What have you done to grow and promote more women and underrepresented minorities into management roles?
Question: “What have you done to grow and promote more women and underrepresented minorities into management roles?”
I recently shared my answer to this question in a private exchange, and thought I’d share it here, too, in case it might spur some ideas and action in others.
I can’t say that I’ve ever been part of a culture that does a world-class job at this. And I definitely can’t claim to be an expert on this topic, nor can I claim to have accomplished anything particularly worthy here, which is a shame because more — much more! — needs to be done and I’m therefore contributing to the lack of of the diversity in tech in two ways: as a white male, and as a white male who hasn’t done much to fix the problem.
Following are a few things I have personally done to help nudge organizations be a smidgen more inclusive and diverse.
One thing I’ve personally done is implement a version of the Rooney rule for all open roles. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule for details about my inspiration. This was a simple requirement that we needed to source and interview at least one underrepresented/diverse person for any given opening. In one organization, it was difficult to get all hiring managers to agree to this, and not all did, but there were consequences to ignoring it. One of the consequences was that once the rule had been agreed to as an optional constraint, hiring managers and leaders who didn’t follow it inflicted damage on their own reputations and their teams’ reputations.
Another thing I’ve personally done is de-stigmatize “work from home” in a culture that previously stigmatized it. If your organization has a culture of stigmatizing work from home (here’s looking at you, Yahoo), the effect is to tell your team that face time is the only time that matters for promotion. This is a belief that hurts women more than it hurts men because our broader culture in the West is one where women are forced to shoulder more than half of the childcare burden. This isn’t fair. This isn’t right. But it’s a fact. This means that the need to work from home and use other flexible arrangements is one that women utilize for different reasons than men.
If a culture makes it clear that working from home (unless you’re a software engineer doing focus work) isn’t cool, then it will struggle to hold onto not just its mothers, but also its would-be mothers because women tend to plan ahead, and see conflicts between motherhood and career years in advance. Sheryl Sandberg, in Lean In, exhorts “don’t leave before you leave.”
“…when it comes to integrating career and family, planning too far in advance can close doors rather than open them. … Of all the ways women hold themselves back, perhaps the most pervasive is that they leave before they leave.”
If Sandberg is right, then there’s a pervasive behavior on the part of women to assess whether organizations are places they could see themselves succeeding as mothers. If an org stigmatizes working from home, and hands out reward and recognition to those who put in the most face time, then the would-be mothers may churn out of these orgs long before they’re hitting the management ranks, let alone executive management ranks.
Another small thing I’ve personally done is implement virtual conference etiquette practices that benefit those working from home. The broadest expression of this is “don’t fuck it up for people who need to dial in. They’re already at a disadvantage vs. those who are here in person; don’t make it any more difficult.” The specifics of implementing this involve sweating the details. Including, but not limited to:
· No noisy catering. If you’re offering a meal during a meeting, as is common when a meeting overlaps with common lunch or dinner hours, ensure that the sandwiches don’t have noisy wrappers. Ensure that all the foil wrappers and lids are removed. Ensure that silverware isn’t packaged in crinkly plastic. Don’t serve soft drinks in aluminum cans that pop open loudly. These noises get in the way of the ability of those on the phone to hear the content of the meeting. This sounds like small stuff, but it’s huge. Missing just one or two words in a sentence renders a listener incapable of forming an intelligent response, and so the optimal strategy is to be silent, rather than participate and look like an idiot.
· Require people to speak up and sit near the mic. Some rooms aren’t configured for virtual conferencing. I get that. Real estate and hardware is expensive. So if the equipment or facility is insufficient, create a culture where the person speaking is expected to get their butts up out of their cozy corner and walk to where the Polycom / microphone is.
· Invest in good virtual conference IT. This one is a killer. Look at most IT departments and you’ll notice that they’re predominantly male (source: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm). These male-dominated departments tend to underinvest in technologies that facilitate workstyles dissimilar from their own. When I find broken stuff in a conference room, I file tickets and doggedly follow up on those tickets. When I notice that software is misconfigured or missing, I file tickets. I file tickets upon tickets to whip conference rooms back into shape. A truly inclusive organization would require its IT department to be more proactive about checking and maintaining conference room hardware and software.
To pull all of this together, here’s a story. Some details have been changed to protect the innocent.
Some time ago, my colleague Jane (not her real name) needed to dial in to an important meeting. Though she preferred to be physically present for this meeting, she needed to work from home that day because her son had a doctor’s appointment in the morning, and an electrician needed someone present for repairs to her home that same afternoon. Neither appointment could wait, and in her husband’s workplace (a traditional and conservative financial services firm) it was culturally unacceptable to work from home.
So Jane’s husband drove to work that day, and Jane worked from home, as typically happened when there was a childcare issue (this imbalance is also unfair, but not the point of my post, so I’ll table it).
Here’s what I observed during the meeting.
“What’s Jane’s cell?” asked the EA who had already fruitlessly searched the company address book for Jane’s cell phone number. IT databases typically only included people’s work phone numbers and the cell phones of a few execs who were on company-paid cell phone plans.
After a couple minutes’ scramble, Jane’s number was procured, and she joined the call… six minutes late. She’d already missed a few important updates, but chose to stay silent rather than interrupt the current speaker to ask for a repeat of what had been said so far.
As the lunchtime meeting progressed, Jane struggled to hear some of the participants because they were sitting too far from the Polycom device located at one end of the long, rectangular room. What’s more, everyone was chowing on sandwiches wrapped in a crinkly paper that was picked up by the mic more clearly than any human voice. She did ask twice for some remarks to be repeated. The repetitions were delivered hurriedly and with some loss of content, because her requests broke the flow of conversation.
When it was time for Jane to share an update, she couldn’t tell if her words were being received with silent nods of approval or confused silence or silent disagreement. She had nothing to go on but the silence. Sitting in the room, I could see most people were following along just fine, but one person’s body language indicated he wanted to ask a follow-up question. Jane barreled on, and this person chose to stay silent, because she couldn’t see that it was appropriate to pause for a second. Jane wrapped up her prepared update, then took an additional moment to offer an idea for solving one of the challenges the group had been discussing.
“What if we ask <Team X> if they’d be willing to contribute a research analyst to help us process the new data?”
Crickets and awkward glances. For two beats, everyone around the room fidgeted. A research analyst from <Team X> was already sitting there in the room, an important fact that was obvious to everyone (except Jane) and had been discussed at the start of the meeting.
“Actually, John was added to the meeting last minute and has agreed to help us out,” someone finally said.
Jane was glad that the room couldn’t see her blush in response. She hoped her embarrassment didn’t show she said, a little too chirpily, “Oh, that’s great. Thank you, John!” Back home, she felt stung. She decided to lay low the rest of the call. What else was she not aware of that would make her look like she was out of touch or uninformed — or worse, lazy?
After the meeting wrapped and the call-in line was disconnected, a few participants kept talking as they cleaned up the detritus from lunch, and plans were made to hold a quick debrief right away. Jane would have raised her hand to attend that meeting had she been able to hear that it was being arranged, and the people setting up the meeting knew she probably would have preferred to receive an invite, but they figured she wouldn’t want to be dialed in to a 15-minute meeting at the local coffee shop, where she wouldn’t have heard anything over the din of cappuccinos being frothed anyway.
…
This story represents a typical experience for remote meeting participants. Even now, with Skype and Google hangouts being common, dialing in to a meeting remains inferior to being physically present because body language, micro-expressions, and pre- and post-meeting small talk are usually unavailable to remote participants. Even after the companies add video chat to the suite of meeting collaboration tools, insufficient bandwidth often results in a low-res, pixelated, stuttering video feed and garbled voice.
In most ways, the situation sucks equally for men and women, but the effects on each population are asymmetrical and biased in effect.
So that was quite a side-rant on the effect of IT on this question… but if you’re still with me, I’ll offer a couple additional ideas.
Book clubs. I can see you rolling your eyes, but hang on just a second. I’m betting that most corporate book clubs that got together to read Lean In or Unfinished Business were comprised of women. What if we spent more time cajoling men into reading these books to develop empathy and perspective? What if an entire organization were given a copy of Between the World and Me as a holiday gift? What if the CEO of the company occasionally dropped links like this one into the company’s #general Slack channel, urging team members to read it? What if these readings were required for leadership team members? How might behaviors change if some of the ignorance engendered by white male privilege were simply eradicated through education?
Did you click that link just above? I’ll share it again and wrap my response here, because that article does a great job providing concrete advice on things companies can do to retain and attract more women and minorities in tech: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-in-tech-is-just-a-pipeline-problem-you-haven-t-been-paying-attention-cb7a2073b996#.zffxg4vtr.
