Introducing Project Include
medium.com
medium.com
"If you’re an early stage startup with little to no diversity, you are in trouble and need to fix it fast."
"For everyone who has the vision and courage to push forward aggressively: What if your whole team spent 25 percent of their time on diversity and inclusion efforts?"
"Think about your biases — we all have them — and how they affect your actions and perspective. Then ask people to teach you even more, and pay them for their time to show that you believe diversity work is hard and valuable."
I agree completely there are issues with, say, gender makeup (10% in SV vs 50% female overall), but this is a pipeline issue and I don't see tech companies having a very big impact here. A better, more direct approach would be to spend time explicitly promoting tech to girls in the K-12 system.
One final point: I decided to create a throwaway to post this because I am confident that I would be pilloried by people in these organizations if I were to bring up these points with my real name attached. There is not a healthy climate of discussion around this topic right now.
When someone asks, "Why should we do that?" you respond with, "What, do you hate African children?"
Many of their specific questions are about whether a workplace is supportive of women and minorities. It's plausible that if many workplaces fail these tests, then tech would be a less appealing career choice to young people "up the pipeline" no matter how strongly it's promoted in school.
Small startups have a tough enough job already without also optimizing for employee diversity. Max Levchin talks about this as well: http://firstround.com/review/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-h....
One day we'll all be cockroaches: great at surviving with zero appreciation for culture.
THIS. So loudly this. Any kind of climate where asking the wrong question or expecting evidence for a claim automatically makes you a villain. And not a whimsical, comical fictional villain but, where people actively seek you out and try to get you fired for asking questions isn't something that people want to engage. There is too much risk and too little reward.
Speak out and you could lose your job, do the right thing and people will say "This is how it should have been the whole time". Even taking credit for a win in this area incorrectly will lead to villainy.
What I would love to see a case study company in tech that "spent 25% of their time on diversity and inclusion efforts" and did not just better than the baseline in tech but, made up for the opportunity cost.
In this case, society has converged on the opinion that diversity benefits so overwhelming, you don't have to explicitly list them each time but can treat diversity as if it were the end goal itself.
But here's a few:
- Basic fairness requires us to encourage diversity in order to create a more balanced distribution of power and money (considering the mere presence of women or minorities tends to depress wages across industries and jobs)
- Diverse teams are better, especially when creativity or social skills are required (there actually are some studies on this I believe)
- Discriminatory hiring practices make it impossible for some people to reach their full potential. When they labor in jobs below their potential, the society as a whole also loses out (remember that for every Einstein, Feynman, Picasso, there was an equally qualified woman who was married off when she was 15 and never had a chance).
...and so on. People react negatively if you challenge diversity because they suspect that you've probably heard the arguments before and have other motives than "opportunity costs" for your recalcitrance.
Not to mention that diversity shouldn't be the end goal, it should be getting the best people for the job. Given the fact that talent is essentially uniformly distributed, that should still result in diversity -- it just shouldn't be the parameter you're optimising for. You should always aim to employ people because they're good at what they do, not because you need to fulfil your diversity quota and it just so happens they're good at what they do.
But... as it often is, I don't see the interest for diversity to be consistent by those who claim to be in favor of it. Let me ask you one question:
The state is the biggest employer of people. They could have a hiring policy of a minimum 40% men and women per job (sorted by either title, assignment, union membership, or what else attribute one might like). Such policy would have a major effect on several professions with currently sits with a ratio of around 90% and higher.
As it stands, only a few professions ever address problems of diversity. Technology is one of those, and it's gender ratio is fairly average compared to the majority. only about 30% (2010 statistics from Sweden) of recognized professions have a balanced gender distribution of minimum 40% men and women. In the remaining 70%, the most extreme had 99.7% women to 0.3% men.
I feel like its really easy in these arguments to make a decision that the other person is just utterly disconnected with reality. On both sides.
In this case I think the author is realistic that practical constraints will make this hard.
The 25% comment is posed as a "What if".
I'd also bet $10 that the proudly South Asian Anil Dash would describe himself as such if asked.
And that's all we need to know about how ridiculous all of this is.
I'm not sure how we measure the end game here as it seems to be more about getting to a point where anyone that wants to work in tech has that opportunity. That likely won't lead to a perfect match between tech demographics and the demographics of their communities but who knows.
They seem to be purposefully ignoring the likelihood that parents drive this.
“If you’re an early stage startup with little to no diversity, you are in trouble and need to fix it fast.” (http://projectinclude.org/moving_forward/)
Whoa. This group has some bold positions.
I think it's great for women to encourage each other and other underrepresented groups to join tech. I also think it is true that some youth get inspired to study tech when they see successful professional people with whom they share something in common. And, I believe that some level of diversity is a useful part of education and the advancement of society.
That said, I wonder what is reasonable to expect of companies that are separate from government. Should the percentage of LGBT for a given job match that of the local community who is skilled in that job? What if certain companies are popular among LGBTs? Should their competitors be chastised for not being able to hire enough LGBT from the local community? It all sounds too complicated to monitor in bulk. Cases of discrimination are just that -- case by case. US law already protects people from being discriminated against during hiring and employment. And while it may not work out to everyone's satisfaction 100% of the time, the US is miles ahead of China, for example, on this front.
> Companies should improve opportunities for all employees, including all underrepresented groups (gender, race, class, age, religion, disability, education, sexual orientation, and others).
I'm confused by this statement. They want companies to give equal opportunities to all people. Isn't this already covered by law? Companies cannot discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin [2].
Also, what is the education group? Like, non-high school grads, high school and college grads?
The more I read about it, the more it sounds like they are saying "please create more jobs for more people".
Maybe it will become more clear when they start to share data and reports.
Ultimately, we're all part of some group that is persecuted by others, even wealthy white folks. We all get depressed and blame it on our environment from time to time.
The most important thing is that these values of equality are ingrained in the laws of society. And in the US, they are. Each year they get better. Gay marriage was passed, and we're now attempting to make some simplifications to the ginormous lawbook with things such as Basic Income. That's natural. It's a result of us collectively realizing that piece by piece we put together a puzzle that says "support everyone".
Of course it would be nice if companies focused on diversity, and I think large companies should definitely think more about it, but telling small startups to do it is wrong at best and exploitative at worst (personal agenda).
I would like to know of any successful company that focused 25% of their time thinking about diversity during their early startup stage. Thinking about diversity 25% of the times means you're thinking less about your customers 25% of the time. This type of company will probably not be around the next year--Congrats, your diverse company is now gone! I'm sure your employees are all happy!--So I wonder where she pulls "if you're an early stage startup with little to no diversity, you're in trouble and need to fix it fast." out of. There's no evidence, and logically it doesn't make sense. It's just her own entitled sense of justice (which I don't even believe is genuine).
I'm not saying diversity is not needed, I don't think it's right to capitalize on social trend by misleading the public. Basically the narrative nowadays is "Let's shame and punish all these companies that are not thinking about diversity", and I think that's as bad as those companies neglecting diversity, in a witch-hunt sort of way.
> I just hate this type of opportunistic people
Your comment crosses into personal attack. That is not allowed here. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it.