5 Practical Ways to Advocate for Diversity

RailsConf 2016

by Tony Wieczorek

The video titled "5 Practical Ways to Advocate for Diversity," delivered by Tony Wieczorek at RailsConf 2016, addresses the critical importance of fostering diversity within engineering teams. Wieczorek emphasizes that diversity is not only a moral imperative but also a business necessity, contributing to innovation, reflecting user needs, and enhancing workplace culture.

Key points discussed in the video include:

- Diversity Importance: Wieczorek highlights that diversity should matter to everyone, not just marginalized groups. He shares personal experiences, including an encounter with Rick Santorum that illuminated the hostile attitudes towards diverse families that can exist in society.
- Defining 'Best': He contends that the definition of the "best" engineers should extend beyond talent to include diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Emphasizing that '10x teams' can outperform individual '10x engineers,' he cites research showing how diverse teams prepare better and reach consensus more effectively.

- Personal Experiences: With a background at companies like Zipcar and Localytics, Wieczorek shares his challenges in hiring diverse talent, underlining that tech companies struggle with ethnic and gender diversity, a common theme in Silicon Valley.

- Practical Ways to Advocate: Wieczorek lists five practical methods to advocate for diversity:

- Measure: Conducting surveys to understand the demographic makeup of the company, sharing the results for transparency.

- Fundraise: Supporting local diversity groups and initiatives through fundraising or involvement, such as hosting events with women in tech.

- Call Out: Using strategies like the SBI tool to address inappropriate jokes and comments, fostering a respectful work environment.

- Recruit: Actively participating in outreach and community events to recruit diverse candidates.

- Communicate Importance: Promoting discussions about diversity within the company, starting conversations with leadership to ensure diverse hiring practices are prioritized.

- Cultural Shifts: He encourages creating an inclusive culture, illustrating this with the renaming of conference rooms after notable figures in diversity, to subtly reinforce the importance of varied contributions in tech.

Wieczorek concludes by stressing that proactive measures in promoting diversity not only benefit individuals from various backgrounds but enhance overall team performance and development. By being vocal about diversity, raising awareness, and creating supportive environments, engineering cultures can evolve to become more inclusive and productive.

Overall, the talk encourages all engineers, especially those in leadership roles, to take actionable steps towards advocating for and achieving diversity in the workplace.

00:00:10.519 What do you say we get started? That's like, okay, cool. Hey, I'm Tony Wieczorek.

00:00:13.290 I'm here to talk today about practical ways to advocate for diversity at work. I've been A/B testing the title of this talk, so sometimes I call it 'Straight White Men Should Advocate for Diversity at Work.' Like any good A/B test, I only had a very small sample size, so it's been accepted in both ways.

00:00:19.800 But I think diversity is something that we should all care about, not just people of color and women. It's very important for our businesses. So, I'll talk today about why I think that. Here's my husband and me. My husband's in the front row right here at Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

00:00:43.230 Does anybody recognize the guy with the arrow pointing to him? Yes, I heard Rick Santorum. That's former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who is particularly vitriolic and hateful in his speech, right before Trump was Trump.

00:01:08.790 And we do what you do at an airport, which is grab your Starbucks or your coffee and wander in a haze around the airport. You find a seat next to someone, you sit down, and we just happened to sit down next to Santorum. He was giving a radio interview on the phone, I don't know to whom, but he was being really hateful that day, saying things about gay families within earshot of my husband and me and our nephews.

00:01:18.960 He was saying how we're destroying America, that a woman's place is in the home. I mean, all these really ridiculous things, and I was just getting angrier and angrier. I'm getting angry just talking about it right now. So, when he got off the phone, I confronted him and said, 'How dare you talk about me and my family that way? We're not destroying America. We're not hurting you. I'm an American just like you are. Why are you talking about us this way?'

00:01:41.549 He gave me a very political answer and simply said, 'Thanks for your vote.' He then gave me a thumbs-up, which only made me more angry. He started walking away, and I noticed the people around us had gotten up and were moving away from us. They were afraid of what was going to happen, worried they wouldn't be able to get on their flight. They were scared of what we might do.

00:02:10.750 So, in a moment of anger, I reminded him of the internet meme that made his name so very famous. Don't look it up right now! I like to think that that got to him. I don't know, but I like telling the story because this is the kind of America that I live in, and a lot of people live in this America.

00:02:43.960 I live in Boston, Massachusetts, a very progressive city in a very, very liberal state. We had marriage equality way before a lot of other states did, and we're constantly at the forefront of social issues.

00:03:02.760 But I travel and meet people like Santorum, and in the airport, randomly, I turn on the television and hear Trump talking about families, about people that I care about in certain ways. It's awful. So, how much more awful do you think it would be to have this in your daily life and then go to work and hear the same kinds of jokes—not quite in such a hateful way—but that constantly dig at you day after day?

00:03:29.740 That's the experience a lot of people of color and women have at work and in engineering culture, and I want to change that. So, this is my attempt at doing that.

00:03:40.150 A little bit about me: I went to undergraduate school at WPI in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then went to graduate school at Tufts. I got my graduate degree from Tufts University in engineering management. I interned at NASA in high school, and my first job out of college was at the Free Software Foundation, where I was the personal assistant for Richard Stallman.

00:04:05.080 So, after this, come talk to me. I have lots of great stories about that. Then, I really got my education in engineering from Zipcar, where I worked for four and a half years. How many people here have driven in a Zipcar or know what it is? Okay, good. You used my software, that's great.

00:04:30.530 I was there while we were growing. I was one of the first eight engineers on a small team, and then we grew to 50 engineers, acquired two companies, went IPO, and then we ourselves were acquired by Avis—all that time I was there.

00:04:56.750 I learned a lot about engineering at Zipcar. Currently, I work at a company called Localytics. We build software that's on all of your phones right now. It's an SDK that companies can install to see what users in aggregate are doing in their apps to build better features.

00:05:12.790 We work with companies from the New York Times to HBO, SoundCloud, and our software is installed in over two and a half billion devices around the world, processing terabytes of data a day. We work across Ruby, Scala, JavaScript, and a few other languages, and I manage a team of 11 engineers who are across all those languages.

00:05:41.500 I hire a lot for our company, and I found that the single biggest challenge of building a company, especially in Boston, is hiring the best people. Everyone says this, right? But what is that definition of 'best'? That's the word I want to concentrate on.

00:06:05.020 For me, best means hiring a diverse workforce—people from different educational backgrounds, people of different genders, and people of different colors, races, ethnicities. Here's a demonstration of why I think that way: Kate Huddleston has a fantastic series of blogs where she talks about how team productivity is a product of how well they work together, which is the sum of the individual talent of the team.

00:06:40.920 I think all too often, engineering groups focus just on the sum of talent. They talk about '10x engineers' and that's why they put it that way, but I like to talk, as others do, about '10x teams,' and this is why. The better the team works together, the more productivity I'm going to get out of everyone.

00:07:06.440 For me, a diverse team is a team that works better together, and there's research that backs this up. Here's some research from Scientific American: Diverse teams prepare better, anticipate alternative viewpoints, and know that reaching consensus will take work. To me, that is the process of developing a product—engineers getting together to build software that helps people and helps companies build better apps.

00:07:33.980 That's the essence of why diversity is important to me. I mentioned I manage 11 engineers, which means every week I have a 30-minute one-on-one with each of them, where I try to give them clear, frequent, and tough feedback. That's how you grow as an engineer.

00:08:02.760 But the way you're going to best receive that feedback is if you also believe that I care about you as a person. I'm not just telling you tough feedback because you're replaceable, and if you don't achieve that, I can replace you. A lot of engineering departments operate that way, or at least that's how people feel.

00:08:43.859 So, I celebrate everyone on my team as a whole and as diverse individuals because that makes sense to people. I want to lead you through five practical ways you can advocate for diversity at work: measure, fundraise, call out, and recruit.

00:09:32.610 I'll preface this by saying I'm not an expert in this. I wanted to share my experiences because that’s how I think we all learn better. I work for a company whose one of our major products is analytics. We tell people what users do in their apps, so I'm used to using data to clarify the problem.

00:09:56.520 At the top, the gray bars represent the U.S. population distribution from a few years ago, and how the major tech companies in America are aligned with those gender and ethnicity distributions. We know that it's not a secret that the gender and ethnicity distributions in all of our companies are out of whack.

00:10:40.580 The representation of Latino and Black employees is especially lacking in companies these days. Major companies like Google, Yahoo, Pinterest, and Etsy have released their gender and ethnicity breakdowns. So, I decided to do this at Localytics, but our company has 250 people, nowhere near the size where we have an HR department who knows how to conduct a proper survey.

00:11:50.049 How do I conduct a survey with really sensitive questions? I couldn't really find much information, so I pieced together a survey for our company and open-sourced it so people can run these surveys at their own companies.

00:12:20.880 Our first decision was how to ask people about their ethnicity and race. It's a very complex question; a lot of people identify as multiple races or ethnicities, and it's also a very personal question.

00:12:44.150 So, we settled on a government form called the EEO-1, which sounds very official. Any company of a certain size has to fill this form out about their employee makeup, and we thought using the same categorizations for ethnicity and race would provide a benchmark to use.

00:13:23.540 We also wanted to be mindful that people identify in various ways regarding gender, so we did not want to present it as a binary choice. We provided a write-in field for people to identify however they wanted. When we received the anonymized data, we had to massage it a little bit—some people put an 'M' for male, for instance.

00:14:06.500 We learned that this wasn't a big deal and because we're only 250 people, we didn't want people to be easily identifiable in the results that we were publishing. So, when it came to GLBT affiliation, we chose to ask if they identify with any of these terms or not.

00:14:41.020 We thought if we went too far into identifying options, it might be too revealing. I wish this next slide showed you the result of how we're doing awesome, how the gender breakdown of Localytics matches the U.S. population. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. We look just like this slide from Google.

00:15:49.940 We suffer through the same challenges and struggles that many other companies face, except we're trying to do something about it. That's really what this talk is about. At a tech conference, I feel it’s important to show results.

00:16:21.590 We also fund local groups at Localytics in an effort to raise awareness. I'm used to receiving Ruby Weekly or DB Weekly in my inbox every week. Anyone subscribe to these weekly tech email newsletters?

00:16:57.020 Yeah, there wasn't one for diversity that I found. There's Model View Culture, which is a fantastic publication, but I started something called Diversity Hackers. Every Tuesday morning, you sign up at diversityhackers.com, and I will send you a curated list of five articles from that week's news on diversity, along with practical tips that can be used at your company.

00:17:25.150 We also support local women's groups in Boston. One of them is called She Geeks Out. You can see on the bottom right there. We made little shot glasses for everyone to take home. We bought dinner for a group of about 150 women—this is in our old Boston office.

00:17:45.920 They showed up, and we had speakers. On the left is Sarah Watz, who was the Senior Product Manager at Localytics, and she talked about techniques for building a product. On the right is Diane Hessen, the CEO of the Startup Institute, who talked about how to find your own company as a woman, especially in Boston.

00:18:08.360 This was a feel-good event—everyone had a great time, and we had some fantastic barbecue. Although now I'm in Kansas City, it's hard to compare! More than just a feel-good event, I put on my recruiter hat and saw that was 150 women who came into our offices.

00:18:42.460 They experienced what it was like to work at Localytics. We received several warm leads from people reaching out to us afterward, asking how they could come work for our company. If I’m not doing that every week, I'm not doing my job as a manager.

00:19:12.770 Encouraging people to come work for our company is essential. Another thing I tried was starting my own monthly meetup in Boston, since there weren't any groups for LGBT engineers to meet up. I started one called Code Pride.

00:19:43.420 If I don't hear from people about Localytics that they were interested before but are now way more excited because I host Code Pride, that's part of my job as an engineering manager—to want people to want to work for us.

00:20:10.940 Another practical way to advocate for diversity is to let others know that it’s important to you. I started that at Localytics about a year and a half ago. In the second week on the job, I didn't know anyone. They bust us all to a casino for a three-day company off-site, two hours from Boston.

00:20:42.300 The whole thing started with a three-hour event with the CEO, who laid out the vision for the company over the next three years. Then, we had an open Q&A session, so you can imagine all 202 people in a room, with people sort of lobbing softballs at the CEO.

00:21:24.230 Eventually, I asked the CEO, 'What are you doing to increase diversity among the management at Localytics and the company as a whole?' I don't think he was expecting that kind of question since he's a person of color himself.

00:21:45.360 He said, 'Obviously, I care personally about this issue, and it's important for our company to hire a diverse workforce.' But then he did something unexpected. He turned the question back on me and said, 'Tony, what are you going to do about it?'

00:22:12.270 I paused and stammered my way through an answer. I thought, 'You know what? That's really great. Thanks for giving that opportunity.' He did what all good leaders do, which is not have an answer but want to encourage leadership in others.

00:22:44.320 That was nerve-racking. I imagine it would be for a lot of people in this room to stand up and say that this is important in front of the whole company. The best leaders of companies you want to work for are those that accept that and want to help you change the culture.

00:23:04.370 It's also important to talk about this because the perception among engineers does not equal the reality that many women and people of color face. Research from Lean In and Sheryl Sandberg's foundation states that seventy-two percent of men believe women have the same opportunities as men in the workplace.

00:23:35.650 This doesn't sound right because women, on the whole, in the United States, make less than men. Surprising to me was that sixteen percent of people said they have more opportunities than men. We hear this from engineers who are leaving—not just leaving the company but also leaving the industry as a whole. There is a perception gap.

00:24:06.960 It's important that you talk about this to your fellow engineers and your management to raise awareness about diversity at work. One easy way to raise awareness for diversity in the workplace is something as simple as the names of your conference rooms.

00:24:35.090 We recently moved to a brand-new beautiful office in downtown Boston that was specifically built for our company, so we had to rename the conference rooms. What an easy opportunity for us to name them after women and LGBT engineers who made remarkable contributions to the industry.

00:24:56.230 Names familiar to many of us here are like Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, and Alan Turing. Think about other departments who also book these conference rooms, who might not know who these people are.

00:25:07.390 Every time they book a conference in Grace Hopper, it's an opportunity to talk about why she is important to our industry and to engineering in general. You can even include it in the description of the room name.

00:25:22.800 It’s not difficult to subtly reinforce that people of all stripes, colors, and backgrounds are accepted here at Localytics.

00:25:54.070 Another common occurrence at work is when people tell jokes or say things that make others feel uncomfortable. I can talk through some techniques I use to call that out when I hear it happening at work.

00:26:18.740 Growing up, I thought mayonnaise came with tuna fish in the jar. I’m the oldest of six kids. We grew up in a small house in Baltimore City, and tuna fish sandwiches were a popular snack, so we would get out the can of tuna fish, get out the mayonnaise, put it between slices of bread—and I thought, 'Why do I have to make this when the mayonnaise jar comes with tuna fish inside?'

00:26:52.330 Of course, it didn’t, but that's a metaphor for our engineering cultures. The things that seem like they've always been that way or 'That's how it has to be' are often the result of people not expanding their worldview or being lazy about certain things. When I was preparing this slide, I couldn't find a stock photo of tuna fish in a mayonnaise jar, so I conducted a little photo shoot. I bought a jar of mayonnaise and put tuna fish at the bottom.

00:27:34.650 My husband had a disgusted look on his face as I was doing this. It’s kind of gross, right? Well, we should be that disgusted at the current state of our engineering cultures regarding diversity.

00:28:12.440 How many people are familiar with the SBI tool? Anyone heard of this before? It’s a technique for discussing sensitive subjects that can make people defensive, allowing for feedback in a way that still makes you heard.

00:28:34.580 There was an incident where a couple people from a different department were doing pull-ups right by my desk and started making jokes that I found offensive towards gay people. I'm out at work, and it's not a secret.

00:29:10.430 I know that they know better than to say those kinds of things at work. The technique I use is, 'You know, twenty minutes ago at the pull-up bar, I overheard a joke about gay people that made me feel really embarrassed for you and didn’t make me feel good about working here. Can you please refrain from those kinds of jokes at work?'