Lauren Sato
Lauren Sato
CEO @ Ada Developers Academy
“We have an opportunity to intervene and to build a system that’s more inclusive and more resilient for everyone.”
Action Prompts
These prompts are inspired by themes Lauren raised around the realities of inequality in the tech workforce, and its ties to economic power. They’ll help you uncover your unconscious bias and consider systems to support the shift in your sphere of influence.
// SELF REFLECTION
Envision a future state with a redistribution of wealth, and journal your answers:
• What could companies & communities led by women & BIPOC look like?
• Do you have internal resistance to that possibility?
• Surface any beliefs, mindsets or fears about seeing a reality with rich women & BIPOC in positions of power.
// TEAM EXPLORATION
Gather your hiring, onboarding & culture planning teams for a 60 minute meeting. Watch this 4 minute video together: Women in Tech Statistics: Hard Truths of an Uphill Battle
Then talk about these factors and how to play a part in closing the gap:
• Education: how are you investing in skill development for your talent?
• Hiring: who is getting hired & who is doing the hiring at your company?
• Retention: how are women, minorities and allies being supported and mentored in your org?
Resource
Empower yourself with facts!
Use the data in this report to fuel your conversations about systemic gender and race inequality.
Lauren Sato (she/her) is CEO at Ada Developers Academy, a non-profit, tuition-free coding school who are changing the face of tech. She and her team’s efforts are at the intersection of our economic structure and its current meltdown, and racial and gender justice, by addressing the issue of underrepresentation of women and minorities in the industry.
A few stats to set the stage… (source / source)
• Women still make up under 25% of employees at the tech biggies Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
• Just 3% of computing-related jobs are held by African-American women, 6% held by Asian women and 2% held by Hispanic women.
“I'm so excited to be living in this moment where we have an opportunity to intervene and to build a system that's more inclusive and more resilient for everyone. It's all connected and we all benefit from it if we fix it,” she urges.
Lauren and the Ada organization are feeling the immense urgency to grow their impact, as the massive demand for tech talent and a massive unemployment crisis converge. Ada not only has a solution that works in addressing the issue of representation, they’re moved by the potential of shifting economic power by ensuring a different group of people secure the bag.
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Investing in a Root Cause Solution
We're seeing our traditional educational structures fail, on top of having historically failed women and underrepresented folks. Coding boot camp Lambda School just got a $74 million investment, but their percentage of women served is lower than what is already in the tech industry -- so a $74 million investment in this solution means we're going to decrease in representation overall. That crushes me because we just started to feel like we were making gains! For us that means we have this solution that works, and we need to scale it.
Navigating the Tension of Change Together
We sit at the intersection of the nonprofit industry, the education industry and the technology industry, so we feel that tension every single day. With our nonprofit hats on, we’re extremely progressive. With our education hats on, we're very much in the pipeline system. With our technology hats on, we're really having to think deeply about how we prepare folks to go into the system and be successful when they're already discounted by the industry.
We’re preparing our students with social justice and racial justice training, we're training them to be able to see white supremacy in the workplace, and to think about decolonizing work. Then we're also saying, “we really want you to get this job at this big tech company, and these are the norms in that job, and we don't want you to be othered anymore than you already are.”
What we found is that the best answer is strength in numbers. We have, for the most part, stopped sending just one intern to a company. We always send them in pairs wherever we can. We're really trying to build critical mass within companies so that folks have a community to lean on and that those who are there who have established their credibility are able to push the envelope more and and support those who are coming up so that they can just go in and do the work.
A Vision of Diversified Economic Power
I'm excited to think about what it looks like to have the whole country covered, (and Ada doing our part) to make sure that our largest economic hubs are full of women with a bunch of money!
The only way to really shift our economic structure is if different people hold economic power. In order to make that happen, we have to get folks into high paying jobs and high growth sectors. If we put our heads down and just get as many women and underrepresented minorities as much money as we possibly can, we will feel like we hit the target.
Authentic Leadership and Engaging Teams in Uncertain Times
We've created such a persona around leadership, like you have it all together, and you have to have all the answers. I've had so many conversations with CEOs recently, particularly around the racial justice uprising. They're like, “I don't know what to say, I don't want to screw it up.” Well, you have to say something! So start with, “I'm gonna get this wrong sometimes, but I'm going to say something and I'm going to keep working on getting better, and knowing better and doing better.” That's just the reality of the time that we live in. Anybody who says they've got it all together isn’t being real.
In super murky, challenging times, having an established, clear vision and helping folks see it every step along the way -- seeing how they plug into the vision, how they impact it, and can make a difference -- is really helpful in creating persistence and engagement.
Commitment to Thriving Amidst Crisis
This crisis [centered around Black Lives Matter] continues to happen, because it's symptomatic of deep systemic failure. We had to think again and again about how we would create a process for addressing these things as they came up. It’s necessary. We're at a place where, we know when something happens, what we're going to do, we pulled some of the reactivity off the table and created a permanent home for this thinking and this work in our organization. It's those little adjustments along the way that help us continue to move forward.
It feels important to be able to say we're holding this space and we're always going to hold this space for these conversations, and we have to keep the work moving forward. We can't stop. We can't let this break us because what we're doing is so important in this moment.
Creating Evergreen Resources to Support the Team & Community
We had to find a way to make it sustainable for us to continue to engage. We needed evergreen spaces so we're not having to spin up from zero to 100 every time. We learned we couldn’t send an email out every time a black person was murdered at the hands of the state in this country, because we’d be emailing multiple times a day. What we don't want is for folks to turn a deaf ear to it.
We created some evergreen guides for different stakeholder groups in our community, so that when things happen, we can point folks back to that space. We also created a top a top level page on our website for folks to come and access those resources.
We have resources for employers, we have ongoing therapy and somatic healing groups for our black students and alums, and our trans students and alums. We have an internal task force focused on this work and an alum affinity group that's focused on making sure that the community has the healing and the support that it needs.
The Bottom Line = Impact
Getting more women and underrepresented folks into building products, particularly in an increasingly tech driven world -- having folks who have different lived experiences creating those products, means we'll have more products that better reflect the wholeness of humanity.
The success of our bottom line is intrinsically tied to success beyond the bottom line. So we’ll stop making money when we stop having an impact in the way that we want to have an impact. That to me is the key to running a really strong social impact organization -- you have to inherently tie the success of the business with the success of doing good.
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Join The Tour & Get Your Free Guide Book!
Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.