Accidentally in Code

Tag: diversity

  • From Visibility to Representation – Rethinking DEI

    From Visibility to Representation – Rethinking DEI

    CC BY 2.0 aeroix

    When I talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), I’m typically coming at it from an angle of systematic change. The purpose of DEI, as I see it, is to dismantle a rigged system and move to something more equitable. This is why the concept of “no politics at work” is seen as antithetical to effective DEI, because what does a person do when their entire existence has been politicised?

    The frustrating thing about DEI, is that often when organisations talk about DEI what they mean is the performative type of DEI. The appearance of progress, without the challenge of systematic change. The percentage points that can be shared externally, like there’s been progress, when the balance of power remains the same. The updates that start and end at the company website, and leave out the hiring process, the promotion process, and anything else that might threaten the status quo.

    This is the trap of Diversity as Performance Art, or (because it so often focuses exclusively on white women) “Corporate Feminism”. Plenty of us have fallen into it, spent time on it, only to later look at the state of things and wonder what it accomplished.

    Personally, I quit Corporate Feminism some time ago. Not quite entirely, I have dabbled since, embraced the odd moment like a not-entirely-ex smoker sneaking a cigarette, feeling grimy afterwards and remembering why I chose not to do that anymore.

    It is hard, I think, to build a model of what DEI really is in tech, amidst all the noise, and “systematic change” can be overwhelming as a concept. Here, I’ll try to lay out some component parts of DEI and explore the impact and limitations they have.

    • Visibility vs. representation
    • Education vs. advocacy
    • Mentorship vs. Sponsorship
    • Individual vs. Environment
    • Status Quo vs. Structural change

    Visibility vs. Representation

    Visibility often seems like the most fraught aspect of DEI. On the one hand, we hear “you can’t be what you can’t see” and many firsts or onlys are driven by the idea that they can be the role model they lacked to others who come after them.

    On the other hand, the concept of exposure, and the expression “people die of exposure”. The costs of visibility in terms of harassment and resentment. The expectation of visibility which is at best the unpaid second shift, and at worse, free work “for the good of the community“.

    At the crux of the issue of visibility is the distinction between visibility and representation. Visibility is a face on the corporate website, or additional interviewing load, to make the team look “more diverse”. Representation is the under-indexed person in the hiring manager role. Visibility is the speaking slot at the sponsored recruiting event. Representation is the invited talk at the industry event based on actual expertise. Visibility is the pride flag on the Twitter profile. Representation is in the people who actually work there and the policies that actually support them.

    At the core of it, visibility is some form of currency, that occasionally exchanges for some goodwill, but rarely anything more. Representation is a form of recognition; representation is visibility for some reason that ties to the actual work you’re compensated for. The first shift of your actual job, not the second, thankless, one.

    I’ve noticed when I feel tokenized, it’s typically been that I was visible but not representative. The speaking slot where I thought I was invited because of my expertise and previous talks, only to doubt that at some point during the negotiation, or worse, after I arrive. The recruiting email that sells the diversity of the organization and the list of roles… that make me suspect the recruiter never even looked at my resume.

    As a result, I’m careful about what I agree to and what I don’t. I think every under-indexed person has to find their own balance there.

    Takeaway: Think about your balance of visibility vs. representation. What is valued? What are you getting out of the things you agree to?

    Education vs. Advocacy

    Education is information. Advocacy is pushing for change based on understanding of systematic bias.

    In essence, advocacy is an educated person, with the power and will to make change.

    The trouble with education is that it often focuses on 101 education, and someone who needs 101 education has made a choice to be ignorant about the world. It also doesn’t necessarily create the will for change. When meritocracy is adopted as a value, there is more bias, there’s also the potential for a shallow understanding to create harm.

    Needing to provide 101 education is also a distraction, time sink, and often starts with needing to justify someone’s existence. There is a cognitive cost to explaining things like “no, women don’t just ‘not like coding’, that is not a well founded statement and has been refuted many times over by [list of sources]”. That kind of comment is annoying, and tiring, but the base level comments about people of colour and trans people (trans women in particular) are so much worse. There is the idea that personal stories can change minds in a lasting way, but that was only 5-7% in political canvassing, so as an activity it has a high disappointment rate [more in this podcast] – as such it’s probably more suited for political canvassing than for people you need to interact with regularly.

    The trouble with advocacy, is that women are perceived negatively when they are seen as self-advocating, but more positively when advocating for others (although not as much as men) [see the book Women Don’t Ask, and this HBR article Women and Minorities Are Penalized for Promoting Diversity]. The trap of education and advocacy for under-indexed folk is that in education you may waste your time, and in advocacy you may in fact set yourself back.

    As such, the only worthwhile use of education is the level that creates advocacy. Education in the absence of both the power and will to make change is meaningless. This means: nuanced education of what actually works to people with power and will to change.

    Takeaway: Be cognizant of the traps of education and advocacy, and critical about where you spend your time. Often this means avoiding 101 education, and focusing your energy on those with the power and will to make change.

    Mentorship vs. Sponsorship

    Mentorship is giving someone advice, like pairing with a junior developer or helping them find resources. Sponsorship is more active help to change someone’s situation, such as connecting them to an opportunity or advocating for them.

    Mentoring programs have been very popular, but not particularly effective. This is because mentoring is a Ponzi scheme designed to distract under-indexed people from actual advancement. Or, less cynically, because the problem isn’t the individual but rather the system.

    Sponsorship is in fact the biggest lever for an individual. The challenge of prove it again, of judging some people on past performance and others on potential, is that decisions on opportunities and advancement are rife with bias. Sponsorship programs, especially those that hold sponsors accountable for supporting their sponsees advancement, attempt to correct for that bias and create more opportunities for success [see: Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women].

    Mentoring programs often pair people up with another person “like them”, and whilst it’s nice to build connections with people who share similar experiences, ultimately it often creates additional work for both parties. The mentor is normally further away from the person they are mentoring, and lacks the power to truly advocate for them. In a sponsorship relationship, the sponsor has influence over the sponsee’s work, can give them more feedback, connect them to opportunities, and shape their career.

    Sometimes sponsorship programs are formalized, but they don’t need to be formalized. All that is required is that people who have the power to do so look for ways to advance people more equitably. Sometimes it’s a one time thing, and sometimes it’s an ongoing thing [see: 5 Things Allies Can Do to Sponsor Coworkers from Underrepresented Groups, Don’t Just Mentor Women and People of Color. Sponsor Them].

    Personally, I find sponsorship is one of the most rewarding activities. Nothing is better than seeing someone you helped get into a position where they can pay it forward to someone else. Sponsorship is a slow but compounding process, but ultimately one of the most powerful ways for individuals to escape traps of systemic inequity.

    Takeaway: Quit the mentoring Ponzi scheme, seek out sponsors instead (and be a sponsor yourself, where you can! Sponsorship can start small).

    Individual vs. Environment

    In Stop Telling Women to Smile [Amazon], the author Tatyana Fazlalizadeh talks about her experience in a street artist collective. She was on the receiving end of street harassment whilst doing the same work, day in day out, and how the others in the collective – all men – were able to get on with what they were doing. She talks about worrying about her clothing when it was hot, whether wearing shorts would increase the verbal abuse, whilst men would work shirtless and not deal with anything, never say anything about the abuse that was hurled at her.

    This story is so illustrative of the tax of the bad environment. The cost of distraction, the unfairness. The environment is a significant piece of what people mean when they talk about “working twice as hard for half as much”. Some of that extra work is work, and some of that extra work it just… getting to do the work.

    This is why an inclusive environment, one that attempts to correct for systematic bias and ensure that a broader range of humanity can be successful can be so impactful for improved DEI outcomes. It provides people who often do not get such a thing a space where they can focus on the work at hand, without the tax of hostility, or thoughtless ambivalence. Individuals get the opportunity to thrive in an environment, rather than despite the environment. It is great for people in it, and it can create a model that encourages change in other parts of the org – or at least discredit the pipeline arguments that say such diversity isn’t even possible.

    The limit of the environment is what is around you. Even if you create an environment where under-indexed folk can thrive, they will have to interact with other parts of the organization, and you won’t be able to control what they encounter there. When you interact with shared process (such as hiring, compensation, etc), these can be some of the biggest detriments to your effectiveness in creating change. It can be exhausting to do that transformation and provide that abstraction, but how long can the principles you have laid down last if you leave?

    Takeaway: Seek out environments where you can thrive, and as you build influence look to what you can do to make an better environment for those who come after you. As you do this, don’t forget to pay attention to where the boundaries are – both of the change you can create in an organization, and what you can personally bridge.

    Status Quo vs. Structural change

    Processes create and reinforce a status quo, and they are often the place that needs to be changed in order to make lasting improvements

    When we design process, we are biased to design process we would be successful in. This is why process updates are inevitable part of effectively improving diversity outcomes.

    I have repeatedly overhauled hiring processes to improve diversity outcomes. The key thing as always been to get very clear about what success in role looks like, evaluate that carefully and systematically and as efficiently as you can, actively address signs of bias (e.g. the words “culture fit” are lazy, so at least interrogate what people mean when they use them).

    I have not (yet) overhauled a promotion process, but I expect that similar thinking applies. Whenever people claim they “know it when I see it”, we need to interrogate what “it” is. Once that is articulated free from aspects of bias (put things like “good company on the golf course” in the bin where they belong), you have the start of a meaningful evaluation which you can reason about and improve. Are there impactful behaviours being left out because no one did them before? Maybe those need to be added. Are some of those things particular ways of working and the same outcomes can be achieved differently? Replace the activities with the outcomes they drive.

    When we accept we live in a white supremecist patriarchy, we can see that white supremecist patriarchy is everywhere. It is in the media, in beauty standards, in relationship expectations, in politics and religion and art. It is in ourselves and our judgements and beliefs – we can try to consciously dismantle it, but we can never be confident it is truly gone.

    As such it is inevitably in every process we create, and that makes constantly critiquing process with respect to outcomes the way to – albeit incrementally – start to dismantle it.

    Process is a powerful mechanism for upholding the status quo. Consider VC funds. Encoded in their process – and many of them are pretty open with that – are pattern matches. When Paul Graham famously said “I can be fooled by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg”, what he told us was that pattern matching is such a key part of his investment decision process that it could override other, presumably more rational, parts of the assessment.

    I believe process as a tool is most powerful when it can affect redistribution of power (and money). This is why such comments from VCs like this get so much heat, because who gets funded now is huge part of who will have power 10-20 years from now. The longer inequity in hiring and promotion processes is perpetuated, the more it will cement homogeneity in the leadership of an organization.

    Takeaway: Process is a powerful mechanism for change, and making it less biased can also make it more effective for everyone. If you can frame things around organizational effectiveness, you may even be able to make change without rehashing tedious DEI 101 arguments along the way.

    Now What?

    There’s an excellent book about stereotype threat, Whistling Vivaldi [Amazon] by Claude Steele. One of the examples that most impacted my thinking is the power of self identification at start of the math test, and how it impacts people’s results – when asked to self-identify gender, women score lower, when asked to self-identify race, Black people score lower. This demonstrates the insidiousness of systematic inequity; that social programming is so strong, it’s sufficient to remind people of it. It is not necessary to “do” anything to perpetuate systemic inequity, the absence of care and effort alone is enough. The action is insufficient to judge whether it perpetuates bias or whether it addresses it – when asking people to self identify you ask them to all do the same thing. But it has impact on some, and not on others.

    It has been 10 years since Ellen Pao sued Kleiner Perkins for gender discrimination. Nearly 10 years since Tracy Chou asked where the numbers are… what has changed in that time?

    The conversation has expanded, somewhat. We talk more about racial equity and transgender rights.

    Worker agency has improved, at least in some parts of the world. People set higher standards for environment, and process improvements have been made across much of the industry. What started as a differentiator is now more normal.

    But representation still lags visibility. Sponsorship lags mentorship. Environment is hit-or-miss. Bias is still encoded in processes. Companies still focus on the things that are comfortable over the things that have more impact to change the status quo.

    Personally I go back and forth between hope and cynicism. I get angry and resent being exploited for visibility, feel that my efforts have been wasted because too many people in power do not really care, are not really willing to change anything hard. And then I have moments where I can recognize my own impact, where I see the sponsee pay it forward, see the person thrive in an environment they never got to experience before, see improved outcomes from more equitable process. When someone thanks me for something that I wish everyone got to experience, but at least this person did, at least I could do that for them.

    I hold on to those moments, because those are what I come back to when I get discouraged. Those are what push me to keep on trying. And this framework helps me decide what to spend my energy on, and what to let go.

    Thanks so much to Karen, Heidi, Trisha, KT, Elle and Camille for their feedback and validation.

  • On Improving Diversity in Hiring

    On Improving Diversity in Hiring

    Caveat: Diversity is more than gender. I’ve used gender in some of these examples because I have enough anecdotal data to support these theories wrt to gender but I don’t want to extrapolate beyond that. In general my policy is to test and measure women because we can actually have data for that, but then follow the same strategies for all under-indexed groups.

    Miss-Sad-Danbo-Longing-Disc-Fig-Cute-Separated-1870358.jpg
    Credit: Pixabay / Alexas_Fotos

    We talk about “Diversity and Inclusion” but perhaps it should be “Inclusion and Diversity” because inclusion needs to come first. Don’t hire people into an environment they can’t be successful in. On a practical level, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. On a human level, it’s harmful.

    Inclusion

    Inclusion is about how welcome people will feel if they are there. Consider if you have to be a certain “type” of person (outgoing? heavy drinking? hyper-competitive?) to be successful on the team. Are these characteristics really necessary? Would your team benefit from people who are quieter and more thoughtful, more collaborative? Would those people feel welcome – and able to be successful – if you hired them?

    If you realise your team is hyper-competitive, for example, you might want to think about how that is encouraged by the hiring process and the environment you have on the team. How much of that do you have control over? If it’s created by your promotion process, can you influence it?

    A good rule for inclusion pre-work to diversity is to stop doing things you would have to change if the demographics of your team better reflected the demographics of the world. If you find yourself watching interactions or jokes and thinking they wouldn’t be okay if there were women / people of color / lgbt / … people on the team… maybe shut that stuff down now if you ever want to have women / people of color / lgbt / … people on the team.

    On-boarding

    What is your on-boarding process like? How long does it take for someone to be ramped up and productive? What kind of help and support do you give them?

    Some things to consider:

    • It’s much easier to onboard someone well than to fix it later.
    • Instead of considering where you most need people, ask where on the team can we most support a new person.

    Juniors

    It’s tempting to improve diversity by hiring juniors. I think the ability to onboard a junior engineer is a measure of the health of a team. Be honest – is your team really healthy enough for one?

    Some things to consider:

    • For women at least anecdotally, the first job seems to be a huge predictor of whether they will stay in tech.
    • If you care about D&I, you will be mindful of the compound effects to the individual of screwing up here.

     

    Pipeline

    Once you’re sure your pipeline doesn’t lead to a sewage plant, you can work on it.

    Brand Awareness

    A lot of Diversity as Performance Art is this PR exercise of women who are known for working at companies whilst female. This works to a certain extent, I think particularly for hiring more junior folk. For a more meaningful and sustained impact, look for ways to give under-indexed folk more recognition for their actual work – what you actually pay them for – being an awesome engineer, or product manager, or designer, or whatever it is they do.

    This works more generally, too. This is one of my favourite comments on a recent launch post from my team. Capture d’écran 2017-09-27 à 22.30.44.png

    Mentoring

    These may not be people you will hire now, but you might hire them later. Either way, people talk. As my friend Julia put it:

    Capture d’écran 2017-09-27 à 22.34.59.png

    In some ways, what Julia is talking about is mentoring – proactively building relationships and supporting people makes you someone that people want to work with when it’s the right time. It’s also something that makes them suggest to their friends to look at, too.

    Personally I have somewhat mixed feelings about mentoring which I’m not going to get into here. However I’ve found that making myself visible in the community and offering some amount of mentoring definitely 1) makes people willing to circulate job postings for my team in their network and 2) generates connections that may result in working together in the longer term.

    Job Postings

    Use Textio to refine your job posting and ensure you’re not using male-coded language. Be honest, but aspirational (but not delusional). E.g. if you want more collaboration on the team then emphasise collaboration (but first make sure you have some signs of healthy collaboration).

    Targeted Outreach

    Consider where you are placing job ads. If you are looking to recruit under-indexed folk, skip Hacker News and look for places where under-indexed people are more likely to read.

    With Technically Speaking we estimate our audience is at least half women. We also work really hard to be inclusive of other under-indexed groups. There are job posting sites with 10x or more reach total – but nowhere close to the level of reach we have with under-indexed folk.

    If you’re looking at events as a way to recruit consider things like, whether they have a code of conduct, what the representation is like on stage, and off stage (whether they offer diversity scholarships is a good question to ask).

    If you start evaluating inclusion and representation as you evaluate how to spend your recruitment budget, you’ll likely make different choices on how to spend it.

    Specific Outreach

    The more senior you go, the more you can expect to have to reach out directly to people. I don’t want the to be taken as a sign that you should hire people you know. More that for senior women my observation is that they are likely to go and work for someone they know.

    Work on your own network and make yourself available. Follow more under-indexed folk on Twitter even after you discover they are not just offering an education but being normal human beings with varied interests. Make an effort to be more involved in communities where there is better diversity and more effort for inclusion. E.g. choose “welcoming Javascript evening with soft drinks and childcare” over the “brogramming with beer” event. Choose the Slack community with a strong – and enforced – Code of Conduct over the one which is fine, except for that channel, and that one, oh wait is there really a channel for…

    Hiring

    Now you’re hiring! Yay!

    The good news is that whatever your applicant pool looks like by gender, your next step should have a better ratio – because women are much more likely to self-select out of roles they are “not qualified” for and men are more likely to have a go.

    Next, consider context. One thing I care about a lot in hiring for my current team is that people have experience with complex applications over longer time-frames. This can be a hard thing to have if you’ve mainly worked in consultancy – which is often the case for people in developing countries. Aim to be equitable rather than equal. If someone comes from a place with less opportunity, factor that in as you evaluate them.

    Prioritise in your queue. Some hiring processes are designed to make people “prove they want it” but anything that selects for that will select for people for whom failure is safer – so, white men. Be prepared to be a bit more pro-active and a bit more on top of the process for under-indexed folk – they’re much less likely to chase you.

    Showcase existing diversity. Volunteer – naturally – information that will make it clear that people who aren’t white men can be successful in the environment (do this regardless of the perceived gender and race of the interviewee). As they ask you questions about projects or team organisation choose your examples.

    Consider how inclusive they would be to others. One of the things I find interesting as I interview is the people (well: men) who are rude to me as part of the process. Whilst at the Conglomerate I would often see men who had “one bad interview” with a woman getting let through anyway, in general I now try to work with people who consider that a deal breaker. Pay attention to their language, how they interact with under-indexed folk on the team, and how they react to inclusive examples.

    Make your process welcoming. There’s a lot of discussion about good hiring processes. The bad news is that we are constrained to design systems we will be successful at, so it’s impossible to discuss these things except from a place of bias. This is why most discussions on these topics are not that helpful (this also applies to promotion systems). The good news is that you get most of the benefit by making a conscious effort throughout not to be an asshole. Be kind to people, clear, and respectful of their time. Insist on this from everyone involved in the process. It really goes a long way.

    Factor out anxiety. In general, anxiety in the candidate is just noise in the system – hopefully the environment they end up working in is not one that causes them to live in a state of panic. Make an effort to be understanding of anxiety and to reduce it where possible, and you’ll get a much more useful idea of how they operate and how they would fit into your team.

    This Seems Like a Lot of Work

    It is. But it doesn’t get easier with time. You may as well start today.

  • If Lists Don’t Change Anything, What Does?

    Credit: Max Pixel
    This is a follow up to last week’s post about lists. Because if lists don’t change anything… what does? The short answer: hard work.

    The long answer:

    A common piece of advice is to broaden your network. But… see all these people as human beings. I’m not on Twitter as a woman in tech educator – I’m on Twitter as a full human being with a rich life. It seems like often people broaden their network and then pretty quickly un-broaden it because they don’t want to listen to the whole person (or maybe, at all). Try and rebalance your consumption to consume more content from under-indexed folk. What if you only watched videos of talks from women, or PoC for a month? Or a year? What if you only went to events that had at least 30% women speakers? How would your perspective change? Don’t tokenise. It’s tempting to issue a hotfix in the form of what I call a “Token woman invitation“. Every so often these turn into public stories. Factor in your own bias and invite under-indexed people because they have something interesting to say – and do so in a respectful timeframe. Otherwise you may as well not bother. For myself, every time I agree to an invite that I worry is token, I regret it. Do Outreach. Start early. Don’t start pinging people the day before your CfP closes because you’ve finally realised it’s pale and male. Be pro-active. Reach out to people, encourage them to submit, make yourself available for questions. Offer coaching and development for first time speakers. There’s a reason why events which have good “diversity” numbers often offer this. If you are going to include people who have historically tended to be left out, you might need to give them some encouragement to get them in. Functionally, Technically Speaking serves as a list of under-indexed folk in tech – a mailing list, not a public list. But a list. We earned our way to that through the work we have done to make it inclusive, and now we ask that events we include earn their way into it in the same way. When we see events doing the work of inclusion, we’re eager to include them. When they’re not, we close their issues as #wontfix.
  • Diversity as Performance Art

    Diversity as Performance Art

    green poi circles, in a beautiful light pattern, around a woman
    Credit: Wikipedia

    For a while now I’ve been using the phrase “diversity as performance art”. It’s a comment on the shallowness of most “diversity” initiatives. How superficial they are, and how they ignore the harder, day to day, work of inclusion.

    The pipeline – the PR around the “problem” of the pipeline – is a performance. Inclusion is what you do when you show up every day.

    Diversity as performance art is PR over Progress. It is easy to talk about, perform, diversity. It is much harder to do the work of inclusion. It’s less visible, and less glamourous. But – more worthwhile.

    Diversity as performance art rarely goes beyond hiring. Inclusion is your promotion process. It’s how projects are assigned. It’s ensuring people are heard in meetings. It’s being mindful about – and proactively working towards – healthy and productive team interactions.

    Diversity as performance art is superficial, and so are the results. Nothing changes until the economics change. The thing about diversity as performance art – it doesn’t change the economics. Structural inequity does’t change through a few extra internship places. It doesn’t change enough by equal pay for equal work – that equal pay has to be matched by equal opportunity. But that is much harder to do.

    My rant about Diversity as Performance art is not that art is shallow – it’s important to raise awareness. But if raising awareness is the start, middle, and end of things it’s really just a mirage of progress, whilst nothing really changes at all.

  • Why HR Shouldn’t Own Inclusion

    multicolored pencils
    Credit: Pexels / NegativeSpace

    On the list of “things that come up a lot in Feminist Cabal meetings”, pretty high is a complaint that HR have taken ownership of “inclusion” and are being ineffective.

    This is not surprising when you think about it. Regardless of discussion about “employee happiness” etc, the main function of HR is to ensure that the company doesn’t get sued. Whilst in theory inclusion should reduce the risk of lawsuits, in practise it’s unclear as to whether that is the case, and definitely that is a longer-term outcome rather than a short-term one.

    Three reasons why HR have tended to be ineffective at Inclusion: Trust, Data, and Accountability.

    Trust

    A genuine inclusion effort defines new parameters, but HR are often distrusted for failing to enforce the theoretical parameters of the old system. Almost every woman I know has a story about harassment at work, and spoiler, the ending is never “but HR handled it really well and I still work there”. Alternative endings include:

    • “It was OK in the end because it pushed me to look for something better. That guy still works there though.”
    • “They finally fired him after he harassed multiple other people, but process was exhausting and cost me a lot of political capital.”

    There is no viable strategy for inclusion that doesn’t include the willingness to fire people over it. Inclusion is the potential to include everyone, not the inclusion of everyone. That means that people must be included on the basis of things they can’t change (gender, orientation, race, etc…) but it’s perfectly reasonable, necessary, to exclude people on the basis of things they could change, but have chosen not to (bigotry).

    Far too often people hear “well we want to include everyone, which means including that guy who is choosing to harass you” and the outcome of this is that the victim of harassment quits instead, and the harasser keeps working there.

    This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be given feedback and the opportunity to improve. But it’s up to them to take it, and there need to be consequences if they don’t.

    How does this relate to trust? Well, this is the system we have had for a long time, and HR have been the enforcers of it. It is hard for people to have any faith that the same documentation, and the same people, will now have a new ethos.

    And if the priority is not getting sued… the strategy has generally been gas-lighting victims into submission, and anecdotally at least, it seems like that has been pretty effective. So when it comes down to it, what will win out? Not getting sued? Or Inclusion?

    Data

    HR often doesn’t want to release data, and there are good reasons why – personal information, and especially for smaller companies, statistical significance. But everyone knows the Dave : woman/latinx/black ratio, and just because the numbers aren’t out there doesn’t mean that people don’t have a very good idea of what’s going on. It just seems like HR are needlessly hiding something that everybody knows.

    The same for data around recruitment and attrition. 1 women leaving when there are 10 might statistically be there same as 10 men leaving when there are 100, but is liable to feel very different to the 9 women who remain.

    Accountability

    Finally, if HR own inclusion, who are they accountable to? Are they evaluated on whether employees trust them to speak to? Or whether ERG (Employee Resource Group) leaders think that they are effective? What’s the lead time on feedback? Is it filtered through employee surveys… run by HR?

    Product and Engineering leadership tend to be separate for a good reason. One asks “what could we do” the other answers “this is what’s feasible”. There’s a natural tension there, that it’s hard for one person to hold together. They risk being not ambitious enough, or too ambitious and defining something that can’t be executed on. The questions “how do we include everyone and address historic structural inequity” is a hard one for someone whose focus has been “how do we not get sued” to answer. It’s hard to hold people accountable for these two things together – since success on one may come at the expense of the other, incentives are unclear.

    If Not HR, then Who?

    Clearly D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) is HR related and even if not within HR needs to work with HR – and HR needs to work with D&I (seriously: I’ve heard multiple stories of HR people bullying D&I counterparts). Even if D&I strategy is not defined by HR, HR will need to execute on parts of that strategy. The title of this post is provocative, intended to invite you to reconsider the role of D&I and define it in a way that will be effective.

    Some questions to consider:

    • Who owns D&I?
    • Do they have credibility?
    • Are they trusted?
    • How are they evaluated?
    • How are they held accountable?

    And finally, is the risk of lawsuits overstated?  For women at least (and I expect other under-indexed people), a lawsuit is seen as likely to end your career. Given the state of things, it’s hard to imagine an under-indexed person suing a company where they are appreciated and happy, that is actively working to address historical inequity, unthinkingly perpetuated. Entitled white men seem to be much more litigious. If fear of lawsuits is king, inclusion will never move forward.

  • The Trouble With Women’s Events

    The Trouble With Women’s Events

    GHC 2014 badge, "Google" is modified to say "Xoogler" instead.
    I improved it.

    There’s a theme emerging in my backchannel lately, as my girlfriends and I discuss why we aren’t doing certain events. And often, these are events for women.

    We used to retreat to these events because we weren’t welcome – or safe – anywhere else. But now, we see lots of technical events working really hard to get 30-50% women speakers in an industry of only ~20% women. To do that they offer things like strong codes of conduct, covering speaker travel costs, both things that women-focused events have been slow to adopt. GHC, for example, didn’t have a code of conduct until 2014 and still doesn’t cover speaker travel – or even give speakers a complementary ticket.

    The other thing we see is that these events focus heavily on the pipeline, with corporate sponsorship from $bigCompany’s, who are hoping to use it to boost their diversity numbers. Often the sponsorship comes with a sponsor speaking slot, which results in an overrepresentation of “Career at $BigCo” perspective, unless organisers are careful to balance it.

    Meanwhile, the same companies who make a huge show of commitment to women’s events, run their own events without proper Codes of Conduct, demonstrating that their “commitment” to “diversity” has the depth of a puddle. They hide behind their donations when called out on things like lack of diversity on their board. And they support women who work there being visible in the context of women’s events – not at technical events. A surprising number of big companies support women who work there speaking at women’s events (recruiting! pipeline!), but not at technical conferences. I would know. I used to work at one.

    I think we’re supposed to want to do these events, make exceptions because it’s “for the collective” but whilst I think some women still go with this obligation, more and more of us are saying no. And I think that can get framed as selfishness – but I see it as prioritisation.

    I left, but I came back, and now I show up every day. That, itself, is an act of activism.

    As a manager, I work to try and hire women, and to create a good environment for those I work with. This is an act of activism.

    Every time I get on stage as a technical woman, this is an act of activism.

    Every other thing I do that helps other women – Technically Speaking, writing, all the stuff I do quietly, the mentoring, listening to women’s stories… these are acts of activism.

    I want to see events for women succeed, but I don’t feel obligated to do any more than I do already. So they have to meet my objective criteria for any event that I speak at… and they haven’t been.

    The little-discussed reason for some of these issues is because these events operate as fundraisers to support other programming put on by these organisations. Whilst I don’t think there’s any excuse for not adopting a standard code of conduct, this makes strategies that cost money harder to justify. I want these organisations to be successful – even if I am unlikely to personally donate time and money to them in this context as I believe my focus is better elsewhere. Is the option to accept that conferences are no longer the best fundraising opportunity? Or to be more transparent about the fundraising nature and all that it entails – including sharing more about what the money raised goes to cover?

    Aside from the financials, the other aspect which – oh, the irony – women’s events often fail at is inclusivity. In the same way that some of the most horrifying things I heard in a corporate setting came from HR, some of the most oblivious comments I’ve experienced at events came from other women… at women’s events. Most recently I asked a question and in doing so alluded to the fact that I don’t want children. Another woman confidently stated to the room that I would change my mind. I was furious.

    Is it because by focusing on what binds us together we forget our differences, or assume they are negligible? Is it the toxic line of thinking that goes “I was oppressed therefore I cannot oppress”, which is far too pervasive? Is it because we end up being sold something approaching One True Way to be a woman in tech, when the truth is there are as many ways as there are women.

    Regardless of why, there’s a failure of empathy that excludes. How I, a cis-het-white-woman felt when it was suggested that I don’t know my own mind when it comes to kids, is nothing to the ways that women of colour, trans women, lesbians, have felt excluded.

    It’s great to celebrate and spend time on the things we have in common, but if we take too narrow a view, we start to erase the differences, which means we start to erase people who we had the best intentions to include. The thing is, intentions don’t go very far. Actions are what matters.

    I do not offer any answers here, just some explanation. The landscape has changed, people are expecting more. The conversations my girlfriends and I are having? Those are the outcome.

  • Maybe… You Should Apologise

    Maybe… You Should Apologise

    I ran a poll on Twitter this week looking for answers to a question I was curious about.

    Tweet reads: Men in tech I'm curious - if/when you accepted that you work in a misogynistic industry and unwittingly perpetuated the status quo did you ever feel compelled to apologise to anyone? (Poll, long form responses also welcome) 57% Yes, it went well 10% Yes, it went badly 11% No, afraid 22% No, no reason to

    I find the results interesting. On the one hand it encourages me how many people have apologised and it went well. On the other, the number of people who say “no reason to” makes me despondent. The question was designed to filter out men who are unaware, and I think some people used that to mean “would be self indulgent to apologise to someone who doesn’t want to speak to me”, and of course Twitter polls are not an exact science.

    I started to think about this question because of two recent conversations.

    The first one. Someone was telling me about how he’s worked in $Dude1’s organization, and $Dude1 was great on diversity so he felt confident it was a good environment. And like, my information on $Dude1 is ~1 year out of date but includes 1) massively inappropriate behaviour (not sexual, but horrifying) to a woman I know, 2) multiple accounts of harassment in his org, and 3) a known broken stair.

    Now it’s possible that in the time that passed $Dude1 has addressed his own behaviour, fired the missing stair, and developed better strategies for harassment and now runs a healthier organization. But I don’t think that people who suffered in the process are obliged to forgive him, or give him the benefit of the doubt.

    The second one. Someone asked me for backchannel on $Dude2. I generally like $Dude2, and am reasonably positive about him, however I feel like he learned some lessons at the expense of me and another woman, and that always tempers my comments on him.

    I’m at peace with it and that allows me to be friendly with him, but the fact that we’ve not had an open conversation about it makes it hard for me to be confident he’d do better today than he did then.

    When and How

    To be clear, I’m not advocating that men apologise to people who clearly want nothing to do with them. That’s self indulgent.

    I’m not suggesting general “I realise I am part of the problem” apologies unless you can answer “how, specifically?”

    But if there’s someone who you still have a relationship with, an apology about a concrete thing that you would do differently now… that seems like something that has the potential to be a good thing.

    Macro Problems

    One thing (of many) I find very jarring about the discourse on “diversity”, is how it’s framed as “things used to be AWESOME, but now they are AWESOMER”. As someone who was harassed, who has many friends who were mistreated in a variety of ways (including N > 1 stories of sexual assault), who has heard horrifying stories about basically every major tech company…

    … the only way I have to describe it is that it’s like being socially gas lit.

    If there are <20% women and ~2-3% PoC there’s a reason for that. And if companies have finally learned, if things are finally better – I’m skeptical of this, but setting that aside – people were financially, emotionally, even physically harmed in the process of learning those lessons and addressing that environment.

    IANAL but I understand companies can’t admit this because legal liability. Which perhaps makes it all the more important that individuals do.

    Thanks Rachael for reviewing a draft and providing helpful comments.

  • Diversity is an Attention Economy and the Economics Suck

    Diversity is an Attention Economy and the Economics Suck

    be the change
    Credit: Wikimedia

    A while ago there was an article about how women got more RTs when they talk about diversity than when they talk about anything else.

    This wasn’t that surprising to women, I don’t think, although it may have been news to some people. Well before this was news, I had been trying to balance what I put out there, and how much is about women (I limit myself to ~1/6 posts), but I can only control the output, not the response. To be honest I think that by volume (this is still ~2 a month) even if not percentage, I put enough out there that is overtly feminist means I am more known for that than anything else. 

    I think about this anytime I see yet another list of women. Why do we have to have lists of women? Because women (often) don’t get included on lists of people. And because it’s share bait. Men hit RT thinking they are improving the visibility of women, and they are, but usually the visibility of women as women and not so much for the awesome stuff they do.

    I think about this when I see a bunch of press about how diverse a founding team is, whilst they struggle to meet their crowdfunding goal.

    I think about this every time I see a product aimed at improving inclusivity, because the truth is that if women and minorities are only feted for and more importantly – paid – for being women and minorities, nothing changes. The market for inclusivity is measured in $M, not $B, and it’s heavily service oriented.

    A few weeks ago I locked down social media because I had refused to back down on wanting a code of conduct, and apparently angry feminists asking for things is something that some people think people should be warned about. It was shitty. It felt really shitty. I wrote about it, and a lot of people shared it. And great, sharing is good. In it though, I included a list of things people could do to help.

    Invite me to speak: I got a couple of invites, this was nice.

    Buy a product from a diverse founding team: This got at least one bitter complaint, I have no idea how many people did.

    Sponsor the newsletter I co-curate: one person (thank you!) reached out to sponsor personally. But no companies  have bought sponsorship slots since then.

    Apparently the end of the year can be slow for this kind of thing, but ever since that whole thing happened, I have worried that I unintentionally sacrificed the sustainability of a side project to a moral stance.

    That’s not a good feeling. I feel an obligation to use my visibility to push for things that others feel they can’t. Did I overestimate my privilege here? My collaborator and I will personally be fine, but do our subscribers eventually lose out on a thing that we know has made a big difference to a number of people? Will this end and we’ll trace it back to this moment, and say, well we had a sustainable thing but then Cate had an opinion and everyone tweeted but there was somehow no more money ever again. Will some time pass and things pick up and we’ll just make a bit less, and it’s not clear how much less. I don’t know. I hope not. But it’s definitely a possibility.

    One thing I explicitly did not include is donate. I hate the cycle of fuck-up-donate-nothing changes. Of course people asked for places to donate to anyway.

    This is why we talk about #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, and by the way, give your money to PoC as well. Give your money to trans/NB people. Give it to LGB people. Exchange your money for products built by people who aren’t cishet white men with regularity and with enthusiasm. One argument I have heard against this, is that you shouldn’t buy something that you don’t really want just because of who the founders are. But actually, this is the entire purpose of the Old Boys Club. And if we who are not welcome in the Old Boys Club do not do this for each other – who will?

    I have spent a lot of time thinking about what male allies do, and I have come to the conclusion that they don’t need to do everything. Some speak up about inclusivity, which is great, we need that.

    But actually I want to see:

    • Paying diverse people for products / services.
    • Hiring and promoting diverse people.
    • Investment in diverse founding teams.
    • Doing the work to create inclusive environments, calling out problematic behaviour (if done in a timely manner, this need not be a major event).

    Nothing changes unless the balance of money and the balance of power changes. Talking and sharing doesn’t change the economics. So next time you’re about to share a list of women and feel like you’ve done your work on inclusivity for the day/week/month/year, move your mouse away from the “RT” button and click on the “BUY NOW” button instead.

    Things I work on:

  • The Sixth Time

    The Sixth Time

    Grace Hopper badge reads "Cate Huston Google", modified to read "Xoogler"
    My badge from last year – I improved it

    I’m heading to Houston, Texas this week to go to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. It’ll be my sixth time attending, and over the years I’ve gone in various guises. As a grad student, a Google employee, in disguise (I de-branded myself and refused to do any recruiting activities), as an independent. This year I’ll be there as a blogger.

    The first time I went, tight connection times had me running through Toronto Airport with no shoes on. Stopped by U.S. border control, I found myself explaining that there was a conference for technical women, because there are so few of us. He said to me, “What do you care? You’ve got a job, you’re OK! Why do you care about other people?”

    Luckily he had stamped my passport by then so I didn’t need to come up with a good answer. I made it to my plane, put my shoes back on, and went and had a great time. Met lots of amazing people, accidentally interviewed for a job in California. The usual. One year I danced with my friend Sri and Maria Klawe. I met engineers from Australia who became my friends when I moved there. My friend Sabrina was on Women of Silicon Valley recently, so now more people know how awesome she is. But I knew already, because we met at GHC. I met Anne-Marie (amongst other things, founder of Stemettes) as I was giving out tshirts at the party. When I moved to London we got to hang out, properly, and I became a “Godmother Stemette”.

    Last year was disappointing because men were front and centre. For four years I’d gotten my dose of women-inspiration there. I’m not sold on Lean In as a philosphy, but seeing Sheryl Sandberg give that talk live… that was pretty awesome. Nora Denzel was probably one of my favourites though. She gave a piece of advice about not expressing all your doubts when you get good feedback that I try to keep in mind, still.

    But instead there was a Q&A with Satya Nadella, and a male allies plenary panel. I was more worried by, and disappointed in the panel. My friend Leigh made a bingo card, and we sat next to each other – her running that Twitter and me live-tweeting on my own account. Satya Nadella made the headlines, in part because his mistake was much more tweetable; Maria Klawe shutting him down though – that was a highlight of the conference in my opinion (I actually did a press interview where someone asked if the women there were angry and I was like “not really because Maria Klawe disagreed on the spot and gave some great advice and that was awesome” – that quote never got printed…)

    This year my friend Hilary is keynoting and I know it’s going to be awesome! One of the men from the panel is back to give a plenary, and well that seems weird. There were some issues with registration forms and trans people. And some women have been coming out to say they won’t be there, and why. Randi wrote about not speaking for free – and I don’t speak if my travel and accommodation costs aren’t covered either, I also think this is an inclusion issue. Academic conferences run on a different model, pay to play, which I kinda get but… well I just choose not to play.

    Most importantly, Erica wrote about “Colorless Diversity”, about not feeling included as a black woman because where are all the black women?

    I understand starting with women, we are fully 50% of the population, but if you end there you’re doing it wrong. Since reading Whistling Vivaldi (Amazon), I have also tried to push that rock up that hill at times, make this event open, include this other group, use the women-only event as a test, not the end goal. I’ve watched things that I started get less inclusive because I left and the people who took over had different motivations. We ran one event on interview prep that I wanted to open up to PoC, and low-income, and instead… it became women from one specific university. At that point… what are we even doing? It’s not “inclusion” it’s “diversity” and what they actually mean by “diversity” is “recruiting”.

    This is the kind of thing that drove me to quit corporate feminism.

    I’ve been getting pickier and pickier about women-based communities that I’m part of. Because I don’t want us to just recreate the same broken power structures. Because I don’t want to see racist language. Because trans or cis, my girlfriends are my girlfriends. Because if other women want to slam other women for not being nice enough to the patriarchy I don’t need to see it.

    But privilege is saying “I see the problems here but I’m going anyway”, because whilst I’ve trained myself to notice I don’t feel it.

    As the border guard said, “what do you care? You’re OK!”

    I care because some of my friends don’t feel welcome at this event where they should be welcome. I’m sad that we won’t get to hang out.

    I care because I don’t believe 50:50 is the goal. If we get to 50% and it’s mostly white women, we’ve just exchanged one kind of brokenness for a different kind of brokenness.

    Inclusion is work, and a women’s community is not automatically inclusive. All this work to include men… what if we worked even half as hard to include trans-women and women of color?