Being a woman of colour in Tech Industry

Technology is for everyone. It sees all humanity as one. It doesn’t know it’s being handled by a man or a woman or a black or a white but inadvertently it often fails to deliver to the ‘other’. Women and blacks. Because technology might be all-inclusive, its makers aren’t; a fiefdom still held by Men and Whites.

Just a month back, a study on the voice assistants of the smartphone world revealed how almost all of them from Siri to Cortana to Google couldn’t cope with women issues and concerns. There was another story alongside this one, though not a research but a conversation with three black women engineers at the workplace messaging startup Slack — Duretti Hirpa, Erica Baker, and Megan Anctil- which appeared in newsletter Lenny Letter but received little attention worldwide. The topic of discussion was obviously diversity or the lack of it in the technology sector and how it is affecting tech companies’ end products.

Duretti, Erica, and Megan talked about the importance of engineers and programmers in making decisions about the way people experience the products they design, and how too often that means gadgets and apps are designed to solve the problems of a limited, affluent part of the population. An example could be- million laundry delivery startups but few businesses disrupting child care.

When major tech companies including Apple, Twitter and Slack released diversity statistics last year, it reflected the harsh truth that many had long suspected: their workforces are overwhelmingly white and male, particularly in technical jobs. Slack’s engineers, for example, are 72 percent white and 82 percent male. That said, women of color make up 9 percent of the engineers at Slack and half of the company’s women engineers overall.

Erica gave a perfect example of how hiring preferences can affect the businesses that sell code and the consumers who buy it: “Every time a manufacturer releases a facial-recognition feature in a camera, almost always it can’t recognize black people. The cause of that is the people who are building these products are white people, and they’re testing it on themselves. They don’t think about it.”

According to Megan, people who don’t code often think coding is sort of like a math problem: it’s not like you can have only one right answer and rest are wrong. Sure, there’s a right and a wrong way to structure a line of code to get it to do what you want — but there’s a correct way to structure English syntax too, and that doesn’t mean there’s a formula for writing prose.

Coding means building a product, and there are infinite ways to build it “right.” Therefore, what’s built often reflects the coders’ implicit biases. If they all look the same, live in the same place, and come from the same schools, they are likely to think the same.

Duretti Hirpa, on the other hand, points towards the ‘feeling of isolation’ that comes with being underrepresented in the Silicon Valley both as a woman and a person of colour. She says. “You feel like you don't belong because you don't see anybody that looks like you.”

Technology is growing, rolling off at an exponential growth rate. The way that the digital world is shaped now could affect how humans interact with each other far into the future. And as Megan says to build this world, you need people who've had different experiences, whether it's race, gender, or sexuality, or anything.