The past few years, we have made large strides to welcome more diverse people into our community. You see better gender ratios in attendance numbers at Python conferences, the billed speakers, the amount of women-centric programs. We can see the benefits of outreach. But we’re not done yet.

While a lot of the Python community embraces the importance of being diverse, we haven’t taken that mindset to our workplace. From recruiting, we still hear, “sure, we wanted to recruit women, but we couldn’t find them” and “we only focus on quality here, not gender!” Within company cultures, we hear “gender equality isn’t a problem here!” or “women don’t ask for a higher salary” and to “just lean in!”

This talk recounts the diversity efforts of the past few years and quantify the effects on the Python community. But this talk also addresses the not-so-low-hanging fruit; the deeper-rooted problems that still plague the community from inside where we work. And it talks the audience through actionable items to improve one’s work place that welcomes more diversity.

This talk was given at EuroPython 2015 and as a keynote at DjangoCon US 2015.