Accidentally in Code

Tag: inclusion

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.
July 18, 2022
Inclusion is a Hack

Credit: Flickr / Marek Kubica

I wish more people understood that (in tech) inclusion – as we talk about it – is a hack. Firstly, “inclusion” is a shorthand for “inclusion of the historically under-represented”. The “historically under-represented” piece is the reason why we need the hack. What started with the deliberate exclusion of people of color and white women from a high paying field (see: Hidden Figures, and this extract from Brotopia for examples), has become – if we’re generous and believe people generally know better than that now – an unthinking perpetuation of an environment designed without diverse input.

Children used to be excluded from public life. To let them in, hacks were required – like adding changing tables. Initially these were just in the women’s bathrooms, because people couldn’t contemplate children without a woman to take care of them. If we designed a public space in a world where children are part of public life, and childcare is evenly distributed between people of all genders, things would look very different.

The thing is: it’s hard to contemplate that world, because we bring so much baggage from this one and all the ones that preceded it. So we keep trying. We keep hacking.

Perhaps because we keep missing the end of “inclusion of those historically under-represented” we fall into these holes of “inclusion is including everybody” which is the thinking that Lambda Conf started on which led them to make a case for… including Nazis. Now it’s the programming conference for White Extremists, with all the strong currents of misogyny that generally implies. Which brought them full circle and back to an environment that – guess what? – people of color and white women are not part of.

The truth that we don’t acknowledge is that inclusion is not just who you let in, but who you push out. When Google allowed Damore to circulate and refine his memo for months – including him – they allowed him to raise questions about women’s fitness and ability to do their jobs. I know at least one women who cited that memo in her decision to leave, and I doubt she was the only one. It’s important to mention here the coded racial language of the memo would not have fostered a good environment for people of color.

When we’re not specific about what we’re doing and why, it allows people to claim “not included” when what they truly mean is “I am uncomfortable with this hack that now makes this environment feel less designed by and for me“. It starts us down a path where we start equating everyone’s feelings and trying to decide by popular vote. If we have a team of 25% women, and we have a vote to ask if people feel included when the team is address as “hey guys”, we might call 75% a success and keep saying it. (This is to say nothing of making comparable the need to make a small adjustment to your language with being reminded that you weren’t expected to be here 10+ times a day.)

This is why allyship and intersectionality is so important. When white people speak up against structural effects of racism. When men speak up about the structural effects of sexism. Because the other truth we must acknowledge to ourselves is this: when we don’t speak up for others, we too perpetuate the structurally racist and misogynistic status quo.

February 13, 2018
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.

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.

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:

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.
September 28, 2017
On Language

Credit: Pixabay / Alexas_Fotos

I’ve encountered a lot of words that I would sooner not, working in tech. I have found the word whore in a design document, had colleagues who refer to women as “bitches”. I’ve been called – as most women have – abrasive, or more bluntly, a “c***”. I have been told, again and again, that I’m unqualified, asked, in ways too myriad to enumerate, if I am really technical, demanded to prove it again, and again.

I’ve endured lengthy explanations from men about how the singular they is grammatically incorrect, and how “guys” is in fact gender neutral like I give a fuck. Like I have any fucks left to give.

“Guys” is not gender neutral. It is not gender neutral because it is literally not gender neutral because in English grammar singular male made plural is plural male. But it is not gender neutral because when (most) men hear it they hear “you” and when (some) women hear it, they hear “not you”.

When I entered tech I fought to be included but to my shame, I am now prepared to accept an environment that is at least not actively diminishing. It would be nice to do better, but the reality is that few of us get to and never all the time. I would like to never be called a “c***” again. I could do without being called “abrasive” either. I doubt that people – men – will ever stop referring to a group I am a part of as a “guys”. I don’t write “a group including me” there, deliberately, because at that point I won’t be included. I will remember that word is almost accurate, and I will feel alone.

There are men who think that being considerate of their language, getting feedback on it, is too unreasonable, too unfair. Perhaps because they don’t know, haven’t experienced, the deep unfairness of low level exclusion, of impossible expectations, and being called words so offensive you can’t bring yourself to repeat them.

The language we use reflects the world we expect and experience. If telling ourselves “I feel excited” helps with anxiety and positive self talk boosts self esteem it makes sense that a foundational part of being an inclusive person, building an inclusive culture is using inclusive language.

I worked at a place where someone else did all the work around language. It was such a relief to watch an automated bot correct an occasional slip up, and refreshing and encouraging to see a male colleague educate a new contractor who triggered it repeatedly.

Then we got a new boss, and he kept saying “guys”. And he hired some “guys” who also kept saying “guys”. And I would look around the room, realise I was the only woman, and feel alone. Appreciate, really, for the first time, all the months where that hadn’t be my experience. The period when I was included, as opposed to not actively diminished. The language changed again, as they started to talk about women like women were inherently broken, discuss this idea of an application that would somehow “fix” women and our inability to communicate. It was laughable, when this is an industry where yes, all women know each other – and we talk about you. But also harmful, because when men talk about women like that in general, how are you possibly supposed to believe that they have professional respect for you in particular.

The idea went nowhere, and the company shut down. And now all that remains are the memories – of when someone else did that work, and I didn’t have to.

July 20, 2017
The Not-So-Secret Feminist Agenda

I put together this talk as part of Design+Exclusion. It’s about the ways in which women get told to be quiet, and some of the thought behind our approach to inclusivity with Technically Speaking.

Watch it here.

This was a challenging talk to put together because part of it involved looking up some of the things people have said to me online that have not been so nice and talking about them. But I think it’s important to highlight the ways in which we get silenced – because it’s easy to ignore, and to surface the hard and continuous work that goes into creating space for under-indexed folk to speak up – because it’s easy to overlook.

I hope you like it.

May 9, 2017
#NotAllMen Like Playboy
Credit: Pixabay / Counselling

So I hear that a conference gave away Playboy magazine as part of the event swag. The internet expressed their outrage, and there was an apology.

I haven’t read it.

I hear it wasn’t stupid, but… meh.

Here’s the thing. There are some classes of problem in conference inclusivity.
- Someone at our event behaved inappropriately. We dealt with it.
- Someone at our event behaved inappropriately. We didn’t deal with it.
- We failed to make $group welcome.
- We failed to remember that $group exist.
Playboy magazine – that’s the last one. That’s a “gift” that most (not all) straight dudes would not give their wives or girlfriends. Let alone someone else’s wife or girlfriend. (Some day, maybe, most – not all – men might stop seeing women only as chattel. They might recognise that not all men appreciate that kind of gift, either).

Maybe Playboy is an appropriate gift for a frat party. Or a stag weekend. I wouldn’t know. Maybe your gay friend will pretend he’s fine with it, and the strip club. Maybe you don’t have a gay friend.

Is your conference a thinly disguised frat party? Do you miss the frat house so much that you had to recreate it, but disguised as a professional (and tax deductible event)?

Did you think your target audience and the audience of men who like to objectify women were one and the same. I guess the internet woke you up.

Forgive me – but if that is news to you in 2016, I’m not really interested in reading your apology. Because I expect it’s about the incident, and really, what I want to know is how you made it to 2016, living in the world, and this could in fact be news. I want to understand how you managed to be so obtuse. Have you met any women? There are things that I would like to be able to ignore. Maybe I could learn something.

I saw something really cool the other day. I saw a woman, on stage, in front of well over a thousand people, talk about the huge open source release she led, and the awesome features it contained. It was amazing. She was one of many women on stage at that event. There were enough women attendees that there was a queue in the bathroom.

I think sometimes we have been fighting so hard for things like codes of conduct that we forget that such things are not the goal – they are just a means to an end. The code of conduct is not the goal. The “woke” apology is not the goal. The goal is diversity, on stage, and off, of people who are included and allowed to thrive.

So, I’m not reading that apology. I have better things to do with my time.
December 6, 2016
Diversity as Performance Art

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.

December 1, 2016
Why HR Shouldn’t Own Inclusion
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.
September 29, 2016
The Sixth Time

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?

October 11, 2015