PwC's Tech While You Trek: Tech Equity

Tune in to our season finale of Tech While You Trek to hear a frank discussion with PwC’s new Technology Impact Officer Mitra Best about the Digital Divide, why women and other minorities are not equally represented in the tech industry and how to close the gap.

Transcript

Tech While You Trek - Tech Equity (Season Finale)
Guest: Mitra Best
Release Date:  June 28, 2021 

Adam:

Welcome to the final episode of another season of Tech While You Trek. I am your host, Adam. Thank you so much, as always, for listening. What better way to bring the season to a close than with a guest who needs very little introduction. Today I have with me Mitra Best, PwC's lead principal for strategic innovation and technology and the co-lead of our Women in Tech Program.

Mitra Best (00:34):

Hi, Adam. Thanks for having me on your show.

Adam (00:36):

It is our pleasure. What does tech equity mean to you?

Mitra Best (00:40):

I define tech equity as both access to technology, for example, access to the Internet, broadband computers, tablets, mobile phones, and access to tech jobs. We live in a world where access to technology means access to healthcare, education, housing, banking, the justice system. I personally can't think of many activities that don't involve using technology.

Adam (01:06):

Not anymore.

Mitra Best (01:07):

No, but at the same time, it's incredible how many people in the U.S. have limited or actually no access to the Internet. The number's somewhere north of 20 million people. This disparity is marked by geography, sort of urban versus rural, income, race, ethnic background. All of those perpetuate the growing divide we see around us. During the pandemic, we saw the digital divide impact kids who don't have access to broadband to attend their virtual classes or to do their homework. This deficit in access actually in turn amplifies the deficit that we have in technology employment.

Think about it. How can you be employed in an industry where you have no familiarity or exposure? The tech sector has an enormous diversity issue. Women make up only 25% of all the tech jobs, and Black and Latinx tech workers combined make up to 5% of the tech workforce.

Adam (02:18):

So, talk about what some of the consequences are of disparities like that.

Mitra Best (02:23):

This disparity has multiple and wide-reaching consequences. The obvious one is that at least half of the population doesn't have access to these great jobs, but one that frequently gets unnoticed and keeps me up at night is bias creep.

Adam (02:40):

Bias creep?

Mitra Best (02:41):

When you lack diversity and equitable representation in software development, particularly in advanced technologies like AI or machine learning, you tend to see both conscious and unconscious bias of the predominant group, with those who are building the software, creep into our everyday applications we use, and then they end up getting integrated in our daily lives, which further excludes underrepresented populations.

For example, there are studies that show mortgage algorithms charging Black and Latinx borrowers higher interest rates, recruiting programs amplifying bias against women, and series of studies showing facial recognition actually misidentifying dark-skinned people in women 37% more than they do lighter skin people. A very, very widely used clinical application tends to have inconsistent referrals based on race, which basically perpetuates racial bias in healthcare. So even when you have access to technology, the technology is not designed to serve everyone equitably.

Adam (03:56):

Your example about the facial recognition, so that's a problem of there not being qualified people within the industry to help program facial recognition. Is that a bias of who's doing the work or is that a bias of not considering what the technology will be applied to?

Mitra Best (04:14):

It's mainly about the bias in the data that the researchers are using to train the models in facial recognition. If most of your data is looking at white men, you're going to have trouble identifying Black women because your training doesn't give you enough data and input. So, it's not representing the demographics equitably so that your software now is not predicting what it's seeing and identifying it correctly.

Adam (04:53):

So then, how can technology be used to level the playing field? How can we start to bridge this gap?

Mitra Best (04:59):

I see women getting left behind. When I graduated, there were 35% of us with a comp sci degree, and I thought that was terrible. Instead of getting better, the numbers just have been dropping, now to around 20%. We have today in the U.S. over a million open tech positions, and they're not getting filled by women or other minorities. One way to bridge that gap is to fortify the employment pipeline, is to ensure that young girls and ethnic minorities have increased exposure to technology and can have a path to future employment in the tech sector.

Adam (05:42):

So, are you saying some aspect of this is that young women, people of color, aren't being told that these jobs are available to them? It's not in their thought process to aspire to a job like that?

Mitra Best (05:55):

They're not exposed to it. When you have that disparity of access to technology or access to knowing that the technology jobs even exist, you don't develop an interest. So, one of the things that we're actually doing at PwC is going downstream to help prime that pipeline by having coding classes and delivering some of those examples of what a tech woman looks like.

Tech looks like me. I'm a woman engineer. For a lot of girls, when I go to their classrooms, when they're first and second graders, they can't believe that you can be a fashionista, walk into a classroom, have this amazing job, and have studied computer science. It blows their minds.

Adam (06:42):

Well, give me some examples. I want to hear some for instances;  tell me some stories.

Mitra Best (06:46):

So, that particular program called Junior Next Gen is part of our Women in Tech programs. We have several, several programs that support the employee life cycle from recruiting to retention, all the way to advancement to leadership. The part about the Junior Next Gen and going to these classrooms is actually part of our recruiting programs. We've expanded our recruiting program to cover a lot more universities, to cover women only events at universities, to holding women only hackathons, but going downstream is my favorite part, going to the students to really get into these underserved communities and show them what the future for them could look like. Technology was meant to be an equalizer, not a divider. We just have to surface those opportunities earlier in life and to more people.

Adam (07:49):

Can you share any other examples of women in technology, some of these programs outside the firm, inside the firm?

Mitra Best (07:56):

What we do around retaining our tech workforce, and in particular our women, is all around creating an inclusive work environment. With equitable access for every person to grow their career their own way, we can't have one model that fits everybody. Everyone has different needs, and they're in different parts of their lives. Our needs change. So, we want to have these flexible programs that allow everyone to be the better versions of themselves and reach the heights that they feel they want to.

We have mentorship programs at all levels, we host quarterly tech talks, which are panel discussions around technology topics that are available on YouTube now. They're led by our tech women and they're open to everyone in our firm, and obviously externally. We have lots of virtual communities, and hopefully soon in-person events again.

I think it's really important to recognize that culture is why people choose to stay, and culture is what attracts people to new work environments. Our women not only have a strong network of other women to rely on, we also have a strong network of allies through our allyship model. I think our allyship model is a differentiator. We give the right environment for men and anybody else who wants to participate to contribute to our mission of creating a culture of equity and inclusion, to be active in a variety of programs, and be part of building that future together.

Adam (09:37):

So, you consider yourself a technologist. Talk to me a little bit about how you are training technologists, retraining technologists right now within the firm.

Mitra Best (09:48):

Well, within the firm, we have a continuous upskilling program, and that is something that's available for everybody. Now in terms of what we've done around equity, Adam, we have to be very deliberate about the upskilling and the leadership development programs that we have.

Specifically one that I'm super proud of, we established a sponsorship program which takes each candidate and matches them to a partner who uses his or her social capital to help open doors, expand networks, and identify those hard-to-find opportunities.

There's this thing called similarity bias, where we like people who look like us, talk like us, think like us, and we try to help them.So, we have to go out of our way to make sure that we are sponsoring and advocating for people who don't look like us, who don't think like us, but who could be accretive to our future.

Adam (11:00):

I want to ask you a final question that I've been asking all of my guests this season. Are you prepared? 

Mitra Best (11:06):

Let's go for it.

Adam (11:08):

What would the you of 20 years ago be most surprised that you use technology for today?

Mitra Best (11:12):

Well, since I've been in innovation and technology for the past 20 years, I actually expected most of the technologies we use today. However, I just imagined that we would have more accelerated results in human space travel and exploration.

Adam (11:29):

Well, sure. We were promised flying cars. We're already 10 years behind the flying car, if Robert Zemeckis has anything to say about it.

Mitra Best (11:34):

There you go, there you go. So if we landed on the moon before we were born, and then there were flying cars when we were in school, then we really should be visiting lots of planets today.

Adam (11:47):

All right. Well, so let me ask you this. Let me try a different one. What did you think would already be tech enabled that isn't?

Mitra Best (11:53):

I was hoping that technology would solve a lot of our societal problems, but I will tell you what I was actually thinking about yesterday as I was trying to go between my computer screen and my iPhone and needing to put glasses on and off. I was thinking we shouldn't have to wear eyesight correction glasses anymore in digital interfaces. I would like the computer screen and mainly my iPhone to automatically correct to my vision based on my prescription. That's what I would like to see for my own personal convenience. You know, while we're there, I'd like to see Geordi's glasses from Star Trek: Next Generation enable all kinds of sight.

Adam (12:37):

Well, I think you're probably the most qualified of all of our guests so far to help make that happen. So, let me officially lodge the request.

Mitra Best (12:47):

Thank you, taken. I'll put it in the queue.

Adam (12:49):

Well, Mitra Best, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with us today.

Mitra Best (12:52):

Thank you, Adam. This was super fun.

Adam (12:54):

Oh, for us too, thank you. I have been your host, Adam. Thank you all very much for spending an entire season with Tech While You Trek.

Speaker 3 (13:07):

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