Thursday, November 13, 2014

Building Diversity in IT: reading recommendations roundup

There's a conversation going on at the day job about how to encourage diversity in hiring and retention. Of the places I've worked, this one actually looks pretty good at hiring all kinds of people and encouraging all kinds of perspectives -- at least compared to the miserable state of affairs in tech companies generally. ("Be located downtown in an ethnically diverse city, not out in the suburbs" is something that, I've noted, helps a lot). Nonetheless there are some notable gaps, such as in gender segregation of roles (i.e. a trend towards "girls talk to humans, boys talk to machines").

There seems to be some interest in addressing this and some desire for resources containing smart thinking about it. I called upon the hive-mind for help and here's what it yielded:

• Tomes:
  • Unlocking the Clubhouse, Margolis & Fisher, MIT Press; underlying causes and contributing factors for the CS gender gap
  • (Forthcoming:) The Diverse Team - Healthy Companies, Progressive Practices, Ashe Dryden; specifically on how marketing, hiring process, culture, and practices attract or repel, support or discourage the people you want to hire.
• General articles on the topic:
  • Hacking Tech's Diversity Problem, Harvard Business Review; this one came multiply recommended.
  • Several articles on the gender gap in this Fast Comany feed, including "The Loneliness of the Female Coder"
  • There's quite a bit of insight on the alienation involved in acculturating to tech world's norms, and the costs thereby incrued, in Fast Company's profile of entrepeneur Tristan Walker and associated roundtable talk on race in Silicon Valley.
• Success stories:
  • Everybody in my social web raved about Hacker School and its success in creating an awesome-and-thus-diverse environment. In particular:
    • My friend Sumana's keynote speech at WikiCon talks about what Hacker School does right.
    • Worth reading is Hacker School's user manual, and particularly its section on how they create a welcoming environment.
    • (And Hacker School is, of course, itself a good place to find employees).
  • On Etsy quintupling their female engineer headcount
  • Harvey Mudd's revamp of its CS program to close the gender gap has been covered in TechCrunch and NPR
• Blogs and websites to follow
  • Model View Culture, a webzine addressing political issues in tech.
  • Geek Feminism
  • Diversity expert Ashe Dryden
• Other resources
  • "Questions I'm Asking in Interviews", and which employers ought to be thinking about how to answer