Diversity In Tech: Visibility And Exposure Is Important

“You know when I was going to elementary and middle school, when we had career day, the only folks that would come speak to us were nurses, and and paralegals.” I said, sipping my coffee. It’s 6am and my husband and I are in a mostly empty Ihop, reminiscing about the days we spent in school. Growing up in a not so great area of Detroit, career days were not very diverse when it came to the types of people that would come speak. There was always someone’s parent who worked long hours as a nurse, or another relative that had a career with a legal affiliation, whether they were a lawyer, or police officer. Once we had a dentist come in (I remember because he gave us tooth brushes, and toothpaste), a milk man who brought ice cream, and if I can recall correctly a local wrestler who ended up teaching art at the highschool came in once. Other than that, I wasn’t exposed to many other career fields.

And then it happened, my mother and father both got better jobs and moved us out of Detroit, a few moves later and we ended up in Keego Harbor, attending West Bloomfield Highschool (Go Lakers! Don’t ask me why I remember that………) and I was introduced to my first career choice that wouldn’t have me sewing up wounds or wearing a suit, or carrying a gun. Because I’d completed all of my credits to graduate by the time I got there as a senior (that should tell you something about the school system in Michigan, because in one district I was on track, in another I was behind, and in the other I was ahead) I was placed into mostly electives. I had welding, english, sociology, math, graphic design, art, and computer science. Yes, you read that right, I attended a highschool that taught (and still teaches) graphic design, and computer science as electives. Now for those of you that don’t know, West Bloomfield High School, is in a very well to do part of Michigan, we had people that were graduating that were going of to Yale, Harvard, and the University Of Michigan, and I was the only person in my class that was going into the military after highschool because I could not afford to pay for school (and I’d spent three out of 4 years of high school in JROTC) but I digress.

Before I attended West Bloomfield, the thought never crossed my mind to go into a field that was outside of the spectrum of what I’d encountered from my day to day living in Detroit. When I was going to elementary and middle school (my highschool in Detroit didn’t even have a career day), I was always met with the same categories of careers. Nurse, Dentist, Lawyer, Police Officer………it got pretty boring, as we became very well acquainted with all of the logistics of obtaining each job, I think it really got to the point where after the person stopped speaking and asked if there were any questions, they were met with an awkward silence, because we’d had our questions answered the year before that and the year before that.

Now let’s flash forward to now, I’ve done my time over the barrel for Uncle Sam, I’m finishing my degree in Illustration, and am a working developer. I go home for a visit, and see my aunt that I had not seen in years (about 4 I believe) and she askes me what I’m doing now, and I tell her that I’ve gotten into coding, and she gets excited and starts talking about how she was thinking about going back to school to learn medical billing transcription too. Letting out a long, drawn out sigh, I correct her and say, no web development, I build web apps, web pages and mobile apps. She gives me a disappointed “oh” and then goes back to talking about what she’s trying to do for work now. My younger cousin, her daughter pulls me to the side and asks me about it, because she’s genuinely interested in going into coding, like I am, and like my husband is. I give her a few resources and we part ways.

Visibility And Exposure Make All The Difference

It wasn’t until this morning having breakfast in that empty Ihop, going over the weird and mostly boring days of school with my husband, that everything sort of culminated, and came to a head. One of the biggest issues with diversity in tech is visibility and exposure. Case in point, I am an artist, I am also a developer, I have a 7 year old, a 4 year old, a 3 year old and an 11 month old. All of my kids want to be artists because they see me draw, ALL THE TIME. My oldest daughter started learning how to code around the same time I did, she’s 7 years old, and has already built an add-on for Minecraft on her Kano (a super nifty raspberry pi) with her father. The biggest reason why she wanted to do it was because she saw me doing it. Now when she first said she wanted to get into it, I didn’t rush out and spend 150 bucks on her Kano, I had her sit down and do the hour of code website, she ended up enjoying it thoroughly and thus the purchase was made.

Because I am pretty sure that career day in the inner city hasn’t changed much, (my dad even said that they had basically the same line up when he was going through school) I’m sure there aren’t many developers breaking their necks to get to that west side Detroit (not Detroit Area, not Ann Arbor), middle and elementary and high school to show and explain to a group of inner city kids how they built the super cool mobile game that they enjoy every day after school, and that’s a problem. Around 70% of the African American population dwell in the inner city, and most of that population really never make it out. I have friends that while I’ve gone to great lengths not to let that happen, have harkened to the “It doesn’t matter what I do, nothing will get better for me” attitude because they weren’t shown anything better, or they weren’t shown anything more than the 12 nurses and one police officer that came to see us on career day. There was never anyone there who built software, there was never an engineer, or hell even an artist.

There is so much untapped potential, and talent in these so called “ghettos” it’s disappointing to see that a lot of the solutions that include bringing more blacks into tech have NOTHING to do with the areas that have the LARGEST populations of people who can and will benefit to exposure to things like that. My 7 year old daughters eyes lit up when she realized that she’d sat there, and put enough of the blocks together on code.org to make Elsa skate around and make a snowflake in the ice. She nearly gasped herself to the point of passing out when I made my computer say “Hi Harley” in the terminal. If you want to bring more diversity into tech, do it in the places where wonder and excitement still exist, and where you wouldn’t know just by looking at it, but creativity runs rampant throughout these places. For every kid that wants to be a singer or basketball player, there’s about 3 or 4 that want to build websites, or make video games, or just build an app for their grandma to be able to track her insulin.

I’m not going to lie, I have my issues with the push for diversity in tech, I feel like it’s forced for lack of a better word. However, if you’re going to push for diversity in take, aim for the folks that exposure to that will make a change for the better in their lives. Show them that there’s a way out, make it relatable, and by all means put an effort in exposing someone who otherwise wouldn’t know that that is an option for them, because believe or not, some of the best coders that I have met, did not know that it was even an option for them.

By taking something as simple as building a bare-bones html page in notepad, and teaching it to a bunch of bright eyed, elementary, middle school and high school students from the inner city, I can pretty much guarantee that there won’t be a diversity issue.