I just watched a fun interview with some of the folks from Heroku. The interviewer at one point casually gendered all Heroku users as “he”. These things stick out to me these days. It makes me think about how it must feel to be a woman and constantly be reminded that few people imagine anyone like you when they think of developers. Which got me thinking a little about gender and race and tech startups.
Now I want to say… I like Heroku. Heroku, The Technology is an amazing piece of architecture. I think it’s a gift to developers, and I think Adam and the other folks who work there are good people. I’m using it for SproutRobot. I know Adam is committed to Free Software, and he was super nice to respond to an email I once sent him about Heroku and F/OSS.
But there’s something that sketches me out a little about Heroku, The Company, and it’s the same thing that sketches me out about AppJet, The Company, and most of the tech startups I see.
It’s pretty much all white dudes.
Now, I haven’t seen Heroku do anything as blatantly sexist as making the only woman on your About page be a sexy mannequin whose lack of development and business skills you mock. But the Heroku founders are all white men, and the only other employee I’ve seen photos of is a white man. It seems uncontroversial for me to say that they’re hiring people for specific attributes that are predominantly found only in white men… if they weren’t, they’d be more diverse*.
Which makes me wonder: what human attributes and skills and ideas are their organization lacking? What kinds of knowledge and experience are they completely blind to because whoever is making the hiring choices thinks that these specific white dude attributes are the Most Important Attributes For Our Organization To Have?
And truthfully, I don’t know the answer. I’m sure their company will succeed. Like I said, the Heroku folks are brilliant, good people, who are doing great work. Lots of companies have made fistfulls of money employing the “let’s look for attributes that predominantly only white dudes have” methodology. But what is lost?
The thing is, it’s hard to know. As white males, we have come to see certain things as “relevant” and “important”, and those values are partly formed by our whiteness and our maleness. Certainly there are values that extend across color and gender lines, but there are plenty of things that women and people of color are more likely to find important than I would.
And this is the hard part. These values that vary across color and gender lines, and I have a hard time seeing and understanding them precisely because they vary across color and gender lines. The things I undervalue because I am white and male are necessarily invisible to me because I undervalue them.
This is why I’m reticent to rely completely on my personal values to do hiring. My values are skewed because of who I am.
So my only choice is to put a premium on diversity. To put trust in people and say “I don’t fully understand all of the value in this person, or everything they can contribute to this organization, but I am going to choose them over someone whose value I can see more clearly because I know there is invisible value in diversity.”
I just have this hunch that what will come out of that will be totally freaking rad. We’ll see, I guess.
______
* I wish this would go without saying, but I know I have to say it or people will get Very Upset: obviously they’re not doing this on purpose. They didn’t sit down and think “what qualities can we look for that only white dudes will have.” They just decided that Ruby prowess, or scaling experience, and the ability to speak in a language they understand… that these are what matters to them. The fact that these are predominantly attributes of white men is a consequence of that decision that I’m sure they didn’t choose deliberately. In a lot of ways, we’ve moved beyond what I think most people would call “deliberate” racism and sexism (although even the deliberate stuff is still sadly common). Instead, what most of us are faced with is a more insidious, despite-our-best-intentions kind of racism and sexism. Whether that kind of stuff is “deliberate”, and whether it’s ethically bankrupt is a very abstract, philosophical question that is, generally speaking, an inappropriate diversion for most discussions about specific race- and gender-related phenomena. We’re biased. It hurts people. Let’s focus on fixing it, not on discussing endlessly whether it makes us bad people.
I disagree with your footnote. I think people sit down and come up with a list of qualifications for a position without a specific gender in mind (conscious or unconscious). The point where things break down is not who they interview, but who applies. The bigger issue is that there is a lack of women developers available for these startups in the first place. The whole field is heavily male dominated, there aren’t enough women around to fill all of these available positions. When you’re a startup you only have 5 people in the first place, odds are you aren’t going to have a woman on staff. You can’t except a startup to pass up great candidates in hopes that a woman might apply.
Hey Tiffanie!
I don’t expect a startup to pass up great candidates in hopes that a woman might apply. I actually find that notion kind of offensive. Not just offensive in the “that’s terrible business” sense, but offensive in the “obviously all these guys are way greater than all of the women around at everything that might possibly be useful to a startup” sense. I think that notion is offensive… and I’m sure you do too.
I am just saying that I want to question my definition of “great”. Am I only considering qualities that are extremely important to me? Or am I considering a broader set of qualities of “greatness” that are important to lots of people?
your point is well taken, tif – one problem is certainly a dearth of female developers. but i think erik nails something here that a lot of other discussions of diversity miss, which is the idea that another problem is a focus on technical prowess and code as the most important aspects of ‘development.’ why aren’t things like cultural impact and context of use as crucial to understand from day one as data structures? there are plenty of women with things to say about WHY to make things, instead of just HOW, and postponing that discussion until it’s too late for them to impact the design process is dangerous.
overall, EPP, this is the best argument for diversity that i’ve seen in a while, and i’m not just saying that because i am currently benefiting from your hiring practices at Sprout Robot.
here’s to bringing invisible structures to light.
Hey all!
I just wanted to add that we recently hired for a graphic design position and of the 20 resume’s we received, 2 were from women.
The white guy we hired is hands-down the best of the bunch and probably of many others who didn’t apply. His application materials were beautiful and his work in the 10 days since he’s started has been crucial to ongoing projects.
We just didn’t have a diversity of people to choose from. And we posted on Craig’s list, our site, LinkedIn and contact recruiters. I would have loved to hired anyone but a white guy because it’s becoming apparent in our office that the organizational viewpoint has narrowed due to homogeneity.
How do we hire the people who are not applying?
Hey Jesse!
Well, you choose more diverse venues to post in. This is where you need to get creative. It’s easy for you to post on LinkedIn, but your LinkedIn network is 80% men. By choosing LinkedIn as one of your primary venues for recruitment, you are choosing to hire a man, right there. If you want to find a more diverse venue, you need to work harder.
Off the top of my head, I can think of:
* college graphic design departments
* graphic design conferences
* facebook
* the grocery store
* postering near your local MOMA
* women in computing groups
Those are all venues that are probably more than 50% women. And if you made those your primary recruitment venues and you didn’t post on LinkedIn or your site, or the recruiters or any of the other male-dominated arenas, I’m sure you would get a much better ratio of applicants.
And maybe none of those venues will work. But if you give up, you’re basically saying it’s not worth it, and you’re just going to hire a man because it’s easier.
Erik