Inclusion in Tech

Building a Gender-Balanced Engineering Organization in the Middle East

Jordan's tech scene has a gender distribution of 50:50 in colleges, but this does not translate to the workforce due to women not being expected to stay late at the office. To challenge this, the core team responsible for establishing the Expedia Jordan office focused on making sure to build a sustainable gender-equal presence from the get-go. This included top-of-funnel sourcing, resume screening, tech tasks, and onsite interviews. The outcome was a 50:50 gender balance, showing that women engineers were succeeding in the recruiting process at a higher rate than men. This highlights the untapped talent pool of female engineers in Jordan.

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Creating a Cultural Shift for Effective Meetings: Building a Writing Culture

Poor documentation can be risky for businesses, but adopting a writing culture can help to increase inclusivity, reduce meeting time, and increase productivity. To build a successful writing culture, it is important to make it collaborative, document the process and make it accessible, and encourage people to read it. Remote work requires trust, focus time, and asynchronous ways to collaborate and discuss.

Do You Know How to Tackle Diversity Issues on Your Team?

After a woman declined a job offer, the company realized that 90% of their team were men and decided to do more sourcing at women's engineering events. This resulted in a more gender-balanced team with a 60/40 male to female ratio, without changing their technical requirements. The lesson learned was that it is important to create a non-hostile work environment for everyone, and to prioritize women candidates without changing the bar.

Building Diverse and Inclusive Teams

Diversity and inclusion are essential for individual and organizational success, but how do we build a diverse and inclusive team? A holistic approach is needed, from defining and implementing culture to employee lifecycle, hiring, onboarding, fair compensation, feedback, and measuring progress. Additionally, intersectionality should be taken into account, and everyone should be better allies for underrepresented groups.

Developing and Sustaining Diversity Within a Company

This article discusses the importance of hiring a diverse team and outlines the steps taken to achieve this. It suggests having a diverse interview panel, avoiding terms that label candidates, creating a grassroots organization, and using social networks as a hiring resource. It also suggests having a template that represents real voices from within the company to create a welcoming impact.