In our first year of running Project Include, we saw people clearly starting to understand that tech is neither inclusive nor diverse. But we also saw they were mostly uncertain, unmotivated or afraid to improve.
One year later, we see people more eager to take on transformational change. But we also see that it’s extremely difficult to create a diverse and inclusive culture quickly — regardless of company size or CEO commitment — if you depend only on the current set of popular diversity and inclusion activities.
Setting an inclusive culture through ongoing training, creating transparency in wage bands, removing bias from job descriptions and the recruiting process, hiring a Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) lead…these are all necessary actions, but results are slow. Implementing all these strategies won’t get your employee base to reflect America’s broader demographics overnight. In fact, at today’s pace, and without more revolutionary ideas, we may not see changes in our lifetime — or even our children’s lifetimes. Juxtaposed with this disheartening insight, however, is the silver lining: We’ve recently seen an encouraging level of CEOs who are interested in transformational, revolutionary change.
