Becky Blank is passionate about making the tech industry a more diverse space. She lives her passion in her day job at Ample by striving to be the kind of strong woman leader whom she has always wanted to have in her workplace, and in her free time through the two nonprofits she helped found, We Pivot and Unmute. Both aim to amplify marginalized voices in the tech industry. We connected virtually to discuss diversity in tech, accessibility, food, and more.

Interview by Tracy Van Wagner. Photography by Nicole Mayes.

Please tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a Cincinnati native, for the most part; I moved here from Rhode Island when I was eight weeks old. I grew up in the Green Hills/Forest Park area, went to the Winton Woods school district, went to Miami University, and then moved back to Cincinnati after I graduated in 2005. I've worked in the technology/digital agency world ever since.

I have a philosophy degree in interdisciplinary studies; what that means is that I got to make my own major, basically. My focus areas were marketing, psychology, and computer science. Going into it, I didn't know it was going to be so in demand on the other side. So, it worked out well for me. Most of my experience in the tech space has been as a technical project manager. I’m currently the director of technical operations at a small agency downtown called Ample.

I live in Norwood. I’m married. I don't have any kids, but my husband has two from his first marriage – although they're both adults, so I don't consider myself a parent necessarily. My husband and I travel a lot. We're obsessed with boxers – the dogs, not the fighters. I'm a foodie. That’s me in a nutshell.

What issues are you especially passionate about?

I put a lot of focus and energy into diversity in tech. I've always been the “only” of something on most of the teams I’ve worked on in my 15 years in tech. Usually it's the only woman and the only person of color. Sometimes one, sometimes both. I always try to bring more diverse perspectives to the table.

That's actually what got me started working with a nonprofit called Girl Develop It, a women-focused organization that trains women to enter the technology space, teaching how to code and things like that. Granted, that was a women-focused organization – not specifically diversity focused – but it was my gateway into, “How can I actually do something about this and not just complain about it?” and “How can I advocate for the women around me in the workspaces I’m already in, but also build into the pipeline of new voices that can enter the tech space?”

I get more energy from training the trainers and bringing up new people, new staff, and new volunteers and getting them to be community-builders.

That was a big focus area for me for a long time, and then it evolved into being more about marginalized and vulnerable communities that want to work in the tech space. I'm all about making the tech industry inclusive, welcoming, and safe for everyone in those communities. There are pockets of inclusivity and pockets where it’s growing, but, dominantly, most technology organizations are very homogeneous and are led, run, and owned by a very homogeneous demographic. I'm trying to break down some of those boundaries.

Tell us about We Pivot.

I’m the co-chair of the board of directors for a nonprofit called We Pivot, which serves marginalized and underrepresented folks who either want to get into the tech space or may already be in the tech space. We Pivot has a chapter model and we're in a growth state, which is to say, we have, like, one and a half chapters right now! Our biggest and most active chapter is in Milwaukee and our other one is in Rochester, New York.

My role is mostly governance, oversight, operationalizing: making sure we're moving, we're growing, we have funding, we're compliant with the government and things like that. One of the things I learned from my previous experience is that I get more energy from training the trainers and bringing up new people, new staff, and new volunteers and getting them to be community-builders.

Are there plans to build a Cincinnati chapter? If someone reading this was interested in starting one, what would that entail?

I would love that! It has taken everything I have to not volunteer to run a Cincinnati chapter. I'm the kind of person who spreads myself way too thin. So, I'm just going to stick with being on the board.

However, if there's anybody who is willing to raise their hand – yes, let's do it! Cincinnati needs it. I would not run it, but I would absolutely be available to support, volunteer for, and help build the thing. I would love to find a go-getter, entrepreneurial-type of person in Cincinnati who is interested in and willing to help me stand up a local chapter.

Are you working on any other projects?

I've recently launched an event-based community called Unmute. It's a storytelling platform with a series of events for people who work in the tech space, with a focus on marginalized and vulnerable voices. They are given an opportunity to tell their story, talk about their journey in the technology space, and learn from each other. We just did our first event virtually a couple weeks ago. Our speaker was a woman who works on the Google Maps design team. She had an awesome story.

We'll be doing more of those in the future. We’re trying to make it even bigger and even better. We definitely did not intend to start it during a pandemic over Zoom! We wanted them to be in-person events, but doing it over Zoom actually gave us the opportunity to expand it nationally. So, our speaker was in Seattle and she was able to tell her story because it was entirely remote.

Tell us more about starting Unmute.

It started with a couple friends of mine, one of whom is big into storytelling. He's a storytelling human by trade. Between that and my passion for diversity in tech, we were like, “How can we put them together?” Unmute is what came out of that. We were like, “Everybody has something interesting to say. If you ask the right questions, somewhere in that conversation, this little Pandora's Box gets unlocked.”

You can never know other people's experiences with things. It's hard to think of everything all the time. I totally get that – and that's why having a very diverse team of people working on a product, bringing different perspectives to the table, is how you change those conversations. You can't expect a homogeneous group of people to know how to design something for a group that doesn't fit their homogeneity.

That was the thing we grabbed onto: There's a story to be told and it's a matter of asking the right questions and digging and working with that person to find their story. And we also wanted to create a space where people could talk to each other; not just have speakers. We want dialogue around it because... In networking events and stuff like that, I say I hate them because I find them very exhausting. I always struggle to find something interesting to ask somebody, so I'm big on coming into a conversation with a thing that you're going to talk about.

With Unmute, somebody’s going to talk about their interesting thing for 10 or 15 minutes, and then we’ll get everybody into small groups and have discussion questions where everyone reflects on what this person talked about. Then, we’ll play that back in a smaller group dialogue which is, in my mind, less terrifying and less draining networking.

Who would be your dream speaker for Unmute?

There’s a woman named Jessica Matthews based in New York City. She founded Uncharted Power [previously Uncharted Play]. She's a scientist who figured out a way to harness energy through a soccer ball. She’s Nigerian, so she'd go there every summer and visit her family. They are a big soccer playing country. It's apparently very common in Nigeria to have brownouts and blackouts because their electric grid is not very good. After certain points every night, they knew that their electricity was going to go out. So, there was always this question of how do you conserve the electricity? Or how can you store electricity so you can use it when the brownouts happen?

She figured out that you could basically store the energy from kicking a soccer ball around, and it turned into a light after it had enough energy stored in it! She went on to found a company to manufacture it. It’s since evolved into enabling electricity, energy, and power to places that don't have it or don't have enough of it. I got to hear her speak once at a Google Women Techmakers conference on International Women’s Day in New York City. She was so great!

There have been issues with technology causing harm to vulnerable and marginalized groups. Would you please speak to some of those issues?

There are so many different lenses and people don't even realize it, and some of it can be very basic stuff. Like, is your website optimized for accessibility? Can people who have some sort of hearing impairment or vision impairment successfully use your website? As a person who manages web development projects all day, I know that gets overlooked all the time – even down to color and how that affects people who have a vision impairment.

There are better best practices for this now and I think people in the tech space are learning them more. There's the application side of things, which is the vehicle that delivers the website to you. But there's also the content itself. If you're writing a blog for a site that's constantly creating new content, then you've got to make sure all of your images are optimized and have appropriate tagging, your color palette is legible, and that you format the text on the screen so that it can be scraped by a screen reader.

I'm all about making the tech industry inclusive, welcoming, and safe for everyone in those communities. There are pockets of inclusivity and pockets where it’s growing, but, dominantly, most technology organizations are very homogeneous and are led, run, and owned by a very homogeneous demographic. I'm trying to break down some of those boundaries.

Another big area is product design. Anything that's got a motion sensor on it, like soap dispensers or hand dryers, often are checking for the presence of color or a change of color. They're often looking for a lighter color. Well, you can see where that becomes problematic. When darker hands are underneath it, nothing comes out because they're looking for the net change of a bright color.

I feel like we're in a space where it's coming around a little bit. People are a little bit more aware of it, but it's certainly not anywhere near where it needs to be.

How do you think that diversity in tech can help with these different kinds of issues?

It's hard to understand until you have those voices at the table. You can never know other people's experiences with things. It's hard to think of everything all the time. I totally get that – and that's why having a very diverse team of people working on a product, bringing different perspectives to the table, is how you change those conversations. You can't expect a homogeneous group of people to know how to design something for a group that doesn't fit their homogeneity.

For example, the woman who spoke at Unmute for our first event is a map designer for Google. For her first project, they flew her to Nigeria to help figure out how Google Maps should work, what it needed to do, and how to map it to Nigeria. She's like, “I am a white woman from the United States. I can't understand the experiences of Nigerian people enough to know how they need to consume information in order to navigate the space they live in.” So, she ended up going there to stand up a team of Nigerians who helped flesh out and design the products they were working on versus her trying to infer that herself. She's like, “I can't relate to this experience at all. So, let's ask the people who are experts in that experience.”

Suppose you're going to design a website or a mobile application for a broad swath of users. How do you make sure you’ve calculated for every different type of user and how they might think about it? What things might be sensitive to certain users versus others? The only way I believe you can really do that is by having multiple faces on the team who all have different lived experiences and bring those to the table.

Another good example of this is when Apple released an update for iPhones to do facial recognition with masks on. I was like, “Why did it take that long?” I mean, I know why; I know how long this stuff takes. But I also thought it could have happened sooner. Because that's a thing some people have had to experience in the past, like cancer patients often wear masks in public. Pre-pandemic, who was wearing masks in public? Certain people were. Now everybody wears them, so now all of a sudden we have facial recognition support for it. That's an accessibility thing and an inclusivity thing.

Tell us a bit about what you do at your full-time position at Ample.

Ample is an agency, and we design and build websites and digital material for a variety of different clients. My title is director of technical operations, which means I wear a lot of hats. I run our project management team. I have a team of five; we’re all the project managers and effectively also account managers for our clients. We've got a lot of clients here in Cincinnati, as well as throughout the country, but most of our clients are in the region.

I've always been the “only” of something on most of the teams I’ve worked on in my 15 years in tech. Usually it's the only woman and the only person of color. Sometimes one, sometimes both. I always try to bring more diverse perspectives to the table.

We don't have a specific niche of client or product types. So, for example, a lot of agencies might only serve the healthcare industry or only serve the government, but we're kind of all over the board. I've got clients in all sorts of different industries. At any given time, I'm working with half a dozen different clients. My role is to make sure they're getting what they need from us as an organization. And then I work closely with our technology team designing technical strategy for these clients, whether what they need is a website or blog or e-commerce or what have you. That's what I do; I spend a long time on Zoom!

Tell me about going to culinary school.

In the early 2010s, I was working full-time at another agency in town. I love food – I'm the kind of person who will read a cookbook for fun, like, from top to bottom. I wanted to learn in a more formal way and I'm a nerd who loves school. I wasn't married at the time and I didn't have a massive circle of friends, so I decided, “I have time. I can just do this.”

I enrolled in Cincinnati State’s Midwest Culinary Institute, which is awesome. It's mind boggling to me that we have a program like that here in Cincinnati! I did the personal chef certification program. I made it about halfway through before I ended up having to drop it, which was cool because I at least got through the classes I really wanted to take. My favorite class by far was the soups, stocks, and sauces class, which was so hard.

I think people assume that you go to culinary school and instantly get thrown into a kitchen. It's not like that at all. You actually have to go through all the food safety certification classes and nutrition classes, and you have to learn how to figure out what a calorie is and all of that before you're ever allowed to step foot in a kitchen. So, that was cool to learn.

Once you get into the kitchen-level classes, you have to take them in a specific sequence. I could only take one class per semester because they're pretty long. But, since I was working full time, I was beholden to them offering whatever the next class was that I needed in an evening or a weekend, and that became very cumbersome. I ended up not completing the program, so I always joke that I'm a culinary school dropout!

Do you have a favorite kind of cuisine or favorite dish that you like cooking?

Asian food is my go-to! I'm half Filipino; my dad is from the Philippines. Here's a fun fact, or a weird fact about me: I don't make my own cuisine. I don't cook a lot of Filipino food. My husband always gives me crap about it, but it's because I kind of put it on a pedestal, so I only make it for special occasions. When I was growing up, we only had it for special occasions. For my everyday food, I eat a ton of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese food. And I very seldom ever make Filipino food, even though it's the one I revere the most. It's kind of funny.

I'm also very into soups. It's mind boggling how much good flavor you can get in a bowl of soup. I think people underestimate soup. It's an American thing; we have this soup in America, like chicken noodle soup or maybe tomato soup with grilled cheese. Our vernacular of soups is not that broad, whereas in Asian countries, it's really common to have soup with your breakfast. I'm all for that! I wish we had that type of mentality.

Tell us about some influential women in your life.

I have a few influential women in my life! My parents were divorced when I was very young and so I’ve had this gift of my dad marrying multiple times and having three mom-type figures in my life. My mom, of course. My dad remarried when I was young and I had a stepmom for most of my childhood up until early adulthood. Then he got remarried again after that divorce and then I had stepmom number two, and all of them have just been incredible humans! Then I got married, and my mother-in-law is also the most amazing human. So, I have been surrounded by really great women. I think the common thread with them is this fierce independence and resistance to ever hearing things like, “Oh, you can't do that,” or “That's not appropriate for women,” or whatever. They have this cold rejection of that.

There are also a couple friends of mine from past jobs that I still connect with just to talk. My friend Shawna Becknell and I meet up and walk every Tuesday morning for an hour and most of our conversation is about solving each other’s work dilemmas and sharing feedback. She's so helpful in processing and picking through that kind of stuff.

There are a few women I met through Girl Develop It. We learn from each other and we support each other. The cool thing about that group of women is that we've worked together to develop anti-racist practices in our own lives, so it's really interesting having a community where you go in together on something like that. The other cool thing about those women is they're from all around the country, because Girl Develop It was a national organization. So, my two closest friends from that organization are Kristen Seversky, who lives in Rochester, New York, and Amy Gebhardt, who lives in Minneapolis. They're super-inspiring badasses I get to call my friends and who are also super-aligned with me; we just want to be better people. We want to be better humans. We want to leave a better mark on this Earth. Then, we help each other do that.

The other women I will point out are the women who founded We Pivot. Particularly, Kim Crayton. She's amazing! She's a great leader and teacher. She's a big voice in the community and one I've learned a ton from. There’s Maggie Fernandes, who’s also part of the We Pivot circle, and Marisa Catalina Casey, who's now my co-chair on the board of directors. All of them are super inspiring and awesome women who are all in this diversity in tech space with me and want to make it a better space.

Something that's been a big motivating fact for me is I've always wanted a strong female leader in my own workspace. Doesn't happen very often... So, my own goal has always been to be that person that I want to work with. I want to be the manager that I wanted to report to for my entire career. I wanted this super strong woman leader in my space that I could report to. I haven't really had that, so I am that. I try to be that anyway!

Becky Blank: Giving Voice to Diversity in the Tech Space