Cross-institutional innovation is needed to drive gender equality in tech.
I had the good fortune of meeting Renee Wittemyer when the company she works for, Pivotal Ventures, invested in Break Through Tech, an organization I am privileged to lead. I’ve learned so much from her about innovating at the intersection of industry and academia to advance gender equality in tech. If you aren’t already following Wittemyer, consider this interview with her your chance to change that.
You may recall that in 2019, Melinda French Gates committed $1 billion to promote gender equality. What you may not know is the name of one of the leaders who helms the decision-making around how that funding will be distributed in support of tech-focused initiatives: Renee Wittemyer, the director of program strategy and investment for French Gates’s company, Pivotal Ventures. Previously Wittemyer helped leading companies such as Intel and Microsoft develop research and strategies focused on the impact of gender and technology.
Read on to learn about a devastating statistic that fuels her work to get more women into the tech ecosystem, her vision for cross-sector innovation, her advice for young women starting out in tech, and more.
What is a specific data point about gender inequality in tech that galvanizes you to be an agent of change?
30 percent of Black, Latina, and Native American women are passed over for promotion at tech companies — over double the rate for White and Asian women — and they cite unfairness as the top reason for leaving the industry much more frequently than their White and Asian counterparts.
As a social scientist, I have interviewed hundreds of underrepresented people of color in tech and heard their often-negative experiences and stories from working in this industry, ones that bring these stats to life. A Black woman who had recently graduated with a computing degree told me that, on her first day at work, her manager said, “We don’t help people be successful here; you have to learn how to survive.” Another young woman said she was told, “You’re my diverse hire, so don’t apply for other jobs in the company.” Many told me, “No matter how knowledgeable I am or confidently I speak, my voice isn’t heard.”
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These are the things that inspire me in my work at Pivotal Ventures to bend the curve to make tech more reflective of our society—because tech will never live up to its potential until it reinvents itself as an industry where people of all backgrounds can thrive.
Tell me more about the kinds of initiatives that Pivotal Ventures invests in — and why.
As part of our strategy to expand women’s power and influence and strengthen the well-being of people in the United States, we’re focused on seeding innovation. That means investing in creative solutions to old problems and standing behind the people who can bring those solutions to scale. We look for early-stage ideas with lots of promise and try to connect them to the resources they need to demonstrate progress quickly.
Break Through Tech’s Sprinternship program is a great example of a creative approach to disrupting an inequitable system. We know summer internships are critical in tech and a key pathway to getting a job offer in the industry. But these internships aren’t easy to land, especially if you haven’t had one before. Sprinternships expand access to those door-opening opportunities by providing women studying computing with three-week paid tech internships during school breaks. After completing a Sprinternship, over half of participants end up with a paid tech internship essentially creating a new pathway into the industry. That’s an exciting—and disruptive—thing.
You have a lot of experience working at the intersection of the private, nonprofit, and public sectors. What have you learned about partnering across sectors to fuel systemic change? What are some examples of specific programs that work at this intersection between sectors?
Well-crafted partnerships between the public and private sectors can be incredibly powerful. It’s true that actors in the public and private sectors usually have different incentives and drivers even on similar issues. But when you can find a way to partner to amplify both sets of interests—while being candid and open about the actors’ motivations—you can see tremendous results.
The Reboot Representation Tech Coalition and Gender Equality in Tech (GET) Cities initiative are two excellent examples of these types of nonprofit-private-public partnerships in action.
GET Cities works to convene local, city-based partners to align efforts in local tech ecosystems toward shared goals. For example, they foster local nonprofits and universities working with local companies to understand the technical experiences and skills that they must equip students with to be successful in the workplace. They convene local incubator and entrepreneur support organizations with local investors to identify ways to bridge funding gaps for female tech entrepreneurs.
Reboot Representation is a partnership of leading tech companies that pools corporate funding toward nonprofit programs in alignment with their shared goal to double the number of Black, Latina, and Native American women graduating with computing degrees by 2025—and at the same time creates a place for companies to share best practices and learnings from their own, individual efforts to diversify the industry.
What advice do you have for young women beginning jobs in tech?
Find a way to apply your skills in the workplace to advance your values in the world. For example, I’m a researcher by training. My graduate work focused on links between tech and economic development. As a researcher, my approach is to use data and evidence to dream up strategies to drive systemic, structural change in society. I’ve always looked for opportunities that leverage my social science skillset with my passion for understanding different people’s lived experiences and cultures in service of a better world. And it’s okay if you’re not quite sure what that’s going to look like for you. One role can lead to another.
