How will you curate your 2023 reading list?
As a tech professionals, we are constantly learning and growing in our career. But have you considered the impact that the authors you choose to read can have on your thinking and perspectives? By seeking out diverse voices, you can broaden your perspectives and challenge your assumptions.
Let’s explore the benefits of reading diverse authors and how it can enrich your professional and personal life.
Use your critical eye
Take a minute to look at your latest reading list. Blog posts, news articles, tech books, novels, comics… How many of these writers are men? How many live in the US? How many are white?
When did you last get a new perspective on the world, through the author’s eye?
In the early 90s, Rudine Sims Bishop published her essay “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors”, where she explains, “Literature transforms the human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation.”
What about technical reading?
It is no secret that technology is led by white dudes and that it is causing a lot of problems. Apple’s first release of their expensive Health app could monitor your inhaler usage and sodium intake, because “with Health, you can monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in,” yet you cannot monitor your period, something that 24% of the world’s population needs to do.
This is just an example of what happens when a tech product is developed by a group with limited diversity. Scientific research is generally about men, and the rest of humanity is expected to adapt.
(To be a bit more precise, “white men” is actually about western Caucasian cisgender heterosexual non-disabled men between 30 and 50 years of age, and the list goes on, but I didn’t want the whole paragraph is be a list of adjectives. Let’s agree that is does not represent the majority of human beings on this planet.)
In a line of work where creativity is indispensable, where thinking out of the box is a way of life, there is no better way to get out of your box than by reading other people’s points of view.
Reading diverse authors can help you understand and empathize with the needs and experiences of a broader range of users and clients. This can be particularly important in an industry where the products and services being developed often have a wide-reaching impact on society.
Additionally, reading diverse authors can help you foster a more inclusive and respectful workplace culture, as it can promote understanding and appreciation for the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of your own colleagues.
Overall, reading diverse authors is a valuable and enriching experience for professionals in the tech industry, and can contribute to personal and professional growth.
Quotas and the critical eye
Research shows that setting up quotas for gender equality does not, as some would fear, bring in some under-qualified women, but raises the level by eliminating the under-qualified men who are only here because they are men. This mechanics of society is not in the scope of this article.
But even before you decide to set up quotas, which will probably raise the quality of what you read, start by training your critical eye. You already know how to do that. You have trained it for security since you have stopped opening attachments from strangers and clicking on spammish-looking links: you start by wondering, is this really what I want to do? You train is for fake news: is this really true, what is this person trying to sell? Have you trained it for identifying bias? (It takes a lifetime) What am I looking at, who am I reading, who am I listening to, who are the voices in the media I consume? And then, why so many white men?
After the analysis, you can set yourself some objectives and key results.
A few suggested Key Indicators
I am an engineer, so I have one question left: how do we measure?
Last year, I did not consciously define any target or quota. I picked what I wanted to read by going with the flow, reading things that were suggested by friends, stories I heard about on the various news I follow (this is properly biased in the direction I want), and random bookstore discoveries. Let’s have a look.
Gender
I have been looking into understanding the problems of gender diversity for over ten years. On this ground, let’s say I’m ok.
Let me add that the most technical book I read recently was hard to finish: I can’t bear the arrogance of these white US-American dudes anymore.
Country of origin
I grew up in a country where ethnicity cannot be used for statistics, and guessing people’s ethnicity from looking at Googled pictures is not a good idea, so I chose the author’s country of origin, as found on Goodreads or Wikipedia (I am not a journalist, as you can see).
21 out of 25 books come from the same 3 very western and priviledged countries that are the US, UK and France. Not good.
Meanwhile engineers keep facing terrible biases, mainly in the offer phase of recruitment. I will end the paragraph with this quote:
102. Don’t assume that just because someone comes from a third-world country that […]they never worked on intellectually demanding projects before.
— Mohamed Hazem Abbas, addition to the 100 ways to be an ally to non-white people.
Background, education, religion,…
… sexual orientation, body mass, age, disabilities, mother tongue, the list of ways that one person can vary from the norm is enormous. How deeply do you believe that this is a good thing? How much are you ready to celebrate the diversity in human beings? How much do you want to build your technology for everyone?
Aliénor Latour is a Lead Back-end developer convinced by the Go language striving for simplicity in code and design, co-author of Learn Go with Pocket-Sized Projects. She advocates for diversity in technology and endeavours to learn from wide diversity. She teaches Scottish Country dancing, knits, sews skirts with pockets and reads about linguistics and sociology.
