Q&A: Chief Diversity Officer Plans to Build Equity into Education with Tech

SMITH: Product inclusion is a really, really interesting focus. Often, during your product development stage, a lot of the folks creating products are not super diverse. When we look at the population of our country in general, it’s obvious that we are of very diverse backgrounds, thoughts and beliefs.

Our mission is about improving outcomes for students. So, for us, it’s super important that we are able to reach all students. In particular, we have a responsibility to ensure that, when it comes to students who are from traditionally marginalized groups, we are aware they are there, and we are ensuring that our products are inclusive of them.

What we’re doing at GoGuardian is looking at our processes and intentionally building in a product inclusion lens to ensure that we are considering and hearing the voices of other people during the development process. A lot of companies end up missing out on so many different perspectives, but there are ways to build our processes to ensure that doesn’t happen. So, the more that we can focus on building diverse teams internally, the more we will have of those diverse voices.

DISCOVER: Four women share their inspiration for working in K–12 IT roles.

EDTECH: Do you anticipate that building a diverse team will be challenging given the historic lack of diversity in the tech industry?

SMITH: It is a challenge, but it is absolutely not impossible. We are being intentional and having accountability as part of our processes. When we think about diversity, we’re ensuring that our interviewers are tackling unconscious biases and being really open and transparent. And we’re ensuring we are in places that maybe a lot of tech companies aren’t tapping into: historically Black colleges and universities, women’s colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions and organizations. We will do our part to be as proactive as possible.

We’re going to be tackling this from two angles, definitely on the recruiting side, but also ensuring that when employees are here, they get development opportunities and opportunities to grow in their roles.

One of the reasons I was really interested in this role with GoGuardian as chief diversity officer is the fact that we are looking at diversity, equity and inclusion internally and externally. This role will focus on ensuring that our employees are included and feel like they belong. My theory about that is, when we have a more diverse and inclusive workforce, they will create more inclusive products.

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EDTECH: Many GoGuardian products rely on artificial intelligence. Do you have a plan to ensure that AI’s bias doesn’t translate into your products, and that the tech supports marginalized groups instead?

SMITH: We are absolutely aware, recognize and acknowledge that bias can exist in AI, and I think that’s the first step.

We are constantly working to develop products and features that meet the needs of all learners, and so we are constantly keeping an eye on testing and thinking about how to do things better. As I’m building out my team, one of the areas I’m really focusing on is what we’re calling equitable impacts. That will allow us to actually build in ways to ensure that our products are reaching everyone in the way that we want them to.

So often in DEI, people are so concerned about doing the wrong things that we don’t feel comfortable measuring the impact we’re making. If we don’t know what we’re not doing well, we can’t fix it. As I’m building my team, and our product inclusion and equitable impact strategies, it’s really going to be about ensuring that we are measuring the work that we’re doing specifically for the lower 25 percent of testers and being very open about any shortcomings.

We are building processes and products with that in mind. We’re also super excited about being in the forefront of helping to figure out how to best use AI and how we can mitigate bias in any of the products we’re using.

EDTECH: What is one goal you have as GoGuardian’s chief diversity officer?

SMITH: Ultimately, our goal is to be able to create products and programs that can benefit all students. For me, when I say all students, I’m super excited about being explicitly focused on students who are traditionally excluded. We are uniquely positioned to make a huge difference in how we can use technology to add equity to education.

MORE ON EDTECH: Schools are working to reduce the STEM divide for Black students.

Equity in education is on the forefront of so many people’s minds, but people are not sure what to do. They’re not sure how to address it or how to measure whether they’re doing it. Oftentimes, DEI is seen as an add on, or it’s something running separately in the background, or it’s seen as part of HR. At GoGuardian, our mission specifically is about all students. The success of our company is very much dependent on us being able to have an impact on students who are from historically marginalized groups.

All my life, education has been this great equalizer. Technology is a central avenue to be able to do that. So, to be working in ed tech, and to be able to have an impact because we are touching so many students, it’s just amazing.