Why Diversity Matters

I recently had an exchange on Twitter with a technology company about diversity. The conversation started when I saw a hiring post they shared. It was your typical recruitment post that announced how they have been killing it and, as a result, needed to hire more people. Sweet! They also shared a picture of the successful team that you, the applicant, would join should you get the job. Awesome! Beyond this great opportunity for someone, the longer that I studied the company picture, the more I felt something was off. Then out of the blue, I started counting...

Males: 25
Females: 3
White Males: 24
White Females: 3
Asian Males: 1
Asian Females: 0
Black Males: 0
Black Females: 0
Hispanic Males: 0
Hispanic Females: 0

What I began to realize is that this company, with all its accolades, had a diversity problem, and if left unresolved, would result in them never achieving their full potential. As a founder of SourceCode B46, I believe that diversity tremendously impacts the potential of a company, thus I wanted to make sure this belief was weaved into our mission.

“To make the world stronger and more beautiful by ensuring every community has a qualified representative at the table.”

This mission is our heart and the blood it pumps carries our commitment to the world and gives purpose to our work. Our commitment to diversity means that we structure our pricing differently and provide scholarships through our foundation to ensure every community has access to our services. Our commitment to diversity explains why we started actively recruiting women and people of color after I looked at the homogeneous makeup of our advisory board.

We are in the business of making the world better and to do this, we need a diverse group of qualified people lending their nuanced experiences and perspectives to the solutions. No community is an island. We are all interconnected, which means the challenges of one community impact all others. Thus, diversity gives us an opportunity to work together, understand needs, share gifts, experience struggle and create bonds that allow us to persevere during times of crisis.

A great example of how a crisis affects a community and diversity helpes people persevere is in the battle against breast cancer. Although it devastates millions of women, breast cancer was not always a top of the mind issue. In fact, it received little attention prior to the 1970's.  One of the reasons that attributed to this reality was a lack of diversity in the medical field, which influenced cancer research and treatment priorities. In 1970, only 9% of the doctors were women and as a result, breast cancer, which predominantly affects women, did not garner the same level of attention as prostate cancer, which only affects men.

Prostate cancer, due to a higher number of influential male voices, was a higher priority than breast cancer and, as a result, saved thousands of men's lives every year. But the victory was short-lived because the community, inhabited by women, was being ravaged by breast cancer. Inevitably, these men, who initially were victorious, would experience defeat when they encountered the suffering and deaths of their wives, sisters and daughters as a result of this disease. It was not until Title IX (1972) and the Public Health Service Act (1975), which banning discrimination on grounds of gender, did enough women enter the medical field to ensure that the  needs  of their community were being adequately expressed and addressed.

Today, close to 48% of medical degrees are awarded to women, which has resulted in more women at the table, more breast cancer research dollars being committed and a dramatic decrease in the mortality rate. Now, more women, the daughters, sisters, wives and partners of men, are surviving because diversity brought men and women together to develop solutions that allowed millions to persevere through this crisis.

There is a Jewish Midrash that says,

“In Heaven and Hell people sit at banquet tables filled with amazing food, but no one can bend their elbows. In Hell, everyone starves because they can’t feed themselves. In Heaven, everyone’s stuffed because they don’t have to bend their arms to feed each other.”

At some point in our lives, we all need help eating because our arms do not bend and to survive, we need each other. As a company that strives to make the world more beautiful, we appeal to other companies to maximize their potential and subsequent impact on the world by embracing diversity. Actively recruiting more women and people of a different ethnicity is great, but in reality more effort is needed. To truly be effective in fostering diversity, we must reach back into underrepresented communities and begin nurturing its members.

For us, we answer the call through our Pathways program, which is administrated by the SourceCode B46 Foundation. The purpose of Pathways is to identify and nurture promising elementary students from underrepresented communities who have a talent for software coding. With the help of a sponsoring corporation, we are able to provide each student with year-round enrichment opportunities until high school graduation. By providing this type of guided nurturing,  we help these students achieve proficiency and increase the chances of underrepresented communities having a representative, who can lobby for their needs, at the solutions table.

Indeed, diversity matters if your goal is to maximize potential and make the world better.

- K