How to Prevent White Flight from Happening In Technology.
A while back I discovered the book, “Coders” by Clive Thompson. I highly recommend it for anyone attempting to gain insight into the world of coding. There was one concept from the book that really struck me. In one of the chapters that focused on boot camps and workforce retraining, Thompson talks about the class stratification of coders who come into the field through retraining programs and coding boot camps vs. those who have been in the field for a while or are coming up through colleges and universities.
“There are, of course, lots of subtle problems that emerge as more people crowd into coding. One is that the jobs appear to bifurcate by gender. As women and minorities move into the field, the areas in which they work decline in prestige.” — Coders by Clive Thompson, p. 366
This caste system of coders is real. As more women and minorities join the tech field by way of boot camps and retraining programs, more privileged white men who have dominated the industry for years leave for “sexier” fields like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, etc.
What is “white flight”?
Historically, “white flight” became prominent in the 1950s and 1960s when “people of color moved into predominantly white neighborhoods in cities from which they had previously been excluded, many white residents of those neighborhoods picked up and left. They resettled in newly built, overwhelmingly white suburbs.” We’re now seeing a similar shift in technology.
The biggest problem with this shift is that it leaves the technology jobs with diminishing salaries and the careers being threatened by automation and smarter technologies(ex. software that writes software and no code/low code solutions) to women and minorities. These two groups are left to ultimately play the role of maintaining tech rather than defining tech.
There will still be many opportunities and value in obtaining a career in software for some time. However, we shouldn’t let ourselves be lulled into the idea that boot camps and workforce retraining are the answers to all of our problems if we want to see the prevention of issues like these:
- The World’s most powerful natural-language processor generates hate speech.
- Google Can’t Recognize Black People
- Apple Releases Health Tracker Without Ability to Track Menstruation
- Bias in Predictive Policing Tools
How can the tech community promote diversity + impact?
To combat these types of issues, we need solutions that span age as well as gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The earlier kids can gain exposure to tech, the earlier the barriers start to fall away, enabling the next generation to gain more knowledge over time that may lead to a more diverse group of individuals seated at the proverbial table for developing more advanced types of technology. This was, in fact, one of our reasons for starting South Bend Code School. We want to make technology education equitable. We do this by offering weekly, virtual coding sessions as well as scholarships for all of our programs.
The problem doesn’t just stop there.
It would be ill-advised to point to primary and secondary education and claim that is where the real problem lies. That is a decades-long solution that doesn’t account for the systematic issues that exist once someone enters the workforce. Instead, the solution is much broader.
It’s the education piece. It’s how employers treat their employees. It’s retraining programs and boot camps being accessible to help tech professionals reach the next level professionally. We are staring this problem in the face today (and have been for quite a while now).
Alex Sejdinaj is a cofounder of Code Works, South Bend Code School, and GiveGrove. If you would like to get in touch with Alex or any of these companies please reach out to info@sbcodeworks.com.
