UPDATED 18:30 EDT / NOVEMBER 01 2017

WOMEN IN TECH

Ignore gender to close gender gap? This tech company did

Under pressure to prove sexism stereotypes wrong, some tech companies grasp for any means to add female employees. But copying generic best practices may yield flimsy results; for example, a quota for women in tech only goes so far when a company pads it with human resources hires. Plunging deep into employee data, on the other hand, might uncover surer ways to move the needle forward.

“I get really excited about the idea that you can use research to make little tweaks to the way that you do things that change outcomes in really big ways,” said Aubrey Blanche (pictured), global head of diversity and inclusion at Atlassian Pty Ltd.

A “recovering social scientist by training,” Blanche regularly pores over the enterprise software company’s internal data to gauge equitable hiring, employee satisfaction and the like. The data may inform programs or focus groups aimed at retaining and promoting employees from underrepresented groups.

Blanche recently spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event in Orlando, Florida.

Probing its data has sometimes led Atlassian to counterintuitive insights into workplace heterogeneity; it’s also helped the company drill down to the level of individual teams. The latter has allowed it to go beyond blanket quotas that may patch a gender gap with HR or marketing hires.

“We’ve improved our hiring of women in technical roles by 80 percent over the last two years,” Blanche said.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Aubrey Blanche in our Women in Tech feature.

Redefining diversity

The deeper an organization digs into employee data, the richer its definition of diversity becomes, according to Blanche. Earlier this month, Apple Inc.’s vice president of diversity and inclusion, Denise Young Smith, raised some eyebrows with her reinterpretation of diversity.

“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room, and they’re going to be diverse, too, because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” Smith said at a panel on minority issues. “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”

Some felt that Young was shrugging off the importance of gender and ethnicity-based inclusion. Despite the blowback, Blanche (who is Hispanic) seems to agree with Young in principal.

“You need to understand that women is a diverse group,” Blanche said. When companies parse employee data, intersectional lines between individuals based on much more than gender will surface, she explained. A female employee might have several factors — background, education, experience, skills, political views, etc. — in common with other, perhaps male, employees.

Building on data beyond gender obliquely, but with measurable success, resulted in greater retention and promotion of females at Atlassian. “When you start talking about axes of diversity that are past gender … it turns what could be an us versus them into something about we,” she said. “And you will get greater gender equity out of that.”

It may seem awkward to build programs for gender equity that begin off topic, but this shows what’s possible when people are willing to suspend assumptions in favor of data, Blanche stated. “Trust the data, and know that there are no best practices or silver bullets,” she said.

The cosmetic quota

Atlassian boosted its percentage of women in technical roles by 80 percent in just two years with the same scientific approach. “We test something, we see whether it works, and then we iterate and improve it,” Blanche said.

Zeroing in on the gender balance of particular teams is an aggressive step toward equity. “It doesn’t actually matter if you have 30 percent women in your company if all the women are in HR and marketing,” she said.

Are corporate-level quotas useless sans a technical headcount?

Accenture Plc has announced an ambitious goal of 50/50 gender representation by 2025. In September, Alicia Johnson, managing director at Accenture, told theCUBE the company will publicly publish its numbers. Accenture’s core business is consulting and strategy, though some initiatives concentrate on “high-demand, short-supply, high-performing women in technical architect roles,” Johnson said.

Companies willing to publicly publish numbers appear in short supply. While nearly 80 companies — including Airbnb Inc., Lyft Inc. and GitHub Inc. — signed the White House Tech Inclusion Pledge, a mere 17 of them report figures, according Fortune.

Is it the job of for-profit companies to close the tech gender gap? Some — including a former female engineering project manager at Google LLC — say no. Last August, shortly after the Jame Damore fury, Vidya Narayanan aired her response in a Medium article. Narayanan bemoaned the difficulty of hiring women from a 90-percent-male candidate pool. The university pipeline is where the work must begin, she stated.

“In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we f*** it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech,” she wrote. A quota of underqualified women “reinforces to the male population that was already peeved by the diversity push that women aren’t that good at tech after all,” Narayanan wrote.

Data bias eraser

Narayanan conceded that conscious and unconscious biases against women exist within tech companies. By collecting and rendering data creatively, these companies can help circumvent that bias, according to Blanche.

Women exhibit this bias themselves, it seems — research shows that they rate themselves lower than men do for the same work. Last year, Atlassian changed its performance-review process to adjust for this distortion. “Now managers write their review without seeing their direct reports review. Turns out, it remove bias, it shortens the process, and it helps identify whether people have an agreement about what people’s work is,” Blanche said.

Giving credit to whomever deserves it and plugging diverse inputs into projects can have concrete business value, Blanche added. In fact, employees from majority groups have reported that these initiatives have improved their experience at Atlassian.

“This is a win-win-win solution. It’s not a zero-sum game,” Blanche concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU