Excerpts from Denice Denton’s talk at Google on June 8, 2005
Denice Denton, chancellor at University of California, Santa Cruz spoke at an Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology event sponsored by Google in June. Dr. Denton is an advocate for supporting access to science, math, and engineering opportunities for women and minorities. On this night, she spoke of diversity and leadership.
Diversity and excellence are synergistic. Some of you may be familiar with the Catalyst study that looks at gender diversity in upper management. 350 Fortune 500 companies were surveyed and measured both for Return On Equity (ROE) and Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) The companies with the highest representation of women in top management (this is fairly high-level Board positions and VP positions), had 35% higher ROE and TRS. In an academic setting, diverse teams do better research and provide a better teaching and learning environment.
When we talk about diversity-related issues, there are many mythologies around diversity. One mythology is the idea that discrimination is only practiced by a small set of ignorant people. Many people believe if we could just get rid of those few people, work environments would improve and because there would no longer be any prejudice or biases. What research shows is the reality is everybody, men and women alike, perceive and treat women differently from men. And these biases are not only gender biases.
Another mythology is that women don’t have biases against women. We are all socialized about biases, so it’s important wherever you work you grapple with diversity issues. The first step is to confront this realization that we all have biases, and those biases come out in how we interact with people, how we engage with our peers and colleagues, how we treat people when we’re interviewing them and how we develop policies and guidelines for how our organizations are going to work. These biases have a huge impact.
If you want to learn more about these biases, there is an Implicit Associations Test online. This is a rigorous academic analysis that has been put together by Professor Banaji at Harvard and Professor Greenwald at the University of Washington . Online tests of this nature will give you a sense of your own biases around age, race, sexuality, ability and disability. Take the test for you first, if you’re in an organization where you are trying to lead cultural change or precipitate conversations about change, have a group of people take the test as well. The results will give you a sense of what the bias load each of us and get people to talk about these biases.
Leaders need to always be thinking about succession planning. If you really want to make a difference in diversity and cultural change in an organization, every time you appoint a leader you need to find out what the agenda is of the person you are considering. Does this person get the agenda, does this a person really understand the agenda and have a track record to prove it. You have to make that a red light/green light issue on every appointment; otherwise you’re not going to change the organization. It’s not the only criteria, but it has to be one of the key criteria.
One of the things we haven’t done as well as we might, both in universities and in corporate settings, is: (A) think about professional development for everybody, so they can begin to move into leadership roles; and (B) think about how to diversify the people in the pipeline who are going to take on leadership roles. The people at the top of the organization are the ones who have to carry that ball.
An important way leaders can make a big difference is in recruiting. Often in the technical arena traditional approaches to recruiting yield the same results. Cast the net broadly by using different recruiting strategies and networks. As an example, search for recipients of different kinds of awards like the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math and Engineering Mentoring. This award goes to people who have mentored under-represented minorities and woman.
Retention is another area where leaders can make a big difference. Policies and succession planning can have a big impact on whether or not we retain women and under- represented minorities. Because it’s those policies and whether or not women and minorities are being moved into leadership roles, that really has an impact on retention. If positions of authority are not attractive, then we need to re-examine the role and see if it needs to be redefined.
It’s important to connect with people early in the pipeline. Make sure you are connecting with SWE and NASES (Native Americans in Science and Engineering Society), the SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers), the Society of Black Engineers, and so on. Think about the candidates you’re looking at and every engagement they’ve had with you. Consider what the language in your ad says and what the ad looks like as a whole. When the applicant responded to your ad how was their resume received, was there a follow up from your end and if so was your response to them encouraging? Also think about what the candidate wants to know about you and your organization in addition to what you want to know about them.
Cultural change requires real transformation around policy. Family-friendly policies including childcare, elder care and flexible leave policies are important. Leaders have to set expectations about what they want to see in the culture of departments or divisions. There are things you can do around leadership development to give leaders tools to help make those changes happen. One example is a situation where we had the first woman in a department. The Department Chair made a huge difference because he took it upon himself to make sure she was going to have good mentoring, her laboratory space was appropriate, that she got integrated into some research groups and partnerships. Companies that want to take diversity seriously and particularly with respect to women, really do have to change the culture.
Who is responsible for change? If you want to work here do you need to act like people here? We’ve spent 30-40 years asking women to change and developing programs for women and minorities. .Why can’t you just get with the program? Come on, come on. Let’s go. Here’s a little help for you.. Move into this male-dominated structure that has its own philosophy. If you want to be in Engineering and study it, act like that. What we want to see now is these systems moving over a little bit, to accommodate the needs of a more diverse group of people. There’s some responsibility on all sides. It’s not only that women and minorities need to change, or do something different, but that the organizations need to change to accommodate people’s needs.