While it’s safe to assume that most senior managers in the HPC community are in favor of hiring and promoting more women and people of color within their organizations, many don’t know how to make it happen. At last week’s annual meeting of the Dell Technologies HPC Community, Melyssa Fratkin of the Texas Advanced Computing Center offered this piece of advice: using same-old-same-old hiring practices won’t work.
Fratkin, a passional diversity advocate, is TACC’s industrial programs director and co-chair of the Texas chapter of Women in HPC, a position she shares with Carolyn Devany, executive chair of Data Vortex Technologies. Following her excellent talk last week in Austin last week, we caught up with Fratkin to discuss the state of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in HPC and her recommendations for accelerating progress in this critical area.
We ask lots of questions and cover lots of topics, including why this is such a hard problem, the burden of being a diversity pioneer, the impact of political environments and changing laws, how to post jobs that attract a diverse set of candidates, why you need support from the top and throughout the organization, and more.
Also, as discussed during our conversation, here is a sample list of sites that could be helpful for EDI programs:
- Society of Women Engineers – http://societyofwomenengineers.swe.org/
- National Society of Black Engineers – http://www.nsbe.org/home.aspx
- MAES – Latinos in Science & Engineering http://mymaes.org/
- National Girls Collaborative Project https://ngcproject.org/
- Girls Who Code – http://www.girlswhocode.com
- TEALS – https://www.tealsk12.org/volunteers/
- Women in HPC job listings: https://womeninhpc.org/community/jobs
You can find our podcasts at insideHPC’s @HPCpodcast page, on Twitter and at the OrionX.net blog. Here’s the RSS feed.
We welcome your ideas for special topics and guest commentators. Feel free to contact Doug Black or Shahin Khan with your suggestions.
Did I miss it or like many DEI initiatives disability is invisible?