The tech industry does not suffer from a lack of leaders and thinkers willing to talk about diversity, and we have heard major companies talk about their desire to hire more minorities. Apple, as one example, declares that “diversity is our future” and proudly notes that “from July 2016 to July 2017, half of our new hires in the United States were from historically underrepresented groups in tech.”
Yet at the same time, Apple admits that the percentage of underrepresented minorities in the company from 2014 to 2017 grew from 19 percent to just 23 percent. Other tech companies are doing no better. The New York Times reported that Hispanic and blacks make up just four percent of technical workers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter. And Asians, while overrepresented as tech workers, struggle to get promoted as leadership positions inevitably fall to white men.
It would be nice to assume that the cause of black and Hispanic underrepresentation in tech jobs was due to malicious racism and leave it at that, but it is not that simple. Tech leaders and HR professionals are often committed to diversity but fall into bad habits because their privileged background precludes them from understanding how to truly fight prejudice.
Diversity Promotion Done Wrong
An obvious question should be asked at this point. How can Apple hire so many underrepresented minorities, yet the percentage of minorities has grown so little over the past few years?
The primary reason is that those same minorities are leaving tech companies faster than their white counterparts. This is due to an unfriendly corporate culture where leaders make insensitive remarks such as “all lives matter” or stoop to stereotypes. The lack of minorities encourages Silicon Valley workers to keep up what is essentially a jock nerd, “techbro” culture which favors whites. This forces minorities to leave, and the cycle repeats.
Yes, tech companies are making more of an effort to fight against such thoughts and incidents. But all too often, diversity efforts amount to little more than a training seminar attended once a year that no one pays attention to. Just as often, these seminars discourage prejudice by tokenizing currently working ethnic minorities with a masters in Data Science, and creating a rift between those minorities and the white majority who believe that those minorities get special treatment.
Creating New Companies
Some tech companies understand how old methods such as unconscious bias treatment are pointless at best and harmful at worst. They are seeking new methods such as focusing more on retention instead of recruitment and promoting a unified culture instead of otherization. But changing the culture of Silicon Valley will take years and invite pushback from those content with the status quo. If blacks and Hispanics desire more representation in the tech world, they cannot rely on white leaders and hiring professionals to graciously hand them jobs and work their way up the corporate ladders. They will have to create tech businesses themselves which place minorities at the top from the very beginning.
The good news is that we have seen the rise of tech businesses run by and catering to blacks such as Innclusive, an Airbnb clone which aims to avoid the challenges the original has faced with racial discrimination. Meanwhile, The Guardian notes that in Washington DC, a tech-heavy area filled with thousands of employees in cybersecurity and other important fields, blacks make up over 15 percent of tech jobs, in-line with their nationwide numbers. We should not forget that when thinkers talk about the “tech industry,” we often focus on just Silicon Valley and its few largest companies.
But the unfortunate reality is that we focus on Silicon Valley because white-led behemoths like Amazon and Facebook threaten to envelop black-held and other smaller businesses by smashing their niches and poaching employees. This brings us to another potential last resort alternative.
These large tech companies have committed egregious actions such as Amazon paying their workers practically nothing, Facebook with the Cambridge Analytics scandal, and Google’s virtual monopoly. An effort by the United States government to limit their power or even potentially break them up could help smaller businesses, particularly including those by blacks, to thrive and enter the tech sector. Such efforts would obviously not end prejudice by themselves and will not happen anytime soon, but could present a potential fresh start for everyone.
Doing Better
We should not forget that while blacks and minority numbers in the technology sector are nowhere what they should be, some progress has been made over the past few years. Predominantly white tech companies must do more to actually embrace blacks and Hispanics as members of their teams instead of tokens to show how progressive they are. Minority leaders and tech experts must promote solidarity in their own business to become true equals. Becoming true equals to whites will take time, but a committment to true progress by everyone is the first step towards real diversity.
