By Haneih Khosroshahi, Stanford Social Innovation Review, May 10, 2021
I have spent more than six years working in the technology space as a user-experience researcher and designer. As an immigrant, Muslim-identifying, Iranian-Canadian woman, it didn’t take long to notice that the workplace environments I found myself in were not designed for me, and therefore did not support my career growth and ambition, or accommodate for my unique needs as a woman of color.
For years, companies have framed diversity in tech as a “pipeline” problem—that the reason for the lack of diversity is due to there not being enough qualified talent from different backgrounds. This claim is not only untrue but also dismisses the effects of racism on people’s careers.
Years of workplace anxiety and discrimination have made me realize that the tech industry’s current challenge is not hiring women of color in technology, it’s keeping us there. A 2019 study from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) found that although the number of women in computing professions has increased since 2017, so has the number of women who leave tech companies and careers.
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