A Silicon Valley summit reveals tech companies lack social diversity with very few percent of their employees being Latinos, Afro-Americans or even women.
About 20 tech organizations including Google, Apple and Facebook joined civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and his group Rainbow PUSH Wednesday at Diversity 2.0 Summit to discuss and come up with answers to this particular issue. This is actually a premiere, being a first run when companies actually openly addressed and acknowledged the absence of diversity.
Social equality fighter Jesse Jackson used the vast majority of this current year constraining the High-tech business into confronting up to the glaring lack of blacks, women and Latinos at organizations that made a fame being ‘the it’ work destination.
But Diversity 2.0 means discovering approaches to switch a profoundly embedded issue that might not be as simple as coding computer programs against viruses.
The difficulties and possible future answers were investigated Wednesday at the Silicon Valley summit, in Santa Clara, California at Intel Corp.’s headquarters. Over 300 guests attended the event including business visionaries, scholars and charitable organizations, enthusiastic to change the social and educational environment that transformed software programming into an occupation reserved for white and Asian men.
Gwen Houston, Microsoft Corp’s general director of global diversity, said she believes the summit is a great debate opportunity in light of the fact that she also thinks that top managers should assume responsibility for the absence of ladies and non-Asian minorities on companies’ payrolls.
She considered the nomination a step forward for John Thompson, an African-American, as Microsoft’s chairman earlier this year.
Except for Intel Corp. , Hewlett-Packard Co. and a few other cases, most of the tech giants have constantly rejected calls to showcase employment data that they routinely deliver to government work controllers. Only this May when Google Inc. yielded to Jackson’s requests and publicly presented the data did other companies decide to undertake similar actions. Jackson, who is now 73 years old, says he plans to held companies responsible for the pledges they made to create a more accessible work environment for everybody.
Silicon Valley, where the industry takes pride in forward thinking and policies based on merits, has a considerable catching up to do.
Just 2 percent of the U.S. employees at Google and Facebook are Afro-Americans and the quantity of Hispanics is underneath 5 percent with both organizations. If statistics take into account all U.S. industries then 12 percent of employees are black and 14 percent are Latinos. Also, less than one-third of the global high-tech companies employees are ladies.
Recently, even President Barack Obama tried to take a stand regarding these issues. He declared this week that he intends to come up with educational programs that can give adolescent young ladies and minority young men a jump start into a career in technology.