Colorintech's Dion McKenzie: "We want to make the UK the most inclusive tech hub in the world"

Only 4 per cent of the UK's tech industry come from BAME backgroundsand that's a problem 
Colorintech
Amelia Heathman3 October 2018

Dion McKenzie is a busy guy. Depending on what day of the week it is, you might catch him in San Francisco’s Bay Area advising and investing in the hottest new start-ups or spending time with his family in London.

Aside from his day job as a venture capitalist, McKenzie is also breaking ground as the co-founder of Colorintech, a London-based organisation. McKenzie and his co-founder Ashleigh Ainsley want to improve diversity in the tech industry and get more people from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds (BAME) to choose tech careers.

A lot has been said about the lack of women in the tech industry, current UK figures hover around 17 per cent, but if you think that’s bad, you should look at the diversity statistics.

According to Colorintech’s research, only four per cent of the UK’s tech industry are BAME. And in the non-profit’s most recent report focusing on diversity amongst tech FTSE companies, a mere four out of 152 board seats were taken up by people from BAME backgrounds.

But, why are the statistics so bad? And what can an organisation like Colorintech do about it?

The tech diversity problem

McKenzie semi-relocated back to London in 2015 after 10 years in the US, just after the capital's tech explosion took off.

"There was this start-up tech ecosystem that wasn't there before. But, there were the same problems with diversity and inclusion [as the US]; I was one of a few BAME tech investors here in London and I wanted to do something about this."

There isn’t one particular reason why people from BAME backgrounds aren’t going into tech. It could be education: kids in some schools aren't always given the time to learn about coding and computer science.

It’s also an awareness issue. “These kids don’t have networks: they’re often first-generation university students so they don’t have people in their family who will have worked in tech,” he explains.

The lack of transparency in the industry doesn’t help too. McKenzie studied an undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where he received coaching on topics such as interview prep and tactics to get through things like Google’s difficult interview questions.

“But if you go to university in the UK, a lot of these students will never have done that before,” he explains.

One of the arguments against diversity policies such as quotas is that the best person should get the job, regardless of their gender and background. Yet this overlooks the barriers, like these, that are in place from the start which prevents people from non-white backgrounds from being able to achieve their potential.

As well, McKenzie believes that tech, above all industries, has a particular responsibility to promote inclusion due to the sheer impact tech has on the world. “You need people from all walks of life [in tech]. If you want to get to unicorn status, a company valued at over $1 billion, then you need a product that is going to help millions of people, even billions,” explains McKenzie.

“When you’re building products for a global audience, you need to have that represented in your company because otherwise how are you going to know different nuances from cultures and backgrounds?”

It makes sense.

What can Colorintech do about this?

We know there are barriers to people from BAME backgrounds and that companies need to rectify this if they want to have a global impact. What are the solutions?

Colorintech runs a series of different programmes tackling just this. There’s the Pipeline programme, which focuses on children at Key Stage 3 and 4 level, and opens them and their parents up to the possibilities of tech through an annual ColorCode summit.

The Immersion programme takes 10-15 university students at a time over to Silicon Valley so they can see what it’s really like to work in tech. “A lot of people studying computer science have zero awareness that they can work at Google or Monzo or a start-up. A big part of the trip is to show them they can,” says McKenzie.

The organisation also arranges fellowships for students to spend their summers interning for big tech companies and start-ups in London, and recently collaborated with WeWork’s coding school, Flatiron, to offer over £370,000 in coding scholarships.

Colorintech is able to offer these programmes thanks to funding from its corporate backers. “It means the partners are invested in what we’re doing and often become our host partners too when we go to the Bay Area.”

Colorintech's Immersion programme takes students to Silicon Valley to introduce them to the world of tech
Colorintech

The organisation also recently launched an in-house consultancy which is going to work with its partners to help them improve their diversity policies. That could be in the form of unconscious bias training, sexual harassment training, or even looking at company culture and how to adapt it to make people from different backgrounds feel included.

For instance, when Colorintech visits a tech company, it will quiz the students before and after on whether they would want to work there. McKenzie says the female students will often change their answers from “yes” to “no” because they don’t see anyone that looks like them at the company, or the engineering team is very male-dominated.

“This is really interesting feedback. The next step is for us to help those companies either eradicating bias or help them cultivate interesting teams because we believe that is the future,” he adds.

So far, the organisation has helped 150 students through the programmes but wants to scale up to reach at least 500 students by the end of 2019. It’s not an easy task to break down systematic barriers in the tech industry but McKenzie is optimistic.

“Our mission is to make the UK the most inclusive tech hub in the world,” he says. “London is one of the most diverse cities in the world and it’s disappointing that this isn’t reflected in these great tech companies.”

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