Project Include: One year in and looking forward

When Project Include launched, we were a group of friends and advocates who wanted to push for greater diversity and inclusion in the technology industry. One year later, we’re astonished at what’s happened.

Over the past 12 months, the fabric of discussion about diversity and inclusion in tech has changed dramatically. Project Include was a product of and we hope a substantive contributor to these conversations. Before, many conversations revolved around misleading and often dangerous ideas — for example talking about inclusion as “lowering the bar” or blaming the “pipeline” as the sole cause, and the idea that there was a quick fix.

Since May 2016, Project Include’s founding team in hundreds of talks and interviews in front of tens of thousands of tech community members have promoted a consistent message on our three values:

1. Inclusion of all groups, with a look at intersectionality;
2. Comprehensive solutions across all company activities; and
3. Metrics to hold CEOs and other leaders accountable.

Today, a year into our work, accountability is finally taking hold.

The spotlight on recent controversies in tech — at Uber, Binary Capital, 500 Startups, Lowercase Capital, Google, and others — has highlighted our core tenet for change: that we need to hold CEOs and top leaders accountable. It is now becoming the center of debate in the press, social media, and in the industry itself.

There’s a growing awareness that greater diversity and inclusion in the technology industry is a necessity, though it is certainly not inevitable — as we see from recurring instances of sexism, racism and more. And just as we have always stated that culture must be set from the beginning, more and more businesses are realizing how making the wrong decisions early in a company’s life can create an problematic, unsafe, or even illegal cultures. We see from Uber and now Google how a toxic culture scales with growth and may be impossible to reset.

Companies are seeing that ignoring inclusion is an unhealthy trade-off for any business that’s genuinely striving to break new ground.

At the outset of Project Include, we launched with 87 recommendations, nearly as many resource links, and eight case studies, all on a website. Our focus was on how to “reset” tech culture as a sector (and set tech culture for startups) through data and recommendations, including accountability for CEOs and investors. We defined inclusion as all groups, across all activities, and required metrics for accountability. For implementation, we focused on two principles:

• Build D&I into culture from day one, and across a whole company. It’s not an afterthought or a silo to be managed by a single junior employee; it needs to be considered in every activity, by all leaders and all employees. We focus our recommendations on startups large and small, and asked them to go beyond gender and think about inclusion more broadly and about intersectionality.
• Change has to come from the CEO, leading from the top. Without a leader who is truly bought in and pushing efforts forward, diversity efforts are likely to fail. The hardest decisions will escalate to the CEO, the only person who can make and enforce them. That’s why our Startup Include program focuses on CEOs.

The results we’ve seen since then have been encouraging. Not only has the public started to call for the CEO to be accountable for diversity, and that D&I be integrated into culture, but we also saw a cohort of founders and leaders take up our recommendations as part of Startup Include, and many more companies used our recommendations to make progress towards these goals.

Over the past year, despite the election of a president who discourages diversity and inclusion, we saw results that give us hope.

We are concurrently publishing our first Startup Include report, showing demographic and satisfaction data for employees across several startups. We are encouraged by employee survey results over eight months:

• Startup Include company employees report high satisfaction overall and with diversity and inclusion efforts, and satisfaction in most areas increased significantly from baseline to follow-up.
• The startup cohort was generally more diverse than large companies. We also saw diversity improve over time, though it is too early to know what caused all the changes. The percentage of Latinx employees increased to 12% of the sample, multiracial employees increased to 11%, and women increased to 46%. Thirty-six percent of the recent sample are immigrants, 26% are veterans, 14% are parents, 10% do not have a college degree, 6% have a disability, and 11% identify as LGBTQA.

There is still a lot of work to do, as the data reflect many of the patterns of underrepresentation in the tech industry, and data raised concerns:

• Though not statistically significant by research standards, we were concerned that Black employees decreased to 3% of the follow-up sample and that non-binary and transgender respondents decreased to 1%. Certain groups were not reflected in the leadership levels, and some had more negative experiences that the rest of the group.

We see troubling attempts at quick fixes, including:

• Hiring junior people, often well-meaning but very inexperienced, as heads of D&I.
• A search for “best practices” and a blueprint checklist, when it’s clear that none of the tech companies have gotten diversity and inclusion right even after spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
• A growing list of one-off initiatives, such as unconscious bias training, that have been shown to make no statistically significant difference and can actually be harmful.

At the same time, we’re encouraged by our own progress at Project Include. Operationally, we’ve built a standalone 501(c)(3) non-profit with a small but efficient team that is continuing our work into the future. We’ve hired program director Brandie Heinel, joining from Stripe. We’ve also brought in part-time contractors and pro bono teams to help us.

To accelerate our progress, we’re adding additional advisers for their diverse perspectives and tech experiences: Anil Dash of Fog Creek Software, Catherine Bracy of TechEquity Collaborative, Gina Bianchini of Mighty Bell, Leanne Pittsford of Lesbians Who Tech, and Matthew Yazzie of the Others Project.

Our c0-founders — bethanye McKinney Blount, Erica Baker, Freada Kapor Klein, Laura Gόmez, Susan Wu, Tracy Chou, and Y-Vonne Hutchinson — are responsible for our strong foundation and will continue to provide thoughtful perspectives as they move to founding advisory roles. With their time increasingly focused on running their own startups and organizations, we have moved the day-to-day and week-to-week work at Project Include to our dedicated team.

We have also established a formal board, with bethanye McKinney Blount and Cedric Brown of the Kapor Center joining me to guide Project Include as we drive for more effective solutions in tech over the next 18 months. We’re pleased with the progress we’re making, both as a voice for change in Silicon Valley, and as an organization ourselves.

We launched both the Startup Include and VC Include programs, and we are evolving them as we learn. We received awards, press, and recognition, but we know there is much more to be done.

So what comes next?

We don’t just want to improve Silicon Valley — we want to transform it. That means moving Diversity and Inclusion from conversation to action, and by creating lasting change. We know it can be done.

In the future we want CEOs, founders, venture capitalists, and the institutional investors who fund them to be held accountable for what their firms and investments do. It’s not just heads of diversity who should be responsible for moving the needle of inclusion; we want leaders to publicly declare that they will set their company’s culture, explain how they aim to improve it, and to attack and address hard culture issues with conviction and integrity.

And it’s not just about pledging to “do better,” either. We want leaders to have specific goals and ways to measure success. We will provide tools, benchmarks, and standards, and not just leave them stranded or without support. In return they should craft comprehensive solutions for true inclusion across all groups.

It’s promising to see public pressure finally force a company like Uber to hold its CEO accountable for its failures — but we have a long way to go. How do we move forward from this? What can we learn from this example? Let’s not just say, “he resigned, we won.” Let’s figure out what’s next, together.

That’s why Project Include is here to collaborate with the public, the industry, and everyone who wants to make a difference. We’re only one year in, but things are clearer than ever: It’s time to make technology a place where everyone gets a fair chance to succeed.

It’s time for a reset in Silicon Valley.

We want to change the course of its history, and we want you to join us.