“Show them you are not only their ally, but that you are their advocate and accomplice.”
Erica Joy Baker delivered this call in a 2017 TED@BCG talk about diversity and inclusion in technology. Drawing on experience as an engineer and workplace advocate, she asked people with relative power to do more than express sympathy to colleagues from underrepresented groups. An ally may agree with a concern; an advocate carries that concern into rooms, processes, and decisions where the affected person may not be present or equally heard. Baker’s added word “accomplice” stressed shared risk and practical participation. Inclusion becomes credible when support changes what happens, not only what someone privately believes.
The language can sound confrontational because “accomplice” is often associated with wrongdoing. In organizing contexts, it is used deliberately to contrast low-cost identification with action that may require discomfort. In a technology workplace, that action can include correcting credit, questioning an unfair evaluation, recommending someone for visible work, improving hiring practices, or refusing a demeaning pattern. The quote does not authorize speaking over others or deciding what they need. Effective advocacy starts with listening, respects consent, and uses influence to widen another person’s ability to participate rather than making the supporter the center of the story.
The distinction matters because inequity is maintained through ordinary systems as well as explicit hostility. Referral networks, performance criteria, meeting dynamics, project assignments, compensation decisions, and informal sponsorship shape careers. A company may publish inclusive values while those mechanisms continue to reproduce narrow outcomes. Technical teams are especially prone to treating culture as separate from engineering, yet who is trusted to define a problem influences what gets built and which risks are noticed. Advocacy is therefore not peripheral to product quality. It can bring missing experience into decisions before costly blind spots harden into systems.
Baker’s challenge remains relevant amid repeated promises to improve representation across technology. Metrics and policies matter, but they are enacted through people who make daily choices about access, credibility, and consequences. A practical response is specific: notice whose contribution is overlooked, document patterns, share information, sponsor fairly, and support transparent processes that do not depend on individual heroics. Organizations must still carry the primary duty to create safe reporting, equitable pay, and accountable leadership. The quote addresses what colleagues can do within that structure. Solidarity becomes meaningful when it travels from a statement of identity to an observable redistribution of attention, opportunity, and protection. Consistent follow-through matters more than one dramatic intervention because workplace trust is built across many ordinary decisions.
Baker spoke at TED@BCG in 2017 about strengthening diversity and inclusion in technology. Her talk addressed what coworkers can do when inequity affects people around them.
The line escalated from ally to advocate and accomplice, emphasizing that support should appear in decisions and behavior rather than remain a private attitude.
Advocacy uses access and credibility to improve another person’s treatment, opportunities, or ability to be heard. It can involve correcting credit, challenging criteria, and sponsoring fairly.
Action should follow listening and consent. Speaking over colleagues or making oneself the hero reproduces the imbalance the support is supposed to address.
Careers in technology are shaped by everyday mechanisms such as referrals, project assignments, evaluations, and sponsorship, not only by public diversity commitments.
Transparent systems and accountable leadership are essential, while individual advocacy helps ensure that stated values affect the rooms and decisions where opportunities are actually distributed.
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