Diversity still lags in tech industry
Silicon Valley has been engulfed in data-driven debate on hiring.
More than a decade before diversity became a hot issue in Silicon Valley, Jason Young came home on winter break from Harvard to discover that his family was being evicted.
Having grown up in a single-parent home, Young, 33, can identify with other young black men he calls “hidden geniuses” — the promising male teenagers who grow up in challenging circumstances mere miles away, but light years apart, from Silicon Valley’s tech money machine.
That experience led Young to found the Hidden Genius Project two years ago. The program immerses high school men of color in coding, Web and app design, team building and other skills intended to give them a leg up in the tech economy.
His project is one of a multitude of grass-roots efforts that have sprung up to address one of Silicon Valley’s most acute diversity problems: the scarcity of African-Americans in the tech industry.
“We are helping these young men to understand who they are and what they’re capable of,” said Young, who runs his education technology startup, MindBlown Labs, in the same Oakland building as Hidden Genius Project. “We’re giving them a pathway and putting them on it.”
Silicon Valley has been engulfed in a diversity debate, in part because data released by tech companies like Google, Facebook and others showed how overwhelmingly tilted the population of tech workers is to white men. The data highlighted that the low number of African-American tech workers is particularly acute.
Google revealed that its tech workforce was 1 percent black, compared with 60 percent white. Yahoo disclosed in July that African-Americans made up 1 percent of its tech workers while Hispanics were 3 percent. In a report last month, Apple said it had made progress increasing diversity in hiring, although African-Americans remained the smallest fraction of its tech workforce at 7 percent.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, African-Americans and Hispanics have been consistently underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics occupations, or STEM. In 2011, blacks represented 11 percent of the total workforce but only 6 percent of STEM workers. Hispanics were 15 percent of the workforce and 7 percent of STEM workers.
The figures have led to a flurry of initiatives. There are efforts by historically black colleges and universities to produce more science, technology, math and engineering graduates. These have been joined by a growing number of professional networks.
“No one new idea will drive systemic change,” said Rosalind Hudnell, chief diversity officer at Intel, which has pledged $425 million over the last few years to diversity efforts. “There is no quick fix.”
Underrepresented minorities “are up against a series of barriers and obstacles that their Caucasian and Asian counterparts don’t have,” said Freada Kapor Klein, founder of the Level Playing Field Institute in Oakland, which sponsors programs to increase diversity in technology. “The farther outside the tech ecosystem they are, the harder it is.”