The tech industry—and the social media giants it has spawned—has suffered from diversity problems for years. More recently Twitter, in particular, has come under fire recently for its lack of Black and female employees. Not just externally, but from within, when Leslie Miley—Twitter’s only Black engineer in a management position—publicly complained about the company’s lack of inclusion after leaving the company in October 2015.
Twitter compounded its problem when it hired Jeffrey Siminoff, a White male, to lead its diversity efforts after Janet Van Huysse left in 2015. Siminoff stepped down in February.
Castleberry-Singleton, an African American woman, will certainly fix the optics problem created by Siminoff’s tenure. But she is far more than a “Black face in a high space.” Singleton brings a formidable reputation as an international lecturer, an innovator in the diversity field of human resources management.
“It goes beyond that, beyond ‘the illusion of inclusion,’” Castleberry-Singleton told the Courier in 2014. “It’s the difference between mentorship and sponsorship—that means you have skin in the game. It takes a conscious personal commitment from everyone. If we only recommend people we know for jobs, we all need to make new friends.”
Castleberry-Singleton probably still has many old friends in the Bay Area, too. In addition to having worked in California’s tech industry, she received an MBA from Pepperdine University, a Bachelor’s degree in legal studies from UC Berkeley and completed the Stanford University Executive Human Resources program.
That was before she created The Integrated Inclusion Model TM, a systems integration model that helps companies transition from compliance-driven processes led by human resources, to integrated activities that shift the responsibility for achieving an inclusive culture to every employee.
True to that model, during her time in Pittsburgh, Castleberry-Singleton made a lot of new friends. She served on the boards of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute of Politics, NEED, Pittsburgh Promise, Women and Girls Foundation, Urban League, PERSAD, Hill House Association, and also volunteered on projects with Athena, Go Red for Women, Women’s Shelter, Best of the Batch Foundation, East End Cooperative Ministries, and just two weeks ago at the inaugural USSIE Games.
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