My dear GFPs, just a couple of reminders before we get going.First up, you have until 06:59 BST on Friday 22nd October to sign up for newsletter membership if you want to join in this week's GFP LIVE with Tracy Chou, which will be taking place at 6pm BST on Friday 22nd October!Tracy Chou is an entrepreneur and software engineer known for her work advocating for diversity and inclusion in tech. She is currently the founder and CEO of Block Party, which builds tools for online safety and anti-harassment. She is also a co-founder of Project Include, a non-profit working to create a tech ecosystem where everyone has a fair chance to succeed. In 2013, her Medium article “Where are the numbers?” helped jumpstart the practice of tech companies disclosing their diversity data. Tracy was an early engineer at Pinterest, Quora, and the U.S. Digital Service.Anti-harassment tools are, unsurprisingly, quite close to my heart, so I'm really looking forward to this chat, in particular the new functionalities Blockparty has released that allow you to mass-block @ssholes perfectly lovely people who entirely innocently join an online pile-on. We'll also be talking about her experiences founding a tech start-up as well as her experiences in tech more generally while being that most dreaded of things: A WOMAN.I'll also be asking Tracy about the reaction to her 2013 Medium article; some of you may remember my quoting it in an Invisible Women passage about the tech world's mysterious reticence to be data-driven in its approach to diversity:Google has since repeatedly refused to hand over fuller pay data to the Labor Department, fighting in court for months to avoid the demand. There was no pay imbalance, they insisted.For a company built almost entirely on data, Google’s reluctance to engage here may seem surprising. It shouldn’t be. Software engineer Tracy Chou has been investigating the number of female engineers in the US tech industry since 2013 and has found that ‘[e]very company has some way of hiding or muddling the data’. They also don’t seem interested in measuring whether or not their ‘initiatives to make the work environment more female-friendly, or to encourage more women to go into or stay in computing’, are actually successful. There’s ‘no way of judging whether they’re successful or worth mimicking, because there are no success metrics attached to any of them’, explains Chou. And the result is that ‘nobody is having honest conversations about the issue’.It’s not entirely clear why the tech industry is so afraid of sex-disaggregated employment data, but its love affair with the myth of meritocracy might have something to do with it: if all you need to get the ‘best people’ is to believe in meritocracy, what use is data to you? (IW, p.109)In conclusion, I'm REALLY excited about this GFP LIVE -- lots to discuss! I hope to see loads of you there ❤️ ✊ I will be sending out the zoom link to all members at 7 am on the 22nd of October, so if you'd like to join us, make sure you've signed up before then!I ALSO hope to see loads of you at my next two tour dates, which are taking place this week!I'll be in DURHAM on Tuesday and LEEDS on Wednesday! There are still a few tickets left for both dates and don't forget GFPs get a SPECIAL GFP DISCOUNT: just type VISIBLE15 in when you checkout for 15% off. Hurrah!