Black and White: The Shades of Gray to Inclusion

I was sitting on the beach watching the waves crash along the shore when my cell phone rang. The alarm company. Our house alarm was going off and the police had been dispatched. Another call came in. Tom*, my son’s friend.

Tom’s voice was laced with panic. “Mrs. Howson, we tripped the alarm and Bryce isn’t with us.” My son and his friends had worked out at their old high school gym, then headed back to our house to hang out. We call them the football bros; they are that close. My son had decided to stop at the store first. I hurriedly gave Tom the code, then called the alarm company back.

           I explained, “It’s okay, just my son and his friends, home from college.”

           “The police are on their way. It’s too late to cancel.”

           I imagined the police pulling up to our house finding three large black men, a Latino, and one white man at our house in rural New Jersey, in a predominantly white town. My husband frantically tried to reach our son, while I barked orders to Tom. “Go to the bottom of the driveway! Do not let the others out of the house!” Tom understood the scene that was playing out in both our heads.

On that day, the police negotiated with Tom. My son showed up just in time. Our collective panic subsided and we would all later laugh about this. But other incidences over the years still make me angry. It is not that the police in our town are bad. Some are little league coaches; others are parents we know through the local schools. But the appearance that day at our house would not have been on the boys’ side. The nonwhite boys come to our high school from more than an hour away. A few live with host families during the year. All are making hard choices on the path for a better life. 

As I think about the tragic events around George Floyd and the subsequent protests, some violent, some peaceful, all from a passionate place, I think about how companies and individuals are responding. With Respect. Impact. Pain. Anger. Can we channel this current passion? Or will it go the way of other protests, including the 1919 riots, coincidentally after the last pandemic? This moment seems bigger, louder, more heartfelt with a degree of bravery in companies taking positions in ways I’ve not seen before.

My first real encounter with racism was in 1980, when my family moved from northern New Jersey to Maryland. I was 15 and we were moving into a street with nice middle class homes. But a mile down the road, the homes were more humble. On the bus on my first day of school, a boy pointed to one of these homes and said they had burned a cross in front it. “To ‘learn’ him a lesson.” Until that point in time, I had thought such things were only in the movies and much further back in history. I arrived at my new highschool that was ~30% African American and had to learn which hallways I was allowed to walk down and which ones where I would not be welcome. How is it that our school was mixed but my classes were not? At best, we came together at a football or basketball game. My father worked nights, so even if he had been home, he had no answers, having grown up in South St. Louis with its own racial divides.

The seeds were sown early in my life in trying to understand who fit in where and why —whether a black person, a woman, or an American living abroad

Diversity in Tech: Social Responsibility or Business Value?

Some of the early rallying cries for diversity and inclusion in tech centered around “fairness.” “It’s the right thing to do.” Nobody bought this. In fact, people bristled. Quotas can become just another form of reverse discrimination.

Are we at an inflection point that people are more willing to say we have a social responsibility to more purposefully level up? This is one of the key values of the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth, an organization early to leverage data for good. 

Regardless of where you stand on the social responsibility viewpoint, consider the business case for diversity. When I was leading the Gartner Analytics and BI MQ, we added the vendors’ diversity metrics because we saw how it impacted innovation and growth. The idea of it and implementation met with friction from various sides. Were we pushing a political agenda, some asked. My co-authors were women and men, from different countries and backgrounds, but no Black people or Latinos. I can count on one hand the number of black industry analysts I’ve met over the years. In the tech industry, there are very few blacks: less than 3% of computer science graduates are Black males and less than 1% female. Let’s take it a step earlier in the education process: in the U.S. only 23% of Black students earn a bachelor’s degree, compared to 44% of whites. How can we possibly fix tech’s diversity problem, when we can’t fix the pipeline education problem? Black people fall further behind, then, without access to these higher paying, higher growth jobs.

The Dangerous Impact on AI

When I first started writing and speaking about Joy Buolamwini’s research at MIT detailing how facial recognition programs were less accurate for Black people, some claimed it was a matter of darker photos and poor smartphone lighting. Feedback on the Gartner keynote that year (2018) was polarizing. Experts and builders of AI resisted the idea that their models might have bias at scale. 

Here is the brutal reality. We DO have bias at scale. It starts with data gaps in the training data, compounded by lack of diversity in the teams building the models who fail even to notice the biased data. Two years later, Buolamwini’s work has changed the thinking of policy makers, data scientists, and numerous tech companies. And yet, if you listen to Stephen Harris, CDO of VMWare in The Data Chief Podcast, some AI developers grossly fail to address these issues. Last week, IBM announced they were pulling out of all facial recognition development. It’s a tragic indictment of our collective failure to establish ethical uses of AI because really, I want such facial recognition programs to help stop human trafficking (where minorities are more often victims) - an example of AI used for good. Stop the bad. Keep the good. But this requires a greater understanding of how AI works and more diversity in developing such guidelines. Even with Covid, we have massive data gaps and data literacy challenges that are especially punishing to minorities.

Small Steps to Inclusion

After reading Denver More and Ron Hall’s book, Same Kind of Different As Me, my family started baking chocolate chip cookies for homeless and poor people in Irvington, NJ, delivered through Bridges Outreach. More, a modern-day slave with little hope, paints a picture of how broken one’s spirit can become and yet how small kindnesses can help lift a person up. In the light of the last few weeks, chocolate chip cookies seem woefully inadequate. And yet, it is standing on the streets of Irvington in 22F that has helped me develop a deeper empathy. The Center for Talent and Innovation calls this type two or acquired diversity.

Last year, ThoughtSpot started a partnership with South Carolina State University and Claflin University, historically Black colleges (HBCUs). We were so excited and yet a tad anxious, picturing these young interns spending a summer in Silicon Valley. Could we create an inclusive enough culture? At times, it seems impossible given how hard it remains for the tech industry to move the needle on gender diversity, a larger minority group than Black workers. In reading the book The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, I know that inclusiveness is the key, otherwise, we merely set everyone up for more heartache. A move to California is a big undertaking for students who have never been far from home and community. We put a new plan in place to meet the students on campus, guest teach in some classes and build trust. Then Covid hit. Perhaps this new work from home will help all of us get to a more diverse workforce, without taking Black students away from their communities and homes. And yet now HBCUs face harsher challenges than other universities.

One Small Big Thing

Companies and individuals alike are thinking how best to respond to this racial crisis. As a company, ThoughtSpot is asking other companies to pledge to enable people to vote. I would also like to see tech companies recruit differently. Here is my big ask: I want to see the industry recruit in highschools and community colleges and enable part time jobs so minorities can afford college at all.

Can I personally do anything better than friggin cookies? I can. I should. As Gary Barr, CDO of BNY Mellon suggested, “Do one thing between now and the end of 2020 to ensure you are another catalyst for change in the world.”

So here is my thing: I will teach a data 101 bootcamp to black high schoolers, this summer, Saturdays. I’m calling it “Data: Football Meets Cupid.”

Why now? Because the high schoolers are bored out of their minds with no summer sports, no summer camps, and no part time jobs. Talk about layering hopelessness upon hopelessness. I hope I can do this in New Jersey. I picture an unused football field in Somerville or perhaps in Elizabeth. I’ll try to make it fun and relevant for these boys and these girls, because at least I know football data, and I love the Cupid analysis that one of our engineers developed. I think boys and girls alike will find that data a hoot. Or maybe now is just not the time when work is so busy and people are so angry as is. I don’t know. I’m willing to give it a shot.

If I can’t get this going in New Jersey, then I’ll work with BuildOn to make it happen in the Bronx. Of course, I will have challenges and I understand many of these students don’t have access to computers. I already know who I will be calling for help here. I will not do this alone. I will borrow the great lessons learned from girls+data and from my decade teaching for TDWI. I’ll report back to you, the data and analytics community on what’s worked and what hasn’t.  

Perhaps this is a crazy silly idea. Am I dreaming too big to imagine a year from now, that some local employer will give a high schooler a chance, even without a college degree, because they have a skill in data and analytics, a space in which we have long had a talent shortage?

Hope Ahead

I remember all the times that the football bros were laughed at for dreaming of playing football in college. Here we are eight years later. All of them made it to college and played football at various levels, across the country. For the Black players, they are the first in their families even to make it to college.

Nothing is impossible.

Thank you to Sudheesh, Ryan, Tiffany, Dallas and others who helped me try to find the right words to write this.

*names changed to protect individuals' privacy