Ally Up

The Definitive Guide to Building More Inclusive, Innovative, & Productive Teams

Di Ciruolo

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781642500325
• eBook ISBN: 9781631954023
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Ally Up teaches what every business should know about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

PART 1

CREATING A CULTURE THAT PROMOTES DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

“So how are you guys attracting and retaining more-diverse talent?” This is the question I asked the woman across the table from me, over coffee in 2018. I really wanted to work with her company—let’s call it Ranger—and had offered a free consultation. “Ranger” is a software as a service (SaaS) company, a marketing powerhouse with more than 3,000 employees worldwide. I was impressed by its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I wanted to learn and grow in a place that shared my values. It is consistently recognized by Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work” award, and I love its brand.

“We aren’t,” said the woman (who served as Ranger’s Head of People), matter of factly.

I responded with my surprise; I’d seen so many posts about Ranger’s initiatives and the pictures of happy, diverse employees. She slowly sipped her coffee, clearly measuring her words before deciding to just be honest: “It’s marketing.” Obviously. Ranger’s marketing was geared toward attracting more-diverse candidates. But when such new hires arrived, I later learned, they discovered the same problems they’d experienced at so many other companies. This was causing a high turnover rate and, even worse, a lack of diverse representation at the top.

“And it is a great place to work, of course,” the woman continued. “I mean, we really do care. None of us see color.” Another one of these, I thought—a business with its own staffing team seeking a free consultation before claiming to conduct its own diversity initiatives internally. When I later spoke to a Hispanic woman they’d interviewed, she said: “I really did want to work with them, but I felt like they were putting me up for a job I wasn’t qualified for just to check a diversity box.” Ranger, I learned, had already decided to hire a white man before interviewing her. Why would a well-intentioned company do that?

Well, it happens all the time. Many large tech companies want to be seen making diversity and inclusion a priority, so they hire someone to solve all their internal and systemic problems, while granting them no power to make change. Later that same quarter, when the problems are still there, these companies will reach out to “pick my brain,” and here we are. They’re all adopting the Rooney Rule, created by the NFL to require teams to interview ethnic minorities before filling a senior coaching position. It can be a great thing—and it can also go sideways, as it had with Ranger.

This is just one example of a company with good “diversity” policies—but no allyship. You can have the absolute best diversity officer in the business instituting the best practices, but without a culture that promotes allyship, you’ve solved nothing. Without allyship, nothing changes. Without a willingness to change and learn and do better, everything stays the same.

As the research and stories in the following chapters reveal, we’re still a long way from creating cultures that promote DEI,⁵² no matter what their branding and marketing tells you. I’ll also share strategies for combining diversity policies with allyship to create a true culture of DEI.

Chapter 1

DIVERSITY VALUES ARE DEVALUED

Recently, researchers David R. Hekman and Stefanie K. Johnson surveyed 350 executives on “diversity-valuing” behaviors.⁵³ They found women+ and nonwhite managers who promoted other women and nonwhite employees were thought to be less competent by their own managers.

But white men who promoted women and other URGs were not thought to be less competent. This study was run twice with the same results. According to Johnson and Hekman: “Basically, all managers were judged harshly if they hired someone who looked like them, unless they were a white male.” So white men can not only hire other white men with no adverse effects to their career; they can also hire and promote the rest of us.

Why is knowing this fact important? Because more women+ and URGs in a company won’t change the culture without white men as allies. We need white men to step up, step forward, and participate in making the changes that need to be made in tech and other STEM fields. Look, if any one of us could change the whole system ourselves, we would! But we can’t do it alone. It really is that simple.

“People are opting out of vital conversations about diversity and inclusivity because they fear looking wrong, saying something wrong, or being wrong. Choosing our own comfort over hard conversations is the epitome of privilege, and it corrodes trust and moves us away from meaningful and lasting change.”

—Brené Brown in Dare to Lead, explaining one of the 10 behaviors and cultural issues leaders identified as getting in our way in organizations around the world.

Tech Talk

I’ve consulted extensively in the tech industry, and I can tell you firsthand, it’s a mess. In interview after interview, women and URGs have shared stories of workplaces trying to look more like the stereotypes reinforced by HBO’s Silicon Valley projecting squeaky-clean shots of women and people of color at the top. Most recently, this issue hit the front page of everyone’s awareness with the mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter, or BLM, movement. Many companies were coming out for the first time in support of Black Lives Matter, but they seemed to be following a “trend.” After George Floyd’s murder, Salesforce was one of the first out of the gate. But it’s extremely important to note that other companies like Ben & Jerry’s were way ahead of the curve with their own BLM statement— by years. According to Mita Mallick, then Head of Diversity and Cross-Cultural Marketing at Unilever, “Sometimes, you just need to come out on the right side of history and wait for other people to catch up.”

As more eyes turned toward tech as the movement spread, we learned that all of the top tech companies did have at least one person of color at the table, and that person usually had the same title: “Chief of Diversity.” During that same time, those of us in the DEI field watched while companies took whomever among them looked the most diverse and put them in charge of diversity with no additional compensation or support. It became their responsibility to bear the entire weight of the systemic problems they were directly impacted and victimized by from the start of their career there. Are you seeing the problem with this yet? You will.

Similarly, many companies are creating employee resource groups (ERGs) to involve employees who have experienced these systemic problems and give them a voice to address these concerns in a safe space. Speaking to the Washington Post on the subject, Dominique Hollins, veteran of Google and eBay, said: “The dependence on ERGs has stifled the industry because it gives a false sense of progress. We joined the ERG because we needed help, but we became the help.”⁵⁴

Look, I’m a big fan of ERGs, and I think they can do a lot of good in a company, especially when it comes to keeping leaders honest and up to date on the issues and policies directly impacting their employees. (See my advice at the end of this chapter.) In fact, I help leaders form them in start-ups as advisory groups. But ERGs can’t be leading the fight for an inclusive workforce. They can’t shoulder the burden of improving the culture of an oppressive workplace—that’s what a DEI professional is for. ERGs can’t be solely responsible for attracting diverse talent—that’s what staffing professionals do. They can’t be used as props at conferences like Grace Hopper or AfroTech—that is the responsibility of leadership. If you want to be an ally, you have to do the real work. Anything else is performative allyship: a performance with no real impact or substance.

Or as Jenni Lee of Statisfy said better: “Hey, Google, thanks, but your efforts to bring more women into tech is really just tokenism. Instead of throwing money at the problem (i.e., paying for a few women to take coding classes or putting them up at nice hotels at women’s only conferences), you should just give them a dignified job. Put your money where your PR is.”⁵⁵

Let’s look at some numbers for a moment. According to the Holloway Report’s “Diversity and Inclusion in Tech,” women make up 57% of the U.S. workforce as a whole, but only 26% of the technical workforce. Black, Latina, and Native American women make up 16% of the U.S. workforce and hold only 4% of tech jobs. And only 10% of tech executives are women, write Jennifer Wong and Jason Kim.

Asian and Asian American men make up 32% of the tech workforces, but only 20% hold executive positions. While Asian and Asian American women make up 15% of the workforce, they hold only 5% of executive roles in tech.⁵⁶

“Harassment and discrimination,” write Wong and Kim, “affect workers based on their caregiver status, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability status.”

There was this “uniform” that everyone wore, which was a Patagonia vest, and everyone who wore one seemed to have this “brogramming” attitude. The engineers walked around as if they were incapable of being wrong, and I didn’t fit in. Some women, who were friends and felt I was an ally, had reported to me that they were being targeted for sexual harassment by one of the engineering managers. I begged them to report him, but they were scared. No one wanted to be singled out by the team or thought of as a traitor or a troublemaker or someone who couldn’t take a joke. No one wanted their careers ruined. It would have been a breach of their trust to report him, so I didn’t do anything about it.

Later that same year, there was a gay male manager who would get drunk at get-togethers and sexually assault guys who worked there. He was pretty high up in the food chain, and everyone was talking about it, and how if he tries to touch you, you should let him so he can help your career and not ruin it. At one party, he walked up to a guy and grabbed him in the junk right in front of someone from HR. When the guy who had been grabbed stood up for himself and reported to HR, and only after an HR rep had been a witness, guess who got a golden parachute? The predator. He was given a huge severance to quit and not sue the company. He’s at another company now.

—A.G., large online discount furniture retailer

There are glimmers of hope, which you’ll read about at the end of this book. When I began interviewing one nationwide tech school, I was thrilled to learn how the leadership team had been making thoughtful changes affecting the entire company culture for the better. There’s now a Slack channel dedicated to DEI, where everyone’s invited to contribute on policies and how each is respectful (or not) of their diversity of people. They host girls’ coding events, contribute to the local diversity fabric and form relationships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs). They mentor women+ and URGs and help them network, providing sponsorship.

Still, leaders must learn to both reach out to more-diverse groups and lean into the untapped potential of their company. Aubrey Blanche, a designer of equitable organizations and products at Culture Amp and a diversity thought leader, writes on Medium how the tech industry has done a terrible job of recruiting and retaining people who don’t come from a very small set of backgrounds. “From social and economic factors that influence who is given access to computers,” she writes, “to being constantly—overtly or implicitly—questioned about your suitability for a career in tech, members of groups underrepresented in tech face significant additional barriers to entering and staying in tech than their well-represented counterparts.”⁵⁷

Blanche continues to discuss the so-called pipeline problem blamed for the tech industry’s lack of diversity, adding more statistics to those from the Holloway Report. As she points out, 11% of technical degrees go to Black and Hispanic students, but most tech workforces include only 2% to 3% people of color. “Simply put,” writes Blanche, “before we can meaningfully talk about a ‘pipeline problem,’ we have to effectively employ the pipeline that already exists.”

And that can be a tough task when people are promoting toxic cultures and jamming up the pipeline with discriminatory behaviors and processes.

I’ve been working at a SaaS-focused marketing agency for about two years (due to our turnover, I’m now in the top 10% of folks in terms of seniority). Since the first few months, I flagged to my then-manager (our now-COO) my interest in advancing up a track to a department head for technical, dev-focused content. Got all kinds of encouragement that they were grooming me for this role, etc.

About a year ago, a very junior guy joined our team. He was assigned as my second hand for one of my clients, and I trained/mentored him for a few months before he was given his own account (which I took as a good thing, like, “Hey I trained them well, they’re competent. Yay!”). Since then, the opportunities I’m given to work on my track have dramatically decreased, and largely have been diverted to him. He’s still junior to me, and every one of his technical clients have churned (while I’ve kept most of them, many of which have reupped with us). He’s treated like an expert in dev-focused content, and our CEO defers to him for leading a how-to-do-dev-content-well program, even though I’m the one with hands-on coding experience and a track record of running these clients well, not to mention management experience.

The icing on the cake is that the same day this junior employee hit me up to get on a Zoom call to “consult” on his program, our CEO (a person I’ve known for two years since they were a direct manager) quoted some work of mine from my side project and spelled my name incorrectly in a company-wide memo. I can’t help feeling like my experience, presence at the company, and knowledge is being discounted in favor of yet another young white dude in tech who fails upward. It’s demoralizing, to say the least; every junior white guy seems to be treated like a rising star who will never need to go on maternity leave by management. Everywhere.

—C.F., SaaS marketing company

TL;DR:

• We need white men to step up, step forward, and participate in making the changes that need to be made in tech and other STEM fields.
• The dependence on creating ERGs without committing to systemic improvements has stifled the industry because it displays a false sense of progress.
• Women make up 57% of the U.S. workforce as a whole, but only 26% of the technical workforce. Black, Latina, and Native American women make up 16% of the U.S. workforce and ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Creating a Culture That Promotes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Part 2: Hiring with Inclusivity
• Part 3: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Work
• Acknowledgments
• Social Justice Resources:
• About the Author