Name: Twitter’s Diversity Leader Doesn’t Look the Part, but He's Still Making a Difference
Uploaded: 2016-07-26
Duration: 4 min 45 s
Description: He shares how during Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference.

I'm just gonna start off with the tough question, the obvious one that everyone wants to know. When you were hired, it was widely criticized, because you are the head of diversity, but you look like everybody else in tech. So, how can a white man increase diversity? So, I would love to hear your response to that criticism. Yeah, well, thank you. I really appreciate the question, it's something But obviously thought a lot about and had been thinking a lot about. The way I look at it is that a diversity leader is part of a team. So I have a team that works with me, and I looked at our whole entire organization as part of the effort at Twitter around inclusion and diversity. And yes, I haven't walked certain paths. And yes, the color of my skin is not mutable. It is what it is. But you can be part of the conversation and you can listen and you can learn and you could take constructively the sentiments that were expressed and some of those prospectors early on and learn from them and say, " how can I absorb that information to inform my work going forward to make a difference So I learned from it, I listened to it and I moved forward and I relied on the people at Twitter around me to come together with me to make a difference. Because we know that we're all in this together, and if we look at it divisively, progress will never be made whether it comes to social Social justice issues or quality issues in the work place or inclusion in general. So what did you learn from that push back initially? I learned that it's important to listen to other people. To not presume based on your own experiences Is either professionally or personally that you necessarily have all the answers, that to be effective in this work you have to create vehicles and opportunities for people to speak with you, to convey what they believe, they need rather than to presume that your own experience no matter how well intended you might be or How open minded you may be, or how much you believe in equality, or issues, or inclusion, but you have to listen to others and bring them together to help inform your perspectives moving forward. So what I learned was, you need to listen. You need to learn and you have to be willing to recognize that good intention is not always enough. The company is not as diverse, as many tech companies struggle with. It's mostly white, it's mostly men but also Twitter hit a lot of respect on this because their user base is very diverse and their management does not really reflect the user base. So tell me about the initiatives that you're putting in place To change that. Yes I think one of the things that we're really focused on is empowering and leveraging those diverse voices that are on our platform. We recognize that inclusion lives on Twitter, meaning that people come to Twitter to exercise their voice, to become a part of something, to learn, to form a movement. And that diversity on our platform is amazing. And is something that we realize that if inclusion lives on Twitter the platform It needs to meet up with inclusion in the workplace. Once those two things fuse more fully, then something even more rich happens. So in terms of what we're doing in the workplace, is being really mindful of particularly senior hires that we're making. So for example, we're very focused on the diversity of our board, as our executive board chairman has said, and as Jack Dorsey our CEO has said, We've made four board placements in the last two months. Two of them are women. One of them is a woman of color, an African American woman, Deborah Lee, who leads BET. Our new Chief Marketing Officer is a woman who joined us from American Express. Our new Head of Corporate Communications, also a woman who joined us. And so, there's mindfulness around executive hiring because we know That leadership and role modeling from the top really does matter. And we're also trying very hard to empower our employee resource groups to leverage our platform to help reach the communities that they're most connected to. One is TwitterOpen which is our LGBT employee group. Which really created a great presence on our platform. Around the events of Orlando. Creating a sense of community and solidarity around moments that really matter to them as a community but to the country more largely. So how does that translate then to your actual make up of your workforce. Yeah. So I think a couple fo things. Whether it's Twitter open doing that or it's BlackBirds, the african- american employee group Recreating, resurrecting if you will, the hashtag emoji of this multi- skintone black fist that was first used during Black History Month. What those things do is recognize that when we engage externally, whether it's on the platform or with another organization that's doing good Not only do we support that organization's work. But we create a sense of community and solidarity with our own employees who feel very engaged, very proud to be working at Twitter. And it helps us demonstrate to the people who are interested in Twitter that this is a place where you can belong and really feel inspired by your work. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

He shares how during Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference.