JOELLE EMERSON
Age: 30 Birthplace: Tucson, Arizona Position: Founder, CEO of Paradigm Previous jobs: Skadden Fellow at Equal Rights Advocates practicing women’s rights employment law; law clerk on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Education: Stanford Law School, University of Southern California Family: Emerson lives with her boyfriend, Box CEO Aaron Levie. Residence: Palo Alto a clear goal? Yet with diversity there’s a lot of resistance to doing that. What I think companies worry about is if they set goals they’ll have to lower their talent bar to reach those goals and that’s something companies aren’t willing to compromise on and don’t need to compromise on. Goals aren’t something that you at all costs will achieve. You won’t hire people who are underqualified to meet a goal. It’s just setting a target. QThe
diversity numbers for some of the nation’s largest tech firms barely budged this year. Why do you think that is? ACompanies
make the mistake of leading with strategies that sound good but aren’t necessarily designed to address the particular barriers they have. I’ll give you an example. We’ve heard from companies that have talked about taking names off résumés to minimize bias in the recruiting process. There’s a lot of research that shows résumés with male names get higher call- backs than résumés with female names. White- sounding names get higher call- backs than African- American sounding names. This research exists and it’s a problem that’s been identified but we don’t know if that exact problem exists in every company. If there’s no disparity at the résumé review stage, putting resources toward anonymizing résumés is not going to have an impact on who they hire. QI’ve
heard solving tech’s diversity problem compared to a marathon. When are we going to get to the finish line? AI
don’t really know if there is a finish line. As long as there’s inequality in society that inequality is going to be reflected in organizations and industries. Companies that want to benefit from the wide range of perspectives we have in our country and in our world are always going to have this to contend with and are always going to need to be focused on improving.