Mirrors: Sara Sanford, Gender Equity Expert
The AdaMarie Mirrors reflect back to us the many roads (often winding, never smooth) to success! Real stories of real women to see yourself reflected in. At first, you’ll see Sara in this mirror, but eventually, we hope you’ll see yourself.
Welcome, Sara Sanford
A defender of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and the brains behind AdaMarie’s DEI Equity Consulting Offerings: helping us build a more equitable future, together.
Getting to Know You:
Field of Work: Data-Driven DEI Problem-Solving
Your STEM letters: S&T
Expertise In: People analytics, research design, equity in the workplace
Current Company: University of Washington, GEN, Ada Marie
Job Titles
Assistant Professor, University of Washington, School of Information
Founder, Gender Equity Now
Author of Inclusion, Inc: How to Design Intersectional Equity into the Workplace
Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, AdaMarie
One-liner about what you’re working on: Finding the intersections of ethics, bias, and data.
Currently geeking out over: W.E.B. Du Bois' Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
STEM hero (alive or dead!): Emily Bender is an extravagantly nerdy badass, known for her rally cry, “You are not a stochastic parrot!” She’s spent decades shouting into the void about the future of LLMs and is finally having her moment. Bender founded the University of Washington’s computational linguistics program in 2005, and despite the risk, she continues to loudly, publicly push back against tech-makers who assume their reality represents the world while excluding those not like them from the worlds they are creating. While many are worried about how humanlike our machines are becoming, Bender’s been ringing the opposing alarm –
She’s concerned about how machinelike our people are becoming, and she thinks that progress and humanity can coexist – and both are worth saving.
Tell us about your professional journey – how did you get where you are now?
I never planned on doing the work I am now. The through-lines I can find are that I’ve always been driven by a focus on meaningful impact, communicating what matters, and strengthening relationships.
I studied English literature in college, spent time in the sustainable development and international development space in Central America, earned my Masters in Public Policy, and eventually encountered the power of stats and quantitative analysis to effect change.
Over the last fifteen years, I have focused my career on harnessing the knowledge in information to drive meaningful action. That’s led to roles in the NGO space, financial services, product development, interdisciplinary research, and most recently, launching the first standardized certification for intersectional gender equity in US businesses, and teaching at the University of Washington’s School of Information.
I think the industry-agnostic advice that’s served me the best is simply – “Stay bold.” There’s a quote I love that says, “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”
I’ve acted out of fear and I’ve acted out of bravery. I can’t think of a single time in which I acted out of fear that I would look back on and say “I’m so glad I was timid. I’m glad I dimmed my light.” Whatever the thing is that you fear, it still comes for you. Wouldn’t you rather it came for you knowing you were true to yourself, that you had acted with integrity?
Aren’t you coming out of that fire with your head held higher? I’ve endured consequences for being bold, and I don’t regret a single one of those decisions. If a job or a relationship doesn’t thrive in the midst of your strength, it means it’s not right for you; it doesn’t have enough to offer back to you.
If you act boldly, you will find the people and the work that honor your strength – but you won’t get to that place by acting out of fear.
I want to be clear that this is not the same as telling women that ‘leaning in’ will be a magical antidote to the obstacles they face because of gender. It’s about not having to look back and wonder ‘What if?’ Every time I considered giving up on some stage of my journey, I’ve asked myself “Could you, in good conscience, look back on this moment from the future and know you were as bold as you could have been, or will you wonder ‘what if’?” Women who strive will inevitably face the consequences of their gender – You can’t beat that by acting out of fear. So, stay bold.
We’re also curious to know your personal story and upbringing. What has made you “you”?
As a child of activist boomers, I was brought up with stories of how that generation championed the rights of those who were considered “outsiders” in race, gender, customs, and belief. I grew up watching these values modeled by my parents, our community, and the reform Jewish synagogue we attended.
Rather than stressing memorization of text or strict adherence to ritual, our temple emphasized “Tikkun Olam” (helping to repair our world).
My academic and professional orientation has been shaped by this convergence of people and experiences that constantly pushed me to question if there is a better, a more inclusive, way. As a result, a commitment to inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and sovereignty has been the through-line in my life choices. While these values have remained constant, my approach to honoring them has evolved over my career.
We know that real life isn’t a smooth and linear journey. What was your initiating moment that led you to your calling - can you tell us about that moment, what helped you move forward, what you learned/discovered?
I know my moment of truth came when a company that had employed me to expand their DEI efforts fired me for attempting to hold them accountable to the DEI commitments they had made. I knew that one company wasn’t an anomaly, and that many workplaces force underrepresented employees to face an impossible choice: assimilate or leave.
I knew that what we’d been doing as a society wasn’t working, and that I had enough brilliant, skilled, equally frustrated women around me to find a better way.
I trusted them. They helped me trust myself. And any time the work started to feel impossible, I remembered that the alternative was unacceptable.
You’re a working woman in a performance-driven industry. Where do you find balance?
I’ve honestly never been great at balance, and I’ve come to accept that. In a way, this acceptance is actually the best way for me to feel balanced. I know I’m more of a “seasons” person. Rather than maintaining a surface-level involvement in several areas at the same time, I tend to be a fan of deep work for prolonged stretches. While working on my book, for example, was a severely isolating task, I also derived some pleasure from getting to fully indulge in that task. While I have some non-negotiables – movement, sleep, and time with loved ones (preferably outside), I think I’ve moved from finding balance to being present enough to find pleasure in the work. That’s something that I think still isn’t talked about often.
We don’t often put the pleasure of running your own world, as a woman, on display.
There is a pleasure that comes with achievement. There is a pleasure that comes with setting your own standards. There is pleasure in insisting that you get to tell your own story. There is pleasure in upending the status quo. There is pleasure in choosing not just to strive, but to fully indulge in the striving, like we would good love or good food. I know so few women that sit cozily in their success the way that men do. It’s still this little unspoken sin for women to say “Yeah, I did that, and It. Felt. Good.” I think we underestimate how revolutionary that can be. It can be worth being a little off-kilter.
If you were a scientific process or phenomenon, what would you be?
I attempt to live my life like a trim tab, so I think I'd go with the trim tab principle:
In a 1972 interview, the visionary inventor and philosopher Buckminster Fuller introduced the timeless wisdom of the trim tab - a small mechanism that helps stabilize an enormous ship or aircraft - which would become a central metaphor in his philosophy: "Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth - the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks that it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, 'Call me trim tab.' The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and tying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don't work and aren't true until you start to get that trim-tab motion.”
In my work, and in my life, I try to live by this principle - My work on workplace equity, for example, stops asking employees to keep pushing on the front of the ship, and instead offers a "trim tab" approach:
Simple, purposeful redesigns that focus on correcting mechanisms rather than mindsets.
We’d love to feature your work! How can we spread the word about what you’re doing?
My Book • Inclusion, Inc, How to Design Intersectional Equity into the Workplace
TED Talks
