Gluecon - Hacking the Tech Workforce
May. 26, 2015•0 likes•644 views
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It’s been over a year since Silicon Valley tech companies published their dismal diversity stats showing the low number of underrepresented minorities and women in tech. In response, we’ve seen a growing community of entrepreneurs and programmers hacking the tech workforce, one hackathon/conference/company at a time. Join me to hear their stories and learn how to implement these hacks in your workplace. Gluecon 2015
Mary ScottonFollow
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Gluecon - Hacking the Tech Workforce
- 1. Hacking the Tech Workforce Mary Scotton Developer Evangelist Salesforce Platform @rockchick322004
- 2. Source: google.com/diversity
- 3. Source: Code.org
- 4. How can we change these ratios?
- 5. Hacking Your Company
- 6. “Radical Inclusion is a core value, that’s what has set us apart.” Ashara Ekundayo, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Impact Hub Oakland
- 8. bit.ly/LWTpanel
- 9. “Hire differently.” Ayori Selassie, Sr Sales Engineer & President of BoldForce, Salesforce
- 10. “Hiring is necessary but not sufficient…we have to look in the mirror.” Kelli Dragovich, VP of HR, Github
- 11. “When I think about diversity it's like planting a garden; you need to have soil that is good for the seeds to actually grow.” Lisa Lee, Diversity Program Manager, Pandora
- 12. Make inclusion a core value bake it in from the start, catch up now if you didn’t, be an active bystander Seek diverse applicants go to universities, meetups, uncubators for underrepresented talent Talk about diversity & privilege all hands meetings, small group facilitated conversations, internal discussion boards, unconscious bias training Start or support affinity groups safe space for employees, make sure HR/Execs are accountable for action
- 13. Hacking Tech Conferences
- 14. Hacking conferences Source: https://medium.com/@sailorhg/coding-like-a-girl-595b90791cce
- 16. Be aware of your unconscious biases assume everyone is an expert, talk to people who don’t look like you Work within the system seek a diverse set of speakers, say no to all white male panels, notice the monoculture Hack the system organize meetups inside the conference, organize sessions outside the conference
- 17. Hacking the Pipeline
- 18. Source: Code.org
- 19. Volunteer mentor at a youth hackathon (Qeyno Labs), assist in a BlackGirls CODE or Girls Who Code workshop Donate find orgs in your community (Hack the Hood, Hidden Genius, Youth Impact Hub Oakland) Provide internships work with dev bootcamps and CODE2040 to connect students to internships in your company
- 20. What will you do?
- 21. Thank You Mary Scotton Developer Evangelist Salesforce Platform @rockchick322004
Editor's Notes
- A year ago, Silicon Valley tech companies published their dismal diversity stats showing the low number of underrepresented minorities and women in tech. In response, we’ve seen a growing movement, sometimes in unexpected places, like yesterday’s opening keynote, as these companies attempt to correct the imbalances and make their workplaces more inclusive. In the next 30 minutes I want to share some of these stories with you, and to hear what you’ve been doing and what you plan to do in your company or community. Gluecon 5/21/2015
- Google was the first to release their stats, and as others followed suit, they all looked pretty much like this, Salesforce included. Compare this to the stats of the general population in America, and it shows that we can fix the developer draught problem by including women and all races in the tech workforce. Women make up 47% of the general workforce, yet only 17% of the tech workforce. http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech
- Blacks make up 11% of the general workforce. Why are they only 1% of the tech workforce? Think of how many of those open developer jobs can be filled by changing these ratios. But how? I’ve been on a journey this past year trying to answer just that, and I’ve met a community of entrepreneurs and programmers who are hacking this problem. Let’s talk about what they’ve done, and more importantly… https://gigaom.com/2014/08/21/eight-charts-that-put-tech-companies-diversity-stats-into-perspective/
- what you’all can do, to change these ratios. I am visible and vocal about diversity and inclusion at work, so often people say “I think this is important, but I don’t know what to do to fix it.” This talk is one way that I’m trying to answer that question, and I know I don’t have all the answers. As developers and technologists, and many of you as members of the dominant group in tech, straight cisgender white able-bodied males, you are in a position to make a huge impact. You don’t have to be an activist, you can be what is called an “active bystander” – someone who notices the imbalances of power and speaks up to level the playing field. E.g., noticing and speaking up when women are interrupted in meetings – “I’d like to hear what Mary has to say.”
- Let’s talk about some other ways to hack diversity in your company.
- The best way to hack diversity is to build companies that are founded on inclusion and diversity. And not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes a stronger business: better products, higher profits. Impact Hub Oakland is a perfect example. Diverse minds came together to create a community and a company in Oakland. Radical Inclusion is one of their seven core values, and it has been this single design factor that has set Impact Hub Oakland apart in the global Impact Hub network as the leader in brand development, community engagement, and in the amount of members who in the first four months surpassed what any other Impact Hub had been able to get in their first year.
- Another example is Cloud Foundry – in Sam Ramji’s keynote yesterday, he shared how they intentionally build community through inclusion.
- I want to pause here to point out that talking about diversity CAN be fun. I recently hosted a panel at a tech conference in San Francisco, the Lesbians Who Tech Summit, and was able to pick the brains of 3 people who have been doing diversity work for a long time. That full 20 minute conversation is online, here’s the link (bit.ly/LWTpanel), but I pulled some quotes from it.
- When asked how to change the ratio, Ayori Selassie said “hire differently.” Whether you are in a large or small company, how you hire will impact the ratio in a big way, but often tech companies look to the same pipelines to hire, and the people in those pipelines all look the same. But there are other pipelines – you can target schools in Atlanta, Philadelphia, or DC, that organically have a more diverse population, or target HBCUs to change the ration of Black employees in your company. There are also tech incubators that are focused on underrepresented groups: Women’s Startup Lab, NewME.
- Kelli Dragovich is from Github said that hiring is necessary but not sufficient. Everyone knows Github, but I have to say that it was not a company I’d considered a hallmark of diversity, based on what I’d read online. Turns out, they only hired someone to run HR about a year ago…and it shows in their culture. So step one was looking in the mirror, starting internally to find out what was going well and what wasn’t. This was done different ways. One was unconscious bias training. That is a powerful way to raise awareness of the decisions and assumptions we make all the time that we don’t even know we’re making, based on race or gender or ability. Another way was via multiple small group conversations, often uncomfortable conversations. These conversations tend to be the most uncomfortable for the 97% of the folks who are in the dominant group, not the folks in the underrepresented groups. As part of the dominant group you can feel defensive or guilty about your privilege, but as Adam said, having privilege doesn’t make you a bad person. Society has been consciously constructed over hundreds of years to set up white people as dominant. It is going to take a lot of effort to dismantle that, which is why I’m encouraging everyone to take action, however small. The easiest action to take is to educate yourself – everything you’ve ever wanted to know you can google. If I say a term that’s unfamiliar, like “intersectionality” or “cisgender” – google it. It is on our shoulders to get educated, not to ask the underrepresented class to explain their experience to us…because we’re too, um, busy, to research it ourselves.
- The best quote of the panel was Lisa Lee’s analogy comparing company culture to a garden. garden soil analogy: "when I think about diversity it's like planting a garden; you need to have soil that is good for the seeds to actually grow. when you think about the company culture and the company environment, that's the soil. You can go out and hire as many people as you want but no one is going to come and stay and no one is going to grow. Find the patches of soil in your garden and plant those seeds, bring people in to those patches; as things grow it effects the other patches. Make sure the people you are bringing in are going to be comfortable and stay and really have a fantastic career." affinity groups get together to support, protect our group, provide a safe space, learn from each other about how to interact with our peeps we have to engage the rest of the population and work on engaging the 97% of folks who don’t think about diversity all the time.
- So this is the “Do” step – how to hack diversity at your company.
- Tech conferences are where relationships happen. It’s not just about session content, it’s about hallway conversations and networking. If only straight-cisgender-white-able-bodied-males see themselves represented as speakers, and feel welcomed by marketing images and messaging, then that’s leaving a whole lot of other folks out of the loop.
- sailor mercury wrote an article on Medium recently titled “Coding Like a Girl” – I definitely recommend reading the full article. I’ll share one anecdote here. Tracy Chou, an engineer at Pinterest, shared this story with sailor: A couple years ago she attended a technical conference and on the first day, she wore a dress. When she walked around the conference, no one came up to talk to her. When she asked people very technical questions about their stack, questions she assumed would indicate that she was a programmer, she was brushed aside and told, “You wouldn’t understand.” She went back home that night really frustrated and flustered. She almost didn’t feel like going to the conference the next day. But she did and wore a nerdy tshirt and jeans instead, and she had a better experience that day. People assumed she was technical and didn’t dilute their explanations to her. One of my team members read this article right before attending the Microsoft Ignite conference. It TOTALLY changed the way they interacted with women who approached the Salesforce Platform booth. Instead of judging women based on how they were dressed, they assumed that everyone was a developer, and the conversations were much more meaningful because of it. This evanaglists happened to be a straight white middle-aged man, but I want you to know that the women on my team do this too. Everyone is learning. No one has this down perfectly.
- I’ve personally found that the best way to increase diversity and inclusion at a conference is to own the speaker lineup. Not everyone can do this, but last year, I did, and I invited 6 amazing people to come and share what they are doing to change the ratio (https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2014/09/luminary-developer-sessions-dreamforce-2014.html). I also wanted more women and underrepresented minorities on stage all around the Developer Zone, but I wasn’t sure how to do that (the year before, we had a very low number of submissions from women). So…I called Eric Norlin. He told me that outreach was key, that I had to be open about our desire for more diversity on stage. I blogged and did a google hangout to encourage underrepresented folks to submit during our Call for Papers, and received 15% of submissions from women. That year I also worked with our internal affinity groups to organized meetups in the Developer Zone. But even if you don’t have that Developer Evangelism perk, you can self-organize – host a women’s breakfast, put the word out that there will be an informal affinity groups meetup in a conference lounge, or organize an off-conference event. This year was the first time SXSW had a Blacks in Tech track inside the conference walls. Previously it had been held outside of the conference, organized by black tech leaders. Before I was an evangelist, I helped to organize a pre-conference panel with our internal women’s group and our community women’s group. We started from humble beginnings, but last year’s panel drew over 500 people and had a rockstar lineup.
- This is the “Do” step for hacking diversity at tech conferences.
- There is a lot to be done right now to make the tech community more inclusive. We also need to look at how we are inspiring and preparing youth and connecting them to tech jobs.
- I hadn’t seen this chart until yesterday in Adam Seligman’s keynote. I was shocked. There is definitely a lot of work to be done to improve Computer Science education and to increase participation in all groups. Let’s talk about some ways to hack this pipeline…
- Hackathons are where inspiration happens. I’m an advisor for an organization called Qeyno Labs, an they’ve been running inclusive youth hackathons focused on youth of color, in cities all around the country. One way to help is to be a mentor at one of these hackathons or a weekend workshops. That said, I mentored one weekend and learned a valuable lesson – I don’t click with teenagers. So, then I moved on to the next action – donate. I felt that I couldn’t do the kids justice with my time, but could help with my money. These organizations are afterschool programs in Oakland (where I lived for 12 years) that serve to maintain the interest sparked in a weekend event and build skills. Once students have built their skills, they don’t have the practical experience needed to get a job. That’s where internships come in. Working with dev training organizations, or CODE2040 which connects college students from all over with summer internships in Silicon Valley.
- OK, that’s what I’ve seen happening in this movement over the last year. Now I want you to take a minute to think about one action you can take to hack the tech workforce at your company, at a conference, or in the pipeline. <wait> Anyone want to share?
- Twitter challenge – tweet at me when you’ve taken that action. You don’t have to say what it is, just say “hey mary, I hacked the tech workforce #gluecon” I’d also love to stay connected and to hear from you when you read or see something that is making an impact and changing the ratio. THANK YOU!