Dee Tuck has heard all the excuses. “I want to hire more women, but I just don’t know where they are.” Yep. “I want to hire more people of color, I just don’t know anybody.” That too. She’s been working in tech for more than a decade and has often been the only Black female engineer on her team. She has reviewed company hiring practices and pointed out that “maybe you’re weeding out a lot of people who can’t code with eight non-people-of-color watching them on Zoom.” Tuck doesn’t want to hear the excuses anymore.
Last November she was tapped to be chief technology officer at Array, the film collective founded by director Ava DuVernay. Her main objective: launching Array Crew, a database of women and people of color that studios can use when staffing up for movies and TV shows. The goal is to see if the industry will diversify its ranks when the “We can’t find anybody” barrier is removed. “When we really diagnosed the issue, it wasn’t that people weren’t willing to do it, it was that people weren’t willing to be inconvenienced to do it,” DuVernay says. “So what we tried to do is create a platform that made it really easy. And so now we’re in a space where, to be frank, if you still don’t do it, you never really wanted to.”
