Y-Vonne Hutchinson says we need to get some perspective
Over a career of unexpected turns and varied experiences, Y-Vonne Hutchinson has developed an unusual perspective on the future. Now as founding advisor to Project Include and CEO of a diversity consulting firm, she’s trying to bring it to Silicon Valley.
Y-Vonne Hutchinson remembers the moment precisely. In fact, it’s her earliest memory.
She was 12 years old, standing in a train station in Tokyo thronging with people. It was her first time in Japan — in fact, her first time overseas full stop — on an exchange program with her school. She was excited beyond words, but things didn’t go exactly as planned.
“The wheel of my suitcase fell off,” she says. “Everybody left me behind. Everything was in Japanese, I was just a wee little girl, and I couldn’t orient myself at all. I was from suburban Texas. I’d never been to a city, never done anything. And I’m in a train station in Tokyo, and I’m lost.”
What does a Black girl from small-town Texas do in a situation like that?
“I told myself I couldn’t panic, that I’d just have to stay still — I thought they’d come back and find me, but if I moved it would make it harder. So I just froze, and I stood there. It was a big lesson: this is the worst it can get, and you will survive it and be strong and resourceful. That was a good lesson, right?”
That may be an understatement. That otherworldly experience, being in unfamiliar territory, having to deal with what life threw at her, take stock and make a plan, seems to have sparked something inside her. As a child, she’d suffered with a chronic skin condition, asthma, and neglected by teachers who thought her disinterest in schoolwork was inability rather than boredom. As she grew in herself, however, she turned into a precocious, determined and confident child. She’d taken her SATs early, first at 12 and then at 16, and started acting — first as an amateur, then professionally — and eventually worked her way into drama school.
As she got deeper in, however, she realized it wasn’t enough.
“I recognized even early on that it was probably not going to be a career plan. I did not want my destiny to be shaped by what I looked like and how people perceived me, and the boxes they were willing to put me in,” she says. “I think for me it was the reality that I was never going to be a lead anything. I was never going to use that training that I got at Carnegie Mellon, that amazing conservatory training, really to be anything other than a sassy best friend — or a magical Negress if I got lucky.”
That’s when she decided on the first of several abrupt changes of direction, switching to study international law and human rights. She eventually won a place at Harvard Law, interning at the State Department and the United Nations.
After graduating, this humanitarian journey took her to new places, and some more unusual situations — including field research in Afghanistan during the dark days of 2007, border refugee camps in Thailand and, eventually, to an NGO in Nicaragua focused on workers’ rights.
“We were working with sugar cane workers who were dying of a mysterious form of kidney disease,” she says. “It was essentially a public health crisis that was precipitated by human rights and labor rights crisis. The town where our workers were centered, where the biggest sugar cane producer was, they had to expand their cemetery several times over because the men were dying at such a high rate. Their children, because that was the only work in town, their children would then go to the fields.”
The work underscored the link between power and opportunity, success and exploitation — and it turned out to be another transformative experience.
When she returned to the U.S, Hutchinson saw another potential disaster, much closer to home: technology. Specifically, she was concerned that the changing nature of work enabled by technology — jobs disappearing to automation and being subsumed by the gig economy — will disproportionately impact those who are already disadvantaged.
For example, much is made of the impact that self-driving cars will have on the work of millions of professional drivers in America — but Hutchinson points to research that suggests the differences and inequities created by technology will actually be much more forceful in other areas.
“The World Economic forum predicts that, should hiring trends in STEM continue, for every four jobs lost by men, one will be recovered — but for every 20 jobs lost by women, one will be recovered. White House economists published a report on the future of work that predicted that 83% of all jobs where the wage was less than $20 an hour will be automated. 50% of African Americans and 59% of Latinos work in jobs that pay less than $15 an hour. What happens to those people?”
“We’re looking down the barrel of economic and social stratification that I don’t think we’ve seen in recent history. I think the stakes are really high.”
That viewpoint, informed by experience outside the technology industry, is why she set up a strategy and consulting firm called ReadySet. And it’s the reason she helped co-found Project Include.
Helping startups tackle diversity and inclusion from their inception — heading off potential problems from the beginning rather than grafting on solutions when a company is already mature — is one way of trying to tackle that broader danger that the rich get richer and the excluded get pushed even further to the outside.
It’s not easy, but the consequences of not acting are immense, she explains.
“I like telling stories,” she says. “But I like thinking about the consequences too: I think I’ll always be a policy person, a person who tries to think ‘what does this mean for society?’ As we go through this industrial revolution, there are going to be huge outcomes, which everybody knows. But I don’t think that the economists and the technologists who are embedded in this industry understand fully how those outcomes are going to play out.
