Aubrey Blanche
OwnTrail
This Trailblazers series takes a look at the pivotal milestones that make up the life trails of inspiring women from a diverse array of backgrounds and experiences. We all know what social media profiles display about the end results women have achieved. This series is intended to take a deeper, more authentic look at the journeys they have taken to get there.
Aubrey Blanche is a tech executive, consultant and investor focused on equitable design and building a fairer world. As a self-identified “Mathpath” (Math Nerd + Empath), she strives to reimagine systems and practices to ensure that all people have equitable access to opportunities and outcomes. Aubrey applies her training in social scientific methods and her passion for inclusive leadership as Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, as well as through her consulting, startup advising and investing roles.
After learning more about the trail that Aubrey has blazed, I got the chance to ask her some questions.
Rebekah Bastian: What led you to leave your PhD program and move into the tech industry, and what was that transition from academia to corporate like for you?
Aubrey Blanche: Honestly, I left academia because it wasn’t a great fit for me, and because of the sexism and racism that I ran into there. I saw these repeated instances of my peers—a good number of whom were women and/or women of color—who were getting passed over for opportunities or getting less support from faculty. I ended up in tech largely because it was…what was here! I was already in the Bay Area, but the transition to corporate was both pretty stark and not that different. Not that different in that tech is just about as homogenous as academia, but different in that there were at least a few people who were willing to talk to me about it and try to fix it. During the transition, I learned pretty quickly that I preferred to be in a collaborative role, working with people to achieve something—which a corporate rather than academic career seemed better suited for.
Bastian: How did your experiences and learning journey lead you to pivot into Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work?
Blanche: I think more than anything what pushed me into this career was loneliness: being Latina has always been an important part of who I am, and I didn’t see people from that community included in tech. I had my first strong community in grad school through a special program called Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE), and wanted to replicate that in tech but wasn’t finding it.
The story is pretty simple in terms of how I got into DEI: I had a meeting with a leader at the company and said that I thought there was a lot they could do, from a systems perspective, to improve the way they were hiring and advancing people from underrepresented groups. We agreed that I should run some studies on the company to see what we found, and based on those studies the company created a role for me in the DEI space. From there, I went to design and scale the DEI program at Atlassian, and have led Culture Amp on their journey over the last year and a half.
Bastian: As you do work to provide support and create more equitable systems for others, how do you make sure you’re also taking care of yourself?
Blanche: Oh my gosh, I feel a bit intimidated by this question, because I think there’s a lot of things I think I could do better. But first, what I do well: I’m really dedicated to taking care of my mental health: that means meds (I’m on the bipolar spectrum), psychiatrist and therapist, other healers and community. I try really hard to maintain a system that keeps me well. I also am very dedicated to getting enough sleep and I try hard to drink enough water.
On what I’m not awesome at: I “take work home.” I can’t help it. In the kind of work I do—and I know I’m speaking for a number of us in this space—it’s impossible not to care about the work that we’re doing and about the people that we’re doing it for. So I’m working on finding more peace amid such a hard year, with no real end in sight in terms of so many of the structural injustices that have so recently become a part of the mainstream discussion. I’m reading more works on various spiritualities, peace activism and trauma. These are the things we’re going to need to understand as we all recover and heal from the period we’ve been in.
Bastian: You’ve shared how you were recently diagnosed with and treated for Bipolar Affective Disorder. How has your own mental health journey informed the way you approach neurodiversity in your equity work?
Blanche: That’s such a great question. I think the most honest answer is: I’m not entirely sure yet. It was a few years ago now that I really started learning about and getting interested in the disability and accessibility space from a theory and political point of view, and that was very much from the point of view of an outsider. I didn’t yet consider myself disabled, despite a lifetime-long journey with cPTSD. Being formally diagnosed with Bipolar has felt different. It’s made me more keenly aware of how important and how subtly different disability work is from the other anti-oppressive work that we’re trying to do within corporations, because it crosses so many more lines into medicalization.
Right now, I’m really preoccupied with the questions around what levels of data we collect to balance the mutually exclusive goals of privacy and customized service provision. Like, how much detail and corroborating evidence of disability do we need to run a thoughtful system, that’s not unduly burdensome and still provides the support that someone needs? What information disclosures are required, and to whom and when? How do we define those standards in the context of the vast workplace stigma and discomfort that exists around the concept of disability? I think that my own disability has caused me to understand these questions in a new and more intimate way.
Bastian: I’ve loved seeing your approach to creating more equitable systems through product design, business decisions and corporate culture – it shows that this work should span all disciplines. What advice do you have for people that want to apply an equity lens to the work that they are already doing?
Blanche: I would tell them it’s about changing everything you’re doing just 1%, not about these massive shifts. Can you get creative with it? For me, it’s something of a constant puzzle that I always get to solve: “Is there a slightly more equitable way to do this?” The inclusion of slightly is important here, because it’s forgiving. This philosophy of equitable design is meant to be inherently progressive, because it’s about slight but constant improvements, which ultimately add up to huge things systematically, especially if we’re all following that philosophy!
