One-third of workers are ill or disabled—and this industry is shutting them out — Whether you realize it or not, you are likely interacting with ill or disabled people regularly. According to recent survey data, a high portion of the U.S. workforce reports having a disability (30 percent), even though a much smaller percentage says they’ve self-identified as disabled to their employer (only 3.2…

AI is being increasingly used to make important decisions. Many AI experts (including Jeff Dean, head of AI at Google, and Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera and deeplearning.ai) say that warnings about sentient robots are overblown, but other harms are not getting enough attention. I agree. I am an AI…

Thirty percent of people under the age of 65 have a chronic health condition. Despite this prevalence, people with chronic illnesses or disabilities often face discrimination. Over a third of disabled people have experienced negative bias in their current job. The unemployment rate is twice as high for people with…

I recently received the following question: Hi Rachel, I am a software engineer who is dealing with low self esteem. There are people at work who constantly belittle me and it is very subtle. I constantly get demotivated and find my confidence going lower and lower. I decided to find…

Deep learning has great potential, but currently the people using this technology are overwhelmingly white and male. We’re already seeing society’s racial and gender biases being encoded into software that uses AI when built by such a homogeneous group. …

The top advice I would give my younger self would be to start blogging sooner. Here are some reasons to blog: It’s like a resume, only better. I know of a few people who have had blog posts lead to job offers! Helps you learn. Organizing knowledge always helps me…

We tend to think that any effort towards diversity is a good thing, and that there is no harm in trying. But we should also listen to the other side of the story. — back·lash: a strong and adverse reaction by a large number of people, especially to a social or political development; recoil arising between parts of a mechanism.

Everything about the current interview process in tech is broken. I suspect that, no matter what, being evaluated and making judgements on others for a decision that has a big impact on you both is never going to be fun — especially since both of you only have a limited…

This article has been translated into Portuguese by the Maria Lab and translated into Spanish by Anastassia Ivaškiva of Tallín University. Women are more than twice as likely to quit the tech industry as men (41% vs 17%). Why is this happening? A study of 4,000 women who had recently…