Diversity Archives - Page 2 of 4

Listen to Black Women!

This entire moment is important. @digitalsista has been signaling the digital failures that preceded Russian bots disrupting American politics. We should listen to Black women. https://t.co/sXL0pE0IT0

— Safiya U Noble PhD (@safiyanoble) April 23, 2018

Diversity stats ain’t jack unless you’re checking on inclusion. And the fastest way to understand how you’re doing on inclusion and equity is this: FIND OUT HOW BLACK WOMEN ARE EXPERIENCING THE WORKPLACE. If getting to the bottom of that is hard, you’ve got a problem. Fact.

— Nicole Sanchez (@nmsanchez) April 22, 2018

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …

The Moment by Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) are both well worth listening to. Shireen’s been calling attention to this for a while, and this Moment weaves together various threads and articles. Nicole’s one of the leading voices for intersectional diversity, inclusion, justice, and equaity in the software industry, and the replies include her perspective as a Latinx woman as to why listening to black women is so important in this context. Safiya Umoya Noble’s recent Wired article Social Inequality Will Not Be Solved By an App is also well worth listening to, as is her outstanding book Algorithms of Oppression.

But what I especially want to highlight in this post is the overall theme.

Listen to Black women.

It’s good advice in the workplace. It’s good advice professionally – collaborating with (and listening to) Shireen, Tammarrian Rogers, and Lynn Cyrin helped me raise my game and took our work on diversity-friendly software to a much higher level. It’s good advice in politics and activism. It’s good advice for protecting democracy. It’s good advice in general.

Of course, I’m far from the first person to say this. But a lot of white people, and a lot of guys, still act like they haven’t gotten the memo.

Fortunately, this is one of those rare pieces of advice that it’s very easy to act on. Start by looking at your own behavior: are you hearing Black women’s voices? Are you really listening to them?

Then get to work on to your friends, family, and colleagues. Encourage them to listen; amplify Black women’s voices to make it easier for them.

It’s really not that hard.

Listen to Black women.

Image credit: Jeff Swensen, Getty Images, via Kiratiana Freelon’s March for Black Women Organizers Want to Put Our Issues Front and Center During March for Racial Justice on The Root

Intersectionality: definitions, videos, and links

“Intersectionality” is a concept that a lot of people – including me, when I first heard it – find challenging to really understand.

The definition is actually fairly straightforward. Merriam-Webster has a very pithy version:

when forms of discrimination combine, overlap, and intersect

Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Intersectionality is a term coined by American civil rights advocate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to describe overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from the component identities.

And M-W’s Words We’re Watching page has a short history of the word

The term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in a 1989 essay that asserts that antidiscrimination law, feminist theory, and antiracist politics all fail to address the experiences of black women because of how they each focus on only a single factor. Crenshaw writes that “[b]ecause the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”

Though originally applied only to the ways that sexism and racism combine and overlap, intersectionality has come to include other forms of discrimination as well, such as those based on class, sexuality, and ability.

Indeed.

Still, even once you know the definition, the concept itself is subtle and complex, and the implications are very far-ranging. If you want to understand it better, you really need to dig into it. So here are some videos and links.

- Intersectionality 101, by Teaching Tolerance, is a three-minute, student-friendly video.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s TED talk The Urgency of Intersectionality (from October 2016) is a great starting point for going deeper. It’s the video at the top of the post; here’s the link.
No Single-Issue Politics, Only Intersectionality, a recent interview with Crenshaw in Truth Out, relates intersectionality to today’s political landscape.
Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait, a 2015 interview with Crenshaw, starts with her observation that “Intersectionality was a lived reality before it became a term.” It’s part of a series on intersectionality in the Washington Post that also has perspectives from Latoya Peterson, Brittney Cooper, and others.
Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, published in 1990, developed similar ideas, and is sometimes also credited as coining the term. Her 2015 talk on Sharpening Intersectionality’s Critical Edge is more theoretical than some of the other links, but still very approachable.

Ange-Marie Hancock’s Intersectionality: An Intellectual History is a deep dive into the background of intersectionality’s histories, genealogies, and meanings – including a lot of attention to precursor work by bell hooks, Audre Lourde, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and others. Jennifer Nash’s detailed review in Hypatia is a good overview.
And speaking of bell hooks, her public dialog with Laverne Cox at New School (from 2014), is as insightful as it is entertaining.

There’s lots of other good stuff out there as well … if you have some favorite links, feel free to share them!

A stick figure, with arrows pointing to it saying race, education, sexuality, ability, age, gender, ethnicity, culture, language, and class — Image source: All Booked Up

Intersectional Inclusion: Perspectives from the Resistance Manual

One of the topics in my upcoming Open Source Bridge presentation Grassroots Activism is Hard. Can Open Source Help? is

Highlight techniques from projects like Resistance Manual that take an explicitly intersectional focus

You can see the work-in-progress list of techniques on the OSBridge wiki. This post focuses specifically on the Resistance Manual.

Continue reading Intersectional Inclusion: Perspectives from the Resistance Manual

TechInclusion Seattle and Open Source Bridge: a diversity-in-tech twofer!

Two of my favorite conferences, in back-to-back weeks, make the Pacific Northwest the place to be for diversity and inclusion in technology this month.

It kicks off with TechInclusion Seattle, June 14-15. Here’s how I described TechInclusion SF late last year:

everything I look for in a conference experience: excellent content, outstanding networking, and a great mix of attendees — entrepreneurs, diversity and inclusion experts, policy people, executives, designers, engineers, marketers, investors, and hard-to-categorize people. The vibe was wonderful as well, positive with a sense of excitement, with the aid of remarkably good food and coffee.

Wayne Sutton, Melinda Briana Eppler, and the team at Change Catalysts do a great job organizing conferences, so unsurprisingly the agenda for the Seattle event features a similarly exciting mix of people: Saara Romu of the Gates Foundation, Jessica Eggert of Include Seattle, Tammarrian Rogers and Aurea Astro of Microsoft, Leslie Miley of Venture for America, Ellie Tumbuan of The Justice Collective, Andrew Mcgee of Greater, Surya Venka of and many others. As if that’s not enough, this time the list of hard-to-categorize people includes … me!

I’ll be speaking about Diversity-friendly software and strategy on Wednesday, June 14, at 3 PM. * Just to drive home the point about how good the networking is at TechInclusion: one of the examples of diversity-friendly software I’ll be talking about is O.school, where I’m currently Tech DIVA (Technical Diversity, Inclusion, and Values Advisor). And how did I connect with O.school? By striking up a conversation with their CEO Andrea Barrica after a panel she was on at TechInclusion SF!

Next comes Open Source Bridge, June 20-23 in Portland. Here’s how I described it in If you enjoyed Tech Inclusion, you might also like …

Open Source Bridge (“the conference for Open Source Citizens”) is a 100% volunteer-run conference that’s been going strong since 2009 with a very strong diversity focus…. It’s more focused on development and design than some of the other conferences, with a lot of discussion of community organizing and the business of open source as well.

As always this year’s schedule looks amazing, starting with the keynotes: Nicole Sanchez on Tech Reform, Walé Ogundipé on Doing away with (bad) shibboleths (it’ll be really interesting to see how everybody pronounces the talk’s title), and Emily Gorcenski on Fake Science! Sad! A case study of the perils of Open Data. As a Mastodon fan, I’m also really looking forward to Federating with Trouble by the toot.cat admins; and the programming tools geek in me is very excited about my former MSR colleague Michael Ernst’s Create your own type system in 45 minutes. It’s going to be a great conference, so if you’re in or near the software industry it’s worth checking out whether or not you’re into open source.

This year Open Source Bridge has added a track on activism – including my Thursday morning session Grassroots Activism is Hard. Can Open Source Help?

Grassroots activists have to deal with many challenges — including the tools they’re using. Sounds like a great opportunity for open source! This session will survey progressive and transpartisan grassroots activists’ needs and today’s solutions (including techniques that work for explicitly intersectional groups), look at some existing open-source offerings and how they could evolve to better meet grassroots activists’ needs, and identify future directions that could be even more impactful.

A lot of diversity-in-tech and citizenship-in-open-source people live multiple lives, so if you’re also a grassroots activist, I’m very interested in hearing about the tools you’re using, what works, and what doesn’t. Here’s a blog post with more information and a link to a survey. And if you know somebody who’s involved in grassroots activism, especially with an intersectional focus, please pass the link along!

And while I’m making requests …

Open Source Bridge is really is a grassroots all-volunteer effort, produced on a shoestring budget by the Stumptown Syndicate. As they write in We need your help,

In order to cover the costs of producing a community conference, we rely largely on sponsorships. We haven’t been as fortunate this year in monetary recruiting and would love extra help in spreading the word about Open Source Bridge to your company or tech managers.

So those of you who are at tech companies in the Pacific Northwest, or within flying distance of Portland: as you’ll hear at my Tech Inclusion talk on Wednesday, investing in diversity-friendly software offers some significant technical advantages. Sponsoring an event like Open Source Bridge is a great way to start connecting with the community, and giving one or more engineers or designers at your company a great chance to learn skills and make connections. Please check out their sponsorship prospectus, and see if it makes sense for your company to sponsor!

* If you’re looking for a taste of what I’ll be talking about, you can check out the talk on Diversity-friendly software that Shireen Mitchell and I did at SXSW this March … or if wikis are your thing, here’s a session on Supporting diversity with a new approach to software Tammarrian and I did at Open Source Bridge last year.]

Transforming Tech with Diversity-Friendly Software

This presentation builds on earlier work with Shireen Mitchell, Tammarrian Rogers, Lynn Cyrin, and Deborah Pierce. Thanks also to my colleagues at O.school for the great feedback in the run-through!

Here’s the slides (along with speaker notes). I’ve made some minor revisions in response to feedback — and to include a bit more information.

Update, August 2018:
Please see the revised version, with links and references (and few updates), currently posted on Medium

Previous work

This presentation builds on a series of four presentations, with different collaborators, on diversity-friendly software.

Towards More Diversity-Friendly Social Networks, with Deborah Pierce, Open Source Bridge 2014
Building Diverse Social Networks, with Lynn Cyrin, Open Source Bridge 2015
Supporting Diversity with A New Approach to Software, with Tammarrian Rogers, Open Source Bridge 2016
Diversity-friendly software, with Shireen Mitchell, SXSW 2017

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That’s not the headline I would have chosen …

NBC News has a report on Stack Overflow’s 2017 Developer Survey. Here’s some of the data:

And here’s the headline.

So let me get this straight, 87.7% of female developers agree that diversity is important, and on 61.7% strongly agree, but “no one actually cares”.

Don’t get me wrong, the data (both in the original survey and the additional analysis Stack Overflow did for NBC) is interesting. But the headline, wow.

Some times all you can say is WTF.