CAREERS AND RECRUITMENT
© 2018 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
Mentoring for diversity in technology
Maggie Werner-Washburne
Psychosocial mentoring for both students and managers can help people from different backgrounds
develop into a team and a community.
F
or science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (STEM) students, there are
two major types of mentors: research or scientific mentors and, if they can find one, psychosocial mentors. Psychosocial mentors help
students, and even professionals, learn how to
reframe experiences, deal with people, and be
resilient in their lives. My mentoring ideas have
come from my own experiences with mentors,
some good and some not so good; from what I
learned backpacking for almost five years after
getting my English degree and before finding
my path to graduate school and becoming a
scientist; from having a profound love for science and creativity; and from my belief that
Albert or Alberta Einstein might be a student
living anywhere, including in New Mexico. I
have not studied mentoring as much as I have
mentored. My passion has always been to work
with students over the long term.
My mentoring approach is not about convincing anyone of their path or how to be
inclusive, but about allowing students to find
the magic inside themselves and helping senior
managers to see diversity and understand their
role in achieving it in a new way. My mentoring program for students is based on a set of
universal principles that allow people from different backgrounds to develop into a team and
a community. It is designed to teach them how
to reframe experience, and to develop insight,
creativity, and a sense of connection to their
lives. Psychosocial mentors complement what
research mentors do. Students learn science
in the laboratory, and ethics and resilience
from psychosocial mentors. For the purposes
of this article, diversity covers gender, race,
and ethnicity, as well as different skills and
backgrounds. By inclusion, I mean bringing
Maggie Werner-Washburne is in the
Department of Biology at the University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.
e-mail: maggieww@unm.edu
individuals from diverse groups together to
successfully build and sustain diverse teams.
In mentoring for diversity in technology, it is
important to keep in mind that there is an ecology to every business environment and an ecology to hiring. A mentor would love to be able
to touch each node in the network—from the
hiring officials to the manager, co-workers, and
other team members—to make the team work
well, but most often, we are able to work only
with students as they wind their way toward a
career. In this article, I will discuss: (i) diversity, and how far we are from achieving it; (ii)
principles to guide reframing, or looking at an
event or a situation from a different perspective to learn the most from it, creativity, and
resilience; (iii) how in-group dynamics can be
barriers to diversity; and (iv) achieving diversity by connecting hubs.
Since civil rights legislation was passed in
the 1960s, Americans have attempted to make
less common the non-random composition of
groups of people based on race and ethnicity,
equating an increase in diversity within groups
with an increase in equality of opportunity. But
somewhere, between the classrooms, homes,
workplaces, rooms where confidential hiring decisions are made, and young people
themselves, we have not achieved this dream.
Because the problem has proven so difficult,
achieving diversity and inclusion are seen as
wicked problems, in that they persist for long
periods of time and have social, political, and/
or cultural aspects that make them appear not
to have solutions1.
Technology needs diversity
Achieving a level of diversity in companies
makes good business sense on many levels.
Diverse teams have been shown to be more
successful2. Having a variety of perspectives
allows a group to solve hard problems3,4.
Finally, a workforce that represents our nation’s
diversity speaks more easily to all stakeholders.
NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY VOLUME 36 NUMBER 1 JANUARY 2018
Given these positives, the fact that we haven’t
achieved diversity, says: (i) achieving diversity
is a wicked problem; (ii) we don’t yet know the
answers or we would have fixed it by now; and
(iii) we need to look more creatively and deeply
at what the barriers might be.
Know our assumptions. As mentors, knowing
our assumptions is key to success. For example,
if we ascribe all the problems students have
to the impact of poor high schools, we limit
their futures. Poor high schools make college
tougher at first, but a smart, motivated person
can learn. Many of us work in subject areas
distinct from our college majors, so we know,
once fear of failure is overcome, it is possible
to learn entirely new disciplines. When faced
with a new situation, some people tend to
be quiet, and a quiet person is often wrongly
assumed to be less intelligent. This barrier can
be overcome if the quiet person knows it is a
barrier and the interviewer becomes aware of
their own assumptions. There are many more
assumptions that each of us must uncover to
be successful mentors and achieve our goal of
working with mentees to become resilient and
have valuable careers and lives.
Diversity won’t happen unless everyone
‘wants’ it. I recently asked a group of biotech
leaders about diversity training at their companies. While everyone had had this training,
essentially no one could remember it as being
fun. Honestly, the only way to achieve change
is to make it compelling, for example, by saying, “Be on my team; we are going to discover
amazing things.” Diversity isn’t always easy
but it can be fun, and the sooner we agree to
making it our goal, develop trust, and communicate honestly and openly, the sooner we
will achieve it. Getting feelings about diversity out in the open and talking with people
who have addressed them is the best way to
begin to reframe the discussion and see what
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CAREERS AND RECRUITMENT
© 2018 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
someone is unkind to you, you have immediate positives: you aren’t them, and you aren’t
married to them! That seems funny on the
face of it and gives us a moment to realize
that we choose how to respond, that we do
not have to get in the dirt with the person.
Principle 2 helps us to not accept the role of
victim and see that any failure, when seen as
a teacher, is not a failure. It helps us lead in a
positive direction more quickly.
x
i
x
ii
iii
Figure 1 Three possible outcomes from starting with a mixture of beans: (i) beans sorted by type; (ii)
mixed beans; and (iii) a group of white beans. “i” and “iii” are energetically (entropically) unfavorable
and require energy input to maintain. “i” is the grouping we see in our cities, in middle and high
schools, and in our social life. “iii” represents the top levels of government, academia, and business.
are the even deeper barriers to diversity and
inclusion.
‘Fixing’ mentees or ‘adapting’ to the environment. Many mentoring approaches are
criticized for trying to ‘fix’ a student or starting with a deficit model that sees poverty, disabilities, and other characteristics as negatives.
In contrast, my goals in mentoring are to help
a student (i) know their strengths; (ii) learn
to take a moment to read a situation; and (iii)
quickly reframe it to make it work. In working
with students, I am reminded of my own experience moving from South America to interior
Alaska in my early 20s. It was a huge shock to
be cold. I had to learn about clothing, heating with wood, hypothermia, eating food we
hunted, and the incredible experience of life
at –60 °F. Success was about adapting. It was
also about finding out what I was capable of
doing, knowing the risks and challenges, and
learning from them. It was exciting and risky
and helped me tremendously to survive and
thrive as a faculty member and scientist. Thus,
what I do in mentoring is not about fixing deficiencies but about letting students and others
discover or rediscover their own abilities: leadership, creativity, critical thinking, resilience,
and emotional intelligence.
Principles as a guide to resilience. In mentoring, my goal is to produce honest, empathetic,
creative students who know what their passion is and how to follow it. A part of this is a
114
focus on several principles and the concept of
working as a team. In this process, the students
practice reframing, empathy, and creativity,
and most come to see that they can grow the
source of real innovation and creativity that is
inside themselves.
Principle 1: know your heart. Amazingly few
young people have thought about what they
really love to think about. They may have chosen a college major because a family member
suggested it. Knowing your heart is being clear
about what your values are, what you love to
think about, and where you will put your foot
next—not where you will be in five years. It is
a life-long practice of being aware that we want
to do what we are doing. Once a person knows
their heart, they are self-motivated, tend to
become happier, and longer-term mentoring
can start.
Principle 2: look for the positive or the blessing in everything. This principle teaches
leadership. It should force us to stop and get a
complete view of a situation. It doesn’t mean
‘ignore’ or ‘negate’ your feelings. But when
you have an experience that seems negative
or is painful, identify not just the negative but
also the positive. This principle encourages
us to see the complexity of things, so that we
can choose a positive path forward. Principle
2 helps with many different situations, from
a bad boss or a stock loss to overt racism
and microaggressions. As an example, when
Principle 3: embrace who you are and bring
it to the table. We all have two major, personal narratives. First, we are the end of a
successful lineage of human beings who sacrificed and loved and won and lost so that we
could be here—our family stories. The second personal narrative is from our birth to
the present. That is an important narrative to
have available—like an elevator speech—that
frames our personal characteristics. Because
every human being has each of these narratives, it provides a shared space to begin to
talk together before we focus on our individual characteristics or differences. This is
the diversity principle.
Forming diverse and inclusive teams
The three characteristics of a great team, in
addition to having a common goal, are: (i)
good, honest communication; (ii) willingness to watch each other’s backs; and (iii) no
unnecessary emergencies. If a group agrees
to these characteristics, it takes a great deal
of drama out of discussions about how to
make a team work. Not everyone can mentor this way, and I do not believe it is possible
for research mentors to work this way with
their students. But if you can—or if someone
on your team or in your corporation can—it
can lead to long-term success. The principles,
which anyone can devise, work when they are
universals that form a structure for deeper
discussions during challenging times.
In-group dynamics can be barriers to
diversity and inclusion. As much as we can
work individually, inclusion requires the
group to function.
All things being equal, the difficulty we
have in forming diverse and inclusive teams
is frequently based on the ease with which
we all form in-groups with ‘like’ people5,6.
This social dynamic is undoubtedly an evolutionary characteristic, but if we believe
that diverse teams are better, we have to be
conscious of who is in our in-group. We hire
for comfort and prestige7. We choose teams
based on ease of communication. We often
ignore or discount people with vastly different backgrounds. Knowing our tendency
to form in- and out-groups presents a huge
VOLUME 36 NUMBER 1 JANUARY 2018 NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY
© 2018 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
CAREERS AND RECRUITMENT
opportunity to create change. If we know the
barriers to forming successful, diverse teams,
we can discover ways to overcome them.
When I talk to business people and scientists in charge of hiring, I often start by talking
about beans (Fig. 1). We aren’t emotional about
beans and they can teach us about human communities. If we start with a mixture of beans, we
have at least three possible outcomes: (i) beans
sorted by types; (ii) mixed beans; and (iii) a
group of white beans. As scientists, we know
that “i” and “iii” are energetically (entropically)
unfavorable and require energy input to maintain. But “i” is the grouping we see in our cities,
in middle and high schools, and in our social
life. The white beans in “iii” represent the top
levels of government, academia, and business.
There are reasons why these groupings
persist, but I hypothesize that they persist
for understandable reasons: humans want to
be with people who are like them. It’s easier
and no one asks you why you eat this or that,
etc. This is also sustained by the cost of housing in different places and other reasons. The
white bean group is sustained, I hypothesize,
by proximity, shared cultural values, and socioeconomic status.
In-group members may be unaware of their
group, but the edges are clearly seen if you are
in an out-group. Information is passed almost
invisibly within the in-group but out-group
individuals ask themselves, “What are the
rules? Who has the power? How do you get
and keep power?” Once an in-group is formed,
prestige bias leads to equating in-group characteristics as ‘good’ and out-group characteristics as ‘bad’ or ‘less than’, even by members of
the out-group. In-group members may not be
aware of the prestige afforded them.
In-group/out-group dynamics operate all
the time in research, teaching, hiring, and
other workplace environments. This tendency
to associate in like-groups, where we are comfortable, has probably been with humans from
very early days, but if we truly believe that, at
work, diverse groups are better, we need to
spend more time working together to understand what can motivate us, without guilt or
anger, to want to move and enjoy moving
between outcomes “i” and “ii” (Fig. 1).
If we want to go easily from “i” to “ii”, then
we need to find ways to have in-groups be
more family-like, and be much broader and
more inclusive. Finding examples where
this has worked is important. The movie 42,
about Jackie Robinson breaking the color
barrier in Major League Baseball, provides
an important example of someone at a high
level—Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager
Branch Rickey—reaching out to a person in
an out-group and the process of opening up
the team’s players and staff to include Jackie.
Both Rickey and Robinson were emotionally
intelligent and committed, and wanted it to
work. Robinson was a hero, but my favorite
line in the movie occurs when Jackie asks
Branch why he brought him into the team
and Branch replies, “You made me love baseball again.” Successfully diversifying in-groups
needs to include benefits in both directions.
Achieving diversity by connecting hubs
Our universities are not yet educating enough
underrepresented minorities and women in
some fields to create diversity by mass action,
or increases in the overall representation of
underrepresented students. Thus, I propose
to increase diversity at a greater rate by connecting people who are ‘hubs’, who know
many people at different levels of careers. In
my life, Mary Clutter, former assistant director for the biological sciences at the National
Science Foundation, and Clifton Poodry,
senior science education fellow at the Howard
NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY VOLUME 36 NUMBER 1 JANUARY 2018
Hughes Medical Institute, have been hubs.
They provided advice and connections, and
alerted other people to me during my career.
While hub interactions are what maintain
old boys’ networks in the white bean sector,
in fact, with hubs that embody inclusion, it is
a mechanism to open up in-group status to
more people.
If I were in biotech and looking for talent,
I would have a list of hub people to contact,
including faculty and staff at undergraduate
and graduate schools and in government and
business. We have not activated a hub network
across cultures in this country, and it shows.
We need more extensive conversations among
hub people of all sorts—from universities to
community colleges to biotech companies. I
would invite hub people to give presentations,
because every business needs some of these
people at every level. It is how Branch Rickey
found Jackie Robinson, and it may be how you
find your best talent. This is an exciting and
challenging time and all of us need to make
it fun.
COMPETING FINANCIAL INTERESTS
The author declares no competing financial interests.
Published online 18 December 2017; https:// dx.doi.
org/10.1038/nbt.4025
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