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- Apr 15, 2015
Possibe. Maybe she just picked the most "controversial" option to generate more buzz and bitch when people pointed that out like it happened in the screenshot above.
Brianna Wu / John Flynt - Original Thread
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Possibe. Maybe she just picked the most "controversial" option to generate more buzz and bitch when people pointed that out like it happened in the screenshot above.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
I like this trend of shitty feminists being puppets of shitty men.
I'm also glad to know Cupcake Crisis is for preschool/kindergarten girls, but in that case, I don't think the title should contain the word "crisis."
I'm also glad to know Cupcake Crisis is for preschool/kindergarten girls, but in that case, I don't think the title should contain the word "crisis."
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2014
I think it's more to do with she doesn't really know shit about games or game companies and EA/Activision is the only company that makes games that she can think of. Maybe because one of her boyfriends had Madden NFL 2000 or something and played it forever, with the EA logo staring them in the face.
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2013
Wait that was Frank?
Holy shit I thought it was just some idiot calling her who took the bait. Which I guess is kinda the same.
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2015
Oh, are you "going to start looking at" it? That's a real firm commitment there, John.
I'm sure it will be delivered in a "timely" manner, like every other empty promise you make - PC, Mac, VR, other games, legal fund, etc etc.
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2014
What a cheap bitch.
Android Test devices? You can enable developer mode by navigating through the phone settings to the "About Phone" menu and holding a finger press on it for five seconds. The only requirements are that you own a fucking Android device and you have a google account you can register to use the various SDK packages (which are in fact free so long as your apps are developed only for personal use, otherwise you gotta sign some agreements if you wanna sell).
Obviously, the writing is on the wall: Brianna Wu doesn't understand the first thing about reverse-engineering their own goddamn iOS app. So they're jumping ship to the far less restrictive Android/Java based platform, since IIRC there was nothing about Android somehow getting focus for R60 (because what the fuck else would such an announcement imply?) but I get the feeling, sooner or later, Wuwu's gonna blow a fuse in trying to deal with Google Play's stipulations.
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2014
Wait, so gamers don't want to hear any criticism of their media or listen to a dissenting, controversial opinion about it?
You sure about that, luv?
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2013
What GSXOffice can't fix this?
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2013
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Especially when defending EA, which is basically on the ethical level of the Mafia. Fuck any cunt that supports that shitty operation.
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2014
I'm sure she would rather get speaking engagements on other subjects actually.
Fucking aye this thing is just about impossible to stomach. I extracted the closed captioning from youtube in case you want to search or whatever.
MALE SPEAKER: Greetings.
Today we want to welcome Brianna Wu, who
is the co-founder and head of development at Giant Spacekat,
the game studio nearby.
She is also on a couple of podcasts at Relay FM--
Isometric, which is about the gaming industry,
and Rocket, which I think is about assorted geekery topics.
So welcome, Brianna.
[APPLAUSE]
BRIANNA WU: Thank you so much for coming today.
All right.
I want to thank Google for having me today.
And you know, [? Kose, ?] I know you
were responsible for getting me here,
so I definitely appreciate that.
My name is Briana Wu.
I'm head of development at Giant Spacekat.
I'm kind of an expert in the Unreal Engine.
You know, when I got into this field,
like most software engineers, I did this
because I love engineering, I love programming,
I love all this geeky stuff.
When I was a child, I remember, my parents were
so hesitant to get me a computer,
because they knew that the moment they did,
I would just stay in my room non-stop
and never leave the house.
So when I find myself, especially in this last year,
kind of being an unintentional figure for women in tech,
I just want to let you know, this
isn't why I got into this field in the first place.
That leads to our first slide.
Why do we have to talk about this?
What I've discovered along the way
is that we really don't have a choice-- women in this field--
to talk about gender issues.
These things we're going to be talking about today,
they really make or break the careers of women in this field.
Sometime I sit there and listen to my male colleagues
in the field, and I watch what they tweet
and what they talk about.
It really amazes me just how little
thought they have to apply to some of these social things
that a lot of women engineers have to talk about and think
about every single day-- little things like being talked over
in meetings, not being recommended for promotions.
Google itself has done a lot of really wonderful work
on unconscious bias.
What I want you to know is, I would rather
be up here talking about anything else today--
Unreal Engine, implementing Unreal on Android, OpenGL,
just about anything.
But the only way it's going to get better for me
and the other women that work in this field
is by talking openly about that.
So this can be a presentation today-- I'm not Oprah Winfrey,
I'm a software engineer, and I'm just
going to lay it out on the table for you
in the same way I would a software bug.
When I made this talk a few years ago, I was on my way
down to WWDC, and I kind of threw it together on a whim.
What really struck me at the time
is these issues of gender in tech had really come to a head.
This was early in 2014.
My friend Julie Ann Horvath received
a lot of gender based harassment at GitHub.
I'm sure you read about that.
There was a founder that was accused
in some really horrific ways of beating up his girlfriend 152
times on tape.
You have things like Code Babes coming out.
Google, which I think speaks to your credit,
now have released your numbers of diversity in the workforce.
I think it's really worth noting that when that story came out
in 2014, I and a lot of people were like, this isn't so good.
But with you being open with that number,
you started to see a trend of other companies
like Apple bringing that number out, and it's not any better.
So I think that speaks to your credit.
And for me, every single time I give this talk,
it's more and more frustrating to me
because there are these incidents that
break out about what women in tech
are facing that make the news.
And every single time, it just gets
longer and longer and longer.
It got to the point where I couldn't even
update these slides.
It would just keep going through it for 10 minutes.
So we're just going to go through it super quick here.
For me, one of the most bizarre experiences of my life
is I prepared this talk before Gamergate happened to me.
Now, I don't know if you're aware of what's
happened to me in this year.
I'm up to 165 death threats in the last 11 months
in this field.
I have to talk to the FBI and prosecutors
this week about updates in my case
and trying to get some of these things prosecuted.
What I've kind of unintentionally found
is by speaking out on these issues,
it's literally put my life in danger.
I hope that kind of communicates to you
how strongly I feel about being up here
talking about this today.
So what we're going to do is we're
going to go through nine things very quickly,
and there's going to kind of be a negative,
and there's going to be a positive.
What we're going to be talking about
is some unconscious things that men in this field tend to do.
And before we get into this, I just
really want to make this clear.
Google has done some amazing work on unconscious bias,
and it's really important to note, these problems,
if you do them, do not make you a bad person.
I myself have some of the same unconscious bias myself.
I remember, I was at Apple two years ago,
and I was sitting there, and a man
was trying to sell me a computer,
and a woman was trying to sell me a computer.
And I found myself unconsciously realizing,
I was talking more to the man about my computer needs,
and I'm a woman in tech figure.
We all have problems with these kind of unconscious biases.
So I just want you to know, this is not personal.
This is just talking about a problem in an objective way.
So the first thing I would like to talk about
is, you need to stop treating sexism
like it's just another controversy to discuss.
There is an inevitable pattern that happens.
Two days ago, I wrote a piece for Polygon praising Kojima's
team for making women a playable character in "Metal Gear Solid
5."
The game has gotten quite a bit of sexist controversy.
This is a piece I didn't think would be controversial,
because I was actually praising an aspect of the game-- again,
they had gotten a lot of feminist criticism.
And what I found to happen was, although my response was
a lot more positive than usual, I
was inundated with men talking to me,
emailing me, writing me, dynamiting into of my house,
doing whatever, wanting to discuss it with me.
And this is a really common theme
when we're talking about sexism in the workplace.
This is not like talking about the ending of "Lost" or a TV
show.
This is not like trying to talk about,
is a blue dress or a gold dress?
These are deeply, deeply personal issues for all of us.
And what ends up happening is sometimes,
when you try to talk about your lived experiences
in this field, you'll have male engineers who come up to you,
and they start talking about it like it's
a problem of implementing a framework.
Like they are completely objective
and just trying to think through it.
What I think they don't realize in
that moment is it's a real unconscious problem,
because what you are doing is kind of saying,
prove to me that you're right.
And there's an unconscious message there
that my lived experiences are not-- your opinions
on this trump my own lived experience.
This is not a very helpful way to do it.
What you're unconsciously doing is when I say, look,
I have had x problem of sexism with x, y, and z,
and you're like, yeah, prove it to me,
yeah, well, have you thought about this,
oh, well, it's just x, y, or z, you
are dismissing my life and the difficult things
that I've gone through.
What we need you to do is to start showing basic sensitivity
instead.
I want to give you an example.
I had a really good, lifelong friend of mine
that went through a divorce a few years ago.
I knew his wife, I knew his child,
and when my friend was sitting there talking
to me about his divorce, I didn't sit there and say, hey,
but did you really try to make her happy?
Were you really present there?
I know you feel like she's being unreasonable on this,
but I'm sure it was just blah.
That would be unbelievably obnoxious, right?
But that is what happens every single time
that women start talking about our experiences in tech.
And again, this is not intentional.
But what men in this field end up doing
is telling us that our own interpretation of our own lives
is incorrect.
You need to understand, when we talk about this stuff,
it is very difficult for us.
It is emotionally risky.
We're trusting you.
That leads us into this.
This is something that happened back in 2014.
I'm a woman in my 30s, OK?
If I'm telling you I get catcalled down
the street, trust me, that's something
that's really happening.
I'm an engineer.
I'm talking about being out in San Francisco at WWDC
and getting harassed constantly on the street.
So I tweet about this, and I end up
getting literally hundreds of responses
to this telling me that my interpretation of my own life
is wrong.
This happens all the time in technology.
Again, this is very hurtful.
What we need you to do instead is just stop doing that.
Again, this is every single day of our lives.
There are some things that you have to live to experience,
and let me give you an example.
We've talked a lot this year about police violence
towards people of color, particularly black people.
I have the privilege of being white in our society.
When I get pulled over by the cops,
I don't have to stress that the cops are
going to be violent to me.
A lot of people in this room today have that same privilege.
I can't speak to any number of experiences in life,
and that is true for all of us.
So when someone is black and they are telling you
about their experiences with law enforcement,
you need to just listen to it, and understand
that that lived experience trumps your own hypotheses
about the situation.
If someone gay is telling you about coming out
to their parents, or the discrimination they
faced as a child, you need to listen to them.
If someone is transgender and they are telling you
about the difficulties in transitioning,
you need to listen to them.
Even if the opinion were hypothetically incorrect,
the emotion that that person is feeling is absolutely true.
I want to tell a very quick story about this
related to this point.
A few years ago, they were doing a study on Alzheimer's patients
who have this phenomena of, when you put them in assisted living
care facilities, they wake up, they're terrified,
they're confused, they're scared,
they think they should be home, and they're not.
They're in a strange hospital.
What they would end up doing is constantly
leaving this hospital and going down to the bus stop,
where they would be waited on for hours.
What this study found out is that the people in the hospital
would go down and start yelling at these poor, elderly people
that were suffering from the disease.
What you need to understand is in that situation,
even if the patients-- if the facts of the situation
were not that they were in a place they weren't supposed
to be, their terror was absolutely real.
Their frustration was absolutely real.
So when these hospital employees were coming down and yelling
at them, they didn't realize that their emotions
in that situation were very true.
What you need to do, again, is start just
simply respecting those lived experiences.
These are our lives.
These are our stories.
When you respect our lived experience,
you end up respecting us as individuals.
This really makes me frustrated.
There is a phenomena when you talk
about women in tech issues.
I swear, it is like you're in court, and all of a sudden,
you end up getting it flipped, and you end up
talking about how these issues affect men.
It is amazing to me just how instantly the script flips,
and I find the subject-- if I'm talking
about the things I face, the subject instantly
comes to if it's fair to men.
Let me give you an example.
Yesterday, Apple had a rather large event.
They were talking about the iPad Pro, the new Apple TV,
and I was live tweeting a few thoughts about it.
I couldn't help but note for the first 30 minutes of it,
there were barely any women on stage.
So I tweet something to the effect of, well, here
are all Apple's white guys, here are all Microsoft's white guys,
and now we've got Adobe's white guys coming on stage.
I'm deluged with tweets from people saying,
well, you can't have quotas for women you can't do this,
how dare you insinuates that men shouldn't
be on stage, which is a really, really, really,
unhelpful response.
I want to talk a little bit about where that comes from.
You may have heard the word privilege a little bit lately.
And the truth is, men in this field
are kind of blind to how great you've got it.
I don't think you understand what
it's like to go to an engineering event
and be the only person that looks like you there.
I don't think you understand what
it's like to go to a recruiting event
and have people talk to your husband,
assuming he's the engineer, when he can't even update
the software on his iPhone.
This entire system has been built for you,
for your comfort.
When we start talking about other people's comfort,
you're so used to it working for you
that just the slightest bit of upset--
there's a lot of defensiveness that
really happens very quickly with that, and it's not helpful.
So again, this is not about you, and I promise you,
every single woman engineer in this room
has heard these opinions 100 times before,
like a tape on repeat.
With all respect, I have heard the argument
against quotas for women in tech hundreds of times this week.
There is a really, really beautiful thing
called the ring theory that I'd like to talk about.
The idea is how not to say the wrong thing to someone.
So the idea is, you are right here
in the center of the circle when something goes wrong for you.
Imagine if you have cancer, or you've just lost your spouse,
or you're going through a divorce,
or your parents have died, or you've got 165 death threats
in a year.
Imagine you were here in the center of the circle.
This is not a good place to be.
So what the psychologist figured out
is, when you were in the center of the circle-- she had cancer.
She had a colleague come to her while she
was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery who
said to her, well, you need to realize this cancer isn't
all about you, it's affecting people in our department.
And she thought a lot about that conversation
and why that was so obnoxious.
So there's this thing called the ring theory.
At the center of the circle-- which again, is not
a good place to be-- is the aggrieved.
In the outer limits of the circle might be close
family members, loved ones, your spouse.
On the outer circle might be colleagues, and on the thing
here might be strangers.
The idea is, comfort flows in, grievance flows out.
If you're not in the center of the circle,
or in one of these inner rings, inevitably making it about you
is unfortunately obnoxious.
What you need to do is very simple.
Just listen instead.
OK.
This is a really big one.
I want to talk very openly and honestly about this.
I'm a 38-year-old engineer.
I don't have any children, and my husband
and I made the choice to really hyper focus on our careers.
I had been blind to this for a long time,
and I was very blind to this until I
had women with children come work for me,
or people on my staff get pregnant.
In the game industry, where I work,
we talk a lot about things like death threats,
rape threats, sexual harassment, women
getting hit on at conventions.
Something we're almost silent about
is the way we treat women with children in tech.
And this doesn't personally affect me,
but I want to tell you straight up, in my career,
I've seen more women leave over this issue than anything else.
Someone in a society has to have the children.
It's not like women made a choice about this, right?
And what I think people don't understand
is how ridiculously expensive child care is.
Here in Massachusetts, do you know
that having day care for your child
is as expensive as tuition at UMass?
I want you really to think about that.
Every single year your child is in day care,
that costs tuition and fees.
Absolutely.
It's unconscionable.
This is a really big deal.
So what ends up happening when women have children in tech
is they end up slowly, suddenly, being shown the door.
Again, I have unconscious biases, too,
and what I found at first when my employee with a child--
she got pregnant, my co-founder, and I found myself
wrestling with all these unconscious biases.
Is Amanda going to be present at our workplace?
Is she going to be able to get her job done?
Is she going to start talking about her kids non-stop, which
was absolutely wrong for me to think.
I've thought about that and I've grown from that.
This is the unconscious bias a lot of people have.
What you need to know-- and this is for parents of all genders,
not just women-- part of respecting
a parent in the workforce means respecting their children.
That means if a parent needs to leave
at five to go pick their child up,
respecting that person means respecting
that their family comes first.
This is really, really important.
This is a really hard one, and I've run into this a lot
in Boston.
I can't tell you how many networking events
I've been to in a bar, at night, with a bunch of dudes
in their 20s, drinking.
Right here in Boston there was one of them we went to a while
back that was right across the street.
What has happened in the field of computer science
and engineering is, this is a field that
was built from the ground up to be by men for men.
I want to stress, this is unconscious bias.
But what ends up happening is you
have a culture of networking that
is built to serve men in the way that you
like to network, like going to a bar and having beer.
Let's take that example, for a minute,
because I'd for you to think about it.
Let's say you were an engineer at Google in your 20s,
and you choose to go have a meeting out
with the guys on your team at the bar
next door after you leave.
Let's think about how that's affecting women.
If you're a woman in, say, your 20s, I think you may not know,
that doesn't feel emotionally very frequently
like a safe place for you-- a lot of guys drinking heavily
and you're the lone woman there.
I can think of three specific friends that have been sexually
harassed in that situation to the point
that they've been forced to leave their company,
and HR hasn't helped them.
It's not the best situation.
If you are a woman in your 30s, maybe you
have children, how many moms do you
know that really want to go hit a bar at 8 o'clock
at night when their kids have to go to school the next day?
This is one of these situations where the system has been built
to work for a very certain kind of person,
and it very unintentionally excludes a lot of people.
And let's be honest-- networking is how you make careers.
It makes or breaks it.
This is really important.
So what we need people to do, what I need everyone
in this room to do, is to think about widening your network.
If Google has a networking meeting or recruitment
meeting to bring in engineers, maybe
don't have them in a bar at night.
Maybe have a luncheon here at one o'clock
like we're having right now.
Maybe do it earlier.
It's not enough to just simply believe
that women need to be included.
I'm a software engineer.
If I go write some code for my game and it doesn't run,
the problem is with my code.
I don't sit there and go, well, I just
don't know why it's not working.
We'll just keep compiling it and that will be that.
The method that we use to recruit engineers in our field
is not working.
I've heard from so many people when
they tell me, well, we put a job posting online,
and no women applied, and that's just the end of that.
We have made so many advancements
in the last 15, 20 years, and yet we
can't look at the hiring process and realize it
overlooks a lot of candidates.
Let me tell you a story.
It's a story of how the lead engineer at my team
came to work at my company.
This is a woman that was fresh out of college.
She had not gone on the straight and narrow.
She didn't get a CS degree and then just instantly
get into the workforce.
She had some life adventures along the way.
She had been working for us part time,
and we were just dazzled by her work.
She was doing technical rigging in 3-D, which is
very, very difficult process.
We loved her work and we kept encouraging
her to apply to the lead engineer position,
and she didn't do it.
I asked her to keep coming in and sit with me
as we were interviewing other candidates for this position.
As we did that, she realized that she
had the exact same qualifications as the men
we were interviewing for that position,
and that gave her the confidence to move forward.
Just for whatever reason-- and it's really
too much to get into here-- a lot of women
are kind of trained by society to not believe in ourselves,
and we don't always apply for these kinds of positions.
So what you need to do is to widen your networking efforts
to make sure you're looking at absolutely everyone.
We face a lot more inertia to getting our foot in the door.
OK.
This is hard.
So many times, when you try to talk to people in tech
about even a very small behavioural thing they might
have done that is not helpful, it gets defensive very, very,
very quickly.
And I think part of this problem is self identifying yourself
as a racist or a sexist or a homophobe
is nearly impossible, because we get
all these messages from society that these things are bad.
They're terrible.
What ends up happening is you tell yourself, hey,
I'm not a bad person.
I'm a nice guy.
I care about women.
You think of this extreme example,
and you say, I'm not that, and you self identify yourself
as a nice person, and you're unable to hear
any of the criticism there.
And I want to be straight up with you.
I think we could do a better job with this
as a society of giving people a break.
I think we have a really unfortunate tendency to,
when someone makes one mistake, often unconscious, often
unintentional, kind of crucifying them about it,
to be honest.
I make mistakes all the time in my field.
I've told you about some today.
I don't think that makes me a bad person.
We have got to get past this so we
can hear about these behavior problems and move forward.
I think it's really telling in all the years I've
been speaking about women in tech issues,
I have almost never had a guy come up to me afterwards
and say, hey Brianna, you know what, I am part of the problem.
There has almost never happened.
It's always those other guys.
It's always the other examples.
The truth is, if you think that the problem is someone else,
you are part of the problem.
We've talked a lot this year about people of color,
and again, to give an example where
I have failed-- we had my staff for the last game
that we shipped, "Revolution 60," happened
to be all white people.
I looked at that and I realized that I was not
bringing people of color into my own company,
to evaluate people of color for these positions.
I realized I had a responsibility
to change myself, change when network happens
and make sure it was bringing people of color
in for those positions.
This is a mindset where I'm not saying, hey, I'm not a racist,
hey, I have nothing to fix here, hey, I have no part
to play in making it better.
This is a very helpful attitude that all of us need to have.
Again, this is all about responsibility and thinking
critically about your behavior.
What I love about one of the videos
I've seen from Google, An Unconscious Bias,
is what they found is the science shows
if you take one of the things I'm talking about today,
if you just take one thing, if you say hey,
I'm not networking enough with women, hey,
I am invalidating people's experiences-- if you make
a commitment to just change one thing today-- the science shows
that that is going to cause you to start thinking about more
things, and it will make you a better person and a better team
mate.
We all make mistakes.
There is a misconception, I feel, in tech,
that the problem women face is like Don Draper sitting
in a tech office somewhere, drinking some scotch,
and talking about how broads can't code.
Like that's the hypothetical situation
that we think discrimination is in this field.
I have never had, from a professional,
someone tell me to go back to the kitchen.
These kind of moments are not the real problem.
What we've set up is this idea in our minds
that the real problem is some raging sexist stereotype
from the 50s.
The science shows that's not quite right.
Sexism in tech, according to the science of it,
is death by 1,000 cuts.
And what happens is that it's every single day you're
in this field, if you're someone that's a person of color,
or someone that's gay, someone that's a woman,
you find yourself slowly dying the death of 1,000 cuts.
And how that happens is it's little things all day long.
People not inviting you to meetings,
people underestimating your capacity as an engineer, people
assuming that you don't know your field,
even when you may have dedicated your entire career for it.
I had an example yesterday.
I was talking at the Apple TV event.
I will tell you, straight up, I know more
about running the Unreal Engine on Apple platforms, Apple
mobile platforms, than almost anyone else.
You can probably find, 20, 30 people,
maybe, in the world that understand
the subject as much as I do.
I was talking critically about some of the engineering
choices that Apple made when developing
this platform, in particular the 200 megabyte
limit, which is kind of obviated by a cloud solution.
I was inundated by hundreds and hundreds of people
writing me, assuming they knew more than I did in this field,
and telling me I was wrong, when all they had
was a rather obvious fact that was mentioned in some tech
documents.
This is a really good example of a death of 1,000 cuts.
This is just one minor thing that happens,
but it happens over and over and over and over and over.
They're called micro aggressions,
and they kind of slowly push you out of the field.
Another good example.
At Apple's event yesterday, they happened
to Photoshop a picture of a woman
into smiling using the new iPad pro.
This is a pretty tone deaf moment, right?
Guys don't understand how often, when
you're walking down the street, you're instructed to smile.
You're told you would be prettier
if you would just smile.
This happens all the time.
When Apple had not had any women on stage yet at that point,
and they're Photoshopping a woman in smiling,
it's a really tone deaf moment.
That's something a lot of guys I saw on Twitter
just didn't understand.
It was just a little thing that was really
just kind of obnoxious.
It pushes us away.
This is a really good example.
This happened last year.
This is just a slide at a conference, and you know,
it's completely tone deaf.
Stuff like that will happen to you almost every
single day if you're a woman in this field.
What we need to understand is real sexism
in this field is very, very subtle.
A good example of this happened here in Boston with Harmonix.
You might have read this week that they got $15 million
in venture capital funding.
A friend of mine that worked at Harmonix
was telling me this story.
She was setting out in a meeting and they
were looking at getting a new person to come in
for an engineering position.
The team leader kept using masculine pronouns
when asking someone to come in for the job.
Well, this engineer he should have x years of experience
with x, y, and z.
He should be x.
He should live in x.
He should have this kind of background.
She stopped him in the meeting, and said, excuse me,
this could be a man or woman that we hire for this position.
This engineer proceeded to then completely talk over her,
belittle her objection, and said, this is not a problem.
He means everybody.
That's just a very small thing that happens.
It's subtle.
This is a really hard thing to understand,
and this is something, again, I have learned in my lifetime.
The absence of privilege is not oppression.
And I say this with all respect to all the male engineers
in this room, this is a system that really, really
works for you.
When we're talking about changing the system just
a little bit so other people can come in
and you can have awesome people on your team,
we are talking about changing things.
And I want to be clear, it is going
to disrupt some of the boys' club atmosphere
that exists in tech.
That is not oppression.
That is a quality.
I want to give you a very quick story.
So I was over at MIT the other day,
and I was giving a presentation.
Afterwords, I had some people that were really moved by it,
and they were telling me stories about being out with drinks
with the guys afterwards.
There was this one engineer that was on the team
and he was sitting there.
He was having drinks out with his buddies,
and he was really, really angry about the talk that I gave.
He was talking about how he felt like he had never
fit in anywhere in his whole life-- something
I have a lot of empathy for.
I can understand that, because I felt
the entire same way growing up.
What he was saying was he was really, really scared.
The attack was going to change to this place
where he couldn't have bro time, couldn't
have pictures of bikini girls on his screen saver,
and it would be a different kind of atmosphere.
As much as my heart goes out to that person,
because I think we all have a need
to want to belong to a social group,
it's not fair for him to prioritize his own comfort
over just equality for gay people,
for women, for people of color.
The culture tech has been built in your own image.
I was at PAX Dev two weeks ago, and I found myself-- there
was this weird moment.
It was a 23-year-old kid.
He's a white guy, and he's sitting there talking to me,
and he was talking about how he was
terrified that he was never going to find an engineering
position.
And the whole time I was sitting there talking to him,
I was realizing all the assumptions I had in my mind.
He looked like an engineer, he had kind of messy hair,
and he was just wearing a t-shirt
at a professional event.
He kind of looked like that stereotype.
And in the back of my mind, I'm going, of course
is going to find a job.
I found myself saying, I don't know anything
about his technical expertise, I don't know anything
about his education, I don't know anything
about how well he plays with others.
But he looks like the part, right?
It's just another example of the entire tech industry
being built in your image.
When you close your eyes and think about someone working
in this field, it probably doesn't
look like me or other women.
And the truth is, I get so much hate mail
in speaking out against this.
This is before Gamergate that I got this.
This is just absolutely terrible.
It's stuff like this I get every single day speaking out
about this.
This is something that would be of benefit to everyone
here to understand.
Let's be straight out.
Tech is going to change.
The momentum is on the side of women and people
of color and other minorities.
We are talking about these problems more and more and more
and I feel very confident that tech in 10 years
is going to look different than it does today.
I grew up in Mississippi, which is
a state that was described by MLK as sweltering
with the heat of injustice and oppression.
Growing up, I sure did meet a lot
of people that were extremely homophobic or racist.
Even in my own social groups, in college,
I would find these people.
What will inevitably happen, especially with gay rights,
we'd kind of have this person there
that was ranting about gay people
being able to get married, and they'd slowly be pushed out
of our social circle.
Do you know what I mean?
They just had views that were kind of dated
and we started moving away from them.
In the same way-- I'm talking about this
in an utterly pragmatic terms-- this change is happening.
Your work force will include more women in the future.
It's not just that this is the right thing to do.
This is to your own career advantage
to develop the skills to learn to work with other people.
One of the best skills for any tech professional
is being able to work well with a team.
A lot of times, when I talk about women in tech issues,
there's this assumption that women in tech
is just a chick thing, right?
Oh, well, you know, that's just a women problem,
and I don't really have to deal with that.
I was at a tech event last night.
It was a VIP event with investors and women startup
founders.
As much as I love events like that,
it sometimes feels like there's a trade off in this field
where the powers that be will let women
go have our lunches over here, and they'll
pay for us to have an auditorium and do some networking events.
But nothing really changes.
I'm going to tell you, in all honesty, straight up,
sexism in tech is not a problem with women's behavior.
I'm going to say that one more time.
Sexism in tech is not a problem with women's behavior.
This is a male behavior problem.
I can be up here and I can speak to you about changing this,
but the only person that can make this better is you.
What we're going to do is we're going to start
a conversation right now.
I'll answer any question in the entire world.
Who's going to be brave enough to put their hand up first?
And we will do that.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi.
Thanks for having the courage to come here and give this talk.
BRIANNA WU: I appreciate that.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Your slides are refreshingly direct.
I didn't expect him to be that so, because I
found that people don't seem to respond to them that well.
But in your experience, if you're with a bunch of people,
one of them makes a comment that they don't understand
is inappropriate.
Have you found it's better to actually
be more direct with them and just say,
straight up, that's wrong, instead of saying,
well, maybe it's not quite like that?
BRIANNA WU: That's a wonderful question.
Let me answer it equally directly.
If you're a woman and you do that, that direct conversation,
you will get tremendous blowback,
which is why so many of the women I know in game dev
are very, very careful about dancing around this issue,
and just hinting to it as subtly as she can,
because she gets so much blowback.
This is where you personally can do the most
good in the entire world.
With the Gamergate thing, we do have men on our field
that are speaking now.
Chris Kluwe is one of them.
Arthur Chu would be another.
They don't get a fraction of the death threats that I get,
or Anita gets, or Zoe Quinn gets, or Randi Harper gets.
What happens is when you have that male privilege,
you are able to kind of pull your buddy aside and be like,
hey, can we just talk about that?
That's not really cool what you just said.
Just have an open conversation with them about that.
That's almost no risk for you.
I think if you're a woman, you need
to realize there are going to be blowback for that.
I personally made the choice to just answer it directly.
I'm not Oprah Winfrey, again, but this
is where I would really ask guys to step up and help us out.
You can do so much good, you have no idea.
Let's go to another question
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I suspect most people here in the room
are probably on your side, are probably
very receptive to this message.
BRIANNA WU: Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, I am too, and thank you
for coming to give the talk.
Do you think it's better to try to engage
people who aren't here and maybe wouldn't be as receptive?
Or do you think it's better for them
to come to this conversation of their own volition?
BRIANNA WU: Sure.
I think that's a really good question.
Did anyone else here see the piece
on Vox last week that was talking
what nerds don't understand about politics by Dr.
[INAUDIBLE]?
Did you see that?
That was a 10 out of 10 talk.
I called up that writer on the phone afterwards,
and I started asking him that exact question, how
we could get that answer.
Let me tell you about the science of it.
I know Google nerds love science.
He has a lot of expertise in climate change denial, people
that don't want to believe in global warming.
What happens is, with some people, you are correct,
it is impossible to change their minds.
There's nothing that you can say that is ever
going to make them feel differently on that.
You cannot scientifically change someone's opinion.
What you can change scientifically
is someone's behavior.
The human mind has this really interesting trait
that we'd like to think of ourselves
as rational creatures, but we're not.
We have this psychological trick where
we decide how we want to feel, and then
our minds act like lawyers and justify the thing
that we want to believe.
If you're a programmer, you've learned to short circuit
that to a certain extent.
We tend to be very logical creatures,
but that is the overall human tendency.
You can't change someone's opinion.
You can change their behavior.
So what happens if you make a social cost
to that person doing something, if every single time they
speak up, they face consequences for that?
Even if it's just some guy going, hey, that's
not really cool, hey, that made me feel uncomfortable, hey,
can you think about this way, maybe?
What happens over time is you change that behavior, and then
the psychological trick where you decide how you want to feel
and then the mind justifies it, you
decide that you want to feel like not doing this,
because the social cost is less.
And then your attitudes slowly start to change.
With the climate change denial thing,
this would be if you can get through any way
possible-- to get tax rebates, to get people
to put solar panels on their roof
to save on energy efficiency.
What they found when you do that is their opinions change.
You can have the most dedicated climate change denier,
but once they get that government tax
rebate to put solar panels on their roof,
suddenly, they're a proponent of renewable energy.
It's exactly the same way in the field.
So scientifically, that is the best weapon that we have.
Do we have another question?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: First of all, thank you
for the choice you're making.
I cannot imagine choosing to live a life where death threats
were just sort of a background fact of it.
BRIANNA WU: It's really bad.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think it's necessary to have conversations
in this space, for there to be people like you,
so I'm grateful for you for doing something I
don't think I'd be able to do.
The question I was curious about asking
is, do you have some understanding or intuition
about where the depth of vitriol comes from?
BRIANNA WU: Sure.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Some of it, I buy,
is being the confusion between absence of privilege
and oppression, and I get that, but it
doesn't feel like enough to me, and there's something about it
that I'm just not wrapping my brain.
BRIANNA WU: Oh, I spent an entire year thinking
about this question.
This is very insightful.
This is as best as I can figure it,
because that's getting at the core of the problem, which
I love.
How many people here are gamers?
Can you raise your hand if you're a gamer?
Great.
The biggest mistake my parents ever made
was getting Nintendo entertainment system in 1985.
I remember opening that box at Christmas,
and I remember my grades went to hell, I stopped socializing,
I stopped doing my chores, and that
was all I did-- I still do it.
What I remember about that era-- and this was 30 years ago,
like Mario turns 30 soon, guys, this is really amazing--
what I remember about this era was
how marketed the product was for boys.
And this shows up in all these subtle ways.
Do you know there have only been two core Mario
games where you could play as a girl character, Princess Peach?
The first was "Super Mario 2" in 1988,
and then as far as the core Mario titles,
we had to wait 25 years for Princess Peach
to be playable again.
Making this a boy space was very deliberately chosen
by the Nintendo marketing team back in 1985.
They said that they were targeting
boys between 5 and 10.
Then when the Super Nintendo came out in 1982,
they just rewrote the same document and said,
we're targeting boys 5 to 15 now.
What has happened is, I think we'd
like to say that the problem is a bunch
of misogynistic 15-year-olds, and that
is part of the problem.
But I think if you want to look at it more deeply,
there are all these unconscious messages.
They've been telling boys, now 35-year-old men,
that games are their space.
It's not women's space.
It happens in all these subtle ways.
Princess Peach is always waiting to be rescued in the castle.
When women are in games, we are frequently over sexualized.
We're always the sidekick or the damsel in distress,
and we have huge, giant boobs with lots of cleavage out.
And what it is, is 1,000 unconscious signals that
have been sent to men saying, this is for you,
this is not for women.
They have this intellectual shortcut
where they might be theoretically fine with women
playing games, but the instant we bring their lived experience
into it and say, well, it really hurts me to never
be able to be the playable character in a game,
well, I'd like to see a woman larger than size six
represented in a video game.
How many games can you think of where you've seen
a mom as a playable character?
Do know what percentage of women are going
to have kids in their lifetime?
It's all unconscious by the people in our field,
but they feel-- it's kind of the same as politics.
Certain people feel their identity is being taken away,
and they get very defensive.
Did you have a follow up?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I do.
BRIANNA WU: Go ahead.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: If I take what you're saying,
and I take it to sort of try and wrap my brain around it,
what I'm hearing is that people create or adopt
or dive into spaces that are restricted to one set of people
when they are threatened by another set of people.
So I'm hearing you as saying that people who are feeling--
and you can look at what they say online,
and it's pretty clear, too.
BRIANNA WU: Look through my Twitter mentions sometime.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Saying that there
is a class of men that feel threatened
by the presence of women in gaming seems a little obvious,
but it does bring up the next question, which
is sort of, why?
What's going on there that those people feel like they
need that space to feel safe?
BRIANNA WU: Let me only tell you another a quick story.
I grew up in Mississippi, so my senator
at the time, Trent Lott-- I actually
worked for him one summer.
We'll leave that there.
Don't judge me.
I was very young.
My senator, Trent Lott, once did a study for the Republican
Party in the south-- and I'm keeping this very apolitical,
we're just talking about facts here--
he did a study looking at what would
drive voter behavior to vote for the Republicans that year.
They tested all these questions like, the Democrats will
raise taxes, blah, blah, blah.
They found this one question that raised through the roof
the response of it.
The question was, the Democrats want to take away your culture.
And white Southern males just responded off the charts
to this, just ridiculously high.
What happens is, there's a really deep set
evolutionary part of our brain where
we're programmed from back when we were living in caves to have
in groups and out groups, and we're just programmed to say,
we're in this group, and then this group over here
is the other, and they are a threat.
You can see that portrayed all through history, through war,
through all of this stuff.
What's happening is it's really tapping
into a very reptilian, primordial part of the brain
where people feel like, this is their in group.
Their identity is based in it, and they're scared
it's going to be taken away.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to pass
on a question from a speaker last month, [INAUDIBLE]
who just wanted to know what we might see next from you,
and also, how friends can help with anything
you're working on.
BRIANNA WU: Oh, that's a really great question.
I love her.
You should check out her book.
What I am working on next is-- as if dealing with Gamergate
were not big enough for me, we are working on the venture
capital scene right now to do a multi-million dollar expansion.
I can't talk about some of it, but we're
very interested in what we're calling emotional game play
dynamic.
To me, I feel like we have reinvented this wheel
for 30 years in the video game industry.
How many first person shooters have you played?
Because let's be honest, Call of Duty
is not that different than Doom.
It's like we keep reinventing the same idea because it's
the same people there.
What we're doing is taking a step back
from the entire video game industry,
from all the assumptions that we've made, and we're saying,
what is the goal in the video game industry?
To me, the goal is a holodeck.
The goal is a holodeck and to go and interact
with different kinds of people in emotional ways
and learn things about yourself along the way.
As we really have an explosion in VR technology,
we have some very interesting ideas about frameworks
to develop from this.
We're raising millions of dollars for that.
As far as how to help me-- guys, if I personally
dealt with all of my death threats myself,
I would not do anything else with my time.
There's just too much of it.
And it's sad, but I'm just being straight with you,
being up here today, people will see this video on Google,
I will get threats, I will get attacked.
I have to employ in my company a full time person
to deal with my harassment, to talk to prosecutors,
to talk to the FBI, to document this stuff,
because I could not work in this field if I did.
I have a Patreon where people can help pay for that position,
because startups don't have room for extra positions
to pay people to file death threat
charges with prosecutors.
That's how you can help.
Maybe we'll give a link to that in the video.
Thanks for that question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Stepping back to the attitudes
that lead to the horribleness-- it makes me wonder,
were the cultural watchdogs right all along,
that these games were corrupting us during our formative years
with destructive attitudes?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
BRIANNA WU: Can I tell you the weirdest story about that?
Who else here was a gamer in the 90s with Jack Thompson?
Do you remember that, when they were worried about "Mortal
Kombat" corrupting the youth?
I remember being a teenager and being
like, oh, that's so stupid, that's so dumb,
that's so full of crap.
I'm not saying that it's not, but I will tell you
an experience that I had.
They're coming out with "Hatred,"
which is this game that's a mass murder simulator.
You have a certain person on Steam
that is demanding the creators add modifiable tools so people
can put me in that game to kill, and Zoe Quinn,
and Anita Sarkeesian.
I have gamers that want to do that.
I keep thinking back to being a teenager
and my strong opinion about violence doesn't matter.
I'm just be a straight up, I don't have an answer there.
I think we should be able to make whatever games that we
want.
I'm certainly not pro censorship,
but I think something's really wrong in our industry.
I think we need to think about that.
Does that answer your question?
I'm not going to tell you we need to start censoring games.
I don't.
I think it's impossible in an age of digital distribution.
But what I do believe is that Nintendo,
Sony, Microsoft, and Steam have a responsibility
to think about the product that they're putting out.
When Steam reversed their decision
and did decide to release "Hatred" which
is made by neo Nazis-- it's a white power thing
to just go kill people.
You watch the trailer and there's
a woman begging on her knees for her life,
and you'll stick a shotgun in her mouth and kill her.
It is horrific.
I don't think you should censor that by the government,
and I think in an age of digital distribution anyone
can play the game if they want.
I think we should do that.
Can we do two question super quickly?
Great.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned a couple of micro aggression.
You mentioned mansplaining and interrupting.
I wonder if there's any others you
want to call out as maybe anything that's
specific to the software development environment?
BRIANNA WU: I think that a really big one
would be assuming women do not know their stuff.
That's a really, really big one.
It hurts a lot.
I think talking over women in meetings, and let me say this,
I love gender neutral examples.
Look, a lot of us here are software engineers.
Almost all the engineers I know are introverts.
I'm not, but the vast majority are.
What I have noticed in running my company is
if I don't take a firm hand, the extroverts end
up talking over everyone and introverts
can't get a word in edgewise.
This includes a lot of women.
If you are product manager, you have a strong responsibility
as a team leader to shut down the extroverts like me
for monopolising the entire conversation
and letting everyone be heard.
I could go into a whole bunch of them,
but I think that's a good example.
Last question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering--
there was a time in the late tube and early transistor days
when computer operators were mostly women,
and because [INAUDIBLE] switchboard operation,
it was basically seen as secretarial.
My question was, are there any lessons
we can draw from the path of computing?
Is there a time when it was indeed mostly women?
It wasn't a prestigious position.
It became a prestigious position, then came men.
Is there anything we can learn from the early part
of that history?
BRIANNA WU: Yes, that's a historical pattern.
Believe it or not, there's a huge pattern
through history of field coming along and being born.
It starts off as very prestigious,
and women are drawn to it, and there's a pattern over and over
again that men move into the field and end up changing it.
I would love to tell you what happened
in computing in those early days is like an aberration,
but it's not.
There is so much baggage that women
face to working as professional engineers.
I see this was someone my friends' children,
who are 14, 15 right now.
And they're put into a culture where beauty culture starts
telling them who their friends, are what they look like,
is so much more important than doing that work we all know
is so important, sitting in your bedroom
and learning how to code.
There are 1,000 messages like that we really
have to move past as a society.
I've got to leave it there today.
Thank you all for having me.
I appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
Today we want to welcome Brianna Wu, who
is the co-founder and head of development at Giant Spacekat,
the game studio nearby.
She is also on a couple of podcasts at Relay FM--
Isometric, which is about the gaming industry,
and Rocket, which I think is about assorted geekery topics.
So welcome, Brianna.
[APPLAUSE]
BRIANNA WU: Thank you so much for coming today.
All right.
I want to thank Google for having me today.
And you know, [? Kose, ?] I know you
were responsible for getting me here,
so I definitely appreciate that.
My name is Briana Wu.
I'm head of development at Giant Spacekat.
I'm kind of an expert in the Unreal Engine.
You know, when I got into this field,
like most software engineers, I did this
because I love engineering, I love programming,
I love all this geeky stuff.
When I was a child, I remember, my parents were
so hesitant to get me a computer,
because they knew that the moment they did,
I would just stay in my room non-stop
and never leave the house.
So when I find myself, especially in this last year,
kind of being an unintentional figure for women in tech,
I just want to let you know, this
isn't why I got into this field in the first place.
That leads to our first slide.
Why do we have to talk about this?
What I've discovered along the way
is that we really don't have a choice-- women in this field--
to talk about gender issues.
These things we're going to be talking about today,
they really make or break the careers of women in this field.
Sometime I sit there and listen to my male colleagues
in the field, and I watch what they tweet
and what they talk about.
It really amazes me just how little
thought they have to apply to some of these social things
that a lot of women engineers have to talk about and think
about every single day-- little things like being talked over
in meetings, not being recommended for promotions.
Google itself has done a lot of really wonderful work
on unconscious bias.
What I want you to know is, I would rather
be up here talking about anything else today--
Unreal Engine, implementing Unreal on Android, OpenGL,
just about anything.
But the only way it's going to get better for me
and the other women that work in this field
is by talking openly about that.
So this can be a presentation today-- I'm not Oprah Winfrey,
I'm a software engineer, and I'm just
going to lay it out on the table for you
in the same way I would a software bug.
When I made this talk a few years ago, I was on my way
down to WWDC, and I kind of threw it together on a whim.
What really struck me at the time
is these issues of gender in tech had really come to a head.
This was early in 2014.
My friend Julie Ann Horvath received
a lot of gender based harassment at GitHub.
I'm sure you read about that.
There was a founder that was accused
in some really horrific ways of beating up his girlfriend 152
times on tape.
You have things like Code Babes coming out.
Google, which I think speaks to your credit,
now have released your numbers of diversity in the workforce.
I think it's really worth noting that when that story came out
in 2014, I and a lot of people were like, this isn't so good.
But with you being open with that number,
you started to see a trend of other companies
like Apple bringing that number out, and it's not any better.
So I think that speaks to your credit.
And for me, every single time I give this talk,
it's more and more frustrating to me
because there are these incidents that
break out about what women in tech
are facing that make the news.
And every single time, it just gets
longer and longer and longer.
It got to the point where I couldn't even
update these slides.
It would just keep going through it for 10 minutes.
So we're just going to go through it super quick here.
For me, one of the most bizarre experiences of my life
is I prepared this talk before Gamergate happened to me.
Now, I don't know if you're aware of what's
happened to me in this year.
I'm up to 165 death threats in the last 11 months
in this field.
I have to talk to the FBI and prosecutors
this week about updates in my case
and trying to get some of these things prosecuted.
What I've kind of unintentionally found
is by speaking out on these issues,
it's literally put my life in danger.
I hope that kind of communicates to you
how strongly I feel about being up here
talking about this today.
So what we're going to do is we're
going to go through nine things very quickly,
and there's going to kind of be a negative,
and there's going to be a positive.
What we're going to be talking about
is some unconscious things that men in this field tend to do.
And before we get into this, I just
really want to make this clear.
Google has done some amazing work on unconscious bias,
and it's really important to note, these problems,
if you do them, do not make you a bad person.
I myself have some of the same unconscious bias myself.
I remember, I was at Apple two years ago,
and I was sitting there, and a man
was trying to sell me a computer,
and a woman was trying to sell me a computer.
And I found myself unconsciously realizing,
I was talking more to the man about my computer needs,
and I'm a woman in tech figure.
We all have problems with these kind of unconscious biases.
So I just want you to know, this is not personal.
This is just talking about a problem in an objective way.
So the first thing I would like to talk about
is, you need to stop treating sexism
like it's just another controversy to discuss.
There is an inevitable pattern that happens.
Two days ago, I wrote a piece for Polygon praising Kojima's
team for making women a playable character in "Metal Gear Solid
5."
The game has gotten quite a bit of sexist controversy.
This is a piece I didn't think would be controversial,
because I was actually praising an aspect of the game-- again,
they had gotten a lot of feminist criticism.
And what I found to happen was, although my response was
a lot more positive than usual, I
was inundated with men talking to me,
emailing me, writing me, dynamiting into of my house,
doing whatever, wanting to discuss it with me.
And this is a really common theme
when we're talking about sexism in the workplace.
This is not like talking about the ending of "Lost" or a TV
show.
This is not like trying to talk about,
is a blue dress or a gold dress?
These are deeply, deeply personal issues for all of us.
And what ends up happening is sometimes,
when you try to talk about your lived experiences
in this field, you'll have male engineers who come up to you,
and they start talking about it like it's
a problem of implementing a framework.
Like they are completely objective
and just trying to think through it.
What I think they don't realize in
that moment is it's a real unconscious problem,
because what you are doing is kind of saying,
prove to me that you're right.
And there's an unconscious message there
that my lived experiences are not-- your opinions
on this trump my own lived experience.
This is not a very helpful way to do it.
What you're unconsciously doing is when I say, look,
I have had x problem of sexism with x, y, and z,
and you're like, yeah, prove it to me,
yeah, well, have you thought about this,
oh, well, it's just x, y, or z, you
are dismissing my life and the difficult things
that I've gone through.
What we need you to do is to start showing basic sensitivity
instead.
I want to give you an example.
I had a really good, lifelong friend of mine
that went through a divorce a few years ago.
I knew his wife, I knew his child,
and when my friend was sitting there talking
to me about his divorce, I didn't sit there and say, hey,
but did you really try to make her happy?
Were you really present there?
I know you feel like she's being unreasonable on this,
but I'm sure it was just blah.
That would be unbelievably obnoxious, right?
But that is what happens every single time
that women start talking about our experiences in tech.
And again, this is not intentional.
But what men in this field end up doing
is telling us that our own interpretation of our own lives
is incorrect.
You need to understand, when we talk about this stuff,
it is very difficult for us.
It is emotionally risky.
We're trusting you.
That leads us into this.
This is something that happened back in 2014.
I'm a woman in my 30s, OK?
If I'm telling you I get catcalled down
the street, trust me, that's something
that's really happening.
I'm an engineer.
I'm talking about being out in San Francisco at WWDC
and getting harassed constantly on the street.
So I tweet about this, and I end up
getting literally hundreds of responses
to this telling me that my interpretation of my own life
is wrong.
This happens all the time in technology.
Again, this is very hurtful.
What we need you to do instead is just stop doing that.
Again, this is every single day of our lives.
There are some things that you have to live to experience,
and let me give you an example.
We've talked a lot this year about police violence
towards people of color, particularly black people.
I have the privilege of being white in our society.
When I get pulled over by the cops,
I don't have to stress that the cops are
going to be violent to me.
A lot of people in this room today have that same privilege.
I can't speak to any number of experiences in life,
and that is true for all of us.
So when someone is black and they are telling you
about their experiences with law enforcement,
you need to just listen to it, and understand
that that lived experience trumps your own hypotheses
about the situation.
If someone gay is telling you about coming out
to their parents, or the discrimination they
faced as a child, you need to listen to them.
If someone is transgender and they are telling you
about the difficulties in transitioning,
you need to listen to them.
Even if the opinion were hypothetically incorrect,
the emotion that that person is feeling is absolutely true.
I want to tell a very quick story about this
related to this point.
A few years ago, they were doing a study on Alzheimer's patients
who have this phenomena of, when you put them in assisted living
care facilities, they wake up, they're terrified,
they're confused, they're scared,
they think they should be home, and they're not.
They're in a strange hospital.
What they would end up doing is constantly
leaving this hospital and going down to the bus stop,
where they would be waited on for hours.
What this study found out is that the people in the hospital
would go down and start yelling at these poor, elderly people
that were suffering from the disease.
What you need to understand is in that situation,
even if the patients-- if the facts of the situation
were not that they were in a place they weren't supposed
to be, their terror was absolutely real.
Their frustration was absolutely real.
So when these hospital employees were coming down and yelling
at them, they didn't realize that their emotions
in that situation were very true.
What you need to do, again, is start just
simply respecting those lived experiences.
These are our lives.
These are our stories.
When you respect our lived experience,
you end up respecting us as individuals.
This really makes me frustrated.
There is a phenomena when you talk
about women in tech issues.
I swear, it is like you're in court, and all of a sudden,
you end up getting it flipped, and you end up
talking about how these issues affect men.
It is amazing to me just how instantly the script flips,
and I find the subject-- if I'm talking
about the things I face, the subject instantly
comes to if it's fair to men.
Let me give you an example.
Yesterday, Apple had a rather large event.
They were talking about the iPad Pro, the new Apple TV,
and I was live tweeting a few thoughts about it.
I couldn't help but note for the first 30 minutes of it,
there were barely any women on stage.
So I tweet something to the effect of, well, here
are all Apple's white guys, here are all Microsoft's white guys,
and now we've got Adobe's white guys coming on stage.
I'm deluged with tweets from people saying,
well, you can't have quotas for women you can't do this,
how dare you insinuates that men shouldn't
be on stage, which is a really, really, really,
unhelpful response.
I want to talk a little bit about where that comes from.
You may have heard the word privilege a little bit lately.
And the truth is, men in this field
are kind of blind to how great you've got it.
I don't think you understand what
it's like to go to an engineering event
and be the only person that looks like you there.
I don't think you understand what
it's like to go to a recruiting event
and have people talk to your husband,
assuming he's the engineer, when he can't even update
the software on his iPhone.
This entire system has been built for you,
for your comfort.
When we start talking about other people's comfort,
you're so used to it working for you
that just the slightest bit of upset--
there's a lot of defensiveness that
really happens very quickly with that, and it's not helpful.
So again, this is not about you, and I promise you,
every single woman engineer in this room
has heard these opinions 100 times before,
like a tape on repeat.
With all respect, I have heard the argument
against quotas for women in tech hundreds of times this week.
There is a really, really beautiful thing
called the ring theory that I'd like to talk about.
The idea is how not to say the wrong thing to someone.
So the idea is, you are right here
in the center of the circle when something goes wrong for you.
Imagine if you have cancer, or you've just lost your spouse,
or you're going through a divorce,
or your parents have died, or you've got 165 death threats
in a year.
Imagine you were here in the center of the circle.
This is not a good place to be.
So what the psychologist figured out
is, when you were in the center of the circle-- she had cancer.
She had a colleague come to her while she
was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery who
said to her, well, you need to realize this cancer isn't
all about you, it's affecting people in our department.
And she thought a lot about that conversation
and why that was so obnoxious.
So there's this thing called the ring theory.
At the center of the circle-- which again, is not
a good place to be-- is the aggrieved.
In the outer limits of the circle might be close
family members, loved ones, your spouse.
On the outer circle might be colleagues, and on the thing
here might be strangers.
The idea is, comfort flows in, grievance flows out.
If you're not in the center of the circle,
or in one of these inner rings, inevitably making it about you
is unfortunately obnoxious.
What you need to do is very simple.
Just listen instead.
OK.
This is a really big one.
I want to talk very openly and honestly about this.
I'm a 38-year-old engineer.
I don't have any children, and my husband
and I made the choice to really hyper focus on our careers.
I had been blind to this for a long time,
and I was very blind to this until I
had women with children come work for me,
or people on my staff get pregnant.
In the game industry, where I work,
we talk a lot about things like death threats,
rape threats, sexual harassment, women
getting hit on at conventions.
Something we're almost silent about
is the way we treat women with children in tech.
And this doesn't personally affect me,
but I want to tell you straight up, in my career,
I've seen more women leave over this issue than anything else.
Someone in a society has to have the children.
It's not like women made a choice about this, right?
And what I think people don't understand
is how ridiculously expensive child care is.
Here in Massachusetts, do you know
that having day care for your child
is as expensive as tuition at UMass?
I want you really to think about that.
Every single year your child is in day care,
that costs tuition and fees.
Absolutely.
It's unconscionable.
This is a really big deal.
So what ends up happening when women have children in tech
is they end up slowly, suddenly, being shown the door.
Again, I have unconscious biases, too,
and what I found at first when my employee with a child--
she got pregnant, my co-founder, and I found myself
wrestling with all these unconscious biases.
Is Amanda going to be present at our workplace?
Is she going to be able to get her job done?
Is she going to start talking about her kids non-stop, which
was absolutely wrong for me to think.
I've thought about that and I've grown from that.
This is the unconscious bias a lot of people have.
What you need to know-- and this is for parents of all genders,
not just women-- part of respecting
a parent in the workforce means respecting their children.
That means if a parent needs to leave
at five to go pick their child up,
respecting that person means respecting
that their family comes first.
This is really, really important.
This is a really hard one, and I've run into this a lot
in Boston.
I can't tell you how many networking events
I've been to in a bar, at night, with a bunch of dudes
in their 20s, drinking.
Right here in Boston there was one of them we went to a while
back that was right across the street.
What has happened in the field of computer science
and engineering is, this is a field that
was built from the ground up to be by men for men.
I want to stress, this is unconscious bias.
But what ends up happening is you
have a culture of networking that
is built to serve men in the way that you
like to network, like going to a bar and having beer.
Let's take that example, for a minute,
because I'd for you to think about it.
Let's say you were an engineer at Google in your 20s,
and you choose to go have a meeting out
with the guys on your team at the bar
next door after you leave.
Let's think about how that's affecting women.
If you're a woman in, say, your 20s, I think you may not know,
that doesn't feel emotionally very frequently
like a safe place for you-- a lot of guys drinking heavily
and you're the lone woman there.
I can think of three specific friends that have been sexually
harassed in that situation to the point
that they've been forced to leave their company,
and HR hasn't helped them.
It's not the best situation.
If you are a woman in your 30s, maybe you
have children, how many moms do you
know that really want to go hit a bar at 8 o'clock
at night when their kids have to go to school the next day?
This is one of these situations where the system has been built
to work for a very certain kind of person,
and it very unintentionally excludes a lot of people.
And let's be honest-- networking is how you make careers.
It makes or breaks it.
This is really important.
So what we need people to do, what I need everyone
in this room to do, is to think about widening your network.
If Google has a networking meeting or recruitment
meeting to bring in engineers, maybe
don't have them in a bar at night.
Maybe have a luncheon here at one o'clock
like we're having right now.
Maybe do it earlier.
It's not enough to just simply believe
that women need to be included.
I'm a software engineer.
If I go write some code for my game and it doesn't run,
the problem is with my code.
I don't sit there and go, well, I just
don't know why it's not working.
We'll just keep compiling it and that will be that.
The method that we use to recruit engineers in our field
is not working.
I've heard from so many people when
they tell me, well, we put a job posting online,
and no women applied, and that's just the end of that.
We have made so many advancements
in the last 15, 20 years, and yet we
can't look at the hiring process and realize it
overlooks a lot of candidates.
Let me tell you a story.
It's a story of how the lead engineer at my team
came to work at my company.
This is a woman that was fresh out of college.
She had not gone on the straight and narrow.
She didn't get a CS degree and then just instantly
get into the workforce.
She had some life adventures along the way.
She had been working for us part time,
and we were just dazzled by her work.
She was doing technical rigging in 3-D, which is
very, very difficult process.
We loved her work and we kept encouraging
her to apply to the lead engineer position,
and she didn't do it.
I asked her to keep coming in and sit with me
as we were interviewing other candidates for this position.
As we did that, she realized that she
had the exact same qualifications as the men
we were interviewing for that position,
and that gave her the confidence to move forward.
Just for whatever reason-- and it's really
too much to get into here-- a lot of women
are kind of trained by society to not believe in ourselves,
and we don't always apply for these kinds of positions.
So what you need to do is to widen your networking efforts
to make sure you're looking at absolutely everyone.
We face a lot more inertia to getting our foot in the door.
OK.
This is hard.
So many times, when you try to talk to people in tech
about even a very small behavioural thing they might
have done that is not helpful, it gets defensive very, very,
very quickly.
And I think part of this problem is self identifying yourself
as a racist or a sexist or a homophobe
is nearly impossible, because we get
all these messages from society that these things are bad.
They're terrible.
What ends up happening is you tell yourself, hey,
I'm not a bad person.
I'm a nice guy.
I care about women.
You think of this extreme example,
and you say, I'm not that, and you self identify yourself
as a nice person, and you're unable to hear
any of the criticism there.
And I want to be straight up with you.
I think we could do a better job with this
as a society of giving people a break.
I think we have a really unfortunate tendency to,
when someone makes one mistake, often unconscious, often
unintentional, kind of crucifying them about it,
to be honest.
I make mistakes all the time in my field.
I've told you about some today.
I don't think that makes me a bad person.
We have got to get past this so we
can hear about these behavior problems and move forward.
I think it's really telling in all the years I've
been speaking about women in tech issues,
I have almost never had a guy come up to me afterwards
and say, hey Brianna, you know what, I am part of the problem.
There has almost never happened.
It's always those other guys.
It's always the other examples.
The truth is, if you think that the problem is someone else,
you are part of the problem.
We've talked a lot this year about people of color,
and again, to give an example where
I have failed-- we had my staff for the last game
that we shipped, "Revolution 60," happened
to be all white people.
I looked at that and I realized that I was not
bringing people of color into my own company,
to evaluate people of color for these positions.
I realized I had a responsibility
to change myself, change when network happens
and make sure it was bringing people of color
in for those positions.
This is a mindset where I'm not saying, hey, I'm not a racist,
hey, I have nothing to fix here, hey, I have no part
to play in making it better.
This is a very helpful attitude that all of us need to have.
Again, this is all about responsibility and thinking
critically about your behavior.
What I love about one of the videos
I've seen from Google, An Unconscious Bias,
is what they found is the science shows
if you take one of the things I'm talking about today,
if you just take one thing, if you say hey,
I'm not networking enough with women, hey,
I am invalidating people's experiences-- if you make
a commitment to just change one thing today-- the science shows
that that is going to cause you to start thinking about more
things, and it will make you a better person and a better team
mate.
We all make mistakes.
There is a misconception, I feel, in tech,
that the problem women face is like Don Draper sitting
in a tech office somewhere, drinking some scotch,
and talking about how broads can't code.
Like that's the hypothetical situation
that we think discrimination is in this field.
I have never had, from a professional,
someone tell me to go back to the kitchen.
These kind of moments are not the real problem.
What we've set up is this idea in our minds
that the real problem is some raging sexist stereotype
from the 50s.
The science shows that's not quite right.
Sexism in tech, according to the science of it,
is death by 1,000 cuts.
And what happens is that it's every single day you're
in this field, if you're someone that's a person of color,
or someone that's gay, someone that's a woman,
you find yourself slowly dying the death of 1,000 cuts.
And how that happens is it's little things all day long.
People not inviting you to meetings,
people underestimating your capacity as an engineer, people
assuming that you don't know your field,
even when you may have dedicated your entire career for it.
I had an example yesterday.
I was talking at the Apple TV event.
I will tell you, straight up, I know more
about running the Unreal Engine on Apple platforms, Apple
mobile platforms, than almost anyone else.
You can probably find, 20, 30 people,
maybe, in the world that understand
the subject as much as I do.
I was talking critically about some of the engineering
choices that Apple made when developing
this platform, in particular the 200 megabyte
limit, which is kind of obviated by a cloud solution.
I was inundated by hundreds and hundreds of people
writing me, assuming they knew more than I did in this field,
and telling me I was wrong, when all they had
was a rather obvious fact that was mentioned in some tech
documents.
This is a really good example of a death of 1,000 cuts.
This is just one minor thing that happens,
but it happens over and over and over and over and over.
They're called micro aggressions,
and they kind of slowly push you out of the field.
Another good example.
At Apple's event yesterday, they happened
to Photoshop a picture of a woman
into smiling using the new iPad pro.
This is a pretty tone deaf moment, right?
Guys don't understand how often, when
you're walking down the street, you're instructed to smile.
You're told you would be prettier
if you would just smile.
This happens all the time.
When Apple had not had any women on stage yet at that point,
and they're Photoshopping a woman in smiling,
it's a really tone deaf moment.
That's something a lot of guys I saw on Twitter
just didn't understand.
It was just a little thing that was really
just kind of obnoxious.
It pushes us away.
This is a really good example.
This happened last year.
This is just a slide at a conference, and you know,
it's completely tone deaf.
Stuff like that will happen to you almost every
single day if you're a woman in this field.
What we need to understand is real sexism
in this field is very, very subtle.
A good example of this happened here in Boston with Harmonix.
You might have read this week that they got $15 million
in venture capital funding.
A friend of mine that worked at Harmonix
was telling me this story.
She was setting out in a meeting and they
were looking at getting a new person to come in
for an engineering position.
The team leader kept using masculine pronouns
when asking someone to come in for the job.
Well, this engineer he should have x years of experience
with x, y, and z.
He should be x.
He should live in x.
He should have this kind of background.
She stopped him in the meeting, and said, excuse me,
this could be a man or woman that we hire for this position.
This engineer proceeded to then completely talk over her,
belittle her objection, and said, this is not a problem.
He means everybody.
That's just a very small thing that happens.
It's subtle.
This is a really hard thing to understand,
and this is something, again, I have learned in my lifetime.
The absence of privilege is not oppression.
And I say this with all respect to all the male engineers
in this room, this is a system that really, really
works for you.
When we're talking about changing the system just
a little bit so other people can come in
and you can have awesome people on your team,
we are talking about changing things.
And I want to be clear, it is going
to disrupt some of the boys' club atmosphere
that exists in tech.
That is not oppression.
That is a quality.
I want to give you a very quick story.
So I was over at MIT the other day,
and I was giving a presentation.
Afterwords, I had some people that were really moved by it,
and they were telling me stories about being out with drinks
with the guys afterwards.
There was this one engineer that was on the team
and he was sitting there.
He was having drinks out with his buddies,
and he was really, really angry about the talk that I gave.
He was talking about how he felt like he had never
fit in anywhere in his whole life-- something
I have a lot of empathy for.
I can understand that, because I felt
the entire same way growing up.
What he was saying was he was really, really scared.
The attack was going to change to this place
where he couldn't have bro time, couldn't
have pictures of bikini girls on his screen saver,
and it would be a different kind of atmosphere.
As much as my heart goes out to that person,
because I think we all have a need
to want to belong to a social group,
it's not fair for him to prioritize his own comfort
over just equality for gay people,
for women, for people of color.
The culture tech has been built in your own image.
I was at PAX Dev two weeks ago, and I found myself-- there
was this weird moment.
It was a 23-year-old kid.
He's a white guy, and he's sitting there talking to me,
and he was talking about how he was
terrified that he was never going to find an engineering
position.
And the whole time I was sitting there talking to him,
I was realizing all the assumptions I had in my mind.
He looked like an engineer, he had kind of messy hair,
and he was just wearing a t-shirt
at a professional event.
He kind of looked like that stereotype.
And in the back of my mind, I'm going, of course
is going to find a job.
I found myself saying, I don't know anything
about his technical expertise, I don't know anything
about his education, I don't know anything
about how well he plays with others.
But he looks like the part, right?
It's just another example of the entire tech industry
being built in your image.
When you close your eyes and think about someone working
in this field, it probably doesn't
look like me or other women.
And the truth is, I get so much hate mail
in speaking out against this.
This is before Gamergate that I got this.
This is just absolutely terrible.
It's stuff like this I get every single day speaking out
about this.
This is something that would be of benefit to everyone
here to understand.
Let's be straight out.
Tech is going to change.
The momentum is on the side of women and people
of color and other minorities.
We are talking about these problems more and more and more
and I feel very confident that tech in 10 years
is going to look different than it does today.
I grew up in Mississippi, which is
a state that was described by MLK as sweltering
with the heat of injustice and oppression.
Growing up, I sure did meet a lot
of people that were extremely homophobic or racist.
Even in my own social groups, in college,
I would find these people.
What will inevitably happen, especially with gay rights,
we'd kind of have this person there
that was ranting about gay people
being able to get married, and they'd slowly be pushed out
of our social circle.
Do you know what I mean?
They just had views that were kind of dated
and we started moving away from them.
In the same way-- I'm talking about this
in an utterly pragmatic terms-- this change is happening.
Your work force will include more women in the future.
It's not just that this is the right thing to do.
This is to your own career advantage
to develop the skills to learn to work with other people.
One of the best skills for any tech professional
is being able to work well with a team.
A lot of times, when I talk about women in tech issues,
there's this assumption that women in tech
is just a chick thing, right?
Oh, well, you know, that's just a women problem,
and I don't really have to deal with that.
I was at a tech event last night.
It was a VIP event with investors and women startup
founders.
As much as I love events like that,
it sometimes feels like there's a trade off in this field
where the powers that be will let women
go have our lunches over here, and they'll
pay for us to have an auditorium and do some networking events.
But nothing really changes.
I'm going to tell you, in all honesty, straight up,
sexism in tech is not a problem with women's behavior.
I'm going to say that one more time.
Sexism in tech is not a problem with women's behavior.
This is a male behavior problem.
I can be up here and I can speak to you about changing this,
but the only person that can make this better is you.
What we're going to do is we're going to start
a conversation right now.
I'll answer any question in the entire world.
Who's going to be brave enough to put their hand up first?
And we will do that.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi.
Thanks for having the courage to come here and give this talk.
BRIANNA WU: I appreciate that.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Your slides are refreshingly direct.
I didn't expect him to be that so, because I
found that people don't seem to respond to them that well.
But in your experience, if you're with a bunch of people,
one of them makes a comment that they don't understand
is inappropriate.
Have you found it's better to actually
be more direct with them and just say,
straight up, that's wrong, instead of saying,
well, maybe it's not quite like that?
BRIANNA WU: That's a wonderful question.
Let me answer it equally directly.
If you're a woman and you do that, that direct conversation,
you will get tremendous blowback,
which is why so many of the women I know in game dev
are very, very careful about dancing around this issue,
and just hinting to it as subtly as she can,
because she gets so much blowback.
This is where you personally can do the most
good in the entire world.
With the Gamergate thing, we do have men on our field
that are speaking now.
Chris Kluwe is one of them.
Arthur Chu would be another.
They don't get a fraction of the death threats that I get,
or Anita gets, or Zoe Quinn gets, or Randi Harper gets.
What happens is when you have that male privilege,
you are able to kind of pull your buddy aside and be like,
hey, can we just talk about that?
That's not really cool what you just said.
Just have an open conversation with them about that.
That's almost no risk for you.
I think if you're a woman, you need
to realize there are going to be blowback for that.
I personally made the choice to just answer it directly.
I'm not Oprah Winfrey, again, but this
is where I would really ask guys to step up and help us out.
You can do so much good, you have no idea.
Let's go to another question
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I suspect most people here in the room
are probably on your side, are probably
very receptive to this message.
BRIANNA WU: Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, I am too, and thank you
for coming to give the talk.
Do you think it's better to try to engage
people who aren't here and maybe wouldn't be as receptive?
Or do you think it's better for them
to come to this conversation of their own volition?
BRIANNA WU: Sure.
I think that's a really good question.
Did anyone else here see the piece
on Vox last week that was talking
what nerds don't understand about politics by Dr.
[INAUDIBLE]?
Did you see that?
That was a 10 out of 10 talk.
I called up that writer on the phone afterwards,
and I started asking him that exact question, how
we could get that answer.
Let me tell you about the science of it.
I know Google nerds love science.
He has a lot of expertise in climate change denial, people
that don't want to believe in global warming.
What happens is, with some people, you are correct,
it is impossible to change their minds.
There's nothing that you can say that is ever
going to make them feel differently on that.
You cannot scientifically change someone's opinion.
What you can change scientifically
is someone's behavior.
The human mind has this really interesting trait
that we'd like to think of ourselves
as rational creatures, but we're not.
We have this psychological trick where
we decide how we want to feel, and then
our minds act like lawyers and justify the thing
that we want to believe.
If you're a programmer, you've learned to short circuit
that to a certain extent.
We tend to be very logical creatures,
but that is the overall human tendency.
You can't change someone's opinion.
You can change their behavior.
So what happens if you make a social cost
to that person doing something, if every single time they
speak up, they face consequences for that?
Even if it's just some guy going, hey, that's
not really cool, hey, that made me feel uncomfortable, hey,
can you think about this way, maybe?
What happens over time is you change that behavior, and then
the psychological trick where you decide how you want to feel
and then the mind justifies it, you
decide that you want to feel like not doing this,
because the social cost is less.
And then your attitudes slowly start to change.
With the climate change denial thing,
this would be if you can get through any way
possible-- to get tax rebates, to get people
to put solar panels on their roof
to save on energy efficiency.
What they found when you do that is their opinions change.
You can have the most dedicated climate change denier,
but once they get that government tax
rebate to put solar panels on their roof,
suddenly, they're a proponent of renewable energy.
It's exactly the same way in the field.
So scientifically, that is the best weapon that we have.
Do we have another question?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: First of all, thank you
for the choice you're making.
I cannot imagine choosing to live a life where death threats
were just sort of a background fact of it.
BRIANNA WU: It's really bad.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think it's necessary to have conversations
in this space, for there to be people like you,
so I'm grateful for you for doing something I
don't think I'd be able to do.
The question I was curious about asking
is, do you have some understanding or intuition
about where the depth of vitriol comes from?
BRIANNA WU: Sure.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Some of it, I buy,
is being the confusion between absence of privilege
and oppression, and I get that, but it
doesn't feel like enough to me, and there's something about it
that I'm just not wrapping my brain.
BRIANNA WU: Oh, I spent an entire year thinking
about this question.
This is very insightful.
This is as best as I can figure it,
because that's getting at the core of the problem, which
I love.
How many people here are gamers?
Can you raise your hand if you're a gamer?
Great.
The biggest mistake my parents ever made
was getting Nintendo entertainment system in 1985.
I remember opening that box at Christmas,
and I remember my grades went to hell, I stopped socializing,
I stopped doing my chores, and that
was all I did-- I still do it.
What I remember about that era-- and this was 30 years ago,
like Mario turns 30 soon, guys, this is really amazing--
what I remember about this era was
how marketed the product was for boys.
And this shows up in all these subtle ways.
Do you know there have only been two core Mario
games where you could play as a girl character, Princess Peach?
The first was "Super Mario 2" in 1988,
and then as far as the core Mario titles,
we had to wait 25 years for Princess Peach
to be playable again.
Making this a boy space was very deliberately chosen
by the Nintendo marketing team back in 1985.
They said that they were targeting
boys between 5 and 10.
Then when the Super Nintendo came out in 1982,
they just rewrote the same document and said,
we're targeting boys 5 to 15 now.
What has happened is, I think we'd
like to say that the problem is a bunch
of misogynistic 15-year-olds, and that
is part of the problem.
But I think if you want to look at it more deeply,
there are all these unconscious messages.
They've been telling boys, now 35-year-old men,
that games are their space.
It's not women's space.
It happens in all these subtle ways.
Princess Peach is always waiting to be rescued in the castle.
When women are in games, we are frequently over sexualized.
We're always the sidekick or the damsel in distress,
and we have huge, giant boobs with lots of cleavage out.
And what it is, is 1,000 unconscious signals that
have been sent to men saying, this is for you,
this is not for women.
They have this intellectual shortcut
where they might be theoretically fine with women
playing games, but the instant we bring their lived experience
into it and say, well, it really hurts me to never
be able to be the playable character in a game,
well, I'd like to see a woman larger than size six
represented in a video game.
How many games can you think of where you've seen
a mom as a playable character?
Do know what percentage of women are going
to have kids in their lifetime?
It's all unconscious by the people in our field,
but they feel-- it's kind of the same as politics.
Certain people feel their identity is being taken away,
and they get very defensive.
Did you have a follow up?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I do.
BRIANNA WU: Go ahead.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: If I take what you're saying,
and I take it to sort of try and wrap my brain around it,
what I'm hearing is that people create or adopt
or dive into spaces that are restricted to one set of people
when they are threatened by another set of people.
So I'm hearing you as saying that people who are feeling--
and you can look at what they say online,
and it's pretty clear, too.
BRIANNA WU: Look through my Twitter mentions sometime.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Saying that there
is a class of men that feel threatened
by the presence of women in gaming seems a little obvious,
but it does bring up the next question, which
is sort of, why?
What's going on there that those people feel like they
need that space to feel safe?
BRIANNA WU: Let me only tell you another a quick story.
I grew up in Mississippi, so my senator
at the time, Trent Lott-- I actually
worked for him one summer.
We'll leave that there.
Don't judge me.
I was very young.
My senator, Trent Lott, once did a study for the Republican
Party in the south-- and I'm keeping this very apolitical,
we're just talking about facts here--
he did a study looking at what would
drive voter behavior to vote for the Republicans that year.
They tested all these questions like, the Democrats will
raise taxes, blah, blah, blah.
They found this one question that raised through the roof
the response of it.
The question was, the Democrats want to take away your culture.
And white Southern males just responded off the charts
to this, just ridiculously high.
What happens is, there's a really deep set
evolutionary part of our brain where
we're programmed from back when we were living in caves to have
in groups and out groups, and we're just programmed to say,
we're in this group, and then this group over here
is the other, and they are a threat.
You can see that portrayed all through history, through war,
through all of this stuff.
What's happening is it's really tapping
into a very reptilian, primordial part of the brain
where people feel like, this is their in group.
Their identity is based in it, and they're scared
it's going to be taken away.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to pass
on a question from a speaker last month, [INAUDIBLE]
who just wanted to know what we might see next from you,
and also, how friends can help with anything
you're working on.
BRIANNA WU: Oh, that's a really great question.
I love her.
You should check out her book.
What I am working on next is-- as if dealing with Gamergate
were not big enough for me, we are working on the venture
capital scene right now to do a multi-million dollar expansion.
I can't talk about some of it, but we're
very interested in what we're calling emotional game play
dynamic.
To me, I feel like we have reinvented this wheel
for 30 years in the video game industry.
How many first person shooters have you played?
Because let's be honest, Call of Duty
is not that different than Doom.
It's like we keep reinventing the same idea because it's
the same people there.
What we're doing is taking a step back
from the entire video game industry,
from all the assumptions that we've made, and we're saying,
what is the goal in the video game industry?
To me, the goal is a holodeck.
The goal is a holodeck and to go and interact
with different kinds of people in emotional ways
and learn things about yourself along the way.
As we really have an explosion in VR technology,
we have some very interesting ideas about frameworks
to develop from this.
We're raising millions of dollars for that.
As far as how to help me-- guys, if I personally
dealt with all of my death threats myself,
I would not do anything else with my time.
There's just too much of it.
And it's sad, but I'm just being straight with you,
being up here today, people will see this video on Google,
I will get threats, I will get attacked.
I have to employ in my company a full time person
to deal with my harassment, to talk to prosecutors,
to talk to the FBI, to document this stuff,
because I could not work in this field if I did.
I have a Patreon where people can help pay for that position,
because startups don't have room for extra positions
to pay people to file death threat
charges with prosecutors.
That's how you can help.
Maybe we'll give a link to that in the video.
Thanks for that question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Stepping back to the attitudes
that lead to the horribleness-- it makes me wonder,
were the cultural watchdogs right all along,
that these games were corrupting us during our formative years
with destructive attitudes?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
BRIANNA WU: Can I tell you the weirdest story about that?
Who else here was a gamer in the 90s with Jack Thompson?
Do you remember that, when they were worried about "Mortal
Kombat" corrupting the youth?
I remember being a teenager and being
like, oh, that's so stupid, that's so dumb,
that's so full of crap.
I'm not saying that it's not, but I will tell you
an experience that I had.
They're coming out with "Hatred,"
which is this game that's a mass murder simulator.
You have a certain person on Steam
that is demanding the creators add modifiable tools so people
can put me in that game to kill, and Zoe Quinn,
and Anita Sarkeesian.
I have gamers that want to do that.
I keep thinking back to being a teenager
and my strong opinion about violence doesn't matter.
I'm just be a straight up, I don't have an answer there.
I think we should be able to make whatever games that we
want.
I'm certainly not pro censorship,
but I think something's really wrong in our industry.
I think we need to think about that.
Does that answer your question?
I'm not going to tell you we need to start censoring games.
I don't.
I think it's impossible in an age of digital distribution.
But what I do believe is that Nintendo,
Sony, Microsoft, and Steam have a responsibility
to think about the product that they're putting out.
When Steam reversed their decision
and did decide to release "Hatred" which
is made by neo Nazis-- it's a white power thing
to just go kill people.
You watch the trailer and there's
a woman begging on her knees for her life,
and you'll stick a shotgun in her mouth and kill her.
It is horrific.
I don't think you should censor that by the government,
and I think in an age of digital distribution anyone
can play the game if they want.
I think we should do that.
Can we do two question super quickly?
Great.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned a couple of micro aggression.
You mentioned mansplaining and interrupting.
I wonder if there's any others you
want to call out as maybe anything that's
specific to the software development environment?
BRIANNA WU: I think that a really big one
would be assuming women do not know their stuff.
That's a really, really big one.
It hurts a lot.
I think talking over women in meetings, and let me say this,
I love gender neutral examples.
Look, a lot of us here are software engineers.
Almost all the engineers I know are introverts.
I'm not, but the vast majority are.
What I have noticed in running my company is
if I don't take a firm hand, the extroverts end
up talking over everyone and introverts
can't get a word in edgewise.
This includes a lot of women.
If you are product manager, you have a strong responsibility
as a team leader to shut down the extroverts like me
for monopolising the entire conversation
and letting everyone be heard.
I could go into a whole bunch of them,
but I think that's a good example.
Last question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering--
there was a time in the late tube and early transistor days
when computer operators were mostly women,
and because [INAUDIBLE] switchboard operation,
it was basically seen as secretarial.
My question was, are there any lessons
we can draw from the path of computing?
Is there a time when it was indeed mostly women?
It wasn't a prestigious position.
It became a prestigious position, then came men.
Is there anything we can learn from the early part
of that history?
BRIANNA WU: Yes, that's a historical pattern.
Believe it or not, there's a huge pattern
through history of field coming along and being born.
It starts off as very prestigious,
and women are drawn to it, and there's a pattern over and over
again that men move into the field and end up changing it.
I would love to tell you what happened
in computing in those early days is like an aberration,
but it's not.
There is so much baggage that women
face to working as professional engineers.
I see this was someone my friends' children,
who are 14, 15 right now.
And they're put into a culture where beauty culture starts
telling them who their friends, are what they look like,
is so much more important than doing that work we all know
is so important, sitting in your bedroom
and learning how to code.
There are 1,000 messages like that we really
have to move past as a society.
I've got to leave it there today.
Thank you all for having me.
I appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
I can't believe that wu has the audacity to get up in front of google and claim this when half the room knows between the devs, SDETs, application support, and consulting services that EPIC provides for professional license of the unreal engine... that then gets sold to probably like 50 other companies (who have their own staff of varied skill).... there are more than 30 people closely building, supporting, and testing the engine at epic megagames alone. Not to mention it's been around forever and she's been involved in game development since like 2009 or 2010 tops.
In this day and age to make a big deal about death of 1000 cuts in the professional game making world is ludicrous. Game companies beat the fuck out of their coders...male and female both. It's not death from 1000 cuts every day, it's like office space where every day is the new worst day of their lives! If you're complaining about death of 1000 cuts you're getting handled with kid gloves. Lots of that room has no doubt been through sweatshops like EA or Amazon... well they probably don't even bother to compare their experiences with her complaints. People in audiences have a tendency to listen and believe.[/spoiler]
Lol ok, there are both more attractive men, women, and trannies not getting catcalled in downtown SF
Yes and the men are leaving too, most Amazon employees only manage to last 6 months of 6 day work weeks.
Lol
No you weren't wu we make sure to monitor your every move. You were at another school called MIT months ago but not the one in Massachusetts
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- Apr 15, 2015
"In which a prominent & frequently media-quoted game industry pundit, feminist, anti-racist, anti-bullyist, tolerant, inclusive, progressive social activist schools me in constructive dialog."
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You even remember you said you were a sex positive feminist?
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649424394931015680
So no guarantees you'll get shit working? Well, at least you're being honest for once.
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649425558988832768
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649426142278086657
While you still had a dick you were probably jacking off, you fucking liar.
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649426263262760960
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649424394931015680
So no guarantees you'll get shit working? Well, at least you're being honest for once.
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649425558988832768
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649426142278086657
While you still had a dick you were probably jacking off, you fucking liar.
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649426263262760960
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2015
How much longer until "Lara Croft is trans"?
(Insert original Revolution 60 poster of sexualized Bratz dolls here in response to this BS)
This is what is so triggering:
http://thebirdandthebat.tumblr.com/post/130223771344/theactioneer-detail-from-contra-flyer-konami
The person Wu is responding to used to Editor in Chief of The Mary Sue.
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649434467078172672
Dude, if you're expecting sex for that comment, Frank put the ring on the crotch wound, so too late.
This is what is so triggering:
http://thebirdandthebat.tumblr.com/post/130223771344/theactioneer-detail-from-contra-flyer-konami
The person Wu is responding to used to Editor in Chief of The Mary Sue.
http://tweetsave.com/spacekatgal/status/649434467078172672
Dude, if you're expecting sex for that comment, Frank put the ring on the crotch wound, so too late.
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- Aug 1, 2013
Wu doesn't even really understand what that means, much less that she's claimed on multiple occasions to be it.
I'm guessing we won't be seeing another "[X] is trans" article for a couple of reasons.
1. Brianna doesn't give a shit about any other characters being trans. She only cares about Samus Aran being trans. There are plenty of transgendered characters in video games but they aren't wish fulfillment fantasies for Wu.
2. Pushing the "Samus is a tranny" narrative was one of her most demonstrably damaging campaigns to date. Her Patreon has been bleeding since and, judging from her knowing about the quote since March, she had to know it had a high chance of backfiring the way it did. I think Brianna ultimately went with it because she was desperate to get some media focus back on her and her hugbox led her to (falsely) believe that other transgendered individuals and supporters were as pathetically shallow as her.
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2015
Wu would rather talk about something other than the aggrieved martyrdom of Brianna Wu, Unreal Engine genius?
You really think so?
I was under the impression that this was her favorite topic, and the only one she was knowledgeable enough about to speak on at length.
She certainly seems to be enjoying herself, gesticulating jovially and regaling the attendees with the Dickensian struggle / grand entrepreneurial exploits of her original character, Brianna Wu.
What do you suppose she'd rather discuss?
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2015
"Blogger" <--- thank you, Google
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- Joined
- Dec 3, 2013
- Status