Inclusion 101: Tech's Future Founders Get Schooled on Diversity
July 05 2017 - 8:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Kelsey Gee
As a slew of Silicon Valley companies confront accusations of
unfair treatment of women and minorities, Stanford University's
Graduate School of Business is trying to help would-be
entrepreneurs create more conscientious companies.
The 10-week course is the first of its kind at the nation's most
selective M.B.A. program and prime breeding ground for tech
startups. Students enrolled in "Building Diverse and Inclusive
Organizations," slated to launch this spring, will examine research
on how to prevent bias from creeping into job descriptions and
managers' feedback -- and how to promote stronger feelings of
belonging, which can enhance employee performance and retention of
women and underrepresented minorities.
Students will also review case studies of companies' efforts to
improve diversity with expanded parental leave and job promotion
policies and critique recruitment and retention reports from firms
like Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co.
"We're at a tipping point, as people begin to realize that
inclusion has to be built into the fabric of the company," says
Fern Mandelbaum, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist leading the
course.
Though other courses at Stanford touch on how diversity impacts
a company's business performance, this is the first specifically
evaluating the policies of startups and early-stage companies.
Gender and racial inclusivity has become one of Silicon Valley's
most intractable challenges. This year alone, Facebook and Alphabet
Inc.'s Google have been locked in public battles over allegations
of discriminatory pay practices, which the companies dispute. The
sector's treatment of women has attracted more scrutiny in recent
weeks, as big investors in Uber Technologies Inc. demanded the
resignation of Chief Executive Travis Kalanick following
allegations he presided over a workplace permissive of sexism. Days
later, a partner of venture firm Binary Capital resigned after he
was accused of sexually harassing multiple women entrepreneurs.
Although companies have committed to stronger recruitment and
retention efforts, the annual data that firms like Twitter Inc. and
Apple Inc. share about the gender and racial makeup of their
workforces suggest slow progress.
Sluggish improvement and the string of recent scandals have
prompted executives and aspiring founders to seek out new
strategies to diversify workforces. Stanford business school's
associate dean for academic affairs, Sarah Soule, says students
have also been asking for more guidance on the issue in recent
years.
"There's been a lot of focus on the numbers by companies that
say they care about diversity, without those numbers changing," Ms.
Mandelbaum says.
She has been on the front lines of Silicon Valley's efforts to
change. In the past few years, she has spent less time in the
office of Vista Venture Partners, the Palo Alto, Calif., firm she
co-founded, as her role has grown as a corporate diversity coach.
She also teaches other classes at Stanford, including
"Entrepreneurship from Diverse Perspectives" and conducts workshops
on creating supportive work environments.
During a two-week pilot of the new course in May, speakers like
Pat Wadors, LinkedIn Corp.'s chief human resources officer, and
Rachel Williams, Yelp Inc.'s head of corporate recruiting, led case
study discussions. Co-teacher Joelle Emerson, founder of diversity
consultancy Paradigm, invited Candice Morgan, the head of diversity
at Pinterest Inc. and a current client, to speak about how the
company trains managers to minimize implicit biases about job
candidates and employees.
The course comes as Stanford -- which enrolled 41% women and 29%
minorities in the M.B.A. class last year -- and other top business
schools take steps to diversify the makeup of their own programs,
administrators say.
Colton Heward-Mills, an African-American student who enrolled in
the pilot course, says that while he has long felt passionate about
diversity, he was particularly moved when a white classmate in the
early stages of launching a company devised a strategy for
supporting diverse employees for a project the two worked on.
"This class made me hopeful that more people who haven't
typically needed to pay attention to these issues are beginning to
now," he says.
Most companies are just starting to introduce strategies for
reducing workplace bias, despite a wealth of academic research
demonstrating bottom-line benefits, says Ms. Emerson. Such
approaches make sense in the formative stages of a company's
lifespan "rather than reacting after something goes wrong," Ms.
Emerson adds.
The idea seems to be gaining steam.
Venture firm Freestyle Capital invited Ms. Mandelbaum to lead a
panel on inclusion for the leaders of its portfolio companies last
month. Since the discussion, Freestyle has started developing a
metric for early-stage startups to evaluate investment
opportunities. The measure is based on factors like a startup's
commitment to diverse hiring and inclusive promotion practices,
which Freestyle co-founder Josh Felser says have become an
important gauge of a company's health.
"We don't want our CEOs to end up like Travis (Kalanick), and
it's become clear that the earlier we can get them to understand
the importance of diversity and inclusion the better," says Mr.
Felser.
Write to Kelsey Gee at kelsey.gee@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 05, 2017 08:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
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