Making Diversity and Inclusion Work

[Music] hello my name is so ha a manager of diversity inclusion programs at riot and thank you for coming to see me talk this early in the morning at some point during my talk GDC he's going to be sending you a survey to just ask you how I did and this is really the first time that I'm speaking in an external way about what we're doing at riot so I would love to hear some feedback if they were if there's anything we can do to make it better for next time or if you never want to see me speak again that's totally understandable I get it and then at some point I'm gonna do my best to make room at the end for talks we do have a mic in the middle of the room but if we run out of time we have a wrap-up area that we can go to and our lovely friends will help us get to it safely and soundly so yeah thanks for coming heads-up that I'll be shortening the

words diversity and inclusion to DNI just because I'm gonna keep repeating the words over and over and over and driving myself and probably you up the wall so keep in mind DNI means diversity and inclusion so some of the things that what I want to talk about today are some of the things that I've learned as I'm journeying through different spaces of diversity inclusion leading up to riot and also during my time at riot and the mouse isn't working sweet got it so when I say making it work I don't mean to suggest that there's a finite list of proven ways to solve DNI it's not like here's a list of 10 things to do and then BAM you've got diversity and another five things and boom you've got inclusion and there's also not one solution that fits every single single organization so you might find that things are different where you work or the organizations that you're a part of it's not really an end result it's not like you do stuff and then you get diversity it's really more about ongoing actions that shift and evolve and mature

over time and really in the title of diversity and inclusion there's an implication that it's about learning and embracing different perspectives and being someone who is willing to be a manager in that that means being someone who is willing to be challenged and question your own assumptions and your own values coming into the space it's really about a combination of building bridges to create deep connections with people and also to embolden ourselves with a growth mindset and these are two things that I will get more into later on I want to add something to the conversation about DNI that I believe is missing from a lot of mainstream mainstream conversations it feels like this this subject kind of just exploded at some point and now everybody's talking about it and it's great but we're also missing a few valuable pieces of the puzzle that I believe are foundational you'll also hear me say like hey this isn't about programs or training sessions or courses

or initiatives or policies and it's not to say it's not to bash any of those things let's not say those things don't work it's not to say that those things aren't valuable it's to say that before we get into that we really have to understand why we are choosing these things why we're choosing a program or a course or whatever sort of output comes out of that you can't really tack on products about improving DNI unless you really understand the space within though the space that you're working with them and on a just a deep fundamental valuable level in in the organization that you're a part of so to step back I'm gonna do a deep dive into my backgrounds leading up to riot I get this question asked a lot like what do you do and like it's mostly from people who are also interested in coming into the space and I kind of have like a very wonky route getting into the role that I'm in today so I just wanted to talk about that a little bit and I feel like - my philosophy on diversity inclusion has evolved in a way hopefully and has

matured alongside sort of my interest coming into it so I've been a gamer my whole life my two earliest memories were actually in Saudi Arabia and they were Michael Jackson's Moonwalker and Sega and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on NES and when I was seven my family had just emigrated to Canada for about couple I'm the youngest of a really big family so I was kind of left alone too while they were teaching themselves English I was kind of left alone because like it's when you're five that's pretty easy to pick up another language so I had all these floppy disks that were like vocabulary games and math games in addition but then I found another fluffy desk that had doom too and that's kind of when I became a gamer for and I knew that this is something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life but when it came to like an academic and professional life I didn't get into games right away so at first I studied

political science and criminology and I say it's because I wanted to be like a human rights lawyer but like I think I just like wanted like a sexy crime-fighting forensics job and fortunately that dream dissipated and but unfortunately took into film studies and philosophy so I wanted to be unemployed for the rest of my life but this is really the point where I started looking at media and like representation in media and race relations and media and how powerful of a tool that can be I was I specialized specifically in blaxploitation cinema and Palestinian cinema and this is where a lot of my interests in terms of like okay the media that we have is not just entertainment it could be something really meaningful and valuable and not just because we see diverse characters in something but they're actually the the film's in blaxploitation in Palestinian cinema are made by those people so it's very much an

introspective externalization so I then moved to Toronto I pursued my masters and again nothing game-related it was film and photographic preservation and strangely this is actually where my career in games began so Toronto has an awesome indie game scene and it was there that I stumbled upon Danes making games and they're like oh here like this first throughout so if you see them you should say hello to them and find out what they're working on their great initiative it's a non-profit to support women and non-binary folks to make games and provide them with mentorship and accessible tools particularly open-source tools and this blew my mind because up until this point I hadn't really seen people make games when they didn't have technical backgrounds like one of the sort of myths about the tech industry is that you have to be a programmer or you have to be a computer scientist to make it big and that's not true

and this is where dmg really started to shape a lot of how I felt about game making and really up until this point in my life I never really like played indie games it was mostly triple-a games and the indie games were ones that were on console it's not kind of like how today there's a lot of you know there's marketplaces on consoles where there's tons of indie games this was before that was happening so it was a really cool experience I volunteered with them for a couple of years and then shortly after that sat on their board of directors and this is where I seriously started thinking about accessible game making and how many stories that aren't represented in blockbuster games that can be mobilized in like through indie game making one of my favorite highlights was and didja Kate and it's a collaboration between dmg and the indigenous reps collective to teach a group of six indigenous girls and women between the age of 13 to 24 on how to make their first video game from scratch and this was really eye-opening for me

it was eye-opening to watch this group give voice to their experiences and imaginations in a way that is entirely new to them there are artists in different ways but this is the first time they're using game making tools and like gaming is really intimidating even when you know what you're doing it's an overwhelming career choice to get into and so mentoring just one of the women to help her creator story that gave me a lot of hope for the future of girls and women of color and games so at this point of my career I considered dropping out of grad school and I didn't and there's what like one reason I feel like that I didn't drop out of grad school my master's thesis wasn't so not what photo historians wanted to talk about or deal with that they buddied me up with um a game studies professor so we just spent most of our time talking about Resident people and he was just like god submit it whenever you ready sweet so one point

but the changes really started in terms of the changes in how I thought about diverse communities and indie game making is it really started to foster when I worked in community management for a mobile game studio called you can and I was also lecturing about DIY game making on the side so I had the pleasure to speak at Brandeis at NYU I got to Skype in tipplers it to University in Ramallah in the West Bank which is awesome I'm half Palestinian so that was a really huge moment for me and at the same time running workshops on text adventures game and text that text adventure games there we go at OCAD York and Ryerson University so at this point it's particularly interested in understanding marginalized communities and their voices and by that I mean groups that are often not included as part of status quo they've been other din society either implicitly or explicitly due to differences in race gender sexuality

disability socioeconomic status and religion and so forth and I wanted to be part of including and appreciating different voices outside of of nonprofits like nonprofits when you're already a community of activists it's quite easy to kind of do a grassroots collaboration and get the get started on DNI initiatives what I wanted to do was actually work at an organization and I wanted to because really I wanted to normalize Deana I wanted to have it be something that we all can talk about and we all feel pretty comfortable talking about at first it was mostly about boosting marginalized voices but to also raise the quality bar of teams and creative spaces so when riot was looking for a manager of DNI programs I thought this is the kind of role I've been working towards you know like despite the twists and turns and my life I like a common thread is that I'm a pretty political person it's really difficult for me to view the

world in a way that's not influenced by my gender or my race that's always kind of a prevalent lens and this didn't change when I talked about games or worked with in them or mentored folks so in case this is a relatively new topic for some of you in the audience I want to just touch on the conversations about diversity inclusion in the games in the tech world and kind of circle back into sort of how my philosophy has grown leading up to my role so diversity is on a lot of people's minds with some like Facebook Google Apple they're releasing their demographic data every year and they're recognizing that hey we have an overwhelming status quo we want to be better at representing under at including underrepresented groups to have better balance and to have you know better outcomes because there's a lot of evidence to support the benefits of the DNI when a group of people is trying to solve a complex problem progress often

results from when diverse perspectives are brought in so it's not just about how smart or capable you are but how you're how much you're willing to look at a problem through a multitude of different ways and then you land a breakthrough so when a group of intelligent individuals are trying to solve a problem it's the diversity of those individuals has just as much if not more potential than just their ability or their education alone and there's also evidence that implicit biases and stereotypes break down trust and productivity and morale and teams so our implicit biases refer to attitudes or stereotypes that affect our decisions they also affect our understanding and our actions in an unintended or unconscious way so they're pervasive they usually favor our own in-group and they actually don't always align with what our declared beliefs are so we can say one thing but our implicit biases

actually and our that affect our actions indicate maybe sometimes the opposite or just a different route so these sorts of biases create echo chambers or groupthink and that's detrimental to teams and individuals in them they impact how we communicate which can also dominate what sort of direction you're going through on a project or if you are in a meeting about maybe compensation or performance management that's a lot of areas where our biases can trickle in so it sounds pretty obvious that you know we'd want to be working on these spaces if diversity of thought coming from a diversity of people and a diversity of experiences is a good thing then let's fix it but it's difficult getting it right is complicated and one of the first reasons honestly is that it's really overwhelming diversity inclusion you know they're some of the most common

sorts of concerns that I hear is that it focuses on one groups over other like you have to include everybody in this and that can be overwhelming and you have to start somewhere and where do you start and why do you start with that group etc etc and on top of like understanding different experiences and different perspectives it takes a lot of introspection to break down implicit biases and that doesn't always feel great like whether we like it or not we all have biases it's neurologically impossible to not have them and it can be really uncomfortable to try and unlearn our socializations the things that we grew up thinking like this this has always been like this it's always been this way these jokes have always been funny that's hard to undo so for example if any of you have ever had to address your own privilege you'll know that it's a very uncomfortable thing to do at first privilege seems like a very dirty very loaded word and really it's more about

it's a study of like how we all have blind spots due to our lived experiences and there's no way that like you are going to understand every lived experiences just because you haven't actually experienced them that's all that it really means it's that recognition that okay this doesn't affect me but I also have never had that experience so I understand that you also haven't had my experiences and so forth but the thing is like every one of us we want to believe that the reason we're successful in life is do to constant hard work when the revelation is made that hey you we actually all face different obstacles and sometimes that means that you are further ahead than others by things that you can't control like gender or race or wealth or physical ability it can feel like a punch to the gut and it's especially complicated when identities are made up of balancing intersections of their like advantages and disadvantages from majority and minority groups so for example like I'm a woman I'm a woman of

color I face sexism I face racism but I've also have high education I have a good job like there's all of these things that sort of make up like hey these are places I don't struggle but these are places that I have struggled and it's important to see ourselves as a sum of many parts and that they're not necessarily opposites right they're not like battling with each other they're more of just tensions and frictions that we just have to understand on a deeper level another reason diversity initiatives are difficult to get right comes from the belief that people should be rewarded based on their merit which is based on their ability and effort this is what's known as a meritocracy so a meritocracy is like the best ideas rise to the top based on whether or not they're actually the best ideas and that's a theoretically super sound fair clean-cut approach but in reality there's evidence showing that unchecked meritocracies can

lead to a higher likelihood of bias and that's because there's kind of this pursuit of objectivity that's not really possible we can't none of us can actually be truly objective and especially when we're working in creative spaces that's that's even harder to become objective because it's all about like emotion and and passion and kind of gut feelings so you know does that mean like it meritocracy let's never talk about it again let's do something different I would actually say not really I still think there's a benefit to it if we're willing to actually make it work and using it as an aspiration that can actually help us identify the behaviors that would stifle it so the sort of famous research that came out about it's called the paradox of America of meritocracy was made by Emilio Jake Estella and he's a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management he's written extensively and research offensively about these issues and at a stanford

conference he he was addressing the like the sort of like well if it's a paradox should we even try and pursue it and he says it doesn't mean the pursuit is futile my research provides a cautionary lesson that practices implemented to increase fairness and equity need to be carefully addressed thought need be carefully thought through sorry so that potential opportunities for biases are addressed the thing is it's it's a prevalent thing in art in the tech industry which were a part of so meritocracy is a core belief at riot and we recently had a roundtable internally to talk about specifically the intersection of meritocracy and diversity what influence is that what doesn't influence it like we actually have to address this problem instead of sort of being too afraid to say like hey there's a problem with meritocracy I don't want to I do you know I don't want to start any trouble it's like no let's talk about it let's see how we can actually make this work we also have teams that are dedicated to building

models for solving this kind of issue like how do you define fairness and how do you know that somebody is being fairly rewarded or fairly recognized the more aware of where we can all make mistakes as humans as part of the process the more likely that's something as sort of idealistic as meritocracy could actually be closer to be a reality and honestly my philosophy is that diversity and meritocracy they're not opposing ends of a spectrum it's not one or the other they're really working together in a symbiotic relationship like how do you know that you have the best ideas rising to the top if everybody on the team has very like-minded thoughts like if you're all in an echo chamber and it's all groupthink you're not actually getting the best ideas you're getting what you think is the best idea if more diverse perspectives are included will the best ideas that rise to the top actually end up looking different from each other and there's so much creativity bursting

from marginalized communities in video games so if I could find a way to be part of including and inspiring and empowering different voices and therefore help teams be more successful that's a future that I wanted to be a part of so fast forward I'm a DNI manager and my hope is that like I man change the world I'm gonna make it a better place and I'm gonna do it my first 90 days preferably but you know no big deal but if I need to wait a couple of months before making this like amazing breakthrough in the world I just wanted to make an impact really and I knew it wasn't going to be easy but I figured the first baby steps would be pretty clear like okay let's partner with diversity initiatives easy and hey if implicit biases are a problem let's develop courses and training and programs to tackle them so cool plan is all laid out and none of it happens and

there's really no shortage of support it wasn't like anybody stopped me from pursuing the plans that I had laid out it really wasn't about that it was that like for all the nuance involved in the space and how overwhelming and intimidating it can be like people are actually very curious about making diversity and inclusion work people want to get involved they there's really no no one's stopping me but I was just missing a vital piece of the information which is really that if you want to make something work you have to understand why are doing it on a very foundational fundamental philosophical level the problem is is that I spent a lot of time trying to tackle on solutions to an existing organizational culture without deeply understanding how they'll interact with each other as essentially undoing my own work and doing myself a huge disservice so what I really needed to do was step back and reassess my own

assumptions coming into this place coming into this line of work so two months into my role Harvard Business Review published an article titled diversity policies rarely make companies fairer and they feel threatening to white men which is a brutal brutal headline and to summarize what and it's always the case where it's like the headline is super brutal but like the content is actually like pretty pretty chill like it's not like crazy but summarize it found that companies that were using the existence of a diversity policy they use it as a logical or legal defense to sort of discount claims of unfair treatment and white men who were the status quo in these examples they perceived women and minorities as being treated differently so they perceived it as they were then being treated unfairly they were the ones being treated differently too but in an in a negative way it's hard for me

to not panic at first reading this because it's like I just got hired to do this but it actually makes sense and and I was like the first person to sort of that riot hired to tackle to tech tackle these issues sorry head-on people have been thinking and talking about diversity they were super involved in it especially since in the games and tech industry specifically it was kind of exploding all of a sudden everybody wants to talk about it but this is the first time I'm somebody who's me was like hired to work on this full-time and actually develop a solution so small panic attack over after reading that article I realized that like these reactions make complete sense these reactions to policies and trainings and like sort of like sensitivity training sessions they make sense and the reason I feel it's because like people don't change because of company policy I feel

like there are some folks in here who work in HR can probably attest to that where it's like yeah if you put up a policy it's not like everybody's going to be suddenly inspired to change all of the behaviors that are included with that policy focusing on policies doesn't actually address the root cause of exclusionary behavior and diversity policies especially they can create an a illusion that's not real they can create an illusion that different people are treated that are there unfairly rewarded or unfairly treated or that they're too fairly treated and rewarded and that causes a lot of tension and resentment internally so we're pretty we're pretty quick to think of tactics like policies or trainings to solve DNI issues but without understanding what it is that we're aiming for or trying to learn or trying to change a lot of damage can be unintentionally done because of distrust or misperceptions there are a couple of key values that I wanted to share today

that I found particularly helpful as from my own growth as a diversity inclusion manager and my hypothesis is that hopefully what I share can help programs be successful and meaningful and have lasting effect so it's not about not having programs it's not about not having policies it's about understanding why you're doing them so as a DNI manager like I'm obviously I'm for the people and that probably sounds super obvious but it's all people like everybody wants to talk to the diversity inclusion manager because we all have different experiences that we believe are valuable to our teams but there there is this light bulb moment that where I had to pivot how I engaged with everyone not just everybody at my work but also in the in the industry as well this is the part of the larger sort of D&I discourse that I feel like a lot of professionals don't stress and it can be really easy to take for granted because I came in thinking like all right I'm an advocate I'm gonna find all

the underrepresented groups I'm gonna tear them out and I'm going to create programs and initiatives based on what they need and that sounds like a great thing to do it's not a bad thing to do that's not like a negative solution but without taking the time to understand the majority groups that these underrepresented groups are collaborating with on a daily basis and working with on a daily basis programs and trainings and so forth that are targeting the majority groups will probably feel a little bit like this gentle persuasion so especially with the current political climate building bridges to each other now is more crucial than ever so NPR published an article about how after the American election there was this new version of us vs. them and

we're professional peacemakers who would be diversity managers share some of the immediate challenges of a deeply divided country like addressing the concerns of people usually thought of as privileged or having to navigate a language minefield where the wrong word can ignite conflict and speaking of my own personal experiences after the election it was just like all of the sudden everybody on Facebook had an opinion and everybody wanted to tell you it and there was just like threads of drama and blocking and freak-outs and it makes like there's a lot of anxiety right now there is a lot of tension and there's an uptick that you know I don't think a lot of people were expecting to see in 2017 we're seeing more division and resentment it's leading to isolation its resorting to groupthink and we're starting to fear the unknown and there's a restlessness and a whirlwind of breaking news like every day something new is happening and it's awful and it's

like moving leaders and managers to sort of have to realize how do I keep the calm internally and how do I like call for for everybody to unite and there's also growing research on how social media is disrupting the way that we communicate with each other about specifically political issues and I've been seeing a lot of parallels personally with how that's been specifically affecting the DNI conversation and if we don't address the sort of disconnect that's happening between how people look at each other politically and how people look at each other how people communicate to each other on social media I feel like we're ignoring a vital piece of the puzzle and it's most recently like played a an unprecedented role in the American election and the current administration like in January we saw press secretary Sean Spicer the spice man hold up a printed tweet like to address it at an actual press conference like at the rate that we're going we're gonna see political tweets in textbooks it's going to be

part of language and like listen like as a millennial I hate when people blame on social media even though that's like low-key what I'm trying to do right now because obviously like majority and minority tensions like tensions between majority and minority groups that's been around forever but it's impossible to kind of ignore the growing impact of how online spaces directly frame and affect the conversations that we have in person as colleagues and as teammates and we in the games industry especially we have a lexicon that's built almost entirely on how we speak on the internet like we engage and care about an audience that knows the ins and outs of Reddit they call us call us out for misusing memes and make sure to know that we're embarrassing ourselves and they can easily out post all of us combined in terms of social media affecting DNI in games a number of initiatives and

movements began as hashtags and they sparked into something bigger so this point an example it began as hashtag one reason why where a designer asked on Twitter why there are so few women creating games and hundreds of women responded with anecdotes of sexism in the industry and that evolved into hashtag one reason to be and this was started again on Twitter in response by narrative designer Rhianna Pratchett as to the positive reasons of why women are in games and why they should stay in games and why they should pursue their career in games and this evolved into a series of GDC panels where women and minorities empower each other and inspire creators to make the industry more inclusive and to make us a better place we also can't deny how social media field groups like gamergate are the alt-right and that have hugely impacted the conversations that we have every day about DNI so

what we're seeing is kind of like this wild evolution of not only media and how media is changing but also our language with each other because on the one hand you have free accessible tools that are potential platforms and opportunities which is a key part of mobilizing groups and ideas and on the other hand you have free accessible tools that are potential platforms and opportunities which is a key part of mobilizing groups and ideas so you have like this potential for greater good and incredible change and a this other potential of just raging dumpster fires but really what I've noticed the most within this new lexicon is that we have a tendency to group people and shorthand them with labels that are loaded with assumptions I've seen far too many conversations and I've like I've had to cast myself from being part of those conversations where we devolve into a reductive dismissal of the other person and those reductive dismissals like appear on social media

first so like like you're a Bernie bro or you're feminazi or like you're triggered snowflake like that all happens online but we actually use that sort of thinking to in person and it's this quick clumping of people to an online identity it bleeds into the way that we talk to each other in real life and even if we're more politically or philosophically aligned than not I can't say that I'm entirely surprised there are years of short handing and labeling and grouping that we've socially assigned each other that up until this point were a very divided country we're reducing each other to identities and affiliations and not considering much else there is a great talk by Howard J Ross who he spoke about managing fear managing bias and a time of fear and it was all specifically about this kind of work where it's like how do you people feel a lot of anxiety when it's like they're the rise of sort of like black

lives matter and then people feeling like do you mean like only a black lives matter or like black lives matter too and then it kind of grows and grows and especially with the election you have people reducing to each other each other to like what do you and what do you believe in versus anything else we've lost a lot of nuance he says the DNI manager if I'm working for the people I have to understand what makes them tick what gives them pause or else nothing that I give them is gonna address the root sort of cause of intolerance or exclusion that means engaging with people I have a mentally disagree with and like mind you I'm not talking about trolls I'm talking about like people that you're working with people in your industry your peer group if we believe that games are such a profound core part of our lives then we have to be working together on this and it's not easy coming from sorry just like fresh stuff against my mic that probably didn't sound great I coming from a nonprofit

that's rooted in social activism and moving directly into the industry where this is a conversation people are having for the first time that made me have to stop and sort of reefa Miller eyes myself with how I got into this space and and the sort of ways that I I've stumbled along the way and it that can be super humbling and grounding and a reminder that we all have to start somewhere so when we focus on building relationships we're making an effort to find where bridges can connect not watch them burn in the rearview mirror and that's just one part of my hypothesis you know not only invested in working with people who are heavily affected by diversity concerns but also the specter of the skeptics and especially the people who are indifferent the people who can kind of take it or leave it or never really had an opinion either way and again that might sound really painfully obvious but like it's super blindsiding when that is not part of the

core conversations that we have in DNI as a peer group another core part in navigating the space in a way that feels more authentic and is more meaningful to me is by fostering an organizational mindset that embraces diversity and that means digging deep into a company culture and embedding values and frameworks of thought when it comes to diversity seamlessly into it diversity is more like a model that matures over time and taking shortcuts in order to increase head counts or improve quotas aren't addressing the real problem of what might actually be alienating people which could very well be your company culture so knowing the core values of a company is when D&I programs become more of a rational choice like obviously we would go for something like this instead of you know giving way to sort of a righteous moral stance or paying lip service to what's seen as a hot topic issue again investing in this is not just a theoretically good thing to do it's something that gives companies

competitive edge and makes them more innovative so let's say for example as a company you value teamwork and creativity and that's kind of seeing what's up holding the company vision what you can do is that it may maybe instead of adding training that's like high-level implicit biases hey here all the different biases that you can have a solution would be to actually put together like a team working team-building workshop to address biases and behaviors that exclude other people who are trying to collaborate with each other and this is obviously where diversity heavily overlaps into biases and how they can break down team morale it's this is lineman of like hey well if we care about teams then on the positive side this is what a healthy team looks like and the results that they get and on a negative side this is how toxicity can form that could be a better starting point to actually start initiating changes to address actual root causes to get people to look more deeply into

themselves and to be more introspective so embedding diversity of thought as like a core tenet of a company's mental model that's really helped me understand how to connect with my peers in a deeper way regardless of our political or philosophical differences because now we have a value that binds us and it's the value it's why we come to work every day it's our common ground a mine site that encourages diversity in my opinion is psychologist Carol Dweck's growth mindset principle which I mentioned at the beginning of my talk so to summarize direct makes a distinction between two mindsets the first is a fixed and this is when people believe qualities like intelligence or talent are predetermined or unchangeable traits and that influences how they grow so students Dweck found that students that have a fixed mindset are more likely to learn slower they're more likely to give up on challenges and they're more likely to avoid taking risks in growth mindset

is when people believe that qualities can be developed through dedication and hard work it's like building a muscle so she found that students who embrace growth mindsets were more likely to learn quickly and view challenges and failures as opportunities to improve rather than confirmations that well I was never good at this to begin with so why should I even do it applying that framework to an organizational mindset is so important like when a company embraces a growth mindset the kinds of people that thrive are the ones who aren't afraid of being wrong they're the ones that are not afraid of making mistakes they see conflicts and tensions as learning opportunities and they see different perspectives that test their own as ultimately positive and educational and really up until this point I had been so hyper focused on delivering DNI as a product like here it is its diversity inclusion we did it and

like leaders in that like sorry totally jumped ahead thing is that no one solves it even as researchers uncover more data about the inclusion of underrepresented groups we're still finding more problems so as companies are including more people they're finding that they're actually maybe including more white women there's more diversity of white women and black indigenous people of color are still being underrepresented and there's a lot so there's a lot of sociological layers kind of mixed in that you have to be aware of and when you're thinking of a global mindset if it's a global company you have to understand that the the problems that affect North America are not the problems that affect Brazil they're not the problems that affect Turkey you have to really think deeply and when you embrace a growth mindset that means that like as more data is uncovered about how to you know diverse diverse can keep diversifying leaders in the space can develop alongside those changes and one of the examples is the

way that hiring managers think about candidates like if you're prioritizing people who want to hire if you're prioritizing learners not people who are self-proclaimed geniuses or rockstars you're creating a possibility for growth learners don't they know they don't have all the solutions but they will do whatever it takes to get them and they'll see failure as part of the process and not as a setback or a reason to give up and this tactic is actually specifically to target women who either opt out of applying to jobs that say like hey we want rock stars hey we want geniuses because they're less likely to see themselves as such but if they do go through the process they're more likely to be stereotyped against as not being geniuses and not being rock stars so a fixed mindset will probably tell you that this is a risky thing to do but I

do want to add that yes it's risky to hire people based on their potential versus here is proof that I have done all the rock star awesome genius things in my life but keep in mind that our industry is almost entirely based on taking risks from crowd-sourced indie developed games to the ambitious of new studios or first-timers the chances of failure are extremely high all the time and a growth mindset can extend outside the hiring process too so there's an awesome podcast it's called Coates which I talk about it all the time so of course I'm going to shoehorn it here it's called code-switch it's by journalist Shireen Marisol Marashi and Jean Denby and if one episode featured the professor Catherine or who teaches courses on whiteness as part of critical identity studies at Beloit College so she framed the teaching of race relations specifically with regards to white privilege as an intellectual habit and that means that her class would ask

themselves questions that have to do with understanding who they are in the room how or why did they get to where they are and then allowing those questions to begin informing their situations outside the classroom so teaching complex nuanced topics related to diversity as if it was an intellectual habit that would have all of us stopped and asks ourselves you know why do I prefer living in this neighborhood why do I not feel great when a friend of mine who looks different than me has this like controversial view on my favorite hobby why did I feel really great about that candidate the concept of a growth mindset where DNI concepts and experiences that we have about DNI that is what ultimately if we're thinking about things as an intellectual habit that can fundamentally shift the conversations that we have and ultimately that will be the thing that affects programs and trainings and initiatives so where do I go from here

I've been thinking about this problem space for just over a year now and for starters DNI at like riot it originally sat as a pod of just me like I'm the diversity and inclusion person team right here and it's that within talent which is our human resources discipline and I was mostly thinking about like okay how do i Learning and Development how do I affect our rewards and perks how do we make that more inclusive how do we make things more diverse but this year we're actually building an initiative in the company that works directly on defining strengthening and expanding the foundations of our organizational culture so our team is now dedicated to keeping a pulse on culture which means codifying the values that we find crucial and how we work together and communicate with each other and ensuring that those values are baked into projects and programs across riot and that affects things like manager development or performance management

leadership development and that like we and all levels of sort of decision-making across the company so we're ensuring that we're thoughtful and that we're consistent in how our values manifest from the inside out so that means thinking about how do we work together how do we collaborate how do we make decisions how do we communicate and share stories with each other and also with our players and also with our peers we take culture extremely seriously and we believe that being deliberate about who we are that will help us grow and evolve in the right way and we want to hold all rioters accountable to upholding our culture and the fact that DNI is now a part of that team that's a significant shift forward because it doesn't actually change about whether or not I consider programs and trainings and policies etc as potential outputs these are things that can still

happen but we're actually thinking about it not as a pocket that influence is part of the organization but as something that is deeply embedded in our values which fuels our passion at the end of the day diversity is everyone's problem it's not just talents it's not legals it's not just you know PRS or marketing's or philanthropies it's part of everyday life and public discourse and when it becomes integral to your organization's success people start to buy in on their own you don't have to convince them because now everyone knows that they have a stake in it that they have a stake in improving it and they have in a stake in making the company stronger so I hope that what I shared today about learning to build bridges to all types of people and having a belief system that welcomes growth and flourishes under challenges is helpful keep in mind it is a very hard thing to do you're not going to wake up one day and just have all of these things sort of clear and cut it takes patience it

takes time and constant action and it will be messy and it will be awkward and it will be frustrating but my bet is that if we learn to do this if we learn to unite and work together not only as a company but as part of an industry we can make diversity and inclusion work so I want to thank you for listening and GDC for having me and just a reminder you will get a survey to say like how'd she do and you can be like oh god finally she's terrible and there will be a we have 10 minutes for questions and there will be a wrap-up room that we can move over if we're going overtime there is a mic in the middle of the room so if you can please speak clearly into the mic I deeply appreciate that great talk thank you so much

few months ago I came across dr. Robin G Angela D'Angelo's work on white fragility you familiar with that okay so very brief or very briefly for those who aren't like I wasn't just a few months ago the way I remember it all is people like me often think of racism specifically as a binary issue and an individual issue so I or somebody else is either racist or not and and it's good and bad and what a lot of people like me don't understand is how systemic it is and how much grey there is in between so that was blue light bulb for me super helpful question is do you find that helpful in the work you do around racism and is there equal fragility does that framework work for other inclusion issues yeah I found honestly taking the time to explain to people in a very sort of soft and gentle way how these things

are how these things can affect you on a daily basis where it's like hey it's not that you're racist it's that you've just grown up only knowing this thing and only believing this thing is right that has a much I feel like that's super useful and really like part of me hates that we sometimes have to sterilize a lot of the real pain and real anger from underrepresented groups and marginalized communities to sort of make other people feel better but again as a like NPR calls that diversity managers are professional peacemakers you have to sort of work within that framework so yeah I have found it really helpful and also what I found working really well surprisingly is teaching people about intersectionality is teaching people that you're not just one thing or the other that you are a person who's had many experiences and maybe you have you know sort of invisible disadvantages that other people don't see but they will make assumptions that you're super advantage when they look at you that has

been a very helpful approach and just calling out the nuance and sort of reducing this binary thinking that you mentioned yeah thank you great talk I'm Shrek I'm Don hi I'm glad you brought up the topic of new lots and and so I'd like to introduce one of those nuances and I just get your thought thoughts on it and that's that say myself as an Indian dude from South India growing up for instance well one of the anecdotes I like to bring up is that was around 12 years old I won a violin award it sounds like a great thing right like I had this creative side and you would think that my community would reward that but the sort of response to that was actually that you know my parents would grill me that I didn't actually get a academic aboard right and now I work in games right so you know it but what it took for there to be the sort of acceptance of my

family that this was okay was a sort of ten-year struggle of constant conversation and constant criticism of my own community right and so when we talk about diversity in conclusion I often see that there's this onus on the majority to welcome us in and I completely agree that's that's totally valid but what I see missing from the conversation is active criticism of minority communities because it helps the leaders in those communities right it helps us to to challenge our own communities so that they can grow I mean don't get me started on if I was a woman I mean like I probably right now married with two kids right and and so we're what I just want to throw out there and I'd like to get your thoughts on that is where where does the role of criticism coming right and as a majority towards towards a minority and I'll let you take it from there I think it depends on the goal of the conversation like are you criticizing like when people criticize each other criticism is a good thing but if it is

if it's not to get a deeper understanding that's when I feel like it's a problem so like right now with all likely aslam a phobia it's kind of like how I feel I grew up in a non-practicing but I grew up in a Muslim family and it kind of always feels like I have to like explain on behalf of the billions of billion of Muslims across the world of like this is why we might think this way or this is why this thing might have happened so it really depends on what is being asked like I think healthy criticism is crucial but if it's kind of like a if it further read if you're trying to go for nuance but you're actually furthering or reducing the problem and making it more binary that's where I think it's like you need to step back and just understand what you're trying to achieve do you think there's a place in an organization to criticize minority communities uh it depends I can you give me an example of what you

mean by that I just meant that so what the focus is entirely seems to be to be inclusive but to also go and challenge individuals and grow their leadership skills and things like that it kind of meant let me you know it I think this might probably take a bit longer let me think about that and I'll meet you in the bathroom just see you there thank you hi hi I work in a in Japan in a Japanese company and ninety seven percent of Japanese in that kind of a context I can tell you that this kind of slow and steady approach isn't gonna work in my situation to create diversity I've been sent here as a foreigner to try and bring diversity back to the Japanese company do you have any kind of more specific tactical ideas may you could share with them with me later for how to try and change the situation there the company is about 40 years old it's a gaming company they have gaming division but they're not really committed to gaming the culture of the company sorry if I might have misheard you in Japan yeah it's a Japanese

company in Japan I think you have to sort of like short answer and then we can talk more is you have to understand like what diversity they're looking for like they don't know they don't know okay well this is like this is sort of thank you this is sort of like the time for assessment I feel like my one of the most crucial things that DNI managers might not do right away is actually do a full assessment of like what is the pockets that are missing like what is the story that's missing do you think that manager should be Japanese or foreign I don't really have an answer for that yeah let's go talk later yeah thanks hi hi um I like to talk I have these diversity discussions sometimes I wondered do you have any advice on how to keep your cool when you're talking with someone about an issue that deeply affects you but doesn't affect them and they don't believe it's actually harmful to you to

kind of go back to the the second question that was answered um this idea of like what is the goal right like sometimes I have to set very clear parameters of like listen I can try and help you understand why people would feel a certain way but I'm not gonna sit here and justify why I'm upset you just need to accept that I'm upset about this thing and I find that that kind of like sets the tone of the conversation that not only helps them understand that they don't have to like you know be sort of a devil's advocate they don't have to play that position but it also helps me look at kind of distance myself and be a bit more anthropological when trying to talk about my problems and that's kind of what I've like being very intentional and setting a tone from the very beginning is pretty crucial like I've seen a I've seen conversations so we

actually have like an internal selection select a group before diversity and there I've seen people use pretty great tactics of like I can't get into why I'm upset right now but like short points like this is how I feel about this thing happy to talk about it more later but sort of short version and I feel like that has only been met with like understanding and respect and compassion because the people understand like okay you're actually trying to open up to me and this is a difficult thing to talk about that's helped okay thank you so much yeah thank you um we have two minutes okay I think this might be a quick one thank you for the talk it was lovely in your work at riot would you say that most of your attention and I guess your your job your energy is going toward potential or new hires or would it be more of like changing the internal like who's already there and being more inclusive to the people that maybe already exist there yeah both I guess

yeah so for me it's actually been more so of the latter so that when new people are introduced and brought in they actually feel included and they actually feel like they're part of the culture I feel like when you're a part of the problem that I personally have with sort of head counts and trying to increase increased quotas of people is that if you're not understanding why maybe you do have those underrepresented groups to begin with bringing them in might not be the most obvious solution but I also don't think that those things have to be one or the other right I think that these two things can happen in parallel and they can work together thank you very much yeah thank you may be less of a two minute question so I apologize but you mentioned in your presentation like fostering relationships with people who are not affected by DNI and I was curious if you could elaborate a little bit on that because I - I'm a little bit tired of for my entire life being the one Arab Muslim that you know and being the good one so it gets a little bit

exhausting particularly in this current climate so my gut instinct is why do why do we need to seek those people out every single time I mean is that not what we've been doing pretty much all the time so I think it's because people have an understanding or an assumption that like when you're talking about a sign of phobia or you're talking about racism that you're you're talking about like KKK or like something so incredibly obvious and straightforward that without addressing the like daily ways that you can you know undermine somebody or disengage somebody from a conversation because they don't feel safe that conversation that's where I feel like most of our problems are at we're actually just out of time so I would love to talk to you more about that especially arab-muslim I feel you I thank you so much