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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I ran a poll on Twitter this week looking for answers to a question I was curious about. 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 […]
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’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 was annoyed recently, because a conglomerate organising a conference pinged us (and every other group that might yield “diverse” speakers) to promote their CfP… three days before closing. I sent them a series of comments on how leaving it to the last minute like that wasn’t helpful. As Chiu-Ki put it “we’re not a magic […]