Segregated Valley: the ugly truth about Google and diversity in tech | Technology | The... - 0 views
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Google’s workforce is, by its own accounting, 69% male and just 2% African American. Just 20% of technical jobs are held by women. Google may be unequivocal in its “belief” about diversity, but the figures make its shortcomings clear. The company tends to hire white and Asian men over women and other racial minorities.
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ack of diversity in Silicon Valley is an old story. Eighteen years ago, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson first launched a campaign to encourage the region’s tech companies to hire black and Latino workers.
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Google is the subject of an investigation by the US Department of Labor, which has accused the technology corporation of systematically discriminating against women (the company denies the charge.)
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the tech industry has lately been shaken by allegations that high-profile venture capitalists have abused their position to prey on female startup entrepreneurs.
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Meanwhile, the representation of black, Latino, and female employees at top Silicon Valley technology firms remains so disproportionately low that a government report published last year described the problem with the same word that Jackson uses: “segregation”. For all its forward looking technologies, Silicon Valley is in many ways mired in the ugliest practices of the American past.
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The DC area is a kind of mirror image to Silicon Valley when it comes to hiring African Americans. Overall, blacks make up 14.4% of the workforce nationwide and 7.4% of high-tech employment. In the DC metro area, which includes parts of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, blacks hold 17.3% of the jobs in 12 computing occupations, according to government employment data. But cross over to the west coast, and in Silicon Valley African Americans hold just 2.7% of the jobs in the same categories. At premiere employers like Google and Facebook, black representation in technical jobs drops below 2%.
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the fact that northern California’s workforce is heavily Latino (more than 20%) is not reflected in the area’s tech companies (about 6% Latino).
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Where the DC tech industry grew in a symbiotic relationship with government, many of the pioneers of Silicon Valley were techno-libertarians, ideologically opposed to government regulation and oversight.
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Tech leaders like McNealy and Cypress Industries CEO TJ Rodgers were openly hostile to the idea of consciously diverse hiring. Rodgers wrote an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News in 1999 declaring that “the only sharecropper I know is my dad” and calling Jackson “a hustler who exploits white shame for his own financial and political ends”.
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At the top 75 companies in Silicon Valley, only 3% of employees are black, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Premier employers Facebook and Google have yet to crack 2% in technical jobs.
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It’s not the fault of tech companies that the pipeline is overwhelmingly filled with white and Asian people, Silicon Valley’s defenders claim.
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But there’s a problem with that argument: black students are earning computer science degrees at higher rates than they are being hired by Silicon Valley companies. In 2014, they received 9.7% of the bachelor degrees awarded in computer science, according to the National Science Foundation.
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“How difficult do you think it would be to go to an engineering meeting and tell all these people who went to Cal, Stanford, and MIT that the person coming from the University of Texas El Paso or a community college can do their job as well as they can?” Miley asked. “You will not be able to convince them of that. They don’t want to believe that they’re not special.”
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“Amongst the African American students that I engage with, I don’t hear many of them aspiring to work at Google.” he said. “They hear Silicon Valley and they think, ‘I’m not going to see people like me.’”