The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.
These early personal computers weren’t much more than toys. You could play pong or simple shooting games, maybe do some word processing. And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys.
This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.
families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.
This was a big deal when those kids got to college. As personal computers became more common, computer science professors increasingly assumed that their students had grown up playing with computers at home.
how to talk about the subject internally and externally, how to rank it among competing priorities and how to allocate appropriate resources. Before answering these questions, it’s helpful to identify why diversity and inclusion matters to you and your company specifically.
Diversity efforts are most successful when they’re driven by a commitment from company leaders. And meaningful commitment requires leaders to understand why diversity matters. At Paradigm, we spend a lot of time brainstorming with CEOs and other company leaders about what is or should be driving their diversity and inclusion efforts. Here are five themes that have emerged from those conversations:
Given that diverse teams are smarter and more creative than homogeneous ones, it is unsurprising that a wealth of research shows a strong correlation between diverse organizations and positive financial outcomes. In a 2011 study of diversity in the top firms in Standard & Poor’s Composite 1500 list, researchers found “female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value.”
Failing to attract and hire employees from underrepresented backgrounds leads companies to miss out on incredible talent. In a recent blog post describing a partnership with Code2040, Slack Engineering Chief of Staff Nolan Caudill acknowledged: “Like almost every tech company, our own upbringings, biases and life experiences result in referral networks that are very homogeneous, and we know we are missing out on great candidates based on these shortcomings.”
When the employees of an organization better represent their users and desired users, they will build more effectively for those groups. When YouTube’s almost entirely right-handed developer team built the iOS app without considering how left-handed people would use it, for example, 5% to 10% of videos were uploaded upside down as a result. This factor may be especially relevant for leaders of consumer tech companies.
While diversity and inclusion efforts are most often driven by business rationales, we’ve spoken with a few CEOs who are motivated primarily by a belief that cultivating an inclusive tech community is simply the right thing to do.
Some of these leaders have noted that the tech industry is creating vast opportunity and that by excluding certain groups from that opportunity the industry is perpetuating and exacerbating existing social inequality. Others have emphasized a concern that by failing to involve particular communities in the process of creating of new technology, we as a society lose out on the benefits of those community members’ ideas.
For company leaders beginning to consider diversity and inclusion, understanding these rationales and identifying one that resonates for you and your organization can be a helpful first step.
But it’s only a first step. After deciding that diversity matters and articulating its importance, leaders must create a strategy for building a more diverse, inclusive company and an accountability plan to ensure that strategy is effective.