Tech Inclusion Journey

Building Inclusive Cultures Through NCWIT’s Tech Inclusion Journey

Computing is one of the most powerful and influential fields shaping society today, yet women – diverse in race, class, ability, and other intersections – are severely underrepresented. This significantly impedes their power and influence as innovators, leaders, and researchers in shaping technologies of the future. Research clearly shows why decades of traditional diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts have failed to improve this situation. These reasons include an overreliance on “diversity training,” treatment of DEI as a “compliance” issue, implementation of isolated, “one-off” interventions, and use of approaches that imply members from under-represented groups need “fixing.”

To help avoid these traditional DEI pitfalls, NCWIT has developed the Tech Inclusion Journey (TIJ)®, a one-of-a-kind scalable decision-support software platform that enables organizations to implement systemic, sustainable approaches to creating inclusive computing cultures. By embedding evidence-based strategies in an easy-to-use software platform that conveys not only what to do but how to do it, any organization can strategically implement effective change efforts that positively impact outcomes for everyone, not just technical women and other marginalized groups.

The TIJ empowers organizational stakeholders and change leaders with practical strategies to dismantle barriers, attend to the needs of a wide range of intersecting identities, and build inclusive cultures that foster a sense of community and belonging.

Critical to the entire process are Team Consensus Building and Action Planning sessions in which team members compare results, develop a shared understanding, prioritize outcomes, and create a strategic action plan that identifies and equips change leaders at every level.

NCWIT has created versions of the TIJ to serve the breadth of its organizational members.

Corporate Tech Inclusion Journey (TIJ)®

The TIJ upends the longstanding tendency for technical leaders to abdicate responsibility to HR/D&I divisions and instead requires them to take personal ownership and accountability for change.

The platform guides users through a step-by-step process for developing a strategic plan, complete with progress metrics. The three basic elements of the TIJ are:

The Map – the research-backed change model that describes the key areas of culture that need to be addressed to achieve inclusion;
The GPS – the online assessment tool that helps leaders understand how their organizations are performing in each area;
The Route – and the action planning step that helps leaders prioritize and make specific plans for how they will enact change

Outcomes

Numerous NCWIT member companies, ranging from small start-ups to large corporations, have used the TIJ and reported increases in recruitment, retention, and advancement of underrepresented technologists, along with improvement in inclusive culture development, an often overlooked but essential element for sustained change. In pilot studies, efforts guided by the TIJ improved key measures of inclusive culture:

91% of participants reported that their “ability to help create a more inclusive work environment has improved”
86% reported that “it is easier to bring up bias-related topics at work”
96% reported “thinking more about how subtle bias might be occurring at work”

Tech Inclusion Journey for Undergraduate Programs (TIJ-UP)®

The Tech Inclusion Journey® for Undergraduate Programs (TIJ-UP) is an online tool that teams in higher education working to broaden participation in computing (BPC) can use to:

Build a common vision
Identify gaps in knowledge and practices
Improve communication and coordination
Prioritize goals
Develop an actionable strategic plan
Connect to NCWIT resources

The TIJ-UP is best suited for 4-year undergraduate computing programs. NCWIT’s Higher Ed Team recently initiated work on a multi-year grant focused on enhancing resources and tools—including the TIJ-UP—for community and technical colleges.

The TIJ-UP is based on the NCWIT Undergraduate System Model, a research-based framework that guides efforts to broaden participation in undergraduate computing. The model’s six interdependent focus areas depict the “system” of an undergraduate program, and each area includes research-based strategies and practices for implementing systemic change.

A graphic of the NCWIT Undergraduate System Model

Testimonials from TIJ-UP Users:

That TIJ-UP tool is great…There were a lot of general things I knew we should be doing that didn’t have a structure around it and the tool…really helped provide a framework and a structure about how to have these conversations and to give discrete objectives that we could aim for in how to make incremental changes that don’t sound so scary that can get us to the right direction. [NCWIT] gave us the tools we needed to make the changes we wanted.
The structure, the TIJ setup, made it very easy for me to do [BPC work].
Our default as a department, when there’s a problem to be solved, is normally to start something new. One of the valuable things from … the TIJ-UP is … that maybe there are existing efforts that you can tap into, there are things you’re already doing that you can do more of.
There’s a lot of latitude, you can decide which order you want to go through the modules. There’s flexibility but enough structure that I know what to do…we know exactly what we need to do. It’s been great!
One of the real values in this whole process is the designation of space and time to just reflect on what it is that we’re actually doing and not what we think we’re doing. The questions made us think about what we’re doing in ways that I don’t think we would have on our own, so that was all super valuable.

Start Your Journey Today