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The tech industry has some of the best opportunities to generate wealth for new and experienced professionals alike. It's also, unsurprisingly, one of the least diverse industries in the employment market.
Research from last summer found that big tech companies have not held up their promises to hire more Black workers. Over the last five years, Facebook made big leaps in employing more women. In the same period, the tech giant only managed to take its Black workforce from 3% to 3.8%. Other companies have done a little better, but across the board, tech continues to generate mountains of wealth while locking diverse workers out of that growth.
The common argument against minority inclusion in tech ("The talent pipeline just isn't there!") does not hold up to scrutiny. SAP's chief of diversity, Judith Michelle Williams, points out that the so-called pipeline problem is not the obstacle companies imagine it is. That interpretation of the issue simply passes the blame from the companies to the workers, allowing businesses to make token donations and say "we tried."
These old ways of shirking responsibility have to end. Companies must finally become accountable to themselves for increasing BIPOC representation within their ranks. The problem cannot continue as long as tech continues to be one of the largest drivers of wealth in the world. People of other races are earning generational money in startups and at big tech businesses. The longer these companies continue to delay real progress in diversity, the more of that wealth will remain inaccessible to qualified minority workers.
Fixing this problem starts at the top with the leaders of the companies responsible. No one can make the change for them. To that end, companies should address inequality across their organizations in the following ways:
1. Address diversity at every level, inside and outside the business.
One company working toward diversity is small progress. Every company working together toward improved diversity creates real change.
Every business should seek to improve diversity in four areas: the top and bottom of their own organization and the top and bottom of organizations outside themselves. Internally, that means hiring and promoting Black workers. Externally, that means building products for Black end users and selling to companies with Black leadership.
Hiring with diversity in mind matters, of course. But hiring is only one part of the process. Every level of tech has opportunities for change, and companies must focus the lens of progress on all of those levels. Selling products to Black-owned businesses, refusing to deal with companies that do not meet specified diversity thresholds or that espouse racist beliefs — these are drivers of real progress. Companies have power beyond themselves, and they must leverage that power for the good of all.
2. Look beyond traditional education.
Startups and big tech companies love graduates from Stanford, Harvard and other big-name schools. They do not harbor the same love for HBCUs, nor do they give enough credit to nontraditional education paths.
That has finally begun to change, but businesses must follow the examples of the leaders in this space. Elon Musk famously doesn't care for college degrees. Google is working on new courses to replace college degrees for interested workers. IBEX, a Black-owned IT certification and training company, offers several training programs for potential tech employees.
Black students and workers have routinely been excluded from the educational spaces where tech businesses source their talent. Companies cannot place themselves on admissions teams, but they can take matters into their own hands by looking at qualifications outside the Black-excluding norms of tech.
3. Create processes, not just training, to bring unconscious bias into the light.
Diversity training is not useful enough in combating bias in hiring. Businesses must create processes within their hiring and promotion frameworks to address and measure the effects of unconscious bias.
This is not a knock on hiring managers with good intentions. Even people who want to be conscious of their biases cannot undo the expectations of their industry through a few videos about race every year.
Hiring processes must require interviewers to recognize areas where their biases may play a role. Do all the candidates look like the recruiter or hiring manager? Where do those candidates come from? Businesses should commit to leaving every role open until they have received applications from a truly diverse set of applicants and interviewed accordingly. Only when the processes themselves insist upon fairness will momentum begin to shift.
4. Measure departmental success with diversity in mind.
How many companies grade individual departments on their progress toward diversity initiatives? Not many. At some companies, a single diversity officer is responsible for all diversity goals, again passing the buck for leadership. When every department is accountable to improvement, organizations can identify and correct individual problem areas.
Not only does a closer departmental focus root out biased hiring managers, but it can also ensure Black applicants receive equal consideration for all types of roles. If a tech company boasts improvements in diversity, but those improvements are clustered into a small number of low-paying roles, is that really improvement?
Addressing departmental successes and failures allows companies to gauge the effectiveness of their diversity initiatives in ways that have effects beyond diversity. When a team struggles to improve, it could be a sign that the leadership within that team only knows how to do things one way. Inflexibility is a killer in an industry that depends on innovation. By measuring diversity initiatives more closely, companies can get a better understanding of their other shortfalls.
The digital revolution has brought massive changes to quality of life, but companies cannot allow this revolution to leave behind Black workers the way the industrial revolution did. Today's Black workforce has all the talent, motivatio, and innovation tech companies require to succeed. So far, they have not been given sufficient opportunities to showcase their abilities. As a result, the bounty of the tech industry has been reserved for people of other races, leaving Black workers to fight just to be considered.
This has to change. Companies have the power to change it, right now. Tech companies have so far failed to do so. Only by recognizing the immensity of the problem and making a commitment that goes beyond the surface can businesses in this industry uphold their obligation to do better.
