Tech’s Long Hard, Road to Meaningful Inclusion

Ifeoma Ozoma, Pinterest’s former public policy and social impact manager, was shocked to learn from the advocacy group Color of Change that her company was advertising wedding venues that were former slave plantations to its users. She immediately began to push for change with leadership, intuitively understanding the reputational risk if Pinterest didn’t take quick action to remove them.

“As a company, we were promoting slave plantations as wedding and event venues, which is just absolutely offensive, because we would not do the same for concentration camps,” she recalls telling her former manager, when she flagged the issue in multiple emails and meetings.

But her manager, a white man, chastised her in her performance review. Ozoma was also told that the way she presented the issue was biased.? Instead, she was told that she should have provided the pros and cons of ceasing the promotion of former plantations on the company’s platform. She was rebuked for promoting her own “agenda” rather than taking an unbiased view, her manager wrote in her review. “My performance was dinged, which affected my pay,” Ozoma says. “All because I advocated for a policy that when we eventually made the change, the company was celebrated for doing so externally. But internally I was punished for pushing for it.”

The pushback that Ozoma faced in this instance underpinned a history of discrimination that she and other Black women had already been dealing with at the organization. Previously, she raised repeatedly that she was paid less than her white male peer in a similar role. Ozoma also observed that Black women were routinely hired at more junior roles than their experience warranted, especially compared with white employees.

In 2019, a white male engineer became so enraged by Ozoma’s commitment to safeguarding against health misinformation and white supremacist content on the platform, he “doxed” her and two other female colleagues. Doxing is an extreme form of online harassment in which a person’s sensitive information, like their home address and cell phone number, is published—often on unmoderated platforms—with the malicious intent of having that person attacked online and in real life. Doxing particularly impacts women of color who are more likely to have this information posted online without their consent and receive “greater amounts of unwanted, vitriolic messages,” according to experts.

It took a week for Pinterest to fire the engineer, but Ozoma had already experienced unspeakable online harassment by then.

Fed up after facing compounding indignities, Ozoma and another Black woman, Aerica Shimizu Banks, left the company in May 2020. For context, Pinterest has garnered a positive public reputation for being the kindest and most inclusive technology company in Silicon Valley, especially compared to its peers like Facebook and Uber. Ozoma had seen firsthand how untrue that was, but she knew it would be close to impossible to get another job in the industry if she publicly disparaged the company. She was ready to put this painful chapter behind her.

But in June 2020, when she saw Pinterest make public statements in solidarity with Black Lives Matter—as many companies were doing during the national racial justice movement that year—she couldn’t take the hypocrisy any longer.

Ozoma and Shimizu Banks bravely spoke out about how, despite the organization’s public commitment to racial equality, internally, racism and sexism was rampant. Ozoma says that the company’s leadership has yet to publicly acknowledge or address her public grievances, but privately, the company’s CEO and his largely white male leadership team have disparaged her and other women of color who have spoken out. She persists and is determined to change the workplace for others like her.

In February 2021, Ozoma was a leader in pushing legislation in California to protect employees who have experienced workplace discrimination or harassment against nondisclosure agreements enforced by employers to silence them.

The new bill, called Silenced No More, seeks to expand previous state legislation that only protects women who publicly disclose workplace gender discrimination, not racial discrimination. As Ozoma reminds us, intersectionality matters. The groundbreaking bill just passed in California and Washington.?

We know that no one industry is unique in propagating racism and other biases. But what is condoned at large technology companies (as of this writing, Pinterest is valued at close to $40 billion and used by more than 320 million monthly global users) has a significant impact on their employees and customers worldwide. The technology industry deeply influences which company cultures are rewarded, which products get created, and how we live our lives.

Only recently are we beginning to understand the power that a handful of technology companies, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, wield the world over. Technology companies are rarely created by a diverse group of founders (the large technology companies are almost entirely run by white and a few Asian men), don’t have women in decision-making roles (30 percent of technology employees are female), and don’t hire people of color, especially Black people (the average Black employee base of large technology employers in the United States hovers at lower-end single digits). It’s not a stretch to imagine the role of technology and technology companies to spread inequality at scale.

When Silicon Valley sneezes, the whole world has the potential to catch a cold.

So how can we be inclusive on purpose to ensure a technology industry that includes and is created by women of color? First, more women of color must be recruited in and advanced across the industry, whether as technology company employees or entrepreneurs.

That’s according to Janeen Uzzell, one of the most influential Black women leaders in the industry today. Growing up, Uzzell had to press on despite facing surprise and hesitation from teachers and her school principal when she showed her interest in pursuing an engineering degree. She then went on to be one of the few Black people and women in her college. As famous showrunner Shonda Rhimes writes in her book Year of Yes, when you are the first, only, or different in any environment, “you are saddled with that burden of extra responsibility—whether you want it or not” to represent your whole community in every interaction.

Facing inhospitable environments in many STEM workplaces can further deter technically qualified women of color. “Many of these places are incredibly biased, I will say for women, even more so for women of color,” Uzzell remarks. “The catcalling is still real in engineering and manufacturing.” When women of color are barely represented, they may not be safe reporting incidents of bias. As I repeatedly recommend here, taking personal responsibility to foster an inclusive and safe work environment is central to being inclusive on purpose. Only then can we encourage more women of color to enter and advance in the industry.

Take a holistic approach to nurturing the pipeline by actively engaging with organizations that are building and enriching STEM education for girls of color in local schools. When engaging with these programs early, leaders at technology companies must not only fund these programs but also work closely with this pipeline of girls of color to ensure that the workplaces they graduate into are inclusive. Inclusion on purpose takes the long view.

More technology leaders must understand that the challenges begin early; the sexist tropes that girls aren’t good at math and science have filtered out generations of girls from participating in these classes from a young age. Psychologist Claude Steele’s research on the stereotype threat—when girls or students of color subconsciously conform to the stereotype that they are not good at academic test taking—highlights how believing that they’re inferior has often caused these students to self-select out of academic achievements. This happens despite the data showing repeatedly that there is no gender gap in mathematical aptitude. For many girls of color, the intersection of gender and race can compound this further. A confluence of factors contributes to deeper exclusion for girls of color, such as financial and educational barriers, a lack of role models, and facing negative stereotypes that reinforce low self-confidence and interest in these fields.?

Technology companies can partner with programs led by women of color that are seeking to solve the problem. In the United States, Black Girls Code and Girls Who Code are national programs both run by women of color and focused on building a more robust, diverse pipeline of future women engineers. When technology organizations support and host graduates of these programs, many women of color can often be exposed for the first time to the possibilities of a career in the industry.

Next, more leaders must actively understand and address the unique biases faced by women of color technologists. Software engineer Tracy Chou, whom I also interviewed, found that the code she wrote was routinely subject to extra reviews compared with codes written by her male peers. Once when she caught a huge coding error, her manager didn’t believe her until a white male engineer verified that it was a red flag. Uzzell was paired with a more junior white male with no technical expertise to run a global technology program at a former employer “because they didn’t trust me. He didn’t have an engineering degree, but he was the guy that they trusted.”

When leaders are inclusive, they openly name biases and listen to women of color with the intention of believing them. If a woman of color engineer is telling you that she is facing bias or discrimination, believe her. In overt instances of bias, including sexual harassment, it is incumbent on you as a leader and the organization as a whole to create the psychological safety for women of color to surface these issues. Take swift action to address concerns. Do not ignore harassment and exclusionary behavior directed at women of color just because the perpetrators are considered to be too brilliant or valuable to lose—a problem that we frequently encounter in the industry. Not addressing bad behavior early allows it to normalize and proliferate.

Leaders must also constantly sponsor women of color to keep advancing in technology. A lack of finding role models like her became the strongest barrier that Uzzell faced to staying the course for the three decades that she has been in technology. “It makes it difficult to stay encouraged, to know that there’s even a future for you,” she says. “If there are no women at this level in engineering, then I tell myself: surely, I’ll never be plant manager or I’ll never be the chief technology officer . . . that’s impossible! How do I even perceive that that’s an option for me?”

We are fortunate that Uzzell persevered, advanced, and now has turned her sights to building a future in which upcoming women in the technology industry can ascend to technical roles with big budgets and decision-making capabilities. She drove large workplace initiatives to accelerate women in technical roles at various organizations that she has worked in, always taking an intersectional approach in her endeavors. “Leadership is critical because that’s the only way we can hire and build teams that look like the world. Otherwise, we’re kind of just catching the ball and running with it,” she says.