Why Inclusion and Diversity Matters & What Your Company Can Do
Going into Grace Hopper, I knew I would have the opportunity to listen and converse with amazing technologists. Through those conversations, I learned something I wasn’t totally expecting, which were some explicit negative consequences in engineering brought about by a lack of diversity and inclusion.
1. You can’t see a problem because you aren’t the user
As a male, you don’t walk down the ToysRUs aisle for girls with the blinding pink shades of everything and skinny big-boobed “Bratz” in high heels and fish nets. Or if you do, since those aren’t the toys you have to play with, you may not be able to see the problem: the lack of toys for building and creating and the abundance of sexual icons and beautification products. Debbie Sterling experienced this problem as a girl who loved to build things and who eventually became a mechanical engineer. She built a solution called GoldieBlox which is a company for building and telling stories through toys. In her humorous and awe-inspiring keynote, she spoke of all the people (salesmen at trade shows, Y-Combinator, her friend who had originally come up with the idea) who didn’t see the larger point and never thought it would sell. Her point by the end was not blaming people for their ignorance, but rather, pointing out that it’s impossible to make someone believe in a beautiful solution if they don’t see a problem.
In another powerful talk, Michael Curtis, VP of Engineering at Airbnb, recounted the problems in the last couple years of African Americans being disproportionately rejected when booking Airbnbs. He point blank said that if there had existed more diversity within the company, they could’ve caught the issues sooner.
2. Biased humans create biased robots
Human values shape robot values. When you choose a feature set for a program, a human is making a choice about what is and what isn’t important and thus it shouldn’t be surprising that our values will affect what robots’ values are. In a project using articles from Google News to categorize words, the word “programmer” was associated with “male” and “homemaker” with “female”. This was re-enforced by a powerful talk by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who pointed out that we know AI will shape the world, how that’s a given, and how that’s our future, but that the real question is who will shape AI.
On an interesting side note, if you’d like to see just how much we trust robots and thus just how important it is we have a diverse set of people working on them, I recommend watching this scary/hilarious video.
3. More people is better!
Lastly, when you don’t see anyone around you who looks or sounds like you, it’s hard to feel like you fit in. We are just at the beginning of seeing the powers of computer science and we need the ENTIRE population working on the problems. Having more diversity and inclusion means creating a more comfortable environment for more people and thus increasing the chances they will stay in engineering and thus increasing the number of minds we have working on problems and thus increasing our chances of solving problems like the Millennium Problems and world hunger and who knows what else.
So, what is the next step? How do we create a diverse environment and make everyone feel included?
In 2016, AnitaB.org’s Top Companies for Women Technologists noted three program areas that were part of the companies that had the highest representation of women as technologists. And they were:
FLEX TIME, including remote working, flexible schedule, and flexible hours
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT for women technologists, especially at the mid career and executive career levels
GENDER DIVERSITY TRAINING, addressing the value of gender diversity and barriers to building inclusive teams
[Interestingly, none of these programs are about women wanting higher salaries or more equity.]
We’re stronger together.