Building Inclusive Teams Through Allyship

Introduction: Di Ciruolo is a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging strategist focusing on tech and biotech teams. She is the Head of Inclusion at Jambb and she owns Di Ciruolo Consulting where she teaches companies how to build workplaces where employees can bring their whole selves to work. She also teaches leadership courses on developing inclusive policies that are impactful throughout the employee lifecycle.

Jocelyn: Welcome!

Di: ​​Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you today.

Jocelyn: Me too. You currently work for Jambb, but I wanted to start with talking about your journey to get to where you are now.

Di: My DE&I journey is much the way everybody else's journey starts with me bumping into these boundaries that exist within society. I'd been in foster care since I was three. I am Latin. My father has brown skin. That was important to know because it was on all of my paperwork, which very much impacted the way that I was growing up because it impacted the way people saw me.

But when I grew up in foster care, I was bumping into those boundaries a lot, and I was understanding things from an adult perspective and watching them from the outside much earlier than I think we do otherwise. So when I aged out of foster care, I was homeless and I didn't have anywhere to go. In the state of Massachusetts, you age out of foster care at about 20 years old, I think now it's 22. 

So it's 2004 and I have nowhere to go. A couple of my friends were living in Atlanta at the time and they were just like, “Di, why don't you just move to Atlanta? You know, it's cheaper to live here and you'll love it.”

So I made the decision to do that the way you only can, when you're 20 years old, I packed up all of my belongings into a laundry basket and moved.

When I got to Atlanta, the culture was entirely different between Boston and Atlanta, the demographics were entirely different. It was a lot more diverse than anything I'd seen before. It was a way to experience race from a different perspective.

I managed to put myself in therapy. I got a lot better. I went through college at Georgia state. I got a degree in anthropology; specifically, gender, race, class, African-American studies, the diaspora.

When I finished college, I assumed the world was going to just be my oyster because that's where I had been told the goalpost was when you graduate college, “Di, you're going to be able to do anything you want in this world.” Absolutely false, obviously, right?

So I'm doing everything I've been told is going to make me successful. And then they moved the goalpost again. The anger, the rage you feel when you become one of the 3% of foster kids to graduate from college, and then they say, oh, well, you know, it's not a top 10 school.

Eventually I ended up in People Ops. It was seeing all of these places from the outside and how wrongly they were doing things. After graduating from college, I've been in People since then, because of that.

Jocelyn: Talking about your path to get to where you are today. You talk about a struggle of feeling like the goalpost was moved. And I think a lot of people know that or they feel like they went through college and they were given empty promises of what it was going to look like after. What you've learned in college doesn't always transfer to what's actually happening in the workplace later. And so I'm curious to know what you did to break into tech because that's a question I think a lot of people have. So after facing that adversity, how did you get started in tech?

Di: There's a lot of gatekeeping in tech and I think it's important that we keep expanding. I want to get rid of these barriers to entry and expand our inclusion. Because if you even think about this from the 10,000 foot view, which is that a tech education can take somebody from poverty, like me, into middle-class. You know what I mean? So there's a lot of gatekeeping around that where I think we need to talk about this and we need to put systems around educating people into this field. That's what needs to be happening. There's a huge gap that exists between the current retraining options that exist and putting people into actual tech roles. And I want to see more work there too.

Jocelyn: You’ve spoken about all the different biases that come along the way and the gatekeeping that happens. And I think one of the things that I've been really challenging lately is the years of experience. And of course the university requirements for jobs, and some companies are starting to take it off, but I feel like when hiring happens, there's still that preference, we need to remove it from the job postings and job description requirements, but there is still that gatekeeping. So how do you think companies stop doing that?

Di: They need to have an awareness of where these barriers to entry are because when people come to me and they say, of course we care about diversity. Of course, we care about inclusion. I asked them about their recruiting programs and shockingly, they aren't sending their recruiters to HBCUs, or if they are, they're only aware of Howard. So it's like even the stuff that we are doing, even the stuff that we're gaining an awareness of, we are still only doing at level performative.

Also, when you post a job on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will go ahead and they'll figure out what 10 things are must haves for you. And then they'll go ahead and screen people out. So you have to be aware of that and remove those barriers because you don’t need your AI doing that. 

Jocelyn: Absolutely, you wrote a book, Ally Up, that just came out in August, tell us about it.

Di: I wrote a book because I'm hearing things like, “Of course we care about diversity, but we don't want to lower our standards.” And every person would say it to me, like it was the first time I'd ever heard it. So for me, I started writing the book Ally Up because I wanted to share what was happening in my field of tech. I wanted to stop having these same conversations with people who I felt really wanted to understand how to be leading people in the right way.

I kept getting called in about hiring. People would look around and they'd be like, okay, we're essentially monochromatic here. We need to hire somebody to work on our diversity and inclusion only in hiring.

And I'd be like, okay, cool. Let's talk about all the problems you're having in hiring, but let's also talk about the way that you handle promotions.

And then people will say, oh, no, no, no. The way that we promote is entirely by the numbers. And then you go to look and actually it's entirely subjective. Even when they're using numbers, a lot of times the values that are being assigned to things are also subject to bias, biases that are literally being put on people by middle management.

So my point with this book wasn't to just address hiring, it was to address all the spots in the employee life cycle, where biases are creeping in.

It says, here are your action items at the end of every chapter. It's easy, it's totally manageable. Start to finish using stories of people who are actually on the ground. I wanted something that people could pick up and go, “Okay, I'm convinced that you're right, now let's move.” 

Jocelyn: Going back to your time in Foster care, how does that influence your work?

Di: Something that people come to me with is often “Well Di, If you can do that, that must mean anybody can do it.” And it's literally the opposite of that because nobody is coming up this ladder after me. So I guess what it does is it makes me look out for people. It makes me know about things that other people don't know about. It shows me places where there will be barriers to entry for people like me. It's lived experience, you know? But, otherwise it's the same trauma responses as everybody else.

Jocelyn: What would you say that employers should be thinking about in how to support employees who were previously in foster care? Are there things you think they could do differently?

Di: Yeah, for sure. Definitely be thinking about what you think “Best” means. A lot of times when I'm talking about hiring and people say, “We just want the best.” But what does that mean? Well, it's this many years of experience. It's these schools in particular. Y'all, I couldn't even afford to apply to reach schools because I didn't know if I was going to get in and I couldn't waste the money on the application fee. Because that was food and rent. And it's so important for people who are running businesses to understand that when they say, I just want the best that they are excluding everybody who isn't like you.

Jocelyn: Thank you. Switching gears a little bit, but I think it's really related. Another group that struggled of course, historically, but particularly during the pandemic are working moms. And so I'm wondering, as a working mom yourself and somebody who's been home with your kids for the last year and a half while working and writing a book, what do you think employers can do to bring working moms and also caregivers back to the workforce? 

Di: Yeah. It's something that we're really focusing on in tech because over 3 million women left the workforce because of COVID because of caregiver responsibilities, whether that's children or family caregiving responsibilities. And we are going to be working for years to claw back that equity. So the way that we think about that is going to be crucially important.

We need to be thinking about things in a different way, things that are going to become important like flex work, training people into different careers maybe because those jobs are going. The way that we focus on bringing parents, caregivers, and women in particular back into the workforce is going to need to be innovative.

People will say, “I can't get women or BIPOC into my C suite.” And it's like, can't or are you not addressing any of the actual systemic barriers in place? So sometimes I'll hear, “Women left tech because they want to have babies.” Women are the Canary in the coal mine in tech. We get books that say things like the Canary's dying in the coal mine. Canary needs to lean in more. Then we say things like, oh, we just need to get more Canaries. And no, that's not the answer. What we need to do is address the toxicity of the environment.

Jocelyn: Flexibility is definitely key. The desire to return to the office is really fascinating to me. I just think it's so unnecessary when we've seen success for a year and a half of people operating remotely and understanding that some people might want to go back to the office and giving that option, I think is great. Like you said, the flexibility and I love too what you said about the training of people for new roles, because I think it's such an interesting thing when employers talk about this workforce shortage that I think is just a bunch of baloney. If you're having such a hard time hiring for these positions, you need to do a better job of training people. And I absolutely think that's an employer's responsibility to have ongoing learning. And so many employers don't feel that it's their responsibility.

Di: Which, how do you plan to keep all of your employees in your specific work? What's your retention look like if you don't care about that, what's your retention like if you don't promote from within, because you think all of those people aren't smart enough to do bigger jobs.

Jocelyn: Right? But did you give them the opportunity to learn, or did you say, pay for it yourself and go do it on your own time?

Di: And you do it on your own time and maybe I'll give you a 2% raise. I'm like, nobody wants that anymore. All of that stuff, all of that toxicity is gone. It's over. And if we can't figure that out as people who manage people, then we don’t deserve to be in this position because if we have to lean on the powerlessness of our workers in order to advance or in order to grow, then we don't deserve to be in business. That's true for all of us in tech, we've got the money, we need to pay people. It’s true for every single field, we understand it well in tech, I hope the rest of you catch up with us because people aren't willing to work for free or poverty wages.

Jocelyn: Absolutely. Well, I want to circle back to your book before we wrap up and anything else you’re promoting. Where can people buy Ally Up?

Di: Yes. So if you all are interested, the book is a very easy read, it's about two hours worth of reading. At the end of every chapter, I've got like a TLDR (too long, didn't read) I talk like this as you can clearly see. Of course I could just sass you from cover to cover, but what you're going to actually find in there is that I am not the main voice in this. I will tell you stories from my perspective as they happened or DEI war stories as they happened. Because the work is about showing you what existed or what's going on or what you can do differently.

I have a whole list in there of BIPOC community members to follow, books to read, podcasts to listen to, movies to watch. I wanted the book to be “Di you're right. We need to do better. What's next?” 

Jocelyn: Thank you so much for everything. You can find Di’s book Ally Up online anywhere books are sold. And her course, Allyship & Inclusion for Teams can be found here.