Eps 624: Minorities in tech
— The too lazy to register an account podcast
Freada Kapor Klein, a founding partner at venture capital firm Kapor Capital and a longtime advocate for diversity in tech, is baffled by how differently tech companies treat their diversity investments from other business initiatives. "
Klein says the attrition problem reveals that despite all their investments, tech companies still haven't addressed biases in their cultures.
The larger companies' retention rates for women exceeded those of small and midsize companies.
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Elaine Freeman
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Today, technology workers are still overwhelmingly white and Asian, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. Faang examines the diversity gap in Silicon Valley's technology industry and its impact on ethnic and minority communities.
Williams, for example, told TechCrunch that Facebook has increased the number of black women by 25 to 10 in the past five years, and that of black men by 20 to 20. But, while underrepresented minorities make up the entire workforce, little has changed in Facebook's demographic. He pointed out that there had been many changes within the individual groups, but not necessarily in all areas.
As a result, Silicon Valley's recruitment practices are actually exacerbating the structural races and economic inequalities that are endemic at every step of the education and career ladder. Thousands of talented candidates are overlooked because they study at institutions serving minorities, schools that exist outside the elite networks in which technological employers recruit. That means that the number of black computer scientists coming from historically black colleges and universities will never come close to that of their white counterparts.
In the last 20 years, the number of segregated schools in the United States has doubled, and for many, learning is an individualized process. I spoke to a group of women and minorities who have benefited from adaptation in CCSP programmes, many of whom are new to CCSP. Open, "said that increasing diversity efforts within the IT industry could lead to $400 billion in additional revenue per year.
The courses enable learners to develop their IT and workplace skills at a much deeper level. It also helps women and minorities navigate the complex social, cultural and economic realities of the IT industry.
Although millions of dollars are being poured into well-intentioned diversity initiatives, white men are over-represented in the industry compared to the private sector as a whole. The evidence is clear: A more diverse workforce leads to higher revenues and more creative teams.
The technology industry suffers not from a lack of leaders and thinkers who talk about diversity, but from diversity itself. That is why this issue is worth noting: the root problem in Silicon Valley, for blacks and Hispanics, is looming. We hear big companies talk about their desire to hire more minorities, and we hear them talk.
The New York Times reported that "Hispanic and black employees make up only 2.5 percent of the company's workforce, up from 3.2 percent in 2010. At the same time, Apple acknowledged that the number of minority employees in its development department had risen from 19 percent to just 23 percent.
Prominent technology companies often say they are trying to improve the diversity of their workforce, especially in their development departments. Reveal has found that while racial and gender differences are serious, traditional excuses discourage many companies from hiring diverse employees. That same year, Reveals' data showed that Silicon Valley's largest technology company, Apple, and its parent company Google, had the highest percentage of minority employees in their development departments of any US company.
The two companies that make up Hewlett-Packard, including parent company Oracle, and the two largest technology companies in the United States, Google and Apple. Managers' bonuses suffer when a company fails to meet its diversity goal for the second year in a row, according to Reveals.
But there are other reasons for hope, and perhaps the most encouraging is that new companies are preemptively learning lessons that places like Intel and Google have already learned. From 2001 to 2006, the proportion of women and minority leaders rose from 34 to 45 percent. Mudd has grown dramatically, with venture capital firms specifically created to invest in start-ups run by women, according to a recent report from the Center for American Progress.
But the data showing that we are moving in the wrong direction suggests that our current capabilities - based solutions, even if they work - will not solve the nation's digital inclusion problem.
Real inclusion occurs when underrepresented groups gain real power in technology today, as OpenMIC.org has found and as academic Mar Hicks argued in a recent discussion about gender imbalances within technology. Entrepreneurship is one of the most promising opportunities for minorities in the technology industry. Atlanta - Atlanta entrepreneur Rodney Sampson and his co-founders are working to promote minority inclusion in higher education.