I'm Sierra and I'm a data entering tech lead at Oculus. I am so excited to speak with all of you today about my personal experiences and some of the ways I have overcome unconscious bias on my own journey. Hopefully, my story will feel relatable for some of you.And at the end of this talk, I will leave you all with some tips and tricks on how to be a little more conscious and more proactive when dealing with bias. So here's a little bit about my story. I grew up in Southern California and my parents were always super supportive. They did a great job of teaching my sister and I that we are capable of anything we set our minds to in high school. I did everything you're supposed to do to get into a good college. I had perfect grades, extracurriculars. I did volunteer work and it all paid off in the spring of 2010. I got an acceptance letter from the Cooper Union in New York City, which also came with a full tuition scholarship. So a few months later I get there and it is way harder than I ever could. Have expected. I really had no idea what I was signing up for when I decided to move thousands of miles or kilometers away. I had to figure out crazy roommates and terrible landlords and just in general how to survive in New York City on a college students budget.

Trust me, you don't want to know how many slices of $1 pizza I ate back then in the midst of all of this craziness, I was doing my best to get settled and make friends. I still remember introducing myself to a classmate on the elevator and mentioning that I was studying chemical engineering. He said to me, you don't look like an engineer. I don't look like an engineer. Sometimes people would respond a little differently and they might say, wow, I thought you were an art student or you know, you really don't dress like an engineer and I'm sure that they all meant well or maybe they were even trying to give me a compliment. But in reality, what they were telling me over and over again was that I didn't look like I belonged, that I didn't look the part. I had to ask myself, what is it, what is it about my appearance that would make someone else decide that I'm not an engineer without actually knowing anything about me. And that was really the first time I started to become aware of unconscious bias, unconscious bias is when we make associations about different qualities and characteristics such as race, gender, age or disability. The hard part is that we all make these judgments without really knowing it.

There are automatic preferences or stereotypes and we don't even realize that we're susceptible to them. Sometimes these biases can hit really hard way beyond a casual comment on the elevator during school. I had gone to one of my professors for help and he told me I was wasting my time trying to become an engineer and I should just quit hearing that, especially from someone who was supposed to be teaching me was completely devastating, especially because I believed him. I thought his advice was because I wasn't smart enough. Thankfully, I didn't give up today. I'm very happy to tell you that that professor and those classmates were all wrong. I am an engineer. I am what an engineer looks like you are, what an engineer looks like. So when bias can come from well intentioned friends and colleagues to just straight up detractors, how do you deal with it? I think it's really important to find a support system. I joined the National Society of Black Engineers or Nesby as the club is known. My freshman year, I made some friends, I learned a lot and eventually I became president of my school's chapter. That's me in the top center picture with some of my classmates at a Nesby conference through Nesby. I also met a man named Wayne who unbeknownst to me would become one of my biggest supporters. He actually had to push me to interview for an internship and the financial. And it was during that internship where I learned two things.

First, I do actually think finance is super interesting, which surprised me a little bit coming from a chemical engineering background. And second, I'm really good at writing SQL queries, all of the tech stuff sort of used to scare me. But I realized through this internship that I was pretty good at it and I guess I just became hooked as graduation was approaching, I had to decide what to do. So I took a risk even though my degree was in chemical engineering and I had been interning in the client services department. I chose to dive into data. Instead, I was proactive and I decided to reach out to the company's product owner and asked him if he would hire me. Fortunately, I did have a reputation as being pretty smart and hard working and I still had Dwayne as one of my supporters. So I was actually able to join the product team first as an intern and then as a full time business analyst as the company grew and our tech stack expanded. I also taught myself Python and I transitioned to being a data engineer building ETL pipelines. That was my first step into the world of data. When I was ready for my next challenge, I left to become a consultant with Element 22 focusing on data management and technology for banks.

I worked on some really great projects like designing a cloud data lake and setting up data governance programs. Then Arius, where I am today reached out to me and recruited me to become their very first data engineer. So a quick few quick facts about Arius, we were founded back in 2014, about five years before I joined And we're headquartered here in New York City where I still live today. You can see a few of the companies that we work with on the right side here. And basically what we do is validate millions of data points every day for them. Some of you might even recognize us from the inc 5000 list as the fastest growing fintech company in the US last year. So where do I fit into all of this today? As a data entering tech lead, my team and I are building a real time streaming data platform that utilizes Kafka as our data access and movement layer and snowflake for an analytical database. Now that you know how I got here, let's look at a few examples from my past of what unconscious bias looks like. Then I will share some helpful tips that I wish I knew a little earlier in my career. And as I was becoming a manager for the first time, did you catch what happened there? If the team members are all equal. Why do you think Eric asked Amy to share her notes and follow up on the action items?

You would hope the answer is because she volunteered. But that was not the case. And it's not because it's her job. Do you think it's because she's good at it? Maybe Eric did mention that she's very organized. But what about unconscious bias? Do you think that because she's a woman, the rest of the team might think that she would naturally want to do this role. Potentially, we have to remember. It's tough with unconscious bias because you are by definition unaware of it. Now think a little bit about if you were in that situation, how would you react? You could accept the role and just get the job done and so many of us do that because it's easier and quite frankly, more efficient or you could potentially do something a little bit different as the meeting was ending. Amy had the idea that she could agree to take care of it today showing that she's a helpful team player, but then ask the team to rotate, who's responsible going forward. Sometimes a super simple suggestion is enough to make the group aware of the bias and resolve the situation. But oftentimes things don't go quite that smoothly.

Maybe in Amy's situation, there was not enough time to actually have a conversation about setting up a rotating schedule before the meeting ended. So what else? Can you do if you have the opportunity to give feedback to your team in a constructive and productive way. A few great ways to do that are sprint retrospective. If you are part of a Scrum agile team, it's really the perfect opportunity to discuss a situation like that. Similarly, if your company conducts 360 degree reviews where you can get feedback to your peers and your manager, that can be another great opportunity as well. But even if your company doesn't have all of those things, you can always ask to add an agenda item at the next meeting. So you can discuss something like admin tasks. If you don't feel comfortable addressing it with a larger group, you can also bring it up one on one to your manager or someone else you feel comfortable with. Remember in all of these situations, what you wanna highlight is how it is detracting from your other core responsibilities and this can make it harder to meet your own deadlines and just in general distract you from your own career goals.

The last thing that I want to add is all of this is not to say that admin work is unimportant. In fact, it's super important and that's why it needs to be someone's job. These are some suggestions that I have used over the years and I found them helpful in making some of my coworkers more conscious of how their bias was affecting me. Now, let's look at another scenario where Amy is reviewing candidates for a senior engineer position. Let's take a moment to think about what happened and discuss if diversity is a priority. Why did Tom think his candidates were better than Anna? The first thing that he pointed out was a gap in Anna's resume. Traditionally, having a gap in your resume was considered a red flag. And I never really understood why, especially at the last couple of years. I think that we can all appreciate that. Sometimes life just happens once I was interviewing a candidate who took a few years off from our industry to run a family business when a relative had passed away after hearing about his experience stepping up and going way outside of his comfort zone that actually made me wanna hire him even more.

What if we had screened his resume before I got a chance to hear his story. Tom also referred to the quality of education of the candidates, things like having graduate degrees versus attending a coding academy. So here's the thing I have worked with some great developers who came from coding boot camps and the one thing they all have in common, they realized that they wanted to be programmers a little bit later in life just like me. So maybe that's my own bias. But I don't think that's a sign that they won't be a good programmer or a good employee. On the other hand, I did go to a great school and I know that has helped open a lot of doors for me. There's nothing wrong with valuing a good education, but there's a ton of factors that contribute to diverse candidates, having less of these types of qualifications. The third thing that Tom mentioned was working for big name companies and that's a lot like going to be going to a good school. It can be a great sign, but it's just not everything. The reality is that big name companies hire lots of people that is what makes them big after all. So the law of large numbers applies here. Basically, that means that they get a few bad apples in the mix. Just like the rest of us.

It's often tough to put a label like bias or sexism on a situation when discussing it. I think it's important to put a label on the problem so that we can speak about it openly and grow from it. But only if you feel comfortable and the other person is receptive a few things to keep in mind. These conversations are typically going to be best received one on one and you want to do your best to do it in a non confrontational way. You do still have to work with these people after all. Sometimes framing an issue as unconscious bias instead of intentional sexism can make it a little easier to discuss. These conversations are hard for all of us. It's only natural to become a little bit defensive when something unconscious is brought to your attention. Imagine if Amy started another conversation with Tom by saying you probably don't even realize this, but someone else might look at our conversation earlier and think you were being a little bit sexist for disqualifying Anna in favor of all those male candidates. I'm sure you would never mean to do that. I know you're a good guy, but I wanted to point it out to you in case someone else might misconstrue your intentions there. I know we all care a lot about hiring diverse candidates.

Having this sort of conversation is a great way to bring it to someone's attention without having all of that negativity blow back on you. Unfortunately, we're not all in spaces where our coworkers are going to be receptive to this type of conversation. So remember when you do find yourself here, it's really important to consider your own self preservation because you do wanna maintain good relationships at work. These are just two examples, but we all have unconscious biases and they come in a lot of different forms. Affinity bias is a really tough one. We all naturally are going to feel connected to people who are similar to us, but you don't want to let that get in the way of seeing all the positive qualities of people who are a little different from yourself. Earlier, we saw an example of perception bias when Eric assumed that Amy is organized and she would happily share her notes with the team. And also maybe because she's a woman. Similarly, when Tom claimed that everyone who has worked at a big name company is capable, he was projecting positive qualities on the candidates without actually having met them. And that's known as the halo effect. Now imagine if Tom started to interview one of those candidates versus Anna, he had already decided that his candidates were very capable. So no matter what happened in that conversation, he would be very likely to give them a good rating and pass them along in the interview process.

The key here is that we all have to work together to keep each other accountable. We're all here to learn. And the exciting thing is our actions through investing in diversity and treating diversity inclusion as a priority means that we are shaping the future as women in tech.

Our actions lead to a more bias free future in our companies and our technology and in our machine learning tune in at this time tomorrow to catch some of the lovely ladies that I have a privilege to work with as they present the data flywheel. I hope that these tips were helpful. I support you and I want you to know that you're not alone out there. I hope you all have a great journey and career one where you can find tons of supporters and also be a supporter yourself. So just in case you're left wondering why do we do it? Why do we do all of this? It's because diversity is both good for us and it's also good for business. There's a few statistics up on the screen as a reminder here for all of us. So I don't know about you, but I really want to work at a company full of wonderful women every day. So I can't end without mentioning that my company Oculus is definitely hiring. If you like what you heard here today, please check out oculus.com/careers and apply to work with all of us here at Oculus. You can also talk with me and our recruiting team at the info sessions over the next couple of days. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to my story today and it looks like we do have a few minutes left for some questions from the audience.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Sarah. It was very informative and I like some slides, took some screenshots. I think we need to educate ourselves more on different forms of unconscious bias because we do all have them, the more we learn, the more we understand that all all of us are biased. It's just in human nature and that's why it's called unconscious because we don't really know about it, aware of it. That's why the more we educate ourselves, the more we join the talks like yours diversity, leadership and technology and learn about different forms and you speak from the experience, you know, and that I think, and I see we have lots of positive feedback from our audience. They said it was a great session. And as Sierra also mentioned that o is hiring, so there is a chance you will be working with Sierra in case you go check out the expo area and Aus booth. So make sure to drop by and say hi. I see there are some questions that are coming regarding the hiring. I think you, you will be able to approach all of them at the booth. So we will check out and see where the hiring. What are the opportunities?

Do you have any questions to si see they're thanking you a lot. I'm sure they took also lots of notes just like I did. I think the unconscious bias is really tough in hr unless your hr team is just as diverse or at least open to embrace D Yeah, absolutely. And thank you. Thank you for your comment, Latanna. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sarah.

Thank you, Anna. This was so much fun and I hope that I uh left everybody with some positive positivity for the rest of the day.

Here's a question from me. Let's take it. Um How do you handle your own connection bias? Like as a woman, do you favor hiring other women or is there anything inherently wrong with that.

Um, that's a really good question. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong like we've been talking about. We all are susceptible to these things. I do think that you wanna make sure when you're screening other women that you are actually doing all of the screenings you're supposed to do, you don't want to create a situation where you bring someone in who's maybe not qualified and it, you know, it's both bad for them and you.

So there's nothing wrong with wanting to work with more women and you know, maybe looking a little bit more for female candidates when you're hiring, as long as they are capable in passing all these rings.

Yes. Yes. Totally agree. Monica asking, remind me the name of the company hiring. It's aero make sure to learn Aus at the expo. Yeah. Um Just a question from KOP. Are there any good implications of unconscious

bias? Um You know, it's very gonna be very situational. Each case is gonna be a little bit different. Um I do think that there probably are positive outcomes but going back to the idea of it being unconscious and really hard to identify these situations, typically, you can't know 100% for sure. You know what the root cause was or what the impact might be. Life is kind of complicated and messy. So these things are always happening around us and sometimes they probably will be good and sometimes not so good.

The situation as you mentioned. I totally agree. Great. Thank you so much. I see there are a couple of more questions. Perhaps you can connect with Sierra directly or during the networking, say hi and continue the conversation. That was fantastic, super informative and insightful.

I did enjoy a lot. So is our audience? Thank you so much, Sierra. Have a great time at our, at our conference and see

you. Thanks Anna, have a great rest of your day as well.