Battery Member Robin Hauser Reynolds Screens Award-Winning Documentary

Battery Member Robin Hauser Reynolds Screens Award-Winning Documentary Diversifying tech benefits everyone, she says.

CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap has had an incredible run since it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015. The film, directed by Battery member Robin Hauser Reynolds, went on to play at numerous U.S. and international venues to great acclaim, winning the audience choice award at the Mill Valley film festival. It was screened at White House as part of the Initiative for Educational Excellence for African Americans. It was chosen as a U.S. Department of State American Showcase selection, touring across 16 different countries, including Iran and South Korea. Private screenings were held at corporate giants like Google, Microsoft, Capital One and the Mastercard Headquarters.

Why did the film resonate with so many? The lack of diversity in tech has become a deeply embedded cultural problem, Hauser Reynolds explained, and it was also one that hit home. When her daughter began studying computer science in college, she was one of two women in a class of 35 students, and she told her mom that she considered dropping out because she didn’t feel supported and that the guys in the class had greater skills. This triggered Hauser Reynolds to take action, given that her daughter’s experience was not atypical. Droves of women dropping out of technical programs translates to a massive downward economic trend in the years to come. “I realized that we would stall out and not be able to fill the jobs necessary for tech industry growth by 2020. If we are only drawing from half of the population, the American economic future is at stake if we don’t get more women and people of color into the industry,” she said.

In the film, Hauser Reynolds traces how our culture has perpetuated the notion that coding is just for men. She narrates a history of tech development, interspersed with interviews with authorities ranging from the White House chief technology officer to teenage girls participating in after-school coding programs. While the title addresses the gender gap, the film also dives into why computer programming is dominated by a certain demographic. “It’s not a conscious thing,” Hauser Reynolds said. “Startups run out of the fraternity culture. Human nature dictates that we hire people like us and we all do it. We feel most comfortable around people who are like us and it is hard to break out of that.”

She advocates diversifying interview panels at companies and deliberately hiring candidates from different socioeconomic backgrounds from the interviewers. This isn’t just redressing grievances—it has been proven to increase revenue and improve the office environment for everyone, she said. Most important is to safeguard a sense of merit, and avoid quotas. “Women and people of color want to be hired out of merit, not because someone is checking off a box. There are plenty of qualified people, but you have to look for them.” She cited a 2011 Harvard Business Review study that showed that just adding one woman to a team of men raises the collective I.Q.

After her film screenings, Hauser Reynolds said that discussions focus on what startups and tech companies gain from diversity, and the mistakes that have been made because of the dominance of one group. “Your average dropout entrepreneur from Stanford is concerned about getting his dry cleaning from his phone and having food delivered. But when you hire people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they start to tackle problems like clean drinking water, healthcare, and applying technologies to diverse populations.” She mentioned how so many technologies were biased toward particular users. The first automobile airbag was designed by a group of middle-aged men who didn’t take into account different dimensions of the human body. This resulted in the initial product disproportionately killing women and children. The first voice activation technology never tested with a female voice, so women couldn’t operate these devices. Motion-tracking webcams couldn’t initially pick up dark skin. So with more women and people of color involved, she said, “you get more innovation, intelligence, and products that serve greater breadth of humanity.”