USA TODAY International Edition
Diversity: How tech industry is doing it wrong
New report offers companies a how-to manual on how to improve, from kindergarten on up
SAN FRANCISCO – Why doesn’t Silicon Valley look more like the rest of America yet?
Hundreds of millions of dollars, scores of initiatives and four years later, the technology industry is still staffed largely by white and Asian men in striking contrast to the billions of people it serves around the globe.
Tech is doing it wrong, says Freada Kapor Klein, a partner with Kapor Capital and founder of the Level Playing Field Institute. A hodgepodge of one-off efforts has wasted time and money and done little to increase the low numbers of women and underrepresented minorities.
“I have been working on diversity in tech for many decades. It’s sobering to see the lack of progress,” says Kapor Klein. For an industry capable of churning out technological marvels, “it’s appalling.”
This outspoken technology veteran and diversity advocate has called out the tech industry many times before. This time, she’s pushing a comprehensive approach to boosting diversity. And she’s come armed with reams of data on the complex set of structural and social barriers that are the roadblocks to progress.
A new report and a companion website from the Kapor Center released Wednesday gives tech companies, government, philanthropic organizations, non-profits and educators a how-to manual on plugging the leaks that spring up all along the tech “pipeline,” from kindergarten to college and from the tech workforce to venture capital. Think of it as Diversity for Dummies.
It’s time for everyone in tech to step up and say: “We have a problem, and we need to work together to solve it,” Kapor Klein says.
But will anyone pay attention? The report lands amid growing tensions over the lack of progress in changing the demographics of tech.
Privately, diversity advocates say technology leaders still have not made diversity an urgent priority with few CEOs giving the mandate or the marching orders. Diversity staffers are given little in the way of resources and authority.
After years of resistance, Google began annually publishing the demographics of its workforce in 2014. The release of information that the Internet giant had kept under lock and key rippled through the industry. Soon most major tech companies ponied up their own racial and gender breakdown. The first concrete look at the state of the tech industry revealed an industry at odds with America’s growing diversity. Nationwide, the industry is 75% male, 70% white and 20% Asian.
Kapor Klein says much of the current debate on how to increase diversity in tech centers on too few computer science graduates from underrepresented backgrounds and on the prevalence of workplace bias, ignoring underlying causes such as disproportionate access to highquality schools and teachers and computer-science courses, wealth gaps, gender and race stereotypes, and limited access to social networks dominated by white men.