Engineering Managers: What you can do for your URG direct reports
From the perspective of a woman engineer
I graduated a year ago from a university with one of the most gender-balanced computer science programs in the country. At this wonderful place, I looked around and saw other people who looked and thought like me (as well as many who didn’t!) It was by no means a utopia, but ended up looking pretty darn close to one in retrospect after I moved to San Francisco and experienced computer science as an entire industry, outside of the classroom.
A commitment to diversity & inclusion was not something that I actively sought out during my senior-year job search — in fact in some ways I thought I could make more of a difference at a company that was currently worse off. In the end though, when it came to making a decision about what company to join, I couldn’t deny that I had had my most positive on-site interview experience at the Affirm offices. It wasn’t a coincidence that during my phone screens and day on-site, 3 out of my 5 technical interviews were conducted by two women and a now transgender man. In fact, in a whole recruiting season of flying back and forth to San Francisco, Affirm’s was the only panel that included any women. During these interviews I listened to these women speak with expertise about the systems that they built and contributed to, and why they believed these Affirm products were transforming and improving the financial services industry.
After joining Affirm myself, and getting to work on my own transformational projects, I have put a lot of thought and energy into understanding what Affirm’s strengths are in this area, and where there are continued opportunities for growth. One of the areas that I am excited to see us highlighting is manager development. I firmly believe that an engineer’s relationship with their manager and teammates can be one of the biggest indicators of happiness and success at work. Along this vein, I want to highlight a (long!) list of specific things that engineering managers can immediately take action on. All of these actions and behaviors will improve the day-to-day lives of direct reports who belong to underrepresented groups and will allow them to experience the same level of confidence and security that many of their other colleagues enjoy.
This document includes recommendations for how engineering managers can effectively support members of their team who belong to a group that is typically underrepresented in the tech industry. It is written from the perspective of a white woman engineer, but encourages managers to be mindful of their inclusivity towards all Under-Represented Groups (URGs). At Affirm, we define these as groups that make up a significantly small percentage of the general population, the tech industry, or Affirm. It is important to acknowledge that each under-represented group will have its own challenges, degree of under-representation, and individual stereotypes to combat. All feedback on how to make this document more inclusive is welcome.
Make sure that positive feedback is vocalized and explicit. For individuals that belong to a group that is typically underrepresented in tech, it is rare to encounter others who are similar in the same team or organization. This can subtly affect their sense of belonging, result in low confidence levels, and contribute to imposter syndrome. Don’t assume that “no feedback is good feedback.” Additionally, feedback such as “keep doing what you’re doing” is neither helpful nor specific. Make sure to acknowledge any positive work or contributions on a regular basis and with specific examples to help increase confidence levels and foster inclusivity.
Develop a long-term career plan. Let your direct report know that you can see them in leadership positions in the future. Normalize this concept and be supportive of it. Actively set concrete goals with them and offer advice on how they can achieve these goals.
Always express gratitude for escalations of concerns. It takes great courage to escalate issues directly or indirectly related to inclusion and respect. URGs can be hesitant to bring information forward because they are worried about being perceived as overly sensitive or burdensome. One negative experience with escalation will discourage escalation in the future. During the escalation conversation, give your direct report your full attention and sufficient time to address everything that they’d like to. Don’t interrupt them and wait for them to fully finish speaking before responding. Make sure to sincerely and explicitly thank the individual for bringing the incident or concern to your attention and remind them that you value their perspective. Make sure they leave the conversation feeling supported and secure about their place on the team.
It is a manager’s responsibility to view and treat this feedback as useful and to create the psychological safety that allows individual engineers to bring this feedback forward. The only way to help reduce the number and severity of concerns that members of a URG may have is to acknowledge concerns and incidents — and address them head-on. Without escalation and action, these incidents will persist and become part of the team’s culture. The affected, as well as those who are witness to such incidents, may become less engaged with the team. These incidents could be sufficient to prompt such individuals to leave the company.
Respond with empathy first, not justifications or rationalizations. When first learning of an incident or general concern, whether in an individual or group setting, refrain from quickly offering justifications for why individual action or company policy operated in a particular way. This applies especially if you are not extremely familiar with the situation and the individuals involved are not present in the conversation. Instead of being viewed as informative and helpful, any comments offering rationalizations will likely seem dismissive. Understand that even if you see the cause of the incident or concern as logical, this does not reduce the impact that it had on the individual and the impact still needs to be addressed. Consider partnering with Human Resources if you have unanswered questions about a policy or incident.
Distribute career-building opportunities thoughtfully. Even if you have substantial representation from URGs on your team, these engineers from URGs may not be evenly distributed within the different engineering levels. Consider how this structure may result in career and brand-building opportunities such as project lead, All Teams presenter, stakeholder POC, spec reviewer, announcement email sender, etc. being disproportionately given to folks from majority groups. Understand that all of these roles will affect how members outside of your team will perceive the responsibilities and achievements of the members within your team. Consistently evaluate whether certain responsibilities require a certain level of role, and intentionally create opportunities for URGs to have external visibility.
Actively solicit participation from less vocal team members. In a meeting, all attendees should feel that they can participate if they’d like to. This ability to participate may be hindered physically because of a lack of seating at the main conference table. Certain members may also have difficulty interjecting into a conversation or find that they are often interrupted and talked over. Notice who is less vocal during the meeting, and consider addressing the individual with an open-ended question such as ‘what’s your take on the discussion?’ to actively invite them into the conversation.
Encourage all team members to be more inclusive. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are the responsibility of everybody in the company. Further to this, it is the responsibility of managers (not members of the URG) to encourage others to participate. Participation for ICs can involve attending DEI related events and discussion panels within the company, often organized by ERGs. Examples of these events include the Women@ Affirm Virtual Executive Panel or Women@ Feedback & Development (F&D) Sessions on Bias Training/Writing Effective Performance Evaluations. In order to actually get participation from all of your reports, you may have to explicitly tell your team that you expect their attendance. Don’t rely on the URGs on your team to notify you about these events. In general, don’t wait for URGs on your team to bring up issues related to DEI, be proactive in leading discussions within your team/org. Find a reliable way to stay up to date on these types of events, perhaps by subscribing to a company-wide calendar.
Refrain from being overly congratulatory of your company’s DEI policies. While being proud of progress is important and hopefully encourages more progress, many engineers believe that Affirm should still continue to improve the diversity of the engineering org. It can feel alienating and dismissive to be told that your company is the model of a respectful and inclusive workplace and “so much better than other places”. When recognizing your company’s successes in the DEI area, try to focus on specific measures of progress that were made, why you believe the progress was important, and emphasize the need to keep progressing.
Be mindful of where culture-building work is assigned on the team. While responsibilities such as planning team events, note-taking, acknowledging team-member achievements, or writing thank you notes are part of being on an engineering team, it is important to acknowledge if these non-engineering related tasks are disproportionately falling to certain team members (eg women). Consider assigning these tasks on a rotating basis if they are regularly scheduled. Also, note that making these positions volunteer-based may not solve the problem as members of URGs may feel additional pressure to act in a “supportive” manner. Regardless of your mechanism for distributing these tasks, monitor the outcome to ensure it is fair.
Review the guest lists and cadences of your meetings. Invitations to meetings directly feed into feelings of being valued and included. Meetings that include a specific subset of the team based on seniority or domain, as well as the regularity of the meeting, can significantly impact the relationships that team members end up forming together, particularly in a remote working environment. While factors such as seniority or project topic may seem unrelated to representation, creating dividing lines based on these factors can disproportionately affect underrepresented groups. Consider re-evaluating policies such as “1:1 meetings with senior engineers weekly, 1:1 meetings with new grad engineers bi-weekly” and identify areas where more junior engineers could benefit from being present in meetings with more specialized discussion. If the content still seems out of reach, evaluate whether additional learning opportunities could help bridge this gap.
Work to understand where your unconscious biases lie. We all have them, and the only way to combat them is to acknowledge them and actively counteract them. Consider looking at individuals that you’ve hired over the course of your career. Do you see a pattern in the candidates you typically gravitate towards? Consider talking to a recruiter about your process for evaluating new candidates. This self-evaluation should be an on-going process, not a discrete task that you complete once.
Add transparency to company processes to alleviate anxiety. Engineers from URGs may have anxieties related to events or interactions that you would not expect e.g. heightened anxiety during F&D cycles. Remember to provide additional intentional support during these times. This can be done by creating explicit forums for asking questions and adding transparency to unfamiliar processes as part of the onboarding process as well as on a recurring basis when these processes are occurring. Don’t count on information being shared organically. By nature of being ‘underrepresented’, URGs may have fewer peers or superiors that they consider themselves ‘friendly’ with and therefore may be less likely to be part of conversations amongst peers where this type of information is often shared. By proactively sharing with your entire team, this helps level the playing field and ensure that individuals are not disadvantaged by information inadvertently siloing. When discussing these processes refrain from telling URGs to simply “not worry”, “it will be fine” or that “it doesn’t matter”. Instead, consider asking “What can I do to help quash your anxiety or concerns?”.
Understand that progress in DEI is not fixed purely by hiring.
From ‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’:
More than 40% of women leave tech companies after ten years compared to 17% of men. A report by the Center for Talent Innovation found that women didn’t leave for family reasons or because they didn’t enjoy the work. They left because of ‘workplace conditions’, ‘undermining behavior from managers’, and ‘a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career’.
Oftentimes, the reason that the engineering pipeline looks worse for DEI candidates as positions become more senior is attributed to the fact that candidates for these roles require more years of experience, and as you go back further in time, the climate appears less and less inclusive. In other words, it is sometimes believed that the problems we see now, are a result of a lack of inclusivity in the past. In fact, this is only a small part of the issue. The gender imbalance in tech cannot be solved by hiring 50% female new grads, and waiting 10 years until they all become managers and tech leads. Women leave the tech industry and tech companies at a significantly higher rate than men do. This means that to solve the gender imbalance in 10 years, it is important to foster an inclusive workplace for all levels and that as a manager, you have a direct impact on the gender pipeline in tech every single day.
