Agilian antiracism self audit

A colleague of mine recently posted a Fast Company article about the failure of big tech to turn promises and monetary investments to fight Anti-Black racism into meaningful changes at their companies.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers are not real good. In fact, as we all knew they would be, the numbers are terrible.

Our tech company Agilian is miniscule compared to the “big five”, but as an antiracist company, we’re committed to disrupting the status quo of white supremacy culture in technology. Since diverse teams do better work than monocultural teams, and since the best clients love the diversity of consultants we provide, it’s a business imperative at Agilian that white people (especially white, straight, cis, managers) like me leave our cultural inheritance of white supremacy outside the doors of the company, preferably in the dustbin of history when possible.

In our experience, this creates a safer, more creative, healthier place for everybody to do their best work and live their best lives.

And who doesn’t want that?

We aspire and promise to be antiracist, and this means if (or when) we make mistakes, we clean them up with alacrity and rigor.

In Silicon Valley terms, Agilian has been running a four year lean experiment in corporate tech Antiracism. I’m sharing this analysis in hopes you find it helpful or inspiring in your own antiracist work.

Here’s what the company looks like so far:

Agilian has 14 full time employees. There are four of us in management today. The graphs above show how our employees and our management line up in terms of race and pronouns.

It’s worth noting that at Agilian all of our employees are knowledge workers. We have deep roots in the District of Columbia, but in the past year with remote work becoming more the norm, our geographic footprint is now spread across the continental United States.

For reference in the National Capital region where we mainly hire the population is about 10% Asian, 25% Black, 16% LatinX, and 45% white.

The company on the other hand is 30% Asian (including both categories we showed) 36% Black and 36% white.

So, first things first?

Dang, we are kicking the ass of the big five! And we didn’t have to spend $3.8 Billion to do it. We don’t use quotas. We’re not paying diversity based recruiting fees. We’re not sacrificing quality of work. If anything, we’re working circles around our competition and having fun together doing it.

Woot! As my colleague said to me when she looked at this chart, this is something to celebrate.

The second big question it begs is, why are we doing well at hiring and retaining Black and South Asian folks, while doing so poorly at hiring LatinX folks?

I think it’s actually two sides of the same coin. Much of the hiring we do comes from personal and professional referrals by the other people at Agilian. We’ve reached enough of a critical mass of Black and South Asian employees, clients and partners at Agilian that these two communities have a sustainable, self selected pipeline of qualified referral applicants who want to work here.

This network didn’t happen accidentally. When I first started hiring in DC 17 years ago I called the handful of Black technologists I knew at the time. I either offered them work or asked them to introduce me to their Black techie friends that were looking for work and hired the folks we thought were best suited to the tasks at hand. We’ve nurtured and invested in these relationships consistently.

Over the years, this has created a virtuous cycle for us. When Black or South Asian applicants come through our interviewing and onboarding process they will meet somebody who looks like them in a position of responsibility during the interview process.

In truth, we just haven’t created that kind of virtuous cycle with the LatinX tech community yet, and honestly it was in my blindspot until I did this audit, so that’s something we’re going to work on.

Lastly before we move on from Employees and Management, we also measured pronouns, because because I wanted to confirm that that our gender balance was as good as I thought it was (it is). I also wanted to brag that half of our management team are amazing, talented, and inspiring Black Women which, it should be obvious, is a huge competitive advantage for Agiian in our efforts to be an Antiracist consulting company.

So those were the easy charts. The next group of measures weren’t as great for us.

Agilian’s engagement teams are staffed with about half employees and half contractors. I wanted to see what our numbers look like if we include contractors in the reporting.

As I suspected, (and as you can see) the percentage of white people in general (and white men in particular) we engage significantly increases when we include these independent contractors in the audit.

I’m not too disturbed by that though, because even with the bigger sample, and the influx of white men we’re still basically in line with the geographic region we’re in (with the notable exception of LatinX contractors in addition to employees.)

What disturbs me more are the last charts regarding technical roles. Even with 50% Black management and 28-36% Black employees Agilian only has two Black people in technical roles. We’re gonna need to do better there, too.

Takeaways from the Data:

Here are my takeaways. Please let me know what you think down in the comments if you want!

Things that are working:

1.) Being explicit and public in our commitment to antiracism works

2.) Creating a virtuous cycle of referrals and a company where people want to invite their friends

3.) Finding clients that value and appreciate diversity and who themselves are committed to antiracism

4.) Making sure our recruiting sources know and deeply understand that we want to talk to everybody about our openings

Three Areas to improve on:

1.) We need to do a better job of hiring more LatinX colleagues

2.) We need to do a better job of hiring Black techies for technical roles

3.) I didn’t show the data on this, but we also need to do a better job of hiring LGBTQIA+ folks. As the company has grown our percentages of queer colleagues has been dropping and that’s not the direction we want to go.

Anyway, thanks for your time and attention as always. If you or somebody you know wants to come work at a company like Agilian you can always drop me a line on my company email jharvey at agilian.com.