Interview with Tech Activist and Startup Founder Tracy Chou
Tracy Chou is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and diversity advocate. She is currently founder and CEO of Block Party, a startup working to solve abuse and harassment online. Tracy was a software engineer and tech lead at Pinterest, and worked as an early engineer at Quora. During the Obama administration she was on reserve with the U.S. Digital Service as a technical consultant. She helped to kick off the wave of tech company diversity data disclosures with a Medium post titled “Where are the numbers?” and a Github repository collecting data on women in engineering. Tracy co-founded two non-profits, Project Include, which works with tech startups on diversity and inclusion towards a mission of giving everyone a fair chance to succeed in tech, and #MovingForward, which works with venture capital firms to establish and publish anti-harassment policies.
Tracy has appeared on the covers of The Atlantic, WIRED, and MIT Technology Review; has been named to TIME Women of the Year, Forbes Tech 30 under 30, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35, and Fast Company Most Creative People in Business; and has been profiled in Vogue, ELLE, and many other media outlets.
Matilda
What is your definition of including someone?
Tracy
It depends on the context, but it's making sure that there is space for them, and making sure they can participate in the space as much as everybody else.
Matilda
How would you make sure that people are included overall? What do you think is the most important or the best way to make sure that people feel included?
Tracy
There are a few different ways to answer this question, depending on what kind of persona. Just off the top of my head, I'm thinking about, just as another person in the room, what can you do to make somebody feel included? There's also at a higher level, more structural, institutional [solutions for] how do you make sure that people can be included, and these are different responses.
When it's just the person to person, in a room making sure people are included. A lot of it is understanding individuals as humans, and even if it isn't a professional contact, for example, knowing that each person is a whole person. Getting to know people as people makes it a lot easier to try to include them and understand how they think about things, how they might like to contribute, or engage with other folks and participate.
From more of the structural level, institutional, how do you make sure that people are included? That question boils down to understanding power structures, and incentives. It's looking at who has power right now, what are their motivations, and how can you line up inclusion to those goals and drivers that they have? There's understanding how the system works, and there's also thinking about what are the interventions that you can make. In some contexts, this is called "theory of change," but having an opinion on how are we going to disrupt the status quo or change something about the incentive structures and systems or the people who are in power such that there is actually inclusion. This less straightforward, because it's very complicated. If you look at politics, or how anything in the world functions, it's extremely complex with a lot of people involved, and power structures are pretty pervasive.
The people who are in power usually don't like to give out that power, so it's tricky to think at that level of how do you make sure people are included. Tying things to people's incentives, so it's looking at companies, and what are the incentives of driving digital people, and making inclusion, if it can be measured in any way, part of their goals and things that they are evaluated on for performance. It can be tying inclusion to business outcomes. If you want to serve a different market, you have nobody that represents that market on your team, it's just going to be harder to build the right products for them or design the right goods and services for them. There's a bit of building the business argument. It really depends on the organization for what kinds of arguments or cases to be made are the best.
Matilda
What's an encounter that you've had with racism or sexism, and how did you respond to that?
Tracy
There are the examples of racism and sexism that I can share that are the easy ones to call out, but they're also less interesting because they're just outright obnoxious remarks. Then there are the much more insidious ones, where nobody is saying I'm discriminating against you because you're a woman or because you're not white, but it feels much worse. I can give you the first kinds of examples I've had people say to me in the workplace: "I thought women didn't care about their careers, because they really only care about having babies." That's pretty sexist, but ultimately, it's not even that interesting to talk about because it is so flagrantly sexist.
Then there are the cases where there's more interpretation. One thing I've experienced now that I'm further along in my career and have more established competencies and more of a track record, is insecure men will be very upset about the idea that I as a woman could be competent and could be equally as good as they are or better than them. The ways that they react to that are often lashing out and trying to cut me down and make me feel bad. I've had to deal with just outright disrespect from people yelling at me in public settings, even when it's nonsensical because we're talking about something that's very technical and substantive, and there are third party observers who could vouch for what I am saying, on the technical side. But these insecure men would be super rude to me and just refuse to listen to me and be outright disrespectful even in a situation where I am the boss. Those are the more subtle examples, where it's hard to say for sure that because I'm a woman, or it's because I'm not white, but it's very hard for me to believe that these people would act in the same way if I were a white male boss, for example.
Matilda
How did you respond to that? How did you react? What did you do?
Tracy
Usually, the way I look at these situations is trying to understand if there is any useful action to be taken, and if it's something that's worth fighting. In some cases, I decide that it's not worth it, and it's not going to do anything, it's just going to be a waste of my energy. In some cases, I'll try to talk to people and call out what was inappropriate about the behavior or how it made me feel, and try to work with them on why it was inappropriate, what might be better in the future. In some situations, I had no power so I couldn't really do anything besides put up with it. I could try to talk to them, but really nothing was going to happen.
One thing that is nice now about being a little bit more senior in my career is that in some cases, I can actually take action. I can let somebody go from my team if they are being outright disrespectful to me. It's still pretty hard to do because it's hard to justify in the legal and business context sometimes and to explain to other people, but in extreme situations, now that I have a little bit more autonomy and a little bit more control over my work environment, I will sometimes exert it.
Matilda
What would you recommend other people do if they face situations where they're being discriminated against?
Tracy
Decide what you want. There's a lot of different things you could want. One is just to be out of the situation, and you can just choose. In some cases you'll leave. If it's a work context, maybe it's find another job. You could want the outcome to be that the person perpetrating this discriminatory behavior learns that it's inappropriate and changes their behavior. In some cases, people are open to change as they're doing it, they don't realize what they're doing, so actually talking to them can be effective. Other cases, they may not want to, but you can see if it's worth the effort.
You may want the outcome to be that you fix this problem in a more structural way. It's not just resolving this specific incident, or trying to set up systems such that this kind of incident won't happen again, in the future. Structural change is harder, but if that's what you want, you can also formulate a plan and try to execute against that. It's more work, but it may be more rewarding if you can actually pull it off.
Matilda
What would you tell middle schoolers about discrimination in general?
Tracy
One, discrimination sucks. Two, it is, unfortunately, very "natural" given human systems. We all have a tendency to be tribal and identify with people that are more similar to us, even if sometimes those identifications are completely fabricated by society. It is also somewhat of a "natural" instinct. That doesn't mean we can't try to fight against it. There are many ways in which we go against what is "natural." We don't live in nature, for the most part; most of us live in housing that we have constructed. There are things that we can do that are unnatural, but we have chosen to do them in a different way.
Building on that point: We can fight against discrimination. That also doesn't mean that each person needs to take on the mantle of doing it. Sometimes, you need to just do what's right for you. It might be leaving a situation if you don't want to take on the whole fight. Either way is good. If you want to protect yourself or if you want to try to fight for more change, these are all valid choices that people can make.
I don't think it's fair to say that everybody who has experienced discrimination then has to become a champion for fighting against it. That's just not fair for people who are already marginalized to have to take on this additional burden, but the people who are in these positions are uniquely able to identify what is wrong from having experienced and being on the receiving end of it and advocate for what would be better. You have options for how you want to deal with it.
Matilda
What's your favorite part of Asian culture?
Tracy
I just like the food, Asian food. Trying to pick a favorite is probably the food but there's a lot of other stuff that's maybe just more personal nostalgic side. My family is Taiwanese, and I just have this identification with Taiwanese culture, where there's been more historical elements of cultural heritage from Confucianism and older Chinese society.
I like the arts, too. I do Chinese calligraphy, and I just think it looks really beautiful. Even though Chinese as a language is very difficult to learn, it's pretty cool that every word is composed of these different characters that are not alphabetic; you just have to memorize them. You have to memorize what they mean, what they look like, how they're pronounced, and they're all separate. It's just kind of cool to see how different it is than the more American western culture that I've grown up in. To have that contrast with my family history and my family background, and what I've experienced growing up is pretty cool.
Matilda
What is something that's very important to know about Asian culture or interesting to know?
Tracy
One thing that's more specific to like Asian American identity is there's a lot of variation within Asian cultures and Asian countries. For Asian Americans, there's been a bit of this political organizing around the idea that we can be a coalition, but all of us are coming from different countries with different histories and also very complex interplay of those histories. Things like Japan colonized Korea, and for Japanese Americans and Korean Americans, that is part of history. Just because they're both Asian American doesn't mean they're all the same. The part where we're perceived as all the same by non-Asians in Western culture does mean that we share parts of our experience.
What's fun is to be able to tease out not just the immediate experience we have in the Western world, but also the connections like home countries or the countries of our ancestors.
Matilda
I know you created Block Party, and social media is a very huge part of teenagers' lives. Because social media can be very toxic, what can like teenagers do to help keep themselves safe?
Tracy
The first thing is just mindfulness and checking in with yourself when you are using social media. How does it make you feel? What is the impact on you? There may be very positive things like being able to connect with friends. You maybe connect with other people over shared interests, and you wouldn't be able to spend time with in person as easily. There are very good things that are possible, but also be aware of when there are negative impacts to you. If you notice yourself looking at a bunch of photos of people who are models and then feeling bad about your self image, just be aware of that negative impact on your mental health and think about how to curtail the negatives. Just pay attention first, and some things are unavoidable. Hopefully, you can still put in some controls to make sure that what you're getting out of being online is on balance, much more positive than it is negative.
One interesting framing on this is how do you use social media in a way that your life is better for it using it instead of it's a necessary thing and I'm just on here because I have to be. Try to be intentional. How does actively make my life better, and dictate choices in what platforms you're using, who you're connected with who you're following, what kinds of content you engage with or share. You can always try to be a bit more intentional and try out different things to see how it works for you.
Matilda
You won the TIME 100 Women of the Year award and so how does it feel to be like recognized for your work?
Tracy
I'm very honored and flattered. Sometimes I still have this question for myself of what am I even doing? Am I doing anything that's meaningful. Does any of this matter? Particularly working in social media and anti-harassment tooling, sometimes what I'm surrounded with is quite negative. In order to build anti-harassment tools you have to be aware of what harassment looks like and take a look at it and understand it, so it can be quite negative sometimes. To have a recognition, like the TIME Women of the Year Award, is a nice perspective, reframe, and reset, like, "Oh, yes. This is important work, and it's meaningful, and people are recognizing it." I still am mostly motivated by internal factors and not by external, in general, but it is nice to get a little bit of that validation from a very recognized entity like TIME.
Matilda
How has like how have you seen Block Party like change since Elon Musk like thought Twitter?
Tracy
We've seen a few different effects, based on the changes that have happened in the last month and a half. One is that there are some people who are just leaving Twitter, because they don't want to be around anymore, but there's still a lot of people who are sticking around. This idea that some people might want to leave is like bringing this question to the forefront of people's minds of, "Can I leave? Should I leave?"
What a lot of people are realizing in answering that question is that it's not that easy to leave, especially if you've spent a lot of time on the platform, invested in building up your following, and you have an audience here, or maybe you're using it for professional purposes, you're running a small business, and this is how you get lead gen[eration] for your business, or you're a creator, and this is where your fans are. It's not so easy to just go somewhere else. Some people will call this the freedom to exit. It's not actually that easy to leave. There are people sticking around, even if they don't feel that comfortable with it. They would prefer that things not be so chaotic. They would prefer that Elon not be the owner of the platform. In the end for business reasons, for whatever reasons, it's not that straightforward to leave.
There are a lot of these folks who are sticking around who are now signing up for Block Party and saying, "Okay, I'm here, and now I'm going to invest in better tools to protect myself." We see more people proactively using blocking features to curate who they're going to see in their feeds and who can interact with them. There's a bit of an increase there in terms of the signups and the usage as people are testing out what this platform feels like when moderation controls might be coming off. There hasn't been explicitly that much change on the moderation side. Elon has said various things, but it hasn't necessarily been reflected in very concrete changes that people can point to. Maybe there's slightly less enforcement because there are fewer people working at the company. The policy changes that he's rolled out and then rolled back very quickly have not meaningfully had an impact on most people. On the whole, people are sticking around and want more tools to fight the toxicity.
Matilda
Is there anything else that you would like to tell middle schoolers about diversity and inclusion or anything else you'd like to say?
Tracy
I hope you all can make the world better than it is now. I think we are making progress in a lot of these aspects of diversity and inclusion, but I don't think progress is something to be taken for granted. It is something we have to keep working for it, so every generation has more to do and contribute.
Matilda
Thank you so much for meeting with me.
Tracy
You're very welcome.
Bio adapted from triketora.com/about
Photo from techiesproject.com/tracy-chou
