Reading 04: Diversity In Technology

As I look over the diversity record of Google, a company that prides itself on its diversity efforts and is one of the biggest proponents of hiring the best engineers, regardless of their background and ethnicity, it is quite obvious to me that the lack of diversity and the gender gap in the tech industry is truly a problem. This problem obviously must be addressed, as it is in the interest of the tech industry, and the world in general, to make greater efforts toward achieving diversity in the workplace. Innovation is born when brilliant people, who come from different backgrounds and think in different ways, can unite for a common purpose. If a vast majority of a company’s tech employees come from the same background, it is much more likely that they will think the same way, and thus innovation suffers.

There are several obstacles faced by women and minorities in the tech industry today. First, reading from the articles, there is a preconceived notion amongst many people in the tech industry that women and minorities are capable of less than white and Asian men. Second, women are often subjected to sexual harassment and face difficult situations due to poor handling of these problems. Too often these occurrences are swept under the rug and women must decide to either transfer to another team or keep quiet and just deal with it. These challenges exist for two reasons: First, when a position is held mostly by a single group of people with the same background, then those people can often fall into thinking that people with other backgrounds in that same position are inferior to them. Second, there is a lack of effort in our country to keeping women and minorities interested STEM paths. One of the articles states that often times women and minorities see that most people in their computer science classes are not like them, and this makes them feel unwanted. Because of this, they are more critical of their mistakes than their peers, often leading to them thinking that they do not belong in the class. In order to combat these problems, there needs to be major effort from the tech industry to make sure that employees are not judged based on their gender or ethnicity and to support women and minorities in STEM classes, especially computer science in high school, by offering things like tutoring to help students understand the material, be proud of what they can do, and help them find meaning in their work. At the end of the day, tech companies need to hire the best candidates for tech positions, but biases must be eradicated and education should be reformed and supported in order to improve diversity and, by extension, benefit innovation.

When you look at Susan Fowler’s reflection and read about her experiences at Uber, its clear that the upper management at the company put in very little effort into making the company culture tolerate and support diversity. It’s pretty shocking that when Susan started working at her organization within Uber, women comprised only 25% of the jobs, and that the treatment of women and the handling of misconduct was so bad that most had changed organizations, left the company, or quit, dropping the number down to 6%. It honestly is pathetic that this occurred, and those in positions of authority who did nothing to alleviate the problem should be ashamed. Not only were they condemning women to harmful work environments, but they were also causing top talent to leave the company. If there is something to learn from these events, it’s this: It doesn’t matter who you are, what your ethnicity is, what your gender is, or what your sexual preferences are; if you can code and are passionate about what you do, you belong in the tech industry. And in order to make the most out of diversity efforts in Silicon Valley, companies should support education to make sure that (as idealistic as this sounds) everyone has an opportunity to pursue technology and has enough support to make them successful. This goes back to the hacker manifesto we read earlier in this class: “We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias…”