Two more presentations left today. And up next is Tessa Crissel. Tessa has such a great story. She is a developer turned developer Whisperer.So Tessa has been in the tech industry for over 13 years and here she is coming on stage and she is in fact a self taught developer and she focused on open source space most of her career. And actually in 2016, she changed gears and moved from that developer role into developer relations where she grows communities and developer ad and developer advocacy program. So today, Tessa is the head of developer community at Twitter. She is the creator of the developer mindset, which is a content hub and community with insightful information about how developers think and advice on how to engage with them. So if you're someone who has to hire developers, probably a pretty good place to check out um or manage them. So we are so fortunate to get some of that advice here today, Tessa, you are already here with us on stage. So I'll just give the name of your presentation which is very clear, it is breaking down gender discrimination and I will hand it over to you.

Awesome. Can everyone hear me? OK,

so far? It sounds great.

Perfect. I just have to say Angie, your presentation was amazing. And I think that my presentation is just gonna kind of build off of that same exact sentiment. And I'm very excited to share it in this way. Um Right after her. So it was 2017, I was at the Denver post delivering a conference presentation on continuous integration and deployment, which six months before that, I had no idea what that meant. Not a clue. And it turns out that automating your development process is a lot harder than you would think. Um But I had compliments and questions and people seeking to chat with me afterwards. And if you've ever spoke before, you know, that's the best compliment that you can get as a speaker. I was proud. I was so happy that I mastered something that was very difficult to master or at least for me. And it was anyways, I was chatting with a very lovely woman. Her name was Maddie who was asking a variety of different questions and we ended up walking to lunch together um for just a bit more context into this story. I was speaking and attending the conference on behalf of my previous employer, uh who was a tech start up out of San Francisco.

Um My male coworker who was also attending the conference, uh tracked me down in the lunchroom and proceeded to scream at me about the fact that I left our booth presence. I was only about six months into my role at that point in time. And this person was by no means my manager, he screamed at me in front of the entire cafeteria where the entire conference was eating lunch. It was probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. Um Not because I was ashamed uh but because I was being publicly screamed at by a toxic white dude. I was newish to my role and very new to this tech community specifically. What were they gonna think of me? What were they gonna think of him? Oh my gosh. What were they gonna think of my company? Are they still gonna trust them? Are they gonna trust me? I tried to get him to at least stop screaming, but it wasn't working. And so I stood up, I left my lunch behind and I walked into where all the sponsor booths were only to find the room completely empty. He embarrassed me. He embarrassed himself for what? To scold me for not being at our booth when no one was even around. Oh, I wanted to punch him in the face. Oh my gosh. I so badly wanted to punch him in the face. Have you ever had those moments?

You know the ones where if you make the wrong choice in the split second heat of the moment, they could easily destroy your career, maybe your entire life and everything you've worked so hard to accomplish. I was in that moment and it felt 100% worth it. But I stayed strong somehow. I told him that the way that he spoke to me was unacceptable and that he should never do it again. Of course, he didn't listen. He continued to scream at me when my all male coworkers and managers weren't around. He continued to ridicule me in the work that we had to complete together. He continued to harass me at conferences and other in-person events we attended together. He continued to make it near impossible for me to really enjoy and be successful at my job. So I reported that's what we're supposed to do, right? That's what all these companies train us to do and their onboarding and their anti harassment contracts and training. My manager who was also a white male told me to talk to him to work through it with my coworker. Oh, yes, please. Can I talk to someone who seems like they're emotionally and mentally unstable about their mistreatment and microaggressions he's shown towards me. I think not, I never approached my coworker. He was too unstable in, in my mind and I couldn't put myself at risk.

I had stopped myself from, I had stopped from lowering myself to his standards. Once already, I didn't think I was strong enough to be able to do it again. He continued to mistreat me and my manager continued to ask me if I had spoken to him yet. What was happening? Is this my worst nightmare, two white dudes putting me in a place where I was destined to fail. I hate to say this, but the situation only got worse. Um My reporting finally worked sort of and hr was brought in at that time, I was living in Minnesota working remotely. So it was my manager actually. And him and I both had to fly to San Francisco, which is where my coworker coincidentally lived. So his, his requirements of travel were non-existent. Um as well as the hr leader. Yet again, what was happening to me? Why am I constantly being put in these situations where I have to advocate for myself so hard? Why in the world did I have to fly across the country? Leave my family behind to have a discussion about someone else's bad behavior? Why was the effort put on me? Not only that, but at the end, but the end result of that meeting was that I was supposed to tell my coworker to eat a sandwich when he was mistreating me. He suggested it and hr agreed to it.

The worst part about all of this was that the hr leader was a woman, a woman who clearly felt that the pressure should be put on me to resolve the situation. So many things happened. This story is a lot longer than I can tell you in this session including getting reprimanded on my birthday for the only negative comment I had ever made at that company. I was bubbly and kind and optimistic. So when I finally shared negative feedback, it was jarring and my manager decided to also scream at me for it. This situation felt all too familiar. I thought my manager had my best interest in mind. He was kind and constantly praising me for my work and lifting me up publicly and in front of executives at my company. I believe that there was no way that he was maliciously playing a role in this situation because of that. But here's the thing, no matter how kind or nice or amplifying or supportive that your manager may feel you can't use that as an excuse for their neglect. They've been given the privilege and the authority to support and manage you and if they're failing in any area, they're failing you. I was the only woman on that team.

And even though I'm strong and I'm vocal and for the most part, I can take care of myself, I was still put in a situation that any woman would have failed at. And that is the part that makes me so sad. What happens to women who aren't like me? What happens to women who haven't had to fight their entire life for everything they want. What happens to women who are too scared to speak up for themselves, they leave tech, they leave the toxicity behind because it's not worth the energy. But we need these women, I need these women who are going to support me and speak up for me and women that I can support and speak up for. We need allies and we need each other. I know that a number of you are probably nodding your head. I really hope that it's not a lot of you, but I have a feeling it's probably a lot of you. Maybe even tearing up. It's actually a little hard for me to hold it together. Honestly, take a deep breath and imagine a world where we all have each other's back.

Imagine a world where if I saw that same coworker screaming at another woman that I stood up and I stopped the microaggression immediately before it could rear its ugly head because I knew that every other woman in that room had my back. Take a second and imagine that it gives me goose bumps. It gives me hope. I don't have a computer science degree. I'm a scrappy girl who came from a low income small town. I left my first job in tech because they brought in a new female manager and she hated me to this day. I really don't know why, but I left the company because she made my life a living nightmare. I began to think. Am I the problem? Am I the one that's doing something wrong. I worked so hard for that first tech role and it hurt like hell when I left it behind. The only way that we're gonna break the culture of toxic masculinity is by breaking the culture of toxic behavior among women. We can't be causing harm to our own gender. Have any of you seen the movie Mean Girls If you haven't? My TLDR for that movie is there's one girl who's just awful and somehow she ends up being like the girl that all of the girls, why I don't know, want to be like and she creates this little posse of her quote unquote friends and they essentially harass and bully most of the other girls at the school.

This behavior is encouraged in our society. We've been encouraged to compete against each other and encouraged to take actions that bring each other down. Today. We need to band together, we need to support each other, compliment each other, elevate each other's work and praise one another publicly so much so that the tech industry notices our impact because suddenly less women are leaving tech and more women are taking on difficult leadership roles and nailing them.

And why? Because every single woman is standing behind them, ensuring that they know that they have what it takes to change their company, to change our role in tech and to change the world as we know it. My name is Tessa Creel and I vow to only encourage women and elevate them every single chance I get because I have a daughter and I want better for her. I want better for every girl and woman in this world. Thank you for listening to my story. I intentionally tried to leave this at 10 minutes. Let's see how I'm doing. Oop, I'm at 1130. I'm close, I'm close to that because I want all of us to really think and have a conversation for these last few minutes of this session about the impact that we can make in tech and how we can help other women by simply just having their back. Thank you again. And please please reach out in any of the uh listed items on this slide. I love building an army of amazing women allies and I want to be on your side.

Tessa, thank you so much. Um If you want, you can stop sharing slides and we can definitely answer some questions or leave that up for a bit with your contact info there and we can do that in a minute. So, um Tessa, what a real and detailed story, we are so lucky to have you be brave enough to share that with us in the comments. We had many women who are joining us today saying that your story really resonated with them. So thank you. Um Your comments on the rate of women leaving tech for the reasons that you described is saddening and so impactful. And we are certainly better together. So, thank you so much, Tessa for, for your powerful message that you shared with us today.

Of course, like, like I said, I just want all of us to have each other back and to be able to work together.

Tessa, we've got someone in the chat here who's asked us if you're intending to share your story in a book by writing a book about it.

Oh, that's absolutely amazing to ask. I actually had someone reach out if you look on my Twitter and you dig pretty deep. I actually retold the story and, uh this is a little hard to say. Um I retold the story in, in a Twitter thread. Um, because I, they actually took ads out in my name not that long ago. So they were trying to market my name to, um, obtain Captures, obviously left their company and moved to Twitter. And, you know, I'm at Twitter. It's a pretty big company. Um It wasn't intentionally malicious but it actually led into a uh settlement or a lawsuit that led into a settlement. Um And someone reached out and actually asked if they could ghost write my story. Um And, and the more I do things like this and the more I have people who ask me like that, I think that it makes me wanna tell my story because I came from such a small town. I came from a low-income family. I came from, from really nothing and worked incredibly hard to get to where I am. And for some reason I like still have this like ability to just keep fighting and fighting and fighting. And, and I think that if I can instill anything on any other women, it's that I want them to see that fighting is worth it and that the rest of us have your back and we're here to support you. Um So that book might just happen someday.

Um But uh we'll just see,

I am sure that so many women here would read that book and that you would have a really supportive community. But we also know that doing that kind of thing is really brave. So you've already shared it on many platforms and we can feel the emotion from you. I've got a lump in my throat, you know, trying to, to keep our conversation on track, but it's, it's so positive that you're sharing, but of course, there's a motion that's tied to it, right? And so we really appreciate you being here, Tessa and we do have time for a few more questions. So if people have any the chat um that they're thinking of, but uh I will ask you what, in the meantime, you were speaking about some finding that kind of group of people that can really support you, right? And so I think sometimes when people are in these tricky environments and they glance at kind of who they have available. They might feel like there's no one there. How do you, by a protein or where do you look?

Oh, that's a really hard choice. Um, a really hard topic to talk about. It's actually interesting because I launched a nonprofit, a number of years ago called Outspoken Women, which has since not had a lot of traction, but the intent of that was to actually get more women in tech to be public speaking. I was really sick of going to conferences and hanging out with a bunch of dudes all the time. Uh And so that was the purpose. It was a very like selfish uh self driven purpose to try to change that environment in tech. Um But my friend and I uh her name is Ryan Kinney. She's lovely. She's also going through a very similar situation and has a very similar story which is quite unfortunate. Um But her and I have been talking about changing the mission of outspoken women to be more about being outspoken and being able to use your voice to share your story and feel like you have folks who are backing you up. Um You know, so I'm that could be an initiative one day. We'll see how much time I've got on my plate.

But I think that the thing that's really key is for all of us to start to reach out to some of these women who are in our network. Whether it be on Twitter, whether it be on linkedin, whether it be and some of these communities um being a community manager and leader myself. I, I tend to spend a lot of time in communities and there's a lot of great things that can come out of that. And then networking is really the best part that can come out of those communities. And oftentimes you just, you're so pleasantly surprised by the people that you meet or the the various like roles that they turn, they end up playing in your life. And um I would definitely, first off, you can reach out to me, please follow me on Twitter. If you have anything that you need to talk through, you need to vent, you need to share. I have your back 100 and 50 million% outside of that, reach out to those women around you. Um share with them, your story. They are not going to not listen to you, they're going to want to be on your side and they're gonna want to advocate for you because if we can all do this together, it's gonna be a much better world that we can all live in

so well said, and perhaps it's also doing what you just did there, Tessa, which is saying I have your back because I think when we put ourselves out there, when we're not in a place of need, then when, when that time comes right, you have that network that you've grown. And so Anna also, who of course brought us all together today wrote in the chat too when people were commenting on your really powerful message, she wrote in the chat saying, you know, this is why her and her team created the women tech network. And so we're all really fortunate to have been able to be part of this discussion with you today. Thank you for being with us, Tessa. Very happy to be here.