(cheerful music)
- Good morning.
My name is Charlotte James.
I'm coming from Baltimore,
shoutout to Baltimore.
(audience cheers)
Yeah.
(audience member laughs)
Yeah, that's a good presence
in this room, love it.
So my name is Charlotte
James, I am a Baltimore Corps
Fellow member, I'm in the
second cohort this year,
and as a Fellow, I was
connected with an organization
of Baltimore called Code in the Schools,
where I now serve as the
Communications Director.
I will give my caveat to this talk.
I'm coming into the tech
sector completely new.
I studied anthropology
and Latin American studies
that have very little
to do with technology,
but I was given an
opportunity to live for a year
in Bolivia, where I
attempted to do a project
using social journalism
to empower young children and teenagers,
and I went in with a lot
of assumptions about their
readiness, their technology readiness.
Going in thinking about my education
and my digital literacy,
and it became very obvious very quickly
that that is the tech gap, and
the access to technology gap,
creates an incredible
amount of disparities,
and so when I came back to the
US and was looking for a job,
I was interested in
serving in this position
in Baltimore City to
expand access to technology
and to computer science learning.
Oh, I have to use this?
Cool.
So I wanna start with a quote.
This is from the Senior VP
of Engineering at Twitter,
Alex Roetter, and this was from, I dunno,
like two months ago maybe,
and he says, so the story is,
that at Twitter a high level
Twitter engineer who was black
left the company and refused
the severance package,
which included a nondisclosure agreement,
because he wanted to address
the lack of diversity
at Twitter, and the attitude that,
when he brought up
diversity, the response was,
"Diversity is important,
but we can't lower the bar."
And I'm sure that's something
that many people have heard
in this room, that
there's an assumption that
increasing diversity,
whether it be racial,
gender, differently abled
people, whatever that means,
that that somehow means you'll
have a less capable workforce
or a less productive workforce,
and for everyone sitting in this room,
we can all say that that
is absolutely not true.
And is untrue and offensive
to have this response
from somebody at such
a high level company.
Now, Twitter in the last couple weeks
has gone through a lot of changes,
I think they're having a
lot of issues internally,
reflected here.
(Charlotte and audience laugh)
So, maybe there'll be some
changes that come about
in this attitude, but I
use this quote to show that
this is not an opinion that
is only held by this man,
this is an opinion that is
unfortunately widespread
across the tech and other sectors.
And to demonstrate that, I
wanna look at some statistics
about labor in America.
Our national workforce is 81% white.
Our nation is not 81% white.
In the tech sector this
breaks down a little bit more,
so 64%, but 24% Asian.
Our population is 5.3% Asian,
and so they are incredibly
overrepresented, and this
is oftentimes because
high level tech jobs are
being taken by international
individuals who come in with a H-1B visa,
and there's a lot of talk,
and I will address this later
as well when talking about
workforce development,
of how to sort of shift that.
And then we have 6% African American,
which I think this stat is
probably a little generous,
and 5% Latino, and these are coming from
the Bureau of Labor.
But these numbers don't
really talk about the origin
of our diversity problem,
which is academic institutions.
And this is something
that Code in the Schools,
the organization that I work
with, attempts to mitigate,
and, while we're all
sitting here right now,
the White House is announcing their
Computer Science Education
for All initiative
that was brought to their
attention by Code.org,
I dunno if anyone is
familiar with their work,
but they started a petition
that two million people signed,
and there's now going to
be a huge amount of money
dedicated to increasing
resources and access
to computer science across the nation.
So that's happening literally right now,
that announcement is going out.
So, in our high schools,
the AP Computer Science
curriculum and course
is only available in 5%
of high schools nationally.
As we know, in American education,
in American public education especially,
disparities are huge,
especially the racial disparity
of reading levels, of math
testing scores, everything,
and so if we think about
the inequality of education,
and then also see that
only 5% of high schools
in the nation have an AP
Computer Science course,
it's pretty fair to
assume that those courses
are concentrated in high
schools that already have
a lot of resources available to them.
Of those enrolled in the
computer science AP course,
in 2014, 15% were girls,
8% were African American
and Hispanics combined.
At the university level,
only 2% of students
in the STEM field are
studying computer science,
and we have fewer computer science majors
than 10 years ago.
Of people graduating with
a computer science major
or degree, 14% are women,
3% are African American,
and 7% are Hispanic.
So how do we change these numbers?
First I'm gonna talk
about partnerships between
the private sector and
the non-profit sector.
So, the current trend in
the private sector is,
let's throw some millions
of dollars at the problem.
So just last year,
Intel, Apple, and Google
pledged large sums of money
to increasing diversity
in their workforce.
Unfortunately, this ignores the origin of
the diversity problem, which
is education disparities.
So if you're putting
millions of dollars into
changing your hiring practices,
or your training practices,
or your support systems,
that's great, but you could
probably hire all the women
computer science majors,
all the racial minorities, all
the differently abled people,
still have money left over
and still have a deficit
in the workforce, right?
Because this isn't addressed
that there's just not
the pipeline there to put
those kajillion of dollars to,
because it's not attacking
the issue earlier on.
So this is where organizations
like Code in the Schools come in.
So I'm gonna use our Prodigy
Program as an example.
So, our Prodigy Program,
it did a pilot this year
and was successful, so we'll be continuing
and reshaping a bit, but what it is
is a workforce development
and internship program
for underserved and underrepresented youth
in Baltimore City.
We do this by identifying
talented and interested students
in their junior year, providing
them a quality training
so they go through a coding
boot camp in the summer
where they do HTML, CSS, JavaScript,
and then during the school
year they're matched with
local tech companies and startups
for a year-long internship
where they are paid.
So often people are like,
"Oh, but you can get work
"experience in this free
internship," no, that's free labor,
that's not an option,
that's not inclusive,
that's not recognizing
that many people don't have
the luxury of doing an unpaid internship,
and it doesn't at all solve the problem,
because you're gonna do the same thing,
you're gonna have affluent
kids who already had access
to these resources getting
more access to these resources,
and what we wanna do is spread it out.
So they get paid.
And we have our tech partners,
our private companies,
paying us to pay them,
so that's not coming out
of our pocket either.
So why does this work?
It creates sustainable
relationships between tech companies
and non-profit organizations,
it provides some form of
income to these students,
which is oftentimes important
for them, some of them are
doing this internship and
also working a second job,
it addresses the issue
before the hiring stage,
and it holds local companies
socially responsible.
Baltimore is growing,
the Baltimore tech sector
is growing rapidly,
but if we don't hold companies
to a certain standard
of social responsibility,
then it's difficult to go back
later on and say, "Oh, but you didn't do
"this, this, and this."
Unfortunately, again as
most people in this room
probably know, when you
want things you have to
push for them yourself,
you can't wait for people
to come and be like, "Oh,
we're not diverse enough,"
'cause they're not gonna do that,
'cause they haven't done it yet.
So it's important to hold local companies
socially responsible.
The second way to change
these numbers is through
IT workforce development programs,
and to talk about that, I am going to use
the White House TechHire
initiative as an example.
White House TechHire is
multi-sector initiative
to empower Americans with
necessary 21st century skills,
fancy buzzword for IT skills.
It's $120 million in
Department of Labor grants
that you can get through really
complicated applications,
which I'm learning about now.
So to workforce development,
it creates an ecosystem of support,
to apply you have to have
educational and training
institutions in place,
and employers who say,
"When people finish this training
program, we onboard them."
Or, "We provide a paid
internship," or whatever it is.
But you have to have those
three entities in place.
So why it might work.
White House TechHire was just announced,
the money has not been given out yet,
so I'm not gonna endorse a federal program
before we see what happens,
because, as we all know,
it's a federal program,
it might not do what
it says it's gonna do.
But why it might work is
that it sets standards
based on industry needs.
Traditionally workforce
development is saying,
"We think that people who
wanna work need these skills,"
and then people go through
programs, have the skills,
go to apply for jobs,
and that's not at all
what the employer is looking for.
So it's going to the employers
first and asking them
to set standards, and then
training to those standards.
It includes traditionally
excluded populations.
100 million of that is for I
think 17- through 29-year-olds,
but then 20 million is
specifically set out for
the reentry population, so
people coming out of jail,
people maybe transitioning
out of foster care,
or out of youth juvenile justice systems,
but really trying to
pull in those communities
that have very obvious and
difficult barriers to employment.
And it addresses educational
gaps, it recognizes that
not everyone or every position
needs a four-year degree.
We often hear these big
numbers thrown out of like,
by 2020 there'll be 100
million jobs, or a million jobs
unfilled in the tech sector.
What that number often
does not reflect is that
90% of those jobs right now
say that you need to have
a four-year bachelor's degree
in order to be employed.
Ah, it went away.
So sad.
(laughs)
So, something like an IT
workforce development program
addresses that you don't
necessarily need a college degree
to be very proficient in JavaScript,
or in front-end web development.
And so it's trying to mitigate
that not everyone has access
to a four-year degree.
And it's a quick, meaningful turnover,
in a lot of these cases there's
like six-month bootleg pro,
bootleg, boot camp programs.
(Charlotte and audience laugh)
Not bootleg, boot camp.
They're quality!
They're quality.
And so, that's really important
for people who quickly need
to have an income.
So a concrete example would be
PhIT for the Future in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia has begun
to convene this ecosystem
that includes universities, like Drexel,
and employers like
Philadelphia Gas and Electric,
and training programs to bring
this ecosystem of support
together so that people
can successfully complete
these programs and go on to
mid-range and even high-range salaries.
So, I said in my abstract that
I would give some examples
of what you can do, and I'm gonna try.
So, are you a tech or
a gaming professional?
Meaning, do you currently work
at a tech or gaming company?
Urge your employer to
become more involved in
their local community, as I
said before, it's oftentimes
up to us to push for these
diversity initiatives.
Try to identify some
innovative non-profits.
There are so many here in DC,
there are a good amount in Baltimore,
and they're growing these
tech ed organizations
that do Maker Faires and all
these other events for kids,
game jams, have after-school programs,
identify those people
and partner with them.
You can partner directly by mentorship
or internship programs, or
you could work with them
to create an employment pipeline,
or work with them indirectly
and just make sure
that your corporate donations count.
Corporations have a lot of
money they have to give it away
for tax purposes, make
sure they're giving it away
to places that are making
a meaningful change
in the tech sector and
really pushing for diversity.
Are you an educator?
You could implement a coding class,
coding in your classroom.
You could teach an hour of
code, you could attend a free
Code.org PD, or you could
start an after-school club.
There are a lot of ways to
start pulling on kids' interests
and expanding that.
And if you're an individual,
mentor a young person who does or will
face barriers to employment.
Pull on your own experience
in the tech sector
or your struggles to break
into the tech sector,
and share that knowledge with others,
and help them get their foot in the door
in the way that somebody
didn't necessarily help you.
So that's the end.
If you would like more
info, here's our stuff.
More about Baltimore
Corps, if you're interested
in asking me anything specifically
my email is down there,
and I think I also have like 30 seconds
if anybody has a question,
no, I don't, just kidding.
(audience laughs)
Ask me after.
The end.
(audience applauds)
(cheerful music)
