How Women In Tech Are Transforming Social Impact

Tech titans’ desire to reshape philanthropy is nothing new. Everyone knows the transition that Melinda Gates made from Microsoft to the Gates Foundation to Pivotal Ventures, a hybrid approach to investing in women-led startups and leveraging philanthropic grant-making to drive advocacy and social progress. Founder of craigslist, Craig Newmark, started Craig Newmark Philanthropies to give back and fight disinformation, protect democracy, and support women in tech, while Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Google, co-founded The Schmidt Family Foundation to support organizations and initiatives to work toward a healthier and more just world.

But it isn’t just the tech luminaries making these shifts. A growing number of tech leaders are answering the call to address some of the most pressing issues facing the world, change systems, and help communities by taking their experience into the social impact sector.

Smart, savvy, and innovative women, in particular, have made this transition—from Ellen Pao, CEO of the nonprofit Project Include (formerly COO of Reddit), to Ann Mei Chang, CEO of the nonprofit Candid (formerly Senior Engineering Director at Google), and Nabiha Syed, CEO of media nonprofit The Markup (formerly VP and Associate General Counsel at Buzzfeed).

What inspired these powerful people to move out of the tech sector to focus on social impact? Any of them could have easily left Reddit, Google, or Buzzfeed for another tech company or unicorn startup, but they chose to make a career pivot and, as Chang explained, “accelerate the impact and scale of solutions to the world’s most intractable challenges.”

I spoke to Pao, Chang, and Syed to get some insight into why they transitioned from tech to the nonprofit sector, and the impact they are on a mission to achieve.

How They Got Here

The tech world feeds into our need as humans for instant gratification: You dream, you iterate, you solve complex problems, often quickly and with some of the smartest teams of people around. You build tangible products. You can rapidly start up projects, even companies, and there can be big financial benefits. You can even fail and get another chance.

So why move into social sector leadership? For Chang, the change was part of a 20 year plan to do good. It was “a responsibility to make the world a better place,” Chang said. She was inspired by Elizabeth Birch who had left Apple to become President of the Human Rights Campaign.

Pao saw how companies could use data to be more inclusive and successful. Too many companies were hiring consultants to check a DEI box by doing 45-minute unconscious bias trainings. “It was frustrating to see companies championing progress by doing PR around a single training.”

For Syed, the move from Buzzfeed to The Markup was a chance to shift journalism narratives. “I became interested in what it would be like to do news that was integral to democracy and accountability,” Syed said. “A nonprofit gives you the freedom to do that instead of being on track to an IPO.”

Each of these women sought to build frameworks for lasting change. Their tech experiences made them comfortable with experimentation and risk, traits not often found in the social impact and nonprofit spaces for many reasons.

Risk and Trust in Social Impact Work

Risk and trust may not be common traits in the nonprofit sector, but they are familiar subjects for nonprofit leaders. Social impact resources are limited and closely watched. Nobody in social impact wants to be seen as the one wasting resources. “People don’t want to take risks because they don’t want to fail,” Chang said. “They are happy to take baby steps.” The thing is, baby steps and a reticence to fail fast means that it can take decades, if not longer, to catalyze the social impact and structural changes that many nonprofits strive for, creating barriers to success.

“Funders focus on impact,” said Pao. “Startups focus on growth.” The difference between impact and growth creates vastly different cultures, incentives, and metrics. Impact measurement is complicated (and often debated), while growth is simpler and incentivizes risk—sometimes even failure. For better or worse, the successes and failures of impact have human consequences beyond a product or even one’s job.

Chang, who worked at some of the most innovative companies on the planet (Apple, Google), said she was able to take risks by experimenting and iterating. “Silicon Valley is a pressure cooker of innovation.” This iteration model that Chang is bringing into social impact isn’t always easy for nonprofit leaders who have historically worked in the nonprofit sector.

How Does the Social Impact Sector Get the Freedom (and the Courage) to Innovate?

It’s no secret that there’s power imbalances between nonprofits and the foundations who fund them. And historically, it’s those funders who ultimately control what social issues and programs are championed to the rest of the world.

“We need to trust the nonprofits we invest in. And we need to shift the funder-fundee dynamic, which requires different responsibilities on the part of both funders and nonprofits. Funders need to do their due diligence [before making an investment], then trust that the nonprofits they invest in will do the right thing, and that they are capable of doing so without micromanagement. If every investor micromanaged the companies they invest in, I’m sure they wouldn’t be nearly as successful as they are,” said Chang.

A move to a trust-based philanthropy model would create space for nonprofits to thrive authentically.

Syed spoke about proactively building trust and diversifying power as a way to address risk and create projects that take on systems. “I’d love to see more spaces where you have different people at the table,” Syed says. Trust is challenging but essential to taking risks that innovate. “What does it look like to share power and decision making? Concession requires trust, and that feels unattainable in many spaces. But we need it if we’re going to survive.”

The Accountability to Take on System Change

All three nonprofit leaders talked about how surprisingly tough it is to raise money at a nonprofit, and how this directly correlates with risk-taking. They saw how much money is thrown into products on the for-profit side at Google, Apple, Buzzfeed, and Reddit, including products developed with a positive social impact. And yet, most nonprofits don’t see those same returns.

Chang noted that Candid gets 85% of its revenue from earned income, but for most nonprofits, funding comes from grants or individual donations, which “means you need to jump through hoops to keep the lights on,” Chang said.

Pao added that “you don’t have control over the revenue like you do in the for-profit world. You are looking for donations and that’s not something you have a lot of control over.”

This feedback loop of funding can control a leader’s vision of what’s possible, and it can foster cynicism over time. Syed noted that while organizations don’t have to answer to shareholders, there are still incentive structures in philanthropy. Syed says that nonprofits are always asking: “Will our stakeholders like this? Is it fundable?” The answers to these questions often don’t get to the heart of what the communities being served actually need, creating vanity projects that cycle right back into that funding feedback loop.

Syed hopes that organizations can reframe accountability to overcome these incentive structures by asking the hard questions and answering them with action. She asks, “What does power and accountability mean? Walk the walk. Does your nonprofit organization have paid parental leave? Problems like these are everywhere and the social sector has not solved them.” Social impact leaders aim to shift systems by turning organizations into models of possibility.

Social impact organizations can benefit from the experience and skills of technology leaders. Syed, Chang, and Pao are familiar with complexity, solving problems under pressure, and turning ideas into tangible products. The challenges are unexpected and often frustrating; however, these leaders’ deep passion for systemic change motivates them to find new approaches and ways for organizations, communities, governments, and funders to successfully work together to create meaningful shifts in a once-static system.