Single Line Comment

To the folks at Reply All,

I have a strong affection for your show. It delights and entertains me; it educates and keeps me out of trouble in my spare time. In conversation, I recommend it to anyone who shows even a glimmer of interest in podcasts. (Most people I rub elbows with are fast and slip away quickly, but rest easy knowing you’ll soon dominate the Slow Movers demographic.)

My work keeps me right in the thick of tech and internet companies, and adjacent to the startup universe. It’s painfully clear our industry does have a diversity problem, and amplifying stories from people being pushed to—or kept at—the outskirts is an important part of making any kind of meaningful change.

This isn’t your battle by trade, but you might imagine I was encouraged to see you solicit help researching a problem so near to my heart. “Of course Reply All is tackling this,” I thought. “Who better to shine the light on this but folks who live and breathe the internet?”

Voices

I don’t presume to know the details of your listener base, but I think Reply All is in a position to telegraph important stories into corners they’ve not yet reached.

In no particular order, here are some of the voices I looked forward to hearing:

LGBT folks
People of color
Women
Folks with disabilities

Here’s Alex in the call for help:

We’re talking about the way the little moments of prejudice that might be subtle and unintended – maybe even hard to describe – but that can poison the work environment for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people

Hot damn! We’re on the same page. This was very exciting.

Episode 52

So how did things turn out? You know this already, but here are the guests of Raising the Bar, in order of appearance:

The first guest, Leslie Miley, told his story of being the only black engineer in a senior role at Twitter. It’s an important story, one I hadn’t personally heard before, and I’m very glad he shared it.

Based on the thoroughly unscientific method of Googling around and then eyeballing headshots, my “research” suggests the next three guests—which is to say, the rest of the show—were white men.

In other words, in the episode about lack of diversity in technology we heard one black man’s first-hand account, followed by three white guys with no apparent ties to the industry.

I’ll just cut to the chase: that’s a huge disappointment.

Time is precious in a 36-minute runtime, of course, but an 8-minute Yes Yes No segment on what is arguably a terrible, misogynistic corner of the internet, and fourteen minutes of white men telling anecdotes and explaining the landscape of an industry from the outside means lots of other first-hand experiences are left untold:

Women
Folks with disabilities
LGBT folks

Bafflingly, to me at least, we heard about Janet Jansson (the ecologist who “studies dirt”) from Carl Zimmer rather than hearing from Janet herself. I’d much rather hear Dr. Jansson talk about her experiences as a woman in science than hear Carl’s interpretation of them.

“Prove the Value of Diversity”

Please see an update on my misinterpretation of Adam Davidson’s stance on needing more data on the benefits of diversity in positions of power in Silicon Valley.

I’m retracting my criticism on this particular segment but preserving the original text for the sake of context and clarity.

While I appreciate his response and clarification on this part of the episode, my broader argument that Raising the Bar needed to step back and give space to people with personal experience still stands.

—AC

Perhaps most troubling is the message that the value of diversity is yet unproven. In his segment, Adam Davidson, host of your sister show Surprisingly Awesome, says:

We don’t have proof that [a diverse workforce] works in Silicon Valley yet.

I’ve been a big fan of Adam’s work for a long time, and I respect the hell out of him. But this particular argument—we need proof that diversity works for the tech industry—strikes me as wrong-headed and utterly backwards thinking.

Adam again:

A problem with having an incredibly small number of minorities working in positions of power in fast-growing companies is it’s really hard to make any conclusive determination about them because there just aren’t enough.

The argument that we must definitively measure whether it’s a good idea to have minorities—which is to say women, people of color, non-heterosexual folks, and anyone else who isn’t your basic white guy—in positions of power in Silicon Valley is rooted in the notion that minorities might not be suited for those positions.

Adam. Come on, man. Do you really think we need to crunch more numbers on whether straight white guys are just inherently better at running tech companies?

Conclusion

In the end, I’m disappointed. I wish you had actively pursued and shared first-hand stories from more people.

Your staff seems like a smart, investigative, curious bunch of people. If Episode 52 is ultimately your only treatment on the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, then I think you missed the mark. I hope, however, that it’s the first in an ongoing series to explore the struggles of real people trying to be part of shaping how we experience the internet.

Today, the gatekeepers of our online lives are disproportionately dominated by white men. Lack of diversity in Silicon Valley isn’t Reply All’s problem to solve, but it is a problem that directly affects a show about the internet. I hope you’ll take the opportunity to play a role in making the industry more representative of the people who share that internet with you.

Best,
Ashur Cabrera