Isabel Rodriguez: 2022’s State of the Community
Data & Communications Manager Isabel J. Rodriguez joins us on the podcast to introduce PDXWIT’s 2022 State of the Community survey.
Tune in to learn about the history of the survey and this year’s goals, how taking the survey can impact real change, and the principles PDXWIT uses to inform the questions we ask. Visit PDXWIT.org to take the survey, and get your responses in by August 11, 2022. Sharing it with your organizations and networks will help to amplify our impact.
Transcript
Intro:
Welcome to humanizing tech, a PDX WIT podcast. We interview people to dig below the surface of their achievements and challenges showcasing the story behind the story. We believe that focusing on the person and humanizing their lived experiences will help us shape the future of tech.
Rihana Mungin:
Hi everyone. I'm excited to be back for another episode. My name is Rihana and I use she/her pronouns, and I want my wonderful co-host to introduce herself.
Anusha Neelam:
Thank you, Rihana. Welcome back, everyone. Welcome to another episode of humanizing tech. This is your co host, Anusha. I use She/Her pronouns, super excited for today's episode. I feel like it's going to be super informative. And I'm also excited because our awesome guest today is none other than PDXWIT’s, own data and communications manager, Isabel Rodriguez, [cheers] who is here to discuss the 2022 state of the community survey that will be launching in June. So excited to have you here. Isabel, I think this is your first time on the podcast, so welcome.
RM:
Welcome. Welcome. Okay, so first off, I just need to make it clear that Isabel and I go way back. We met working in the same lab when we were in college doing crazy space experiments and not to be creepy, but I've been Isabel's number one fan for a very long time. And I'm so excited that they're with PDXIT. I know you're here to discuss the state of the community survey, but will you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself?
Isabel Rodriguez:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here on the podcast with yall. I'll start by telling you a little bit about how I identify myself and then I'll talk about why I feel that that's important to kind of ground those conversations with. I am a Black, queer Puerto Rican. I am non-binary. I am also a feminist and a scientist by training. Both of my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in physics. At my professional core, I'm a researcher and analyst who has a passion for storytelling with a critical lens. And while this by no means tells you the entirety of who I am. I bring this up because there are ways in which my positionality, my interests, my experiences, inform the work that I do. And I think that's really important for me as somebody who works with data and who in my role as data and communications manager at PDXWIT is working to help build a better tech industry.
AN:
Well, thank you so much for sharing your background with us, Isabel. I feel like it's really important for our listeners to just kind of hear about your background, the perspective that you bring and the skill set that you have with data particularly. I want to switch gears a little bit to discussing the actual survey itself for those who are unfamiliar with what the state of the community survey is. Can you just talk to us a little bit about the history of the survey, what the goals are? Our listeners would love to hear that.
IR:
Absolutely. The state of the community survey.. and at this point, it's been running for a number of years. It was actually something that started as an internal tool. Kind of like an internal temperature check of the PDXWIT community. I think very quickly, we realized that this survey had potential to end relevance really, that went just beyond our smaller community. So now it's a survey that's open to a national audience. It covers a broad range of topics from money talk to company culture, to work life balance and belonging. Our website stateofthecommunity.pdxwit.org has survey results that go back to 2018. And I also just wanted to share for our listeners, this survey was really developed with a lot of care and it has gone through some iterations over the years and there are actually a set of principles that have helped to shape the survey process and its delivery, including the way that we share results.
Right? So, some of the things that… some of those principles include relevance. Are we asking the right questions, and will the information that we get be something that is useful to our community? Another is safety and privacy. We are making sure that we are asking questions that aren't intrusive and that we're protecting participants' information. Another principle is anti-oppression. So how are we working with the community to identify and remove sources of bias in both the survey process and the questions. There's efficiency - so are we using plain language and are we communicating our results in such a way that it truly has an impact both to our community and the various stakeholders that we hope will learn from it and take action based on it. Then scalability - so again, going back to, is it useful, not just for our community, not just for our region in Portland or the Pacific Northwest, but is it something that the tech company on a national level will be able to use?
RM:
Okay. So, when you were talking about the principles of how you're developing the survey, I'm just curious, what does it mean by the questions not being intrusive? I was able to get a good idea of the other principles, but that's something that I've never thought about. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
IR:
Cause I know that this survey does go into some, what could for our participants be some heavy topics around harassment and, and different kinds of experiences. And so being able to get at some of those really heavy, sensitive, potentially traumatic things that I've gone on and that folks I've experienced, but without having them dredge too much of that up.
RM:
Right. Yeah. We're not trying to retraumatize folks by getting a pulse on the tech industry.
IR:
Exactly. Yeah.
RM:
Okay, that makes sense. Cool. So… this is your first year at PDXWIT and I know in the past we've taken that feedback each year and we do our best to implement those changes. Can you talk a little bit about the changes that you have observed by looking at the past data? I'm curious to have your perspective of coming in with a fresh lens.
IR:
Yeah. So when the survey was initially run, some of the feedback that came back was that, I think it focused a lot on kind of women's issues very generally. But it was missing some of what we now incorporate into the work that we do a lot of that intersectional, feminist kind of lens. So some of the things that we've had to do to expand those questions is thinking deeper about the racial component, the ethnicity, gender and LGBTQ plus demographic questions. And trying to layer in some questions that really help to identify those experiences. Again, not just thinking about women's issues and maybe, harassment in the workplace but thinking about racism in the workplace and different kinds of bigotry. So making sure that those experiences were also included in the survey.
And I think another thing that won’t necessarily change the fundamental structure of the wave that the survey ran, but in 2020, that was our last state of the community survey. And I think that, one of the lessons that PDXWIT learned kind of in the retrospective aspect was, we launched that survey when there was a lot going on, right? So we had a global pandemic that was disproportionately impacting communities that are racially marginalized, racial justice protests, record levels of unemployment, just a lot of uncertainty and pain and kind of collective trauma.
And so, one of the impacts that we saw from that was there are things in our survey about job satisfaction, work life balance, and those we found were clearly a lower priority than a lot of the other things that were kind of in our nation's forefront. I think a piece of feedback that we'll be moving forward with is being able to do these temperature checks. But do it in a way that's really responding to the context that we're in and not just overlooking that for the sake of trying to continue asking these questions of our community if that makes sense.
RM:
So I'm just going to quickly throw myself under the bus because I sit on the board at PDXWIT at this very moment. I'm the interim executive director and I did not take that survey. I started it and I was like, I don't have the capacity to do this. I have the capacity to lay on my couch. And Anusha. I'm not going to, but you know, if you feel comfortable, did you take the survey in 2020?
AN:
No, I have not. I'll be honest. I mean, honestly, this is all pretty informative to me as well. And I feel like there's so much that comes out of this survey. I took a look at the insights that were on the PDXWIT site for 2019 and 2020, and it's so useful. And I definitely want to partake in the future and definitely this year. I would love to look into it and even kind of inform people in my community about the survey as well. But yeah, I have not taken it in the past.
RM:
Yeah. I mean, 2020 was rough. It was rough.
AN:
Mhmm. It was.
RM:
And it was hard to….exactly like what you said Isabel, like the world was literally, I mean, in Oregon, it was on fire at one point [laughs] And how can you focus on job satisfaction, even when people just didn't have a job at that point? Like things were nuts.
AN:
And kind of in line with that, I know you mentioned Isabel that this survey is iterative and that it evolves based on what is going on at that time. Are there any particular areas of focus for this year's survey?
IR:
Yes. So, one of the kind of hot topics or buzzwords of 2021 was the great resignation. And while I wish I could find a better name for that phenomenon, that is just what I'm going to have to run with [all laugh]. But you know, we were saying right, this pandemic really shifted a lot of our perspectives with our careers and kind of where we wanted to be and the things that matter to us.
RM:
Yeah. Our priorities are completely different.
IR:
Absolutely. So one of the, one of the areas we'd like to focus on for this year's survey is how the great resignation, that phenomenon really is reflected in our community and kind of where they're at with all that now. So in addition to having a few survey questions to kind of probe at some of those ideas, we are going to be conducting focus groups, in addition to one-on-one interviews, to go deeper on that particular area of focus.
RM:
Okay. What's going to be the best way? Anusha is going to have this survey introduce it to her community. I'm going to put it on blast to make sure people take it. Can you talk about what we should keep in mind and explain to people the importance of this survey? And then, I also want you to talk a little bit more about anonymity and why that's important and how we can talk about it too, to help bring folks to share their experiences.
IR:
So, I will start there because that is going to be the freshest question in my mind. And then I might have to ask you for the other once again [laughs]
RM:
Know what, I just like, I kind of went on questioning off the rails, I don’t know where I was going with things. I'm just mesmerized by you in this whole survey, you know, so you'll have to forgive me, so yeah. Anonymity with these questions.
IR:
Absolutely. And I think this also ties into one of our goals for this survey… to reach as many different people as possible. Going back again to our values, to that safety and privacy. So data will be aggregated as much as needed in order to protect anything that might have that personal identity kind of pointers, that might single somebody out of the company, for example. Especially given that this industry is such that minoritized communities are as small as they are. So… that's something that I'd like for folks that are taking the survey to kind of keep on the forefront is - your identity is going to be protected. And one of the ways that I think we can also do that while valuing disaggregated data, because that really tells us right? At the end of the day, who are the folks that are being the most impacted, it's really hard to do that if we don't have enough of those communities, those populations participating in the survey.
And so in addition to putting it on blast into your communities, by going and making those direct connections, even if you can connect with 2, 3, 4 other people to be like, Hey, I think you would really benefit from taking this survey, like please help us be able to get to as many different people as possible so that we can start driving these positive outcomes. Because you know, tech companies made some big promises in 2020.
RM:
Oh yeah they did!
IR:
And you know, part of what this survey is also doing is tracking like, is there any momentum, is there any forward progress on those promises that so many companies made?
RM:
Yeah, that's great. That's going to be great to help convince people to not only open the survey and look at the data, but also convince them that it's safe and get us that information that we need. Because there were a lot of social media posts in 2020 talking about how they support Black Lives Matter [laughs] and how they want diversity.
AN:
Well, yeah, I think those are really great focus areas for this survey, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of interesting results that come out of it. So I guess kind of for my last question, I've got that kind of a series of questions here, but I think this is important for our listeners. When does the survey open up this year? How long do people have to take it and, when is it going to close?
IR:
Yep. So, if you are listening to this episode around the time that it's launched, the survey is already live. And so you'll have until mid July to get those in. And that way we're hoping to be able to get results to the community in the fall. So you'll be able to glean results and figure out ways to take action on… what those community needs are.
RM:
So when we get these results, how do we want to, as PDXWIT, how do we want to take those results to tech companies and how do we want to have those conversations? Is that something that you've thought about as you're analyzing the data?
IR:
Yeah… There are actually a couple of things that PDXWIT does to help communicate and really drive home the importance of these survey results. So, one of them, some of our listeners might be familiar that PDXWIT has a speaker's bureau. A collection of speakers that will go to our companies and give these talks and presentations and results from the state of the community survey will be one of those talks. So you'll be able to bring us directly to you, your employees, and not only share the results, but also some concrete steps that companies can take, whether you are in a leadership position or you're an employee, steps that you can take, to act based on what, what those results are.
In addition to those talks, there will be little PDFs that have really pieces of bite size information. So it's not a mountain of things to swim through. It’s here are the results, here are the action items, take it, share it, run with it, use it, and generate some conversation around it. I will also be back in the fall sharing the survey results on this podcast. So that will be another avenue where again, sharing results, sharing things that we can do with it. So we try. Because having as many different avenues as we can to reach folks is going to be important. Otherwise the survey… it doesn't stand on its own, just sitting on the website. We have got to take it and then run with it and do something with it.
RM:
So, this is a mini episode, and it breaks my heart because we have got to wrap up this conversation and I could probably guess what this is, but as we close out, what's your call of action to the listeners of our podcast?
IR:
Take the survey. [All laughs] And I want you to share it with two or three other people. If you are an employer who's listening to this episode, I highly encourage you to share this survey link with your employees, the people you work with, your colleagues. Really encourage them to take the survey as well. We are wanting to get a pulse on the tech industry, right?. So, take the survey. [laughs]
RM:
I guessed it! That was my guess! [laughs] Thank you again, Isabel, huge shout out to our podcast team. Your dedication makes it possible to share these amazing stories. Thank you to our listeners for always tuning in. We will see Isabel back again in a couple months to report out on the survey results. So, my heart is breaking now, but it'll be repaired when they are back. Thank you very much.
AN:
I also want to quickly plug that, you can follow PDXWIT on social [media] so you can see when it's live and any results and things like that. any updates, you'll be able to follow along with. Thank you so much, everyone for tuning in and thanks, Isabel and Rihana.
RM:
Thanks for that Anusha. Thanks for remembering. [All laugh}
AN:
I had to squeeze it in. Thank you. [All laugh]
RM:
Follow us on socials y'all!
Outro:
PDXWIT is a 501C3 nonprofit. We're building a better tech industry by creating access, dismantling inequities and feeling belonging. Find out more about us at www.PDXWIT.org. Like this podcast? Subscribe and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Wanna give us feedback? Contact us podcast@pxwit.org to help us improve and ensure you learn and grow from the stories you hear on humanizing tech.