HubSpot Chief People Officer And Sloan Alum Hacks Diversity in Tech
Late last month, MIT Sloan spoke with Cambridge-based HubSpot Chief People Officer Katie Burke, MBA ’09, in advance of her talk at the upcoming Sloan Women in Management Breaking the Mold Hackathon whose prompt is “Hacking Diversity.”
Burke elaborated on a recent blog post about the inbound marketing company’s commitment to diversity, whose ethos on the topic she summarized concisely, “humility drives much more interesting conversations than hubris.”
Burke continues, saying, “To truly transform the face of tech, we need more individuals who [are] first in their families to attend college or work in a corporate business environment [but] traditional solutions and ideas won’t meaningfully transform diversity and inclusion at most organizations globally.”
Burke believes diverse workplaces are only a realistic proposition if everyone’s on board with a change in corporate culture. Burke points to a number of initiatives HubSpot spearheaded to champion inclusion throughout its organization, including “a mentorship program specifically for employees of color at HubSpot [and] two events focused on helping first generation students learn more about tech and prepare for interviews.”
Another event Burke references is HubSpot’s ‘Add The Women Back’, which gave one of its lead engineers “the tools, support and promotion” to highlight dynamic women executives on Wikipedia to balance the site’s male bias.
“There’s no question tech needs a better pipeline of more diverse candidates over time, but I also think all of us can be doing more to diversify our networks, rethink our existing processes, and ultimately create a workforce that looks more like the world we are building our software for day in and day out.”
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About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
