Jaclyn Damiano, Director of Digital Operations at a large telecommunications firm, talks with Sonatype's Justin Miller about raising the visibility of diversity within teams. Her research shows that there is still a lot of work to be done to capture the business potential of diversity. She discusses some of these issues, and about the chapter she contributed to the book Epic Failures in DevSecOps, Volume 2.
Below is an excerpt from the chapter, "Making Everyone Visible in Tech" is included in Epic Failures in DevSecOps, Volume 2, which is available for free download.
The research supports this: Ryan Carson, CEO of Treehouse, says: “Most companies have a significant challenge recruiting and retaining a diverse set of employees, particularly women in technology. For our team to match the diversity of America, we’d need 13.4% Black, 1.3% Native American, 18.1% Latinx, and 50% women employees. “ Today, 7% of the high tech sector workforce is Black, and 8% is Hispanic. Depending on what source you read, between 20-36% of the high tech sector is female. Most research also states only 18% of engineering graduates are female. The problem intensifies as you look up the hierarchy. In the U.S. top 1,000 companies by revenue, only 19% of CIOs are women.
Those of us who work in tech need only to look around during a meeting to be confronted with an all-too-real illustration of these numbers. Sometimes I look around an office building and check out the conference rooms. Who is sitting around the table? If I see only men, I have an odd compulsion to run into the room screaming “Wait, you’re missing a gender!” Gender is only the beginning of what it means to have a diverse team.
