Note: This post is an installment in the STRIPES series. For more background on what STRIPES is, check out the July 15, 2020 post.
Tech careers are for everyone.
Great banners however, are for the moneyed elite.
To start, I want I acknowledge that I have benefitted from my white male privilege. I have not made billions on Wall Street, but I also have never had anyone question my legitimacy for any role that I’ve been up for. I wasn’t discouraged from pursuing a STEM career as a kid because science was cool for boys. No one raised an eyebrow at me when I decided to go to college because I didn’t look like the other college kids. And I certainly was never disqualified from a role because I didn’t look the part.
And that’s a problem.
I need to just be honest here and say that writing a post on inclusion is terribly daunting for a middle-aged white guy in middle management. How can I be authentic about something that has legitimately never impacted me? I grew up in rural New Hampshire and when the first Black family moved into our town, we had an all-school assembly to talk about it and warn us that we couldn’t pick on the new kids – effectively guaranteeing that they would be ridiculed. That’s the kind of background I’m from. So how can I write a post on inclusion?
Well, I’m going to try, and here’s what I can tell you from my experience: IT has an inclusion problem. You and I may be included, but I can certainly tell you that when I go to a conference – it’s pretty clear that it’s dominated by white men. Case in point – the last conference I was at had taped signs over some women’s rooms turning them into men’s rooms. Because, you know, there aren’t that many women here so they can walk a little further… right?
The last time I went to hire for a position, I actively searched to find someone from an underrepresented group – and got exactly zero candidates that were even remotely qualified for the role to apply. Not one – and I insisted that we advertise the position only in job boards focused on underrepresented populations. That’s terrible. It shouldn’t be this way; STEM and IT careers should be accessible and open to all.
Historically, we’ve done a terrible job at including women, Black and Latinx, and other people who don’t look like Steve Jobs in technology. We can – and need to - do better. Those of us already in the field can be part of the solution. I think there are three very simple ways we can help, based only on some things that have helped me along the way – especially if we’re in a leadership position in our organization. You’ll note that I focus on working with those very early in their career or even earlier, as I think it’s essential to make sure teens who might not otherwise be encouraged to go into a STEM career see it as a viable option for them.
First, we can start opening up more internships that require no experience and be very intentional about recruiting students who break the tech mold. It needs to be abundantly clear that a career in technology is open to everyone. One of the things that I love most about working in IT is that some of the very best technologists I know didn’t come up through a classical STEM education. Many have degrees in areas like criminal justice, psychology, or don’t have a degree at all – and are still adding immense value to their companies and killing it. Let’s capitalize on the ability to enter the field and make the onramp to an IT career more inviting to all.
This picture is courtesy of Women of Color in Tech Chat. They discontinued the program in 2016 but still have a ton of stock photos up. Using their pictures is a simple and profound way to include the most poorly represented group in tech.
We need to make sure that we recruit young people of all backgrounds and show them that they can be successful in IT. I had an internship when I was in high school that quite literally changed the trajectory of my life. My first “real” boss at that job, Jeff, is legitimately one of the best people I’ve ever met. Jeff actively worked with local high school guidance offices to find students who had potential but possibly were at some risk, and he offered them a job in IT at whatever level they were at and gave them on-the-job training.
You can do the same thing Jeff did. You can convince your boss to let you hire a teenager; they work for almost nothing, and many are thrilled just to walk into a server room. Trust me, dollar-for-dollar the work you get out of an intern is priceless: imagine never needing to update documentation again unless you want to! You can give a young Black woman who no one has encouraged to go into technology the opportunity to see the benefits of an IT career. And when she graduates, you can do it again and again.
The second thing we need to do more often as IT practitioners is to do a better job telling young people who don’t have an engineer in their family and have never considered technology as an opportunity open to them how they can be a part of this. This can be as simple as volunteering to talk a bit about your job in a technical or vocational high school to kids who love to hear from people actively in a career field. Or, it can be as big as volunteering in a FIRST robotics team in an underserved community near you. (Side note – FIRST is an awesome organization that you totally should know about and support if you can.) The point here is that you need to make sure that you’re actively talking to young people from every background to get them excited about a career in IT.
This seems really simple, but we have had a pipeline problem that persists today. Working in higher education, I can walk the halls of the engineering or computer science buildings and it’s still not an accurate representation of the country we live in. It’s certainly getting better than it was when I first showed up on campus in 1999, but women still aren’t accounting for 50% of the students and Black and Latinx students aren’t nearly well-represented enough. The only way to improve the pipeline is to get more students in high school and younger to be excited about technology as a career. Ultimately, we need to make sure that they know that choosing an IT career is an option that is open to them – and anyone else.
I told you, I’m not great with kids.
I know I’ve been focusing a lot on teenagers, and you may be rightly thinking that the problem begins before high school. If you’re asking why can’t we get younger kids interested in science and technology, you’re absolutely right that we can! Here’s where I admit that I’m not great with middle school and younger kids and don’t have any great ideas on how to engage with that demographic – but you might be! Tell me in the comments below: how do we engage these kids to make tech an option before they even get to high school?
You may also be thinking that unequal access to the Internet and technology itself is a barrier and a concern. You might cite some of the many studies done that show that Internet access is disproportionally skewed towards affluent, white citizens – and you’d be correct. Internet access needs to be ubiquitous and regulated like a utility. In 2020, it’s unconscionable that we’d consider it to not be essential – especially when we’re currently relying on it as the medium to educate our kids through. This is a major failing of our society and we need to do better.
Finally, we need to make sure that we’re truly being inclusive with people in our offices when they don’t look like me or have a different background than the geek archetype. All too often I see cliques forming in offices that are exclusionary – possibly by design. It’s up to you to tear down those walls. Your company’s HR office can set all the policies and release all the memos in the world – but if you aren’t welcoming to everyone in the company – you’re to blame. Yes, I’m advocating that you take the extra time to make someone feel welcome and go out of your way to show someone new the ropes. Don’t give me a bunch of crap about how you had to “earn your respect” in the office, either. You very well may have, but you also may have been accepted more easily because you “fit in.” Remember that everyone is part of the team and has something to offer.
Like I said at the beginning, I have benefitted from my white male privilege. I didn’t want to admit that for a long time, but I see it more clearly now. And I’m committed to doing my part to make sure that not only future generations have an equal playing field – but that this generation right now does as well. This is on all of us and I hope we can be better at being the solution.
Okay, on to you:
Do you believe that IT has a gender and racial inclusivity problem?
How can you advocate for a young person to get into IT who might not be considering it because they don’t think they’d fit in?
What’s something you can do today – right now, even – to make someone feel comfortable and wanted that you may not have done before?
