“We didn’t know how good baseball could be until everybody was allowed to play,” Rev. Jesse Jackson told a room full of tech leaders, community leaders, and civil servants at Northeastern University’s South Lake Union campus on June 10.

He was drawing an analogy comparing  diversity in sports with diversity in  the tech industry. The WTIA became actively engaged in tech diversity because we were inspired by our initial meeting with Rev. Jackson in December of 2014, when he first came to Seattle to challenge the tech industry to hire more underrepresented minorities.

Building new partnerships

Rev. Jackson’s initial visit resulted in WTIA forming a Diversity Action Committee (DAC) to get more women and underrepresented minorities, that is African Americans and Latinos, into the tech industry. Nate Miles, the board chair of the Urban League, also formed the Northwest Technology Equity Initiative (NWTEI), a group of minority business and community leaders dedicated to the same cause. The DAC includes WTIA board members such as Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz; Heather Redman, COO of Indix; and Tayloe Washburn, Dean of the Seattle campus of Northeastern University.

We know this problem won’t be solved quickly. With the help of NWTEI, we outlined a set of achievable, short-term initiatives we could work on together, including a speakers bureau where tech leaders volunteer to speak at schools and organizations to encourage more students to enter the tech industry. In true tech startup fashion, we created a minimum viable product and we are now testing it. You can read more about that work here. The luncheon on June 10 gave us an opportunity to update Rev. Jackson, as well as the community, of our progress on all our initiatives.

One of our goals was to add more racial diversity to our board. A few months ago, WTIA invited three well-respected African American leaders to join the WTIA board. The presence of these three new board members, Pamela Banks, Executive Director of the Urban League; Trish Dziko, founder and Executive Director of Technology Access Foundation; and Dave Cotter, tech entrepreneur and angel investor, ensured we had strong representation from the community, from education, and also industry. The fact that two are women is a continuation of our two-year effort to ensure gender balance on the board. Of the 39 directors on our WTIA board, 13 are now women!

Adding a social justice lens to recruiting diverse talent

For the tech leaders, it makes business sense to reach out to underrepresented communities as a source for talent to fuel our industry’s growth because 1) we create jobs ten times faster than we produce local talent qualified for those jobs and 2) we need the people building products and services to fully understand the diverse markets that tech companies serve.

When asked by an audience member, “Why do you personally care about increasing the number of minorities in the tech industry?”, Rev. Jackson responded, “I am passionate about justice.”

At the end of the talk, Seth Stell, President, co-founder of HERE Seattle, said, “As an African American who has grown up with exposure to technology, I haven’t faced a lot of the issues that are prevalent in minority communities. Hearing Rev. Jesse Jackson talk about the lack of visibility and the lack of proactive organizations has opened my eyes and inspired me to do more than what I’m currently doing with HERE Seattle.”

Looking forward and continuing to build

The challenge of increasing the number of underrepresented minorities and women in the tech industry can at times seem daunting. By some estimates, African Americans and Latinos make up less than two percent of the tech industry. How do we solve this problem when underrepresented minorities are facing a systemic access dilemma in the K-12 pipeline that removes most of the potentially qualified students from the labor pool? ?

Rev. Jackson also talked about how one-fifth of African Americans are employed in the public sector and the public sector is shrinking and the private sector is growing and they need to be able to turn to the private sector for jobs. Fortunately we can start doing something now while we build a diverse, local engineering talent pool. Nate Miles called on the tech industry to make a concerted effort to hire women and minority-owned businesses as suppliers.  WTIA are in the process of working with Tabor 100 and the Northwest Minority Supplier Development Council to connect our members with women and minority owned  suppliers to help the qualified suppliers get access to more opportunities.

Over the past few months, WTIA leadership  have had many conversations with organizations deeply engaged in serving women and minorities k so that we can achieve our goals quickly and efficiently. Aside from NWTEI, we’ve been partnering with Technology Access Foundation, Washington State Opportunity Scholarship, Washington STEM, and also HERE Seattle, which is organizing a speed mentoring event on July 18.

VentureScale is hosting a series of CEO Breakfasts, “Impact Over Easy,” dedicated to discussing ways businesses can build business practices that incorporate diverse hiring. Its July 7 breakfast features Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz, a WTIA board member, and the chair of the DAC. If you are interested in partnering with WTIA to help increase women and underrepresented minorities in the tech industry, please email me.

After breaking down racial barriers, we now know how good baseball can be. We still don’t know how good tech can be. But we know it can be a lot better than what it is now.

Photos by Don Pham