Empowering Underrepresented Groups with Technology

Michelle Glauser

That’s my talk, Empowering Underrepresented Groups with Technology. And there’s where you can contact me later if you want to.

Michelle Glauser

So, my story, I grew up in Salt Lake in a big Mormon family, and I was always a nerd and was in the computer club and learned some visual basic. Played around with HTML and I just never realized that was a career path that I could take. And then a few years ago, I was working in San Francisco, barely able to pay rent. and just really floundering. And one day I was thinking about how much I wished I could build the things that the engineers were building myself. And so I Googled how to build a website. And I found a new intensive training program and became a software engineer. And loved it. It was so great. It was a perfect fit. And I just was amazed that I hadn’t figured out that I could have done that earlier.

Michelle Glauser

And it tripled my income. So it was really empowering to say, wow, I’m making more money than my husband is. And I have this cool career that fits really well.

Michelle Glauser

But tech has a big problem. It’s a huge lack of diversity. As you can see, there aren’t very many women and especially in technical roles. And so there are also a lot of microaggressions and discrimination that we face and other underrepresent. Other underrepresented groups are also really underrepresented. I mean, Latinos and blacks especially. Interestingly, in the Bay Area or in Silicon Valley in general, Asians are not considered underrepresented because there are so many of them.

Michelle Glauser

All right, so after I realized about this huge diversity problem, I started organizing meetups and I published an open source learning to code resources list. And I still add to that to this day. But it’s a little bit overwhelming because it has thousands of links now.

Michelle Glauser

But tech companies know that this is an issue, right? They’re dedicating millions of dollars to solving the diversity issue. But we still need things like this.

Michelle Glauser

So in 2015, a woman who worked with my husband Was on some ads for the company, and immediately she started hearing that people were saying, Oh, she can’t really be an engineer. She must be a model. She’s too pretty to be an engineer. She doesn’t look like an engineer. So I reached out to her and I said, Oh, this makes me so mad. I’m here for you. Maybe we should put up billboards in response. And she said Or we could do a hashtag. And the hashtag took off within a day, within actually a few hours, it was viral. And we ended up putting up a fundraiser to do the billboards that I talked about.

Michelle Glauser

So then I also noticed this other problem, and that’s that in the Bay Area, where tech is the huge thing and people think that it’s just money, money, money. there are a lot of people really struggling. There’s a high homeless population, and it’s it’s really bad. And if any of you have been to San Francisco and walked through the tenderline, you can see that. So I just thought, how come they’re the ones who are being displaced when there’s so much money here? Can’t we give them the training they need? And I found out that the income disparity is worse than Rwanda in parts of San Francisco. And that was really shocking to me.

Michelle Glauser

And I feel like a lot of techies kind of Just get in an Uber or Lyft to go home and just put on their blinders in the parts of the city where the poverty is apparent.

Michelle Glauser

And then I started looking at all the top tech cities where there are the highest number of tech jobs and found that that’s the same problem, right? There are a lot of jobs, but if you don’t have the skills, then you get left way behind.

Michelle Glauser

And I knew that there was already a lot of training, but all of them had barriers, right? They cost a lot. Most of the coding boot camps these days are upwards of $15,000. And you have to be able to pay rent while you’re doing the training. You need a laptop, you need to quit your job, there isn’t childcare, it might not be safe for you as an underrepresented person. And you don’t have connections to the industry, to jobs, if you don’t know people.

Michelle Glauser

So I started putting together workshops. And they were at local computer labs, so they didn’t need a laptop. And we had child care and food. And it was all through the local organizations. And every single student loved it and wanted to join again.

Michelle Glauser

So this is the makeup of our workshops. As you can see, it’s really diverse. And that’s a great thing about the Bay Area, but we’re not taking advantage of that. Same thing with gender.

Michelle Glauser

So I decide what if the tech companies and the people who need the jobs can help each other. So the tech companies can Fund the training basically. So I started this nonprofit, Tectonica. And what we do is we partner with the tech companies to provide free tech training and living stipends to the students. And then we placed the women with the companies that paid for their training. Oh, and I have to add, we always make sure to say that it’s for local women and non-binary adults because there are quite a few in our area.

Michelle Glauser

Okay, so the training that we have put together is six months long, and we do not just web development, but a lot of other in-demand tech skills.

Michelle Glauser

And the sponsors get all of these lovely benefits. I think the biggest is probably that they can say they’re supporting a program like this. But there’s also tax deduction. And they do get inclusion training. I don’t know if people have heard of diversity inclusion training, but it’s kind of popular right now, and it’s like $20,000 or more.

Michelle Glauser

So here’s the class that we’ve selected. We are about to start, and I am so excited. On Wednesday, actually, we have an event to get sponsors signed up.

Michelle Glauser

And if anyone wants to help, here are some ways you can help. The first is we always take donations, of course. And the second is we need tech companies to get behind this and sponsor and hire the students. And then obviously, if you can follow us on social media and just spread the word, that would be great. And we take lots of volunteers.

Michelle Glauser

Questions? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Step up to the mic when you’re making it if you would. A question, say that it’s the microphone. That’s what we’re saying. Sorry.

Speaker 2

What is it that you need? Can you hear me about that? What is it that you need? Most out of all your money, time, expertise, probably money.

Michelle Glauser

I have not paid myself in over years, so loud, nice. But I would also say we do have a lot of volunteers, but they’re not all willing to do the grunt work, right? So if someone said, hey, I’m willing to like send a bunch of emails or like fix up a spreadsheet, I would be so happy. So yeah. Thank you.

Speaker 3

I was wondering if you could speak a bit organizationally about how do you have local chapters and how are those grown and how to engage at that local level.

Michelle Glauser

Okay, so far we are only in the Bay Area, and we don’t actually have a location. We’re looking for one of our sponsored companies to provide a meeting room for the first class to save us some money. And so we’ve done workshops in several different cities around the Bay Area and hope to expand once we have some success with this first class. Thank you.

Speaker 4

Um it’s handicapped.

Speaker 5

getting the companies themselves to run this. In other words, this seems like such a national need for a learning company to be building its own staff You mentioned diversity training. That implies that they don’t get the need for diverse employees yet. So you’re over here doing this thing, trying to get these people so you Help a social problem, but they don’t see that as a business problem. Am I right there? And so, how do you make your social activism Business problem, they go, Oh, we don’t need nonprofits. We need to make this part of our budget and just train people, and we want affirmative action on this kind of thing.

Michelle Glauser

So my answer to that would be companies are already looking everywhere for diverse talent, and some of them have started apprenticeship programs, but most of them say we don’t want to do the training. We want them to come to West Train. In fact, a lot of companies are saying we only hire senior engineers, but the problem with that is they end up having to poach them from other companies. And then the diversity and inclusion training, that is, I think it’s not so much about why they need the diversity, even though McKinsey has published several things saying that it is better. in general, and it reaches users with a broader perspective and then they have more revenue. But it’s more they need to figure out what a microaggression is.

Michelle Glauser

Who here knows what a microaggression is? Ooh, maybe I should talk about that. Talk about it.

Michelle Glauser

So microaggression is just a s They happen all the time. They’re just small things that we say or do that make someone feel not included. So for example, the you don’t look like an engineer thing. She could laugh that off, right? But it would kind of hurt hearing that over and over, and it does take a toll on people. Being able to say, hey, here are some microaggressions, and these are things you should avoid, and we should try not to assume things about people. It seems kind of obvious, but there have been some really great trainers out there working on. curriculum for that. So we’re going to do the same thing.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I was going to ask you about how it’s gone so far with finding trainers and what kind of skill sets you found and areas where maybe you need You have a certain need that maybe you haven’t, you’re still looking for, or whatever. Um So, cohort, what are you teaching them mostly?

Michelle Glauser

Right, so it’s mostly web development. And then we have a whole bunch of other lectures. about UI UX design and project management. We also want to make sure that our students become community leaders. So we are going over that. And they’ll learn a little bit about diversity and inclusion themselves so they can stand up for themselves and for each other. Cool.

Speaker 4

Thank you. Thank you. All right, thank you so much.