Here’s how we’re trying to boost diversity in tech
We’re at the point where many people agree that tech has a diversity problem. And we know why that’s important: because diverse teams are better, more creative teams, and because a sector that’s building so much of what we use and consume needs to reflect the actual world of its users — or it risks building products that don’t serve the world well. Not to mention that as tech is the fastest growing job field in most companies, a more diverse tech sector gives more people a chance to get these potentially lucrative new jobs. While things are improving, there’s still a long way to go.
So there’s a lot of talk about diversity right now — but how do we actually change things? There’s no one silver bullet — but one of the things we’re trying at Enspiral Dev Academy is a scholarship for anyone identifying with a group that’s underrepresented in tech. You’ll get $2000 off one of our 18-week coding boot camps, which will train you as an industry-ready web developer. These scholarships are available for a short time only, and you can apply for one now.
This post focuses on raising the number of women in tech, but Dev Academy’s scholarships are open to all underrepresented groups, including women, LGBTQ+, Māori, or Pacific Island peoples. If you’re not sure, contact us for a chat.
The graduate: Gabby Young, freelance web and app developer
In the past, I found it intimidating to walk into lecture rooms and labs and be the only girl. However, I feel that recently there has been such an awareness of the gender gap in tech, and that many opportunities have been created to help women — including some I have benefited from.
More role models would definitely encourage more women to work in tech. Also, we need to bust some myths — for example that working in tech means that you are antisocial, or that you have to be a genius to do it.
Enspiral Dev Academy promotes an environment of inclusiveness and respect, which in turn makes it feel like a safe environment for any gender. And there are discussions at EDA about sexism in the industry. I was awarded a diversity scholarship to attend, which paid for my tuition fees.
The catalyst: Joshua Vial from Enspiral Dev Academy explains how greater diversity in tech can become a reality.
Up until the mid 1980s, number of women enrolling in computer science degrees was trending alongside law, medicine, engineering; they were all going up. Then, in the mid 80s, the number of women in IT plummeted, and the number of women enrolling and graduating in IT decreased, while the number of women in law and medicine kept going up.
Some people think it’s because of the way personal computers evolved and were marketed — as a “tool” and thus a “men’s thing” — but for whatever reason it became a culture where lots of women were leaving and not many new women were showing up — so it became self-fulfilling. I think the main reason there now aren’t more women in IT is because of a cultural quirk in the sector where it got into a systemic state that excluded women — mostly fairly unconsciously, which doesn’t make it better — but at a systemic level.
Lots of people have noticed this, and lots are trying to address it. There’s been a bunch of researching showing that more diverse teams are pretty much always more successful. What’s more, when you have a whole lots of stuff that’s only built by one section of society, the people building it unconsciously make mistakes that mean the stuff they build isn’t as good as it could be. If you have a more diverse range of people building stuff, you make better things.
Population parity is one of Enspiral Dev Academy’s big mission objectives — we want to see the same demographics of programmers as there are people in New Zealand (against gender, ethnicity, and other markers). One big way to do that is you have to say explicitly that you want more women in tech. You have to run events, run media, promote it, award scholarships, and more, all as a way of signalling to people that there’s a place for them there. You hope they’ll think, “This will be welcoming, maybe it won’t be like I expect an IT thing to be.”
At EDA, we did all of those things and got our enrolment rate to almost 50/50 — it’s about 45/55. However, even with all that, there’s a disproportionate drop-off of women during the course — by the time cohorts graduate, it’s about 30% women. Not many drop out once they’re actually here at EDA, so it’s happening somewhere between the enrolment and starting the course, or between starting the course (the first phase is completed at home) and arriving at EDA. Once women arrive at EDA, they tend to stay and graduate. We’re trying to analyse that to know how we can change it — to know how we get more women applying, and how to keep them in the process through to boot camp — the part that takes place at EDA. We’re talking to people and experimenting to try and figure it out.
We run diversity scholarships; we sponsor Rails Girls, and we try to profile our women graduates. We’ve found that role models are really important, and to that end, we’re really working on the diversity of our teaching team. It’s tough though; the people who are drawn to teaching in this field tend to be men, but we’re making inroads on that. As we keep doing this stuff — measuring, and experimenting — we hope we’ll be able to smooth it out, and that we see the same follow-through as we do on the admissions rate. if we can start getting women as 40 or 45% of our cohorts to graduate, then we can look at how we make it 50%.
We’ve had some exciting conversations around what a less intensive boot camp around the hours of childcare would look like for mothers with young kids — perhaps starting at 9.30a.m., with bulk-bought hours at a local daycare centre. Perhaps we could do women-only boot camps. There are lots of ideas, and some are more expensive than others, so we need to be more certain that those ones would help. But it’s mostly that we need to be really clear on intention, and then measure, analyse, and adapt.
The reality is that our whole system needs to change, and it’s not just systems around business or school; it’s our cultural systems. If you look at the unconscious biases everyone has about women — or gender or race more generally — they’re long-lasting and they take generations to change. We’re part of a sexist system and that system needs work, so we need to insulate ourselves from the worst parts of it, and we need to create bubbles where we change our culture. At EDA, instead of saying, “Hey guys,” as a plural for people, we try and remember that we actually just mean “people” — that “guys” is a gendered term. That’s an example that’s just a gentle reminder and a way of re-centring the culture.
The best strategies on diversity have a very forceful and very unwavering attention. They say, “This is what we want, this is what is okay and what’s not,” and you need to be uncompromising about people who say they don’t want that, or that they’re not going to change. Then you need the humility to deeply listen to every person in the system and every aspect of the system. It’s not about knowing the answer, it’s about saying, “I don’t know,” and approaching everything with questions. If it seems like there’s a drop off rate for women, or it seems like Māori are uncomfortable in this environment, we need to ask why, and by approaching it as a question and listening to everyone, you’ll get better results in the long term. Then, through commitment to making little changes everywhere, all the time, for a long time, you can strategically shift a culture.
If you identify as part of a group underrepresented in tech — including women, LGBTQ+, Māori, or Pacific Island peoples — and you want to become a web developer, you can apply for a scholarship for a Dev Academy boot camp now.
