Giving Compass' Take:
- A model of DEI within the technology industry aims to bring the tech sector to historically excluded communities in an effort to increase diversity in talent pipelines.
- How does this model help advance accessible job and training opportunities?
- Learn more about exclusion in the tech industry.
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These social challenges constitute barriers for applicants that go far beyond the obvious professional hurdles. As a result, only few exceptional people from excluded communities choose to study and work in tech professions, and these members often find themselves socially and culturally isolated. The chasm is at times so dramatic that they are unaware of the very existence and relevance of tech professions for them. Having few, if any, examples of people who have achieved professional success, they understandably have a difficult time imagining successfully integrating into these occupations.
Common approaches to workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion identify it with bringing members of the excluded community into the industry’s existing locations. Understanding that such integration cannot be properly achieved without efforts on the part of employers, companies bear the burden of making their teams more “diverse” and “inclusive.” They may appoint chief diversity officers, change their policies to ensure equal employment, make sure that employees go through diversity trainings to avoid implicit biases, establish mentoring programs and diversity task forces, and more. However, such diversity initiatives fail time and again. Even when companies’ efforts are sincere, the individual job seeker faces barriers to entering the corporate tech world, let alone to surviving in it for any significant period of time. Moreover, even the most well-intended initiatives to integrate members from excluded communities face an inconvenient truth: Not enough candidates apply for their openings, and not all those who apply are qualified.
Companies often offer practical trainings to address the problem of diversity in high tech, acknowledging the disadvantages that members of excluded communities face and trying to level the playing field in terms of expertise and skills. But such trainings often fail in generating mass participation among excluded communities in tech professions. Beyond the professional knowledge and hands-on technical experience that these trainings provide, the fundamental social, ethnic, and economic barriers often remain unaddressed.
Read the full article about inclusion in the tech industry by Linda Jakob Sadeh and Smadar Nehab at Stanford Social Innovation Review.