Thought Provoking

I traveled to Boston for work last week to the National Society of Black Engineers conference.  I traveled with several others to work the career fair and interview people at the career fair.  It's both rewarding and exhausting.  You stand on your feet for about 7 hours talking to people about their resumes and trying to find good candidates.  You risk getting sick by shaking the hands of hundreds of people.

Most of the people from my company that were at the conference were engineers, but there were a few human resources people from the company there as well.  Let me just say that HR people are much different than engineers.  They are very much into hugs.  They say that at meetings at work they even give hugs to each other, which is pretty much unheard of in engineering.  At least if you're from the U.S.  Some Brazilian, Mexican, and Italian engineers can get away with a hug in engineering.  Also, black people seem to be much more into hugs.  I know what I said was just a bunch of stereotypes, but in general that's what I observed and was told on my trip.  The observation may not apply to all.

Our Recruiting Group

Some people ask why I'm going to NSBE given the color of my skin.  The main answer is because I'm part of a minority in engineering (women) and believe we need to increase the diversity in engineering, so I help recruit at NSBE sometimes too.  Sometimes for a minority to gain traction in an organization, it requires the people in the majority to support them and mentor them and include them in the culture.  Here is one interesting article.  It's a bit dry and old (from the 80's), but it makes some good points.  The content around pages 43 and 44 is interesting.

I know some people (including some of my friends and family) think organizations like NSBE and SWE (Society of Women Engineers) are exclusive and possibly unwarranated, and why does the minority get to discriminate but the majority can't form the Society of White Male Engineers?  Actually, any gender or race can join both SWE and NSBE if you support the basic concepts of the organization(s).  I think many people in the majority don't understand the isolation that can occur for minorities in the workplace.  Isolation produces lack of knowledge about the culture, and lack of knowledge about the culture produces faux pas that can result in the person's performance perception being negative.  Probably it takes some kind of significant emotional experience to understand it.

The other topic is related to bias.  If someone tells you they don't have any biases (race, gender, socio-economic status, etc.), they are probably lying to themselves.  Unless they're Jesus.  In most cases we need to be aware of our biases and overcome them.  In my career I've known older women who have told me when they first started their career, they had to walk to a different building because the building they worked in didn't have a women's restroom and they were the only female who worked in the building.  One of my co-workers in her late 30's told me when she was an intern she had a boss who explicitly told her he didn't believe women should be in engineering, and he didn't know what to do with her, so he wasn't going to assign her any work for the summer.  Now not all people in her company felt that way, but there is still bias out there.  That's why organizations like SWE started.

To be clear, when we go there to recruit, we don't lower our standards.  We're still looking for "top talent".  The thing that impressed me this year was the commitment of my co-workers to give advice to those who don't meet the standards so maybe in the future they can meet the standards and become more hireable.  Sometimes it breaks your heart to meet someone that you can see has great potential, but that person doesn't meet the criteria of the company, so you have to turn them down with some advice on what to do to try to meet the criteria in the future.

I was trying to think of an analogy / comparison to help a white male understand what it might be like to be the minority.  One I could think of is being a Tupperware salesperson.  Men use tupperware to store leftovers and maybe store things in their work shop, and let's say there was this great untapped potential for uses of Tupperware by men.  So the company hires a man to help sell Tupperware.  When he joins the sales group, the rest of the people are females.  The entire company's structure and culture is female-centric.  They only think about food and kitchen uses and not about work shop and other male uses, and they aren't always keen to hear about the man's ideas on new products.  He has some success with selling Tupperware to men, but most women he tries to sell to are a bit wary and wonder why a man is going around trying to sell Tupperware.  Why is he being all different and trying to break into their culture?  Eventually he becomes discouraged and quits and moves to a different career in sales that is more male-centric like selling tractors.

Over dinner one night I talked to a guy from HR in my company, and he told me about his non-profit organization called Free Intelligent Conversation.  I asked him if he had some standard "starter" questions, and he said one of them is, "If you had 20 minutes to talk to everybody in the world, what would you talk about?"  I didn't have to think long - my immediate thought was to talk about Jesus because it's our soul that is most important in this life.  Check out his website - the 16 minute Tedx talk video is the guy from the company where I work.  I'll embed the video below as well.

That's about enough philosophy for today.