A recap of my past week of continuous D&I learning—with selections discovered through friends and peers in tech, education, neurodiversity, LGBTQ, and disability communities. Thanks for sharing.
In this one:
- All that we share
- Sexist things teachers says
- Coding pipelines
- Acceptance > Awareness
- Women in executive roles
- Disability representation in stock photography, invisible disability
- The Bell Curve of Despair
- Making it through
- Tolerance and the Paradox of Free Speech
- Born to learn, collaborative learning communities
- Educate for massive software driven change
- Diversity Hiring
- Rethinking Learning to Read
- Ableist Job Requirements
- Autism Diagnosis Rates, Anti-vaxx Pseudoscience
- Teen Vogue
- Context Matters, Identity First
- Diversity and Unpaid Internships
- Tech Soul Searching and Solidarity
- Mindfulness and bikeshedding the deficit model
- LambdaConf and Codes of Conduct
- Ex-evangelical Perspective
- White male views on diversity
- Inspiration Porn
- Hackathon for reconciliation
- Responsible Communication Style Guide
- Community Event Planning
- Language and structural racism
- #ActuallyAutistic perspective on High Functioning and Low Functioning labels
All that we share
Compassion and inclusion.
Sexist things teachers says
Coding pipelines
Credentialist systems with their pipeline problems and meritocracy myths are not the only ways into tech. There are a diversity of learning paths. Degrees are not always required. Teams are often more STEAM than STEM. My path included a CS degree, but times, and teams, have changed. We acknowledge the meritocracy myth and pipeline problems and recognize that teams and companies built solely from deficit model credentialism are missing true diversity and inclusion.
Politicians routinely bemoan the loss of good blue-collar jobs. Work like that is correctly seen as a pillar of civil middle-class society. And it may yet be again. What if the next big blue-collar job category is already here-and it’s programming? What if we regarded code not as a high-stakes, sexy affair, but the equivalent of skilled work at a Chrysler plant?
Among other things, it would change training for programming jobs-and who gets encouraged to pursue them. As my friend Anil Dash, a technology thinker and entrepreneur, notes, teachers and businesses would spend less time urging kids to do expensive four-year computer-science degrees and instead introduce more code at the vocational level in high school. You could learn how to do it at a community college; midcareer folks would attend intense months-long programs like Dev Bootcamp. There’d be less focus on the wunderkinds and more on the proletariat.
Source: The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding | WIRED
Acceptance > Awareness
One of my rules of thumb for human systems is acceptance > awareness. Awareness focuses on deficits. Acceptance focuses on inclusion.
Source: Acceptance > Awareness – Ryan Boren
Women in executive roles
We recently conducted a study of more than 10,000 senior executives who were competing for top management jobs in the UK. We found that women were indeed less likely than men to apply for these jobs, but here’s the interesting part: We found that women were much less likely to apply for a job if they had been rejected for a similar job in the past. Of course, men were also less likely to apply if they had been rejected, but the effect was much stronger for women – more than 1.5 times as strong.
The implications here are not trivial, because rejection is a routine part of corporate life. Employees regularly get rejected for promotions, job transfers, important project assignments, and so on. To reach the top of the organization, people need to keep playing the game, over and over again, even after repeated disappointments. So even small differences between how men and women respond to rejection could lead to big differences over time.
To investigate this effect further, we interviewed top women executives about their experiences in recruitment processes and found a common complaint: dissatisfaction and frustration with how those processes were managed. For example, the CFO of a biotech company recalled that she had been considered for a CEO position. After failing to get the job after many rounds of interviews, she had been left with the impression that she was asked to apply merely because she was female and the firm needed a woman on the shortlist – not because the company was serious about hiring her. This may or may not have been true, but that’s the impression she had, and as a result she said she would be unlikely to put herself through a similar process in the future.
Women’s decisions to remove themselves from competition after having been rejected is driven partly by their experience of being a negatively stereotyped minority in the executive labor market. Think about it – women executives were coming to the table with past experiences of being in the minority, and they may have been in situations in which they felt like outsiders or felt that their leadership ability wasn’t recognized. Because the majority of men had generally not been subject to these same situations, men were less likely to take rejection as a signal that they did not belong in the corner offices, and therefore such disappointments had less of a negative impact on their willingness to apply again.
And, by the way, this same underlying mechanism should apply to any underrepresented group. In other words, what we found is not that there’s something unique about women; it’s that women are a minority, and minorities are often not perceived as legitimate leaders. Indeed, we would expect that men would behave in the same way in contexts where they were seen as illegitimate or outsiders.
Source: Women Are Less Likely to Apply for Executive Roles If They’ve Been Rejected Before
Disability representation in stock photography, invisible disability
On disability tropes in stock photography.
1. Use a (manual) wheelchair.
How else will anyone know? Other mobility aids don’t really count – do you see them on parking spaces and bathroom signs? Yeah, didn’t think so. If you want people to believe that you’re disabled, you have to prove it to them in a familiar, comfortable way. Then they’ll know how much misguided guilt to project onto you, what to assume about your self-esteem, which questions are okay to ask (spoiler: doesn’t matter, they’ll ask anyway), and exactly how often to ponder the intricacies of your sex life.
Invisible disabilities are useless in stock photos and particularly cruel to your audience. Could you imagine if they knew that disabled people are everywhere, all the time, even if they don’t realize it? And that supporting us involves more than installing ramps or calling Trump out on being a big bad meanie? The world would cease to turn! Nondisabled people can’t be bothered with that sort of critical thinking. So keep it simple and stick with the tried and true. There are a couple of exceptions — namely, white canes for blind folks and prosthetics for athletes or veterans — but otherwise, get yourself a chair that looks like it came straight out of a hospital in 1972.
Source: How To Be Disabled, According to Stock Photography | Autostraddle
The Bell Curve of Despair
More than 2,200 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 were surveyed by the Prince’s Trust charity. Nearly half (45 per cent) said that they did not believe in themselves when they were at school. And 48 per cent said that they experienced problems during their school years that prevented them from concentrating on their academic work.
Of these, 46 per cent did not talk to anyone about their problems. Largely, this was because they did not want other people to know that they were struggling. And more than half (58 per cent) did not think that asking for help would solve the problem.
The survey is the eighth such study conducted by the Prince’s Trust. This year, young people’s levels of happiness and confidence were at their lowest level since the first survey was commissioned.
Source: Young people are so troubled they can’t focus at school | News
Making it through
With ableist, eugenicist, white supremacist authoritarianism on the rise, the history presented in NeuroTribes is all too relevant.
Tolerance and the Paradox of Free Speech
Born to learn, collaborative learning communities
This piece fits my communication is oxygen, psychological safety, structural ideology, hacker ethos, social model for minds and bodies, and collaboration narratives.
Research has confirmed what most parents of young children can already see for themselves – that children are born to learn, rather than to be taught, as Abbott puts it. Driven by an inborn desire to make sense of the world and find purpose in life, they naturally observe, deconstruct, piece together and create their own knowledge. They learn best when this intrinsic motivation is harnessed in what he calls “highly challenging but low-threat environments.”
The bottom line, Abbott notes, is that the current system excels at preparing children to be dependent “customers,” so if we hope to instead create a world of responsible, community-minded adults, we need to overhaul the educational paradigm. That means replacing the metaphor – the concept of the world and its inhabitants as machine-like entities – that has shaped the education system, as well as many other aspects of our culture. Because humans are not machines, a reliance on this metaphor has created a large disconnect between people’s actual lives and their inherited expectations and predispositions, which lies at the root of many inter-related modern challenges, says Abbott.
Clues to a more suitable paradigm can be found in the metaphors that characterize the dynamic, networked Information Age. These share some key characteristics with the pre-industrial past, when people learned in the community, from a variety of adults with whom they built relationships. Learning continued over the course of a lifetime filled with meaningful work (in contrast to today’s high unemployment rates and low workplace engagement levels), and success was judged by whether a person carried out his or her fair share of responsibilities within the community.
“It is essential to view learning as a total community responsibility,” he says, and to expect no short cuts. Children need to be integrated, fully contributing members of the broader community, so they can feel useful and valued. (It is not just the children who need this, he adds; healthy communities also need children.)
Source: To Advance Education, We Must First Reimagine Society | MindShift | KQED News
Educate for massive software driven change
At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well. At Asilomar, they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration-far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.
Source: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class | WIRED
Diversity Hiring
It’s important not to frame diversity as a charitable endeavor, marketing, or as loss leader. Diversity hiring offers enormous returns to companies looking for talent in fields in which competition is now global. This means that companies must look for lessons from areas in the private sector that have realized human capital is more important than financial capital.
This translates into a several powerful lessons for diversity hiring: companies need to view recruiting as more than just gathering a pool of applicants when they have a job opening. Instead, companies need to cultivate talent and gather information on future talent over many months and years. This means active mentoring programs that start early and connect company leadership to college students and young professionals.
In order to develop diverse human capital, companies need to think beyond merely “hiring the best.” They need to incubate talent with advice. Mentoring need not be touchy-feely. In fact, mentoring is a deadly serious matter if companies want to build their human capital and retain their best employees. Recruiting is expensive. When employees don’t succeed or leave, companies suffer. Moreover, diversity hiring and building inclusive workplaces cannot be separate. They need to be integrated projects that challenge employees and companies to reach their potential.
The race for talent is no different; it is rerun every year if not every month. The old saying still holds true: a company’s greatest assets walk out the front door every night. To make sure the best assets walk back in in the morning, companies need to continually improve and reinvent their diversity and inclusiveness initiatives. Learning and nimbleness must become part of human resources’ DNA.
Source: How Diversity Hiring is Like Startup Investing – Medium
Rethinking Learning to Read
This article jibes with our experience homeschooling our neurodivergent kids. Following this advice to teachers and parents of nuerodivergent kids will put you on the path to natural, authentic reading based on social model compassion and structural awareness instead of the deficit model treadmill.
Our older daughter has recently learned to read. Although I feel that this has been a gradual process which has taken place over a period of many years it seems to have come together coherently over the last 6 months to a year, largely motivated by her desire to understand what was happening on Minecraft chat and communicate with other players online. My daughter was very excited about this and felt empowered having learned to read of her own volition and in a way that suited her.
The participating families adopted a range of approaches to learning and home education: some families were more structured in their approaches, while other families favoured autonomous and radical unschooling approaches and others an eclectic mix. Parents reported that their children were learning to read in a diversity of ways and accounts differed not only between families but also within families; no two children learned in exactly the same way. What was apparent was that each child followed a unique learning trajectory, which could be quite different from that found in normative studies.
In the book Pattison draws an important distinction between the metaphors of acquisition and participation first identified by Sfard (1998). The metaphor of acquisition involves thinking about learning to read as a cognitive skill that can be acquired sequentially while participation focuses on the child’s role as an important member of a social and relational network and an active participant in a wider literate community. To me this latter metaphor is an exciting and useful way of thinking which may be more able to account for the diversity of accounts of learning to read that were found in the sample. It also interests me as a clinical psychologist as it opens up conversations about the emotional, relational and psychological processes involved in learning to read and reflects on aspects of identity involved in becoming a reader and being part of a wider community. In my experience accounts based on the individual acquisition of cognitive skills do not tend to focus on these issues and the many diverse meanings and implications learning to read has for the child and the social processes involved.
As an adult I had been influenced by John Holt’s (1991; 1995) observations of children learning to read without needing to be ‘taught’. Holt explained how children could be in fact be damaged by being coerced and pressured to read in a school system which was unable to accommodate and respond to the child’s individual preferences and needs. These ideas along with unschooling philosophy that I had accessed mainly via online forums and sites such as sandradodd.com and Always Learning led me to trust that our children would learn to read in their own time with our support in ways that suited them. Peter Gray has also written some interesting accounts of unschoolers learning to read.
Families shared: “No phonics, no flash cards, no traditional teaching methods were used in our home – for reading or anything else” and “Phonics doesn’t suit every child – as a very strong visual learner my daughter finds the individual sounds in words meaningless … she hears words as a single sound.”
Some families drew on whole word learning approaches, some an eclectic mix, while others acknowledged the limitations of using methods and a number preferred to use no methods at all because this is what they felt was the best approach for their particular child and that they would learn to read naturally by engaging in everyday life. “Living a life style of literacy”; “Living life in a world where words are everywhere” and “Given time and exposure children will learn to read and will enjoy it.”
Away from phonics families were actively and pragmatically choosing methods and approaches with the best fit for the child and they were using those methods in ways that were facilitative of their relationships, the child’s learning and their emotional well being. In taking this open and flexible approach families were placing the child at the centre of the learning experience. For example, a parent said “Go with what works for that particular child” and another “The method is not important; the important [thing] is that the child likes it.“
One of the assumptions to be questioned in ‘Rethinking Learning to Read’ is the normative research and educational based accounts which structure our ideas about the age at which we expect children to read. The ages at which children learned to read in the sample ranged between 18 months and 16 years. The ages varied widely not only between families but also within them. The home educating families reported that their children were able to learn in a variety of ways, for example, through play, auditory, practical activities, TV and video, computers and digital media generally learning by participating in a wide range of activities at home and in their communities. Children were free to pursue their interests and passions in ways that were meaningful to them and were not restricted if they were not yet reading. Parents also often read to children and supported them in their activities which may have required reading or writing (if the children desired this). Learning to read at an older age did not appear to have any negative associations, children often learning to read quickly and effortlessly when they were ready. In fact a number of parents described their children benefiting from learning to read according to their own schedule and not pressuring them to learn according the parents own expectations.
Source: ‘Rethinking Learning to Read’ by Dr. Harriet Pattison – Book Review – Rethinking Parenting
Read the whole thing. Highly recommended.
Ableist Job Requirements
https://twitter.com/gallerychapel/status/831539759818301440
Autism Diagnosis Rates, Anti-vaxx Pseudoscience
Teen Vogue
Teen Vogue is doing great intersectional and structurally aware journalism.
Teen Vogue deserves credit not just for Duca’s op-ed but for the entirety of its political coverage, which has provided sharp, impassioned coverage of everything from gun control to Black Lives Matter in 2016. Much of this is due to Teen Vogue‘s editor, Elaine Welteroth, who graduated to the position last May, and Phil Picardi, the magazine’s digital editorial director. Just two years ago, the site’s most-read articles were comprised almost entirely of light celebrity and beauty news (an expose of Taylor Swift’s secret past as an Abercrombie & Fitch model performed particularly well). Today, a quick scan of its Twitter feed reveals pieces about the Dylann Roof verdict and Ohio’s recent abortion ban interspersed with galleries of “2016’s Cutest Celebrity Couples” and a review of Miranda Kerr’s skincare routine. (I clicked; my passion for gender equality is matched only by my abiding interest in dry oils.)
Under the incoming Trump administration, it’s crucial that we banish the idea that there is a boundary between “women’s journalism” and “serious journalism” once and for all. When the president of the United States has admitted to committing sexual assault on tape; when an architect of GamerGate sits in the White House; when states start passing “heartbeat bills” designed to effectively overturn Roe v. Wade, those aren’t “women’s issues”-they’re national news. A failure to treat them as such will leave us unprepared to adequately oppose Trump and Trumpism.
Context Matters, Identity First
Something we #ActuallyAutistic say over and over.
Our data demonstrate that both autistic and non-autistic people’s degree of autistic traits — their difficulty interacting and communicating with other people — are contextually specific.
autistic participants report having fewer autistic traits (i.e., less difficulty interacting and communicating) when the items are contextualized as “with autistic persons” than when the items are contextualized as “with non-autistic persons.”
Context matters not only for accurately assessing autistic traits but also for designing environments that enable autistic persons to optimally interact and communicate.
*We purposely use identity-first terms (e.g., “autistic traits” and “autistic participants”) rather than person-first terms (“autism-related traits” and “participants with autism”) because identify-first language is recommended by psychologists, preferred by autistic people, and less prone to stigma.
Source: Researcher ‘First Person’: Why Context Matters When Assessing Autistic Traits | Your Say
Diversity and Unpaid Internships
For more on unpaid internships and the post-employment economy, see Sarah Kendzior’s The View from Flyover Country.
The reality is that, in the “jobless recovery”, nearly every sector of the economy has been decimated. Companies have turned permanent jobs into contingency labor, and entry-level positions into unpaid internships. Changing your major will not change a broken economy.
It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.
To which the 30-something, having spent their adult life in an economy of stagnant wages and eroding opportunities, takes the 20-something aside, and explains that this is a maxim they, too, were told, but from which they never benefitted. They tell the 20-something what they already know: It is hard to plan for what is already gone. We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.
Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience”. The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity – and quality – in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.
Post-recession America runs on a contingency economy based on prestige and privation. The great commonality is that few are paid enough to live instead of simply survive.
Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. By treating poverty as inevitable for parts of the population, and giving impoverished workers no means to rise out of it, America deprives not only them but society as a whole. Talented and hard-working people are denied the ability to contribute, and society is denied the benefits of their gifts. Poverty is not a character flaw. Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.
Millennials are chastised for leaning on elders, but the new rules of the economy demand it. Unpaid internships are often prerequisites to full-time jobs, and the ability to take them is based on money, not merit. Young adults who live off wealthy parents are the lucky few. They can envision a future because they can envision its purchase. Almost everyone else is locked out of the game.
Source: The View From Flyover Country
Tech Soul Searching and Solidarity
Rank and file tech workers are doing a lot of soul searching and pushing their companies to be more ethical, compassionate, and protective of our own.
Mindfulness and bikeshedding the deficit model
Mindfulness joins grit and growth mindset in the endless parade of deficit model bikeshedding. Instead, get structural, and directly confront injustice.
LambdaConf and Codes of Conduct
We must be wary of the spread of codes of conduct such LambdaConf’s. This is not a truly inclusive contributor covenant.
Ex-evangelical Perspective
Christoper Stroop’s blog and Twitter timelineare great resources on ex-evangelical perspective.
Among the reasons I decided to start blogging are not just a desire to raise awareness about the dangers of illiberal religion to democratic politics and an impulse to express my own ex-Evangelical voice, but also a desire to help build up the ex-Evangelical and broader ex-fundamentalist community. Many ex-Evangelicals end up feeling isolated, and the issues that result from leaving fundamentalism can be difficult to discuss. Outsiders often find the experiences of those who grew up in the subculture we did difficult to believe; those still in that subculture are often defensive.
Source: Ex-Evangelical Conversations: An Interview with Grete Howland – Christopher Stroop
White male views on diversity
Last November, LinkedIn published a study that showed just how much white men care about diversity in tech. Spoiler: Very little when they are allowed to answer questions about diversity without using their name.
Less than 5% of white men surveyed said they considered a lack of diversity a top problem. Three-out-of-four respondents were unaware of any initiatives to make their companies or portfolios more diverse. And 40% of male respondents were sick of the media going on and on about it.
Source: Pando: White men to women and minorities in tech: We just DGAF
A sad showing from my fellow white men that suggests structural ignorance, lack of systems thinking, and a failure of empathy.
Inspiration Porn
Hackathon for reconciliation
Coding and education must directly confront social injustice and structural inequality. Glad to see this.
UbuntuHack is a hackathon between communities in conflict, gathering youth and police. We also invite activists, tech companies, churches, and community organizations to take part in identifying solutions that will create more safe spaces for everyone.
There have been hackathons that included police and youth, but UbuntuHack is an app building, rapid prototype testing, design thinking conversation BETWEEN youth, police and the community. This hackathon creates space for EVERYONE. Engineers, developers, artists, entrepreneurs, activists, and more importantly – you! Everyone will be on a level playing field.
Source: UbuntuHack Tickets, Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 4:00 PM | Eventbrite
Responsible Communication Style Guide
The Responsible Communication Style Guide is available for pre-order.
The words we use to talk about different situations, companies, and people have a huge impact on what we think. While style guides like the Associated Press Stylebook are used in newsrooms and public relations offices alike, they don’t cover identity well – if they mention topics like gender or race at all, they just touch on the surface. Identity is a crucial topic for anyone writing today to get right, especially in fields like technology, where we need to talk about our users and audience in a way they find inclusive and understanding.
The Responsible Communication Style Guide will cover how to write about five key topics:
- Race
- Gender
- Sexuality
- Religion
- Health and Well-Being
Source: Pre-order The Responsible Communication Style Guide – The Recompiler
If you want your organization to be diverse and inclusive, it takes a lot of hard work. You have to listen, expand your networks, rethink your assumptions … and you also have to make sure how you talk about what you’re doing doesn’t negate all the effort you’ve put in. Luckily, there’s help at hand: The Responsible Communication Style Guide.
We chose to describe these styles as ‘responsible’ because, for us, writing and creating other media comes with an obligation to tell stories clearly and accurately. Doing anything else – misrepresenting an interviewee or offending an audience – is irresponsible. Personally, I feel that my writing is best when I consider how it will impact people long before I hit the button to publish anything.
For us, basing the guide on our editors’ lived experience is crucial and factors into all of our decisions. This is already providing some major insights into our recommendations. It’s pretty clear that many style guides don’t have people advocating from their own areas of expertise.
We’re also finding that lived experience is crucial when dealing with the differences between the style guides put out by organizations such as GLAAD and other organizations. There are some substantial differences in how to handle identical terminology between different groups, like how a style guide covering aging talks about disabilities and how a style guide about specific accessibility issues covers the same terms. We’re tackling these topics with an intersectional approach – not just by having experienced editors from a specific community, but by also cultivating conversations between people with a variety of backgrounds.
Source: Words Matter: Thursday Bram on the Art of ‘Responsible Communication’ | Design.blog
Community Event Planning
Audrey Eschwright, contributor to the Responsible Communication Style Guide also contributed to the great Community Event Planning.
If you’ve ever thought about hosting a code sprint, hackathon, (un)conference or workshop, this book is for you. In it, we explain what you need to know to plan and execute a successful event, including:
- assembling and organizing your planning team
- identifying and securing a venue for your event
- how to get money and pay for things
- volunteer recruitment and management
- determining your event format and creating your event’s schedule
- advertising your event
- tickets and registration
- insurance, liability and what to do when things go wrong
- deciding on must-haves and nice-to-haves (e.g., food, wifi, etc)
- dealing with venue logistics (space, sound, power, etc.)
- codes of conduct, after parties, considerations for serving alcohol
- how to keep the momentum once your first event is over
Source: Community Event Guide
Language and structural racism
And as attentive as I am to languages, and as sensitive as I am to it as a writer, and as much as I believe that insight can be found or lost through language, I do think that when it comes to racism, we pay too much attention to language, and we give language a power that I don’t believe it actually has. When in fact, I think there are many graver actions that are happening that happen without anyone ever saying anything offensive.
And that a lot of our policing of offensive language – it’s not that that is unimportant, it’s not that people should be allowed to say whatever they want, but I feel that there’s extra energy put into that policing because we aren’t sure how to address the real problems, and how to address the kind of systemic racism that happens without anyone ever saying anything that would look to us like racism. And I think that this is part of how we’re hobbling ourselves around, coming to kind of broader and more advanced understandings around what’s going on with race.
Source: Eula Biss — Let’s Talk About Whiteness – | On Being
#ActuallyAutistic perspective on High Functioning and Low Functioning labels
We’re dismissed either way.
Thanks for including my comments on ex-Evangelical perspectives here. The paradox of tolerance is very apropos when it comes to the Christian Right.