Over the past few months I’ve had quite a few inquiries from young black women who are starting their careers in tech. They’ve been asking for advice related to working in the industry, navigating through corporate, and flourishing in the workplace.

Out of the belief that black women can learn from each other and can support each other in our professional aspirations, I reached out to black women in tech and asked them three questions:

(1) If you could go back in time to the beginning of your career in tech and give yourself a piece of advice, what would you say?

(2) What’s one piece of advice you would give to black women entering the tech industry?

(3) If you could change one thing about your current work place to make it a better experience for black women, what would it be?

The advice in this piece comes from black women who work in design, research, advertising, engineering, IT, and product/program management; they work across major cities in the U.S. and most respondents were 25 to 45 years old.

This is their advice.

If you could go back in time to the beginning of your career in tech and give yourself a piece of advice, what would you say?

Themes: don’t be fearful, believe in yourself, secure the bag, be vocal about your aspirations, seek out wisdom and support.

“People will sometimes be trash towards you. They’ll tell you that you don’t know enough, or that your knowledge isn’t technical enough. Don’t listen to them. They’re going on some impossible standard that even they themselves could not fulfill. You simply loving technology is enough.”

“Just go for it! Stop making excuses for reasons not to go after something you really want.”

“Build a network of other black women in tech who have been in the industry. You’ll need them during difficult and discouraging times at work. More importantly, they’ll be able to give you advice on how to navigate corporate life, especially because you’ll find yourself in spaces where (more times than not) you’ll be one of the only black women there.”

“Prioritize self-care in your hustle. Don’t let relationships fall to the wayside just because you’re busy. Find the time and make the time for those close to you and prioritize your well-being.”

“I would say that even though the road aheads looks lonely, you are not alone. I would say to lean on the women who you have known and seen pave the way ahead of you, both inside and outside of the tech industry, and don’t be afraid that you will be a ‘bother’ by asking for help and admitting you are having a hard time. My greatest advice would be to extend grace and pride to myself for having the courage to move outside of a comfort zone to pursue a path that was not yet fully determined, but would ultimately lead me to swim in the depths of my own possibility and to not fear or doubt those depths.”

“Be more confident. Take the steps that will foster trust in your knowledge, expertise, and skills. For example, thoroughly prepare before each meeting, regardless of the meeting’s level of importance, reading key documents, annotating the documents, etc.. Confidence is nothing more than preparation. Build a reputation of being on top of your stuff.”

“You are the main character in your life, it’s your world, enjoy your journey, indulge in your passions, love yourself fiercely, you’ll make it.”

“Go for the money and also take heed of companies’ reputations. Seek out others’ insights about what the company is like to work at before accepting an offer, as well as meet your team.”

“Don’t be afraid to articulate what your interests and career goals are and stick to them. Don’t be afraid to counter offer.”

“Have faith in yourself. You forging your own way is a strength, not a weakness. I pivoted from working in the non-profit sector with a non-technical education and I felt so much like a fish out of water in Silicon Valley. However, as I gained more experience as a designer I realized that my background was an asset that set me apart.”

“Start to advocate for yourself earlier, you are your own best cheerleader.”

What’s one piece of advice you would give to black women entering the tech industry?

_Themes: sponsors > mentors, take risks, don’t give up on your career aspirations, be confident in what you have to offer, your thoughts and ideas have val_ue.

“Getting a sponsor is more important than a mentor. A sponsor is someone who can speak to the quality of your work/work ethic and will go to bat for your during performance reviews or in landing your next project/gig. In essence, they are willing to risk their social & professional capital in order to increase yours. That is not the same as a mentor. A mentor’s only risk and expenditure is their time.”

“If a job looks interesting, apply for it. Ignore the urge to fit 100% of the qualifications. Studies show that men only look at and fulfill maybe 25% of them. Imagine a woman who has 75% applying for the same job. You’d be a shoe-in.”

“Have confidence that your perspective, no matter how different, is worth being heard. Be bold in sharing the ways you think and experience things differently, because it could have a strong impact on the direction of a product or business that may not have had diverse perspectives without you. Know that your voice is of value, even if there is no one else that supports you or if there are others who try to tell you otherwise. Often when you lean into those moments and speak up, you will find that there are others who have felt the same but have felt as though they didn’t have the space or confidence to say it.”

“Network, you’ll realize later how important connections are.”

“Don’t stay at a company or team if you don’t like it or them, there is someone else willing to pay you more and be happy.”

“Write down your vision and make a plan. Find trusty mentors and sponsors that you can meet with for sound meaningful feedback.”

“Don’t be fooled into thinking that all ‘mainstream’ women will be your sponsor or allies in the workplace. I have been surprised by the people who have gone to bat for me or defended my reputation when things go wrong (which they inevitably will). Many of those people have included white men on my team. In fact, white men have been equally — if not more — supportive of me than white women.”

“In the majority of work team environments you will be the only black female. Be intentional in your decisions, speak up and never be afraid to make mistakes. That is how you will learn. Also, always have a goal that is targeted towards career growth that you are actively working towards.”

“Don’t give up. We need your thoughts options and ideas. Also relationships matter so get ready to network to help you get in and keep networking to move up.”

“Build together. Ask for help. Seek community wherever you can to support you. Even if that just means joining a Slack group for WoC.”

“Be confident in your value and skills others might doubt, but never doubt yourself — you are unlimited. Haters are immature.”

If you could change one thing about your current work place to make it a better experience for black women, what would it be?

Themes: increase representation by hiring more black women, safety to acknowledge white privilege and racism, white co-workers leading the conversation on diversity & inclusion.

“I would have encouraged black women even more than ever to apply for positions they think would be out of their realm. We need a lot of black women in management. And to stop looking for mentors after a certain point and start looking for sponsors. You need someone to drop your name in the decision room when the time comes. Start building those early (and never think you DON’T deserve the accolades).”

“MORE BLACK WOMEN! The worlds need you.”

“I’m the only black woman in our software company of (10000+ employees, Italian-based company). I’ve asked HR to improve our cultural diversity training as it’s affecting my comfortability at work (e.g. comments about hair, people trying to use ‘slang’ with me, assuming I’m ‘aggressive’ because I’m tall, black, and played basketball, being asked why I don’t make friends or eat with anyone when everyone groups together based on nationalities/cultures/race).”

“More black women. I work at a large, well-known tech company and even though we have several office buildings, I’m the ONLY black woman in my building. It can feel really lonely and like I always have to be crushing it in order to prove that I belong here.”

“To have white people own their whiteness and racist ideologies so we can have courageous conversations about race and why in 2019, I am the first African American to obtain promotion and tenure in my department. Also, why no one in the department wants to acknowledge it.”

“More of us! There is so few black women in design-tech jobs.”

“Provide more education on white privilege and white feminism. As the only black woman in my building, I find it difficult to join in conversations that my white women co-workers are having about equality because, well, the only perspective they’re talking about is what it means to be a woman. Whereas for me, it’s about also being a black woman. It’s a privilege to only see your gender as being a barrier to equality and not have to take into account your ethnicity and/or race.”

“I work in a remote and fully-distributed team that seems resistant to meeting in person. To me, I see this as a negative because relationship building happens in-person. No amount of Slack messages or video conferencing can replace in-person networking. For remote workers, have more opportunities for building relationships in order to foster social bonding and team trust.”

“Hire more of us! Be intentional and transparent about your hiring process when it is time for the team to grow and don’t leave inclusion out of the discussion when seeking candidates.”

“Just one thing? Unconscious bias training for management.”

“I would create more visibility of the black female leaders here … I would still like to have a solid network or space for black women specifically to lean into.”

“Please stop forcing black women into being the Diversity & Inclusion Champion. We’re tired and shouldn’t need to take on the responsibility to educating you on privilege, racism, and your own bias. No, we don’t want to talk about this all the time. I often feel like I have to talk about Diversity and Inclusion because no one else in the office is championing it or even discussing it. And as the only black women, that’s discouraging AF.”

“More internal groups targeted to mentoring and advancing career growth for women of color in the company.”

“I don’t have any other black women on my team. It would be nice to have more people that looked like me in the office.”

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As a female technical founder who is heavily involved in recruiting efforts, diversity in hiring is an issue I think about every day. A growing body of research shows that diverse teams perform better, and as that research becomes common knowledge, companies of all sizes are prioritizing diversity efforts.

Though larger tech companies like Facebook and Google are making steady progress towards their diversity goals, the metrics for technical teams at startups remain dismal. I find it encouraging that so many startup hiring managers and recruiters have recognized this as a serious problem, but there are a few areas that are routinely overlooked. This article focuses on five points that I have found effective in helping our startup recruit women. While there are many different facets of diversity and inclusion, this post will specifically focus on gender diversity.

1. Recruit at least one female founder, investor, advisor, or leadership team member.

Hiring at early-stage startups is difficult and largely network-based. A diverse founding team will have a more diverse network from which to hire early employees, whereas a founding team who is entirely male can unintentionally recruit an all-male team.

Having no female leadership, no female investors, and no female advisors is signal that a startup doesn’t truly value diversity, and could influence female candidates against joining. Even if your founding team isn’t diverse, you can reverse the trend by recruiting a woman onto your leadership team. Female leaders often add a diverse network to the candidate pool, and their presence in an organization indicates less bias against promoting women into management.

While searching for the right hires, also put effort into finding a diverse set of company mentors. The right female advisor or investor can help recruit female candidates and serve as a role model for people at the company. There are so many accomplished women who would make incredible assets as advisors to startups relevant to their area of expertise.

2. Prioritize pipeline diversity at the top of the recruiting funnel.

Companies with women can more easily recruit other women, and the best place to start is at the beginning. Early diversity problems can compound down the road, when candidates may view a lack of women as indicators of systemic bias or a toxic culture.

To systematically focus on diversity from the beginning, constantly monitor your candidate pipeline. At our company’s outset, our engineering hiring pipeline was around 50% women. While we benefitted from the network effects of having a female founder (myself), we filled the pipeline by pushing ourselves to brainstorm a diverse set of candidates from our networks, looking at LinkedIn and Facebook to spark our memories. However, over the next few months, we noticed that our pipeline gradually became less and less diverse, and flagged this as an issue.

To fix the problem, we focused on balancing the top of the recruiting funnel. Early startup hiring tends to bias strongly towards in-network referrals, and team members often think of people to refer in an ad-hoc way, which is an opportunity for bias to seep into the process.

To improve diversity among referrals, hold one-on-one meetings with members of your team and ask them to systematically search their networks for female and minority engineers they have worked with in the past, even if they are unsure about their technical skill. Create an internal system for tracking referrals, and make sure to check in to see whether team members have reached out. Many people don’t realize that they subconsciously tend to only refer white and asian males, but by verbally acknowledging that common bias, the team can start to work against it.

3. Incorporate diversity efforts into every external company event.

“Women in engineering” events seem disingenuous when other company events are not ordinarily inclusive. Integrate diversity and inclusion into every event by aiming for a better gender balance at all office events (e.g. board game nights and dinners). Ask the team to conscientiously invite both male and female friends, with the explicit goal of reaching a 50/50 gender ratio at the event.

The benefits of making every engineering event inclusive go farther than helping the women who attend such events feel more comfortable. Often, the burden of throwing diversity-oriented events disproportionately falls on women and minorities, when in reality, it should be the responsibility of the whole team. Ultimately, the most progress happens when the men on the team participate in diversity and inclusion efforts as much as the women.

4. Encourage the team to actively reach out to and mentor women.

Men and women who have made it a priority to mentor women will have more diverse networks. Because there are fewer senior women than senior men in tech, it’s important that those who are able to provide mentorship go out of their way to do so for both the men and the women in their lives.

Good mentorship goes a long way, both inside and outside of your immediate work environment. Within a company, mentorship builds internal role models and helps teammates grow more quickly. However, not every person you mentor needs to be a current coworker, or even a potential hire.

I personally go out of my way to provide guidance to anyone who reaches out, regardless of if I know them or if they are a potential candidate. This involves assisting with interview practice, connecting people with companies that match their interests, helping others deal with workplace conflicts, and even providing advice over the phone to someone who cold-emailed me after reading one of my blog posts.

Providing guidance to a diverse set of mentees helps move the needle on an industry-wide problem. Besides, you might find that your help comes back around in unexpected ways; maybe you can’t recruit that mentee today, but you may be able to recruit them years down the line, or recruit someone else from their network. By consistently and conscientiously offering career advice to both men and women, anyone at your company can establish themselves as a role model for others, and role models are a powerful incentive for someone to join your company. Many people join startups because they’re following a mentor — myself included.

5. Focus more on the system than the statistics.

Often, startups focus too much on diversity metrics, seeming to forget that metrics are merely a symptom of systematic problems in sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and retaining diverse team members.

Lack of diversity is not a problem for which deployed solutions reap immediate results. There is no way for a startup to implement perfect hiring systems and see the metrics start improving the next day; often, results take years to manifest. By rewarding only the results and not the process, leadership may slow gradual improvement towards a better culture and a fairer system.

Instead, create internal metrics that focus on bite-sized issues that can be addressed through day-to-day actions. Reward team members who refer diverse sets of people. Reward those who come up with ways to make company events feel more inclusive. When performance and compensation reviews come around, reward employees who went out of their way to move the needle on diversity initiatives, especially those who are neither hiring managers nor recruiters. Improving diversity is a team-wide effort; to generate change, every person at your company should be aligned on its importance.

The press has placed a lot of emphasis on company-wide statistics — the percentage of women and minorities in leadership or technical roles. However, the companies who have most successfully fostered change didn’t simply discover a previously-unknown source of female candidates. Instead, they invested years into building an inclusive culture, and those years of investment eventually proved fruitful.

Long before working together on Impira, Ankur and I would discuss at length the bleak state of diversity at small startups. We wanted to make sure that, at minimum, we would build a company with an inclusive culture, following the guidelines set by organizations such as Project Include.

Our technical team is currently 30% women, and this number will soon be higher. By continuing to reflect on the successes and failures of our diversity efforts, reinforce diversity as a core value, and improve our hiring processes, I believe that that number can continue to grow in the future. If this is something you’re also passionate about, we would love to work together!

Thank you to Ankur Goyal, Sashko Stubailo, Carl Grennes, and Richard Ni for edits and feedback on this post.

My first year of medical school was in 2003, a time when caring for HIV/AIDS patients was difficult due to lack of antiretrovirals (ARVs). Now as every medical student knows, the excitement of getting to the clinical rotations is unparalleled… walking down the inpatient halls with a stethoscope around your neck , taking care of you ‘own’ patients are among the joys of a young medical student.

However, my dreams were crashed pretty fast — I spent more time chasing after lab results that were lost. But in typical Judy style of being at the right place at the right time, I connected with Ben Wolfe (the first developer for OpenMRS — the largest open source medical records system in the world used in over 40 countries) and the rest is history.

I could tell that Ben was wondering when the only girl in his class would drop off, but those 4 pm hands on meetings proved to be one of the most valuable investments of my time……

Fast forward — and now I have worked in health open source software for many years as a developer, implementer, and evaluator — traveling around the world and making friends whose purpose is to improve patient care in places with limited resources. Nonetheless , I am not one to command a room when I walk in — I am soft spoken, and as most Americans will be quick to remind me “Where is your accent from ?” and a woman of color.

However I am still able to connect to people doing amazing work, most of whom have let me sit on their shoulders and opened innumerable opportunities for this village girl. In summarizing how I network, I realized my strategy is the open source way — I volunteer to maintain an open source radiology imaging system at librehealth.io , and share my experience below. I hope this article helps both mentors and mentees looking to make a difference for diversity in STEM and medicine.

1. Welcome to the community

At LibreHealth, the first post we encourage our new members to write is a short blob about themselves. I check this every other day and give a thumbs up to new members or a like for a new post to send a message that someone saw their message.

Librehealth meet the community post

How can you introduce STEM to minorities? By sharing your social capital — even with simple things like retweets and tags of people who are doing amazing work if you have a big social media presence. Remember most minorities will be shy to propose themselves for award nominations — so give them a shout out for things like the RedHat open source award or the Anita Borg awards… Don’t forget to introduce yourself to someone new and break out of your social circle — especially at conferences.

2. Building a community — How I do it

The challenge of building a radiology information system (RIS) which is is not directly used by patients but by doctors is that your consumer/customer pool is small. With a personal motto of “ people before code” , I work to build a community before focusing on the developer stuff.

For you as a mentee …
Build your network before you need it

In my open source journey this means stalking people using Google — I will start by searching “radiology” + “ Congo” and keep reading on people and organizations working in these countries — connecting with them on Linkedln and Twitter and finally introducing them to our project. I have volunteered as a mentor every year for high school students working on Google Code In and for university students working on Google Summer of Code on projects within our community.

3 months ago, I noticed a tweet introducing the black in AI workshop to be held at NIPS 2017 (which turned out to be amazing). I joined the group and here is my introduction:

self introduction to black in AI group

I did not know who would respond — but this email resulted in making wonderful connections to ML scientists in the Bay area — and as a bonus, I obtained feedback for a future project that would have taken years to learn about. Remember, some connections will work and others will not — don’t sweat it.

3. Help!

There are many channels for getting help on an open source project including Slack channels or IRC:

Help options for developers

How/ Where do you start networking? Online networking is easy and lower in cost, but face to face communication is king. For example, at the open source summit organized by the Linux foundation, there is a women’s lunch event that is informal, allowing people introduce themselves and the work they do. The Linux foundation is pretty generous in providing comprehensive scholarships for attendees.

Overall for all conferences, the highest value is the
Hallway track
In other words, people you meet in the corridors and stairs and exchange and inspire each other.

4. Git commit

The idea of committing code to the world to see can be pretty terrifying, so is mentorship. Recognize and embrace the vulnerability of people around you

Git commit

5. Dev 1 -> Dev 2 -> Dev 3

Akin to the evolving developer stages for open source development , let your mentorship relationship grow. For example, while the first talk from a minority speaker maybe on diversity, the next natural step should be to give technical talks. Remember this evolution also means that your mentorship relationship will at one point come to an end and its okay.

6. Code of conduct

Codes of conduct define acceptable behaviors within a community. Seek an environment of safety in your mentorship journey, where you can get honest feedback about your work and where there is room to grow. Also recognize when its time to move on.

7. Social capital

I talk about this again since we geeks love to get free swag or be the volunteer of the month. Use the same principal for your mentors — give a shout out to them when you do something amazing. Reward the mentors in your daily work.

8. Version 1.0 release -> Version 2.0 release

Remember the relationship with your mentors is always changing. Seek to provide updates to both mentors and mentees — What conference have you recently attended? Did you read a new academic paper or book ? Or is there something new in your personal life? …

Have a roadmap, and be agile in tackling your milestones, evaluating what works and what doesn't work. Use version control to manage chaos (and conflict) and be inspired to be amazing !

I recently read an article from Babson talking on how to build your village as a mentee.

I love this idea of a personal board with the following membership (copied from Babson article):

• Chairperson: The person you turn to first; perhaps a spouse or family member
• Zen Master: Someone you can count on to keep you sane and calm
• Business Guru: A professional peer who knows your craft inside and out
• Sounding Board: Someone who is wired similarly to you, with a sensibility like your own
• Devil’s Advocate: A person with a keen ability to reveal opposing perspectives
• Lifelong Friend: Someone who knows your history and helps you stay true to your values

What are your tricks that have worked for you in mentorship (as a mentor or mentee) … ?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock with no access to news outlets or social media, you’re aware that diversity in tech is a huge issue. I’m not going to go deep into why diversity in tech (and all fields) is important, because many others have made this argument quite thoroughly and eloquently. Long story short — hiring diverse teams is not only the right thing to do, but has been linked to better business metrics.

What I do want to address is the issue of words vs. deeds. While a very encouraging number of large and small tech companies are showing great interest in improving the diversity of their engineering teams, merely talking about hiring more diverse candidates is not enough to change the status quo.

I recently attended the career fair portion of Tech Inclusion 2017, a conference hosted by Google, where “the tech industry comes together to drive solutions to diversity and inclusion.” Fifty tech companies were in attendance to discuss this year’s conference focus — “what will we each do to ensure that we are driving an inclusive future for everyone?”

Based on my experience at the career fair, and my research on the companies in attendance, I have a few suggestions for where the tech industry should start.

#1: Open up your engineering internships to people who are not currently pursuing Computer Science degrees at a university

Most large and mid-sized tech companies offer engineering internships to current university students and recent grads from traditional Computer Science degree programs. These internships provide valuable experience as well as a foot in the door to people pursuing a career in engineering. But limiting internship opportunities in this way severely restricts the ethnic and gender diversity of internship programs.

The demographics of CS graduates are very similar to the demographics for current software developers: 80% are male, 76% are white or Asian. There are many fantastic efforts currently underway to encourage young girls and children from ethnic minority groups to pursue Computer Science degrees. But the results of these efforts will take decades to go into effect. And these kids still may be discouraged from entering the field if they do not see their gender or ethnicity well-represented in Computer Science.

I checked into the requirements for internships at some of the largest and most well known companies in attendance at tech inclusion: Amazon, Google, Yelp, Microsoft, Zillow, and PayPal. Spoiler alert — they all require applicants to study Computer Science at a traditional university.

These internships exclude people who are self-taught, people who learned programming online, people who attended coding bootcamps, and people who decided to learn to code later in life. If your company’s engineering internships target only current CS students and recent CS grads — your company’s diversity efforts will fail.

If engineering internships are only open to CS students, maybe there’s another way for people from different educational and experiential backgrounds to break into tech roles. This leads me to my next point.

#2: Make sure your company has truly entry level engineering roles

If all of your company’s job openings require prior professional experience in engineering, a Computer Science degree, or both, your company has created a serious barrier to entry for diverse candidates.

Nationally, approximately 80% of software developers are male, and 92% are white or Asian. The best way to change this ratio is to widen the top of your company’s hiring funnel.

Consider hiring people who don’t yet have professional software development experience. Hire those who have taught themselves how to code and created personal projects. Encourage people who have attended coding bootcamps (45% of people who complete coding bootcamps identify as female or gender non-binary) to apply. Give people a chance who learned to code through online courses instead of studying CS in a formal setting.

I researched the software engineering roles posted online by a variety of companies. They all expressed an interest in increasing the diversity of their technical teams by coming to the Tech Inclusion conference and career fair.

Below are specific examples of some of the requirements listed for the most entry level positions I could find at the companies I researched:

Amazon — Software Development Engineer

• 3+ years professional experience in software development
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent work experience

Amplitude

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science or another technical field
• 1+ years of experience working in a frontend or mobile engineering role

Yelp — Software Engineer — Full Stack

• If you don’t have at least one year of experience in a similar role, please take a look at our College Engineering roles instead! (As noted above, College Engineering roles require the applicant to study Computer Science in a traditional university setting).

Ellation

• BS in Computer Science
• 3+ years working on API’s and/or web technologies

Zillow — Software Development Engineer

• You hold a Bachelors degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering
• 2+ years of software development experience

PayPal — Software Engineer — Entry Level

• Bachelors in Computer Science degree or related field from an accredited college or university

Starting to notice a trend? These limiting requirements compound the problems outlined above regarding internships. Entry level engineering roles are even more out of reach than university internships for non-traditional applicants.

By the time Computer Science majors graduate university, they have had the opportunity to gain on-the-job experience as interns. They have already made valuable tech industry connections that will open doors for them as they start their engineering careers.

While the jobs listed above may appear to be entry level, their requirements don’t translate that way. These positions are for people who have already spent 5+ years steeped in the tech industry. Only people who belong to the “in crowd” need apply.

More than a few companies at Tech Inclusion had only senior level engineering positions open with even more rigid requirements. There are, of course, tech companies that create roles for people from non-traditional backgrounds, but these roles and companies are few and far between.

At this point you may be thinking that people without a degree in computer science, and without professional engineering experience, may require much more training and mentorship to ramp up their skills. This may be true — and also leads me to my last suggestion.

#3: Create apprenticeships for people from non-traditional backgrounds

If your company has enough resources to hire interns, your company has enough resources to hire and train apprentices who know how to code but lack professional programming experience. Pinterest, LinkedIn and Facebook started offering these apprentice-style roles in 2016–2017 and have started releasing the results of their efforts.

Pinterest’s Abby Maldonado offers insight on mentorship, training, and regular check-ins to create a successful apprenticeship program in this blog post. She also highlights the success of the first cohort of apprentice engineers. All apprentices from Pinterest’s first cohort were hired as full time engineers within one year of starting the program.

LinkedIn’s Shalini Agarwal shared in the LinkedIn blog that 80% of the engineers in the new REACH program were offered full time software engineering positions with LinkedIn at the end of LinkedIn’s first cohort.

Their recommendations? Give apprentices time to ramp up, but make sure to treat them the same as any other engineer on your team. Offer them opportunities to grow and take on responsibilities.

Business Insider covers Facebook’s Rotational Engineering program — an initiative to provide more opportunities to engineers with non-traditional backgrounds. My favorite insight from this article:

“Facebook Engineering Director Nimrod Hoofien, the rotational program’s internal sponsor, said that introducing the program to Facebook’s engineering teams was “nerve-wracking.” There was no way to tell how they would react. Within two hours, though, he had 60 Facebook engineering teams willing to participate.”

Not only are these apprenticeship programs bringing more diverse hires into the tech industry, but they’re helping companies train and test their talent before offering applicants full engineering roles. Apprenticeships can prevent tech companies from hiring permanent employees who turn out to have disastrous work habits.

Creating a successful apprenticeship program takes careful planning. You must understand what characteristics indicate that a candidate has the potential to become a great engineer. If your company is truly dedicated to creating a more inclusive tech industry, offering apprenticeships is a huge step in the right direction.

On hiring for potential

Taking the time to determine a candidate’s aptitude and potential to succeed requires more effort than glancing at the credentials on their resume. Plenty of tech companies like to cite a pipeline problem as the reason for their lack of diverse hires — they say that there are not enough qualified diverse applicants to fill their technical roles.

This limitation is self-imposed. Each individual company gets to choose who does and does not qualify for an engineering role.

If your company cannot hire engineers from a diverse range of genders and races, your business will perform sub-optimally. Your competitors who are able to broaden their reach will beat you. This is not something that can be easily or immediately solved, and it will require a lot of time and effort. But the long-term results are critical in today’s business environment.

Allocate time and resources to mold the employees you want on your teams. There are plenty of folks out there with huge potential just itching for the opportunity to thrive. We keep trying to kick down doors but progress would come along much more quickly and easily if tech companies would unlock and open those doors. A diverse engineering team is only out of reach if you choose to make it so.

Interested in hiring more female engineers? I’m on the hunt for a role in software engineering. I also happen to be part of a vast network of other female engineers from schools like Hackbright Academy and Techtonica looking to break into the industry. Let’s talk.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please give me some claps so more people see it. Thank you!

References

• Harvard Business Review — Why Diverse Teams are Smarter
• Tech Inclusion 2017 Conference
• Datausa.io — Demographic info for University CS programs and current Software Developers
• Course Report — [2016 Course Report Alumni Outcomes & Demographics Study](http://2016 Course Report Alumni Outcomes & Demographics Study)
• Pinterest blog — Building a more diverse Pinterest though apprenticeship
• LinkedIn blog — REACH Pilot Results in 80% Conversion: Making Strides in Cultivating Talent from Non-traditional Backgrounds
• Business Insider — Facebook rejected her application the first time — now she’s part of a new initiative on how Facebook can step up its hiring practices
• NPR — Why Aren’t There More Women In Tech? A Tour Of Silicon Valley’s Leaky Pipeline
• McKinsey & Company — Why Diversity Matters

Last summer, my spouse’s coworker was featured in an engineer recruitment ad campaign in San Francisco’s BART stations. Many people responded that she didn’t “look like” an engineer.

Unfortunately, this is something that people who are underrepresented in their fields of work hear all the time.

So on August 3rd, I reached out to her in solidarity and shared an idea—what if we raised money to put up billboards showing a lot of underrepresented engineers? She replied, “That would probably break the internet, but I like where your mind is at.”

Later, she responded with an idea for a hashtag: #ILookLikeAnEngineer. It didn’t take long for us to spread the word. We marveled as the hashtag went viral.

With the help of the LadyNerds group that I help lead, we launched a crowdfunding campaign and raised more than $47,000 for #ILookLikeAnEngineer ads. One month after the start of the hashtag, these ads showing underrepresented engineers went up around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The #ILookLikeAnEngineer ad campaign officially ended a year ago this month. Here are some interesting facts about the campaign. I’ve also included a free, downloadable #ILookLikeAnEngineer poster, and a bit about what’s next.

1. What validated the idea of the ad campaign?

The success of the hashtag made it clear that the idea for the ad campaign could become a reality.

Because we spread the word to many women-in-tech groups (LadyNerds, Women Who Code, PyLadies, DevChix, Systers, and Global Tech Women, to name a few), it only took 3 hours for the hashtag to trend in San Francisco.

At the peak time, there were 65 tweets using the hashtag per minute, and in the first five days, there were 140,000 tweets with the hashtag. It was the overwhelming response on the first day of the hashtag that made us realize the ads could get enough support. It took another two days to launch the crowdfunding ad campaign.

_[Stats](http://reverb.guru/view/710372476321586216" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=") from @Bindi & @trebor of Twitter. Shown: @isisAnchalee, @MIT, @triketora, @ChelseaClinton, and @melindagates.

2. Where were supporters of the ad campaign from?

274 out of 381 contributors chose perks that needed to be shipped (otherwise we do not have their locations). These supporters had their perks mailed to 26 U.S. states as well as Washington, D.C.

Ranked by number of contributors wanting perks, the top 10 cities were:

• San Francisco (67)
• Seattle (15)
• Mountain View (8)
• Oakland (8)
• Brooklyn (7)
• Berkeley (6)
• Redwood City (5)
• Alameda (4)
• Cambridge (4)
• Sunnyvale (4)

The campaign also had contributors who wanted perks from the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong, Netherlands, India, Australia, France, Japan, Mexico, Germany, Costa Rica, Pakistan, and Kenya.

Interestingly, not all the top cities for viewers of the ad campaign page were the same top cities for contributors. Here are some stats showing locations of viewers during the first month:

3. Who appeared in the ads?

The #ILookLikeAnEngineer community gathering where most of the photos were taken had 237 people — 56 of whom counted themselves as allies (indicated by which ticket they selected).

Not all of the remaining people were engineers, had their photos taken, or gave us consent to use their photos in these ads. We also received photos provided from the Kapor Center and Billups, an ad management company that donated their services to the campaign, thanks to encouragement from two women in their engineering department. In the end, we had 94 individuals split up among different versions of the ads.

The photographer at the event had the subjects write down their engineering specialties, just in case we wanted to put those details on the ads. Here’s a list that summarizes their responses:

• Aerospace
• Android
• Angular
• Audio
• Automation
• Back End
• Biomedical
• Chemical
• Cloud Software
• Computer Science
• CSS
• Data Science
• Data Visualization
• Databases
• Distributed Systems
• Firmware
• Front End
• Full Stack
• Growth
• Haptics
• Hardware
• iOS
• Java
• JavaScript
• Manufacturing
• Mechanical
• Mobile
• Product
• Quality
• Radio-Frequency
• Robotics
• Sales
• Security
• Supply Chain
• UI/UX
• Wearables
• Web

They also wrote down their employing companies at the time (not all of which still exist):

• Alphastreet
• Apple
• Beezwax
• Booshaka
• Brightroll
• Clever
• Clover Network
• Codepath
• Contract Work
• Credit Karma
• DoubleDutch
• Futuris
• GAP tech
• Glassbreakers
• Google
• Insightly
• Interworks
• Intuit
• Kink.com
• Lanetix
• Literator
• Lithium Tech
• Mainframe
• Mapbox
• Neighborly
• Neustar
• Pivotal
• Propelx
• Punch Through Design
• Radical Designs
• Rohde & Schwarz
• Salesforce
• Siemens
• Sosh
• Symantec
• Tesla
• ThoughtWorks
• U.S. Digital Service
• VSCO
• We Heart It
• WIRED
• Yelp

4. How many people saw the ads?

It’s difficult to estimate just how many eyes saw (and registered) our ads.

This is even tougher to guess since Billups secured “remnant” ad space, which meant that as long as there weren’t replacement ads, our ads could stay up. We never received a final date on all of the ads, so there’s no way to estimate exactly how many additional “impressions” (views, which can occur multiple times per person) there were.

The last estimated number of impressions on October 26, 2015 was 29,953,266. Depending on how long those ads stayed up, the number of impressions could be an additional 340,000 or more.

I was under the impression the ads wouldn’t be up much longer, so I was happily surprised to run into an ad that was still up on November 29th:

I’d heard that someone had placed stickers over faces on this ad, so it was good to see that the stickers had been moved. I also heard some ads had snarky writing on them but never witnessed that myself.

5. How much would an ad campaign this size normally cost?

As best as I can calculate based on the documentation Billups gave us throughout the process, the total cost would have been over $107,351—more than twice the amount we raised.

Here are some factors that saved us significant costs and allowed the ads to spread further:

• Opting for remnant space, which is 60-66% of the full price
• Billups waiving their usual 10% planning fee
• $30,550 in override (to keep the ads up longer if there were no replacement ads) provided free of charge

We are so grateful to Billups for donating their campaign management services, which included research, contracting, design, and many other necessities.

Did I hear there’s a free poster?

I started giving away free #ILookLikeAnEngineer poster PDFs to teachers in November last year:

Now that it’s been a year since the campaign, I’d love to share a poster with everyone.

Download a high-resolution PDF of this #ILookLikeAnEngineer poster here.

Note that you may need to use Adobe Acrobat Pro or other software to view the PDF.

What’s next?

Spearheading the ad campaign was an amazing experience. It inspired me to make another dream of mine a reality: I’m launching a nonprofit called Techtonica that empowers low-income women and non-binary adults with free tech training and job placement.

Learn how you can support this initiative here.