Diversity & Inclusion in the Tech Industry

That Time When Women Stopped Coding

• What occured during the same time as the beginning of the decline of women in computer sciene?
  • more people started owning personal computers
  • those personal computers were mostly games and marketed almost exclusively to men and boys
• Why does it matter that males had been playing on computers growing up?
  • when those boys got to college/the workplace they were more proficient with computers

Employee breakdown of key technology companies

• What three take-a-ways do you have looking at this data?
  • Tech is generally fairly representative of US demographics, although specific companies have a lot of work to do
  • interesting that, as a whole ,the tech industry is 51% women but only a handful of these top tech companies come close to approaching fifty percent women
  • qualifying observation #1: only the workers of these companies are representative of US demographics, Congress and the leadership of the Fortune 500 are still almost all men, mostly white.

Why diversity matters to your tech company

• When are diversity efforts most successful? When they are driven by a commitment from company leaadership.
• Why do diverse companies perform better? More creative and onnovative.
• Give an example of how a diverse company can serve a diverse user base or vise-versa. I’ve read a lot about the racism of automated objects like sinks, soap dispensers, and air dryers that don’t recognize darker skin tones and, thus, won’t work properly. If a team consists of all fair-skinned people, it can be easy to miss that a product simply won’t work for black people.