Hiring for Diversity

Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.
Hi, Michelle.

Michelle Frechette:
Hi, Allie. How are you?

Allie Nimmons:
I wanted to jump in with the first hi because you always get the first hi and so-

Michelle Frechette:
[inaudible 00:00:26].

Allie Nimmons:
… I was like, “I’m going to get her this time.”

Michelle Frechette:
And you did, and you did it very well.

Allie Nimmons:
Thank you. Thank you. I’ve had a lot of practice.

Michelle Frechette:
There you go. It’s actually spring. Did you know that?

Allie Nimmons:
It is? When’s the first day of spring?

Michelle Frechette:
I don’t know. It was a while ago, sometime in March, but this is the thing. It’s been snowing here anyway, and I haven’t looked out the window today because it said 40% chance of snow or something here today, but it’s supposed to get up in the 40s this afternoon, and tomorrow… If anybody knows me, you know that I love taking pictures of birds and nature and my favorite place to do that is a wildlife refuge here in New York. Tomorrow it opens again. Actually today it opens for the season, but tomorrow’s supposed to be sunny.

Allie Nimmons:
Yay. That’s exciting.

Michelle Frechette:
I’m taking my cameras and I’m going to go for a drive.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s awesome. Yeah, the first day of spring was March 20th, which was over a week ago, almost two weeks ago.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:01:22].

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, that’s so awesome. I did notice… Today this morning I took a walk and I did notice a lot of the trees were starting to get their little green leaves back and some of them were blooming, my basil plant has flowers on it, and I was like, “This is crazy.”

Michelle Frechette:
I didn’t know they flowered but that makes sense-

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, me either.

Michelle Frechette:
… but I didn’t know that was a thing.

Allie Nimmons:
I didn’t know it was a thing either. I guess my basil plant knew that it was spring and I didn’t so it was like, “Time for flowers.”

Michelle Frechette:
That’s awesome. I love it.

Allie Nimmons:
Well, we are talking about something a little bit less pleasant today than spring and flowers and all of that. You sent me a link a couple days ago that I arguably did not read, but you just gave me the lowdown on what was going on.

Michelle Frechette:
The TLDR.

Allie Nimmons:
The TLDR, NFL forms new committee to review policies regarding diversity hiring, teams mandated to hire a minority coach as offensive assistant. It sounds like basically the NFL was like, “We need more diverse people so you have to hire a diverse person for this position. That’s the requirement.” I didn’t even have to read the whole article to just think, “Well, that’s dumb. That’s offensive. That…” I talk to so many people as a result of the work that we do about diversity and about hiring and about how underrepresented people feel about these issues, and I’ve heard so many people say, “I don’t like this kind of conversations because I don’t want to be hired because I’m diverse. I don’t want to be the token Black person or the token gay person or whatever the case might be.”
I totally understand that because you have policies like this that exist or that people would like to try to implement that boil somebody down to whatever it is that makes them underrepresented rather than prioritizing whatever it is that makes them skilled. I thought today we could talk about how not to do this kind of hiring because while you want to prioritize diversity, having quotas and requirements and percentages can be a very slippery slope into just being offensive and really setting people up for failure in terms of when you get hired to do a job, you assume, “I’m hired to do this job because I was the best person they found to do this job.” Then that expectation is then shattered when you realize, “Oh, well, I was not hired because of that. I was hired in order to increase a percentage.” That can affect your self-worth and your self-esteem and your confidence a lot.

Michelle Frechette:
Morale [inaudible 00:04:20].

Allie Nimmons:
Morale, yeah, and a lot, and affect the trust that you then have with your employer in a lot of different ways. There are ways to do this appropriately, to prioritize diversity with your recruiting and hiring correctly.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
This example is not a good example.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s not. No. It’s not a bad idea, I don’t think, and maybe you could correct me if I’m wrong. It’s not a bad idea for a company that’s definitely not diverse to say, “We want to increase diversity by a percentage. We want to make sure that we have equal representation and we want to take it from zero or 2% or whatever. This is our goal for our first year in making sure that diversity is important to be able to give yourself goals to work toward.” But then those goals shouldn’t be focused on, “Well, we want to find an offensive assistant who’s a Black person or an offensive assistant who’s whatever minority that they want to focus on,” as opposed to, “We want to make sure that we’re recruiting properly and that we’re getting applications from the right places and the right people because we’re putting our efforts into the proper ways to make sure that we are hiring for the right reasons with diversity in mind.”

Allie Nimmons:
Exactly.

Michelle Frechette:
So giving yourself… To say that, “We’re a company that’s X percentage,” I’m not sure that’s correct, but to give ourselves goals to move forward and make sure hold ourselves accountable to those goals I think is important.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, absolutely. There are times when you do need a particular type of person with a particular type of background in a position. My husband was recently telling me about a new comic book coming out and there are two characters in this comic that are supposed to be non-binary. They are the most cringey, inaccurate representations of binary people you could possibly imagine. It was just so obvious that they didn’t have any queer people, much less a non-binary person, on the creative or executive team making those decisions with the character designs, how they were going to be designed and created. So there are situations where you might say, “Hey, we would like to have a non-binary character in this comic. We need to hire a non-binary artist or animator or whatever the case may be.” And so yeah, when you interview someone you have a-

Michelle Frechette:
Or at least consultant.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, or a consultant. That then means when you do recruit or hire those people, you can tell them, “We are looking for a non-binary person because of this reason.” The thing with the NFL is a lot of… I don’t know the exact percentage. I want to say something like 95% of professional football players are Black men, and yeah, it totally makes sense that you would want to have Black leadership, Black coaches, Black assistants supporting them and providing them the kind of mentorship and help that they need, but there’s… It’s such a weird line between, “Well, we’re hiring you because you are Black and we just want more Black people around,” and, “We’re hiring you because you’re really talented and it’s a bonus, it’s an additional value-add that you come from the Black community and you can have that perspective and connect with the players and whatever.” But you have to look at the whole picture of who a person is and not just how they’re going to increase your percentages.

Michelle Frechette:
No, I’m not a sports person. Anybody that knows-

Allie Nimmons:
Me either.

Michelle Frechette:
I mean, I understand what the different point values are for different actions in football and that’s about it. I also don’t like to watch football with the volume up because the constant crowd cheering is… It hits my ADHD in a way that is just unpleasant, but… Let me say before anybody that’s listening to this is a football fan and wants to correct me, I’m fine with that. You can correct me, but when you’re looking at the leadership of a team and you mandate a specific coach to be a minority, isn’t that kind of strange? It’s like teams are mandated to hire a minority coach as the offensive assistant. Why? Why the offensive? Why not the defensive assistant? Why not the whatever [inaudible 00:08:50]?

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, why not any other position? Yeah, just that position for some reason is what they decided. That I don’t [inaudible 00:08:56].

Michelle Frechette:
I didn’t see anywhere in the article that it mentioned why that position at all. Guys, ladies, non-binary people, if you’re really into football and you want to educate me on why that was a good idea, I’m all ears. Try to keep it as non-sports terminology as possible for me to understand because I am that… What’s the… I can’t think of the right word. The stereotypical white woman who does not understand football.

Allie Nimmons:
Doesn’t understand football. I mean, I’m a stereotypical woman that doesn’t understand football. I don’t get it either.

Michelle Frechette:
Right, exactly. But I was trying to equate it to like, “Okay, what if I was a WordPress company?” I said, “Okay, anybody who’s a WordPress company now has to hire a minority person for their director of marketing.” What? How does that even make sense?

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
Like, “Well, I got a great…” I apply and I’m a great developer and they’re like, “Oh, no, we need you in marketing.” Like, “Wait, what?” I mean, it just doesn’t make sense to me, but you know.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. What’s funny is I’ve been in that position before, or I believe I have because no one will outright say it, right?

Michelle Frechette:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
I mean, I guess the NFL has decided to, but people won’t say it. I have been approached for jobs, I’ve been recruited for jobs and I’ve been hired places where in retrospect it was very much a diversity hire. Then I was asked to do work or fill positions or learn how to do things that were not what I was hired to do. It was like, “Well, we want another person in this department or this area who checks this box.”

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. It is a very insulting… It’s a very insulting thing because it’s like, “Okay, well, then why did I spend all of this time and passion and energy learning how to be good at this one thing if that doesn’t matter to you, it just matters that I sit in this desk and do this job and have my face on this part of the website?” It’s-

Michelle Frechette:
Right. The most important part. That’s why we talk about representation without tokenization because it is about not just having a different colored face on your website, it’s about what does that represent and who is that person and what are they doing within your company, what are their qualifications, why are they a strong person and what value do they bring to the company besides what you see in a camera?

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. That’s why I… That’s one of the things I love the most about our database. Not to get all self promo-y, but it allows people-

Michelle Frechette:
We can, it’s our podcast.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, we totally can. It allows people to say, “Okay. I want to… I would like to increase my diversity hires by… Or diversity hires is not the right term, but I would like to increase the number of diverse people on my team by this percentage and so every time I hire, I’m going to go to this database and I’m going to look through this database first and reach out to these people first.” We’ve never said that like, “Oh, you’re guaranteed to find somebody or that we have people in the database that fill every possible position.” I’m sure that we have options in the database for particular roles that if you searched for that role in the database, you might not find anybody at all that fits that box.
But it allows you to say, “I’m going to prioritize diversity but also prioritize the skill rather than just reaching out to the first Black person I find and being like, ‘Do you want to do this?'” Again, I feel the need to emphasize we’re not pulling this out of our butts. This has happened to me. I have DMs in my inbox of people like, “Hey, do you want to come do social media for my brand?” I have to reply and say, “I don’t now, nor have I ever, been a social media manager. This is what I do. This is my website of my business and my services. If you need this, sure, let’s talk about that, but why do you just assume that I would take any role?” [inaudible 00:13:07].

Michelle Frechette:
“Well, you must need it. You’re a minority person, you must be grasping at straws. By the way, we want to put you in a position where you’re front-facing, forward-facing and people know that we have a Black person on our team.”

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. It’s super offensive because it’s like you didn’t take a moment… Either you didn’t take a moment to look and see what I actually do or you did and you ignored that.
Hi, everyone. Allie here to interrupt. As we approach our 50th episode, we want to hear from you. Have you learned something that has helped you through listening to this podcast? Have you used our tool and found it helpful for your projects? We really want to know. Please go to underrepresentedintech.com/fifty and leave us a quick voice memo telling us what you’ve learned or accomplished. Your voice memo might be featured in our 50th episode. Thank you. Back to the episode.

Michelle Frechette:
Can I also bring up something else from this article that really made me stop to think? The NFL in and of itself is not not diverse. Like you said, there are a lot of people in the NFL who are not white people, however it’s the leadership that we’re talking about. If you start to look above the players and you continue to climb up, you see fewer and fewer minority people included, and that includes women and that includes ethnic minority, et cetera. That is not unlike technology. In technology, we have a lot of hires. I should say a lot. We have hires that are diverse people, but they’re not necessarily in the C-suite or the director level positions and that’s where we also need to see change happening is not just like, “Well, we’re getting people for their perspective.”
We do talk about that a lot, that it’s not just about having a diverse person on your team but the perspectives and the experience that they bring and the skillset that they bring, but also it’s not just having them on the team but having people in decision-making and leadership and mentorship positions, like you mentioned earlier. That’s where it really makes a difference too. I think about… I was a single mom raising my daughter, and I think about the fact that I wanted to be a strong woman so she could see a strong woman. If I expected other people to fill that role for her, she wouldn’t be the independent, sometimes overly independent, woman that she is, and I applaud that. I love that she is a strong, capable person and she’s gone beyond anything I’ve ever taught her and that’s great, but if I hadn’t been that role model or made a decision early on to be a role model, it would’ve been up to her to find role models and that’s not as easy to do.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, exactly. I do just want to say before anybody comes for us, I do disagree a little bit with what you said about the NFL being diverse. This is a “how do you define diversity” sort of topic too, which maybe one day we should do an episode on. I just looked it up. As of February 6th 2022… Actually, no, it says, “In 2021, about 71% of the players in the NFL were people of color. A quarter were white, so 25% white, 71% people of color, anything other than white. 4% were not disclosed or specified.”
I don’t know what that looks like as far as the coaches. I know that when… Anytime I’ve ever watched football in my whole life, I have noticed all the coaches are white. I’ve noticed this with every major league sport, basketball as well. I got really into basketball for a while. All the coaches were white. If I ever saw… I can count one or two times I saw a Black coach. So I think that it is awesome that 71% of those players are not white and these men of color, women of color have attained success in the industry that they’ve chosen to participate in, but they’re not diverse sports. You know what I mean?

Michelle Frechette:
Right. I guess what I meant by that was it’s not like when you look at… Let me pick a television show out of the air. You watch L.A. Law back in the day, okay, I just went really too far back, but… Or Ally McBeal or anything like that where it’s like it’s an all white cast with perhaps a Black person or Hispanic person on occasion. You look at the NFL, you watch a game and your mind sees diversity because you see not all white people on the field. I guess that was what I meant by that and I didn’t say it well, so thank you for bringing that back up.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, no worries. I know I think of diversity as many different types of people as kind of equally distributed as possible, so whatever that might mean. I found another… See, now I’m just going down a rabbit hole of being interested in these statistics. I found another set of data that says around 70% of the players are Black, 80% of the coaches are white.

Michelle Frechette:
Wow.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s such a massive disparity, and it would be crazy to see if the NFL was like, “Okay, we want to hire more diverse or fewer white coaches.” That to me has a direct effect on the players, but, again, it’s like you said, why did they pick that one job, that one role, rather than focusing at the top and say, “Okay, we want to create…” I mean, maybe that’s what this is. Maybe they’re trying to create a pipeline where it’s like okay, if you’re a Black person and you join the NFL as this particular role that they’re trying to get people for, maybe that’s the beginning of the pipeline to becoming a coach. I don’t know. Somebody tell us, right?

Michelle Frechette:
Right. It could be, right.

Allie Nimmons:
It could be, but, regardless, it is very strange. They’re already reevaluating it because they’ve gotten backlash, it seems like. But yeah, what we wanted to share with everyone is that it is a good idea to set goals for, “Okay, our company right now is 80% white. By the end of the year, we want to get that down and have more people of color, or maybe by the end of the year we want to have a 50/50 split of men and women or, you know, something like that.”

Michelle Frechette:
Mm-hmm.

Allie Nimmons:
Personally, I think one of the best things to do there, and I guess this depends on the company and it depends on a lot of different factors, but making that known, making that public and saying, “We acknowledge the problem. We recognize that it is a problem and we are dedicated to fixing it.” How we are going to fix it is, like you said before, so much more important than any number, percentage or whatever. You don’t even have to pick a number. You can just say, “We want to increase the amount of diversity on our team. Here’s how we’re going to do it.” Do you know what that would look like to somebody who’s considering applying to work at your company or that you have reached out to and they’re now doing research about their company? If a company reached out to me and I saw that prominently displayed on their social media, their LinkedIn, their website, I would feel way more moved to respond positively to that company. Maybe not everyone feels that way, but that’s how I feel.

Michelle Frechette:
No, I understand. I guess you just bring up a point too. You and I are two people representing ourselves and trying to make a difference for underrepresented folks in technology. I guess the not prominent part of what we do is we don’t speak for everybody. We’re speaking for our knowledge and the information that we have. If you are somebody who’s underrepresented and you don’t agree with us, that’s okay. Feel free to talk to us about it. We are as open to being educated as possible. Just know that our intentions are always the best.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, and if we’ve said something that you disagree with, I want to have you on the podcast and I want to talk about it, and I want to hear-

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
I want to hear change my mind. I want to receive new information that will make me change my… That’s the key to growing more wise, right?

Michelle Frechette:
Mm-hmm.

Allie Nimmons:
Being open to changing your mind about things. Even just since starting the or helping to increase participation in the BlackPress Slack group, I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things just hearing other Black folks in WordPress sharing their ideas and experiences and realizing that I don’t know everything, my experiences are my experiences and I have so much room to grow and that’s so exciting. So yeah, if you disagree with us, let us know. We want to have you on the podcast and you can tell everyone else where you’re coming from. The more the merrier.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. It’s like when we had the all-women identifying release Squad for WordPress. There was one person in the Advanced WordPress Facebook group who was like, “I’m a woman and I’ve never experienced that.” They’re like, “Oh, good. I’m glad. I’m so happy you’ve never experienced that, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t.”

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
You can’t negate everybody else’s experiences because that hasn’t been your experience too. So opening our eyes to your experiences, we’re all for it.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. Exactly.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. Awesome. That’s all I got. I don’t know about you.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s all I got. Another one in the books. Oh, happy April Fools’ Day.

Michelle Frechette:
Oh, that’s right. I did some online pranks. Did you see any of my online pranks?

Allie Nimmons:
I didn’t. I… Oh, sorry. Accidentally muted myself. I honestly have been avoiding Twitter because of the pranks. I’m just like-

Michelle Frechette:
I make them obvious, though.

Allie Nimmons:
I kind of wasn’t in the mood for it today, to be perfectly honest, so I have not, but I’ll go look now and maybe I’ll retweet some to the Underrepresented in Tech account so people can see what you’re… I mean, people should be following you anyway, but I’ll share some.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, no, it wasn’t me, though. It was the companies that I represent. Let me just say I renamed Post Status “Pre Status” so that we can print the news before it even happens.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s really funny.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. I did one for Stellar [inaudible 00:24:08]. Check them out. They’re fun. It’s fun to have fun, but make sure it’s obvious that you’re joking and not misleading people.

Allie Nimmons:
I saw… Oh gosh, the guy that now runs iThemes. His name is totally blanking on me right now, but he tweeted out he’s going to rename it “meThemes”.

Michelle Frechette:
I didn’t see that, but that’s funny.

Allie Nimmons:
That one did make me laugh. All the other ones I’m just like, “All right. Whatever.”

Michelle Frechette:
Roll your eyes, yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, a little bit. I’m a Grinch when it comes to April Fools, I guess.

Michelle Frechette:
Well, I’m having a little bit of fun.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s good.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. I even used Comic Sans. I’m just going to say [inaudible 00:24:43].

Allie Nimmons:
Oh my gosh. How dare you? All right.

Michelle Frechette:
I know, right? [inaudible 00:24:49].

Allie Nimmons:
We’ll go ahead and wrap things up. Thank you so much for listening.

Michelle Frechette:
See you next week.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, we’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

Michelle Frechette:
Bye.

Allie Nimmons:
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