Joelle Emerson Fireside Chat w/ Dylan Tweney

So I was really excited to interview you, Joelle, because you do something that I have only been writing about for a long time. Like, you're actually out there getting things done.

Trying to.

And I'm just writing, like, wouldn't it be nice if? But this is a topic that's really important to me, diversity, for a variety of reasons, which I can go into later if it seems relevant. I guess I wanna start by setting some context. I wanna hear a little bit more about your background, but I also wanna set the context of what diversity, like where diversity in Silicon Valley is right now. So can you kinda tell us, like, I mean, Apple, Twitter, Google, Facebook, all these companies have been issuing diversity reports. I think some of them have now done it for 2 years in a row, right?

Yes.

So, I mean, what can we tell from that? What's the state of diversity? Are they getting better? Let's start with those big ones that are actually saying stuff. How are they doing?

So it's not so good. It's not looking so good.

OK, shocker.

I think to measure improvement, though, we need to be really thoughtful about the numbers that we look at. So for me, it's less relevant— if you're a big company, it's less relevant to look at the change to the makeup of your company overall. If you're a big company, that's going to take— unless you're going to just fire a lot of people. So Twitter has an opportunity now, I suppose. The dynamics are going to take a while to change. So what I think is more interesting is looking at that one year and in the people you hired that year, what did that look like? And so we have seen a little bit of progress. So Facebook, their overall dynamics haven't changed much, but if you look at the people they hired in from last year, in the last year that they released data for, those numbers did have quite a bit more representation than from the previous year. Same thing with Google.

Okay.

They're still not as good as you would hope they would be as compared to the pool of available talent. So they're still not hiring all of the people that are out there and that are qualified for jobs from underrepresented backgrounds, but they are improving.

Okay. So what do we mean by diversity in this case? This is gender and race, right?

Yeah. Well, so I think that's a really hard and important question to ask. So I think traditionally in Silicon Valley when we are talking about diversity, we're talking about gender and ethnicity. There are a couple of problems, but there are reasons why that is. One is that those are the things that companies have to report to the EEOC, so we have really good data on them, whereas things like age matter a lot and are actually— age is a big problem, ageism, in Silicon Valley, but companies don't have to measure that, they don't have to report it, so I think it's—

Okay, hang on. I want to go into the age thing in a minute, but I just realized you used a different word than I did. I said race and you said ethnicity. Did I say something dumb?

No, so ethnicity is broader. Some people say race and ethnicity, but ethnicity is just a broader Like what countries can you sign up? Like Hispanic isn't a race.

Yeah, okay. All right. Thank you. Sorry to interrupt.

No, it's okay.

No, carry on.

So ageism, we could talk about for a long time. Big problem. We don't have a lot of data on it. A lot of companies don't measure the age diversity in their company. Sexual orientation, same thing. Gender identity, same thing. Veteran status, same thing. Disability, same thing. So these are all really important elements of diversity. But we don't have data on them, and if companies do have data, they haven't made it transparent. So I think the conversation has been focused on gender and ethnicity, and those are very big, visible problems. I would just flag one other problem with the way we talk about diversity. We talk about gender and ethnicity as separate things, which sort of misses women of color. So there's this—

Who are kind of both.

Well, right, but when you count them, there's no count that shows, like, what the representation of women of color is in these companies. So that's a really— those are both really important parts of someone's identity. So there are a lot of problems in the way we measure and talk about diversity. But yes, I would say gender and ethnicity are the 2 things we're generally talking about.

OK.

So let me just be stupidly concrete about this, because this is my slow Monday morning brain. But a company could be increasing its ethnic diversity, and it could be increasing its gender diversity, but it could still have very few Well, right, and Facebook got called out for that in, I think, 2013.

They hired only one black woman.

Oh, okay. So out of how many did they hire?

I think it was like 1,400 people or 1,200 people.

Okay. Wow, that's kind of sad.

Yeah, that's a really big problem, right?

So what—

I mean, can I do—

7 in the next year they measured.

Yeah, so I told you I wouldn't put you on the spot with numbers, but can you give me some round figures in terms of like what these self-reports are saying in terms of the numbers?

Yeah, so I can give some numbers. So typically companies break this stuff out into representation overall and then representation in technical roles, representation in leadership versus overall. So what we know is the representation of women varies a lot company to company. In some companies you'll see it be like around 20%, in some companies it'll be closer to 50%, like eBay, 50%. And you break it into technical roles, And it's somewhere between, for most companies, sticking with gender, women are somewhere between 10%, that's Twitter, of technical roles, up to like 22%, which is some of the better companies that are doing better.

Okay.

On ethnicity, when we talk about people from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds, we're talking about Black, Latino, and Native American folks generally. Those are the measured categories. Overall in tech companies, Those folks make up between 5% to 7% of these workforces.

The overall?

Yeah.

Okay.

In technical roles, right around 2%. It's worth noting with that, there's a lot of talk of the pipeline problem.

Right.

Black and Hispanic folks make up about 15% of computer science and computer engineering graduates from top research universities. So that's the number kind of to look at.

So wait, 15% are— are Black and Hispanic at major universities.

Yeah, CS and computer science.

Computer science. But then only 2% or 3% are winding up in Silicon Valley jobs.

Yeah, between 1% and 3%.

Where are the rest going?

Well, I think that's a good question that we don't have a lot of research on. We have anecdotal evidence that some folks are going into technical parts of an org at much larger companies that are not out here. You think about like Coca-Colas, Targets, Walmarts, companies that have big hubs. Yeah.

Okay. All right, so let's talk about— I guess I'd like to know, kind of, these are the big companies. What do we know about the startup scene? Do we know anything? Because I mean, most startups don't report anything.

Yeah, Slack is one. Pinterest, to the extent you could consider it a startup. But Slack is One of the smaller companies to have reported its numbers. And it's— they're a client of ours, so I'm a little bit biased.

Well, their founder Stuart is— it's really important for him. He's talked a lot about diversity, right?

Yes.

So what are they saying?

So they're not too much better than some of their much larger peers. They're a little bit better along several metrics. One of the most interesting metrics for them is their engineering org is 7% black, which is a lot better than a lot of their peers. They're smaller, so the raw numbers are lower. Right.

They're like, what, 1,000 people maybe?

No, they're between 250 and 300 people.

Oh, they're small.

Yeah. Other than that, most startups are not releasing their numbers. I've seen some of them because I work with these folks. And then I have a lot of meetings with startups that I don't end up working with for a variety of reasons. And I'll say it's not good. So I've met with companies that are 50 people. one woman, no Black or Latino folks on the whole team. And the one woman is maybe in an HR, kind of traditionally more female-dominated role, admin.

Right.

You have a 40-person engineering team with no women on it? How are you gonna get that first woman to join? That's gonna be a hard sell. And so what we always say is the earlier you can think about this, the earlier you can work on this, the better. Once you're Google-sized, Facebook-sized, that's a really hard ship to turn, to change those overall numbers is really, really hard. When you're 10 people, it's not hard. I mean, you have to slow down, you have to be thoughtful about it, you have to be intentional about it. But if you get it right from the beginning, you will grow much more organically as a diverse company than if you start thinking about this when you're 1,000 people.

So that's totally true, but let me just say from the perspective of the startup founder, right, like these guys are thinking about starting up companies. They have a whole bunch of priorities in mind, right? Actually creating a company that will survive is one of them, right? Getting funding is another. Shipping product. Like, why should diversity be one of those things demanding your very scarce, precious attention in those first few critical years of your company's life?

Yeah, I think a few reasons. One is if you're building a product that you're hoping to sell to a diverse customer base, you wanna have people on your team that are gonna be able to anticipate some of those needs, are gonna be able to understand that, are gonna be able to communicate with those customers.

Right.

I think another reason, and the one that's more compelling to me, is that there's— I think there are a lot of good reasons. There's about a decade and a half of research that shows that diverse teams, teams that bring together people from different backgrounds, and this has been studied in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of national origin, Research even shows that when you bring together people of different political affiliations, they create teams that out-innovate more homogeneous teams. So if what you care about as a startup is solving a hard problem, coming up with a new idea, building a product that's never been built before, research shows that's exactly the situation in which you wanna bring together people from different backgrounds who have different ways of seeing the world, different experiences, and that that group is gonna just out-problem solve, think more creatively than a more homogeneous group. So I think for a startup, it's like, you know, you're in the position where this matters almost more than any other type of company.

Yeah, so there's the market reason and there's the innovation reason. How difficult is it, though, to increase diversity? I mean, a lot of people will say there's the pipeline problem, right? You know, 15%, you know, African American and Hispanic graduates of top CS programs is like, That's a significant number, but that's definitely way smaller than 85%, right? Or if you're trying to target women, there's this whole idea that women keep dropping out.

Yeah, they're about 20% of CS grads.

Right, but there would be more of them if they didn't drop out earlier in high school or in middle school when they got fed up with whatever, right, or social pressures or what have you, right? How significant is the pipeline?

I mean, well, so we know, I mean, it's those numbers that you just mentioned. So I think certainly it would be much better if people were as represented in this pipeline as they were in the country overall. And that's a problem that I think a lot of great organizations are working on. But until, you know, we're not actually hiring the people that are coming out of that pipeline yet in the numbers that reflect their representation. Is it going to be harder to find people from underrepresented backgrounds to join your company as a startup than majority group members? Yeah. But is it worth spending a little bit more time to do that? I think absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

I think the problem is, one of the reasons it's harder is that when we have a startup, and I have a startup, we tend to hire through our own networks.

Right.

And we know, a lot of research shows that people's networks tend to be quite homogeneous, especially along racial and ethnic lines. So if you're focusing on hiring only through your networks, that's easier, right? You don't have to go out there and do any work, but it's not very likely to— that's one of the reasons I think it's hard. That's not gonna bring you people from backgrounds that are very different from your own. So I think that anyone that says there isn't some kind of trade-off Yeah. In emphasizing diversity or prioritizing it, I think, is maybe being a little bit dishonest. If you are a white man, a white woman, you're gonna have to probably put in a little more work if this is a priority to you. But I would say it's well worth it, both in the benefits to your business now and in the fact that if you don't do it now— I mean, I guess one reason to not do it would be if you just think your business is gonna fail. It's not gonna matter. my business is going to fail and we're never going to get to 100 people. It doesn't— I don't really even need to worry about it. If you think your business is actually going to work, you want to think about this now because you're going to have to think about it at some point to have a successful business.

Okay. Well, maybe my business is focused on selling products to Silicon Valley engineers.

Yeah. I mean, I actually think so many businesses are because that's who's starting them.

Exactly.

Which is part of the problem. I think the lack of diversity in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and in the venture capital world I don't know how many more startups we need that wash and dry and deliver your clothes back to you or deliver food on demand.

Right.

Those are great, but you just need a couple. And then what about having companies that actually do something that makes the world a better place? I mean, I use those companies and I like that they exist, but I think that when we have more people starting companies, we're gonna actually get better companies. being started.

Okay.

More people from different backgrounds.

I think that's a good argument. So what's the— I mean, I'm predisposed to like that, but let me play devil's advocate here. So what's the— what about the founder, and this is a very common mentality in Silicon Valley, which is like, I don't have time for diversity. We're a meritocracy. I'm gonna hire the best person for the job, and I don't care if they're white, brown, or purple, right? Or whether they're male or female, or how they identify, or what they do on their hours off. I'm gonna hire the best person.

Yeah, I hear that a lot. It's so funny. I like don't even know where to start with that sometimes. People say, I'm a meritocracy.

I think a lot of people believe they are.

They're wrong.

I mean, it's certainly a huge, huge theme here, right?

Yeah.

Well, okay, so, but I'm trying— like, people are trying to be a meritocracy. They think they're meritocracies, right? It's not like they're saying they're meritocracies and they're secretly like letting their friends in the back door.

They are.

That's exactly what they're doing.

Oh, okay.

That's exactly what they're doing. That is exactly what's happening. So let me start with, there was a study done a couple of years ago by a renowned sociologist. It's called The Paradox of Meritocracy. And what he finds is that organizations that rank themselves higher in terms of believing themselves to be purely meritocratic are more influenced by bias in organizational decision-making. Similar study in the psychology context that finds that individuals that rank themselves higher in terms of believing themselves to be purely objective thinkers are more influenced by bias in decision-making. So, Paradox of Meritocracy.

That's weird.

Professor Castilla, look it up. But what— so what we know is that when we believe that we have created a meritocratic system, when we believe we are purely objective, it actually makes some sense. We stop noticing all of the ways in which decision-making isn't meritocratic. And then if we assume we're a meritocracy, there's no work to be done in trying to make objective decisions. So, I mean, It isn't meritocratic to hire people only through referrals. It makes sense to do that. It's easier. That's a different thing than saying it's meritocratic. The best person doesn't win when you only have 10 people to pick from, or 20, or 30, or your own network. Similarly, if you take a look at the way that tech companies conduct hiring processes, Mm-hm. most companies have really subjective, really ad hoc processes for evaluating people. And if you know anything about unconscious bias, that is a recipe for hiring someone someone like you. Really common cognitive bias called similar-to-me bias, which is that we tend to prefer people who are like us, which could be they went to the same school as you went to, they grew up in the same town, they have a similar accent. We even have preferences for people who physically look like us. So unless you create a really objective evaluative process for hiring, it's almost certain that unconscious bias is going to influence the hiring decisions you make.

Well, so tell me more about that, because like Google, for instance, has a famously rigorous application process, right? You have to go through like 10 interviews to get a job at Google, and each one of those managers who's interviewing you has, you know, things that they have to fill out and specific questionnaires. They ask you all kinds of supposedly objective questions. I mean, they're brain teasers or whatever, like how many tennis balls does it take to fill up a school bus? But at least that's, you know, that's designed to make you think and generate problem-solving Things which in theory are related to how you do your job, right?

No. No, but it's a really important question. Google used to interview that way. They actually changed their interviewing process about 3 years ago. And Laszlo Bock, their head of people, has written a book and a lot of articles about how the way that they used to interview, how many tennis balls would fill in a 747 or whatever, was totally not a valid way of interviewing. They don't do that anymore. Or if anyone has interviewed there and they've done that recently, some manager is violating their new process. Not all structure is good. So not all interview questions are relevant. And there's research to suggest that these brain teaser type interviews, McKinsey is sort of famous for using these, although even they have moved away from it somewhat, are actually really not good at evaluating whether someone is going to be effective in a role. What you want to do, so stepping back for a second, the best way to possibly evaluate people and make a hiring decision is actually not through interviews. In an ideal world, we could work with someone for like a month, right?

Mm-hm.

And see how they work. See how they, what their work product looks like. How they contribute to the team. And then make a much more informed hiring decision. In the real world, we don't get to do that. Internships are sort of an exception, but we don't really get to do that. So we create interviews. And research gives us some, suggestions about, or a lot of information about, the best way to conduct interviews to make objective decisions. And that includes, first, structured interviewing, which means every candidate for the same role gets asked the same set of questions. Second, work samples. You want to have that be part of the process, actually see the kind of work people can produce. And third, with the interviewing, we know that the questions, the more targeted the questions are to the role you're hiring for, so situational questions like What would you do in this hypothetical situation? That is the best way for making the most accurate hiring decision.

Hypotheticals.

Hypotheticals, just situational, either like what have you done in this similar situation in the past, or what would you do in this kind of situation in the future? That is the most effective way to conduct interviews, that plus behavioral interviewing. But the kind of brain teaser type interviews have been shown to be—

Okay, not effective.

Not pretty ineffective.

Yeah, we have a question here.

I have a quick question. Yeah, because I agree with you that when you work with something, work on some project with somebody, you have a much better understanding on like how they work and how you work and expectations and stuff. So I agree with that. Sam Altman from Y Combinator also praises that you should always try to work with your potential new hires, potential co-founders, before you ever start a company. With that being said, you mentioned how, um, there's like 15% of CS graduates are African American, or like just a very low number of women or minorities are graduating with these CS degrees, and these people aren't necessarily in our networks normally because you said our networks are mostly like people who are like us. How can founders— like, do you have any practical advice for founders today to go out of their own networks, find those few people that are minorities or different from us in general, and work with them on a project somehow?

Is that—

This is an opportunity I can do that. Yeah, someone could do that startup. It's a great question. So I made that point sort of in the kind of process of getting to, unfortunately, we probably can't mostly do that. Mostly we do have to conduct interviews. But I think if you want to find people from different backgrounds, you have to kind of go to where those people might be. So if you're thinking about gender diversity, go to Women Who Code events. Get to know female engineers. Go to, start volunteering at organizations that are focused on getting more people of color into engineering because a lot of the volunteers at those organizations are from underrepresented backgrounds. But I think actually going to events, expanding your network and growing it, and then letting people know, this is what I want. I would love to build a diverse team and I'm trying to start to work on projects with people from backgrounds different than mine.

Is there an organization or conference that brings together minorities or people with different views with regular Silicon Valley engineers?

Regular? Not regular.

Sorry for the language. But I mean the typical—

Yeah. I don't think there's a conference specifically for that. There are conferences focused on diversity in tech. There are also conferences focused on particular groups like National Society for Black Engineers. NSBE has an annual conference. Yeah, there was a tech inclusion conference this year that I think will be from now on annually bringing together people who care about diversity in the tech industry. So those are good places to meet people, but I don't think there's a conference specifically aiming to do what you're talking about.

Okay, we have a question here and then there and then there. Okay.

I just had a very—

a question that I will hope for a very candid response, just in terms of the downside of these diversity conversations. And the reason why I'm saying this is because usually these conversations, people either roll their eyes or they're just really uncomfortable with this because there is a downside I perceive of these conversations because you look at diversity people, diverse people as quotas and not actually the purpose of having them in these organizations. Like for me, if I walk into a room, you immediately can recognize I am Black and that I am a woman. It takes time for you to recognize that I have an Ivy League background. I've done very well in my career and all the things I've done to actually be in this American democracy, to actually earn my place. And these discussions are constantly about quotas and how to be the best marketing company for having diversity. And so I just wanted to know your objective and candid response as to the downside of these conversations, to have a better quality conversation about this, because it really actually hurts us in the long run. It's almost like this conversation for getting to Ivy schools, the meritocracy of affirmative action versus legacy applicants. Both has an upside to get into elite institutions, but no one talks about legacy applicants and how they get in versus affirmative action as an example. So I just wanted to hear if any of you have that.

Yeah, I think that's a really good example. I mean, I think a lot of this is about the way we have the conversation. I don't know of any company that actually has quotas. I think it's funny when people think that people from underrepresented backgrounds are getting into companies because of some kind of affirmative action or quotas. I think it's actually the opposite. I think majority group members get a lot of affirmative benefits from having friends and networks with these companies and have an easier path in. So I think when people from underrepresented backgrounds get in, they've actually overcome more hurdles. I work with a lot of companies and I don't know a single company that either has a quota or hires people because they need to check a box. I think it's really about thinking about the fact that bringing together people from different backgrounds makes teams stronger. And that could be different in terms of gender or race. It's also helpful to hire people from different educational backgrounds. People, you know, you don't only want people that have gone to— so I'm working with a team right now where every single engineer on the team both graduated from Stanford CS program and previously worked at Facebook. That's a terrible team. Like, you don't want to hire people that have all come from the same exact background because when they approach a problem, they're gonna have a really similar framework for solving it. And so the manager on that team is really dedicated to just finding people that have different backgrounds. And it's not just about finding a woman or finding a person of color. It's really about finding people that have been educated in different ways. So I think your point is really well taken and I think there's often this— I think the discussion often moves towards people thinking we must be talking about quotas because we're talking about diversity. But I don't know of any company that's really approaching it that way. And I don't think that there's anyone that's getting into programs or into companies because of their identity.

Any question there?

Yeah, I just wanted to help answer Tim's question around what type of tools you can use. I just wanted to do a quick plug because there are actually startups being formed around this very issue. So one is JobWell. A couple friends of mine started that. They just passed through YC.

Jobwell.

Jobwell with a P. Oh, Jobwell.

Okay.

Diversity recruiting, like a LinkedIn for diversity applicants. And then also Blendoor, B-L-E-N-D-O-O-R, kind of like Glassdoor. Blendoor started by another friend, Stephanie. She actually, she created like a Tinder. It's almost like Tinder for diversity applicants to kind of tackle the unconscious bias that happens even through LinkedIn. Like, there's a kind of like an unconscious bias that happens. So essentially it's like a Tinder that has your, your essentially your resume but without like the face. Like, there isn't any sort of like, it's like a—

There's no depth.

Yeah, yeah.

So those are the two that are currently sort of like in the pipeline, Blendoor and—

And there are more. I mean, if you're talking about hiring for a company, there's a great startup called Gapjumpers that is all about producing a work sample to get an interview. So it's all blind, and it's like if your work product is good, you will get an interview at that company without respect for— they don't know your identity.

I will say I was really influenced as an editor by reading stories about blind auditions. And how in symphony orchestras in the US, when they started having people do auditions behind a screen so you could hear them but not see them, like almost overnight the makeup of orchestras in the US went from like 5% women to almost 50% women. So I was really influenced by that. So I wanted to do blind auditions for people who were applying for jobs as writers at VentureBeat. And I found that Gapjumpers might have been helpful. But I used Google Sheets, and I was like, you know, I used a Google Form, like fill out a form, like give me a sample work. Like I gave them an assignment saying like, here, write a story on X, and then they would fill that out. But I found that it was extremely laborious. And also, you know, this is useful not just for, you know, traditional kinds of diversity, but a lot of times people will give you their samples of things they've written before, and they'll be on fancy, well-designed websites like You know, Salon.com or Wired.com or something, and you'll take those more seriously than if it appeared on their own blog or on, you know, some trade newsletter or what have you. So like stripping out the formatting was really helpful, but it made it much harder to hire because I actually had to go through and read everything really carefully, right? It was so time-consuming.

You couldn't take all those shortcuts.

I know.

Oh, they wrote in Wired, they're probably fine.

Exactly. So you had a comment.

Oh, okay.

Okay, why don't you go first and then you can go. We'll come back to you.

So you guys talk about like the importance of having like a diverse startup team and all that. But what about the downsides though? So I read that basically like if you're a team of let's say like black women alone, you're like you only have a one percent chance of raising like VC money and like yeah the amount of money you raise. I forgot what the cap was, but usually they don't raise more than $2 million or something like that. Versus if you're a team of mostly black with then a white person, you raise more and your chances are more. And then if you're a team of all white people, you raise even more. So what are your thoughts on that?

Well, so the first example wasn't really a diverse team. So the benefits of diversity would exist in the second team that you said. But I think the fact that a group of all-white founders raises more in venture capital speaks to unconscious bias, and that sucks. It sucks that you might have to weigh as a founder, like, will VCs be biased against my team because we have a person of color on the team?

Because VCs are way less diverse than Silicon Valley at large.

Way less, and very stuck in old ways of thinking. VCs work a lot on pattern matching. The interesting thing, though, is that humans are notoriously bad at pattern matching. So it's not a great way to make decisions. You know, if I ask folks in here to think of what does the average successful startup founder look like, people will typically think of like a Mark Zuckerberg type of person, like young, maybe college dropout. It turns out that the average founder who successfully raises VC funding is 36 years old, has an advanced degree, has been working in the workforce for I think 8 years, these types of things. But venture capitalists think it's a pattern, these college dropouts. So we're bad at pattern matching. So I think, you know, I think there's a lot of work to be done in the VC industry to make sure that we don't see these patterns of prioritizing certain types of investments. There was also a study done where a male founder and a female founder pitched VC firms with the same exact idea, and they were coached on how to do the pitch. how to present it and all of these things, and the firms invested far more, or like would have invested far more in the male startup founders. There's a lot of research on bias in venture capital. So I think there's a lot of work to do there.

Just to be totally brutal about that though, that's like the landscape you have to deal with as a founder, right? I mean, if you want to raise venture capital.

Yeah, I think there are venture capitalists who are known for being far more thoughtful about this and far better than others. I think there are a lot of firms that understand that there's value in having founders and early startup teams from different backgrounds. So if that's what I had, those are the firms that I would be talking to.

Yeah, okay. You had another comment.

Just a quick note. I have a quick thumbs up on the work sample comment in terms of that being more sort of relevant than someone. I think not only is it more relevant, is it more relevant or beneficial, but it's actually advantageous to us as startups. As someone that passed through to my previous role, actually part of the interview process was actually sort of like completing a challenge that was posed to me in the interview process that was actually related to the role that I was applying for. So it's actually, as startup owners, we can actually use it to our advantage to actually in the interview process ask applicants Pose questions or give applicants challenges that we're actually dealing with. So essentially it's a way for you to kind of like get work done for your startup.

For free!

But like get work done for your startup and also test how you'll be able to actually— if you're actually a fit for the role itself.

Yeah, that's cool.

And I found it very beneficial as an applicant because I actually— because you know, usually when you're applying for a role, it's like this like nebulous You really don't know what you're applying for. You just know you need a job. And it kind of sounds like something you're interested in. But if you're actually able to kind of test out the role through the interview process, you're able to then also filter on your end whether or not this is a good fit for you.

So—

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We use work samples on our team for hiring. We're really small still, but we're hiring now and we use work samples. And I think it's exactly right. It both tells us how this person would get the work done that we need to get done and it Shows that person, what is this work going to look like here? Do you really like this?

You can also hire people as contractors first, right?

Or does that cost labor costs? Legally or strategically? Strategically, yes. But the problem is contractors— the law defines what is a contractor versus what is an employee. So if you're directing their work, if you're doing these things—

I guess what I'm saying is that if I want to try people out, I could go through an interview process and then hire 10 of them to do specific projects. Right? And then the 2 that are the best, then I hire on permanently.

Yeah, yeah, you could do that. Okay. So I mean, it might be a lot of work to manage that, but you could do it.

Yeah.

You got a comment?

Now I've heard— this could be incorrect— but I've heard that there's a considering H-1B visa differentials, and I was curious about your experience in advising on these kinds of hiring circumstances because you both get— you could theoretically get someone from another country, another perspective. But I've heard that there's a 20% or higher differential in the pay scale of someone who was brought in on an H-1B versus someone who was hired locally.

That they're paid more?

The person who was hired locally would be paid more.

Right.

H-1Bs are cheaper.

That's true.

Okay. So have you ever advised on those kinds of ethical differentials?

So say more. What do you think the ethical challenge is there?

Well, I mean, you're hiring a person for the same job.

And paying them less.

And paying them less, right? And it's kind of taking a lane that is open and that is supposed to be, okay, let's bring in folks from other walks of life or entirely different countries.

In this case, entirely different countries.

But then you're still getting paid in a totally different way for the same job.

Yeah, I think that's problematic. I think paying 2 people that are doing the same job different amounts, even if the market makes that a logical choice is problematic. So I haven't advised on that though. I try to steer clear of like H-1B things because there's so many legal implications and I'm not an immigration lawyer. But like ethically, I think that's problematic.

So we have another question.

Yeah. So I would say the economic evidence is actually, a lot of people would say, not so compelling. So there's a lot of research that shows correlation between companies that have diversity in senior levels or on their boards and financial success. All of those studies are correlation, right? Not causation. So it's like that could be, it's kind of chicken and egg. Maybe they were doing well so they could afford to go bring in people with different backgrounds. Who knows? The research that I find really compelling is this research done on small-scale teams that shows that teams that have more diversity out-innovate homogeneous teams. But that research hasn't ever been translated to a company level. And I think there are so many counterexamples, right? Like Google is not super diverse. It's incredibly successful. Apple the same. Or you look at companies in other countries that don't have people from different backgrounds. So a lot of people point to a lot of the Japanese companies. say, well, they're successful. So I think we have so many anecdotes to the contrary that I think you might have to be inspired by something more than that research to care about this. So I think the consumer logic is a really, really important one. So if you— there was an example that I heard recently, and I don't know the whole story, but it was like J.Crew and they were doing— not J.Crew, Old Navy. And they were doing a big advertising campaign in Mexico using a soccer player. And And it turns out that the player they picked was like not cool in Mexico. And like they didn't have anyone on their team to advise them about that apparently. And so the whole thing was like this multimillion-dollar campaign that was a total flop because they picked the wrong soccer player. So I think there are a lot of reasons why having people from different backgrounds, especially when you're selling to those groups, is really important. But I don't think the evidence is so overwhelming. And there's certainly no evidence to suggest that you will fail.

So tell me about your startup and what you do.

Yeah, so we're kind of— we're not a tech startup, we're a consulting firm, and we advise innovative companies, mostly technology companies, on how to build more inclusive cultures so that they can more effectively recruit, develop, retain people from all different backgrounds. And so we take a really social science-heavy, data-driven approach to helping companies think about how to build more inclusive cultures. My partners, everyone else on my team besides me has an advanced degree in the social sciences. I have a law degree. It's not as relevant. But what we do is we use data to understand where the barriers are coming into play. So, for example, on the recruiting side, what we often find is companies say, oh, we don't have anyone at the top of our funnel. We're not bringing anyone in. We look at their data and we say, yeah, you do. Yeah, you are. Problem is they're not passing through this one stage of your process.

Mm-hm.

And when we look at written interview feedback, we see that there may be some kinds of bias that are preventing you actually from hiring these folks that you've brought into your process. Or we'll look at what's going on in a company internally and we'll see that, hey, women are advancing far more slowly than men throughout the various stages of your company. That's interesting. Or, hey, women's performance scores are on the whole one level lower than men's across your company or across a particular org. So we want to figure out where the specific barriers in any given company exist. And they differ company to company.

Mm-hmm.

And then once we know what those are, We draw on social science research in fields like psychology, organizational behavior, sociology to design tools and interventions and strategies that can actually move the needle specifically where we've identified that barrier. So if the barrier is in a particular type of interview you're conducting, we're gonna make small changes to actually shift the way that you conduct that interview to produce more objective outcomes.

Mm-hm.

And, you know, to the point about, about, you know, quotas and some of these concerns before, 98% of what we do at our company is try to help companies implement processes that lead to more objective, better decisions. So if you have an objective hiring process, you will make better hiring decisions. Disproportionately, you will hire more people from underrepresented backgrounds because those are the people who are being most harmed by your ad hoc, subjective, flawed decision-making. Similarly, internally, if you create a more objective process for evaluating people and promoting people, you will make better and more accurate promotion decisions. Disproportionately, people from underrepresented backgrounds will benefit more from that because those are the people that are most likely to be harmed by, again, subjective ad hoc decision-making.

So since you're data-driven, can you point to results like that that are actually specific results?

Yeah, so we were working with one company where women were being promoted at a lower rate than men. It was a really interesting thing, the company thought that the reason women were being promoted at a lower rate than men was because the promotion committee was all male, which doesn't seem good. But we looked at the data and we found out that that actually wasn't the problem. Once women were being considered by the promotion committee for promotion, they were promoted out of that committee at the same rate as men. The problem is they weren't being nominated to the committee—

Mm-hm.

by their managers at the same rate. So we had kind of an interesting challenge. It was like, okay, all-male promotion committee isn't contributing to any disparities. But the optics of that aren't good, and it seems unfair that all of the decision makers in this company would be male. But where the real problem is, is who managers are nominating. So we rolled out an intervention to managers to communicate more clearly what the criteria were for promotions, that we knew that they were less likely to default to unconscious bias and more likely to rely on very clear level descriptions about when someone on their team was ready for promotion. And we also changed the makeup of the committee. Because again, it doesn't seem fair to have all of the decision makers be male. And we closed the gap. So at this particular company, after those interventions, the promotion rate was exactly the same. I'll wanna see it one more cycle to make sure that it persists.

That it sticks, yeah. Were those controversial changes?

No.

In the company? Everyone was cool?

Everybody was cool. I mean, the good thing is, again, So everything we do is about enabling more objective decision-making. So it's not like anyone thinks this is going to result in any unfair outcomes or women being promoted who don't deserve to be. All we're doing is clarifying what it takes to be promoted and then creating a promotion committee that better reflects the makeup of the organization. These are things that fundamentally seem like good ideas and fair—

Very hard to argue.

—fair processes.

Yeah. What kinds of companies do you work with?

Mostly high-growth, startups. So companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, Udacity, those are some of our clients. We're also starting to work with a couple of much larger Fortune 500 financial services companies, and there's a lot of differences there.

Mm-hmm.

But with startups, what it's really about is getting all of the processes in place that will actually make their jobs easier. So once you're, let's say, a 500-person company, if you don't have a good process for the way you interview, we're going to help you create that. And that's just something you need as a company anyway. Disproportionately, it's going to have a positive benefit on outcomes for diversity, but it's also just something you need to have as a company at some point. Same thing with internal performance reviews, promotions. That's a lot of what we spend our time on. With these big financial services companies, it's a lot of like, wow, you've been doing this really wrong for 20 years. We've got to change this. But with startups, it's great. It's like you haven't been doing anything. All we need to do is help you create these things.

I suspect you might find that, well, a little more resistance and controversy at the big Fortune 500 financial companies.

Oh, it's such a pain, yeah. I mean, it's resistance, but it's also so bureaucratic. So every decision needs to be checked by like 30 people. Whereas in a startup, you have like a CEO or head of engineering say, yeah, let's do that. And then you can just go do it.

Now, you were practicing law before, right, in this field?

Yeah.

You were doing—

I was suing companies who got this stuff wrong.

Oh, OK.

Essentially.

And now you're helping them avoid suits. All right. Why'd you switch? That sounds fun.

It's not. Yeah, it kind of sucks. So if you're litigating— is anybody here a lawyer making a career change?

No lawyers?

So if you're litigating, what happens is you're representing one person. And in the course of representing that one person, you find out all of these shitty things the company's doing, like, that are resulting in all of these disparities. And then if you have a good case— and all of my clients had good cases— it settles. And what that means is that person gets out of this bad situation, but you leave behind hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of other employees that are at this same company that has all these flawed processes.

Because the settlements don't include, like, you have to fix this.

Very rarely. Yeah, very rarely. Or even if they do, it's like there's very little follow-up. So it's really hard. So for me, I was getting really frustrated because I was suing tech companies and other companies and seeing like, oh, you know, Company X has no written process at all that determines the way that promotion decisions are made. It's just up to managers to make them. And like, guess what? That results in men getting promoted at like 5x the rate of women in this company.

Mm-hm.

This is a really common pattern. There's a lot of research on the fact that when promotion decisions are made in an ad hoc way, They tend to be highly biased. So I was seeing these things, and then I was negotiating a settlement for one person who had been affected, and my impact was so limited. And I really thought that, okay, if companies are serious about building better processes, making more objective decisions, creating more inclusive cultures, I could have a much bigger impact by helping them do that than by suing them one by one each time someone fucks it up.

Right. Well, that's cool. Yes?

Hi. Thank you very much for your talk so far. I've got 2 questions. What are some of the ways you've been penalized for doing the work you do right now, and how have you dealt with that in your personal life and in your professional life? And second question is, it's been shown that whether it's ethnic minorities or women, for example, the majority of people that tend to employ people in this workforce tend to be founders who are from those sorts of backgrounds. And what have you seen so far as to the ways that have been more to kind of help founders who are from these different backgrounds to be a bit more active and also to get people from these backgrounds to become more founders?

Those are both really good questions. I'll start with the second one. So founders from backgrounds that are underrepresented, like how can they get more involved in helping build this?

Yeah, and how can we get more people from these backgrounds to become founders? Because they tend to employ people from diverse backgrounds as well.

Yeah, they do. It's true. I think one problem is that A lot of founders tend to come from tech companies. And so until— this is one of my goals with the work we're doing. If we can help tech companies see the value in people that they're not currently hiring, get those people in, I think those people are gonna be more likely to become founders because you've had access. I think the venture capital world needs to do a better job. I think, for example, connecting to groups from underrepresented backgrounds and saying we're interested in funding not just white men. We're interested in funding different types of people, so reach out to us if you have an idea. I think the research that we have scares a lot of people away because we see, like, VCs are more likely to invest in groups that don't have people of color on those teams. And so for VCs that actually care about this, they should say the opposite. Say, like, we want to invest in all types of founders and we're gonna be actively looking for founders from different kinds of backgrounds. And there are a couple of firms that have started to do that a little bit. But I think it's really about just increasing representation in the tech ecosystem more broadly. When there are more people from underrepresented backgrounds in tech companies, I think we'll see more founders. When there are more people from underrepresented backgrounds in venture capital investing, I think we will see more founders from underrepresented backgrounds being invested in. So I think it all feeds—

Connects each other.

Yeah, I think so. I think the lack of diversity in the VC world is just a huge problem. And then your first question was personal. Can you say it? Can you phrase it again?

Because we— a lot of people face this issue, but you're dealing with it, I guess, head-on. Yeah, we deal with it in different ways, right? And I'm sure you've been penalized for it in your own— whether it's your professional life or your personal life. And I don't know what are some of the ways you've been penalized for doing what you're doing right now, I suppose. And also, how have you dealt with that? Because it's a different challenge that everyone faces.

Yeah, I mean, I haven't really in starting this company had a lot of pushback from— I've written articles and I get really nasty comments on them, but they're just kind of hilarious. People will call me a lesbian. I'm like, that's not an insult. I don't know what your point is.

All right.

I think it's a given at this point that if you're female or you have a female-sounding name and you write anything on the internet, you're gonna get—

And then if you're writing about diversity, oof.

Yeah, exactly.

So I get a lot of that hatred. That doesn't really affect— if people that don't believe in the work I'm doing say nasty stuff, I'm like, awesome. You're all like— they're not very smart people that are commenting on these things. So that's fine. I think where I struggle is that people have a lot of different ideas about the way to do this work, and a lot of really good ideas. And my company's focused on a really specific set of stuff. Like, we are not, for example, focused really heavily on the entrepreneurial community. Not to say we never will be, but we're not focused on VC. We're not focused on increasing diversity in schools. We're really, really narrowly focused on improving processes that companies use to make decisions, to make those processes more objective. And some people that believe in this work and care about it think that what we're doing is either not the right thing to focus on or not enough. And the hard thing about me for that is I don't disagree. Like, there are a lot of other really valid things to focus on and we could probably be doing more. But we're doing the stuff that we know how to do. You know, I've hired social scientists. We're doing the stuff that we know how to do and we're trying to do that stuff really well. And I really support other organizations that are tackling other pieces of this that are outside my area of sort of expertise. But that's what's hard for me is when people that I actually kind of agree with tell me we're not doing enough or not doing the right thing. I'm like, that's fair.

You had a question, yeah. And then you.

Why were you suing companies for lack of diversity or for that kind of thing?

Not for lack of diversity. So I was suing companies for discrimination. So a woman is in the same job as her male counterpart and is being paid less. Or being passed over for promotion time and time again when she's clearly gotten the best performance reviews on the team. Or a manager sexually harassing her and she reports it and then she gets fired. Those are the types of lawsuits I was litigating.

Like the Ellen Pao case.

Because in certain cases, did you ever consider that that may be the best option for that employee to be in that company in that position?

Say more. I think my answer's gonna be no, but—

What I mean is that once you've Once you get in the job market, you can find a certain job, and basically you are free to go away from that company whenever you want. So if you're getting discriminated, like, it's not even necessary to go to court. You can just move to another company.

So basically we don't need anti-discrimination law?

Well, my point is that it's really a delicate point. The government starts intervening in companies. So basically, once you start doing that, you are opening the doors for the government to say whatever they want to make me do for my company. So let's say you have to hire this type of people, or you have to maintain this person in that position in my company, in my private company. So that's a really delicate point.

No, it's not delicate. Those 2 things are entirely different. The government saying you have to hire and keep that person in a role is very different than having laws that protect people and ensure people aren't discriminated against. These two things are entirely different. But you're not. Let me finish answering your question. You and I probably just have really different political views. A lot of people think that you shouldn't have any laws that protect against discrimination. We shouldn't have any laws that protect people because it's a free market and everyone should just do their thing. I fundamentally disagree with that. I think people are mistreated by companies. I think if a woman, for example, is sexually harassed by a company, it is not an adequate remedy to say she can leave and go work somewhere else. Because the process of doing that, the emotional toll that being sexually harassed or discriminated against takes on people, it's not fair to say that the burden should be on that person to go work somewhere else. That's why we have laws. And you and I can disagree as to whether those laws should exist. I think they very much should, and I think people should take advantage of them when they're mistreated.

David, isn't that influenced by the fact that you're from Guatemala?

Are you using that?

Is that influenced from your background in Guatemala?

Are you looking at specifically—

Well, no, actually in Guatemala you have— no, I was referring to the US. Like, not even to the US, I mean in general. Once you open the door for the government to start intervening in certain areas, it can get very nasty.

There's no evidence for that in employment law. There's no evidence that once you can sue a company for discrimination, then you can then go and do all sorts of other things They're in different parts of— written in different parts of the legal code. There's just no—

A quick comment. I agree on protecting the individual regarding discrimination, sexual harassment, and all that. I'm just curious and a little concerned about whether the government should start setting certain quotas or— because it is happening. In some countries, for example, you have government has put certain quotas on how many women should be in a company or in the Congress.

On the boards and stuff, yeah. That hasn't even come close to happening in the US. I don't think it ever would happen in the US. I think we have a really different culture here that doesn't believe in things like quotas. A lot of people hate those things. So I don't think we'll ever see quotas happen here. But it's a totally different thing than suing companies for discrimination and harassment. Those two things are just— it's not like a slippery slope. They're just completely different.

We had a question there and then you.

What are your thoughts on sharing pay rates within a company? So I think it's great with a couple of caveats. So when I was a lawyer, I actually worked on California's latest equal pay law that recently passed. And one of the goals of that is to encourage more pay transparency. I think where problems come into play is that a lot of employers retaliate against employees when they voluntarily discuss their pay. I think knowing what our colleagues are paid is one of the only ways and best ways of knowing if we're paid fairly. So there was this case that went to the Supreme Court. Lilly Ledbetter sued Goodyear Tire because she found out after 40 years that she'd been making far less than her male colleagues. in the exact same role. Significantly less. And she found out in a really random way. Someone left a sticky note on her desk and said, you're being underpaid. She went to the Supreme Court and they said, it's too late. You can't sue now for something that's been happening for 40 years. And then Congress wrote a law and overturned that decision, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. But we know that a lot of people are being paid unfairly and just have no idea that that's happening. So I don't think the solution is necessarily for companies to tell everyone what everyone makes. I think there are some confidentiality concerns there. If you're a company that pays for performance, 2 people in the same role could be making different amounts. But I think some companies are trying to solve this with having pay bands. So once you are at a certain level, like, you're in this band and there's a range of what you should make. But I think, like, at a minimum, employees should be able to discuss their pay with one another without fear of getting in trouble from the company. And I think moving more towards— we're so, like, awkward about pay in the country. No one likes to talk about it. But I think moving more towards a place where people actually can talk about what they make will close a lot of the compensation gaps that we see now.

I've worked at companies, by the way, where it was a fireable offense to talk about your salary with somebody else.

Yeah. It's actually— and that's actually like depending on the— so it's actually illegal. There's national labor relations—

Now you tell me.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's— but so many companies, it's against the law, and yet so many companies have these rules in their handbooks that say you can't talk about your pay. There's like a federal law that says you can't have a rule like that.

That's good to know.

Just speaking of pay, like, so when you litigated people, these companies, when a woman was making less money than the male counterpart in the same role, and say you won the case, now she has to get paid the same amount, how does that affect the culture? Like, doesn't she feel kind of like she kind of earned her pay, that kind of thing? And then I'm thinking like her point of view, like, is she just like back in her normal Company role, like, does she feel the same way? Like, what's the aftermath of that?

Yeah, so I think like it depends. The culture probably depends a lot on whether this is a class action, which equal pay cases often are. So every woman in a particular organization has been paid less. That's something where it's just like a way bigger deal. Everyone knows that it's happening. If it's me as like a single individual person, keep in mind that not everyone in the company knows this is happening. But for the women that I've represented, Or worked with in equal pay cases or even in discrimination cases where they end up staying at the company and there's some sort of change made, they feel a lot better. They feel like, I finally feel valued. I finally am being paid what I found out that this guy that is my colleague is being paid. It's like people finally feel like they're being treated fairly. But some people that face discrimination decide to leave because, yeah, pay me back pay for all these years that you hadn't been paying me fairly. I don't wanna keep working here.

So I wanna turn the discussion a little bit back toward— away from litigation, back towards strategies and startups and stuff. Yeah, back to the law. I wanna ask the flip side of what you asked, which is, how do you get more people like me, who are like white male guys who've been working in Silicon Valley for 20 years, to care about this? Because, I mean, they're filling the ranks of companies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft, and outside the Valley, Amazon, right? So how do you get people like that to care?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I do it a lot in the one-on-one work that I do with companies, conversations I have with CEOs and with heads of engineering. But I think, as I think about it, there's some bias in the companies that I work with, because they are companies that have reached out to us and that actively already care about this by virtue of the fact that they reached out to us. So they already have CEOs who really care.

Mm-hm.

I don't know that I'm gonna be able to, that I'm the right person to make someone care who doesn't care. I think what my company is trying to do is work with leaders that do care and show them how to do it.

Mm-hm.

There may be other people that are really good at, I don't really enjoy having conversations with people that are just like, I don't believe in this, I don't care, I think this is a waste of my time. I've tried having those conversations and they don't tend to get very far. Mm-hm. Where I really like to focus my time is people are like, I don't know if I should care. Like, why does this matter? What would I really be doing differently? Like, those are the people I like to talk to because they're not so closed-minded. They haven't totally shut out the idea of this being valuable. They just need to learn more. For people that are in that 10% of just not caring, I don't know what to do. But for people that are right here in the middle, I think it's actually like talking about the impact this can have, how it can benefit your business, the fact that the things that you need to do to create a more diverse and inclusive company are completely aligned with the things that you're gonna wanna do anyway to create a better company.

Yes. So tell me—

Can I add a point to you?

Yeah.

What you said was such a good point because it's not gonna help the answer, but just to add to the point, because in my research into domestic abuse cases, I found that apparently with— as sad as the topic is, that one thing that really cut the figures in half is actually educating the men about it means and how to actually truly go about healthy relationships within the relationship itself. So that's one approach to tackle the issue altogether.

Yeah, we do a lot of education and awareness-raising stuff. We do a lot of workshops on unconscious bias and how it affects our decision-making. So we do that a lot with companies, and we find that people that just didn't totally get it before start to understand.

So that's cool, because a lot of these guys are unlikely to go to a diversity conference on their own, right? Until they've reached the point where they're already like, I know I care about this and this is important. So if you can bring those workshops to them, that's good. To their companies, yeah. What are the companies that are your clients telling you about the benefits of this? Like, I mean, obviously they think it's important enough to pay your firm to do this work. So do they see financial benefits from that? Is it cultural? Is it just like you're saying, like, we're a more innovative company now because we're more diverse?

Yeah, I would say it really varies company to company. So we have a couple of clients that I think the CEOs are motivated primarily by sort of a social justice rationale. They think like technology is contributing in significant ways, more probably than any other industry, to our future and defining what the future looks like. And the idea that entire communities are being left out of that process is just problematic. It's problematic in a lot of ways. It's problematic in that we are going to miss out on ideas. that would come from those communities. It's problematic in that it's going to perpetuate inequality. So I have a couple of CEOs that I work with that that is really their primary motivator.

It's just a values-based decision.

Values-based. Other leaders that I work with, I think, think about it from a sort of financial standpoint, which is a recruiting standpoint. Like, there is talent graduating from schools that we are failing to capture somehow, and we are bringing in people from other countries. We're investing so much in recruiting, but there are people right here in the United States graduating that we aren't hiring for some reason, because our networks are homogeneous or because of the language we use in job descriptions or because of unconscious bias. And that's just a waste of money because there are people that we could hire and that's what we need to be doing.

And if you've ever tried to hire an engineer around here, it's like any pool of hireable talent is great.

Right. We want to open up our—

Yeah, you need that.

Yes. So we want to open up our doors as wide as possible and we realize that Although that's what we thought we were doing, we actually weren't. You know, it's not a huge surprise that if your website, your career page, shows all white males, white women and people of color are gonna be less interested in applying for jobs because they might question whether they fit in there. There's a ton of research on that.

Mm-hmm.

So there are small things we're doing that we don't realize we're doing that are shutting people out. And so a lot of, a lot of our clients work with us for that reason, like, how can we make ourselves really the type of inclusive culture that we've always thought we were, that we want to be. And then I think there's a third set that are motivated sort of by the more financial reasons we talked about before, innovation, understanding their users and their consumers.

Okay, more questions from you guys. Yes?

I have a question on the university level and your thoughts on diverse student groups and whether they're good or bad. I've seen both sides. I was part of Native American Student Union, totally great, all that. But I also ran the Entrepreneurship Club, and we tried to change the diversity, realized it was like 90% white males in there. We were trying to figure out what we were doing, and when we looked at it, it wasn't what we were doing, it was that there were other organizations out there. Like, all the girls that were interested in business were in the Women in Business Club, or African Americans were in the African American in Business Club. And so it wasn't that there interested in our organization was that they were already affiliated with another. It's like some of those groups, like I totally understand the diversity organizations, that they help, but at certain points I felt like it held people back from like coming together, and what your thoughts are on that.

I've never actually like been asked that question before. I think it's a really, really good one. I've been asked the question in a slightly different way, which is I've been asked by women of color whether they should be in the women's group in their company or the group, Latino group or African American group. And it's really interesting.

Or the group that has one person in it that's like women of color.

Women of color, right. It's interesting because there are reasons why companies are called employee resource groups. student groups, why it actually makes sense to spend time with people from similar backgrounds to your own. Sometimes sharing the challenges that you're going to face or that you're going to have to overcome and sharing strategies for doing that is just like, they're unique challenges so it's worth having that time. But if that takes away from you being part of these other groups where maybe you're going to get access to people who are different and access to different types of opportunities, I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I don't think the answer is that the student groups for people from underrepresented backgrounds are bad, but maybe the answer is that the 2 groups need to plan events more together or do things to maybe bring them together more, and then maybe people will say, oh, it's worth my time to be in both. Those types of things. Certainly make sure that the group that you were in isn't meeting at the same time as those other groups, stuff like that, but I think there's space for both of them, and figuring out ways to bring them together would be what I would think would be most helpful.

Yes? This is a genuine question. Can you help me understand the difference between diversity in regards to personal characteristics, let's say ethnicity, age, gender, with diversity in terms of background, different background, divergent thinking, and just different thinking view? In the same personal characteristics. Because for me, I don't really care about diversity in the sense of personal traits. I do care about people having different views of mine, but people that I can— if I'm building a company, I'm building my team. I want people also— I also want that subjective decision-making. I understand the objective of people actually being able to do the job, but I also like the subjective decision-making because there are people that I'm going— probably going to have more synergy to work with, and actually it's going to be better in like my perspective of building my company to the vision I want to achieve. So can you help me understand like what's the difference or what are the pros and cons of that kind of diversity versus the other one?

Yeah, I mean, I think diversity of thought which is essentially kind of what you're saying, diversity of perspectives, diversity of thought, or skills, educational background, diversity of background that's not demographic, let's say, is also super important. I think one thing I think people sometimes do is they separate the two like they're always different and they don't ever align. But the experience of growing up in a different country or growing up as a woman or growing up As a Latina woman in the US, these are all differences that very often give people different perspectives on the world. That doesn't mean that, you know, I think if you were to ask like who is more diverse, like a woman and a man that graduate from Stanford the same year and grew up in the same neighborhood, or 2 men, one who went to Stanford and one who grew up in the Midwest and went to a totally different type of school, I don't think like we can measure or value like what is more diverse than what other thing. But I think as a founder you have to decide what matters to you, how are you going to assess diversity of thought or diversity of skills or diversity of perspective. For me, those things matter as does demographic diversity because I think that when you bring together people from different demographic backgrounds, those people do have different life experiences that are really, really relevant and contribute to the way that they do work. So I think both are important.

I have a question about age diversity, which is why do you think that's such— I mean, it's not age is not measured in those statistics that are being reported by these big companies, and it's often not brought up in discussions. Why is that?

Ageism is such an interesting thing. You will hear people say stuff about people over, let's say, the age of 50, but people that are older than the—

Yeah, I mean, like, Mark Zuckerberg has said that.

Paul Graham. You'll hear people say stuff that they won't say about Other underrepresented groups. Young people are smarter. Yeah, this is the classic thing. It's so interesting. I don't know if we feel a little bit freer saying stuff like that because we know that we will all be older one day, and so we don't feel like we're discriminating against some other group. Like, I'm gonna be older too, so it's okay to say this. I don't know, but it's really weird. You'll hear people just say objectively ageist stuff.

Also, Vinod Khosla said something like that, and I'm like, Dude, you are actually kind of getting on there in years yourself.

That's so funny. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the people that say it are not always like super young.

Exactly.

Which is interesting. But maybe that's why, of course you feel like you can say that then, right? Like you feel like, oh, I fit within this group so I can say this extremely offensive thing. Silicon Valley is interesting. It's one of the few industries that I think does not value experience. And I think a lot of companies could— would be wise to think more about the experience people have had, especially in an industry that's like Silicon Valley that goes through cycles.

Mm-hm.

It would be very helpful to have someone who'd been through a similar cycle before and could see, like, okay, this might be where we're headed. Here are some of the things we might need to do. I think until we start to have measurements around this stuff, it's gonna be hard to talk about the nature of the problem Yeah, I mean, it's also sort of the nature of technology.

If technology is changing over so quickly, you know, 10 years go by and like development tools are totally different, architectures are different. Like, I mean, I don't know. That may be built into the thinking, right? We have 5 more minutes. OK, more questions. Here's somebody who hasn't asked yet, and then I'll come back to you.

We only have time for one last question, I think.

Just one question then. Okay, sorry. Because you're all starting new companies, you're saying?

But since, for example, if I put a job posting up saying my startup is hiring, in Silicon Valley, maybe 95% of all people that inquire about the job is going to be male. So how do you change that?

Yeah, I would think a lot about the language in your job description. A ton of research suggests that the way job descriptions are written, the language you use, can have a significant impact on the diversity of the applicant pool. So words like rock star and ninja have been shown to turn off female applicants. Female applicants are far less likely to apply to jobs that say those things. Hard driver, party culture, some of these types of things are just really unappealing to certain types of candidates. So thinking about creating a job description that is like, be really careful with your words. There's research online that can show you how to do this. There's also a startup called Text I think they have free trials.

Yeah.

And you can input your job description and it'll note some of these problematic words for you based on machine learning. They've actually shown this will lead to fewer female applicants. And then explicitly stating on your job description either that you're an equal opportunity employer or that you actually value building a diverse company. Our job descriptions say that. So do a lot of our clients like Pinterest actually say that we value We value having a diverse team and are an equal opportunity employer, something like that. Research shows that small statements like that increase significantly the diversity of the applicant pool. So those are 2 things. And then the 3rd is to try to go outside your referral network or grow your referral network so that it's not only people who have backgrounds, educational and whatnot, similar to yours that are even seeing your job descriptions.

If you use language like that, like we're an equal opportunity employer, are you incurring a legal obligation or is that just—

No, you already have a legal obligation as an employer to be an equal opportunity employer, so you're just stating the fact.

It's just stating the obvious.

Yeah.

Okay.

No, you can't discriminate anyway, but this is just like telling people we know that. We're not going to do it.

Okay. All right. So I always thought that was like a formula that meant we were like a special kind of different company or something. Okay. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have. So everyone, please put your hands together and thank Joelle. Thank you. That was really good.