I'm happy to see there's been a lot more discussion lately in Silicon Valley and entrepreneurial communities, in general, about the importance of role models who are people of color and women. This article only covers one side of that (not that it is less interesting or touching for not covering the other side)...the other side is that until white folks in our industry, or in other industries, are regularly seeing and interacting with people of color and women in leadership roles, we will likely continue to allow unintentional biases to affect our decisions and our workplaces, probably to the detriment of all (but mostly to the detriment of people of color and women).
There have been a number of studies showing the unintentional white supremacist thinking that even folks who think of themselves as progressive and anti-racist exhibit (and even people of color and women can fall prey to these same biases against their own race or gender). That perpetuates a cycle that can only be broken by visible disruption of the cycle. i.e. people who aren't historically in leadership roles, who aren't historically in tech roles, being empowered and successful in those roles.
Note that I'm not making governmental policy suggestions here. I'm making cultural and systemic observations. I don't know the solutions, really, but awareness and acknowledgment of the problem is certainly one of the early steps.
Anyway, I loved having a good barber shop. I haven't found a good one since moving back to Texas, but it really is a nice thing to have a regular barber who does a nice job, and knows and cares about his community. It's unfortunate that there are so few barbers left...they've been replaced by the chain haircutter places that hire people straight out of beauty school; those businesses are rarely worker-owned (they rent the chairs, or are part-time employees), and rarely have any significant ties to the community (though they are often franchises, possibly owned by someone in the same city or, at least, the same state).
There is a very straightforward way to mitigate the effect of biases. Make everything as algorithmic as possible and don't use biasing factors as inputs to the algorithms. This also fixes more biases than just the the ones with sympathetic victims - you'll hire both the woman and the ugly socially awkward guy with kickass github profiles.
Unintentional bias lives in the subjective and human parts of our procedures. The fewer decisions humans make, the less bias you see.
See also this blog post I wrote recently. Drivers I flag on the street explicitly and intentionally discriminate against me about 80% of the time. With Uber/Ola/Taxi4sure it's 0%. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/why_i_like_uber.html
Nobody disagrees with that. But 100 years of management research, and we're nowhere near an objective measure for what makes a good hire.
The objective measure for an Uber ride is orders of magnitude simpler: "is reasonably civilised, unlikely to soil the car or abuse the driver" and even then, their approach to deciding who fits, is to just try, then kick you off the system if you don't live up to the criteria.
We've got lots of great techniques that apply in specific cases. Work sample tests and intelligence tests (admittedly illegal in the US), for example - tokenadult has a long linkdump that backs this up. If I recall right, tptacek has also done this in practice and had it work excellently.
Further, even if you can only systematize part of the process, that still helps you debug. If women all get rejected on the (blind) coding test then you don't need to waste time looking for bias. If women get rejected at the culture fit interview then you might want to look for bias at that stage.
Excellent points - raising awareness by sharing these type of experiences is part of the reason why I've finally begun to blog. It's important not only for people of color working in or aspiring to work in the tech industry, but also for the demographic that doesn't understand what it's like to be a black unicorn in a tech world. It raises the empathy levels of everyone involved.
It's important for people to have role models they can identify with. And role models are selected by those who are looking for them, not by the government.
Government can definitely play a role, however, in how many kids grow up to become role models. We could talk about the prison industrial complex and the rate at which it imprisons young black and brown folks, compared to white folks, even for crimes that are committed by white folks at the same rate or higher (like drug crimes; white folks do more drugs and serve less time for it than black folks). Felons don't often become leaders in the business world.
There are systemic changes that are needed to fix this problem. I didn't think it was particularly relevant to this article so I explicitly excluded it from my comment, but one cannot deny that government plays a huge role in all of this.
The problems of today are only due to the roles government was playing yesterday. The government only needs to do less and society will fix itself. The people are in prison only because of government in the first place. Felons are only restricted from working because of the government. The danger of saying it's the government's job is we as individuals begin to absolve ourselves of responsibility, because we start to think its someone else's problem.
> The government only needs to do less and society will fix itself.
And by "fix itself" you mean it will shift even more wealth from the lower 75% to the top 1% - who will step in to fill the power void.
"Money begets money, power begets power." Society is full of self-reinforcing feedback loops like that. You need a damping factor that prevents any single individual or corporation from amassing too much power.
Compared to the poor in developing and undeveloped countries where people earn $5 a day, your wealth and power relative to them might as well be the same as the wealth and power from 0.1% percenter relative to you. Them looking at you would feel the same as you (assuming $100,000 income) looking at a CEO making $5 million a year.
The only question is, with your wealth and power, how will you diffuse your power to reduce the world's inequality? If you can solve this problem, you can show the example for your family and close friends. If your family and close friends can solve this problem, so can your community, your neighbourhood, the rest of your city and nation.
It's not a problem that can be solved by my "wealth and power" (both of which are in rather meager supply).
It's an issue of mentality. A society is what it is because its members share a set of assumptions, ideas, mentalities. The one-percenters get even more one-percent-y every year because we all hold certain "truths" to be "self-evident".
For starters, we need less individualism. I'm not saying less individual freedom, mind you.
> It's not a problem that can be solved by my "wealth and power" (both of which are in rather meager supply).
You have an observation shared with thousands of millionaires in NYC.
I'm helping my company setup a software development office in South Africa. It won't do much, but it'll provide half a dozen individuals with well paying jobs and diffuse some wealth we collect from Fortune 500 companies.
I'm also planning a trip to a developing country, paid for by that government, to deliver a class to local CS graduates there on how to become a contractors working with projects paying $50+ an hour. It won't do much but if I can help one or two individuals do this I'd be very happy. I was lucky when I traveled there for vacation, managed to talk to someone who works with the government's ministry of education.
I've only been working full time as a software engineer and formally graduated only last May and this is what I'm doing.
My wealth and power is likely more meagre than yours - but it is a lot less meagre than many others.
I hope one day you'll find your own way to help solve problems you see in this world, too.
I'm an anarchist. You're preaching to the choir on that front. I think the police soft strike in NYC is the most fun thing in the world right now.
But, until the rest of the world is convinced that police are an outdated artifact of a dark age in human history and should be abolished, we have to reform the laws that inflict "justice" dramatically unevenly across races and classes.
I think, to improve the environment around us, what matters most is our mindset. If the way we think is best suited to the environment we aspire to live in, the environment will change. To reduce the people's dependence on the government, independence as a trait must be promoted. That means convincing people their lives are up to them, and not to wait for the government to do something. You know as well as I do the governments of 2015 are dysfunctional and power hungry enough they're not going to do anything of the sort you're hoping for, even if it earnestly tries, even ObamaCare as well as interference in Syria and Iraq was a mess.
To change the world, we first cultivate ourselves, and then our family, community, and radiate outwards, and finally the world will be changed.
Confucius
When things are investigated, then true knowledge is achieved; when true knowledge is achieved, then the will becomes sincere; when the will is sincere, then the heart is set right (or then the mind sees right); when the heart is set right, then the personal life is cultivated; when the personal life is cultivated, then the family life is regulated; when the family life is regulated, then the national life is orderly; and when the national life is orderly, then there is peace in this world.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 54.
What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honoured from generation to generation.
There have been a number of studies showing the unintentional white supremacist thinking that even folks who think of themselves as progressive and anti-racist exhibit (and even people of color and women can fall prey to these same biases against their own race or gender). That perpetuates a cycle that can only be broken by visible disruption of the cycle. i.e. people who aren't historically in leadership roles, who aren't historically in tech roles, being empowered and successful in those roles.
Note that I'm not making governmental policy suggestions here. I'm making cultural and systemic observations. I don't know the solutions, really, but awareness and acknowledgment of the problem is certainly one of the early steps.
Anyway, I loved having a good barber shop. I haven't found a good one since moving back to Texas, but it really is a nice thing to have a regular barber who does a nice job, and knows and cares about his community. It's unfortunate that there are so few barbers left...they've been replaced by the chain haircutter places that hire people straight out of beauty school; those businesses are rarely worker-owned (they rent the chairs, or are part-time employees), and rarely have any significant ties to the community (though they are often franchises, possibly owned by someone in the same city or, at least, the same state).