On the performance side, you don\u2019t have to take my word for it. Read Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter<\/a> from the Harvard Business Review. Look at the Mckinsey report on how more diverse leadership makes companies more profitable<\/a>.<\/p>\n My very favorite study in this space<\/a> says it right in the abstract:<\/p>\n I know a man who is an influential leader at a well known organization. He scans the author lists of scientific papers before reading the abstracts. If he doesn\u2019t recognize the names, he doesn\u2019t bother to go further. He once told me why: \u201cIt saves time. If they were any good, I would already have heard of them.\u201d<\/p>\n Provincial.<\/p>\n The few women who did choose to join the company tended to leave after a much shorter tenure than the men. That difference speaks to workplace culture. I have to own that too, since I was responsible for many of the team\u2019s day to day practices.<\/p>\n With what I know now, I can see that I built a place where it was pretty easy for people like me to succeed. My guess is that the more different a person was from me in their work and life patterns, the harder they would find it to succeed in my organization.<\/p>\n That inattention sabotaged the few people who made it past the filters described above.<\/p>\n As above, there\u2019s no malice required. I just wasn\u2019t paying attention.<\/p>\n Stated baldly, it\u2019s a pretty weak and inexperienced manager who can only manage people just like himself.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t all in the past.<\/p>\n Just this year, in 2018, I took flak from several long-term friends because my \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d made it harder for us to organize a joint marketing opportunity.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all too easy to make excuses. The reality is that the state of inclusion in our industry is an embarrassing and broken thing.<\/p>\n It is our job to fix it.<\/p>\n Stat News<\/a> has published several articles lately that shine a spotlight on some of the most egregious behavior. One stark example is their coverage of the Party At Bio Not At Bio<\/a>. In case you haven\u2019t heard, sponsors paid to have their logos painted on nearly nude women who danced for the crowd\u2019s amusement.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a \u201cMad Men\u201d episode, it\u2019s the state of biotech in 2018.<\/p>\n The sponsors, organizers, and attendees aren\u2019t bad people \u2013 but they weren\u2019t paying attention. Making sure that the environment was safe and inclusive didn\u2019t make the list of priorities.<\/p>\n It takes work to overcome these systemic biases. Fortunately, there are resources available. This twitter list of 300 women in tech you should follow<\/a> is up to 522 members. https:\/\/500womenscientists.org<\/a> makes it laughable to use the excuse that there are no qualified women available for speaking engagements.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still hard to talk about this stuff. I hesitated a long time before writing this post, and still longer before hitting \u201cpublish.\u201d<\/p>\n That hesitation is because it is awkward, uncomfortable and weird every single time that I take a customer or a business contact aside and privately point out that they\u2019ve got an all-male team.<\/p>\n People get defensive, evasive, and occasionally even insulting and sanctimonious. They come back with \u201cwhat about,\u201d and even bring up examples from my own past where I didn\u2019t live up to the ideals that I\u2019m now pushing on them.<\/p>\nGroups with out-group newcomers (i.e., diverse groups) reported less confidence in their performance and perceived their interactions as less effective, yet they performed better than groups with in-group newcomers (i.e., homogeneous groups). Moreover, performance gains were not due to newcomers bringing new ideas to the group discussion. Instead, the results demonstrate that the mere presence of socially distinct newcomers and the social concerns their presence stimulates among oldtimers motivates behavior that can convert affective pains into cognitive gains.<\/code><\/p>\nNature vs Nurture<\/h1>\n
It matters<\/h1>\n
Broccoli in your teeth<\/h1>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dwan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/tweet-1024x619.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n