The invisible elephant in the room
Welcome to the page dedicated to my talk « The invisible elephant in the room ».
That talk was given for the first time in january 2023 at NDC London 2023 and for a second time at SQLBits 2023 in march of the same year. It should have been presented at PHPday Verona 2023 as a keynote and at Codemotion Madrid 2023 in may, but saddly covid forced me to cancel. It was presented at NewCrafts Paris 2023 in may and came to Berlin for KanDDDinsky 2023 in october. It has been scheduled at a couple other events this year that are still not public about it.
I hope this talk will have a long life because I believe this is a subject we have to tackle as an industry.
This page will be in constant evolution. I’ll add resources as I go.
The invisible elephant in the room
Welcome to the page dedicated to my talk « The invisible elephant in the room ».
That talk was given for the first time in january 2023 at NDC London 2023 and for a second time at SQLBits 2023 in march of the same year. It should have been presented at PHPday Verona 2023 as a keynote and at Codemotion Madrid 2023 in may, but saddly covid forced me to cancel. It was presented at NewCrafts Paris 2023 in may and came to Berlin for KanDDDinsky 2023 in october. It has been scheduled at a couple other events this year that are still not public about it.
I hope this talk will have a long life because I believe this is a subject we have to tackle as an industry.
This page will be in constant evolution. I’ll add resources as I go.
The pitch.
We’ve been talking about diversity and inclusion in our industry for some time now and most of us have at least a general idea of the issues at stake. But we sometimes forget about one of the aspects of diversity : disability. Not disability at a whole though, I’d say there has been quite an interest about accessibility and how to make our products better for our disabled users. But we almost never talk about disability in our industry.
Many of us tech workers have disabilities and/or chronic illnesses that impact our daily lives. Yet, most of the tech industry can’t seem to see us. It’s always « on friday we go running » or « we play soccer as a team » or « our team building week will make us do many physical stuff ! »… And disabled people get left behind. And it’s even worst when our disabilities are invisible, as our coworkers and managers have even more issues to empathize with what we are living (the little bits we actually share about it).
So today I’d like to take some of your time to talk about the invisible elephant in the room : disability and how so many of our work culture makes the environment toxic for disabled workers.
Resources.
Here is a list of resources I’ve used to write this talk or that would help you understand the issue more. If you want to dig deeper after watching my talk, here are some stuff that will help you. This list is far from being exhaustive of course and there are many other good resources to find.
NB: some of those resources are in French.
- Wikipedia’s page on ableism : A lot of content about the history of the word and a lot of specific ableist tropes are described here. A good beginning point.
- L'(in)accessibilité est politique by Julie Moynat (in French) : Julie has a very good website about accesisbility and disability in general, she is one of the people that help me get more educated on the subject. But this article in particular is super interesting and is about the idea that no, the lack of accessibility is not something neutral, it is actually a choice we make, a ideological/political one.
- Recruitment AI has a disability problem by the Institute for Ethical AI : a study about AI tools used in recruitment and how it increases discrimination against disabled people.
- Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Disability Discrimination in Hiring by the ada.gov : another study on how IA increases discrimination against disabled people with some ideas on how to avoid such discrimination.
- Disability, Bias and AI : another report about AI and biases and discrimination. This one has a lot of resources at the end, a whole bibliography to continue eduticating oneself on the subject.
- Les dévalideuses (in French) : Les dévalideuses are a feminist organization that focuses on disability rights. They do a great work at educating people and have a lot of resources.
- Stock photos of people with disabilities – a list of resources where you can find stock photos inclusive of people with disabilities. (representation matters !)
Now what ?
If you want to talk more about my talk, you cant contact me, I’ll be very happy to keep the discussion going.
If you are an event organizer or represent a company and want to book me for this talk, you can also contact me of course !
Also, I’m working on workshops about how to deconstruct our ableist biases and other content about how to be more inclusive as an industry. If you’re interested, I’d be super happy to talk your ear off about it.
