Bay Area Leader Empowers Latinas to Become Tech 'Jefas'

In the early years of her career, Rocio van Nierop used to stay late in the office of a sports betting tech company in Boston. In the evening, that’s when she saw other Latinos working in the office: the janitors.

When she took a job in Silicon Valley in 2013, she thought that in moving to California, a state where two in five people have roots in Latin America, according to U.S. Census data, the workforce would at least reflect the region’s demographics. She was wrong. Latines were few and far between.

“I never had a single colleague above or even below me that were Latinos until I started hiring,” van Nierop said, referring to when she became a manager.

The experience cemented her belief that Latinas should not just be part of the tech industry. They need to lead it.

That’s why, for the past decade, she’s helped grow Latinas in Tech from a group of friends meeting for coffee into a full-fledged advocacy organization with 25 chapters in seven countries.

Even as Bay Area tech companies have grown to be some of the biggest corporations in the world, Latinx workers of all genders have largely been left out of the tech workforce. Latinas only represent about 2% of tech workers.

Now advocates like van Nierop, the CEO of Latinas in Tech, are confronting a backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion programs at a time when mass layoffs at tech firms have become commonplace.

A study from the Oakland-based Kapor Foundation, a nonprofit focused on making the tech sector more equitable, reported that while about one in five workers in the U.S. is Latine, only one in 10 workers in tech is Latine. In management, only 5% of executive leadership roles and 3% of tech company board seats are held by Latine professionals.

I shared van Nierop’s shock at the lack of Latines making inroads in the tech industry in the Bay Area and in professional fields overall. Like van Nierop, I had the experience of working late in San Francisco’s Financial District. I chatted in Spanish with Carmen, the woman who cleaned the office.

Employers often cite a lack of an adequate pipeline of workers as why their companies or industries lack diversity. Van Nierop agrees that we need more Latines graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, but said companies need to expand their pipelines as well.

People tend to hire people they know, she added, because if a hiring manager doesn’t have any Latinas in their network, they’re unlikely to hire them. But even when Latines can get a toehold in an industry, they often face barriers to advancement.

That is why van Nierop, 44, has emphasized helping Latinas become “jefas” — female bosses.

“When you’re a Latina in power of hiring, then somehow more Latinos come because people hire people that they get to know in their networks,” she said. “Companies have to be intentional on bringing people in at the same level of qualifications but from different backgrounds.”

Van Nierop was born in the U.S. and raised in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, where her parents are from. She

graduated with a degree in marketing from Tecnológico de Monterrey, a well-known private university in Mexico.

She worked for some marketing firms in Mexico before moving to Boston to work for Betclic Group, an online gambling sports betting company. She landed in the Bay Area when she took a job with presentation software company Prezi, leading its marketing in Latin America.

Van Nierop, who is married and has two children, left Prezi in 2019 to focus full-time on Latinas in Tech, an organization with about 33,000 members.

The organization’s membership has grown because of geographic expansion, but the share of Latinas working in tech in the U.S. has been stagnant for years. On top of that, many Latinas in the industry feel stuck in low-level roles, according to Latinas in Tech annual survey. This year’s results found that 64% of respondents were in non-managerial roles despite most of them having enough experience to move up the ranks. Read my previous piece about that here.

Van Nierop said tech executives have talked for years about diversity as the “right thing to do,” and yet staff and management remain mostly male and white or Asian.

She saw progress in the past decade as many companies added a chief diversity officer position to their executive ranks. However, now many companies are eliminating or limiting those roles after last year’s Supreme Court decision that prohibited colleges from using race as a factor in admissions. The ruling does not apply to the private sector. Yet, many executives have used it as cover for not diversifying their staff.

When I entered the world of professional journalism two decades ago, I heard a lot of proclamations and platitudes about the need for more diversity in newsrooms. The first company I worked for out of college distributed swag with the slogan “Diversity No Excuses.” I wonder if any publicly traded company would make such a statement now that DEI has become a derogatory term in political discourse.

“Diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do, but that conversation, along with the fact that everybody’s scrubbing it and putting it under the table, is not even needed anymore,” van Nierop said, referring to the argument that hasn’t been enough to persuade companies to hire people of color.

Companies that don’t cater to the Latinx market will miss out on tapping into our spending power as consumers.

When I met with van Nierop at the Latinas in Tech headquarters in Moraga, she showed me a room filled with “jefa” branded swag — T-shirts, mouse pads and stickers. According to van Nierop, “jefa” is a mentality of delivering solid work, knowing the value you bring to your employer and having decision-making power.

Too many Latinas are conditioned to work hard and not call attention to themselves, van Nierop said. She chalks it up to the phrase “calladita te ves más bonita,” which roughly translates to “you look prettier with your mouth shut.”

“This is what we are told since we are little girls and is expected from us to maintain harmony,” she added.

But not speaking up holds Latinas back in the workplace. Latinas in Tech has focused on equipping its members to network, negotiate higher salaries and effectively ask for promotions.

“If we take ownership of that ‘jefa mode,’ we’re really changing the outcome,” van Nierop said. “We’re going to pass from a mentality of servitude to a mentality of ownership.”

This story was reported for K Onda KQED, a monthly newsletter focused on the Bay Area’s Latinx community. Click here to subscribe.