Diversity & Inclusion in the Tech Industry
That Time When Women Stopped Coding
What occurred during the same time as the beginning of the decline of women in computer science?
Personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers and were marketed almost entirely to men and boys. This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.
Why does it matter that males had been playing on computers growing up?
Because they had an unfair advantage over women trying to get in the field. Like the story of Patricia Ordóñez. She didn’t have a computer at home but she was a Math wiz. She went to Johns Hopkins University in the ’80s to study computer science. When she took her first intro class found that most of her male classmates were way ahead of her because they’d grown up playing with computers. She ended up dropping the program and majored in foreign languages.
Why diversity matters to your tech company
When are diversity efforts most successful?
When they’re driven by a commitment from company leaders. Meaningful commitment requires leaders to understand why diversity matters.
Why do diverse companies perform better?
Diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and faster or better ways of solving it. Research shows a strong correlation between diverse organizations and positive financial outcomes.
Give an example of how a diverse company can serve a diverse user base or vise-versa.
When the employees of an organization better represent their users and desired users, they will build more effectively for those groups. When YouTube’s almost entirely right-handed developer team built the iOS app without considering how left-handed people would use it, 5% to 10% of videos were uploaded upside down as a result.