:
Francesca, you also have a senior position at an enterprise agency. What’s that like for you as a woman working in a role where you’re typically surrounded by men and probably also dealing with a lot of clients who are men as well? What’s that experience?

Francesca:
Actually, in my role, I don’t deal with clients a lot. I used to deal with clients as a freelancer, and that’s actually the only time I’ve ever been discriminated against as a woman because I used to work mainly for women building their websites when they were reinventing their careers. And I was doing really well as a freelancer in Italy. It’s not a huge market. And one company led by a man, and this man knew me very well. So he invited me to do a discovery for the website and everything. And at the end he said, I don’t know if I want to hire you because you seem to work only with women. And that honestly, the only time I was directly discriminated in English, yes, but actually my team, so at XWP, we have a group called the engineering Support Group for the directors of engineering and the CTO, and I’m the only Mormon, but they did their homework.

I have to say my team really did their homework. They welcomed me into this preexisting team and they never made me feel like I was the token woman in the group. And also, I remember this, oh, this is great. We started having meeting and I was frustrated by the lack of note and I was like, oh, maybe I should take notes. And actually my boss, Stephan, the CTO was like, I don’t want you to take the notes because you feel like you have to do the housekeeping job because we do a work at it. So only do it if you really want to do it and not because you’re only woman in the room. And I was like, oh my God, thank you. I didn’t think about that. It is just because I’m a bit OCD about notes, that’s why I want to do them.

But I never thought about this point of view, which is actually very well documented that women end up doing the housekeeping chores also inside projects. So the fact that he actually brought this up and said, you don’t have to do this because you’re the only woman in the room. And actually he said, actually, maybe this is a good occasion for us to do those instead of just, and that was like, wow, they did their homework before getting into this room. So that was really good. XWP is a very, I don’t know, illuminate, I dunno what’s the right word, because I think we still have a lot of work to do and we all know it, but starting from our CEO, everyone is really reflecting a lot on the topic. So even though we still are a minority, and especially in the engineering team, we have very few women, it’s a topic and we talk about it very freely and we actually try to find solutions.

Siobhan:
You make a really good point there about a dynamic between you and Stephan, which is that women have internalized a lot of cultural behavior, cultural norms, and it’s often the case that it’s like, oh, right, well, I’m going to book the dinner, I’m going to arrange the dinner, I’m going to arrange accommodation, I’m going to take the notes. There’s obviously a big one, and it’s not just on women. If you want to create a welcoming and inclusive workspace, it’s not just women to notice that because internalized it so much, it has almost that requires men as well to say, actually, we need to step into that space and not just allow the burden of all of that housekeeping to fall on women. And I think that’s a point we want to make in our talk and in the paper that we’re working on together, is that this is not a woman thing. This is an everyone thing. And we’re in spaces where men, most spaces hold the par. It is the men who have to take many of the steps, not the women within those spaces. So well done, Stephan.

Francesca:
Yeah, he’s acing it. I’m always very happy because he always brings up things on.

Siobhan:
We also need to get beyond the well done individual man for doing that. It needs to be an expectation. It just needs to be a given thing that everybody is doing rather than something exceptional. It’s like my husband’s a stay-at-home dad, and people are like, oh my God, that’s amazing. I’m like, you would not say that to a woman.

Francesca:
Yeah, yeah. Oh dear. I experienced the same, my ex-husband, when our son was born, he was like, well, I’m going to take a, I going to take a bit of a pause from my career and things like that. And he was going to pick up our son from kindergarten and everyone was like, what? And even until a few years ago, he was the only dad going to the PTA meetings and all the moms were like, oh, you’re so lucky. And I’m like, no, you’re picked the wrong husband. Girls, I’m sorry to tell you.

Rae:
In the coming weeks we’ll be collaborating on putting together the gender equality and WordPress businesses report 2024 based on the findings in the survey, what are you hoping this report will, what light will be shed on the community through this report? What are you hoping to illuminate? And I am not framing this very well. Hang on, let me backtrack. In the coming weeks we’ll be collaborating on writing the gender equality in WordPress Businesses report 2024. Based on the findings in the survey, what are you hoping this report will tell the community about gender equality? What are you hoping to change with this report?

Siobhan:
Yeah, I think we want it to be useful. This is not like, oh, we just want to shit talk everybody at all. We want to produce something that is objective, that just really just lays out what we’ve learned in a non-judgmental way. And then that actually provides useful actions that companies can take to support more women to get into leadership. So it compliments the aims of WP Includes and that if an all male leadership team, which I can think of many, and they read it, they’re like, okay, now we feel a bit more equipped to actually create opportunities for women in the companies, in our companies to get into leadership roles to create a welcoming, inclusive leadership team that women will want to be part of and to better recruit for these roles as well. The purpose is just to increase understanding and help people take action on it.

Francesca:
I also, to go back to what Siobhan was saying about the data, I think what is also important is that we really put numbers instead of feelings on paper basically. So I think that, and I see this because I mean we talk to the leadership of a lot of agencies and many, many times this is a totally unconscious situation that has been created. It was never, at least with all the people I’ve talked to, it was never skipped the women out of this. It was never there in. So my hope is that by putting numbers, and this is also why we are aiming to get as many replies as possible. Our goal, the holy grail is a thousand people A, because we want to have a substantial amount of data, not just our friends and family basically. So once they see the data, it’s like, oh, okay, kind of coming to the realization that is based on numbers.

So I think that is also something that I would like to see. And one thing that has already happened actually, which I think is great, and Rae that also, and Siobhan, thanks to the questions you brought up in the survey, some men that have taken the survey have also came back to me and said, well, this question really made me think about this and that other question made me think about that. So even just taking the survey is already having some positive impact on our community. I think, and this is why a thousand people is not a vanity metric, is really because even the survey itself is already making a change. And I think that the more results we’re going to have the biggest different targets because it’s important that hosting companies reply. It’s important that plugin companies reply and not just again, keeping in our bubble of enterprise agencies.

Siobhan:
Yeah, I think that Francesca and I have talked about some of the changes that she’s seen already because of the survey. I mean, I have reflected on changes in myself as a result of doing the survey, doing WP Includes doing the talk that we’re doing for WordCamp Europe in terms of I get lazy and complacent and I’ve actually been like, okay, well what more can I do Human Made to support women within the company? So I’ve definitely seen that within myself, but I think the importance of reach is that we want this to have a broader impact than our immediate sphere. We want other women who we have no contact with, we dunno who they are, but we want ’em to feel benefit from men who hold power within their organizations. Just feeling like the beginnings of a question where they’re thinking actually, is there something small that we could do different?

Or is there something big that we could do different? And what changes can we make that usually there’s a lot that you can do that’s quite straightforward in your organization. It doesn’t always have to be like a mega, like, we are going to have a DNI initiative and it’s going to be a two year pro change project. It’s like, okay, what are the things that we can do now? And we want to be really practical about that. So yes, please complete the survey. Please give it to other people to complete, and we really appreciate what everybody has added so far. And everyone who will fill in as well,.

Rae:
We’ll make sure to include the link to the survey in the show notes. But I think we’ve covered a lot in this conversation and coming naturally to an end. Thank you so much for your time today, Siobhan and Francesca, do you have any parting thoughts that you’d like to add here?

Siobhan:
Fill in the survey, come and see our talk at WordCamp Europe if you can, or watch on the live stream or watch it afterwards and talk to women and see how you can help them to get into advance in their careers and achieve everything they can achieve,

Francesca:
Get involved in everything includes after WordCamp Europe. We’re going to open the applications for the second cohort. We’re looking for mentors, we’re looking for mentees. And yeah, keep talking about this and I think get comfortable talking about this. If you see something at work that in code, we have this thing like code smell, which is such a weird concept if you think about it. But it’s the same in work dynamics. If something smells, bring it up. Find the person in your organization that you can bring it up. If you don’t know how to do it, reach out to other women that are in leadership positions, maybe at other companies and talk through it. I think, I mean, I’m the daughter of a feminist from the seventies that was going to burn bras in the square. So for me, it’s always a feminist issue and not just for women, obviously. So that would be my parting for

Rae:
Thank you both. This has been a really insightful conversation.

Francesca:
Thank you.