Closing the Opportunity Gap: A Former Microsoft Employee Ushers in a New Era for Diversity and Inclusion in Tech
By Yasmeen Mayes and Natalie Jenkins
While working as a marketing employee at Microsoft in 2015, Anthony Clay observed a simple truth: Black employees lacked the same opportunities given to their non-Black counterparts. While this may come as no surprise, presenting this simple truth to executives at Microsoft would steer Clay down a path that would lead him to become the co-founder of BlackLight, one of Microsoft’s largest employee resource groups, and most recently the CEO and co-founder of Indi, a company creating fairer workplaces with more opportunity.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Clay always considered career paths that involved thinking about how to push a movement forward and empower his community — a personal ethos instilled in him by his parents. He thought about carving out a successful career in law, education, or journalism, “Each of those fields has a unique agency to empower and bring truth to the work and movement,” Clay said.
As he got older and the field of technology started to explode, he saw emerging issues that would become a problem for Black Americans in the future. Given the unequal access to education in areas like STEM, this motivated Clay to pivot away from an esteemed career as a lawyer, teacher, or journalist because he knew that the Black community needed, and still needs, more of their own in tech.
Following the murder of George Floyd, a summer filled with Black Lives Matter protests and calls for racial justice, companies everywhere committed to rethinking and investing in diversity and inclusion after years of failing to deliver on the promise of true equality.
After graduating with a degree in economics from Columbia University in 2014, Clay began his early career in big tech where he would witness firsthand the slow progress companies have made with advancing and retaining Black, indigenous, and other people of color within their organizations.
Clay explained that while the lack of diversity in tech is often deemed a pipeline problem (which is true), there are other problems within tech that cause higher turnover rates among underrepresented groups. According to data Clay shared, the reason for this is due to homogenous manager networks and a lack of opportunity.
“Right now, if you want a stretch project or anything that drives real promotions at companies, they are most likely informal and given out by managers at happy hour. The old boys club is a real dynamic that plays itself out in who gets invited to the meeting, who gets invited to those happy hours, or who gets invited to golf on the weekends. Because of that our Black, Latinx, Native indigenous folks and women hear about these opportunities way less.”
For true progress to become a reality in our workplaces, companies needed to be doing more than recycling costly and ineffective measures.
“Talk to any D&I practitioner and they will say that we need to recruit more, which is accurate, but the issue is that companies and organizations cannot keep Black talent,” Clay said. “We are not creating inclusive work environments that have people stay.”
That’s why when the Indi team came together, they were intentional about inclusion coming before diversity. “Diversity is a number and inclusion is a culture shift. That’s Indi: Inclusion before diversity.”
Indi came to life in early 2020 when Clay, along with his co-founders Jason Alafgani and Wandrille Hubert, set out to create an indispensable tool for an organization’s diversity team. Indi’s goal is to help organizations seamlessly integrate inclusion into the workplace.
Indi has software logic that interrupts bias and breaks up behavior stemming from homogeneous manager networks which lead to more opportunities for more people.
Clay, Alafgani, and Hubert successfully raised a large round of venture capital funding for Indi which helped with efforts to actively expand their team in engineering. This was a remarkable achievement given that just 1% of venture-backed companies have a Black or Latinx co-founder. “I saw how difficult and competitive the process was to get venture capital funding which is why I want to try and impart what I learned to help people navigate and empower the next 2%.”
Reflecting on his time in big tech, Clay shared powerful stories regarding its cultural environment and lack of diversity. One of the most striking anecdotes he shared was about attending a meeting and realizing that there were more Alexa devices on the conference table than there were women at the table.
What Clay also noticed were the leadership meetings that mirrored what we’ve all observed: only one person of color in the room. “This dynamic is uncomfortable for a different reason. It leans into this idea that we are monolithic, and we are not.” For many people of color who are the only one in the room, questions tend to be directed at that one person who may not have the viewpoint to speak to the nuance of the vast experiences and backgrounds in our communities.
“There would be blatant examples of when companies needed a nuanced perspective but had resistance to having more than one in the room.”
Clay mitigated the challenges he experienced and observed during his tenure at Microsoft in a big way.
Six and a half years ago, Clay was among a group of Black employees at Microsoft who banded together and co-founded an ERG called BlackLight which had a massive impact on the culture of the company. Its origins were grounded in creating a community and a safe space for Black marketers at Microsoft.
This group was needed. Several thousand employees make up Microsoft’s marketing organization and there was no ERG specific to that branch of the company. We all know marketers are on the frontlines with customers, and we know human beings and customer research is what marketers do.
In five years, BlackLight grew from 6 to nearly 2,000 employees and its North Star was all about attrition and retention.
“A lot of ERGs today do a lot of impactful events and programming, but oftentimes things go unmeasured and there’s not typically a scorecard or business reviews for how the community is progressing,” Clay said. This is the type of rigor Clay and his co-founders wanted to bring to the work and aimed to ensure that BlackLight was measured and data-driven. “When you go into a room with executives that’s what they respond with. That’s their love language,” Clay said.
BlackLight helped increase the tenure of Black marketers at Microsoft and became a group that people outside of marketing wanted to join.
Through their growth at BlackLight, it inspired the formation of other ERGs within Microsoft that focus on Latinx, Native indigenous, and LGBTQ+ communities, and even inspired a revamp of the women’s community in marketing.
After spending six and a half years at Microsoft, Clay was able to take the legacy and imprint he left there and duplicate it to leave the same mark at companies with his new venture as CEO of Indi.
Companies with a mission like Indi’s are important because the effects of a lack of diversity in tech are harmful in more ways than one. For starters, “the urgency to build tech in a way that is mindful is missing,” Clay said.
For example, software that allows the account owner on family phone plans to access the location of every device at any time might affect a household plagued with domestic violence in a way that it would not for other families. This was an issue that was likely not flagged, perhaps because there were no women on the team with that perspective, and according to Clay it is important to include people who can consider or have experienced these types of nuances.
We can also see the effects of a lack of diversity play out in the way that products are built. Amazon developed and sells facial recognition software that has issues with properly recognizing the faces of women and people of color.
Marketing is another space that is in need of greater diversity. Clay believes that the way in which we communicate the value of products and with each other should be intentional and inclusive. It is clear that in many cases these efforts are not applied.
We can all look back and recall the Pepsi commercial that featured Kendall Jenner bringing peace during a protest with the help of a cold can of Pepsi. The way the message was conveyed trivialized the important and necessary work that Black Lives Matter supporters do. There are many instances where marketing misses the mark in this way.
“Lack of representation is a massive problem and no one is down to talk to learn.”
Even in the midst of looming challenges, there have been incredible examples of Black excellence in tech, yet they too tend to be overlooked. Clay acknowledged that there are genius engineers and marketers who don’t get the recognition they deserve, and for this reason, it is so important to celebrate even small wins. “There are so many features and innovations that we use every day that have added accessibility that were driven by Black people.”
Candace Morgan, who is the former Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Pinterest, set out to bring together product and inclusion by merging the two. With her leadership, Pinterest rolled out skin tone filters for users shopping for beauty products. Her concept was groundbreaking and other platforms have attempted to mimic the technology.
Over at Netflix, Vernā Myers played a major role in diversifying the digital giant’s catalog of content. Because of leaders like Myers, many other platforms have made diverse media a priority.
These are just a couple of the examples that Clay shared on Black women in tech who have made a true impact and meaningful contributions in the tech space. Through Indi, Clay will be part of rectifying these types of issues in his own way.
Though there is a lot of work left to be done, Clay is passionate about starting that work, even if he doesn’t get to see his mission fully realized in our society. “Our history is filled with folks who did the work and didn’t get to reap the benefits… I am here today and I am empowered to do what I do because of the history of our ancestors.”
Clay’s commitment to carrying the torch no matter what and leading the next generation to do the same runs deep. When asked what Black History means to him, Clay simply and matter of factly stated, “everything.”
“We are duty-bound to keep it going and build upon it.”
This is the fourth story in an eight-part Black History Month series, Celebrating our Past, Present, and Future featured in the publication The Chronicles of Black History and Culture.
