Meet Tiffanie Stanard, Who Uses Purchasing Power to Open the Door Wider
What’s Your Impact? | For Stanard, being a Black woman in tech isn’t the start of her mission. It’s just the beginning.
When Tiffanie Stanard told her mother she was interested in tech, she enrolled her in an after school theater program. And that wasn’t due to any lack of listening — it was due to a lack of resources.
“If you go into certain Black neighborhoods, you just don’t see great after school programs. You don’t have people trying to put great after school programs like Coded by Kids in them. But if you go to other folks’ neighborhoods, you’re seeing tech and polo and tennis and everything else,” says Stanard, who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia. “So [when it comes to tech], it always comes down to access and making sure each neighborhood is represented with opportunities that allow kids to grow.”
The divide Stanard saw as a child at the apex of the Information age has only widened as technology has grown into a necessary luxury. According to a 2019 survey conducted by the School District of Philadelphia, only 45% of elementary school students can access the internet through a computer — and only 50% of Black families in the district have internet access, compared to 74% of white households.
It’s no surprise that virtual schooling has exacerbated the inequities that make up the foundation of schooling in Philadelphia. In Lower Merion, a Main Line school district that’s 81% white, students have the option to enroll in their Virtual Academy, a flexible asynchronous learning program with tutors on-call to help with difficult students. Meanwhile, the majority of Black students in Philadelphia must rely on the Comcast Essentials Programs, which allegedly isn’t an adequate speed for Zoom classes.
Standard doesn’t just imagine a world where students of color simply have adequate technology to learn. She envisions a world where they understand that mastering technology can unlock a future full of opportunities.
For Stanard, that process starts with enabling both large and mid-size companies to invest in small, BIPOC-owned businesses. Her venture, Stimulus Inc., leverages data analytics to enable companies to make smarter, unbiased purchasing decisions as they grow. On her platform, vendors are assigned a Stimulus Score, which compiles data that equitably and accurately represent company wins and losses to ensure contractors work with businesses based on facts, not stereotypes.
“Data enables you to take your personal biases, put them to the side, and make the best hiring decisions,” she says. Stimulus’s formula accounts for algorithmic bias — the phenomena responsible for Amazon’s racist facial recognition software — by utilizing all publically available data to generate scores. In plain language, this means that while Stimulus accounts for negative Yelp reviews, it also pulls from positive LinkedIn posts, major investments, and updated financial data to demonstrate how companies are improving.
Stimulus’s mission is personal to Stanard, a young black entrepreneur who comes up against the same systemic biases that eat up headlines. A 2020 survey conducted by ProjectDiane found that only Black and Latinx female founders received only 0.64% of available venture funding in the 2018–2019 fiscal year. “I constantly have to overprove myself,” says Stanard. “I’m this young, Black woman coming into my industry and trying to do things differently and disrupt what I’ve seen for the last 15 years. All the while, I’m trying to see to [majority] white males and prove that my thoughts and experiences matter.
Stanard says much of the discrimination she faces is based on her appearance and how it may contrast with white-washed notions of professionalism. 80% of Black women felt they needed to switch their hairstyle to align with more conservative standards to fit in at work, according to the American Bar Association. And these women feel pressure beyond the need for acceptance. Black women shape-shift to accomplish the things so many of us take for granted: to be taken seriously at a meeting, to be told they’ve done a good job, to be promoted.
Stanard believes it’s largely the responsibility of Big Tech to do the heavy work of reforming the industry into the inclusive, accessible space its leaders claim to be striving towards. On a micro level, it means creating company cultures that don’t care about locs or braids and hire from Black and Latinx communities with the same fervor they do Ivy League universities. However, to have a real impact, Stanard believes these companies need to empower BIPOC-lead enterprises by providing more than just resources and mentorship, but the capital to succeed. “I don’t care how many free resources you have, you need money to pay people, you need money to grow, you need money to work with your customers,” she says. “So yes, I need people to believe in me early [on,] but I also need money to grow. I need money to fail. I need money to do anything.”
Case in point: Comcast, alongside the Lenfest Institute and Bank of America, has invested nearly $1 million in the OnE Philadelphia, a tech education ecosystem helmed by Coded by Kids that connects young people with digital literacy and coding classes, mentorship, and college prep opportunities as early as kindergarten. By providing underrepresented young people with the tools and resources they need to succeed in tech and innovation careers, Comcast and Coded by Kids are forging a future for the city where talent and drive determine success.
All that said, Stanard acknowledges that diversity and inclusion work doesn’t need to be publicized to be effective. After all, many of the companies that were already diversifying their workforce and setting standards in their field were doing so long before there were Black Lives Matter protests.
“If you truly care about it, you’re not out there. You don’t need to publicize. It should be a part of everyday life within your company, whether you’re trying to diversify your supply chain, your employees, your team, your board, your customers, whatever.”
