Q&A with Vijaya Gadde, General Counsel and Director of Communications at Twitter

Esten Hurtle

Winged Post: Has being in the minority in a workplace every affected your decisions or actions?

Vijaya Gadde: I think being a woman and a person of color gives me a perspective on decisions when I’m thinking about the people that are using our platform and how they may react if we change certain types of features. We have a platform that is used by different people around the world of all different ethnic, gender, [and] racial background[s], and we want to make sure that the people that are here, building the product and building the company, are reflective of the people using the service in the world.

WP: In your career, how have you seen people’s attitudes on diversity and diverse culture in the workplace change?

VG: I’ve been in the workforce for about 16 years. I think what’s changed is that people always talked about it but people didn’t do very much. I think what you see now is a lot of people not just acknowledging that it’s not good, but acknowledging that doing nothing about it will not change it, and that we must take action. It’s not just about holding ourselves accountable, but that we need to make drastic changes to how we treat our employees within the company, where we find great talent, [and] how we recruit them.

WP: Is there a legal basis for a claim of reverse discrimination when companies try to implement these goals for hiring?

VG: I think there are certainly things that you could do that would result in a claim of reverse discrimination, and I think you have to, as a company, be mindful of not crossing that line, but I think that the types of things that most companies are focused on — in terms of looking at water pipelines of talented people from different schools — I wouldn’t view [those] as a high legal risk.

WP: You’re part of the investing group called the Angels. When you are looking at companies or researching them, how much of a role does their diversity play when you’re considering their company?

VG: It’s definitely something that we look at, but it’s not ultimately the deciding factor of whether we’ll invest or not. One of the reasons we started Angels was to make sure that we had access to be able to invest. As it is, [for] a lot of venture-backed companies, their investors tend to be mostly male, so we thought this was a good way to have women empower women investors, and also [for] our network of people we work with around the industry, to be able to introduce them to these great founders and get them into these great companies. Part of our goal in doing Angels is actually to help our portfolio companies become more diverse, and just because they’re not diverse we’ll still consider investing in them, but we definitely want to work with founders who share the same values that we do and share the same goals that we do.