Cycles of Unconscious Discrimination

It isn’t one single action that causes women and minorities to leave tech. It’s small and oftentimes unnoticable biases that result in higher churn among female engineers. In the past it has been a binary action that has acted as the barrier to equality; during the women’s suffrage movement equality was the right to vote or not and that was the end of the story. Today discrimination is implicitly created through small micro aggressions which over time create a gap in pay and employment opportunity.

The first cycle happens at the earliest stages of employment during culture screening. A homogeneous culture is looking for someone who “fits” their idea of what their culture is. Instead of building a diverse culture they hire people who are similar to the people who already exist in the company. The way this can be corrected is to instead define what your company culture is ahead of time, building diversity into that vision, and instead hire people who add to your current employee pool to make your culture look more like that original vision.

The next part of the cycle happens when culture inside of companies is toxic towards women and minorities. It is hard to notice, but slowly microaggressions like always delegating women to take notes in a meeting or leaving women out of critical team tasks cause many women to churn. Even a slightly higher rate of employee turnover over time means drastically fewer women will advance to the point where they are eligible for senior or leadership roles.

So how do we fix this issue? The answer isn’t as clear cut as it has been in the past. Today we are seeing many cases of outright harassment, and this has drawn attention to the issue. The best way to leverage this attention is to use it as a jumping off point to start a broader discussion about discrimination in our industry. It’s about educating ourselves to become better, understanding unconscious bias and actions affect the people around us, noticing those actions when they occur, and doing what’s right to effect change.