Racial bias in design hiring

Time to strap in for an uncomfortable read about a hot button topic. You didn’t think this industry was immune from this, did you? Good, because systemic racism is pretty deeply entrenched in our industry. In tech at large and within design for sure. Ask any person of color what their experience has been so far and they’ll gladly give you more examples than they can count on their hands of horror stories with recruiters, interviews, and managers. We’ve shrugged it off for the longest time as “it’s just the way it is”, but awareness about racism being a systemic issue only now seems to be coming into the mainstream white consciousness, so here’s a primer on how the design industry in tech perpetuates it.

When I was interviewing for my first design job, I was interviewed almost exclusively by white men. After having reviewed my portfolio, they’d ask me questions like “What music do you listen to when you design?” or “Where do you look for inspiration?”. Seemingly innocent and well-meaning questions. I answered them thoroughly and honestly at the time, not thinking much of it and just wanting to get along with the people that I’d maybe be working with. It was only until I was on the other side of the table that my perspective started to shift.

After a year or so at the company, I started interviewing design candidates who were applying to the company. I had a fair bit of freedom in how to conduct the interviews, so I did my due diligence with ensuring that their skillsets would be a good fit for the role, how they explained their design process, and how user-centric they were in their approach. And that’s the feedback I jotted down. It wasn’t until I submitted my feedback online and got to sit down with the other designers and the design recruiter that I realized how utterly broken the process was.

While submitting candidate feedback online, I was being asked to answer questions like “Do you see this person fitting into the company culture?”, “How comfortable would you be taking advice from this person?”, and “Would you want to sit next to this person?”. If these questions aren’t triggering alarm bells in your head right now, congrats on never having been marginalized during an interview process. These types of open-ended questions are all but guaranteeing responses loaded with unconscious bias. Every person who interviewed the candidate will have a different answer on their potential culture fit and comfort level based on their own past experiences with people like them.

Sure, it could’ve been the candidate’s personality or demeanor that made the interviewer uncomfortable. Or maybe the actual design work wasn’t up to par. Or maybe it was the way they were dressed or how they were talking. But time and time again, data will show you that Black and brown candidates are rejected at higher rates for the same roles than their white counterparts. When you ask primarily white interviewers to answer questions like “Would you be comfortable taking advice from this person?” about a Black candidate, you’ve basically written off the candidate right then and there. A question like this feeds into the hundreds of years of dehumanization and injustice that Black people have had to tolerate until now. It doesn’t matter if you think no-one at your company is racist. Pretending like it doesn’t exist means pretending that hundreds of years of slavery and segregation never happened. It means wrongly assuming that Black people have had the same level of opportunity and privilege that your current white designers have.

And why exactly does it matter if your white designers are comfortable or not? Why on Earth does it matter what music your candidate listens to or where they get the inspiration form? Why is anything aside from the crucial design skill and some basic interpersonal skills even necessary to inquire about? I had to sit in countless “interview debrief” sessions like these listening to white men at the Director and VP level spout out some nonsense about how “something didn’t feel right” to them about the candidate and how they didn’t seem to think that the candidate would “fit in” to the culture of the company. This is system racism at play, pure and simple. When you exclude people for a reason as elitist and privileged as “culture fit”, you’re excluding diverse perspectives and viewpoints that challenge your assumptions and processes of how you work.

A few years down the line at a different company, I felt myself fuming at one of these debrief sessions. We were hiring for a pretty senior designer who was primarily a systems thinker. [Gonna change up some info for privacy reasons, so let’s pretend that this was a female candidate named Roxanne who we interviewed]. I interviewed Roxanne in a one hour portfolio review. She had a stellar portfolio, came very well prepared, had a great story, had good answers to my questions, and asked really good questions of her own. I submitted this in my feedback during the debrief. And the VP of Product [again, for privacy reasons, let’s call him Mike] mentioned some really strange things. He said he didn’t feel like he got the right vibes after looking at Roxanne’s dribbble page. He didn’t think her visual design chops were up to par. I sat there dumbfounded. I was the one doing the portfolio review. I vouched for her having all the right skillsets needed to do the job. And besides, we weren’t even looking for someone with strong visual design skills. We needed a strategic systems thinker.

And then Mike goes on to make comments about how Roxanne was dressed. He said she wasn’t exactly wearing a “designer-y” outfit. Again, what?? Apparently every designer Mike had previously hired wore something unique or trendy that stood out in the interview. It showed “moxie”, according to Mike. Sitting next to me was a white male designer who also interviewed Roxanne, and I could see over his shoulder that he was scrolling through her Instagram feed to get a sense of her style. He made a comment or two about her good photography skills. After some more discussion, it was left up to Mike and the design recruiter to make the call on whether or not to hire Roxanne. She did not get an offer.

Now is a good time to mention that Roxanne was of Asian descent. She had short hair. She had a bit of an accent. She was a fantastic fit for the job. And she didn’t get an offer. In this not-so-uncommon interview process where sexism meets white supremacy, Mike had built up an image in his mind of what a successful designer is — it’s someone who wears fashionable trendy clothing. Roxanne wasn’t that. I’m all but certain that he made the final call to not hire her, despite her being an excellent fit for the role. I contacted the recruiter later to get more details about exactly why we didn’t make an offer, but I never got a clear answer.

I asked Mike as well, and he mentioned something along the lines of “Well, if we had to have such a long discussion about whether or not she was the right fit for the role, maybe the decision is to not hire.” Again, I’m left baffled at how oblivious he is to his own behavior. If Mike hadn’t brought up all these completely pointless things about Roxanne during a debrief about her skillset, the discussion would not have been as long. We could have just quickly talked about her skills in five minutes and decided to hire her on the spot. But that’s unfortunately not how it went down.

This one specific incident greatly soured my impression of the company. It even left me questioning every product decision the company was making, because I knew Mike was at the helm of all of it. If he’s this clueless about how much influence he can have over a design candidate’s hiring decision, why should I trust him with the product decisions of the company going forward? And let me be clear, this type of behavior isn’t isolated to this one company. It happens all the time in tech. Candidates are dismissed and the interviewers, who all may have submitted great feedback on them, are told that they simply weren’t a “culture fit” and are told that no more details can be shared about the situation. It’s a shitshow.

As a design candidate, I’ve been on the receiving end of this multiple times. I have interviewed for roles where I thought I there was a really good fit. I’ve gone to on-site interviews and had great conversations with the teams. And then all of a sudden, the hiring manager and design directors have a change of heart and call me saying that they’ve decided to go with someone else. Every time this happens, I look up who the person who got the role is a few weeks or months later (through a combination of creeping on LinkedIn and Twitter). Almost every time, it has been a white dude who was hired for the role that I didn’t get. And almost every time, their portfolio or past work is mediocre at best.

Black and brown designers don’t get to be mediocre. They have no other option other than to be absolutely excellent. They have to work two or three times as hard just to be taken as seriously as white designers. There is a lot of “white gatekeeping” in the design industry, and it’s primarily because of people like Mike. People who have built up a misguided notion of what a designer is. Maybe it’s because they’ve watched too many white guys with British accents give Apple-esque presentations in minimalist design studios, or maybe they can’t fathom that design can be done and can be done better by non-white people as it can by white people. Again, this is a deeply systemic issue that goes really far back.

Want another example of white gatekeeping? We’ve got plenty. Last week, I saw a tweet from a design manager that said they don’t think any designer who works at Facebook can call themselves ethical due to the controversies and policies that the company’s platform finds itself entrenched in. They even went as far to suggest that any self-respecting designer would’ve quit FB by now and that he wouldn’t be hiring anyone from there. This is a level of elitist pretentiousness that’s just stunning. And yes, he was white.

First of all, not everyone has the same choice when it comes to employers. Many immigrants and minorities are tied to their employers due to visas and work permits. A lot of the most talented designers I know currently work at Facebook, and I respect them greatly. A pandemic and a recession isn’t exactly the greatest time to go job hunting again. Also, those immigrant and minority designers don’t always agree with their company’s policies, but cannot speak out or say anything against their company online because they live in constant fear of their own words being used against them during their visa renewal or work permit authorization. Pretending that these issues don’t exist is a level of privilege that only white people have.

The same pattern proliferates the higher up the design ladder you look. Plenty of white men in the VP and Heads of Design roles. Is this any surprise? The white gatekeepers at these levels will only let their white friends in that they “feel comfortable taking advice from” or “would want to sit next to”. The network of referrals and tech nepotism at these levels is so absurd that I’ve worked at places where everyone who was a Director or above simply made their way into the company because they were good friends with one of the CEOs, not because they were actually qualified for the role. When you see minorities in these roles, it’s because they worked their way up. They were legitimately qualified and deserve to be there.

Another thing we don’t really hear talked about is how minorities are actively discouraged from pursuing design as a career directly from their network of friends and family. This is especially true if you’re a first-generation immigrant whose parents don’t know the first thing about design and only believe there’s a handful of careers to go into. Lower-income Black families working blue collar jobs certainly have no idea about design as a potential career path, even if their sons and daughters would be a great fit for it. Unless they end up extremely lucky, everyone will actively steer minorities away from pursuing any creative field and into some lucrative guaranteed high-paying job like law or finance.

When I graduated high school, everyone laughed at me when I told them I wanted to study design. They didn’t believe design was a real job. I applied and got into some notable and reputed design programs, but my parents wouldn’t pay the tuition fees unless I went to a school for a “real” degree. So instead I ended up getting a degree in engineering and switched careers to design later after becoming financially independent. This is the reality of being an immigrant minority who wants to study design, and it’s all too common.

The problem wasn’t just my parents. It was everyone. My guidance counselors. My friends at school. My extended family. None of them knew any designers. There just wasn’t the same level awareness about UI/UX or Product Design in the broader public consciousness in 2008, and no-one in my network thought it was a viable career. The few that were supportive encouraged me to pursue it as a side hobby or freelance gig because they didn’t think that designers could make a living working full-time. Meanwhile, I was consuming hundreds of videos on YouTube every week from professional designers putting out Photoshop and After Effects tutorials. I knew these people were making money doing this. There was demand for these skills. I just couldn’t get anyone to take me seriously at the time. This is what we have to fight against as minorities. And the fight continues in the interview process and in the workplace. We literally have to prove to people that we can do this simply because we’re not white and our white interviewers can’t project their idea of a designer onto us so easily.

Keep in mind that University hiring programs also suffer from the same issue of entrenched white supremacy and racism. Most of the tech companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley only hire from Stanford, Caltech, UC Berkeley, and a select few other schools in the area. They’ve got strong relationships for intern programs and ties with the professors in the University to send over their best students. By design, these University hiring programs exclude all those minorities who weren’t able to afford an Ivy League education. These institutions are built on the pillars of exclusion and socio-economic privilege. Many Black and brown designers can only dream of their family being able to pay for them to attend a top-tier University that has these ties to tech companies. And in addition, there’s the side effect of your tech company only hiring from a small pool of very similar, elite, and probably white candidates.

I know I’ve made some sweeping generalizations in this post, but there’s a lot of data in the industry to back it up. I follow tons of minority designers on Twitter who share the exact same experiences from being on both sides of the interview process. I’ve personally experienced this so many times that it’s just become the norm. And if you’re wondering why we don’t speak out about this more often or force a change here, what exactly are we supposed to do? If our VPs and Directors are white, they will either refuse to acknowledge the problem or not prioritize it on their long list of tasks. I feel the same helplessness here as I did when my parents said they wouldn’t pay for my design school. My only option was to do what they said and then make my own way into design later. My only plan here is to make my way up to that level and bring about a change when I have the power to do so. For now, the best thing we can do is spread awareness to the issue so that the qualified designers get hired where they deserve to be. I have been trying to be way more vocal and outspoken when I see examples of unconscious bias, sexism, racism, and micro-aggressions spreading unchecked amongst the people I work with, and it seems to be working. So I plan to continue doing that as much as I can, and I highly encourage you to do so as well. It’s the only way we can move towards a more fair and just hiring practice in design and tech.