Diversity hiding in plain view, or my thoughts from a SXSW 2013 panel

Conversations about diversity in technology are as interesting for who they include as who they leave out. Their goal should be to challenge the stereotype of a programmer as a young white male, unencumbered with anything that would keep him from coding 18 hours a day. The panelists who got together to discuss diversity in the Austin tech community were not in this category. But diversity is more than just being female or a person of color.

Those categories are, however, the most visible, and no wonder that the conversation revolved around them. There are companies who have been setting examples in how to bring under-represented groups into engineering. One of them is Etsy, the online craft marketplace, where one of the panelists, Garann Means, worked as a software engineer. Etsy noticed that while most of its customers were women, most of its engineers were men, and they set out to change that. Instead of poaching women developers from other companies, they started the Hacker School, and gave scholarships for women learning programming. Many of its women graduates found software engineering jobs. Moderator Mark Phillip noted that when Etsy committed to diversity, it also benefited male developers -- they became better team players.

Mark Phillip (CEO/Founder Are You Watching This?!), Nicole Cofield (president/CEO of Capital City African American Chamber), Garann Means (software developer), and Gerardo Treviño (founder and CEO of Paybook). More pictures from SXSW 2013 are in my photo gallery.

Garann (who is also the founder of All Girl Hack Night, Austin women developers' group) says that diversity efforts are often criticized as "we shouldn't separate women from men, we want to keep them in the same group". But she says that this kind of separation is never an issue, at least in her own experience. Many white guys talked to her about how things that are "supposed" to offend women and people of color, actually offend them as well. It is sometimes said that a special effort to attract more people from underrepresented groups to software industry would bring a lot of underqualified people. But there are examples showing that that doesn't have to happen. Garannn says her friend Divya put together a conference in San Franscisco, with very diverse speakers, and it was technically excellent -- you didn't have to sacrifice the quality.

People categorize themselves in interesting ways that can be different from the categories we assign them to. I saw this play out in my own life as well, and I was reminded of it by what Natalie Cofield, president/CEO of Capital City African American Chamber, said. Many black engineers in tech are not Americans: they come from African countries. She has heard Nigerian programmers say "African American Chamber is not for me, because I'm not African-American. I'm Nigerian." So she saw a need for AAC to be more internationally inclusive. I can relate to this from my own experience. As an international graduate student in America, I felt I was more of a minority here than the officially recognized minorities. They were at home with this country's ways, and I was not. (I know it's a subjective feeling, and a white foreigner still benefits from the white privilege without realizing it, so I would not put my experience on the same footing as that of truly underprivileged minorities.) But when the Natalie Cofield mentioned a need to include foreign-born engineers in the tech community, it was the first time I felt that somebody was inclusive towards immigrants in this country. It was certainly the first time in my experience that somebody wanted to make them a part of the diversity discourse, as opposed to treating them as a job-stealing, wage-depressing nuisance, which is how high-tech immigrants are usually talked about in this country.

Then there is another dimension to diversity, hidden in plain view. It came to my mind when the fourth participant of the panel brought up something, and his story was considered a success story without anyone noticing the darker undertones. Gerardo Treviño was talking about Paybook, his recently launched startup. It lets people take pictures of their receipts, and Paybook will parse them for you. He and most of his developers are from Mexico. At first he wanted to base his company in Austin, but it was very difficult to get USA work visas for the whole development team. Abandoning that plan, they decided that the company's home will be Monterey, Mexico. They wanted a safe place with landscapes that help creativity. So they got the whole team of a dozen developers to live together in Playa de Carmen, an organic food paradise, in a utopian commune of sorts: for example, the whole team collectively decides what to eat for dinner that night.

Mark Phillip (CEO/Founder Are You Watching This?!), Gerardo Treviño (founder and CEO of Paybook), Nicole Cofield (president/CEO of Capital City African American Chamber), and Garann Means (software developer). More pictures from SXSW 2013 are in my photo gallery.

No one in the audience indicated they viewed it as anything but a creative move, and perhaps it was; but such a move would only work for a team of people who have no other responsibilities outside of work. Clearly, someone who has children would hardly be able to leave their family and move somewhere for months at at time. This is especially true about people who have been traditionally responsible for childcare, namely, women. So I wouldn't say that it's really diversity when you pick employees who are free of family obligations. And since they tend to be in their 20s, you are clearly not aiming for age diversity either.

This goes against bringing more women into computing, because women would be the first to quit a company, or entire industry, that makes it hard to combine a job with a family. Even child-free women are less likely to stay in such a company, because they still want to have friends and personal lives. Encouraging your employees to relax on a beach or eat organic food is not a true support of work-life balance; the balance needs to be the kind that lets people fulfill their other responsibilities.

It reminds me of a story I read in our local newspaper, Austin American-Statesman, about tech startups that open offices downtown. They want to be in an attractive location, because their engineers like to to live music clubs or to the lake after work. Clearly, they are trying to attract only a certain kind of engineers, namely, those whose after-work hours are spent on leisure. They are not positioning themselves for another kind of employee who goes home to their family in the evening. It just so happens that the first kind is usually in their 20s, while the other kind is older and more likely to be female. So in the era when sex and age discrimination is illegal, this is a roundabout way to tell the non-20-something-male applicants that they are not particularly wanted here. And I think that as long as companies have implicit preferences for certain kinds of demographics -- expressed by supporting some lifestyles but not others -- I think that all the talk about bringing more diversity into tech won't yield much fruit.

Throw a non-sequitur grenade, or social strategies for introverts

The other day at the Center For Inquiry Austin non-fiction book club we discussed Susan Cain's "Quiet: The Power of Introverts". All the 8 people in the room self-identified as introverts. We told personal stories of extreme social avoidance (one person, as a teenager, asked his/her parents to turn down an invitation to a school dance on his/her behalf), and debated whether Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a rare example of an extroverted scientist, or if he only acts as an extrovert as a public figure. We also discussed how the workplace and the rest of the society can be hostile to introverts -- that's one of the points the book brings up. "Open" office plans, a.k.a cubicle farms, don't so much facilitate collaboration, as keep introverts from getting work done; in brainstorming exercises, the most dominant person's ideas usually get pushed through, no matter their quality, and the quieter people's ideas not heard; and we won't even mention the horror of various "professional development" and "team building" events, which, as several members attested, did absolutely nothing for their professional growth.

(Myself, I was lucky enough to get exposed to a team-building event just once. It was lead by a motivational speaker who made us play little games -- the bane of introverts -- the purpose of which was to demonstrate some simple and obvious idea. For example: write your name 5 times with your dominant hand. Now write it 5 times with your non-dominant hand. Did it take you much longer? Does it look like chicken-scratch? See, it shows that it's easier and faster to do things you're naturally good at, and much harder to do things you're not good at!

I started out with an open mind. I considered that all those games and exercises, all the platitudes they were designed to express, might add up to some genuine insight. But I lost hope for any such revelation, when I saw the speaker struggling to explain the concepts of "form" and "content". Apparently she thought that we -- a group of programmers and other technical people, who earn their daily bread from abstract thinking -- didn't already know these concepts. Moreover, she thought we would find them hard to understand without a concrete object analogy. So she looked around with urgency in her eyes, grabbed a cup from the table, and raised it, saying: "Form is like this cup, and content is like the water in the cup." After that, I pretty much tuned her out.)

CFI Austin non-fiction book club. More pictures from CFI Austin can be found in my photo gallery.

But back to the discussion.

We also touched upon the appeal of cults, and (at the risk of making it sound like an extrovert hate fest) speculated about how much stock market crash can be indirectly blamed on extroverts, their irrational confidence making investors believe that this market bubble was different. The discussion often deviated from the book (which is just as well, because I haven't read it), but this was one area where everybody in the room had personal experience with, and sharing that personal experience was even better than discussing the book.

Since ~ 75% of society are extroverts, most social conversations flow in such a way that people don't stick to any one topic for more than a few sentences, touching it superficially, and moving on to another topic by association, not because it logically follows. For an introvert, who think *before* they speak, and speak only when they have something to contribute, such a conversation becomes meaningless. By the time they are ready to share their well thought-out point, the conversation would have moved on. So, are there any strategies for an introvert to make social interactions more self-friendly? Some people suggested to interject a complete non-sequitur. Like a grenade, it will cause some chaos in the conversation: "Huh? What did she just say?" And then the introvert can make a point they're trying to make.

Take the stairs, and other impossible health advice

A fire alarm rings at work. You leave your desk and properly evacuate to the parking garage. It turns out to be a drill, and 10 minutes later you are allowed back. You get a brilliant idea: you'll use this disruption to do something good for you health. You'll take the stairs up to the third floor where your office is. And maybe you should try walking up and down the stairs a few times during the day, so your butt won't meld with the chair. You don't quite remember where the stairs are in this building -- you only took them once -- but a building deputy showed them to you.

You go up to the third floor. The stairwell door won't open. It's locked. You swear the last time you tried it, it was unlocked.

You go up to the 4th (top) floor, then to the 2nd floor, and all the stairwell doors are locked. You get down to the first floor, and the door is unlocked, but it opens into a small dead-end hallway with several other nondescript, identical, unlabeled doors. You try one after another, until you find one that opens into a longer hallway, which leads you to the elevators... just in time before your claustrophobia flares up.

This is what happens in corporate America when you try to do something good for your health. It's like that in pretty much any office building. In some buildings, I heard, people are so discouraged from using the stairs, that an alarm would go off if you open the stairwell door! The stairs are to be used strictly as a fire exit.

And yet there is no shortage of health experts who tell us to incorporate small acts of fitness into our daily life, first and foremost by taking the stairs. Also, ride your bicycle to work. Uh-huh. And play Russian roulette with the cars whizzing by, and arrive to your cubicle sweaty, and delight coworkers with your post-workout aroma. None of those experts must have ever worked in corporate America, or lived in a suburb. Next thing they'll tell us to eat cake. :-)

An article that dredged up some memories

There is an article in New York Times about an upcoming report of a study of women's experiences in the science, technology and engineering fields.

Diversity Isn't Rocket Science, Is It?

"It's almost a time warp," said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies women and work. "All the predatory and demeaning and discriminatory stuff that went on in workplaces 20, 30 years ago is alive and well in these professions."

That is the conclusion of the center's latest study, which will be published in the Harvard Business Review in June.

Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually leave.

I would sure like to read this report, if it is ever made available on the internet. It would be interesting to compare those 1493 women's stories with mine. I am lucky to be in a workplace where I haven't experienced a bias against me, despite me being one of the few women in a mostly male technical team. My previous workplace wasn't so good. While I haven't experienced any overt sexism, I ran into some subtle forms of... weirdness, a lot of which could have been attributed to gender perceptions. They were subtle enough to not evoke outrage, and to make me feel it was all my fault (which is actually my default operating assumption in many life's situations).

They were paying me -- why didn't they want me to work?

My previous workplace, a software company in Dallas, had a huge software development team of ~ 100 people, divided into many groups. I was assigned to a group that was focused mostly on R&D, rather than pedal-to-the-metal, get-the-product-out-the-door stuff. My group wrote prototypes of plugins for the company's main product (they didn't call them plugins, but that's kind of what it was -- different algorithms for doing tasks that our product did), and then the Big Brains decided which of them might be worth integrating into the company's product. Out of 10 people on this team, everybody except two people had a PhD. Most of them had spent a significant time in the academia as post-docs or professors. I was one of the two people who only had a Master's degree, and one of only two women. The other woman was a seasoned software developer, who played along very well with the rules and social norms expected in such an environment. I was, on the other hand, a complete rookie. This was my first job as a software developer, and also my first job in the US! I had no idea what to expect or how to behave.

One thing I completely did not expect is that nobody would give me any work to do. :-)

I'm serious. It became clear to me that my team lead did not see me as an available resource. Apparently, when he assigned team members to projects, I simply did not come to his mind. It was kind of like in an old detective story, the title or author of which I forgot. The mystery in it centered around the fact that there were footsteps in the snow leading to the house, yet the witness who's been at the house the whole time swore there were no visitors. It turned out, somebody had indeed come to the house: a postman (or a milkman -- details elude me). But for a member of English upper class in the beginning of the 20th century postmen and milkmen were simply not persons. So the postman flew completely under the witness's radar; when asked who came to the house, the witness did not even think to mention the postman. The same way, when thinking who to assign the work to, my boss simply did not think of me.

Feeling Kafkaesque

How was I supposed to interpret this? Was it because

(a) I didn't have a PhD like most of the group members? But then why did he take me on his group to begin with? Ostensibly it was because the research I did for my Master's thesis was related to the research his group did. Still, he knew I had only a Master's, not a PhD. If he thought this wasn't enough, he should not have taken me on.

(b) I was a woman, and therefore incompatible with a notion of a software developer?

(c) I was considered unworthy to be given a chance for some other reason?

I was so puzzled by his attitude (hey, they are paying me -- don't they want me to work?) that I (a) internalized it, assuming it was my own fault, and (b) tried to rectify the situation by repeatedly asking him to give me tasks to do. Sometimes he did, by assigning me some little research project; the problem was that when I tried to get him to review what I did and determine how to proceed further, he would never, never have time to review it. Weeks would go by, and he still would not find time.

I also asked him to give me bugs to fix in the existing code, because what's a better way to become familiar with the company's code if not by fixing bugs? And his reply literally was "there aren't that many bugs in our group code".

I just didn't know whether I should continue to "bug" him to give me work, or to give up. Since, as I said, I internalized the message that he behaved that way because something was wrong with me (women are really good at this -- at assuming everything is their fault! It's the default operating mode for many women, and I used to be no different), I gave up. I did not dare to continue to pester him. Besides, how many times could I pester him without starting to feel like an attention-starved wife being brushed off by a husband who's "just not that into her"? :-) There's this odd gender dynamics there, that wouldn't be present if both employees were the same sex.

And yet, at the meetings with the director of software development, my boss constantly complained he did not have enough developers to implement all the projects he has planned! I felt Kafkaesque. Should I wave -- hey, look at me over here! I'm not a roach on the wall! I'm a developer too! What about me? How about you give me some work? but of course I couldn't do that, as it would have been very embarrassing for all parties involved, even if it was said in the most polite form.

In retrospective I know my biggest mistake was to try to make the whole thing work, instead of going to the development director and asking him to reassign me to another team. But I could not bring myself to ask for it, because I was afraid that if I admit to the development director I haven't been doing much work, I would be shown the door! Eventually though, he and my team lead jointly decided to reassign me. And it made a big difference. My new team had concrete projects, deadlines, and -- surprise, surprise -- bugs to fix. :-)

So I don't know if this was just a weird case of a boss who's clueless about management, but I suspect he would have treated me differently if I had been a guy. When some new guys joined the team after me, he integrated them right away, giving them work to do. But he never gave me a chance to begin with, as if he simply could not imagine me being on the team. Go figure.