 I wonder if these handheld mics work? Yeah. Fantastic. Hi. So my name is Natanya Malin-Gazik. I work with all different kinds of companies and organizations on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. You see the logos on here, the organizations that I've worked with range quite a bit. I do work quite a bit with early stage and mid-sized tech startups. So have some familiarity working with engineers. The thing that all of these organizations have in common is very strong and often, I would call them beautiful, intentions or values around diversity, equity, and inclusion and some curiosity about where they might be hitting the mark or missing the mark in terms of living those values every day. So I come in and help organizations figure out where they're hitting the mark and where they could be, maybe some room to grow, and then bridge that gap together. So what are we going to talk about today? For the next 20, 25 minutes or so, I'm hoping to answer or start to answer at least two questions for you. The first is, what are we talking about when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion? We'll go through some basic vocabulary words together that hopefully will help us be able to have these conversations a little bit more productively together and in our offices. And the second is, what can I do about it? So when you leave this room, when you get back to work on Monday, what are some things that you can actually do in your organizations to help your organizations live their values? So let's jump in. Let's talk about some vocabulary words. I think when we hear vocabulary words, sometimes we think about vocabulary tests that we know quiz at the end of this conversation. And I'm actually not particularly concerned about whether you memorize definitions to these words. I'm really interested in you walking away with an understanding of how these words are related to one another and why it's important to look at them in combination and not in isolation. So let's think about the relationships between the words and not necessarily focus on making sure we memorize the exact definitions of the words themselves. I like to think about diversity, equity, and inclusion as a dance party. So diversity inviting somebody to come to the dance, inclusion actually asking them to dance with you once they're there. These are outcomes. You either have lots of different kinds of people at the dance or you don't. You either have lots of different kinds of people dancing at the dance or you don't. Equity are the processes, not the outcomes, that we use to actually make sure people are able to get to the dance, people are actually able to dance once they're there and feel comfortable doing so. So equity is thinking about things like, does somebody have a ride to get there in the first place? Is there music playing that not only makes people not uncomfortable, but actually makes them excited to get on the dance floor? What does the lighting look like? What kind of food is being inserted? What's the environment? Do people feel comfortable there so that they can feel included? Let's jump into what that actually means at work. When we talk about diversity, we're usually talking about demographics when we talk about our staff. Is there the presence of difference inside of our organizations? I want to take a pause there and think about the fact that diversity actually only exists in relationship to a group. So if you walk away from this talk with just one thing today, I really hope it's that we stop using the term diverse candidate. Usually when we say the term diverse candidate, we actually mean something else. Well, you might mean this person as a woman. This person is a person of color. This person identifies with the LGBTQ community. If that's what we mean, then that's what we need to say. Being more precise with our language actually helps us achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve. When we're talking about diversity, we're talking about a group of people. And if we're trying to bring more underrepresented folks into our workplaces, let's talk about the groups that exist in our workplaces and the groups that don't. So diversity is the presence of difference in a group. I'm diverse only to the extent that I have a lot of diverse organisms inside of my body. But my femaleness doesn't make me a diverse person, right? That's not a thing. And we're talking about equity. So equity are these processes, right? Equity is the presence of fairness inside an organization. And the process is the systems that we implement to try to create a level playing field, which in this field we recognize actually doesn't exist in society at large. And so because people aren't starting from a level playing field, none of us are. It's important to think about the equitable processes that we put in place inside of our organizations to create that sense of fairness. If we do that, then we might start to see a sense of inclusion, where we're actually bringing individuals in as part of a group. We're involving them meaningfully in the processes that we have going on at work in decision making, there's a sharing of power. And we think about that especially when it comes to underrepresented groups who often are less included, even if they are present. And if we put all of these things in place, then individuals might start feeling a sense of belonging at work. This has become kind of a sexy word lately to talk about belonging. Let's think about what it actually means. We often feel a sense of belonging when we're part of a homogenous group. When we sense a lot of sameness around us. So if you think about a time when you have felt belonging, it might be with your family. It might be when you've been part of a religious organization or a social club, you know what the sameness is with the people around you. You're not having to put a ton of effort into fitting into cultural norms. When we do, when we feel different from other people around us, we're having to actually spend what turns out to be quite a bit of mental and emotional energy to fit in. And that at work takes away from our ability to actually be productive. So what's the point of having a hugely diverse organization? If the folks who you brought in, who are part of underrepresented groups, are having to spend so much of their energy to fit in and to feel like they might kind of sort of maybe belong. That they actually don't have a ton of time left over to put mental energy into their work. That's quite a shame. You'll see I have an equation on the side of the screen. This isn't like a perfect mathematical equation. But what it's meant to represent is the fact that we need to have the presence of all of these things. When we have diversity, we need equity and inclusion in order for everybody to feel that sense of belonging. What you will notice though is that it's quite possible to have diversity without having equity, inclusion, or belonging. It's also quite possible to have a sense of belonging or a sense of inclusion without any diversity at all. That's quite common when you hear especially in tech, people talk about what an amazing culture their company has, how included they feel at work, what a great sense of camaraderie there is among their peers. Do you look at the demographics of those organizations? You're often looking at pretty homogenous organizations. Where I get really excited is when we see the achievement of, there's tons of diversity here, and we're boasting about our culture. And even folks, especially folks from underrepresented groups, are also boasting about the culture, not something to pay attention to. So that's it for the vocabulary lesson. I hope that gives you enough of a foundation to be able to start thinking about these concepts a little bit more productively. I'm going to move on now to what we can actually do about it when we get to work. So diversity and inclusion outcomes, equity process. I'm dividing this up into the phases of the employee life cycle. Just because it's a little bit of an easier way to think about processes in somewhat of an order. And I'm going to start with selection, so hiring. Quick show of hands, raise your hand for me if you're all engineers in tech. So if you have been part of an organization, part of a hiring process, part of a, maybe you've been interviewing or you've been thinking about hiring new people, and you've heard somebody mention the phrase or you've thought to yourself, we really like more diversity inside of this organization. We'd like to hire more women, more people of color, fill in the blank. But we're not finding enough qualified candidates in our field. We don't have enough folks in engineering with the identities. If you've heard that comment, if you've thought it yourself, yeah. So this is something that a lot of my clients come to me with, and I will tell you a little bit of a story about what I have done to help with that. And the kinds of things that you might bring up to your organizations. Next time you hear that. I'm throwing a bunch of tactics on the slide for you. I'm not going to walk you through each of these. It would be a little bit boring. Please feel free to write them down and Google them. And you should find tons of information about each of these. I'm going to walk you through an example instead. Hopefully a little bit more interesting. I had a client come to me last year, early stage tech startup, hiring engineers. Actually, fluency and post-dress was a very important criteria for those engineers. And what they were saying to me was, Natanya, diversity is a core value for us. We mean that, we live it, it's really important. And our engineering team is entirely bailed. And that, visually, is not a representation of what our values are. And also it doesn't feel right to us. Can you please help us find more qualified female engineers? And I said, I would be happy to try to help you with that. But actually, what we need to figure out is why you're having this problem in the first place. And why it is that this is the hypothesis that you've developed is that you don't have enough women on your engineering team because there aren't enough qualified female engineers. Certainly that's true. There are great programs like Girls Who Code who are working to bring more women into the field. But there are quite a few women in this field. So why are they applying to your roles and why aren't you hiring them? The first thing that we did was think about their networking. So it turns out that we tend to hire from the groups that we know. When we're working in tech, we're often in fast-growing organizations. We need to hire somebody yesterday, and so we reach out to our networks. And because we're human beings, we tend to network with people who look like us, who think like us, who have things in common with us. That doesn't make us evil people. That's really, really normal. But what that means is that we need to have some awareness of that and start building our networks a little bit more thoughtfully. So I help this organization build relationships with organizations where women in tech tend to gather. Organizations like Women Who Code where we can post, not only post our job descriptions on their site, but also ask them, what does a meaningful partnership look like for you? What do you need right now? How can we build a relationship for the long term so that the next time we need more engineers, we already have an existing relationship. And the thing that we can do in a hurry is actually reach out to the people we know who are you and start seeing who you have in the organization who we can hire. So thoughtful networking. We then looked at their job description. So there's great platforms out there. Techsteo is one of my favorites. It's been a nice free trial if you want to pop in there today. Techsteo and other platforms like it allow you to put your job descriptions in a website and it pops up for you, shows you what language you might be using that might actually be attracting candidates with certain demographics. So in particular for this organization, we looked at language that might be more attractive to male candidates instead of female candidates. That's a really nice and simple way, pretty straightforward, to help make sure that our job descriptions are not part of the problem. Blind resume reviews. So we took names off of resumes. We took names of schools off of resumes. This is a great way to make sure that our unconscious biases, which is a whole other workshop, aren't playing a bigger role in our candidate selection process than we would like them to when we're thinking with our sound and calm minds. And then structured interviews is the biggest piece of this. So what a structured interview does is make sure that we're assessing every candidate in the same way every time. This is really important because it turns out that as human beings we have different comfort levels with different kinds of human beings. Really normal. Doesn't make us bad people. It's just part of being human. And we have a structured interview process. What we're doing is making sure that the unconscious biases that play a role in that comfort level aren't what's dictating who we're bringing into our organization and who we're not. So we look at the business objectives for an organization, take a lot of steps to end up determining what questions we're gonna ask in the interview and how we're assessing a candidate the same way every time based on their answers to those questions. We then talked about eliminating negotiations. So I worked with them in the offer extension process. It turns out that eliminating negotiations is a really excellent way to start chipping away at the pay equity gap between men and women. And one of the challenges that they were having was that they actually had extended some offers to women and they declined. And so we needed to figure out ways to signal to those women, hey, even though you don't see any other women on this engineering team, we are taking meaningful steps to make sure we have equitable processes in the organization. And so that's one of them. We went through all of those steps and we did see more women start to come through and make more progress in the candidate selection process. And we still saw some women declining the offers. And so what we did then was move on to thinking about why might they be doing that? Well, they might be picking up on some things that give them some hints at what the environment might be like inside the organization. It's also very normal to not want to join a group where we have a visual signal that we might be the only one inside of that group. That means we're gonna have to spend a lot of mental and emotional energy once we get into that organization, doing things that aren't what we're being paid to do or what we're gonna be evaluated based on. Whoops. I'm gonna walk you through an exercise if someone can come up and help me. Oh, there we go, perfect. So we then moved on to looking at retention and promotion practices, which we'll look at next. But before we do that, how much time do I have left? Perfect. I would love to have us just start thinking about how we might implement some of these kinds of practices in our own organizations. So if you could take maybe two minutes with the person next to you or in front of you, depending on where you're sitting and start thinking about what you would do in this scenario. So you've just started, you've gone out and started founded your own company. Congratulations, it's really successful. You're growing fast and you've got to hire some engineers. And you're going, you know, you're tiny. So it might be actually pretty, this is the stage or it might be easy for you to just hire who you know, right? But think about it, you're setting the groundwork for what you're gonna look like in a couple of years down the road. So I'd love for you to start thinking about what are the things that would actually be reasonable for you to expect yourself to do today to start building a diverse, to make sure that you can build a diverse team as you grow. So just take a couple of minutes and talk with your neighbor about what things that you might do. I appreciate it. I'm gonna stick with you. You're so big on it. You're so big on it. I think about all the steps you took. You're so big on it. I'll follow you from there. Yeah. Don't do that. You're so big on it. I need to come with you. Yeah. Yeah. I think the benefits especially, so like, sure. We'll try to do that. But yeah, so like, I think some of the new stuff that we've just added all of last year, it's gonna make a difference in that. Like, I think, I definitely, we've gone like, out in the status care too. Some career stuff, some moving and that kind of thing. And then some things, like representation there, but you can still get a story now. Like going to career fairs that are, like, specifically targeted at those groups, specific groups that you know, like the first five, me too. Also your phone. Yeah. The name of the company was like, was the, I don't know. Only the other one. Okay, rapid fire, might as well, I hope that you can talk about that for a while longer. I'd love to hear some of the ideas that came up. What are some of the things that I didn't talk about yet that you would start doing? Yeah. Oh cool. LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn groups. Yeah. Figuring out what LinkedIn groups out there exist that might connect to the folks you're not already connected with. Great idea. You look like you're an air-raiser again. Yeah? Yeah. Are you part of another group? Absolutely. One of the things that we did in the company that I was recruiting for was actually having the engineers themselves go into user groups and start posting in there. Particularly actually explicitly saying we are really excited to bring in underrepresented folks into our workplace. And here's what we're doing to make sure that our environment is a welcoming one. Yeah. Develop a mentoring program. As part of what? As part of the senior engineers responsible. Yeah. Talk to me about how mentoring would impact the selection process. Well, people looking for internships. Oh, so mentoring for folks who aren't yet inside the organization. But junior people need to start learning how to do the work and also help your senior engineers build up leadership kind of thing of mentoring people. Fantastic. Yeah. That's very rare to see in smaller organizations where the engineers are super pressed for time. It's hard. It's hard to get managers to be able to justify letting engineers spend their time mentoring folks who aren't yet inside the organization. So often we see in a mid-sized or larger organization. But certainly it does have a long term payoff. So that would be a dream client for me. Somebody could recognize that. Yeah. Fantastic. Where is the diversity? Yeah. Okay. Actually, we were just talking because we are from the same organization. Fantastic. Actually, we think that our organization is a perfect example because it was started like just recently and our CEO who is a female actually made sure that from the very beginning it is built with diversity in mind and a lot of things she like put down there because I was like the employer number six in the company. So I've seen for all this process. So actually one of the big things she did from day one again she was explicitly focusing on benefits for parents and we have some unique benefits actually. I think nobody has in addition of like giving very generous like parental leave and most importantly actually she made sure that we are giving actually parental leave. So regardless whether it's mother or father they get like same benefits. And one of the best things we just got back to work is back to work, right? That's helpful. Yeah. So after the maternity paternity leave we have also another four weeks when they come on the short week three times a day on full base. So yes, that's fantastic. So flexible schedules and parental leave benefits are actually that's perfect segue. Thank you. Not even a plant. Into the next section which is talking about, oh, just kidding. Talking about, I'll tell you what's covered up about retaining and promoting diverse talent. So when we think about the kinds of practices that we put in place going back to this previous example where we were bringing women through the pipeline and they were rejecting our offers, thinking about why might that be the case? So when we didn't expect questions actually ask them and one of the things that we did was implement surveys for Kansas who've gone through our hiding process regardless of the outcome. But one of the things that we were learning was that we weren't doing a particularly good job of advertising or sharing with candidates punk the examples of the kinds of equitable processes that we had in place. So here on the screen, I'll tell you what's covered up. So the first one says specific and productive, constructive feedback. So when we give feedback or giving it about a specific incident that happened we can describe the behavior that took place. And then we're being constructive about what we are asking the person to do. One of the things that we know in tech in particular is that when women receive feedback it tends to be vague. It's not necessarily about a specific incident that happened, but it's about like, well, you're just showing up in kind of a funny way. I'm not quite sure. I feel like you could be more ex. If we can be specific and constructive we're actually helping somebody's career quite a bit more. The other thing that's covered up says pay equity and transparency. The other thing that's covered up says share an office housework. So the first column here is really about the kinds of feedback that we give to employees and how. When we think about retention and emotion we want to make sure that we are evaluating people in a fair way. One of the ways that we can do that is the kind of feedback that I just described specific and constructive. Another way we can do that is 360 reviews so making sure that when we're evaluating somebody we're taking a lot of different perspectives into account. If we care about how people treat their subordinates then we've got to ask their subordinates about how they're doing it. And then making sure that we take that into account when we're thinking about promotions and we have a really clear ladder that's transparent for everybody to understand how you can move from point A to point B. Promotion criteria is also a really great way for an organization to live their values when it comes to making sure that we're promoting leaders who are actively supporting our values. So there are companies out there who refuse to give an employee their bonus or promote them if they have been a manager unless as a manager they have managed they have accomplished making their team more diverse as it has grown. If they haven't been able to do that they can't get their bonus that year. So that's a way for an organization to really say we're putting our money where our amount is we might look at a manager's engagement score is to think about is there a huge differential on their team in terms of employees with different demographics experiencing engagement differently in the organization. So really making sure we're evaluating folks fairly and then holding ourselves accountable to that as an organization. Amplification is one thing that I think I should explain because we don't hear a ton. Quick Google with the word amplification in Obama, White House and women will take you a really fun story that I'll summarize for you quickly. You would hope that a president with Barack Obama's values would have be the leader of an organization the White House that was quite equitable and inclusive particularly as a black man. But it turns out that our identity and our values don't actually necessarily mean that we have the practices in place to create the kind of inclusion that we want. And it turns out that the women who worked on Barack Obama's staff were noticing something was happening inside the White House that's really common for women to experience in any organization. Which is that at large meetings a woman would speak up, share an idea. The conversation would move on nobody would really recognize the idea. A man would share the same idea a couple of comments later and all of a sudden it was a fantastic idea and everybody was talking about it. And the women were fed up and so they decided to become allies for each other and engage in a process that we now call amplification. Which means that as soon as a woman shared an idea that another woman at the table thought was interesting then other women would jump in immediately and say, gosh Natanya I love that idea what I heard you just say was I think women should support each other in the workplace by doing x, y and z. And make sure that everybody around the table had an opportunity to actually hear that idea twice. This is something that men could do too except that then we bring in a complicated dynamic of the man getting credit so it actually worked quite well for women to do it for each other. But this is an example of something that you don't need to be a manager to do. There are tons of grassroots efforts that we can engage in to create more equitable processes inside of our organizations. And I encourage I think sharing office housework is also something that we think about when we're thinking about women in tech and in particular office housework is things like who remembers birthdays? Who plays office outings? Who takes the notes during meetings? These are things that we see women tend to do a lot more than men on average. And so when we can put in processes and systems to make sure that we have ways for dividing that work what we're doing is making sure that everybody has an equal amount of time to put into the work that they're actually getting evaluated based on and that we decide to give promotions based on. One of the reasons why it's important to engage in systems and processes like these is because especially in tech but across all most industries in the US we see lots of demographic diversity, entry levels. We've actually done like law is a great example of this. We see 50-50 parity in gender in the entry levels of the law field. And then we see that the vast majority of equity partners in law firms are known. They're also majority white. What's happening? Why are we not seeing people get promoted at equal rates because a lot of these processes aren't in place. People are welcomed into organizations and then have to spend a lot of their time and energy fitting into cultural norms that aren't theirs. We're not actually including them in the culture in meaningful ways giving underrepresented folks time to commit to the activities that we're then evaluating them on and giving them promotions on and then we're not seeing them rise in the ranks. So one quick last exercise let's say you're a manager of a team of 12 or so engineers and your boss comes to you with an opportunity and says I would love for you to nominate one person on your team to join a leadership development program. So this could be any kind of program where this is an opportunity for somebody to develop leadership skills. It's gonna be a big boost in their career and really set them on a management track. Turn to your neighbor and chat for the next 45 seconds or so what factors are you gonna use in determining who to nominate? How are you gonna figure out who to nominate? So like none of these successful solutions will ever come from beginning to the end because it's all kind of housework. So I wanna leave a few minutes for questions in the end and the interest of that I'm gonna jump in and share with you. This answer is a lot less straightforward for the last one. Now the criteria is gonna be really different depending on what your team does, what kind of leadership position we're looking for, what qualities do you think of leader? The thing that turns out to be important in the answer to this question is that you've engaged in the kinds of practices that we talked about before. You've got regular feedback going on, evaluation of criteria are clear. If you've done that, then it's gonna be clear to you what are the different qualifications of different people in your team. Then you'll be able to create some metrics for yourself to think about, okay, who's showing promise? Who could use that development opportunity? And you're gonna have some confidence that's not based on, well I happen to know that because I get coffee more often with this person. Or I happen to know that because this person's kid and my kid are on the same basketball team. But it's really gonna be based on my understanding of everybody on the team's work and how they're doing. So I think I have maybe 90 seconds left or so. Is there any time for two questions? Yeah. So back on that, so if you have a situation where somebody's president but for whatever reason, if you could be a woman on the team, it could be someone who's from a low income background and sort of feels something in the midst of a bunch of rich kids, they may not be suitable for that. They may not be stepping up. They may not be raising. So now when you say we're gonna promote, you're still gonna be promoting the same people. So before you do that, you should already have things in place to encourage people to step up and support them. When they do, encourage people to speak up and support them so prior, there should be steps prior to that. Exactly. Thank you, I appreciate that reiteration. So, right, exactly. So the answer really is, this is a complicated question, right? And in order to make sure that we're actually able to answer it thoughtfully, what we need to do or make sure that we have these equitable processes in place. You'll see one of the other tactics almost turning that we had talked about as regular feedback surveys, right? And so this is reverse feedback. This is making sure that you're actually asking your employees on a regular basis, has it done? What are the things that we could be doing as an organization to make sure that you feel a greater sense of conclusion and belonging at work? When we make these surveys confidential and anonymous with a better chance of actually receiving feedback, it's gonna help us improve as an organization, make sure folks are actually having an opportunity to shine. And of course crafting as we go, none of us are perfect. I'm not perfect at how I implement this stuff. I run these surveys all the time to make sure I figure out where are my blind spots? What have I not told this organization to do that I should be telling them to do? I don't know unless I ask so really important point, thank you. Maybe one last question. Well, hopefully the panel is great food for thought. I'm gonna pass it off to them. You're gonna be hearing from a couple of different folks who think about these issues every day in their organization and hearing from examples from them about what it looks like to actually implement some of these equitable processes at work. I would love to stay in touch with you and continue the conversation. So please feel free to reach out if I can answer any questions and I'll also stick around after the panel as well. Thank you so much. Thank you.