Who's Not in the Room?

One of the most powerful things is thinking about who's not in the room and advocating for them. And I see this even in our diversity and inclusion circles, like in the people I work with. Sometimes we get very fixated on the particular groups we're advocating for. So there's women in tech, there's black and brown people in tech. And I also realize there's many people who are not even represented in the room because they're so marginalized. Like, there's no native people in many of these rooms. We don't have a lot of diversity of religion, so we're not talking about what is the experience like to be Muslim in our tech companies. So there's so many other people who are not even in these rooms. So that exercise of thinking about who's not here and can I try to at least give them a little bit of voice or at least call attention to the fact that they're not here, how can we start to solve these problems? I think it's important that we don't just let the people who are from underrepresented groups do all the work of trying to push for diversity and inclusion. That often happens where the one woman in the room will be asked to do the work of diversity, plan this panel or invite this speaker or mentor the younger people. And I think a lot of times those people from underrepresented groups will feel some of that burden to do that work, and they want to do it, but it's also unfair to ask those people to do all that work all the time. And so for those people who have more bandwidth aren't necessarily from those groups, being able to spend that time to advocate for others is really powerful. So it's a bit tricky. Sometimes you want to amplify these voices that aren't heard as much and help to bring people into the room, but you also don't want to take up the space there. So there have been some cases of people who wanted to be helpful but ended up hogging all of the limelight instead of giving the stage to people who are traditionally underrepresented or aren't getting that stage time.