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The Other Side of Diversity In Tech
An anonymous reader writes: We frequently discuss diversity in the tech industry, and all the initiatives getting underway to encourage women and minorities to enter (and stay in) the field. The prevailing theme is that this will be good for companies, good for innovation, and good for the future of technology. While that's true, greater representation will also be good for the individuals themselves. Erica Joy has been in IT for a long time, and she's worked in many of the industry hotspots. She's written an insightful article on how the lack of diversity has affected her throughout her career. An excerpt: "Unfortunately, my workplace is homogenous and so are my surroundings. I feel different everywhere. I go to work and I stick out like a sore thumb. ... I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I've spent the majority of the last decade in."
And she wonders why she feels like people walk on eggshells around her and why she feels like she makes people uncomfortable.
Our group brought a white woman (race only matters based on what comes later), let's call her Joan. Joan had a closed door office downstairs from the group. Once she joined the group, we had her move into cube-land with the rest of us.
Enter Joan's friend, let's call her Kelly. Kelly happens to be black. One day Joan, Kelly, and I were having lunch in the break room. Kelly asked Joan why she moved out of her nice, closed-door office into cube-land. Here's where I step in it. I replied "We wanted to integrate Joan into the group." Kelly goes absolutely berserk on me. "What do you mean integrate?!? I'm integrated!!"
I'm still trying to figure out what my comment about Joan -- white Joan -- had anything to do with Kelly. Yes, I walked on egg shells around Kelly from then on.
Yes, of course, that would be it, because an all white society is incapable of existing without millions of non-whites to 'improve' it, correct?
Genocide is an international war crime.
I'm not a member of a minority, or at least not one that would be recognized as such. Indeed I am a middle-aged white male, however: a good number of the issues that Erica Joy brings up in the article are ones to which I can relate.
I recently have been in a job where I was the outsider. Mine was a more techie role in an environment populated by those who'se main focus lay elsewhere. Considering that these colleagues were almost uniformly ahead of me in their field, and I would have to be doing domain specific work, this threw up some serious impostor syndrome issues for me. Sure I was good at tech, but this stuff they were doing... well I could grasp it, but always felt a little left behind. Objectively, it's not surprising. We each had our own specialty after all, but at work this divide left me some what isolated. Now, add to that an exclusion from social events as well (I am not one for the drinking, by preference and necessity), and being quite a distance from my non-work social group. So yeah, isolated and stressful, in the long term sense.
In hind sight from a personal perspective, I would have had a much easier time surviving if I had been stricter with myself on work/life balance and made sure to find more things outside of work from which to draw a sense of value and self-worth. Always have a backup plan and all that.
Of course there are a number of issues Erica discusses, which I have not experienced; I have not been mistaken for admin or security, nor have I been passed over without reason (at least not to my knowledge).
tl;dr version: While these issues are particularly apparent with minority groups, not all of them are exclusive. This is something which a number of our geeky cohort can find common experience with at least in part, and as such we ought all be interested in making things better. Not just in terms of encouraging/enforcing diversity, but in terms of allowing for outsiders - be it due to race, gender, culture, or field - (so long as they get the job done).
Native Americans saw an increase in diversity in their country from the 1500s on. A lot of good it did them.
You still didn't answer the question.
From TFA: "I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I've spent the majority of the last decade in"
White male here. I was with a company for many years that had a _very_ different culture than I was used to. Let's just say some of the stuff that went on would be firing offenses and many other companies or at least be highly offensive to some. I learned to fit in and emulate the culture. When I left, I realized how much I had changed, just like the woman in the story said she has lost her identity. This is not just a racial problem.
Professional sports teams seem to *only* recruit from a minority subset of the population...they don't seem to be "missing out."
I read the woman's article and I guess it hit closer to home for me than some people, because while I'm a white male, I'm married to a black woman who works in I.T.
There are certainly some workplace lessons to be learned from the author's insights, but I'm not sure they're all necessarily the ones she would conclude herself?
For starters? Whether you like it or don't... want to admit it's true or don't ... Geographic location has a lot to do with the workplace environment you can expect and its racial makeup. As she admitted herself, the job she took with Home Depot's corporate offices in the South (Atlanta) was one of the places she felt most "comfortable" among her co-workers. If this was as high of a priority for her as it sounds like it was (to the point of her describing health problems due to stress), I would have advised her never to go to Silicon Valley for work - regardless of the promised pay and benefits.
It sounds like, to an extent, she's upset that she can't "have it all" -- meaning working amongst a large population of blacks (with a nice chunk of them being female as well) who share her values and interests, while still earning "top tier" salaries in her field with the biggest industry "movers and shakers".
I'd counter that we simply don't live in a perfect world, and like everyone else, she has to make some tough choices. As a white male who has always had an interest in technology and computing, I knew it was my career field of choice. At the same time? I grew up in the midwest, and found some of my own values made it difficult for me to do such things as running out to the west coast in the dot-com boom era (even when some of my friends did and a couple wound up millionaires). I chose to stick with doing I.T. for manufacturing firms who couldn't afford to pay me that well, but offered some measure of stability and a concept of "life / work balance" that the big tech places lacked. I had family in the midwest that I didn't want to leave, and good friends that I grew up with as a kid and still hung out with. Considering all of that plus the fact that cost of living and housing was reasonable where I lived, it seemed prudent to stay put.
My wife grew up in Memphis, but I think she always knew that she wanted to get out of that area, in order to find more career success. She wound up in New York for a while, Texas for a while, and now out on the east coast with me. She's definitely not anything close to your stereotypical black woman. (Yes, she listens to alternative and classic rock by choice, and doesn't care for much rap music. She also converted to Judaism, among other things people might find outside the norm.) She never had much interest in playing competitive video games though (well, outside of a bit of Guitar Hero until she got bored with it after playing through several songs). (I, on the other hand, still like playing first person shooters, even though I'm in my early 40's.)
If you're working someplace where it's clear the vast majority enjoys and values things you don't -- guess what? That can happen to ANY of us. I worked in I.T. for union steel shops where everyone's interests included hunting, wrestling, monster trucks and country music. I was the only one who listened to alt. rock instead, and cared about a computer as more than just "a pain in the ass tool management forces us to use". I guess I *could* have tried to go hunting or fishing with the guys or start listening to country to try to make new friends. But I didn't.... I just accepted that we liked different things, and went to work to get work done, period. It's a lot easier to enjoy your free time if you have a paycheck and the bills are all paid.
If you're not willing to do that? That's ok... but you have to do your job search based on what's important, then .... which would be finding like-minded co-workers. I know it exists, but she's right that at least for what she was looking for -- it probably won't be found in the "tech giants" of plac