I have become greatly passionate in expanding the way I help other designers achieve their personal goals in their careers. The passion to empower and evangelize UX has manifested into different forms, such as talking in my first podcast, discussion, and curating my own class.

This past month, I decided to give my first “public” talk outside of school. The support and opportunity came from Women Talk Design.

Women Talk Design is a platform that elevates talks by women and non-binary individuals. They enpower event organizers with tools, approaches, and information to engage more diverse speakers.

The founder of this initiative is Christina Wodtke, an amazing teacher and mentor to me during school and my career. Her strong personality, amazing experience, ability to overcome hardship, and take anything she is given into tangible value has given me courage to unapologetically pursue whatever I want. She’s given me the belief that if I put my mind towards something, with intention and perseverance, I can do anything.

I deeply believe one of the more effective ways of calling people to action is through compelling storytelling. Giving public talks in the form of crafting stories is a skill inherent in the whole field of UX design and a skill that is deeply valuable to me and my goal of helping others.

In this article, I’ll be covering what I learned from giving my first talk.

Preparing a talk in a way that works for me

The process of giving my first talk allowed me to understand how to create future talks. Firstly, there are constraints you might need to consider. Because the event required us to give a lighting talk that could only be 5 minutes max, I had to be concise with the information leading up to my message. I could only include the most necessary information that most supported my talk.

So you need to decide: what is the message you want to convey?

Constraints allowed me to be realistic with my speech objectives. The way I prepared my talk was first writing it out and then practicing it to eliminate parts that that didn’t flow well when I spoke. This made it easier to minimize redundancies and focus on parts that were important to identify if I was giving a longer talk, but didn’t contribute any additional value to my message.

From experience, every talk has a lesson or steps of action one can take which connect to the lesson. I found that a good way to start constructing a talk is having a central message and creating points around it. Those could be experiences that connect or prove your message, statistics, conflict and resolutions, a memorable incident, and so on.

Here is a good article by Christina Wodtke about how to craft a good talk and the importance of story.

People want to listen to you

When I was speaking, I found that everyone in the room was very supportive and focused their attention on me. This gave me more encouragement to comfortably and confidently give my talk.

Whenever you give a speech, people are going to listen. That’s why they are there in the first place. They want to learn from your experiences. Giving talks can be super high stress and high stakes because of the amount of pressure it can put on you. But you shouldn’t think about it like that. For the most part, people want you to succeed. They want to hear about your journey.

Incorporating stories in speeches is important, because it is what allows people to empathize, relate, and be more engaged with what you have to say. I found speaking empowering in this aspect, because I knew that people wanted me to succeed in giving the talk. And I also wanted to teach them something new and inspire them.

Everyone has a story to tell

Stories are powerful. They allow us to share our experiences in relatable ways and have a profound impact on our audience. At the event, I had the opportunity to hear talks from other speakers. It was amazing to hear their stories.

Though there were some experiences I haven’t gone through, it was eye-opening to hear women talk about them in a way that made me feel like I was a part of their journey. All the talks I listened to taught me something new or validated things that I could connect to my life.

If you feel like you have nothing to say, you are lying to yourself. There are definitely stories you have which are worth sharing, and everyone loves stories. You just need to find your message or a personal story that is super important to you.

Speaking is an iterative process

I was constantly revising my talk, from how I was going to draw the audience in to the central message I wanted the audience to remember most. I found that presenting to my classmates or random people was really helpful, because it allowed me to understand how people received my message. I got helpful feedback on parts of my talks that didn’t make sense, when to take pauses rather than speaking super fast, smiling, and tone of voice. This allowed me to strengthen my talk and develop better practices moving forward.

I learned that there is no such thing as a “perfect” talk. There is always going to be something you will want to improve on, especially for the small things like emphasizing a certain part of the talk or a time when you wanted to say more.

For me, I try to worry less about the small details but rather about the overall execution. I believe that a talk is successful if I am able to convey my message confidently and spark discussion. If people are able to leave with something valuable that they can apply to their life, I feel successful.

Practice

Practicing allowed me talk more comfortably and confidently in front of an audience without stressing too much about what people think of me. And you shouldn’t care too much anyway, because you can’t please everyone. I believe that being over-prepared is better than being under-prepared, because it shows that you care and are willing to go above and beyond in your work.

I believe the amount of practice you put in will make your message that much more powerful. In my case, practicing a few times every week for the 3–4 weeks before the talk made me more comfortable to give talks in the future.

Besides practicing in front of people and in a mirror, I watched TED talks. Watching and gaining inspiration from TED talks and other women speakers allowed me to pick up and observe how they were communicating with hand motions, intonation, and projection. They also were a great inspiration to tell my story and not give up when I didn’t believe I could successfully give my talk.

Conclusion

A few years ago, I would have never considered myself speaking in a public event. But my calling to communicate deeply with people and empower them through the work I do is something that drives me. I want to continue reaching out to others, and this means getting out of my comfort zone to challenge myself in doing so.

Women Talk Design is great because it provides a safe space for women to practice and give talks. It is a wonderful, supportive network where everyone gives each other the confidence and encouragement to pursue their passions and ultimately help each other. If we want to balance the gender gap and have more equal representation, we need to be more involved in tech events and get our voices out there. We need to inspire the next generation of girls and empower them to challenge existing gender norms of what it means to be a woman.

I’m inspired by women who have the courage to stand on stage and tell their stories. Often times, they have faced adversity, whether in their personal lives or the workforce. They’ve often overcome hardships and challenged societal norms. Their stories are empowering in showing that they can be strong and just as successful as men.

Check out my Skillshare Course on UX Research and learn something new!

To help you get started on owning your design career, here are some amazing tools from Rookieup, a site I used to get mentorship from senior designers.

• Build a portfolio with help from an experienced designer
• Essential tools to strengthen and build your portfolio

Links to some other cool reads:

• What I learned From Interviewing and Receiving Offers from Google Two Times
• I interviewed at Facebook as a new grad. Here is what I learned about design
• Journey Mapping is the Key to Gaining Empathy
• UX is Grounded in Rationale, not Design

This is my story of moving from a company with secretive pay to implementing fully transparent and equal pay at my current company.
Your company can do it too.

Before I became President of Crowdfunder, I worked at firms where pay was secretive and employees were controlled by their salary and bonuses. I always thought there was a more effective way of running a company, so when I had the opportunity, I tried an experiment where pay would be transparent to all employees in the organization.

Rather than a top down approach of holding people hostage to annual bonuses and raises, it would be more of a peer to peer relationship. The idea that if two people knew what each other were making, they would understand which attibutes make employees more valuable in a company. First, we performed an analysis of current employee salaries and salaries of the broader market. Second,we assigned a salary for each title and position, so that when someone gets a promotion they know exactly what their salary will be. Also, when one person gets promoted it’s equitable to others who perform the same level of work. Creating equitable salaries is easy to do, as there are plenty of websites that track the median salary for a wide range of positions, and organize it by location, experience level, industry and company size. If you can see this information, so can your employees, so it makes sense to be on par with the median salary ranges comparable to other companies similar to yours.

Why Equal Pay?

The equal pay idea came to me when a friend of mine, a former Major League Baseball player, was out raising capital for a business he was starting. He had a great idea but had a difficult time raising capital. I soon learned that his situation was not unique. Women and ethnic minorities typically have a more difficult time raising capital. This is one of the reasons I was passionate about online crowdfunding platforms.

I believe the future of early-stage company funding is equity crowdfunding. On these platforms, it doesn’t matter who the founder is, what gender they are or what race they are. People invest in ideas and products through a medium that takes gender and ethnicity out of the equation.

I became obsessed with understanding how to right this wrong and subsequently, came accross studies showing that women and ethnic minorities also make lower wages. I concluded that pay and equality were also very unfair. I also realized it was bad for business. Part of me, my bleeding heart side, felt I needed to take action to treat people fairly and develop pay equality for the company that I would soon be running. The capitalist in me thought, “why isn’t anybody else doing this?” It makes sense if you do the math.

Why take action now?

If you have a company that is 80% male and 20% female and each male is making $80k and each woman is making $70k, even if it feels like a small gap, it makes a difference. If you just paid everyone $75k, you’re actually saving money. The end result is you have an entire team making an average of $75k instead of $78k. The math works.

Crowdfunder had wage disparity between men and women when I joined. So one of my first projects was to comb through the employee roster and gave certain female employees a raise to be on par with their male counterparts. We didn’t give many of the men raises, because most were being paid, in some cases, beyond their level of performance. We had meetings discussing what everyone’s salary was and how we planned to roll out the process. Everything is very transparent now. The women who got raises have turned out to deliver an even higher level of performance than they were before.

This is something that every company can do. First assess the wage disparity, and second, level the playing field. By doing this, you save money and make employees feel appreciated. When employees feel appreciated, they work harder.

The Big Picture

As for the broader issue of gender equality in the Tech industry, I don’t think women are valued to their potential. For example, I met one of our developers at a startup fair. I was pitching our company and she was pitching herself as an employee. I watched her go around talking to startups and not be taken seriously. She was trained, but new to the industry and no one would give her a chance. I believe that if she was a man it would be completely different. He would be a new fresh face, a great opportunity to train and invest in someone new. Instead it was “yeah, it’s really cute she wants to be a programmer.” After hiring her, she has turned into a valuable member of our team and has been doing way more than just development. She’s a potential management level person in the midterm.

Often, women work harder than men, especially in the 20 something age bracket. I believe they are used to having to work twice as hard to get to the same spot as a man. I’ve found that on average, I would naturally get about 10–15% more out of women employees than men, and once you give them a raise and equal salary, that number changes to about 30% more. It’s excellent for business.

Making An Impact

At Crowdfunder, we speak to a lot of companies in their early stages. If we can convince some of the other companies to do the same pay transparency and equality policy, we can make a big impact. A future protocol we could hypothetically bring to the table is to make it a requirement for companies on our platform to enforce an equal pay policy. Maybe some companies will leave, but I believe we will have more companies coming on the platform that will want this for their company.

While I was at my previous company, they came up with a standard vacation policy. We had many employees and they all had different policies based on their negotiation. They came up with a standard number of vacation days for each ranking, and implemented it throughout the company. Some people gained vacation days, and some people lost vacation days. If a company of over 2000 people can create a standard vacation policy that affects all employees, why can’t large companies do the same for pay?

The Tech industry is in a unique position to make a powerful change in pay equality and transparency. We should all be working to make this a reality. From a business standpoint, you save money. From an ethical standpoint, it’s human decency. When it comes down to it, it’s not hard to do.

Do the right thing.

Movie trailers in 2016 promised viewers so many strong female characters. Jyn Erso. Dory. Harley Quinn. Judy Hopps. Wonder Woman. I felt like this could be the year for gender equality in Hollywood’s biggest films.

I was wrong.

And I don’t make this statement lightly.

As a scientist, I turn to data to answer questions I have about the world. And I’ve got the data to back up my claim. In fact, you can have the data, code, and resulting data visualization that I made trying to better understand this topic. But first, let me tell you how I became so interested.

It all started when I went to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. All promotional materials for the movie indicated that Jyn Erso (played by Felicity Jones) was the main character. I mean, just look at the poster.

When your picture is several times larger than everyone else’s, you’re probably the main character.

What I didn’t notice at first was that Jyn is the only woman on that poster.

I went into the movie theater expecting to see men and women fighting side by side. I left feeling certain that I could count every female character from the movie on one hand. While Jyn was the main character, I was profoundly aware that she was often the only woman in any scene.

It felt strangely familiar to have a lead female character be so outnumbered. Then I realized that Jyn and Princess Leia suffered the same inequality 39 years apart. I was overwhelmed with a need to know exactly how female representation in Star Wars movies has changed. But it seemed unfair to compare movies made today with movies made decades ago.

So instead, I decided to look for female equality across the Top 10 Worldwide Highest Grossing Films of 2016. They were:

• Captain America: Civil War
• Finding Dory
• Zootopia
• The Jungle Book
• The Secret Life of Pets
• Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
• Deadpool
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
• Suicide Squad

With so many powerful women in these films, some of them must be gender-equal, right?

The Data

Now that I decided what I wanted to investigate, I needed to figure out how to do it. Similar data exploration projects have focused on dialogue or screen-time equality. Both seemed like good options, but I wanted the ability to report on equality at the movie and character level.

In the end, I decided to explore the movies’ dialogue. This choice gave me the ability to focus on characters with an active role in the story and to cut non-speaking characters from my analysis.

Luckily for me, dedicated movie fans often transcribe a movie’s dialogue and make it freely available online. If I couldn’t find a transcript, I used closed-caption files instead. For those, I re-watched the movie and manually assigned characters to their spoken lines.

This process was a labor of love. It was time consuming, but I have no regrets.

Analysis

Once I had all of the transcripts, I just needed to read the .txt files into R and separate the characters from their lines. For the Rogue One transcript, that process looked like this:

Now that I had a data frame with both Character and Words columns, I had to assign genders to each Character. To remain consistent with my categorizations, I came up with a few simple rules:

1. When possible, assign gender according to the pronouns that other characters use. For example, if a character is referred to by others as “he” or “him”, then he is categorized as “male”.
2. If there is no pronoun used throughout the movie but the character is named or credited (on IMDB), use the gender of the actor or actress. Note that the gender of an actor or actress was assumed based on publicly available information as of January 2017.
3. If no pronoun is used for the character and the character is not named or credited, refer to the closed captions. Sometimes they will identify the character that spoke.
4. If all else fails, make an educated guess based on the character’s voice.

I’ll be the first to say that these methods are not perfect. In fact, here are some caveats:

1. If a male character was voiced by a female actress (or vice versa) and the character was never addressed by other characters using pronouns, he may be incorrectly labelled. (I don’t think this happened, but anything is possible.)
2. Voices that are not associated with a physical embodiment of a character (e.g., the voice of a computer) were categorized according to the gender of their voice actor/actress.
3. I can never really know the gender of any character, but I’m using the cues and information that I have at my disposal.

Again, I am far from infallible, so if you caught a mistake on my part, please let me know.

So now I just needed to count the number of words spoken by each character. Again, I was able to do this in R using the dplyr and stringi packages.

It’s worth noting that I included every speaking character in this analysis. So yes, every stormtrooper who shouts a simple “Wait, stop!” before getting shot is included.

Spoiler Alert: The stormtroopers in Rogue One are all voiced by men.

Data Visualization

I had my data. Unfortunately, tables upon tables of word counts and character names don’t give anyone much insight. Like any good data exploration project, it was time to visualize my results. I had to work through a few iterations before I found the best one.

Scatterplots and bar charts both masked characters with small roles.

A simple bubble chart was better but it became difficult to identify individual characters. It was also challenging to understand movie-level statistics.

Which bubble is which?!

In the end, I decided to learn enough d3.js to make an interactive graphic. Here, each bubble represents a character, and the bubble’s area is scaled based on the number of words spoken. Female and male bubbles can be separated for better insight. The stacked bars below indicate movie-level information.

_Full interactive version [here](https://proquestionasker.github.io/projects/MovieDialogueInteractive/" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

Go ahead, check out the full interactive version.

Interested in exploring the raw word-count data for yourself? I’ve made all of the data and code used to generate these visualizations open source. It’s available here:

ProQuestionAsker/2016MovieDialogue
_Contribute to 2016MovieDialogue development by creating an account on GitHub._github.com

Takeaways

Ok, so the analysis is done. I’ve got a fancy (and fun-to-play-with) visualization. What did I find?

I recommend taking a quick second to look at something “a-Dory-ble” before going on, because this post is about to get real depressing real fast.

Aw, so cute. Feeling good?

All right, here we go.

This is a static version of what the visualization for all 10 movies looks like:

(If you’d like to check out the interactive visualization, go here.)

_The interactive version of this visualization can be found [here](https://proquestionasker.github.io/projects/MovieDialogueInteractive/" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=").

There are a couple of things here that I need to point out:

Not one of the top 10 movies of 2016 had a 50% speaking, female cast.

Finding Dory was the closest to this level of equality with 43% female characters. To be equal, the movie would have needed 8 more speaking, female roles.

Rogue One was the worst. Only 9% of its speaking characters were female. Of those 10 characters, 1 was a computer voice, 1 appeared on screen for no more than 5 seconds, and 1 was a CGI cameo that said 1 word.

Only 1 of 2016’s top 10 movies had 50% dialogue by a female character.

Finding Dory comes out on top here too with 53% female dialogue. But, 76% of that dialogue came from Dory alone.

Trailing at the end was The Jungle Book with only 10% of its dialogue spoken by a female character. Keep in mind, this is after casting Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the historically-male snake, Kaa.

We’re gender equal….Trusssssssst in me….

Here’s a few more:

• Finding Dory and Zootopia were the only 2 movies in 2016’s top 10 in which a female character had the most dialogue.
• Female characters were outnumbered in Captain America: Civil War’s final battle 5:1. Throughout the movie, they only contributed 16% of the dialogue.
• Batman spoke 2.4 times more than Superman and 6 times more than Wonder Woman in Batman V. Superman.
• 78% of the female-spoken lines in Rogue One came from Jyn Erso.
• While Harley Quinn was a highly advertised character in Suicide Squad, she only spoke 42% as many words as Floyd/Deadshot (played by Will Smith). Notably, Amanda Waller (played by Viola Davis) spoke frequently, totaling just 222 words (16%) short of Deadshot’s word count.

I started this project because I had a feeling that Rogue One’s cast and dialogue were not equally divided between male and female characters. I was shocked (and saddened) to find that almost none of the top 10 movies from last year were gender equal.

We can do better.

Added: If you’re looking for more studies and data explorations like this, check out:

• Inequality in 800 popular films from 2007–2015 (includes gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability)
• This exploration of 2000 randomly selected movie scripts from 1980’s — 2010's
• This research on 200 biggest movies from 2014 & 2015
• Female representations in 2014’s biggest movies
• This Twitter thread about gender equality in 2016’s animated films

TL;DR Version: Women represent (on average) 30–35% of speaking roles across each of these investigations.

Added: Have questions or comments about my methodology or conclusions? Check out my follow-up article featuring the most frequently asked questions.

I analyzed the dialogue in 2016’s biggest movies and it started a lot of conversations.
_A few weeks ago I published a story about my analysis of the dialogue in 2016’s 10 Highest Grossing Films. I am so…_medium.com

If you liked this article and want to see more like it, please click the green heart below and share away on your social media network of choice.

I am currently spending my time working on personal projects and data visualizations like this while I look for a data science job. So, if you have a fun project idea (or a job inquiry) you’d like to discuss with me, please reach out to me on Twitter or by email.

Thank you!