Narrative: Tech is Not Diverse

Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.

Each post below is tagged with
  • Company/Division names
  • Topics
  • and
  • Narratives
  • as appropriate.
    Being black in tech can cost you $10k a year – USA Today (Feb 9, 2017)

    This report from Hired this article is based on has lots of interesting data about salaries for software developers in lots of cities in the US and beyond, but the focus of the article is what the report says about bias. Specifically, the report finds that African Americans are 49% more likely to get hired than white candidates, while Latino and Asian candidates are each less likely to be hired, but it also finds that African American candidates ask for and receive lower salaries than Latino, Asian, or white applicants. The report doesn’t draw many conclusions from the data – increased likelihood of being hired for African Americans may be tied to that lower asking price, to diversity initiatives, or something else, and it’s also unclear whether these candidates ask for lower salaries because experience tells them to expect them, because they’re less well informed about going rates than their white counterparts, or again for some other reason. But the results are the results – yet another indication of systemic issues in the tech industry when it comes to race, whatever the underlying causes.

    via USA Today (Hired report here)

    Apple shareholder proposal seeks more diversity at top – USA Today (Feb 1, 2017)

    Apple, along with most of the rest of the tech industry, could be much more diverse than it is in its employee makeup. It’s made progress in some areas (and can argue it’s the only major tech company to be run by an openly gay individual), but women and people of color are still unrepresented at all levels, and especially on the board and among senior management. This shareholder proposal wants Apple to move more quickly to change that, while Apple argues that it’s already working on increasing diversity, and the accelerated changes are focused too narrowly to be broadly beneficial in changing Apple’s workforce as a whole. It’s a reality that changing the composition of a workforce that’s over 100,000 strong is much harder than, say, Twitter’s workforce of a few thousand, and will take considerable time. And swapping out senior executives with full-time jobs based on increasing diversity alone obviously wouldn’t wash either, especially in a company that has as little movement in the upper ranks as Apple does. But board seats are one area where Apple could potentially move more quickly, because there’s a plethora of qualified individuals available. I’m betting the proposal gets voted down, but that’s not to say there isn’t some merit in it.

    via USA Today

    Silicon Valley tries to spread wealth to Trump’s America – USA Today (Jan 30, 2017)

    Leslie Miley, who has been director of engineering at Slack, is working with Venture for America to start a program that will take employees of coastal tech companies and place them for one year at a time in new locations in the US, especially in minority communities, with salaries paid by their employers. Yelp and LinkedIn have signed up already. The initiative aims to break down a couple of facets of the tech industry’s lack of diversity, opening up opportunities for those in the communities served who may come from underrepresented groups, but also hopefully exposing the Silicon Valley types who participate in the program to new ways of thinking and lifestyles. This seems like a great initiative which should benefit both groups, and we should also see more from coastal tech companies investing in non-traditional locations in the US by putting offices and employees there. There are already several smaller tech hubs outside the traditional ones (including where I live in Utah), and they’re often able to attract great employees who don’t want to put up with the cost and other downsides of a Silicon Valley lifestyle.

    via USA Today (see also Miley’s own blog post)

    Twitter users are diverse but not its staff – USA Today (Jan 19, 2017)

    Lots of the coverage of Twitter’s new diversity report (and accompanying blog post) today was positive – the company has made real progress over the past year in increasing its diversity and achieving its own goals, though it also fell short in some areas. However, Jessica Guynn at USA Today has been one of the most active reporters on the diversity beat and doesn’t think the gains are good enough – for one thing, Twitter didn’t share last year’s equivalent report, so it’s impossible to know exactly what gains have been made over the past year alone (the last report released publicly was the 2014 one). But the overall numbers for some minority groups are still very small relative to their share of the US population overall. Kudos to Twitter for increasing its diversity, but kudos to Guynn too, for holding not just Twitter’s but all tech companies’ feet to the fire on this issue.

    via Twitter users are diverse but not its staff – USA Today

    Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode (Jan 18, 2017)

    A lot of the coverage of the lack of diversity in the tech industry focuses on employment and the lack of opportunities and barriers to entry for minorities and women. In other words, the focus is on the negative impact on those who would like to work in the industry. But this article highlights one of what I’d argue are many practical reasons why this lack of diversity is also bad from a product perspective – less diverse teams produce products which are poorer at meeting the needs of a diverse base of users. In this case, the specific issue is face recognition software and its inability to effectively recognize darker faces, in part because it tends to be trained on data sets of largely white faces and tested by mostly white engineers.

    via Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode

    Ellen Pao joins forces with Kapors to bring diversity to technology – USA Today (Jan 10, 2017)

    It’s good to see Ellen Pao land in another venture role, but also one where she’ll be able to continue to push for more diversity in tech now that she has a high profile in this area. Funding is one of several bottlenecks at which diversity is stripped out of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, so having her and her new partners working on improving things should be helpful.

    via Ellen Pao joins forces with Kapors to bring diversity to technology – USA Today

    Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce – Bloomberg (Jan 9, 2017)

    Like most big tech companies, Facebook struggles with diversity, but would like to do better. And yet its own internal processes are apparently hindering its efforts here, with existing engineers having too much power to shape hiring of candidates in their own image. This is a known issue at this point, and it’s frustrating that Facebook – with all its innovation – can’t crack it. All this just highlights that all the will in the world can’t trump flawed processes.

    via Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce – Bloomberg

    Join Our Board: Companies Hotly Pursue New Wave of Women in Tech – The New York Times (Dec 30, 2016)

    Board positions are one of the most visible aspects of a company’s commitment to diversity (or lack thereof), and this means competition for women to sit on boards is at an all-time high. That’s a good thing, but it’s still far less common at lower levels in companies to have this kind of commitment to hiring women or other underrepresented groups in tech.

    via Join Our Board: Companies Hotly Pursue New Wave of Women in Tech – The New York Times

    Canvas — Project Alloy Executive Summary (Dec 28, 2016)

    This seems like an admirable effort aimed at increasing diversity in the tech industry by sponsoring people from underrepresented backgrounds to attend conferences. Nice to see someone come up with a logical and realistic solution, and one that allows those already in the industry to put their money where their mouths are.

    via Canvas — Project Alloy Executive Summary