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Tech Leadership

1.

Review our Strategy Diagnostic Toolkit.  To determine the specific types of programs and interventions that your company should work on and clarify your goals, you need to first reflect on your primary objective, your unique capabilities, and your timeline for impact. The more specific you can be about the type and magnitude of impact your company aspires to achieve, the easier it will be to achieve alignment on a strategic plan that supports gender and racial diversity.

2.

Work with the corporate grantmaking arm of your company to examine the impact of your CSR and philanthropic programs, using our Metrics Dashboard as a guide. Tracking your current investments and programs will greatly help your company’s (and the entire industry’s) ability to learn from and advance the approaches that are having the most impact.

3.

Seemingly small adjustments have a big impact. Consider distributing a survey across affinity groups and disaggregating the responses on the back end to see how leadership can best support Black, Latina, and Native American women and other marginalized groups.

4.

Advocate for gender and racially or ethnically disaggregated data at every stage of the pathways into tech and design unique interventions. For example, do you know how many Black Latina, and Native American women your company hires, as interns?  How many of them receive offers of full-time employment, and how many accept?  How does your company’s retention rate differ by race and gender? Treating women as a monolithic group leads to missing critical insights about the different experiences and challenges particular communities of women face.

5.

If your company is hiring, work with Talent Acquisition to insist on a diverse pool of candidates. Requiring diverse slates of candidates helps to reduce the implicit and unconscious biases that can come into play when interviewing individuals alone. It’s also an important signal to employees and interviewees that diversity is a core priority. Explicitly ask those who source talent to include at least one underrepresented woman of color in the slate of interviewees. To learn more about how companies can put this into practice, check out these articles:

  1. Working Mother: Diverse Interview Panels May Be a Key to Workplace Diversity
  2. Leading Women: Require Diverse Slates of Candidates to Minimize Gender Dynamics

Check out key reading on gender and racial equity in tech

There are many resources you can turn to, and this list is not exhaustive, but these are good primer materials for learning more about the space:

  1. Rebooting Representation Report 
  2. NCWIT Intersectionality in Tech 101
  3. Othering & Belonging Institute: Women & STEM: It’s Not Just a Numbers Problem
  4. AAC&U: If Not Now, When? The Promise of STEM Intersectionality in the Twenty-First Century
  5. Emerald Insight: Navigating STEM-worlds: Applying a lens of intersectionality to the career identity development of underrepresented female students of color

You can also learn more about this issue by reading about other advocacy organizations working to increase representation in tech, like: 

  1. Kapor Center
  2. blackcomputeHER
  3. American Indian Science & Engineering Society (AISES)
  4. Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI)   
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