Appendix C: D&I Reading List

You’re reading an excerpt of The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring, a book by Osman (Ozzie) Osman and over 45 other contributors. It is the most authoritative resource on growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, over 800 links and references, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Effective diversity and inclusion work goes far beyond recruiting. These resources will help you learn more about improving your onboarding process, employee experience, policies, and leadership development with D&I in mind.

General Overview

• The Problem With Diversity in Computing — Ian Bogost (The Atlantic)

• Eight Ways to Make Your D&I Efforts Less Talk and More Walk — Aubrey Blanche (First Round)

• Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? — Liza Mundy (The Atlantic)

• Why Aren’t Black Employees Getting More White-Collar Jobs? — Michael Gee (Harvard Business Review)

• Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don’t get hired — Elizabeth Weise and Jessica Guynn (USA Today)

• When Women Stopped Coding — Steve Henn (NPR)

• Cracking the Gender Code — Accenture

• Essential guide to hiring diverse development teams — Mitch Pronschinske (Tech Beacon)

• Why Tech Degrees Are Not Putting More Blacks and Hispanics Into Tech Jobs — Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller (The New York Times)

• Tech Companies Delay Diversity Reports to Rethink Goals — Georgia Wells (The Wall Street Journal)

• Google Makes Slow Progress in Diversifying Its Workforce — Jack Nicas (The Wall Street Journal)

• Why Silicon Valley Is Failing Miserably At Diversity, And What Should Be Done About It — Salvador Rodriguez (International Business Times)

Foundational Studies

• Delivering Through Diversity — Vivian Hunt, Lareina Yee, Sara Prince, and Sundiatu Dixon-Fyle (McKinsey and Co.)

• The 2017 Tech Leavers Study — The Kapor Center for Social Impact

• Smashing IT’s glass ceiling — Kavitha Prabhakar, Kristi Lamar, Anjali Shaikh, Caroline Brown (Deloitte)

• Women in Tech: The Facts — Catherine Ashcraft, Brad McLain, and Elizabeth Eger (NCWIT)

• Diversity in High Tech — U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

• Stackoverflow 2019 developer survey — Stackoverflow

Additional Research and Data

• Diversity in Tech — Information Is Beautiful

• The Big Takeaway from Atlassian’s Diversity Report — NicoleSanchez (Medium)

• VC Firm First Round: Our Female Founders Outshine The Men — Alex Conrad (Forbes)

• Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers — Lu Hong and Scott E. Page (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

• Google diversity annual report 2019 — Danielle Brown, Melonie Parker (Google)

• The Confidence Gap — Katty Kay AND Claire Shipman (The Atlantic)

• State of Diversity and Inclusion in U.S. Tech — Atlassian

• State of Women in Tech 2019 — Kasee Bailey(Dreamhost)

• By The Numbers: Comparing Tech Employee Salary, Age, Stress, and more — Payscale

• 2018 State of Salaries report — Hired

• Missing Women in Tech — Raviv Murciano-Goroff (New York University)

• We Asked 615 Men About How They Conduct Themselves at Work — Jugal K. Patel, Troy Griggs and Claire Cain Miller (The New York Times)

• Two-Thirds of People Consider Diversity Important When Deciding Where To Work — Glassdoor

Economic and Business Advantages

• The Economic Imperative of Diversity in Tech — Julie Elberfeld (Forbes)

• Want A More Innovative Company? Simple: Hire A More Diverse Workforce — Ben Schiller (Fast Company)

• The Other Diversity Dividend — Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali (Harvard Business Review)

• How and Where Diversity Drives Performance — Rocio Lorenzo and Martin Reeves (Harvard Business Review)

• How Diversity Can Drive Innovation — Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Melinda Marshall, and Laura Sherbin (Harvard Business Review)

• Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter — David Rock and Heidi Grant

• Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others — Anita Woolley, Thomas W. Malone and Christopher F. Chabris (The New York Times)

• Diversity Makes You Brighter — Sheen S. Levine and David Stark (The New York Times)

• The Truth About Diverse Teams — Greg Satell (Inc.)

• Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups — Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alexander Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone (Science)

• The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology — Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce, Lisa J. Servon, Laura Sherbin, Peggy Shiller, Eytan Sosnovich, and Karen Sumberg (Harvard Business Review Research Report)

• Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable — and That’s Why They Perform Better — David Rock, Heidi Grant, and Jacqui Grey (Harvard Business Review)

• How Diversity Makes Us Smarter — Katherine W. Phillips (Scientific American)

Why Inclusion Matters

• Without inclusion, diversity initiatives may not be enough — Chandler Puritty, Lynette R. Strickland, Eanas Alia, Benjamin Blonder, Emily Klein, Michel T. Kohl, Earyn McGee, Maclovia Quintana, Robyn E. Ridley, Beth Tellman, and Leah R. Gerber (Science)

• Diversity Doesn’t Stick Without Inclusion — Laura Sherbin and Ripa Rashid (Harvard Business Review)

• What’s the difference between diversity, inclusion, and equity? — Meg Bolger (The Index)

• Inclusion is a “hack” — Cate Huddleston

• A Rubric for Evaluating Team Members’ Contributions to an Inclusive Culture — Chelsea Troy

• How to Retain Diverse Software Engineering Teams — Mitch Pronschinske (TechBeacon)

Bias

• A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians — Sigal Samuel (Vox)

• Project Implicit — Harvard University

• Bias and Well-Meaning People — Georgetown University National Center for Cultural Competence

• How Badly is Your Unconscious Bias Affecting Your Recruiting Skills? — SocialTalent

• 4 Types of Interviewer Bias — and How to Eliminate Them — Kazim Ladimeji (Recruiter.com)

Costs and Consequences

• Apple promised an expansive health app, so why can’t I track menstruation? — Arielle Duhaime-Ross (The Verge)

• Twitter’s Evan Williams says trolling could have been curbed early on if more women had been on staff from the start — Emily Change (LinkedIn)

• Snapchat faces backlash over filter that promotes racist stereotypes of Asians — Sam Levin (The Guardian)

• Why Can’t This Soap Dispenser Identify Dark Skin? — Sidney Fussell (Gizmodo)

• Facebook’s real name policy — which failed to realize the importance of privacy concerns of people from marginalized groups — was so controversial, there’s an extensive Wikipedia page about it.

• Google Walkout: Employees Stage Protest Over Handling of Sexual Harassment — Daisuke Wakabayashi, Erin Griffith, Amie Tsang, and Kate Conger (The New York Times)

• Here’s what happens to a startup after a sexual harrassment scandal — Lizette Chapman (Bloomberg)

• A lack of diversity isn’t just a social problem — it hurts firms’ profits — Liana Brinded (Quartz)

• Embattled San Francisco VC firm will shut down fund after harassment scandal — Riley McDermid (San Francisco Business Times)

• Founders Of Silicon Valley Firm That Imploded Amid Sex Harassment Allegations Are Now Fighting Each Other — Nathan Vardi (Forbes)

• The Chilling Reason Behind Travis Kalanick’s Abrupt Resignation From Uber — Nick Bilton (Vanity Fair)

• Github Founder Resigns After Investigation — Claire Cain Miller (The New York Times)

• Here’s What Happens to a Startup After a Sexual Harassment Scandal Lizette Chapman (Bloomberg)

• Women and Minorities Are Penalized for Promoting Diversity — Stefanie K. Johnson and David R. Hekman (HBR)

• You don’t know what you don’t know: How our unconscious minds undermine the workplace — Laszlo Bock and Brian Welle (Google)

Myth-Busting

• Is it a pipeline problem — André Arko

• If you think it’s a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention — Rachel Thomas (Tech Diversity Files/Medium)

• Why Tech Needs to Stop Blaming the Pipeline for Its Lack of Diversity — Mehul Patel (Entrepreneur)

• Facebook Blames Lack of Available Talent for Diversity Problem — Georgia Wells (The Wall Street Journal)

• Is tech a meritocracy? — André Arko

• The False Promise of Meritocracy — Marianne Cooper (The Atlantic)

• Meritocracy doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you — Clifton Mark (Fast Company)

• Thoughts on Diversity Part I — Leslie Miley (Shaft/Medium)

• The Satirical Origins of the Meritocracy — Jason Kottke (Kottke.org)

• Affirmative Meritocracy — Gregory Walton (Stanford University)

• Improving Diversity Does Not Mean Lowering the Bar — Kate Heddleston

• What You’re Really Saying When You Talk About Lowering the Bar in Hiring — Laura Weidman Powers (LinkedIn)

• Want to Hire More a More Diverse Set of People? Raise Your Bar. — Joelle Emerson(Paradigm/Medium)

• The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer — Scott Hanselman

Pay and Compensation

• Equal Pay Days — Equal Pay Today

• By The Numbers: What Pay Inequality Looks Like For Women In Tech — Tanya Tarr (Forbes)

• The State of Wage Inequality in the Workplace — Hired

• Example spreadsheet for compensation calibration — Lara Hogan

• Compensating fairly — Project Include

• A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation — Molly Graham (First Round Review)

• Committing to Fair Compensation — Sarah Nahm (Lever)

• Is Salary Transparency More Than a Trend? — Glassdoor

Personal Narratives

• Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber — Susan Fowler

• The Other Side of Diversity — Erica Baker

• Not a Black Chair — Amélie Lamont

• Thoughts on Diversity Part 2. Why Diversity is Difficult. Leslie Miley

• Coding Like a Girl — sailor mercury

• Seeking Happy — Erica Joy

• Growing Up — Justin Edmund

• Why Aston Motes, Dropbox’s First Employee, Chose MIT Over Caltech — Aston Motes

• A black engineer’s take on why diversity matters at startups — Leighton Wallace

• Twitter thread on performance reviews for URGs — Mekka Okereke

• I Didn’t Notice: Why I Trained Myself Not To Be a “Woman in Tech” — Katie Womersley

• Obligated to D&I — Bukky Adebayo

Examples of Successful Efforts

• Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity — Jodi Kantor (The New York Times)

• How One College Is Closing The Computer Science Gender Gap — Wendy Kaufman (NPR)

• Pinterest launches inclusive search tool beauty enthusiasts will love — Jacqueline Laurean Yates (Good Morning America, Yahoo! News)

• Etsy CTO: Prioritizing Diversity in Our Hiring Fielded Better Women … and Men — Rebecca J. Rosen (The Atlantic)

• Etsy’s Trying to Fix Tech’s Women Problem. Why Aren’t You? — Ann Friedman (Matter)

• French Women in Politics: The Long Road to Parity — Caroline Lambert (Brookings)

• Amazing things happen when you give female athletes the same funding as men — Beth A. Brooke-Marciniak, Donna de Varona (World Economic Forum)

• Title IX and the Rise of Female Athletes in America — Women’s Sports Foundation

• Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians — Claudia Goldin, Cecilia Rouse (Harvard Kennedy School)

• Inclusion Interviewing — Jason Wong

• Diversity at Slack: An update, May 2019 — Slack

• GoDaddy Promoted 30% More Women This Year (& They’re Hiring) — Amy Elisa Jackson

• Etsy’s commitment to diversity and inclusion — Jennifer McKaig (Etsy Impact)

• Building Inclusive Engineering Teams — Mekka Okereke (Recall Act)

• Atlassian Boosted Its Female Technical Hires By 80% — Here’s How — Aubrey Blanche (First Round Review)

• How Hiring a Recruiter Can Help Improve Diversity — Baron Schwartz (VividCortex)

• Building a More Inclusive Startup: Introducing the Diversity Dashboard — Courtney Seiter (Buffer)

• Update on Gusto’s Engineering Diversity Goals — Edward Kim (Gusto)

Allyship and Intersectionality

• Demystifying how to be a male ally — Better Allies

• Guide to Allyship — Amélie Lamont

• Ally Skills Workshop — Valerie Aurora (Frame Shift Consulting)

• Moving from Ally to Accomplice: How Far Are You Willing to Go to Disrupt Racism in the Workplace? — Kimberly Harden, Tai Harden-Moore (Diverse Education)

• Intersectionality 101: Why “we’re focusing on women” doesn’t work for Diversity & Inclusion — Jennifer Kim (Awaken)

• True Diversity Is Intersectional — Ellen K. Pao (Include)

• Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics — Kimberlé Crenshaw (University of Chicago Legal Forum)

• The urgency of intersectionality — Kimberlé Crenshaw (TED)

• The intersectionality wars — Jane Coaston (Vox)

Tools and Companies

• #DiversifyYourFeed — Application that analyzes the gender balance of the user’s Twitter feed

• Textio — Products that review and suggest alternatives to gendered language in job postings and other written communications

• The Tech Connection — Recruitment platform that supports the professional development of untapped technical talent

• Diversitytech.co — Collection of resources for underrepresented people in tech (scholarships, events, job board, etc.)

• Code 2040 — Nonprofit offering programs that connect Black & Latinx tech talent with companies, mentors, and peers

• Tech Ladies — Membership organization offering a collection of resources for women in tech (webinars, job board, etc.)

• BRAID (Building, Recruiting, And Inclusion for Diversity) — Partnership of universities and companies committed to increasing the participation of students from underrepresented groups in computer science programs

• Lesbians Who Tech — Community for queer women in tech and their allies

• Recurse Center — Free, self-directed educational retreat in NYC for individuals hoping to improve their programming

• Pursuit — Training program for adults that helps them get their first tech jobs, advance their careers, and become leaders

• Fullstack Academy — Coding bootcamp with campuses in New York and Chicago

Job Descriptions and Interviews

• Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality — Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen, Aaron C. Kay (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

• 1000 different people, the same words — Kieran Snyder (Textio)

• How Changing One Word In Job Descriptions Can Lead To More Diverse Candidates — Courtney Seiter (Fast Company)

• The One Word Men Never See In Their Performance Reviews — Kathleen Davis (Fast Company)

• Research: Vague Feedback Is Holding Women Back — Shelley J. Correll, Caroline Simard (HBR)

• We Recorded VCs’ Conversations and Analyzed How Differently They Talk About Female Entrepreneurs — Malin Malmstrom, Jeaneth Johansson, Joakim Wincent (HBR)

• Women Won’t Apply for Jobs Seeking “Assertive” Applicants. Should Women Change, or Should Job Ads? — Katy Waldman (Slate)

• Use Gendered Words in Job Descriptions? Expect Way Fewer Applicants — Christina Cauterucci (Slate)

• *This* is How We Should Write Developer Job Posting — Mitchell Pronschinske (LinkedIn)

• HOWTO recruit and retain women in tech workplaces: Make your ads inclusive for women — Geek Feminist Wikia

• Why We Removed the Word “Hacker” From Buffer Job Descriptions — Courtney Seiter (Buffer)

• No brogrammers: Practical tips for writing inclusive job ads — Charlie von Metzradt (Hosted Graphite)

• Hiring: It’s About Cultural Contribution, Not Cultural Fit — Diego Rodriguez (LinkedIn)

• The Imbalance of Culture Fit — Matt Griffin (A List Apart)

• Who Y Combinator Companies Want — Ammon Bartram (Triplebyte)

• Why is hiring broken? It starts at the whiteboard. — Quincy Larson (freeCodeCamp)

• How to fix the technical interview (and maybe the developer shortage) — Mitch Pronschinske (TechBeacon)

• Write A Job Advertisement - Part 1 — Career Tools Podcast

• Writing A Job Description - Part 2 — Career Tools Podcast

• For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic — Nitasha Tiku (Wired)

• Hiring — Project Include

• Guide: Use structured interviewing — re:Work with Google

• The essential guide to hiring diverse development teams — Mitch Pronschinske (TechBeacon)

• If There’s Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There’s Statistically No Chance She’ll Be Hired — Stefanie K. Johnson, David R. Hekman, Elsa T. Chan (HBR)

• What Is The Rooney Rule? — Greta Jochem (Bustle)

Legal Considerations

• In Shift, Justice Dept. Says Law Doesn’t Bar Transgender Discrimination — Charlie Savage (The New York Times)

• Championing Diversity Without Discriminating: An Employer’s Dilemma — Jessica X.Y. Rothenberg (Pepper Hamilton LLP)

• Glossary: Protected Class — Thomson Reuters Practical Law

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