Think Deeply About Diversity

So a couple years ago, I and a few other women in tech who would often get together and talk about these issues were frustrated by all the talk of problems as I just laid out. And we thought we should actually start trying to focus on solutions and see what we could do instead of having the same conversations over and over again. And what came out of those initial discussions a couple years ago was a nonprofit called Project Include, which I'm now a founding advisor too. And our idea was that we needed to start giving people solutions. And there are people who want to do the right thing and just don't know what to do. We were often getting people asking us for one on one coffee so we could give them some brain dump on what they could do around diversity. And we thought it would make more sense, it would be more scalable if we actually just wrote down those recommendations and tried to compile these resources to make it easier for people. But as we came together, we also thought about what it means to have sustained solutions and ones that actually make change in the long term. We started with core values. The first of these is true inclusion. And this idea of not just solving for gender first, which often ends up being white women first because of that proximity to the power structures, now thinking about inclusion that actually encompasses everybody. So instead of just widening your circles of exclusion, getting rid of those circles of exclusion altogether, thinking about intersectionality. So it's not just gender and race and class and religion, but all these things cross with each other and all these different dimensions of people's identities and thinking through solving that in a very holistic way. We thought it was important that there be comprehensive solutions that are not just, you know, this tactic here and this other tactic here. People are very into the idea of having a three point checklist of top three things I can do. They want to hear about things like the Rooney rule, which is just make sure that you have some diversity in your candidate pool and then that will result in better metrics downstream. They just want to have these easy check the box solutions. But it's not that easy of a problem to solve. Its culture, its processes, is really deeply ingrained power structures. And I would treat diversity analogous to many other things that companies are trying to solve. I'd say around growth and trying to acquire users monetization. And sure there are blog posts where people say all you have to do to solve culture is these three things, but that's never the full story. And people spend a lot of time thinking about what are the different ways that we can grow our consumer software company. There's all these different hacks you can try and lots of different tactics you will read about from other people. But in the end, you need to have a comprehensive strategy. And you may be able to pick and choose some of these different tactics from other people, but you need to think through the problem holistically.