Rebekah Tweed on The Technically Human Podcast: The Future of the Ethical Technology Workforce

Listen to “The Future of the Ethical Technology Workforce” episode with Rebekah Tweed on The Technically Human Podcast with Deb Donig:

by Rebekah Tweed

I started the Responsible Tech Job Board in September of 2020 after struggling to round up a succinct yet comprehensive checklist of relevant job titles to punch into Indeed, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn, figuring others would appreciate the round-up as well. In January of 2021, after working solo for a few months, I teamed up with David Ryan Polgar and All Tech Is Human to grow and develop the Responsible Tech Job Board. Together, we focused in on what a “Responsible Tech” job meant, streamlining the job board and its included roles around 3 criteria: 1) reducing the harms of technology 2) diversifying the tech pipeline and 3) ensuring that tech aligns with the public interest. The question of what to include and what to exclude has always been an evolving one for us, constantly examined and regularly revisited.

I was incredibly honored to address these challenging questions recently with Dr. Deb Donig on The Technically Human podcast.

Dr. Deb Donig is doing something special with Ethical Tech at Cal Poly, and she is having an incredible impact on this emerging field. She is building Ethical Tech @ Cal Poly; she launched The Technically Human podcast; she recognized the emergence of this field when it was in its infancy and is defining the field and studying the future of tech work in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. 

In this podcast episode, we tackled questions around the definition of the field of Ethical or Responsible Tech — what it is and isn’t. The Responsible Tech job board is where these theoretical queries become a practical necessity for me. The tech industry is the ink-sinking headline-grabber of responsible tech, but the field goes far beyond FAANG and even FAANG-adjacent responsible tech departments. There are teams forming across sectors: healthcare, finance, energy, textiles, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and even home furnishings. Global consultancies have long-standing responsible tech teams. Numerous start-ups are laser-focused on responsible tech. Academia, government, and civil society all devote resources to deeply understanding and addressing these issues. 

Most of these responsible tech teams are in the early stages of launching and building, but there are a growing number of more mature teams that are fully immersed in growing pains. It’s hard enough to determine what roles fall within the purview of “responsible tech” when taking corporate claims at face value. It’s much more challenging to determine the veracity of the claims of individual tech companies about the intentions of their own responsible tech teams. And it’s impossible to vet a new team that emerges from scratch, which is happening with accelerating pace.

Is it enough for a company to stake a claim as having a responsible tech team or are there higher hurdles to clear prior to inclusion on the job board? Alternatively, are teams included until the company screws up? These are not easy questions to answer. For now, we embrace any role that fits our criteria, taking its stated claims at face value. For now, we post all of these roles and encourage candidates to make their own decisions about where they want to work and what teams they want to join. For now, it’s “candidate beware” – but candidates talk and compare notes (sometimes within the ATIH Slack community), so it’s increasingly “employer beware” too.

Check out our conversation – these are challenging questions that get at much more than just the job board; they address the ways in which we define the field as a whole. These are questions that I’m regularly re-assessing, and I don’t do it in a vacuum — I depend on the larger responsible tech community to shape the evolving contours of the field of Responsible Technology, and am constantly learning from the All Tech Is Human Slack community, Mentorship program, and University Ambassadors.