Download to read offline
Uploaded byMary Scotton
Dreamforce 2015 - Hack the Tech Workforce
The document outlines strategies for improving diversity in the tech workforce by focusing on three areas: companies, ecosystems, and community pipelines. Key recommendations include hiring differently, fostering inclusive environments, and engaging with underrepresented groups. Prominent voices emphasize the importance of radical inclusion and taking actionable steps to address biases and promote diversity in tech events and communities.
More Related Content
Similar to Dreamforce 2015 - Hack the Tech Workforce
Dreamforce 2015 - Hack the Tech Workforce
- 1. Hacking the Tech Workforce MaryScotton Developer Evangelist mscotton@salesforce.com @rockchick322004
- 3. The Numbers Don’tAdd Up Women in the Workforce: By the Numbers Overall Tech 47% 18%
- 4. 18% Is LookingPretty Good Ethnicity in the Workforce: By the Numbers Black Hispanic 1% 2%
- 5. Everyone Agrees Diverseis Better
- 6. How Can We MakeIt Better?
- 7. 3 Ways toHack the Tech Workforce Your Company The Ecosystem The Pipeline
- 8. Hacking Your Company Whatto do in the office
- 9. “Radical Inclusion isa core value, that’s what sets us apart.” Ashara Ekundayo, Co-founder, Impact Hub Oakland
- 10. “Hire differently.” Ayori Selassie,President, BoldForce
- 11. “Hiring is necessary butnot sufficient. Look in the mirror.” Kelli Dragovich, VP of Human Resources, GitHub
- 13. Discuss at allleadership levels Send a clear message to your customers Outperform your competition Seek diverse applicants Leave positions open longer Change interview practices Talk about diversity and privilege in all-hands meetings Do unconscious bias training Facilitate uncomfortable conversations Make Inclusion a Core Value Hire Differently Look In The Mirror Hacking Your Company What to do in the office
- 14. Hacking The Ecosystem Whatto do at a tech event
- 15. “Unconscious bias is anexcuse for laziness.” Kara Swisher, Executive Editor, Re/code
- 18.
- 19. “I wanted togo to parties without getting my bum pinched.” Geraldine Gray, Principal, Endiem
- 20. “At this event,you’ll find a newbie-friendly environment.” Girl Develop It San Francisco
- 21. Recognize your biases& check your privilege Propose talks about diversity Provide feedback to organizers Seek diverse speakers & solicit talks about diversity Notice the monoculture Be explicit & use inclusive language Organize meetups inslde & outside the event Host your own event Keep the momentum going Don’t Be Lazy Work Within the System Do It Yourself Hacking the Ecosystem What to do at a tech event
- 22. Hacking the Pipeline Whatto do in your community
- 23. “Can I workon my app?” My kid, age 8
- 25. “KICK IT withCODE2040 is an epic sneaker jam/dance party/fundraiser.” Karla Monterosso, VP of Programs, CODE2040
- 26. Teach your kids& kids in your circles Mentor at a youth hackathon Assist at a kids coding workshop Encourage your company to sponsor an event Fund a Kickstarter campaign Donate food/laptops Provide internships Go to job fairs at HBCUs Look for non-traditional path candidates Teach Donate Hire Hacking the Pipeline What to do in your community
- 27. 3 Ways toHack the Tech Workforce Your Company The Ecosystem The Pipeline
- 28. “Being an inclusiveand diverse workplace is not optional.” Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Slack A messaging app for teams who put robots on Mars!!
- 29.
- 30.
Editor's Notes
- #2 If you deliver software, then you are familiar with having a “bug backlog” or “code debt” – in the tech world, we have a long backlog of debt when it comes to diversity and inclusion. This backlog has accumulated during our legacy of racial and gender oppression – and like any monolithic hunk of spaghetti code, it is taking some time to untangle. What I hope to achieve in this next 40 minutes with you is to inspire you to each get into hacker mode and fix the bugs in the system.
- #3 A quick intro. I’m Mary Scotton and I’m passionate about product design, evangelism, inclusion. You may have used a feature in setup that I designed, like page layouts or spanning formulas, and you may have seen me at a Salesforce World Tour or an ELEVATE workshop, talking about Building Apps with Point & Click, but today I speak as Mary who wants to have an honest conversation about race, gender, and inclusion. Everybody in?
- #4 How do we change this ratio? What if this was the performance of a query or a website? We’d debug to see what’s slowing it down? What are the blockers? How can we refactor? We need to More Than Double the efficiency of our code. That’s gonna take some creative hackery. But as we say in my family, “there is always somebody with more money then you, there is always somebody with less money than you.”
- #5 18% Is Looking Pretty Good, if you are Black or Hispanic. Let’s agree that there’s some work to do here. The system is not performing the way it should be, and it’s our job to fix it. Consider Dreamforce a diversity hackathon, and when you get back to work, your job is to implement the solutions that you explore this week.
- #6 We need to hack the tech workforce because everyone agrees diverse is better. But it’s been hard to agree on HOW to achieve that diversity. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racially-diverse-companies-outperform-industry-norms-by-30/
- #7 I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve been following the work of some pretty brilliant life hackers over the past year, and I want to share what I’ve learned. I especially want to share it with you’all because your attendance at Dreamforce means you have at least one aspect of the many facets of privilege: the privilege or wealth, of a good job, of being respected in your job to be given a week to attend an industry conference and improve your skills and expand your network. Also, as developers and technologists, and many of you as members of the dominant group in tech: straight cisgender white able-bodied males. Is anyone a straight cisgendered white able-bodied male? (are you googling cis-gendered? Good! Self-education is the first step. I can think of a few of my straight cisgender white able-bodied males collegues who are really educated about diversity, not because they asked me or asked a Black friend, but because they googled it, and read about it. I really admire that. We are crossing culture lines when we talk about groups that we don’t belong to, so we need to understand the culture. It’s like going to another country and learning the language and the customs. As a member of white culture, I need to learn about Black culture. Being the mother of a son in a wheelchair does not make me an expert on what it is actually like to be in a wheelchair. Being a lesbian does not mean I know about Transgender culture. So I read and I listen, and I amplify and I educate.
- #8 You can affect change in these 3 ways, with big and small actions.
- #9 Even if you aren’t the head of HR, you have the power to hack your company. It’s easiest to do if there is a blank slate, if you are starting a company or working at a small startup – just like it’s easier to do if you are starting to code from scratch, rather than bolting on features to an existing codebase.
- #10 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.
- #11 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 ratio of Black employees in your company. There are also tech incubators that are focused on underrepresented groups: Women’s Startup Lab, NewME. Or hire from CODE2040 interns and alumni.
- #12 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.
- #13 Or more recently, last Friday at the Tech Inclusion conference here in SF, Tarsha McCormick said … https://twitter.com/thoughtworks/status/642386966894395393?refsrc=email&s=11
- #15 The tech ecosystem needs to be hacked, but it’s hard because this is a legacy system – it’s like trying to make a mobile webpage with COBOL. You have the power to make a change here because you are all a part of it. Changing tech events is important because tech events are where relationships happen. It’s not just about technology, 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. Let’s talk about some things you can do.
- #16 I just told you to do unconscious bias training. Here’s what Kara Swisher, who will be interviewing Marc and Parker on Thurs afternoon, thinks about unconscious bias (video here: https://www.salesforce.com/video/183641/)
- #18 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. When you are dealing with institutionalize racism, you need to flip it. When representing engineers in marketing images or technical presentations, rather than always photos of white men (which arguably are easiest to find), put photos of black women. See what happens. Make people think a little. Make people see differently.
- #19 - how many organize tech confs (just me?) - how many people attend tech confs (everyone!) Just like at your company, it’s important to talk about diversity and inclusion, with everyone, not just people who are underrepresented. That is the goal of the DevZone Luminary sessions – we’ve invited leaders in the diversity and inclusion space to talk about what they’ve been doing and what our community can do to make an impact. As organizer I can invite luminaries who are spending their energy solving this important problem (show last year and this year, encourage attendance; post to chatter feed); as attendees you can provide feedback on surveys or in person, say “I loved hearing from the luminary who predicted when we’d settle on Mars but I’d also like to hear from people solving the important issue of diversity and inclusion.” Or you can say “why are all your speakers straight white men?” You can also propose talks about diversity – in fact I am doing a talk at Millennial Week and when others saw the topic, they wanted to participate! As organizer I can have a no all white male panels policy. I may not be able to enforce it and sometimes it would not make sense and would “tokenize” the non white male person, but having the policy makes people think and makes them behave intentionally as they curate speakers. As an attendee you can provide feedback, either publicly on twitter or this tumbler #allwhitemalepanel or in surveys are directly to organizers. All I’d ask is that when you do, be kind – come at it from a position of “I know you probably have thought about this but…and I know some great people you might want to invite next year.” As an organizer I can make sure we are explicit about being inclusive. As an attendee, you can ask “is there a COC?” or as a speaker you can refuse to speak unless there is a COC. Having a COC doesn’t mean it’s a great conf but it is tables stakes for inclusion.
- #20 Many of you said you don’t organize tech events, here is another way you can hack the tech ecosystem - you can self-organize – start a chatter group in the Success Community and invite people to a meetup (this is how the Girly Geeks was started 6 years ago, and this year a new group, Admins with Disabilities started in the Success Community just before Dreamforce and they are having 2 meetups this week; host a women’s happy hour before a developer group meeting – which some of the ladies in NYC did before there was a formal Girly Geeks group, designate an informal meetup space during lunch each day for your group – which the LatinoForce group has done this year, or organize an off-conference event, which the Black tech community did for years at SXSW until finally this year that speaker series became part of the official track. Before I was an evangelist, I helped to organize a pre-Dreamforce 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 this years panel drew 1000 people - both panels had rockstar lineups.
- #21 So you can work within the system, you can work outside the system, or you can make your own system. That’s what GDI has done. First with tech training, by providing affordable tech training for women. And then with hackathons, which are an important part of the ecosystem. Meetups, workshops, and hackathons are all important parts of the tech ecosystem. This is where communities are built, teams are formed, ideas are refined, and learning happens. GDI has changed the way that the tech ecosystem is trained, by providing affordable women-friendly coding classes. They also changed the way a hackathon looks with neohack. They did not say “this is a hackathon for women” they said “this is a hackathon that is welcoming to everyone” – thus busting the intimidation and making a clear statement that inclusion was a core value. Once your even is in motion, you need to follow through. Have tshirts in all sizes and in men and women’s cuts. Don’t say “you guys” when you address your attendees.
- #23 The final piece of the puzzle is to grow the next generation of technologists. This is the coding equivalent of “Do It Right The First Time” – let’s start from the beginning by making technology education a core part of every kids childhood, like art and music. This week we are hosting coding workshops for kids by partnering with Coder Dojo, Girls Who Code, etc. Here are some things you can do to support the organizations that are doing this work.
- #24 The first thing you can do, is to influence your immediate circle. Teach your own kids, or kids in your circle, or kids in an afterschool program, to code. Tell them what you do. Explain that they don’t have to just be consumers of technology, they can create it. And that creating it can be fun. It’s not all coding (which some people think is fun, but other people don’t. It’s designing, it’s inventing, it’s building a business that solves a problem. Workshops and Hackathons are where inspiration happens. There are many great organizations who teach youth how to design, code, and pitch apps, either through one-off workshops, ongoing afterschool or weekend programs, or weekend hackathons. At the Salesforce World Tours this year, we included Kids Coding in our Expo area, and it was an awesome way to introduce kids to coding and also expose them to the tech ecosystem (and swag). I participated in the NYC event and it was a blast to see the energy a group of 6th grade girls has – and to see that energy engaged in building a video game. At Dreamforce we’re working with CoderDojo to introduce kids age 7-18 to coding using the drag & drop MIT-developed programming tool Scratch. You can check it out in the DevZone near the IoT zone. The students are members of local kids coding organizations such as Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code. I’ve also been a mentor at a Qeyno Labs youth hackathon. It was over a weekend, in Philly, and it was aligned with President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative. The high school students pitched bravely pitched their ideas for apps that would make a positive change in their communities. If you think the pipeline needs more students of color and girls in it, then sign up to mentor at a workshop or hackathon.
- #25 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. Many great organizations deliver afterschool programs that serve to maintain the interest sparked in a weekend event and build skills. If working with youth is not your thing, or you don’t have the bandwidth, then donate to keep those organizations up and running.
- #26 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. Don’t miss Karla Monterosso’s session at 3pm today in the Innovation Theater to hear more about their innovative internships and fellowships.
- #28 I’m hoping that you are already thinking about what you can do after this session to hack the workforce in your company, at this event, and in your community, and I want to leave you with one final story…
- #29 Last week, Slack, a company of 250 people that makes a “A messaging app for teams who put robots on Mars” reported their diversity data. Their stats for women were the same as google (and salesforce). Their stats on LGBTQ employees was 10% (which is totally in line with the general population), and I was pleased to see they cared enough to track that stat. Their stats for African-American engineers was a dramatic 7%. I was impressed by that and even more impressed by their ability to move beyond the “it’s a pipeline problem” narrative and be clear that the culture of tech needs to change. They hit on many areas in their “what are we doing to make things better” statement – I’ve posted it to the session chatter feed and encourage you to check it out: http://slackhq.com/post/128721741660/inclusion-and-diversity-at-slack So…your turn…
- #30 I know that I have the best and the brightest technologists in this room…what will you do to hack the tech workforce?