“I think things are gradually getting better. So even though it might not seem like it at times when we see the world around us. I think things are gradually getting better and one of the things that are helping actually is technology because we’re all seeing a lot of what’s going on in other places.”
Sue Black OBE, Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist, Durham University
Sue Black OBE, Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist, Durham University joins our very own Donna Herdsman, Managing Director, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Talking Talent to discuss the importance and role of technology in Inclusion.
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about:
- Why diversity and inclusion is still such a critical challenge within the IT sector
- Why securing and maintaining a diverse workforce in tech is such a challenge
- The lessons we have still to learn in society about accepting people as we find them
- With AI playing an increasing role in our lives, what we must do to ensure that bias does not prevail and that we create technology that truly benefits all in society.
Watch the interview
Or read on for the transcript
Donna Herdsman: Good afternoon, everybody and I’m really pleased today to say that I’ve got the immense pleasure to spend some time with a wonderful person Sue Black, who I shall ask to introduce off in a moment. My name’s Donna Herdsman. I’m the Managing Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion here at Talking Talent and it gives me great pleasure as ever to spend some time and to take some time out of the day just to reflect on the ongoing importance and challenge and around diversity, equity, and inclusion in particular. So, before we kind of go into our discussion, which I’m really excited by, I’d like to invite Professor Sue Black OBE to introduce herself.
Sue Black: Thanks very much, Donna. Well, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. You are one of my favorite people and so I’m delighted that you’ve invited me on the podcast to talk about something that I know we’re both really passionate about. So, thank you so much. Yeah, so now I’m a Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham Uni. I’ve had, I don’t know, three decades maybe career mainly in technology, computer science, focus a lot of the time on trying to start with kind of realizing that when I was a Ph.D. student, really.
So let me roll back a bit. So, you know, I left school at 16 with not many qualifications because I left home and had kind of a difficult time and then I didn’t go back into education until I was about 25 or 26 by which time I’ve got married, had three children, got divorced and was then kind of like starting life again living on a council state in Brixton wondering what on earth I was going to do, how I was going to bring my kids up. And then thought about going back to work but realized that I’d left school with five O’ Levels so I wouldn’t be able to earn very much. I’d be on minimum wage. I wouldn’t be able to pay for childcare really for the kids. So, I thought, okay, I can’t go back to work. Why don’t I try and go back into education? I hadn’t wanted to leave school when I did. I just had to because of my circumstances. So, I went along to the local college Southern College in London.
Luckily, they had like a fast-track math course and math was my favorite subject at school, so I did that and then I managed to get onto a degree in computing at South Bank Uni. So, I did that degree there then stayed on and did a Ph.D. there and during that Ph.D. started going to conferences, academic computer science conferences. It wasn’t really until I started doing that, that I realized I wasn’t just like a computer scientist. I was a woman in computer science because it was about 10% women maybe and 90% guys and in fact, I didn’t really realize until… So, my Ph.D. supervisor says you got to network at conferences. So, I was trying to talk to people being very shy even still then and not having great success. Some guys getting the wrong idea about why I was talking to them, that it wasn’t my research that I was interested in talking to them.
So yeah, that wasn’t that great. Then I went to a Women in Science conference in Brussels in 1998. So, a while ago now which was all women and I just had like the best time ever at that conference and made so many friends, which are still friends now like 24 years later. Then I realized like that I was a woman in computer science, not just a computer scientist because I don’t know it was just very, very different being at a Women in a Science conference to being at a traditional academic computer science conference. So, I came back from there, set up UK’s first online network work for women in tech, BCS women, which are still going today with over a thousand amazing members and that led me up to Bletchley Park in 2003 as part of that group. Found out that the women’s story Bletchley Park was kind of underrepresented.
There wasn’t much around the museum or online about the women that worked at Bletchley Park. But in fact, 80% of the people that worked at Bletchley Park were women. Bletchley Park, the place where the codebreakers worked during the second world war. So, I ran an oral history project to capture the memories of the women that work there then found out that Bletchley Park might have to close. So, I started a campaign to save it. That was in 2008 through to 2011. Used traditional media and then social media, particularly Twitter. Got Stephen Fry involved, which was one of the key points in the campaign. Meanwhile workwise I’d applied for promotion anytime I could. Sorry, this might go on for the whole time of the podcast. You have to shut me up in a minute.
So, I applied for promotion anytime I could. So, when I was doing my PhD, I applied for lectureship. I got that. Then I applied for senior lecturer, then principal lecturer and by this time in 2008, I was Head of Department at University of Westminster. So, my career was kind of taken off and I was doing all these other things on the side, including the Bletchley Park campaign. Then I wrote a book, the fastest ever crowdfunded book, fastest crowdfunded book ever “Saving Bletchley Park” about the campaign. Then kind of started a bit of a public speaking career because so many people asked me to speak at different events and stuff. And then I also set up a social enterprise #techmums and then joined Durham University where I’m now a Professor three and a half years ago with a real focus on doing something about the lack of women’s students and staff at Durham and trying to do something about diversity inclusion at Durham, But I’ll stop there otherwise I’ll go on forever, Donna.
Donna Herdsman: So, thank you. It’s great to hear all the things that you’ve done and also the fact that you found, and you’ve sustained your passion over time. But I know because we met actually via our connection to Southbank.
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: And it’s great. So, the first thing I wanted to highlight talk about was actually the issue of networking. So, one of the reasons I think I approached you at any event, and I know I can remember where it was. It was at Barclays Bank.
Sue Black: Okay.
Donna Herdsman: Hosted by Barclays, because someone who’s pointed out that you and I had both been to Southbank but we’d never met. And so I approached you and we’ve kind of been friends ever since.
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: But the thing you highlighted was this issue of networking, which comes up quite a lot actually.
Sue Black: Okay.
Donna Herdsman: And whether or not you think there is, there is power to network and what kind of advice would you give? Because I heard you use the word shy as well and you know…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: Clearly you had to break through that. So interested in your thoughts around social networking before we come back to…
Sue Black: Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. So, you know, like I was saying, when I was doing my Ph.D., I was trying to network, it’s like the worst thing you could ever ask me to do. I was shy and I was at conferences with 90% men, computer scientists and sometimes it was all right but other times it was horrendous. I kind of like got my confidence destroyed, I guess, trying to talk to people I didn’t know, and I had no skills in that area either. Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve really kind of pushed myself in that area over the years. And so that’s like ’98, the first sort of conferences I was going to. So, actually 25 years ago and yeah, I found it incredibly difficult. I didn’t know what to say. I just felt very embarrassed really. So, no wonder I didn’t do very well really. So, my confidence got boosted going to that Women in Science conference.
Donna Herdsman: Okay.
Sue Black: Because I didn’t even have to try because it just felt like everyone was talking to everyone and I didn’t have to really do anything. So that was great. Boosted my confidence a bit and then set up a network for women in tech and then because I was organizing events for that. So, I kind of got used to more meeting people I didn’t know, I guess gradually over time and now I don’t worry about it at all. In fact, it’s one of the things I look forward to the most, but how I see it now is very, very different to how I saw it then. How I saw it then was I’m in this kind of alien environment and what do I say, and will it be the right thing and who’s going to judge me and what they going to think about? Lots of negative things. Whereas now, I walk into a room with lots of people, I don’t know and I’m like, oh, there must be lots of really interesting people in this room. Who should I talk to? I kind of look around think like who do I think would be interesting here and kind of take a different kind of approach. I’ve just made so many friends now through networking really.
I kind of feel like networking, the word has got kind of a bad name. It just seems a bit false and you’re just doing it for work and you’re trying to get something out of somebody. But I look at it now as an opportunity to go and make friends with people and find new friends and I love finding out about what people have done in their lives. I just now find it really, really interesting. So, a lot of it is just kind of confidence to get out there and chat to people. I think if I was going to do it all again, kind of starting from the beginning, I would always go with a friend, I think…
Donna Herdsman: Yeah.
Sue Black: …probably. I’d go along with someone else. So, if it was you and me at the beginning of our careers, we could go along and we could chat to each other and then we could try and involve other people in our conversation, which is nothing as scary as just as a single person just trying to on your own, walk up to someone that you don’t know and start a conversation. So, I would probably go along with a friend if I was starting out or I’d always make sure that I was meeting up with someone that I knew at an event where I was going to try and like chat to people, I didn’t know and it just had massive benefits over the years.
It really, really has and lots of things I didn’t even think of to start with, like the fact that people that I met 20 or 30 years ago well, I sort came friends with gradually over the years. Well, we’re all quite senior now. We were probably quite junior then or like the people that I always wanted to chat to maybe one step ahead of me. Also, all those people are still probably one step ahead of me, which means they might be Vice-Chancellor of a university now, or they might be running a big company now and we’ve known each other kind of on and off for 20 years. So, it’s amazing to now have a massive network really, of people that I really like and respect who are doing all sorts of really, really cool things all around the world.
I can just, I was going to say pick up the phone, but I can hardly ever pick up the phone these days to make a phone call but find them on LinkedIn probably because we’re probably connected on LinkedIn and, and just message them and say can we do a Zoom call and chat about whatever it is I might need advice on or want to work with them or just all different sorts of things. I didn’t appreciate any of that at all when I started, I just found it very scary.
Donna Herdsman: I do love your tips and I’m just going to recap what I heard you say. The one thing was around the change in mindset from, is it the scary to, there could be loads of interesting people here and it’d be good to find out what they are. Second thing I heard you talk about was you don’t have to go by yourself go with a friend because that reduces it. And the other thing was network is not just for now. It’s also to create and connect with people who you’ve managed to do that over time, and it sounds like you supported each other. I think one of the reasons I asked about the network was given how extensive your network is, do you hear about common reasons for instance, that might exist about why it seems to be so difficult for organizations to secure and maintain diverse workforce in tech? Because it seems to be an ongoing challenge…
Sue Black: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Donna Herdsman: …we could talk about for years and years.
Sue Black: Something that we both care about passionately and have both tried to do something about over the years. Well, the thing is, I think it’s not just tech. I think we have issues in our society and our culture around diversity and particularly inclusion and so any probably workplace is going to have issues as well so it’s not just technology. I think a lot of the time people think that tech is worse than other areas and maybe sometimes it is. But I think in general, a lot of it is what’s out there in our society. The thing sort of around gender. We send boys and girls, we give them different messages from our culture and our society from when they’re tiny, right from when they’re babies basically onwards and some of those things might work out to people’s advantage, but a lot will be the opposite really.
We bring girls up to not worry so much about themselves. A lot of it is about how they look, right. I mean, and everyone’s kind of got that a bit now too. But girls are kind of brought up still, I think too to make sure everyone else is okay and kind of put themselves at the end of the queue really in terms of looking after themselves. And so that has positive effects for society because it means that people get looked after in society, but it’s also got negative effects if you’re always putting yourself last all the time. Because you’ve got to look after yourself first, really to be able to help other people and that’s a message that doesn’t really get out there that much. Of course, these are kind of stereotypes, but I think they still exist.
In general, we’re bringing boys up to kind of compete with each other and everybody. Be the best get out there, don’t show your emotions and all of that kind of stuff. Of course, you know, that will have some benefits, but at the time there are lots of negative effects from that as well. If you are then kind of in the workplace as a man and you need to start kind of looking after people in the managerial role or something. If you’ve never had to do that you might find that really difficult and also if you are encouraged not to talk about your emotions, of course, that’s going to cause at some point major issues in terms of relationships at home, but also it can do in workplace relationships. So, I think there are loads of stereotypes out there in terms of gender, which kind of mitigate against us just being able to be people and just get on and do a job or live our lives. Then, of course, all the stuff around diversity, around race. We see examples in the press every day of particularly black people being treated very badly which is just so depressing.
I think culture, potentially, maybe all humans are racist in some way, and we have to try and, in our heads, work out how to override that so that we do treat everybody with respect and don’t kind of jump to conclusions about people and don’t end up always thinking about stereotypes. I think there’s kind of a massive education program that we all need to kind of go through to help us be able to talk about these things openly and work out what is the best way forward for the future? I think the death of George Floyd and other people that have died in awful circumstances or been murdered, has really brought to the fore in lots of countries that we’ve really got to do something about it and the way that black people, people of color are treated. It’s awful, but at the same time, it has brought the conversation.
It’s brought it more openly into what everyone’s talking about in society and move things on a bit. I think in a way we don’t really know exactly what we should be doing. It’s kind of like we’re trying to work it out as we go along because society has never been there for everybody. So, it’s not like we can just look at a template in the past. So, in this time, it was fair for everybody that’s never really happened. So, we’re trying to work out as we go on how to do that and I haven’t got the answers. None of us have got all the answers but I feel like if we’re all talking to each other and trying to work out what is the best way to kind of take everyone forward, then that’s the conversations that I want to be in and work with people like you who are really trying to tackle these issues and move things forward.
Donna Herdsman: Yeah. I think that’s great insight because I think we all have to do work together…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …if we’re going to make society as fair as possible. I don’t know if you saw it but “The Imitation Game” was on the other…
Sue Black: Oh, was it?
Donna Herdsman: Yes. Yes. We’ve talked about, of course, Alan Turing who is kind of known as a father of computing but nevertheless died a criminal because in his time being homosexual was a criminal offense. But it still took us a society, I think it was not until 2009 when he was given a posthumous pardon.
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: By, at the time I think it was…
Sue Black: Gordon Brown.
Donna Herdsman: Mr. Brown, Gordon Brown and he was Prime Minister, and I just wondered as you say, even within a more enlightened society, if you think about the time it took for us to acknowledge…
Sue Black: Absolutely.
Donna Herdsman: …that the world had moved on. I do sometimes wonder, and I’m interested in your thoughts. You’re right we don’t have a blueprint for the past, but what is it perhaps we should still be doing better that we can take from the past and not of wait just to work things out in order to see some action in the direction of correcting stuff.
Sue Black: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think things are gradually getting better. So even though it might not seem like it at times when we see the world around us. I think things are gradually getting better and one of the things that are helping actually is technology because we’re all seeing a lot of what’s going on in other places. And so, like for example, before Twitter, you couldn’t have had the whole Black Lives Matter movement be so big because you can use like a hashtag like Black Lives Matter. You can connect with anyone who’s on Twitter across the world. So, anyone who’s got Wi-Fi or access to the internet can then connect, which you couldn’t do before social media. So, Twitter enabled that sort of around that 2007, whenever it started.
So, we’ve got technology to enable us to connect people together in bigger groups than we could ever have done before because before that everything was much more rigid in terms of who could connect to who and it was all in kind of power structures, I guess, really of all different sorts. Of course, there are always going to be power structures and now we’ve got those online as well. But yeah, it’s really interesting. I mean, the thing about the pardon for Alan Turing. I mean, that happened really because several people… So, John Graham-Cumming who’s a friend started the campaign really to get a pardon for Alan Turing and partly because he knew that if he could get a pardon for Alan Turing then that would be kind of a test case in getting a pardon for all gay men that were convicted as well.
So, a lot of the time you need one person to kind of step up and say, okay, this is wrong. We need to do something about it, which is what he did and he worked really hard on getting support for that and also I’ve forgotten his name. But one of the guys in the House of Lords was very supportive and did some work in that area and lots of other people became part of that campaign to get that to happen. And in fact, it just reminds me of one of those wonderful moments on Twitter in my life when I was at, I think it’s called Tweet Fest. It was, I’ve forgotten, Twestival, Twestival which is like a Twitter festival, which happens every year.
So, if it was 2009 that was the year then when Stephen Fry who was involved in that as well started tweeting about some enigma thing that was going to happen. And so, I was at this festival and the people at Bletchley Park phoned me up and said, what’s going on? What’s Stephen Fry tweeting about because they linked it to Bletchley Park. So, I was like, I don’t know what that is. It was in the middle of the Bletchley Park campaign that I was running. So, there I am dancing away with a bottle of beer at Twestival and I’ve got Bletchley Park ringing me up saying what’s going on.
So, I direct messaged Stephen Fry on Twitter saying, oh, Bletchley Park is a bit worried. What are you talking about? And he was like, oh, you’ll find out at nine o’clock tonight. So, obviously, it was before nine. And I was like, oh, what could it be? So, nine o’clock then there’s the announcement, I think in the news. Gordon Brown’s announcing the apology, which is incredible. But I think back to the general point is that a lot of the time you need someone to point something out and start a campaign and get other people involved. And again, technology enables us to do that, I think. A lot of the time, if we wait for… I guess when you grow up, you think governments do that sort of stuff, right. Governments care about people and they will kind of make sure that everyone’s okay and then the older you get, you realize that’s not quite how it all works. As we can see, particularly for our current government. That’s not how it always works and a lot of time you need, you need someone to stand up and say, this is wrong. We’ve got to do something about it and then bring people together to make it happen.
Donna Herdsman: And I think, for me, what you’re highlighting is actually the importance of, I call them active allies. Because lots of people say that they’re allies, and they go what have you done about it? They haven’t done very much, but I think those examples you’ve given, which are brilliant by the way. I love lived experiences because that’s just what they are. They are indications of the difference that allies can make. But the other thing I think you highlighted was the importance of action, which I think is a nice segue into the TechUP program…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …which is something that you and others I know have established. But firstly, TechUpWomen and now the wider TechUP program. So, could you just kind of summarize what those are about and why TechUP is such an important initiative?
Sue Black: Sure. well, so TechUP kind of came about a few years ago because I’ve had like say 30 years in tech now and so many times, I’ve met so many people, particularly women in particularly kind of underserved backgrounds who want to work in tech, but don’t know how to get into it. And I’ve also talked to so many people working in tech companies like in HR or CEOs, CTOs, or hiring managers who want to employ a more diverse workforce, more women into tech roles but advertise. The common thing they say is, but we advertise and said we welcome women or something in our advert, but only two women applied and then they didn’t get through the interview process, so I don’t know what to do.
So, the number of times that someone said something like that to me through my career. So, this funding call from Institute of Coding came up and I realized that I could try and do something about both of these issues, which have annoyed me or worried me for years now. and so, I came up with the idea of a program that would take women, particularly from underserved backgrounds. We could put a course together to train people specifically into a career in technology and work with industry partners. So that’s another thing that’s kind of annoyed me over the years is that there’s not enough connection between what people study at Uni and what they actually do when they get into a job role. So, it kind of ticks all of those boxes for me together.
I thought we could work with industry partners. We could put a program together. We could put a call out for women that want to work in tech. And so basically that’s what we did. So, we put together a program. Well, we were at Durham working with three other Unis, so York, Nottingham, and Edgehill who were great partners and for 15 industry partners. We talked to the industry partners and said where are your skill shortages? Where do you want to hire women into? So, they gave us probably about 10 or 15 different job roles and then from that, we took the top four most popular, which were software engineer, agile project manager, business analyst, and data scientist, and then we created a program that would take someone who had a degree in any subject area with a real passion for technology through a program, starting with computer science basics all the way through to a path tailored specifically into those four job roles.
Then, because we are connected with the industry partners, they told us what sort of things they wanted the students to learn along the way. We put that program together, called it TechUP, TechUPWomen. So, we started with 100 women for our first cohort. Well, 96 made it through, which is pretty good out of 100, I think. We tried to build in as much support as possible all the way through. We had a real focus on women of color. So, we really aim to have more than 50% women of color and we just about managed that. I think it was 55 or something. We had a real focus on our keynote speakers like you Donna coming into the residential weekends, making sure that at least the 50% were women of color as well because I think all of that is really important. You’ve kind of got to see it to believe it kind of thing and to put a program together that was supportive, all the way through to try and make sure that no one felt that they wanted to drop out of it and it’s mainly an online course, right.
So, I know from practically every online course I’ve ever started, I don’t think I’ve ever finished any of them. Well, one or two. So, we were trying to make it fun to get everyone connecting with each other, to make it like a sort of life-changing event, which I think we did pretty well with that. You know, we were just talking before this about how amazing it is seeing our graduates from TechUPWomen get out there, win awards, just doing incredible things. It’s wonderful seeing them on LinkedIn. Yeah, so that was our first run-through of the program which all of our 96 graduated just before lockdown back in is it 2019, 2020?
Donna Herdsman: ‘19, 2019.
Sue Black: Was it? Yeah, I don’t know. I get confused about dates now. Then more recently we’ve run TechUP again all online because of the pandemic and lockdown and stuff we couldn’t do it. So, the original one, we had residential weekends, four of them at each Uni throughout the program, which was utterly amazing and life-changing for me, and I think for everyone involved because it was just such a wonderful environment. Seeing all of these women just blossom into sort of more confident, more awesome versions of themselves was great. And so, we’ve just worked with Institute of Coding again, department for education and run boot camps, TechUP boot camps in software engineering and data engineering, which have just finished with loads more graduates and we welcomed men on that program as well and we are now looking for our next partners. So, if anyone’s listening and is interested in filling their skill shortage roles in tech. It doesn’t have to be the career areas that I identified, because we basically work with partners to tailor courses, to meet your demands as an employer or your needs. So, if anyone’s interested, do get in touch because we’re now working out what we’re going to be doing from September onwards with some new partners.
Donna Herdsman: Because one of the things I think that’s really quite important about TechUP and the approach that you’ve taken in particular is providing the connectivity between people that have a passion to go in technology and just need the skills and…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …potentially employers that are looking for people, but also diverse people which addresses the point you made right at the beginning when employees go, well, I don’t know. I want to have more diverse workforce, but I don’t know where to find them. And what TechUP does is to actually begin to answer and break down that barrier and I think it’s critical because we’ve still got over a million vacancies I read somewhere in IT…
Sue Black: Wow!
Donna Herdsman: …here in this country.
Sue Black: Oh really.
Donna Herdsman: Yeah. here in this country because…
Sue Black: That’s one in 60 people. That’s amazing
Donna Herdsman: Because it’s such a huge growth market really because it’s one of the things that’s continued to go, especially because of the use of technology in the pandemic.
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: But the other thing you mentioned in your opener, which I just wanted to go back to was you said you set up #techmums and that’s still existing today. So, what do you see as the benefits of that initiative?
Sue Black: Sure. So, I set up #techmums, I think in 2012, so like 10 years ago now and I guess at the time I’d just finished running the Bletchley Park campaign and I was kind of getting fed up. So actually, I realized from talking about this, that I get annoyed at about things, and then I’m trying do something about it. So, I was annoyed again at Michael Gove it was that time who was saying that computing’s too difficult. He was the Education Minister at the time. He was saying computing’s too difficult for anyone under 14 so we shouldn’t be teaching it before GCSE basically and I just thought that’s a load rubbish. Why is he saying that? So, I thought I want to prove him wrong. So, I started running some workshops with seven-year-old kids who weren’t doing anything in tech at the time in app design, Scratch programming, and doing stuff on Python programming and Raspberry Pi, and ran workshops with seven-year-old kids because I wanted to prove that anyone can do tech. If you pitch stuff at the right level which we now know is true from lots of things that have happened. We’ve got computing in schools and stuff now which we didn’t really have before at lower level. So, we’re running these workshops. The kids absolutely love them and a big shout out actually to Debbie Forster who was working at Apps for Good at the time and did a great workshop with the seven-year old’s doing app design. Normally she was running it with 14-year old’s, so she did really well with seven-year old’s. It must have been a big jump.
Yeah, so running these workshops and then with the kids, and then we get the parents in at the end of the day, and then I’d be encouraging the parents to have a go at what the kids have been doing. When I did that, I just noticed that most of the dads would just kind of step in and have a look at what the kids were doing, but lots of the mums were like don’t ask me to do that. I just started thinking, well, maybe if I could get mums excited about tech, about computing, then that would get the whole family kind of like being very positive about technology and maybe that would help to get everyone positive about technology. And a lot of stuff in the media was very negative about technology and sometimes still is as well like robots are going to kill us or whatever. So, I kind of noticed that and I thought, oh yeah, maybe I should focus on moms in tech, and I also found some research around that time, which said that the main positive influencing factors on kids doing well at age 11 in literacy and numeracy were their mom’s education and their home environment.
So, I just thought, okay really if we can get moms excited about and confident with technology, it’s going to affect everyone in the family, not just the moms. So, I put together a program, called it #techmums, and started running it in a secondary school in Tower Hamlets Bishop Challoner with the guy who’s the head there, Nick Soar there at the time. So, we had like app design, web design, social media, programming Python, and sort of basic kind of like getting online kind of skills. Started running it there and just had amazing success, right from the beginning really. You could just tell that the moms were becoming more confident and in fact, we had Brunel University run a research project, looking at the moms as they went through the program.
Their confidence with technology absolutely rocketed but the biggest change was their general self-esteem. So, everyone on the program just felt so much more confident now that they knew how to design a website, how to design an app/ They could do a bit of coding, they understood how to keep their kids safe online, that kind of thing. It massively changed how they felt about themselves, which was wonderful. That was like my dream to make that happen. So, we started working there in Tower Hamlets and we’ve worked with various different council schools libraries mainly in the UK, but also over in Dublin in Ireland as well.
We had to shut down during the pandemic really because it has to be face to face. It’s very hard with someone who doesn’t have much confidence and isn’t used to using a computer. So, we’ve just started, we are going through our first cohort up in Northumbria with Fareeha. Fareeha Usman is running it up at Being Woman in Northumbria. So, we’ve got graduation in about six weeks’ time, I think. So, I’m really looking forward to going up to graduation and seeing all the moms that have gone through the program. And I mentioned Fareeha to you, Donna, because she was one of our first cohort TechUP women…
Donna Herdsman: Yeah.
Sue Black: …who’s an amazing entrepreneur up in Northumberland. Yeah, and so again with TechUP we’ve never got enough funding, we’re always looking for funding for TechUP. We’re always looking for partners. But so yeah, if anyone’s interested in running TechUP at their school or council library then please to get in touch with me or you Donna as well.
Donna Herdsman: Yeah, because I think one of the benefits… So, first of all, I know who Fareeha is, so I know bit about the work she’s doing in that part of the world and because of the catchment of people, there’s a large immigration population for instance…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …and an elderly population for whom IT is actually a critical element in order to access services. Without that investment then and without somebody like Fareeha doing that work that actually we’d have people in society that feel actually quite isolated…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …even more so during the pandemic and my parents who are elderly. My parents are in their eighties. They talk ad nauseum about the fact that everything they get is go online and that being online is not their comfort zone.
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: And they speculate and wonder, which I think is really nice of them about people that don’t, for instance, have anyone in their world, one they trust…
Sue Black: With an amazing daughter like you.
Donna Herdsman: Well, there’s me, but one who they trust because you know, you have to hand over a lot of power to someone if they’re going to do stuff for you online and I think that kind of leads me to this inadvertent question of bias within AI, for instance. So, AI is becoming more and more part of our life, even if we don’t realize it, which I think is quite interesting. When people started talking about AI, remember they talked about robots for instance.
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: But actually AI, when I think about AI, it feels like something that’s almost in the back engine that’s driving our world and therefore is less visible.
Sue Black: Yeah, absolutely.
Donna Herdsman: I think one of the things that TechUP does is begin to help raise people’s consciousness and I’m just wondering what can we learn collectively and do collectively in the AI space to make sure that bias doesn’t end up being embedded in things like algorithms.
Sue Black: Yeah. Well, that’s a really good question. It’s a really big question. I mean, I’ve set up a group at Durham looking at bias in AI. We have monthly meetups. We had one yesterday where we have speakers talking about it from their perspective, the work that they’re doing to kind of help all of us understand it a bit more to work out well, what can we do exactly, your question. I think, yeah. I mean, absolutely AI software is making decisions around all sorts of things all around us all the time now. Most of the time like you said we don’t even know that it’s happening. But there are some examples, I don’t know if you’ve seen the film “Coded Bias” on Netflix, which I highly recommend, because that’s a really good introduction to how AI is affecting all of our lives and a lot of time, we don’t even realize and in what sort of ways because there are all sorts of things which are determined by algorithms which are basically step by step instructions.
But if there’s some kind of bias in there and if there’s no kind of human input, then you’ve just got an algorithm making decisions about things which could be programmed by someone who’s biased and making decisions about all sorts of things like who goes to prison, who gets into a certain school, whose CV gets looked at. There was a big thing around, I’m hopeless remembering names and dates and stuff, but there’s a company in the States which helped with recruitment and so they had an AI algorithm that was going through CVSs that people were sending in, and they kind of found that particularly white men did very well with the algorithm and everyone else not so well. They found out it was because it was picking up on certain words as indicators of success and there were things like the particular universities that those people might have gone to or particular schools and stuff. So not intentionally, but unintentionally bias was getting in there and making a difference in terms of who was getting put forward for jobs and stuff. That’s only going to get more and more impactful as time goes on because more and more things are controlled by software.
So, that kind of comes back really to our, our conversation about the sort of workforce, because if you have diverse teams in all sorts of ways, creating that software, there are people in there that are going to think about things like that before a product actually gets to market or gets used with sifting through a million CVs. If you’ve got people of color in there, if you’ve got people with lived experience of poverty example, all different sorts of things. If you’ve got women in there in your teams, you’re going to have people thinking about the results of how it’s been programmed in the first place and how that could affect people. Also looking at the results when systems are tested and stuff to think about is that fit for purpose for all sections of society that are relevant for this product. When I think about software and diverse teams and products that kind of fail, I think of the supermarket checkout systems. I mean, they’ve got a bit better, right but those things where you go to the automated tool are terrible still really. They’re not fit for purpose and have you ever seen a mom with a couple of kids or a dad. A parent with a couple of kids trying to use one of those things with the kids put everything through. The scale that weighs everything to make sure that it’s the correct weight. so, you’ve scanned the product and stuff.
They’re a nightmare and I just cannot believe that that was built by or tested by people that have families or that might have some accessibility needs or something. It to me seems like it was built probably by guys who never have to do any shopping. Either their mom does it for them or their wife does it for them or someone else does it. But it just strikes me that those machines were built without any real kind of testing or anything with people who are going to be using them and they’re all over the world. So, there’s a kind of example which is something that we can really see where it’s happening.
It doesn’t really work the way you’d want it to. But with AI a lot of that’s completely hidden, so you don’t know that’s happening. So that’s why it’s critically important that we have diverse teams building AI software, that we have checks and balances kind of all the way through, and that we have people keeping an eye on what’s happening in that area to make sure that some negative impact doesn’t affect a certain section of society and we don’t even realize until it’s too late. Sound a bit like the harbinger of doom now, don’t we?
Donna Herdsman: No, you don’t sound… I think part of this discussion is so important is if you are aware if we become more aware…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …and we become more curious then collectively we can work together to begin to address these areas and to make sure that technology, which is an important part of our lives now. To your points it serves all of us, irrespective of who we are and what our backgrounds are, but really that we all have a great experience as opposed to what can end up being an experience where we end up thinking technology is excluding us rather than being at all that inclusive. So, it’s not if we don’t watch it now it’s going to be done to us, and then…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …like we’ve seen throughout history, once something’s in place it’s really hard for society to say, we’re going to invest on rolling it all back and doing something different. So, you shouldn’t think it’s wrong for you to call it out. But I’m conscious that we don’t have much more time together. So, I do want to just use the last five minutes or so to talk about you. So, one of the things I love about you…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …is the fact that you never really talk about all these wonderful awards that you have won, which I know that you have. And in fact, TechUP, for instance, won on an Impact Award for the Improvement of Digital Skills. So…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …it’s not that just you are proactive, it’s you are proactive in a way that other people recognize and are prepared to say well done because you’re helping to make a difference. Given all of that and all that you’ve done thus far because I know you’re going to go on and carry on doing great things. What is it that you are most proud of that you’ve done so far?
Sue Black: Oh gosh! It’s really hard to say because there are so many things. I mean the things that kind of, I guess make me cry, feeling proud are well, things like TechUPWomen. When I see those amazing women change, I’m just so proud to have affected people’s lives. I feel like the rewards you get back for the effort you put in are just so much bigger really and I do things because I care about them. But I guess I feel most proud when I see people that have gone through very difficult times. Quite a few of our women on TechUPWomen, for example, have had lots of difficulties in life in lots in lots of different ways. We’ve just tried to do our bit to kind of help move them on and help them to kind of like blossom and bloom so that they can achieve their potential.
When I see women that I know like women that were, for example, kind of crying in a corner chatting to me at the first residential when we started TechUP, and then, I just heard about one of our TechUP women the other day, all sorts of amazing things she’s doing now. She was in a very difficult place right at the beginning. So, to see her out there, very proud, kind of proactive, happy, having a successful life. I couldn’t feel more proud than moments like that really to have been able to change people’s lives I mean, for the better. That’s what makes me the proudest, I guess,
Donna Herdsman: Oh, I think that’s lovely, and you know, one of the reasons I love TechUP is one- meeting the people.
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: I’ve been fortunate enough to join you halfway through the beginning and then happy to stay and met a lot of the participants. What I love is recognition for the amount that we collectively invest in them the rewards they get…
Sue Black: Yeah.
Donna Herdsman: …actually are insurmountable. I think for me, the lesson in life is when we take the time to support each other, then the entire society benefits and that’s what I love about the TechUP initiatives that it’s not just the women that are benefiting and the men because clearly they’ve been involved in the boot camps, but it’s the fact that everybody and society as a whole benefits but we have to take the time to care.
Sue Black: Yeah, absolutely, and support each other.
Donna Herdsman: We have to take the time to care and then support each other. So, I just want to kind of have that as our closing takeaway. So, when we support each other, when we care, and when we use ourselves to invest in others then we as society benefit as a whole.
Sue Black: Absolutely, and there’s a massive ripple effect from that as well through other people who then they go on and help other people.
Donna Herdsman: Absolutely. So, I want to finish by thanking Professor Sue Black OBE…
Sue Black: Thank you.
Donna Herdsman: … for joining me today. It’s been an utter pleasure. I could carry on talking to you for hours…
Sue Black: Likewise.
Donna Herdsman: …and I want to wish both you and your ongoing TechUP initiatives and everything else you decide to do the best of luck and I’ll see you again soon, I’m sure.
Sue Black: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s an absolute pleasure as always Donna.
Donna Herdsman: And it’s been a huge pleasure for me. I feel so touched and thank you for joining me today because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get you because you are always so busy. So, I feel extremely blessed that you’ve taken the time to speak to me today.
Sue Black: Yeah. You’re very welcome. It’s lovely to see you.
Donna Herdsman: And you, too.
