Show notes
02:31 - Karen’s Superpower: The Ability to Simplify Things Simplifying in a Team Context 05:55 - Better Allies – Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces; Triaging and Curating Research @BetterAllies Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces (Book) The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring (Book) Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking (Book) 14:15 - Maintaining Anonyminity (at first); Prove It Again Bias Channeling White Men; Men Listening to Other Men Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Book) [Podcast] 'Whistling Vivaldi' And Beating Stereotypes Reduce the influence of unconscious bias with these re:Work tools Build the Culture Instead of Fit the Culture 26:09 - Culture Add + Values Fit Recognizing Bias Instead of Removing It Meritocracy 32:11 - Network Effect: Venturing Beyond Homogenous Networks Marginalization + Privilege Can Be Self-Reinforcing 50 Potential Privileges in the Workplace 41:58 - Doing This Work is Everyone’s Job 48:12 - People to Follow Minda Harts The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table Jeannie Gainsburg The Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate David Smith & Brad Johnston Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace Corey Ponder Learning the ABCs of Allyship 51:13 - The Decline of Gender Parity in the Tech Industry Women in Tech -- The Missing Force: Karen Catlin at TEDxCollegeofWilliam&Mary 58:15 - Making Statements and Changing the Status Quo Reflections: Rein: Getting better at praxis: for every white dude with a beard you follow on Twitter, go follow 10 Black women in tech. Damien: How bias can interfere with an action right before the action happens. Chanté: We’re all allies. We cannot do this work alone. Today you might be the ally, tomorrow you may be the bridge. Arty: Expanding our homogenous networks. Change takes courage on all of our parts. Karen: Turning period statements into questions or adding “until now” to those statements. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. REIN: Welcome to Episode 224 of Greater Than Code. Take two. So full disclosure, we recorded this or more specifically, didn't record this conversation so we're going to do it again. I'm your co-host, Rein Hendricks, and I'm here with my co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here with my co-host, Chanté Thurmond. CHANTÉ: Everyone, Chanté here. And I'm here with Arty Starr. ARTY: Thank you, Chanté. And I'm here with our awesome guest today, Karen Catlin. So after spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice-president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Welcome, Karen to the show! KAREN: And it is a pleasure to be back with you and to be having this conversation today. Thanks so much for having me. ARTY: And we very much appreciate you being here again with us. So our first question we always ask at the beginning of the show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? KAREN: Okay so, my superpower is the ability to simplify things and I joke that I think I acquired this superpower simply as a coping strategy because there's so much information out there. We're all bombarded with things and maybe my brain is just not as big as other people so I constantly am trying to simplify things so that I can understand them, remember them, convey them, and so forth. And I'll share, I think it served me well, not only as I embarked on my computer science programming school and just trying to like grok everything that I was trying to learn as well as then entering the field initially as a software engineer. Again, simplifying things, divide and conquer, break things down into those procedural elements that can be repeated and generalized. Certainly, then as I moved into executive roles as a vice-president of engineering, you're just context switching all day long. Again, I just had to simplify everything that was going on so that could really remember things, take notes on things, and make decisions based on what I thought I needed to do. Yeah. So that's my superpower. ARTY: That's a great superpower. So in the context of the workplace and you've got teams trying to things out, maybe a design problem you're working on, trying to solve. How does simplifying things come into play in a team context like that? KAREN: Well, it comes into play a lot of ways. I'm remembering one example where there was some interpersonal conflict between two people and I was hearing both sides, as one does, and talking to them both. I got them both in a room because they just weren't seeing each other's point of views, I thought, and they were just working at odds to each other. Hearing them both talk, I was able to say, “So at the heart, this is what we're all trying to do. This is what we are trying to achieve together,” and I got them to confirm that. That was the first step in simplifying just the discussion. They were getting a little emotional about things. They were bringing in a lot of details that frankly, weren't necessary to really understand what was going on and I was able to focus them on that shared purpose that we had for the project. It doesn't even matter what it was. Actually, it was so long ago now I can't quite remember what the issue was, but I remember hearing afterwards one of the people say, “You are so good at simplifying things got down to the heart,” and I'm like, “Yes, I am. That's my superpower.” ARTY: It sounds like even more than that, or maybe a slightly different frame of just the example you just gave. It's not only simplifying things, you are distilling the essence of what's important or what someone is trying to say, and getting at what's the underlying message underneath all the things that someone's actually trying to communicate, even if they're struggling too, so that you can help two people may be coming from different directions, be able to understand one another. That's pretty powerful. KAREN: Well, thank you and I love the way you've just framed it, Arty and oh, those are big shoes to fill. Woo! I hope I've been able to do that in a number of different settings as I think back, but that's yeah, it is powerful. I think I probably still have some stuff I can learn there, too. CHANTÉ: Arty, thank you for teeing up this because what I am curious about in relation to what Karen just mentioned as her superpower, which I think is amazing, is obviously, you have authored a number of books. When it comes to allyship, it sounds like this is a great time where we can get somebody to distill and to simplify and not to oversimplify because there's an art to it. But I would love if you could maybe take us down the pathway of how did you arrive at this moment where you are authoring books on allyship and maybe you could give us a little bit of the backstory, first and then we could get into the superpower you've used along the way in your tech journey. KAREN: Okay. CHANTÉ: And how you're coaching people. KAREN: All right. Chanté, thank you. Yes, I'm happy to. So the backstory, first of all, I never set out to become an author, or to become a speaker, or this expert that people tap into about workplace inclusion. That was not my goal. I was doing my job in tech. I was a vice-president of engineering at Adobe. I was leading engineering teams and realizing that there was a decline happening before my eyes in gender diversity. Now I started my career in tech a long time ago and I started at a time when there was sort of a peak period of women studying computer science in the United States. And so, when I started my career, it wasn't 50-50 by any means, but there was plenty of gender diversity in the teams I was working on, in the conference rooms I was in, in the cube lands that I was working in and I saw a decline happening. So while I was still at Adobe, I started our women's employee resource group—goes back gosh, like 14, 15 years now—and I've started mentoring a lot of women at the company and started basically, being a vocal advocate to make sure women were represented in various leadership meetings I was in, on stage, at our internal events and conferences, giving updates at all-hands meetings, like well, thinking about that. I love doing that work so much and loved doing that work less so my VP of engineering work, I must admit. So about 9 years ago now, I decided to do a big change in my career pivot in my own career, I started leadership coaching practice. A leadership coaching practice focused on helping women who are working in tech in any capacity, any role. But women working in this industry, I wanted to help them grow their leadership skills so they could stay in tech if that's where they wanted to be and not drop out because they felt like, “I just can't get ahead,” or “I'm seeing all the white men get ahead,” for example, “before me.” So I started this coaching practice. I soon realized, though that I had a big problem with my coaching practice and the problem wasn't with my clients—they were amazing. The problem, I don't think was me. I think I'm a decent coach, still learning, still getting better, but decent. And realized the problem really that I was facing is that before I could truly help my clients, I needed to make their companies more inclusive. All of them were working at tech companies where the closer you get to the leadership team, to the C-suite, to the CEO, just the mailer and paler it got. With all due respect to anyone who's male and or pale, I'm white myself, anyone who's listening, who's male and/or pale, like that's just what the demographics were and still are in most of our companies. Also, that coupled with this mentality of, “Hey, we are a meritocracy. People get ahead in our company based on their merits, their accomplishments, the impact to the business.” When in reality, that's not what happens because if it were then the demographics across the company would be uniform, regardless of what level you are at. So the white men were getting ahead more than others. So I was like, “I need to make their companies more inclusive. In fact, I need to make all of tech more inclusive to really help my coaching clients,” and yeah, laugh, right? A big job, one person over here. Now, what's the first thing anyone does these days when they want to change the world? You start a Twitter handle. So I started the Twitter handle @betterallies. I started in 2014 with a goal to share simple everyday actions anyone could take to be more inclusive at work. In hindsight, I was leveraging my super power as I started this Twitter handle. I leveraged it because I started looking at the research that social scientists do about diversity in the workplace and not just gender diversity, but diversity of all kinds. The research that shows that they were uncovering, that shows the challenges that people of non-dominant genders, as well as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, age, abilities, and so forth. What are the challenges these people face in the workplace as they navigate that? Others are doing this great research and I really am—and this builds on what Arty was saying—I used to think I curated this, but really, I was triaging the research. I was triaging it to simplify it, get it to its essence, and figure out with all this great research that gets published, what is someone supposed to do with it? How is the average person who works in tech supposed to take action with this great research that's out there? So I triage and curate and I do it not just based on the research, but also what I'll call cautionary tales that appear in our news, in our Twitter feeds, and so forth. I'll give you two examples to make it real. One is based on research. There's research that shows that men interrupt women more than the other way around and so, based on that research, I go over to Twitter and I type in something like, “I pledge to notice when interruptions happen in the meetings I attend and redirect the conversation back to the person who was interrupted with a simple, ‘I'd like to hear Chanté finish her thought,’” and something like that that's research-driven. Then the more, the cautionary tales that pop up in the research or in the news that we consume, I remember a few years ago when there was so much that was coming out about Uber and its non-inclusive workplace. Just one of the many things we learned about was that the CEO at the time and founder, Travis Kalanick, he was using the nursing mother's room for his personal phone calls. That's not cool because then the nursing moms can't get in there to do what they need to do. So I would go over to Twitter and just a little bit of snark added, I was like, “I pledge not to use the nursing mother's room for my personal phone calls unlike Travis Kalanick at Uber,” [chuckles]. That kind of thing. So I'm just tweeting a couple times a day. I start getting Twitter messages to this anonymous Twitter account—by the way, it was anonymous at the time—and these Twitter requests would be like, “Hey, does anyone at the Better Allies Initiative do any public speaking?” and I'd be like, ‘The initiative? Huh, it's just me tweeting a couple of times a day. Okay.” But I wanted to speak about this topic and I want to retain my anonymity. So I would write back and say, “Yes, one of our contributors does some public speaking. We'll put you in touch with her,” and I go over to my personal Twitter account type something in like, “Hey, I'm Karen Catlin. I contribute to Better Allies. I love public speaking. What do you have in mind?” So I started speaking on this whole approach of everyday simple actions people could take, the Better Allies approach, and every time I gave a talk, someone would ask, “Hey, Karen, do you have a book? Because we want more of this.” For a few years, “I kept saying, no, I don…
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