We are living through a setback in our collective pursuit of racial equity in Boston tech. Last fall, a wave of layoffs swept through the industry, nationally, from which we haven’t yet recovered. Black workers have been disproportionately impacted. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) budgets, teams, and scopes have been slashed. It’s becoming hard to maintain faith in the sweeping pledges and commitments to racial equity made by corporate leaders in 2020.
The fact is that it can’t keep coming down to faith. Any system in which one person’s fair and equitable access to prosperity requires someone else’s choice to make good on their own pledge is not a just system. That’s charity. What we need is something else entirely. We need a recalibration of power.
Equitable employment in Boston tech is possible. We’ve seen glimpses of it over the years. Companies have experimented with various programs and initiatives. Individual people have progressed along their individual journeys, and the bedrock of culture that undergirds this particular industry in this particular town has begun to shift towards change. Ours is a community of people who know how to do, redo, undo, and outdo, in pursuit of better. We are capable of getting this right.
So, what happened?
The industry experienced a mild economic downturn. Equitable employment appears to have been too far removed from power and priority to weather the downturn intact, and was dropped like ballast. This is an example of the difference between charity and justice.
There are many of us who reject this ordering of priorities. We understand it. We see why it’s so widespread, and why it can seem like the best possible decision to make in an uncertain economic environment. We fully get it. And we fully reject it. Equitable employment must become one of the things we don’t drop, like health insurance or parental leave. The economic wellness of our region and its people must take priority over share price. We need to recast our economy as one that works for workers.
A collective response is starting to take shape. Important conversations have been finding their footing in communities that advocate for the equitable employment of people of color. Black tech workers have been leading uncomfortable conversations at their respective companies, for a long time now, often despite fear of reprisal. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are finding their roles as havens for frank discussion within identity communities, from which collective positions can emerge. There is so much power in groups of people within a company finding each other, exploring a common cause, and approaching their leadership with a collective position.
Momentum is building. But so far it’s been building largely in isolation. What we have yet to do is find each other across discrete initiatives. We have an opportunity to unite disparate efforts into a bigger, stronger collective in a way that is equitable and safe.
Imagine how powerful it will be when Black and Brown technologists, many of whom are already working to advance the cause of equitable employment, come together to share their wisdom and deliberate on the one big question: What would it actually take for race and wealth to stop being the factors they are in someone’s professional trajectory?
Imagine how powerful it will be for this exploration to develop into a body of principles for equitable employment that can be disseminated throughout Boston tech.
And because no body of principles is worth much without implementation and sustainability, what will it look like to establish authentic structures of accountability?
The question of accountability was once looming over the horizon when we talked about equitable employment. It’s now become impossible to ignore. We need to have this conversation.
This city is in need of a campaign for equitable employment in tech. We need to come together around a BIPOC- and worker-led understanding of what it really means — and what it really takes — to recruit, employ, and advance equitably. We must create institutions that empower the implementation, and continued evolution, of our principles of equitable employment. And we need to talk about accountability.
Advancing the idea that equitable employment requires some measure of accountability is still divisive. It elicits the argument that the sole function of a business is to make money and therefore it cannot be bothered to prioritize the wellness of the worker above profit. It’s a familiar one. Every advancement in labor history has come on the heels of an organized resistance to that same tired argument. The response is the same as it’s ever been: We build the society that we want around the values that we share. It’s just a question of how many people share those values, and what their proximity is to power.
We have the numbers. There are enough of us with similar values to reorder the ordering of priorities.
There are enough of us who know that we are in a crisis of economic disparities. We understand that we have a "pay-to-play" model of workforce access in this country, in which you need to have a lot of money to make a lot of money. We must decide that we’re capable of better, and that the onus of dismantling economic oppression cannot fall entirely on the shoulders of the economically oppressed.
There are enough of us who recognize that a Bachelor’s degree is unnecessary for high paying tech jobs, like software development. Workers who have these jobs have been saying as much, for years. HackerRank CEO Vivek Ravisankar notes in their 2018 Student Report that “Self-directed learning is the norm among developers.” Of the ten thousand developers they surveyed for the report, nearly a third reported that they are entirely self-taught. In a city like ours, in which Black folx and US-born Latinxs coincide on a ~28% college completion rate, the degree requirement effectively keeps out 72% of our Black and Latinx talent. Enough of us know that we will have to do some amount of on-the-job training throughout the industry in our push for equitable employment. On the job training is not new; just new to tech. We’re behind other trades. And to be sure, software engineering is a trade.
The campaign to employ equitably in tech need not be divisive. There is not a conflict of ideology with two opposing sides. This is a cooperative exploration into how our city’s industries and our city’s people can work together in service to our city’s economic healing.
We begin, as always, in community. On June 12th there will be an initial gathering for tech workers of color who are interested in exploring this question of what it would take to make the field more equitable. Learn more about joining the gathering. If the gathering doesn’t sound like it’s for you, but you’re interested in participating in this effort, sign up to stay involved as the effort builds.
Better is possible. With a multicultural coalition of tech workers, firmly rooted in the wisdom and perspectives of their Black and Latinx colleagues, we can do this in a way that is safe, equitable, and maybe even transformative.
_ David Delmar Sentíes, Founder of Resilient Coders and author of What We build With Power: The fight for economic justice in tech _ Pariss Chandler, Founder and CEO, Black Tech Pipeline _ Spectra Asala, Founder of Project Lela
…and others.
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