Working in the tech industry, there’s something I hear a lot.
“We want to be the Uber of ____”
Uber is looked upon as a shining example in the technology industry. It’s that holy grail: disruptive. It came along and transformed the way people travel and use technology. It operates in countries across the globe. It’s successful. These days, it’s a household name.
But how truly disruptive is it?
The same old stories
We all know the stats. The tech industry is still, despite all diversity initiatives, overwhelmingly white and male. In fact, the number of women in tech is actually shrinking.
When you hear detailed and illuminating accounts such as that of Susan J. Fowler’s experiences of sexism while working at Uber, that shrinking number is hardly surprising.
And what’s sad is that this story itself isn’t really all that surprising. It’s a particularly striking example, but women in tech have heard it all before. Until there’s a real disruption of the status quo, we’ll keep hearing it again.
Think about Twitter and its ongoing abuse problem, to use another example. Twitter may be working on its diversity, but it remains predominantly white and male. When a platform is built by people who have largely not experienced the kind of discrimination or abuse women, LGBT groups, and people of colour are all too familiar with, it simply doesn’t occur to to them to build in any way of handling the overwhelming waves of trolling and threats that minority users are faced with. By the time the problem is too large to sweep under the rug, it’s almost too large to handle.
The same goes for Tinder, another famously “disruptive” piece of technology. A cool new feature or related site for one set of users is a potential danger for others. Did the creators of Swipe Buster consider the ramifications of an abusive partner or dangerous ex discovering when and where someone has been using Tinder?
Yes, this technology is new. It’s exciting. But the same old problems keep repeating themselves.
Disruption and diversity
For all the lip service the tech industry pays to diversity, progress is slow, and at times seems non-existent. In public, companies will talk up diversity, but it’s not always the same story behind closed doors.
The fact is, it’s not just a “numbers” game, a matter of hitting some kind of quota. The makeup of your CEOs, your leadership teams and senior management, your investors, your key decision makers — all of this has a real world impact on the experiences of your users.
In reality, until you start “disrupting” and advocating for more diversity, you’re never really going to be doing anything all that innovative or new.
