Inclusion Includes You
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Hello, welcome. I'm gonna be talking a bit about inclusion and how it includes everyone. So first, I'm Ali Spivak, I work at Mozilla. I work in our developer relations, which is also called Developer Outreach.
00:21
You can mostly find me on Twitter if you're looking to contact me, my DMs are open. So has anybody here ever felt like an outsider? Yeah, me? Hey, did joining open source or learning to code or finding a developer community change that for you?
00:43
Okay, it did for me, somewhat, maybe, kind of. There is a lot of mythology that somehow magically, by joining in communities, we're all included and welcome. But that's not actually the case for everyone all the time.
01:02
A lot of time, it's hard, it's hard to be accepted, it's hard to belong, it's hard to find your people or your community and the place where you fit in. And for some people, it's easier, and for some people, it's harder. And especially if you're not a member of a majority
01:21
in any community, whether it's in tech, whether it's social, whether it's anything else, it's harder and harder if you're not part of the norm or part of the in group to join and be accepted and included. And if you find communities like that, so for example, if you're joining an open source project
01:41
and you don't feel like you belong, how long are you going to stay there? How much time are you willing to put into it? It's sometimes for many people even more hostile in tech than it is in normal society. I was really, really lucky.
02:01
My first job in tech was at a funny little educational software company called Computer Curriculum Corporation, doing quality assurance on their educational software. I was 19. I was also an awkward, introverted, pink haired goth kid who'd grown up in Silicon Valley
02:22
with my dad who worked at Atari. So I played a lot of video games and I wrote a lot of basic. But CCC was really unique at the time and even today. The CEO of the company was African American. The head of my department was a woman, my boss was a woman, and the department was incredibly diverse.
02:43
We had people from, who were Vietnamese, Salvadorian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, Russian, Indian, African American, gay and trans, young, old, almost half or more than half were women. So this was an extremely unusual experience
03:04
and I didn't realize it at the time. And it's not the norm then and it's certainly not the norm now. And how not the norm? Well, we have some data. So this is talking specifically around gender.
03:22
But basically women make up roughly half of the population. If you're just looking broadly in numbers. Yet at best, about 40% of company employees and some of the largest tech and at worst down in the 20s and some even worse. Now, this is actually broad numbers
03:42
of people who work at these companies. This isn't saying these are the percentage of women in engineering roles and that is even worse. In the US, the numbers for gender are similar and the numbers for ethnicity, which is how we track things in the United States,
04:01
are even more grim. Only 1% of Facebook's engineers and coders are black and 3% are Hispanic. That figure hasn't actually changed in four years even though they've put immense amount of effort into driving diversity in their hiring. At Google, only 20% of technical jobs are held by women.
04:24
And last year, last summer, only 49 of Twitter's almost 3,000 employees were black. This is especially striking because Twitter is actually highly adopted by the African American population of the United States.
04:42
So there's a whole bunch of people using this platform who aren't represented at all in the people who are building it. And if you think a bit on some of the issues that some of these platforms have had, if we had more diverse people having input in the way they're built, it might change the way that they interact with us
05:04
broadly across our societies. Apple has been working really, really hard to improve their diversity and I'm using them as an example, not that they're perfect but in the year between July in 2016 and July 2017,
05:22
about half of their new hires in the United States were from underrepresented populations. So that is looking at women, different ethnic groups, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Native American, black, Latino, et cetera. So they've really put a ton of effort into recruiting from places
05:41
that they traditionally had not recruited. So going to things like black colleges in the United States have technical program. They're actually training people with computer science degrees but that were not included in the standard outreach that they had been doing as far as looking for interns. Programs like Outreaching have been incredibly successful
06:02
in bringing different people in into internships to get a chance at a lot of companies that the doors were closed before. Now usually when you start talking about things like diversity, people tend to get a little uncomfortable. Because if you think about it,
06:20
if you're focusing on diversity and saying we're focusing efforts on hiring this group, there's an automatic assumption that somehow that group is being excluded. So if you were excluding some people before, now you must obviously be excluding others now. It's often called reverse discrimination or various other things like that.
06:42
And it might feel like that, especially if you're someone who's traditionally been in the majority. But realistically, there's an assumption made here that there is a scarcity of jobs in tech and there's only a small amount of people
07:00
available to fill them. The fact is there's actually a shortage of skilled technical workers worldwide. In 2016, there were 223,000 unfilled coding jobs just in the United States. In 2017, there were 10 times more coding jobs
07:21
than computer science graduates. And it's projected that by 2022, 30% of worldwide coding jobs will be left unfilled because of lack of workers with the skills to fill them. This is especially true if you start looking at areas like AI,
07:41
Internet of Things, blockchain, VR, like a lot of new technologies. Now this feels a little weird because I'm sure if people have job hunted, it can feel really hard to find jobs. But there's also, I think, a way to look at where are jobs located. Are they located near you?
08:01
Are they in Europe, United States? Are they in Asia? So broadly thinking about where these jobs are, but globally, there's enough room for everyone. And we also need to really think about how we talk about or think about what qualified means. If you look at some of the surveys
08:21
that Stack Overflow has done year over year, even though they're slightly problematic in a few areas, 68% of the people who were surveyed said they're at least partially self-taught. And less than half have computer science degrees of the people who identify themselves as being professional developers,
08:41
which means they're employed as a developer. Yet pretty much 100% of jobs advertising developer roles list having a CS degree as a requirement. Now, this affects a lot of different groups. Some groups, if you're more comfortable in your place
09:01
and being part of a majority, may just say, well, I have enough experience that it overrides that qualification. It turns out that people in underrepresented groups tend to take these lists of requirements pretty much as the truth and are less inclined to apply. It also just affects the fact that only 20% of CS graduates
09:23
at least in the United States are women. There's more in India, roughly about the same in Europe. So we don't have a lot of people who are emerging right now with CS degrees. And even if you're a woman who is in a computer science program getting a degree,
09:41
your experience with recruiting can be really, really miserable. Stanford, which is a college in the United States, did a study of college recruiting where they sent observers to recruitment sessions at top colleges. And the recruiting team that were sent by some of these top companies were overwhelmingly male.
10:02
They overwhelmingly talked in language that was very specifically male-gendered. They talked a lot about things like beer, which is a great thing, but also is a little bit alienating if that's not one of the things you're looking for in your career. And when they did send women, the women were almost entirely in support roles.
10:22
They were checking people in and directing them to the snack table. And when they did have female engineers, they pretty much would only get them up to talk about company culture and not about their engineering contributions. And this has a dampening effect on the willingness of women to participate.
10:43
The observers in these sessions watched women asked almost no questions, and a large percentage of them left partially through the session. In the reverse side, when they do, when male students have female professors or female recruiters, it has almost no negative impact
11:02
on their ability to want to participate in the career. So we're thinking about diversity broadly, because the talk's not necessarily on diversity, it's on inclusion, but you could have set the stage. Diversity is not just these broad categories.
11:20
Gender, race, ethnic background, et cetera, et cetera. It's all the things that make us who we are. That is things like being an introvert or an extrovert, speaking the native language of the company that you work at, your communication style, your age.
11:41
Inclusion is actually getting all that mix of things and people to work together. So everyone is included and belongs and respected and feels like they are part of the team or part of the company and respected for that. At my first job at CCC, I was really lucky
12:01
to be both in a company that was diverse, but also really, really inclusive. I worked there for six years. I felt incredibly appreciated. Everyone was really patient with my cranky little 19-year-old goth self. I was encouraged to grow. This is where I learned HTML on my own time
12:24
as I was working full-time and putting myself through university. And when I graduated, I was actually offered a job as a web developer at the company because they appreciated me and what I brought enough that they wanted me to stay.
12:41
And I realized that this was really not necessarily the norm. And I think a bit about inclusion. When I think about this time and sort of inclusion and understanding what that really meant, I think about potlucks. So a potluck in the United States is essentially a communal meal where people
13:03
participating each bring a dish. It's usually homemade. We had amazing potlucks at CCC. So people would bring in dishes, and because we had this immense variety of people from different national backgrounds, we would have immense amount of food. We learned to really understand
13:21
and respect each other's cultures based on food, which is probably one of the oldest traditions that humans have. I learned to love Vietnamese food at this job. One of my coworkers' moms took me home and taught me how to make proper Indian food. I rolled thousands and thousands of lumpia,
13:42
which are egg rolls in the Philippines. And all of these things brought me closer to the people that I worked with. And it formed a unit I felt accepted and I belonged, and I hope that I brought the same to them as well. That job sort of set the stage for me
14:00
where I discovered that the thing that I loved to do was web development. And that sort of kick-started my career, which actually led to me being here today on the stage talking to all of you. What I didn't realize at the time was that that was not going to be the experience I had everywhere.
14:21
As I worked at more and more companies, I realized how extraordinary that first experience I had and how lucky I was to have it. It turns out that was really just luck. I worked at a lot of other companies. And for a long time, I really thought that the price of admission to the career
14:41
and the work that I loved was being patronized to, being harassed, being talked down to, being talked over. That was my predominant experience. And this was at a lot of different companies, including some that were more diverse, including some where diversity was either a white guy or an Indian guy.
15:00
It was at different roles where I was in senior management or an individual contributor. It was my lived experience. Now, I'm not actually saying that everything was terrible because these were, in truth, more the exception than the norm. I worked with a lot of really fantastic, amazing, supportive people. The arc of my career has been incredibly positive.
15:22
And the company I work for now is fantastic. But I think sometimes, where would I be if I hadn't had to deal with these kind of experiences? And where would other people be if they didn't either? So if it wasn't so hard to be female, if it wasn't so hard to be black.
15:42
And also, where would people who are currently sort of in the majority be if they felt more comfortable with others as well? If you think about it, monoculture and agriculture isn't good, right? You're more susceptible to disease, you're more susceptible to all kinds of things.
16:03
So broadly thinking about more diversity is helpful. In fact, there's a lot of science that shows that diversity makes us smarter and more innovative. What happens when you're exposed to people who aren't like you is you tend to put more effort
16:22
into justifying your thinking because you don't make assumptions that the people around you all think the same way that you do. Now, it may make us smarter, but it also makes us more prone to conflict, which is why a lot of the best practices around inclusion are really important. So conflict management,
16:42
learning to have good communication skills, those things are really important in managing, making diversity turn into inclusion. Sometimes people sort of come at us and say, well, that's your problem, right? That's not my experience, that's other people's problems.
17:01
Or I'm not a jerk, I treat everybody great. You know, none of this is my problem, I'm not the problem. But I will say it actually is your problem. It goes well beyond things like gender, ethnicity, various other things, and I'm gonna talk about a really specific example
17:20
that's going to affect every single person in this room and that's ageism, right? And this is so incredibly prevalent in tech. There's a huge bias against people who are old. There's a thought that people who are old are out of touch, they can't learn new things, they're stupid. And here's a quick question.
17:41
When I say old, how old do you think someone is when they're old? Particularly if you're thinking tech. But like 70, 80, like really old grandparents, right? 50, 60? So in tech, old is 40.
18:05
Worldwide, the average age of a developer is 28. It's a little older, about 31 in the United States, it's roughly that in Europe, it's younger, excuse, younger in Asia Pacific. And this isn't just a problem
18:22
in western or northern countries. Age discrimination is massive in China. Three quarters of Chinese developers are under 30. It is illegal to discriminate based on age and most jobs actually limit applicants to be under 35.
18:41
And if you're thinking about starting your own company, do it now because there's a cut off date. For most investors, it's 32. And that comes from Y Combinator, who's one of the biggest startup funders in the valley, in Silicon Valley. In fact, just in the United States,
19:01
only restaurants and shoe stores have an average age younger than tech. And those are considered transitional jobs that you do while you're in university. These are the median age of some of the biggest tech companies. Facebook is 28, Google is 30,
19:21
Microsoft's really old at 33. And when you think about median age, you're basically saying about half the company, half the employees are under and half are over. But if you think about the arc of your career, most people get out of university, say roughly 22. So half of these companies' employees, more or less,
19:42
have eight years or less experience. And half have a span, if you say retirement is, say, 65, they're 35 years crammed into that upper half. That's a big skew. In fact, millennials, which are under 35, roughly,
20:02
are 50% more likely to be hired than their representation broadly in the population. And Gen X, which is 35 to 55, roughly, is 33% less likely to be hired. And if you're over 60, you're screwed. You have a one-third chance of getting hired.
20:24
26% of workers at tech companies are over 40. So here's a quick thought. If everyone in this room right now was 30 years old, and you're all, say, employed in tech, only one-quarter of you would still be working
20:40
in tech in 10 years. That's one-quarter. Oh, and your salary peaks somewhere between 40 and 43. So for those of you who got aged out before then, you actually miss on your peak earning potential. This is a little bit different for people in management. However, managers tend to roughly stick around
21:02
until they're around 47. This is happening. It's less old than any other industry, but older than individual contributors in tech. This is a quote in 2007 from Mark Zuckerberg.
21:22
You laugh, but he's the head of one of the biggest companies on Earth, employing a huge amount of people and actually driving the way that most people interact with technology across the world. Now, I wonder, he's 34 now. He's six years older than the median employees
21:40
of his company. Does he still feel that way? Is he still gonna feel that way in 10 years, or 15 or 20? And this is a prevalent thinking in tech. And everybody laughed, but it's really there. There's a thought that at some point you're just too old to understand new things. Even though there's tons of data
22:01
that show that older workers actually have higher performance ratings relative to people in the same job. And while it's illegal to discriminate based on age, there's all sorts of ways that companies use to phase out older workers. There's layoffs, there's stagnation where you don't get promoted. There's a whole host of other things being shifted to less important jobs.
22:22
And this is rampant across the entire industry. And more people report age discrimination in tech than gender and sexual orientation discrimination combined. There's been huge lawsuits against Google and a whole host of other companies
22:40
for age discrimination. Anybody nervous yet? So the challenge here really is what can we do? How do you make this better? Is there some way that we can make this change? And this is broadly around all of inclusion,
23:01
but very specifically around ageism, which seems to be the big elephant in the room that everybody doesn't really want to talk about. I think some of it is just the more attention that's being placed on diversity opens up us a chance to really think about all diversity and all inclusion.
23:25
Examine your own biases. I find myself sometimes falling into the trap of thinking like, especially when my mom calls me and says, can you come over and fix my printer? It's like, oh my God, you're old, you don't understand things.
23:40
But realistically, it's a familiarity more than necessarily the lack of ability to comprehend something. If you do something all the time, you gain a familiarity with it. If you're already working in tech, there's no reason. If you've had a career for 20 years in tech, you've obviously, nothing's that for 20 years, you've obviously readjusted multiple times
24:02
in the way you're thinking. And many of our biases are really unconscious, whether it's things around gender, around ethnicity, around age, they're driven by media, they're driven by our social norms. I find it fascinating that this concept that young people are smarter actually goes against cultural norms
24:21
pretty much everywhere in the world. We accept them in tech. And if you find yourself thinking that someone doesn't belong, ask yourself why. Why do you think that? Why is that your immediate reaction to them? A lot of time, it's driven by something like a stereotype or an assumption about them that may or may not be true.
24:46
And force positive thinking. This is an exercise I've been teaching myself to do that's incredibly effective. A lot of times when we're confronted by differences, we tend to react negatively. So forcing yourself to think positively
25:01
is one way to do this and talk about it. Take action, be more involved. If we do all of these things together, we can be the factors for change that means all of us can be included as long as we want to be.
25:22
Thank you.