NCWIT digitally transforms the DEI journey to help uplift women in IT

For the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), effecting change for women working in IT is a holistic endeavor.  

Founded in 2004, NCWIT’s mission has always been to “increase the meaningful and influential participation of women in tech” while respecting intersecting identities, with an overall emphasis on avoiding “treating women as a monolithic group,” says Catherine Ashcraft, a senior research scientist at NCWIT.

The organization, which started with a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and about four or five employees, has since grown into a global nonprofit with more than 1,500 change leaders, universities, companies, nonprofits, and government organizations on board.

In its work, NCWIT targets both men and women change leaders in the industry, emphasizing that equitable representation isn’t simply about what girls and women must do to get into the profession, but what must be changed across educational institutions and the technology industry to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive space from early education all the way to the workforce.

“We like to make the distinction that it’s about fixing systems, not fixing women,” says Ashcraft.

Addressing IT’s equity issue

One key change effort at NCWIT is the work undertaken by its Workforce Alliance.

NCWIT’s Workforce Alliance is for professionals and organizations who want to learn more about retaining employees, inclusive leadership, and creating systemic organizational change. Individuals and corporations who are members of the Workforce Alliance get an exclusive invitation to the annual NCWIT Summit, guidance for implementing research-based strategies for inclusion, and the opportunity to sponsor or fund events and initiatives. Strategic partners include Apple, Microsoft, Google, Bank of America, NSF, Qualcomm, and Intel, among others.

At the heart of its effort to effect organizational change is NCWIT’s strong research department, which employs extensive data and research to objectively demonstrate to organizations what they need to do to enact meaningful change to improve diversity and retention of underrepresented women in the tech industry. As part of its mission, NCWIT addresses representation with a focus on the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, and other historically marginalized identities in the field of computing.

One of the biggest challenges for moving the needle forward on representation in IT is getting organizations to focus on themselves and take accountability for enacting DEI initiatives. Ashcraft says that NCWIT often sees organizations looking to “push the responsibility down into K-12 or higher ed,” perpetuating the idea that there aren’t enough diverse candidates to hire because school systems aren’t producing a diverse population of IT candidates.

Increasing STEM education at the K-12 and higher-education levels is an important aspect to increasing diversity — and it is something NCWIT is actively engaged in through its K-12 Alliance, Counselors for Computing (C4C), Aspirations in Computing (AiC), and Higher Education Alliance programs. But the education system isn’t the only — or biggest — problem in the tech pipeline. It’s also important for organizations to recognize their own responsibility to create equitable and inclusive work environments where diverse workers will want to work and stay.

Here, organizations have long strides to make, and there needs to be a fundamental shift in IT culture, which has a long-standing reputation for being everything from unwelcoming to toxic for underrepresented individuals. Inspiring a more diverse pipeline at an early age only goes so far if those students graduate into an industry that doesn’t feel inclusive or equitable to them.   

“It’s not going to do any good if we do increase the diversity of the so-called ‘pipeline’ and then they get there and it’s a crappy place to work,” says Ashcraft.

Transforming inclusion

To help guide companies through the process of creating meaningful change, NCWIT offers the Tech Inclusion Journey (TIJ), a software platform that draws on more than a decade of research on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech industry.

“It encapsulates all the research into a one-stop software platform that helps companies take a strategic approach to culture change, because that’s one of the biggest pitfalls of most attempts at creating inclusive cultures,” Ashcraft says. “[DEI initiatives] tend to be piecemeal efforts or one-off situations that are not very coordinated or strategic or thought through or sustained. So, the Tech Inclusion Journey is designed to shift companies’ thinking to get them to take a more systemic approach.”

The software is designed to be used by individual teams within an organization to evaluate where they stand on DEI, where they can make improvements, and to gain better insights into everyone’s perspective on inclusivity. TIJ focuses on teams rather than the whole organization because subcultures within an organization can vary team to team.

“Usually, a senior leader and their direct [reports] will participate in the journey. They become familiar with the map, which is our change model. It lays out all the different areas that a team or organization needs to pay attention to in order to create a truly inclusive culture,” Ashcraft says.

The software first pushes users to consider various aspects of their workplace, such as flexibility, employee development programs, promotions, performance evaluations, recruiting, biases, daily interactions, and microaggressions. This is the “Map” stage, and once it is complete, users move on to the “GPS” stage, where they are asked a series of questions around workplace culture and DEI.

Once everyone has completed these two stages, the team comes together to review their answers and compare their scores. This stage is similar to a typical maturity model, where everyone is in a different stage or at a different level, and together they can use this data to start a conversation about strengths and weaknesses in the department in regard to DEI.

“And that’s probably one of the richest parts of the whole journey is they get to see each other’s perceptions and realize that they have different perceptions — and sometimes they’re surprised by that,” Ashcraft says.

The third and final phase of the software is action planning, where users can take the results and determine new priorities. Typically, users will identify one or two focus areas to implement interventions and strategies around for improvement. The software helps to narrow down what the team or organization needs to work on, providing stronger direction for implementing meaningful DEI strategies.

“Often the business leaders or the technology leaders will try to abdicate responsibility and leave it to the DEI personnel to solve the problem. But that’s not really a fair or effective way to do it. It is about the leaders themselves taking ownership. They have to examine their own culture and identify what will be the best way to proceed for them,” Ashcraft says.

DEI isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution

The Tech Inclusion Journey is designed so that companies can use it on their own, but NCWIT is also available to guide organizations through the process if they want extra assistance. NCWIT helps get teams started with the software, and will offer whatever support is needed along the way, but they’re also intentional about training and prepping senior leaders to present the information to their teams themselves.

NCWIT also offers an Ambassador program, through which NCWIT trains members of an organization to become peer leaders to help “lead these cultural conversations and make sure that discussions are happening on an ongoing basis about these topics,” says Ashcraft. For organizations that are serious about their commitment to DEI, an ambassador can help ensure the organization is staying on track towards its goals. It’s often too easy for DEI programs to fall by the wayside, so having an employee focused on ensuring the organization is progressing can be vital to fostering more inclusive workplace cultures.

Organizations that are part of NCWIT’s Workforce Alliance and are utilizing the TIJ software can also network and connect with one another. This gives change leaders the chance to compare strategies and see what has worked, or not worked, for other companies that might help inform their own inclusion strategies.

Ultimately, the TIJ and overall goal of the NCWIT as an organization highlights how the underrepresentation of women in tech can’t be fixed with one simple solution. Increasing diversity in the tech industry requires a strategic, thoughtful approach that ultimately addresses the systemic and cultural problems that keep women out of IT. NCWIT takes a broad approach, addressing these issues all the way from kindergarten to the board room, ensuring leaders hold themselves accountable to DEI goals.