Susanne Tedrick - Women of Color in Tech

Black in AI: This organization seeks to increase the level of participation of Black people working in or studying artificial intelligence. blackinai.github.io

International Consortium of Minority Cybersecurity Professionals (ICMCP): ICMCP seeks to address the dual issue of increasing the presence of people of color and women in the cybersecurity field. The organization offers training and mentoring programs, as well as scholarships to study cybersecurity in two-year or four-year colleges. www.icmcp.org

IT Senior Management Forum (ITSMF): ITSMF's aim is to increase the number of Black professionals in senior technology positions. ITSMF offers the EMERGE Academy, a one-year intensive leadership program to help mold women of color into future technical leaders. www.itsmfonline.org

Code2040: This nonprofit works to provide educational, social, and economic support to Black and Latinx people to fully participate in this new tech economy. Its Early Career Accelerator Program (ECAP) gives training and mentoring to professionals early in their tech career, while its Fellows program give current computer science students a nine-week immersion experience with a local area tech company. www.code2040.org

CompTIA's Advancing Diversity in Tech and Advancing Women in Tech Communities: Both virtual communities aim to narrow the gap of the representation of women and people of color in tech. Members can access educational resources and attend local area networking/educational events. www.comptia.org

This is not a comprehensive list of all the resources out there—there are many, many more. This is rather to point out that numerous communities exist for you to find help, guidance, and support when and where you need it.

Technology is a part of just about every business and educational and governmental institution. Organizations need people who have the technical skills to meet these needs. Table 1.2shows just a sample of tech jobs that are projected to have the highest growth and most new jobs.

Table 1.2 : Projected Growth of Selected Technology Jobs

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics—Occupational Outlook Handbook

Tech jobs have the potential to pay extremely well ( Table 1.3). While what you're paid can be affected by where you live inside the United States, your level of education, and your experience level, tech jobs boast higher salaries than non-tech jobs.

Table 1.3 : Median Salaries of Selected Technology Careers

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics—Occupational Outlook Handbook

Who says that work can't be fun? Tech is one of the few career fields that allows you to utilize creative-thinking skills to solve problems and create innovative solutions.

Take the fashion industry as an example. Technology has lowered the barrier of entry in creating designs and putting them out into the market. In the past, people who created and sold their own clothing and accessories needed access to physical retail space, access to tools and people to manufacture pieces quickly and in large quantities, and ways to ensure that products reached customers when they wanted them.

These are not small undertakings—this requires a lot of human and financial capital. But with technology, designers can now open online stores to sell their products directly to consumers at a fraction of what a physical retail space would cost. Robotics, which are being used by newer designers, can produce more custom pieces quicker than human hands ever could. Inventory-management and customer-engagement software, when used together, can forecast the customer demand for certain pieces, as well as ensure that there is enough inventory to meet the demand.

One of the things I enjoy about my profession, technical sales, is that I can use technology as a tool to help clients solve business problems. Because these problems don't follow a “one answer fits all” path, I can use both technology and a healthy degree of creativity to help clients get to their desired result. It's a lot of fun when you're drawing out sketches or wireframes of what the client is envisioning, and it's doubly rewarding when your efforts help them to be successful.

Being a present and visible woman of color in tech can help give hope to young girls of color. Becoming a tech volunteer or mentor can have many positive effects. For you, it enhances your leadership, teaching, and communication skills, as well as refines your existing tech skills (or teaches you new ones!).

For young girls, they can interact with positive role models that look like them or grew up in situations like theirs. Many girls don't have the good fortune to interact with women who look like them or grew up in similar backgrounds and are current technical practitioners.

As girls of color get older, the idea of a nonwhite female software engineer or data scientist doesn't seem like a weird or foreign concept. They know that women of color in these fields are common and not an exception or anomaly. They can be confident that those career fields are accessible and possible for them.

Simply put, we need more diverse representation at all levels to address the current technological challenges our society is facing as well as future challenges.

In the case of artificial intelligence (AI), businesses are using it more, through chatbots and other means, for low-level tasks—tasks that they believe are repetitive and do not generate a lot of money for them. By automating many of these tasks, and not requiring a lot of human interaction, businesses can save money on overhead costs, salaries, and more.

That's great for the business, but that isn't exactly great for everyone. Let's take the example of someone applying for a business loan at a traditional bank or lending institution. If a person applies and is, let's say, rejected or offered a higher interest rate than what they expected, a person can speak directly with a lending officer to find out why they took that course of action and could potentially negotiate or compromise to reach agreement.

If a bank or lender uses an AI interface alone to process a loan application, the process to approval or rejection may happen faster. But, if the development team behind the AI application inadvertently programs their own gender and race biases, applicants from specific demographics may experience higher rates of rejection or discriminatory actions than others. As the process is automatic, rarely is there a human being that you can speak to in order to contest or change the decision.