There is so much brilliance in Sacha Judd’s talk from Beyond Tellerrand 2016 (available as both video and text) that it feels hard to summarise while fully doing it justice

Some highlights:

I realised that we do this all the time. Dismiss the things that young women are excited about.

:(

When Twitter turned ten last year, most of the retrospectives that were written overlooked the fact that six of the top ten most retweeted tweets of all time were from One Direction members

Pretty impressive social media reach!

I realised that I was spending all this time trying to think about how to engage women with technology, and I was ignoring the fact they already were.

Are you actually trying to find and hire minorities and build a diverse team, or are you virtue signalling as a PR exercise?

Do you really care if the person has a compsci degree? Or is that just on your wishlist? Because if you put it in the ad, you’re turning a bunch of people away.

Do your job ads express your actual requirements, or are they arbitrary exclusionary filters?

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TL;DR Ditch the mirrortocracy, stop looking for people who look like you, don’t undervalue things young women like. But do watch the talk or read the writeup; it’s worth it.