It is a widely acknowledged fact that many industries suffer from endemic lack of diversity, and that efforts to tip the scales the other way often run into resistance. Such was the case, for example, when Google Employee James Damore claimed that the reasons behind the high level of gender inequality in the technology industry were biological rather than cultural.

The industry as a whole needs to realize that achieving meaningful equality is never going to be an easy process, and there isn’t one quick fix to a problem that is so deeply ingrained into industry practices
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To gain some perspective into the real roots of the problem, however, it is helpful to hear from people who have not only managed to overcome such barriers, but thrive in industries such as tech.

Only 12% of engineering staff at the 84 top tech firms are female,
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One such person is Haibei ‘Happy’ Wang, a former Front-end Engineer at PayPal and current Vice-President of Engineering at Silicon Valley tech company Globality, which has just received a $100 million investment  from SoftBank to scale up its cutting edge work in artificial intelligence and business sourcing. She has been working in Silicon Valley for the past two decades, and she tells me that during that time she’s also seen some positive change.

“In my twenty years of working in Silicon Valley, I’ve definitely seen more women getting into the technology field. I’ve also noticed that more and more women in technology are willing to open up and connect by founding many types of groups to support each other. I’ve seen a strong women’s voice represented in the product, engineering, design, and data-analytics fields. Women are no longer shy; we’re becoming more vocal instead of just being receptive.”

Only 12% of engineering staff at the 84 top tech firms are female, yet Happy reflects that there are many more opportunities available to women now, compared to her early career days as an engineer, when she invariably reported to male managers. The last decade, however, has seen a big shift towards promoting women into leadership roles, which means we’re seeing women in C-level roles, which was very rare in the past.

“I feel fortunate to have made it to the vice-president level. My leadership team values my contributions and provides me with great career growth opportunities. I’ve also noticed over the last decade that there are a lot more women founders doing quite well in the startup world, plus we now have more women engineers than ever, especially in the product, front-end engineering, user experience, mobile, and data fields.”

One trend she believes has been pivotal in this change has been the popularity of coding ‘boot-camps’ specifically targeted at women. These camps help address the fundamental issue that inequality in the industry is a question not only of demand, but also of supply, as some start-up founders report difficulties in recruiting female members for their teams in spite of their best efforts.

“I’ve seen lots of women going through these programs and successfully transforming themselves into great engineers,” she says, adding that in recent years she’s seen many more junior-level engineers coming to her who have never studied coding at university. They bypass the costly and often theory-based 4+ year courses, instead learning practical skills and best practices in realistic environments. Some of these boot-camps, such as Hackbright, are exclusively for women and have trained over 700 graduates who have gone on to secure jobs at companies such as Google, Dropbox, and Airbnb.

Happy Wang, Vice-President of Engineering at Globality

“There is no difference between men and women when it comes to the ability to learn. Science isn’t a sport where men can run faster than women can. In science, as long as you give them the same training and opportunity, women absolutely can reach the same level of achievement as men do. We need to open the door for women and find a way to educate and influence them at an early age to help open their eyes and free their minds.”

It is also important for companies to provide opportunities for female employees to transition to different roles during their careers, she says, recounting how she’s helped non-engineers become engineers by giving them on-the-job learning opportunities and constantly challenging them to go beyond their comfort zone. The other part of that, she acknowledges, is for women to also move past culturally-enforced norms that mean they are often more hesitant to put their views forward in fear of seeming overly aggressive or ambitious.

“If you have opinions, it’s better to speak up than hold back; you want to earn an opportunity for yourself and set a great example for your women colleagues to follow. Help others see that there’s a path forward as long as they are competent and doing an awesome job. Fighting for yourself is a way to send a strong message that also helps others.”

The industry as a whole needs to realize that achieving meaningful equality is never going to be an easy process, and there isn’t one quick fix to a problem that is so deeply ingrained into industry practices. “I’ve noticed that some companies are proud of their overall male-to-female employee ratios, but if you dig deeper, you find that many women are employed at much lower levels than their male colleagues are. It’s almost like a pyramid, and very few women can make it to the top.”

There's no difference between men's and women's ability to learn. Science isn’t a sport where men can run faster than women can
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The bottom line, happy concludes, is that we need to provide an equal opportunity for everyone to learn, no matter if you’re a woman or a man. “Technology evolves quickly; the most exciting thing for me in the high-tech world is that you always have something new to learn. While it is up to the individual to demonstrate how fast and how much they can learn new skills, we can’t exclude some people from the beginning by not even affording them those opportunities.”

Women are no longer shy; we’re becoming more vocal instead of just being receptive
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We need to achieve parity at every level in order to affect true change, and companies that do rise to the challenge will also reap the well-known benefits that diversity brings to innovation and productivity in the creative sectors.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. You can follow @alicebonasio on Twitter, connect with her on LinkedIn or subscribe to her Inside VR/AR Newletter for all the latest curated immersive news.  

The post Making Technology More Diverse appeared first on Tech Trends.

AI platform Globality is giving small and medium businesses access to broader opportunities.

In a post-Brexit, “America First” world, protectionism seems to be back in fashion, and globalization has become something of a dirty word. Since the 1990s, global trade has helped lift over a billion people out of poverty, driven sustained economic growth, lowered consumer prices, and delivered unprecedented freedoms to much of the world’s population.

Large multinational companies still seem to be the greatest beneficiaries of a globalized marketplace
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Still, middle-income earners have seen their living standards stagnate, while many of the great leaps forward in automation are destroying the jobs of those least able to cope, with vastly greater levels of disruption feared.

Large multinational companies still seem to be the greatest beneficiaries of a globalized marketplace. Small and medium-sized businesses, which constitute the bulk of the world’s economy and drive most job creation, find it more difficult to make valuable connections that can lead to international trade opportunities and contracts with large organizations.

In a post-Brexit, America First world, protectionism seems to be back in fashion
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This is due in large part to the outdated procurement process based on Requests for Proposals (RFPs), which is still the standard across most industries. RFPs are not only extremely time consuming, but such competitions are used as cover for a procurement decision that has already been made, so prospective smaller suppliers never really stand a chance.

Small and medium-sized businesses, which drive the bulk of the world’s economy and job creation, find it more difficult to make connections
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Joel Hyatt cofounded Globality to prove that technology could be the missing link to make globalization work for more businesses. By providing a matchmaking platform that connects big clients–Fortune 500 companies spanning financial services, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, consumer goods, and other sectors–with a diverse pool of providers, he wants to help those small and medium-sized companies land contracts that would otherwise be out of their reach.

Joel Hyatt cofounded Globality to prove that technology could be the missing link to make globalization work for more businesses
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He served as the national finance chair for the Democratic Party during Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, and after the election, partnered with Gore to start a media company that they sold in 2013. When Hyatt started Globality in 2015, Gore became an investor. The company has since raised $35 million in their latest funding round and embarked on a major expansion of its platform that uses artificial intelligence to match the small clients with big contracts all over the world. So far, over a dozen fortune 500 companies and over 40 multinational corporations have signed up on the client side, and its SME (Small and Medium Sized Enterprise) Service Provider Network covers every continent and more than 100 countries.

The platform is made up of three main elements, explains Globality CTO Ran Harpaz: The first gathers information from the client, helping them to determine what their real needs are. The second matches them with the best service provider to fulfill those needs, and the third helps build the relationship by fostering collaboration between the two parties.

What Globality is doing is making high-level knowledge and expertise accessible to a much larger pool of companies and people
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For the first part, the client answers a detailed Q&A devised by their experts. Their algorithms then extract a variety of data points from those clients using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and continues to build upon that in a constant learning loop. It takes all the information from the questions it asks of both client and providers during the matching process to suggest a shortlist of possible matches, which is then reviewed by an industry expert consultant at the final stages.

Enabling smaller companies to become micro-multinationals means they will fuel job creation and economic growth throughout the developed and developing world
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This AI-powered consultancy model effectively harnesses the best of both worlds, according to Harpaz, as it scales the nuanced, sector-specific expertise that traditionally comes at a prohibitive premium. By leveraging machine learning to recognize interactions–often spotting patterns in the data that might not have occurred to a person and using that in the matching process–this high-level human know-how becomes accessible to companies without multimillion-dollar consultancy budgets at their disposal.

“At every step, the system is collating feedback from both sides, learning from signals that tell it how the match is actually working in practice by prompting them with questions based on interaction data,” Harpaz says. “This systematic approach to human knowledge representation effectively gives people superpowers, by taking that magic sauce of human interaction and knowledge, and making it possible to apply that consistently and at scale.”

Although this process is building toward ever more efficient automation, Harpaz says that they will always need a human expert to look at those matches with a strategic eye and make the final decision on the most suitable pairings. “What Globality is doing is making high-level knowledge and expertise accessible to a much larger pool of companies and people, rather than only the large corporations who have been traditionally able to afford the services of consultancy firms,” he explains. Globality’s pricing model is usually free for client companies, with suppliers being charged a percentage of the contract’s value, but only once they receive payment themselves for the services they provided.

Waqqas Mir, a partner at Axis Law Chambers, a law firm based in Lahore, Pakistan, is one of the suppliers using Globality to reach international clients. Mir feels that law firms such as his in developing countries often lose out on such business because of their size. Being on the platform, however, gives them the opportunity to open up new channels of communication, which he believes provides great value in the long term. “That allows you to begin a relationship and remain on their radar,” he explains. “The whole thing is motivated by a desire to ensure a more inclusive global economy.”

Globality matched a Fortune 50 company with South African marketing agency Colourworks. The company had to find service providers who were Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment-certified by the South African government. “So we worked backwards from that, looking at all the providers who matched the certification criteria, and narrowing it down from there,” Harpaz says.

Since winning the Africa account, the agency has continued to use the Globality platform to connect with their new client on a global level, and are now exploring the possibility of working with them in Germany. “In this day and age, it is so easy to do business online or over video conferencing, so distance is really not a barrier,” says Lexy Geyer, account director at Colourworks.

Enabling smaller companies to become “micro-multinationals” means they will in turn fuel job creation and economic growth throughout the developed and developing world. Globalization and AI are often portrayed as inevitable waves of disruption that will leave chaos and inequality in their wake and ultimately make much of humankind and their skills redundant. But if platforms like Globality continue to create opportunities for diverse smaller businesss in this global marketplace, perhaps globalization can become a force for good.

This article was originally published in The Fast Company

Al Gore-backed AI platform aims to make globalization more equitable https://t.co/KwdblIl8Ku pic.twitter.com/iZKz9yZOOt

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) March 2, 2018

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

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