The Reductive Effect of Homogeneity

Find this on Medium

------

 

A few weeks ago, I was sitting with a friend at a diner in the West Village. He recently finished his Masters from the same graduate program as me in New York City. Since we are both looking for a job, we immediately began talking about the headache involved in the process.

In our profession of technology for international development (ICT4D), we are at a convergence of two fields – one that is increasingly driven by local, diverse solutions (international development) and one that, at least in North America and Europe, has generally become more white and more male (technology). In the United States, women make up a smaller percentage of coders now than they did in the 1980s.

The subject of race and sex/gender in the tech workforce is a testy subject. With every article I write on diversity in tech, I get a backlash of the usual tired comments:

“Stop complaining, work harder.”

“Don’t make excuses for not being qualified.”

“Who the f**k cares if there are no women in tech?”

The arguments in return should be obvious – it’s not a mere coincidence the industry is dominated by white men. Not including, designing or accounting for more than half the population (i.e. women) in any industry is a horrible strategic business decision.

The cause of such visceral reactions to my articles comes down to less refined reason – white men think I am writing them off. As my friend at the diner – a white male – said during our conversation, it really sucks to be reduced to one’s race and sex instead of one’s accomplishments. That, I know. I am an Indian-American woman, and so the reductive nature of everything I have achieved is an everyday reality. Undoubtedly, my black athlete, Indian software developer, and East Asian friends in finance understand being reduced to common racial tropes. They’re harmful and frustrating.

Here’s the ironic thing about homogeneous tech workforces – I can’t help but see them as a trope. The masterfully satirical Tumblr blog, All Male Panel, captures the sentiment of this idea perfectly. In a world in which there are brilliant and qualified people of all sexes, genders, races, ages, religions, ethnicities and nationalities, how do so many companies and organizations continue to have such homogenous groups of employees, founders and executives? Any bystander could conclude it must be the product of a rigged system.

In that rigged system, the individuals and their accomplishments are diminished. There’s even an Etsy store for the cliché, saying, “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” When I, and I’m guessing so many others, see a workplace overwhelmingly made up of white men, I can’t help but think the individual employees got to where they are because of their race and sex. It’s a similar effect to always attributing a black or Latino person’s admission into an Ivy League school to affirmative action.

A product of being privileged to live in New York City and work around the world is exposure to talent of all walks of life. Unfairly reducing a person and their accomplishments is damaging. I don’t want to look at anyone – white males included – and think about only their race and sex. One of my favorite teachers, the person who first encouraged me to write, was a white guy. Had I discounted any of my life mentors and advocates based on race or sex, I would have done myself a lot of harm.

Alas, the ratio of white males to everyone else in the tech industry is impossible to ignore. If those of us outside the favored majority know the system is rigged, we know those in the system may not actually be competitive compared to the entire population. We can’t help but see mediocrity of the favored win over exceptional of the unfavored. We associate homogeneity with mediocrity and, therefore, mediocrity with the homogeneous. That is the reductive effect of homogeneity.

White men, if you don’t want to be reduced to your race and sex, fight for diversity.

Advice to private sector companies trying "solve poverty" - from an International Development Practitioner

This was cross-posted on Medium, here.

 In the past few years, the start-up culture in the States and parts of Europe has exploded. Along with the explosion have come a record number of companies that aim to do a “social good” by providing products and services for the world’s poor. While the Global North’s[1] private sector (GNPS) wages its debate on what type of solution is needed – from social enterprises, to (lean) start-ups, to venture capital funds, to philanthropy to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of major companies – I want to offer some thoughts from an international development prospective, regardless of which private sector solution you favor. After all, the areas these GNPS “social good” initiatives are aiming to reach come on the heels of decades of international development work. Both sides stand to learn a lot.

Ceremony with the Burundian Ministry of Health and the vaccination alliance, GAVI - October 2014

How International Development Thinking Differs

Level of Accountability

By far, the concept in international development (ID) work the GNPS seems to understand the least is level of accountability. In ID, our ultimate goals are to lessen poverty and better economic empowerment in a given context, such as a community, a city or even an entire country. If a GNPS company offers a product or service to a client that fails to meet their needs, there is no punitive recourse so long as legal obligations are met. If I go to the drugstore and buy paper towels that are not strong enough to handle and actually create more of a mess in my kitchen, the company that made the paper towels may choose to better their product to stay competitive, but there is no inherent obligation on their part to ensure my particular needs are met with their product. So long as the company sold what they advertised – paper towels – they have met their requirements.

On the other hand, one of the first things we learn in ID is that we must ensure stakeholder participation does not lead to a worse situation than before. Fulfilling this obligation is incredibly hard in places with weak governments, infrastructure, social benefits and a dearth of employment opportunities, because if our work fails the stakeholder, we have wasted their limited assets, time or trust. If we advise an impoverished person to participate in a training program that doesn’t yield better employment opportunities, we have asked them to spend time and money to commute to the training program, to forgo their normal daily work wages, and to raise their expectations for no benefit. If we advise a farmer to purchase an individual insurance policy to protect against failed crops, and then her crops fail but not to the extent to receive compensation, we have asked for money she could have used to better her yields or purchase food for her family. Even seemingly benign methods of participation have a trade-off, and it is up to us to determine what that means.

Because of this higher standard of accountability, ID organizations have robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms. The main purposes of M&E are to define what constitutes “success” and “failure”, how to prevent unintended harmful consequences, how to improve, and to document what went wrong. M&E is a huge chunk of any given ID project because it is central to protecting our stakeholders and to how ID organizations fulfill donor requirements. The idea of accountability is thus present from start to end of the ID work lifecycle.

Understanding a context

Being a minority (South Asian) in America, I can speak from lived experience that many companies poorly understand segments of the population in the Global North. However, there are commonly used methods to get around this poor comprehension; as we move toward the Internet of Things, more and more of these methods will involve passively generated data. Other common data examples include analyzing purchase patterns and Internet analytics, or conducting focus groups or surveys.

Data certainly exists in the Global South. A large part of what the United Nations (UN) does is collect and analyze data on everything from populations to health centers to crop yields. Data in Global South often does not, however, paint as complete a picture because there are so many more unknowns about a society. That’s why building relationships on the ground is invaluable to contextualizing our work. In fact, these relationships are one set of critical advantages proper ID organizations, particularly the UN, have. Without these relationships, we do not understand why a community does what it does, where a community gets its information, what values are held in high regard, and what we can do to better the situation.

Similarly, understanding a country’s current landscape requires historical, political, and economic knowledge. I once attended an event hosted by a private sector firm that proclaims itself as a “leader in international development consulting”. As I got into the elevator to leave the event, I overheard one of the firm’s associates say that tonight she needs to, “Put together a presentation on Ethiopian food security”. The Ethiopia country office of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) is a massive operation, serving 8 million+ people. The time, money, and resources that go into WFP Ethiopia cannot be boiled down into a few PowerPoint slides, and neither can the entire food security landscape of the country.

One running joke I have is that ID is all think and no action, while the private sector is no think and all action. Of course the truth for both sides is somewhere in between. It should go without saying that if an issue is central to a company’s work the company needs to have a thorough understanding of the landscape beyond just market competitors.

Recommendations for GNPS companies trying to “solve poverty”

Define “poor”

Whether someone makes 2 USD a day or 10 USD a day makes a big difference. Anyone who wants to work with the “poor” should define what they actually mean by "poor". We have numerous indexes in ID to define and contextualize poverty – use them! Common indexes include GDP per capita, the Human Development Index and the Gini coefficient.

Do not push products and services unnecessarily

Along with understanding what “poor” actually means, a company trying “solve poverty” should understand their job is not simply to push products and services. Every company thinks they have stumbled onto something truly innovative, and while some products and services could do a lot of good in a particular context, to truly alleviate poverty and better economic empowerment, the humility to differentiate between a market opportunity and a value-add is critical.

Do not be afraid of the government

As an ID practitioner, it is truly painful to watch current US politics because the Republican party seems convinced that the government fundamentally has no place in helping people. For those of us who have worked intimately with governments that have little capacity, we know nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that the poorest of the poor will not be captured by the private sector (Global North or Global South). Further, certain needed services, like public transportation and healthcare, have to work at scale (and often at a loss) to stay viable, and therefore cannot be privately run.

ID work is not competing with the government. More often than not, we are working directly with the government to strengthen systems and services. Likewise, a GNPS company should not compete with or circumvent the government. Undoubtedly working with governments can be expensive and time-consuming, but even if direct collaboration with a government is not possible, a GNPS company should at least be aware of how the government operates, what they do, and who should be providing what.

Learn international development language

Like every industry or sector, ID practitioners use a set of terms and phrases – we have our own language. For the reasons listed above, ID work is important to a GNPS company trying to “solve poverty”. Some of the most brilliant colleagues with whom I have ever worked have been based in sub-Saharan Africa, rural South Asia and Latin America for years. They will not learn GNPS lingo, nor should they be expected to. If you want to work with them, learn how to communicate with them, even if that means finding someone like me who straddles the two worlds to translate.

Good luck, do well at doing good and get used to using a lot of acronyms.

---

[1] I am not a fan of this term but am using it for simplicity’s sake.

Do not use your newfound knowledge of the world to shame those who stand with France.

This was also posted on Medium, here.

On Monday, I spoke to a good friend who grew up in the 16^th arrondissement of Paris. Like me, she has worked in international humanitarianism throughout the world. On the night of November 13^th, she also joined me in the set of people who have been personally touched by a tragedy that the mass media deemed of international proportions. In my case, the tragedy was the Virginia Tech Massacre of 2007, in which I lost a few friends and knew several others who were killed. In the algorithmic world of social media, both of us had seemingly whittled down our Facebook news feeds to those with whom we more or less agree on major social issues. Strangely, a sad phenomenon crept up in both of our feeds following the attacks in Paris – some people thought it was appropriate and necessary to shame those who mourned for Paris with articles, images and status updates about other, less heard tragedies.

Being in a field that is often defined by massive and heartbreaking losses of life, I had a visceral reaction to the sudden outpouring of “care” for other international tragedies. At least in part, this is because of the hypocritical superficiality of this so-called alternative narrative. The fact that so many people posted in an effort to “call out privilege” or to “put mourning for Paris in check” made me sick.

Is there privilege inherent to an American posting a picture of their vacation to Paris to show solidarity with France? Yes, absolutely. Is there a media bias that favors coverage of 130+ people dying in Paris over Beirut or Kenya or Burundi or Somalia or another economically developing country with people of color? Of course. But this is neither the place nor time to use these as weapons to demonize those who are trying to find an outlet for their pain, to stand with their French friends or to simply support a foreign country.

Privilege comes in all forms and, in fact, social media is largely designed to showcase that privilege. When my straight friends post pictures of their anniversary and talk about how they married their high school sweetheart, they are mired in privilege, because as a gay woman, I never had the luxury of dating someone I was attracted to when I was that young. When I post a status update about my upcoming work trip to Africa, that is mired in privilege, because I had the economic means to study and make a career out of what I love doing. As someone who has devoted considerable time and energy to correcting those imbalances, as my colleagues distribute food in war-torn countries, or set up a new public health system, or as local activists empower their own people to speak freely for the first time, we know there is a way, a time and a place to call out privilege. We also know that if a person chooses to acknowledge the pain and suffering of an event that that does not mean this person does not care about others.

Paris is one of the most visited cities in the world. It is one of the most socioeconomically diverse cities in the world. It is one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Paris is a city that has offered a lot of people a piece of itself, and for this reason, an attack on Paris is something that resonates globally. Yes, there are vicious and heinous attacks on many parts of the world. The media needs to do a better job of covering these issues, but people need to do a better job of caring. This means not just passively caring or caring when it’s in vogue. This means caring in a way that is productive, helpful and acknowledges that one person’s fight may not be same for the next person.

The semester of the Virginia Tech Massacre, the people I knew best that died worked tirelessly with me to help raise campus awareness of what was happening Darfur, Sudan. After the Massacre happened, the support online, through the phone and in-person was such a valuable lifeline when I most needed the help. That support told me it was okay to break down crying in the street, or question why such amazing people were killed or that the events would forever alter who I am. Our capacity to love and support is not limited; my capacity to care about Darfur and mourn for my friends was not mutually exclusive. Our capacity to mourn Paris and Beirut and Somalia and Burundi and the other tragedies of the world in a healthy, pro-active way is not limited.

Do not use your newfound knowledge of the world to shame those who stand with France.