Stop Hiring Asian Women

How do your experiences as a woman of color working in tech, at times questioning, did I do something wrong? How come I'm not being advanced? How did all of that influence your leadership style and how you build diverse teams as a leader?

I'll tell you a story and I think this will help you understand it. There was a time when I had a really hard time hiring people onto my team. It was a team that had fallen apart. They asked me to come take it over and I just struggled to hire someone. So I hired a woman, she's an Asian woman. And then I hired a second Asian woman and I hired a third one. And my manager pulled me aside and he said, you need to stop hiring Asian women because it looks like you're biased. And I said, how many times have we said that to men or white men in our society? We often think that diversity will just happen, but actually it takes real work. So I led PM recruiting for many years at Facebook and previously when I was at PayPal, the leadership was actually almost all women interestingly, and it was 50/50 men and women in the ranks among all the managers amongst the ICs. Which, you know, today, it sounds crazy as a tech company. It turns out that most tech companies actually were extremely diverse in the product side. And what I realized happened, it's along the way women disappeared and they were written out of the story. And so by the time I got to Facebook, there were so few, I think there were like four women in the product organization. It was less than 10%. And I just remember thinking, what happened to all the women in product? Eventually after years I started leading PM recruiting and I looked at all of the barriers that we had put in place. And I realized that it was not intentional. It wasn't that PayPal had some magic answer and that Facebook was doing it wrong. It was that during that time of several years, when I was having my children, women would continue to advance in their own organizations, but could never move to another company.

And what had actually happened was one company, Google, I think it was something like 2004 decided that they required a computer science degree to become a product manager because they wanted their PMs to be more tactical. But computer science degrees, I think 18 to 20% of computer science degrees are earned by women. Probably you change the mix. And the women who were previously successful product leaders in their own right at other companies could not get another job at another company because they didn't have this degree.

That's so interesting.

I mean, I even went to Facebook, not as a PM. I actually went in a non-technical role. I went in product marketing and I have an engineering degree, but not a computer science degree. And what changed was when it became its technical role, women disappeared. But actually all of these women who were successful leaders were now being pushed out of the industry or they could only advance within their own company.