Musings on Diversity and Inclusion in Tech
As a woman of color in tech co-leading the diversity and inclusion efforts at the Advisory Board Company, I have been following many of the conversations taking place around increasing diversity and inclusion (D&I) in technology companies. Many companies have been making incremental progress on this front, although much work remains to be done. I have been particularly impressed recently with the steps that Intel is taking to increase accountability for its D&I efforts. For starters, they have made its diversity data public (one of the few!), which is typically information that many companies guard carefully. Their goals are truly ambitious and I am curious to follow them over the next few years to see how an intentional effort towards D&I retains and attracts diverse talent.
To increase diversity in tech, it is simply not enough to improve hiring practices to attempt to minimize implicit bias, it it also about improving the recruitment pipeline. The pipeline to tech doesn’t just start in college, it starts in elementary school. It is too late to attempt to fund programs in college to increase diversity. Funding science education for students needs to systematically begin early. The common core needs to be updated to include coding and other exposure to tech to expand its reach beyond resource-rich school districts in Silicon Valley.
The gender gap between men and women in STEM fields also needs to be addressed at this elementary school level. While thinking about the gender gap, I cannot help but think about Stanford education professor Carol Dweck’s implicit theories of intelligence. Her theory suggests that individuals’ conceptions of intelligence can be identified by two implicit theories of intelligence — fixed intelligence and incremental intelligence. Fixed intelligence is the idea that success is based on innate ability and there is no way to change it (“I did badly because I’m not smart”), while incremental intelligence is the idea that ability is malleable and changeable (“I did badly because I did not understand this specific concept, so let me work on it some more and try again”).
Those students who have a self-perception of incremental intelligence are more likely to work at a hard problem for a longer amount of time than the latter, and even upon failure are less likely to perceive it as a personal failing. The theory is much more complex and detailed than my brief summary here. However, I wonder if girls are more likely,due to socially-imposed standards of perfectionism, to exhibit tendencies of self-perception of fixed intelligence. Therefore, when girls struggle at STEM, they lose self-confidence. All of this is to say that as a society and a school system we need to do much more to boost self-confidence among young women to pursue STEM and other “non-standard” fields.
To end on a heartwarming note, I read another article on medium.com that made me smile. The discussion is about something as small as a brown hand icon:
Why was the choice an important one, and why did it matter to the people of color who saw it? The simple answer is that they rarely see something like that. These people saw the image and immediately noticed how unusual it was. They were appreciative of being represented in a world where American media has the bad habit of portraying white people as the default, and everyone else as deviations from the norm.
It’s these small choices we make to challenge the norms that make a big difference in the present, whether it be as a person of color or an ally.
This blog post was written with the American tech and education systems in mind — which is what I am most in contact with these days.
