How We Navigate, Prioritize, and Value Building a Diverse Team

Being a woman in a male-dominated industry can feel like a constant uphill battle. It can feel like your voice — the voice you have spent years working to grow and develop — doesn’t wield much power.

The gender gap is still a major roadblock in the tech industry:

• 94% of the world’s software developers are male.
• In 2017, 4.8M people were employed in computer and mathematical occupations in the U.S., but only one in four of those employed were women.
• In 2012, even though women earned 57% of all undergraduate degrees in the U.S., they received only 18% of computing degrees and 19% of engineering degrees.

These are systemic problems — they are rooted in our culture, in the way we socialize women to pursue certain career paths, and in the conversations we have surrounding innovation, leadership, and success in the tech world. It’s important to note that I am choosing to focus on gender diversity since it is the starting point of our diversity hiring efforts, but the tech industry lacks diversity across the board and we need to apply this same resolve to do better in those areas, too.

Inclusivity and diversity aren’t just trendy buzz words, they’re crucial aspects of team-building. A work environment in which individual identities are not acknowledged, embraced, and promoted, hinders progress and creative breakthroughs. The National Center for Women & Information Technology analyzed 2,360 companies around the world and found that gender diversity in management and amongst teams generated positive outcomes related to profit margins, growth, and innovation. This is because when we create, we inevitably draw on our personal experiences and outlooks. So it’s only natural that products built by diverse teams are more likely to appeal to a greater variety of users. In the mobility industry, this is crucial — we are building technology that aims to make the world more accessible to all types people.

I often think about technology as a mirror, reflecting ourselves, our needs, and our desires. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe technology is a kaleidoscope: we can use it to reflect every angle, every part of us as a society and culture, and embrace the odd shapes and colors that make us human to create something beautiful, all-encompassing, and whole. Growing out our team in a way that reflects the world — all of the different types of people who we hope will someday use our tech — is the crux of our philosophy on diversity at rideOS.

Though building out a diverse engineering team has been a major priority for us since day one, we’ve struggled to achieve equal representation. Finding diverse top talent is difficult not only because of the highly-specialized space we work in, but also because of the environment we, as an industry, create for minorities prior to them entering the field. Hiring managers, as the vanguard of diversity initiatives, have a responsibility to prioritize hiring efforts toward those who do not have every door open to them or who are working against the odds.

The first step is to recognize that we’re not perfect. We’ve worked hard to implement inclusive language and practices as well as mentorship and leadership opportunities throughout our organization. We have high aspirations for the future, but we haven’t yet achieved what we hope to in terms of building out a diverse team. In 2019, we’re doubling down on this goal; we are committed to building out a team that is 50% women, even if it means hiring at a slower pace. We are going to fill the top of the funnel with as many diverse candidates as possible by seeking out the right people from diverse spaces, whether that’s conferences, meetups, or recruiting fairs like the oSTEM Conference or Demo Nights hosted by Hackbright Academy. Finally, we’re going to hold ourselves accountable to these initiatives by being open and public about our diversity statistics in the future; as a company that values feedback in all forms, we also welcome outside perspective as we continue to make improvements in this area.

At rideOS, we work to recognize, embrace, and promote individual differences in identity. We strive to be an environment where the intersectionalities in our identities and the ways our identities overlap are also celebrated, as they form our unique perspectives on the world. And ultimately, we recognize that in the same way we push to build groundbreaking technology, we must also push to build a team that breaks the status quo.

Interested in working with us? Apply today!