Diversity & Inclusion: Embrace the Chaos

The flag has been raised. We’ve identified a major gap in tech. Our companies are so homogenous — so very, very white… and male. Treehouse is one of 20+ companies in Portland that recognize this gap and have made a real commitment to make the tech space more diverse and inclusive.

Check out our TechTown pledge.

At Treehouse, we are committed to preserving a diverse and inclusive culture. We know that people who work in a diversified workplace find it easier to express new ideas and perspectives than in an environment where individuals are similar and uniform in thought. We believe diversity should look like a CHAOS OF IDEAS on the inside and GENIUS to our customers on the outside.

What does a diverse employee population look like?

Scanning any company’s directory, you may notice they have a variety of unique names and faces. So they must have this diversity thing mastered, right? Not necessarily.

A more in-depth look may reveal that women and people of color mostly hold entry-level and/or administrative positions, and white males dominate positions of power and technical roles. Or you may find out that most of the company’s staff members were recruited from another company where they all worked together in a previous life. They share similar experiences and opinions about how things should be done.

Even if the team is diverse, it may not necessarily be inclusive.

Consider Leslie Miley’s story: Leslie is an African-American male who grew up in Silicon Valley. He worked hard and became Twitter’s only black engineer in a leadership position. Leslie was inspired and motivated by Twitter’s involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement. However, he was far less impressed with the lack of diversity in the company’s workforce. There were no people of color above him in the organization. When his pleas for action were met with resistance, he felt like he had nobody to which he could elevate his concerns. When Leslie solicited ideas for improving the Twitters level of diversity, his manager approached the problem with an engineering outlook. He recommended developing a “name classifier” program and including it in the screening process. This profiling tool would put applications with seemingly non-white sounding names at the top of the pile, so people who “sounded” racially diverse would be considered first. (Whether or not this approach is legal, it is fraught with potential error and is certainly unethical.)

Leslie left his dream job at Twitter because he was unable to action change. He said that the company’s lack of diversity went straight to the heart of the product, limiting its offerings. With more diverse backgrounds in the workforce, he said, Twitter could expand the product’s possibilities in reaching a more diverse customer base.

What does an INCLUSIVE workplace look like?

If the company manages to hire a diverse set of employees, the key to retaining them will be creating and maintaining an inclusive environment — a place where:

• Every individual feels safe expressing new ideas and they are empowered to challenge the status quo.
• Employees at all levels have access to the tools they need to grow and to be successful. Examples include technology, continuing education, internships, and mentorships.
• Trust is implicit — Employees and managers are comfortable giving and receiving feedback (and they regularly do). Also whenever possible, work schedules and locations are flexible, which reflects an understanding of varied work/life needs.

What we’ve done so far

At Treehouse, we’ve put some initiatives in place to ensure that our workplace is inviting to a broad spectrum of talent. Here are a few:

Blind Applications. We ask candidates NOT to submit their resume when they apply. Instead, they are asked to answer a series of questions that help us determine what unique knowledge and attributes they bring. We omit names and personal information from the early stages of the hiring process in order to eliminate unconscious bias in the screening stage. (Check out our current openings here.)

No Degree Required. We give props to people who have achieved a 4-year (or higher) level of education. We also understand that not everyone has equal access to educational opportunities / higher education. When we advertise a new position, we let candidates know we are more interested in a candidate’s overall experience, life story, and demonstrable skills.

Flexible Work Locations and Schedules. Whenever the job allows, we offer employees the flexibility to choose where and when they do their work.

Diversity Team. We recently formed a team of Treehouse employees that meets regularly to brainstorm ideas on how to preserve an inclusive working environment and diversify our customers and applicants.

What others have done

Audition Challenges — GapJumpers offers a tool to to evaluate candidates based on how they present themselves, rather than keywords on a resume. Why? The goal is to “avoid discarding desirable talent that does not fit preconceived notions of what talent looks like and where it comes from.”

Blind auditions are taken by applicants from diverse educational backgrounds. The concept has generated a great deal of interest from people who don’t have traditional 4-year degrees that are trying to break into tech.

Voice Modulation — Interviewing.io offers real-time voice masking. The platform was built to make men sound like women and women sound like men, to study whether/how interview performance is affected by bias. One study found that there was no measurable systemic bias on the part of interviewers. Instead, they found that women tend to leave the interview process 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. Even when there is no difference in interview performance, women have been shown to underrate their own interview performance more often than men.

Should we be focusing on anonymity in the screening process, or should we be encouraging women to have the confidence and fortitude to dust themselves off and stay in the game?

What’s next?

When it comes to understanding what it means to create a diverse and inclusive workplace, we’ve barely scratched the surface. As we put new ideas and tools in place, we’ll all learn how to close the diversity gap. More importantly, we’ll learn how to make sure all employees feel safe, trusted and respected in our beautifully chaotic workplace.