J+-+Cliff+View+Room+-+Facing+our+Racial+and+Gender+Biases+in+Technology

Facing our Racial and Gender Biases in #|Technology
Convened by: Akbar Ali Herndon The notes below were typed in by Camille Harrison and Matt Moran. Feel free to edit, update, etc.

Participants: Akbar Ali Herndon Jen Davenport Lizbeth Johnson Kenya Lloyd Abasi Aniton Matt Moran (notetaker) Erin Mumford Dave Aronson Katie O’Shaughnessy Glenn Lieberman JP Connolly Camille Harrison Grant Olds Abby Flemming Colin Samuel

Response to Kimberly Bryant’s keynote #|presentation, Black Girls Code What is preventing us? Our own identity.

Aspects that communicate Welcome (or not)
 * The things we post on the walls/books/stories
 * Where students sit within the classroom
 * the examples we use

Structurally, are we even able to meet these needs? If the staff of our schools don’t reflect the racial and gender difference.

What are the practical things we can do?
 * ”Wait time” - building into the culture of your classroom that you will give time for thinking and won’t just call on the first person that raises their hand
 * One-on-one talking with the white male students to let them know they were interrupting, speaking over people,etc. Stress the importance of actually listening and how powerful that can be in learning.

Akbar > We might not be able to support a “Black Girls Code”-type initiative in our schools because of our low numbers, but may be able to do more through some combined efforts across schools
 * Black vs. People of color
 * Some things can be hidden in statistics on “people of color”, but it’s our number of black students that is most telling
 * Underrepresentation of girls in #|technology
 * Research study “Operation Smart” shows many girls are dumbing down after 7th grade, leaving higher level math, science and tech
 * Carol Gilligan, documented the falling off of girls’ performance in school long before the stats presented in the Bryant’s keynote []

JP
 * Our schools are majority white
 * Our technology departments may be majority male
 * Are we doing students a disservice by placing students in environments where they might not feel represented and where their teachers may not be equipped to bridge the gap?

Gina
 * Independent schools do not have the structures in place to support students of color
 * If we dismissed the idea of developing programs in our schools because we don’t have the structural support it will not happen
 * Schools should be non-traditional means for hiring in order to hire more diverse faculty and staff

Akbar
 * Structures really matter in the long-run since they outlast us, but the real work right how is to face whatever keeps us from examining our practice, our classroom environment our approaches and looking for our blind spots.
 * What do WE do?

Katie
 * How do teachers address stereotype threat in the classroom?

Camille
 * She is the sole member of the STEAM department
 * Encouraged by her school to focus on gender but not her racial identity
 * Began to incorporate other elements of her background with her students which had an impact on their understanding of other caretakers in their lives, i.e. nannies

Lizbeth
 * It is possible to make an impact just through one’s presence/identity without needing to be explicit about the fact, ex. A woman of color in a visible leadership role sets a positive example. Is this enough?

Camille
 * Making an effort to include wait time in responses to prevent boisterous boys from being overrepresented in class discussions

JP
 * Attended [|CARLE Institute], which is for educators who identify as white
 * One takeaway was to ask boys if they know how much they are talking/interrupting or demonstrating other #|privileged behaviors, i.e. call attention to those behavior

GIna
 * As technologists, we often get to teach our students over a number of years
 * We have the opportunity to set expectations for the culture in our classroom
 * ====Two priorities in Gina’s classroom (K-12)====
 * Make sure everyone has a chance to participate
 * Someone’s hand goes up, everyone else’s goes down and their #|job is cheer him on. School is for thinking, give that person time to think.

Akbar
 * #|Students work on social issues website projects and choose their topics for their year long research and websites creation. Creates an opportunity to focus on research skills as well as racial and gender based topics that can be guided. Where is the information coming from, etc. Students can bring ownership to their selection.
 * Students write about important topics and it creates opportunities to engage them in conversation and reflection on the beliefs and understandings that they have about those topics.

**Gender**
Akbar
 * Back to Carol Gilligan, the correlation was said to be related to adolescence pressure on girls not to be smarter than the boys. They were giving into social pressure by not taking hard math, science and tech classes

Erin
 * Questions whether the statistics from Gilligan’s research are still applicable to girls in our environment

Jen
 * Has had experience in college and professional environments where men are out to prove that they know more than her
 * Recently occurred to her that her interview experiences and other professional experiences haven’t been shared by her male colleagues

Gina
 * Being able to name and identify the experience that Jen is talking about will help with being able to recognize and avoid the situations
 * The experience changes when someone

Erin
 * Imposter syndrome - some girls are performing better than boys, but they think they are not because the boys express themselves more confidently
 * Studies have shown that women will notice the items on a #|job description that they don’t have experience with and disqualify themselves whereas men will look at the thing

Colin
 * In hiring for a recent opening, he tried to expand to expand his search to have more female candidates
 * [|Textio] - service that provides guidance in hiring to remove bias from the #|job description
 * The words “reports to” was suggested to deter women in hiring


 * [|Women on Boards 2020] is an organization looking to #|find women who are #|qualified for positions on boards and informing them and encouraging them to apply
 * We also need to raise boys to be feminists

Race Akbar
 * Faculty read [|Whistling Vivaldi] by Claude Steele
 * How do we account for the lower performance of black students?
 * We have difficulty staying on this topic. Race is too uncomfortable. Can we stay in front of this quesiton.

Colin
 * Teachers focused on cheating and bias
 * If you check one student’s work based on suspicion, you have to check everyone’s work

Katie
 * How do you address disparities in your classroom where students from minorities groups are lower-performing versus their peers in the class?

Lizbeth
 * Maybe there is a problem with the way the students are assessed?

Grant
 * Extra-level care is necessary to address the problem
 * Need to ask the students “How can I support you?”
 * While there are many good training programs and resources in diversity and inclusion, sometimes the people that our schools call upon to lead training in this work are not able to make an impact.

Abasi
 * How do you build a “cool factor” for a program to get students to come out for STEM programs?
 * Cheerleading squad once tried coding while waiting for their coach. They liked but would not return. How to get them back?

Suggestions: Don’t advertise it as coding or a hackathon, make it a social event with refreshments and have the coding available

Resources
 * [|CARLE Institute]
 * WARE
 * [] (shared by Sarah Hanawald on NEIT Slack)
 * [|Textio - a tool to evaluate bias in job postings]
 * Girls Inc. Operation Smart