How to address tech’s lack of diversity
Kapor Center seeks to understand causes to find better solutions
Lack of diversity in Silicon Valley’s tech industry is well known, persistent and controversial.
Kapor Center for Social Impact wants to help find solutions, but these involve more than just tech companies committing to hire more women and minorities in the workplace. After all, many of them have publicly committed to doing so, but their numbers show little progress.
“Tech companies play a role, but they’re not the only ones,” said Allison Scott, chief research officer for Kapor Center, in an interview Thursday. “If we all agree [diversity in tech] an imperative,” she said, there are stakeholders galore.
Oakland-based Kapor Center this week offered up a framework to help those stakeholders do their part in solving the
problem. It’s a call to educators, entrepreneurs, investors, companies and public entities to first understand why diversity issues persist, and what they can do to combat them.
The center titled the framework “The Leaky Tech Pipeline,” which Kapor Center founder Freada Kapor Klein calls “our way of looking at the interconnectedness of… biases and how they keep people out of tech,” according to a video on the accompanying website that the center launched this week along with the report about the framework.
“It’s the first time that all this information has been put together into a clear framework,” Scott said. Kapor Center plans to keep the website updated with the latest research on diversity in tech, and to use the framework
to discuss solutions with various stakeholders.
The Kapor Center framework consists of thinking about equity in overall education; expanding computer science education; enhancing pathways to tech careers; implementing comprehensive inclusion and diversity strategies; increasing diverse computing role models; and public-private partnerships.
For example, Scott said, looking at the framework might “help teachers to think about how they present role models to girls in schools.”
The research report and website’s launch comes as the tech industry grapples with diversity issues amid the #MeToo movement and the cultural and political wars playing out in the workplace and elsewhere.
For example, Google has been sued by former employees who have pushed back against the tech giant’s diversity efforts — most notably James Damore,
who wrote the now-infamous memo that suggested the gender disparity in tech was due to biological differences between men and women — and by an employee who claims he was fired because he spoke up against bigotry at the company.
As for #MeToo, the reckoning over sexism and sexual harassment that is sweeping the nation, in Silicon Valley it’s not hard to see connections between the issue and the dearth of women in tech.
A former female engineer at Google last week sued the company over its “bro culture,” which she claims contributed to her suffering “frequent sexual harassment and gender discrimination, for which Google failed to take corrective action.” Google — which is also facing a separate lawsuit over a gender gap in pay — fired her in 2016 for poor performance, according to the lawsuit.
Citing a plethora of
research — including the business case for diversity — the Kapor Center report also underscores why it’s important for the tech workforce to become more diverse: “While the evolution of technology has already demonstrated a significant impact on society, the future of work and trend towards automation of jobs has the potential to further exacerbate disparities.”
Scott said, “We’re at a critical moment where our country is becoming more diverse… and we’re leaving a lot of talent on the table.” She noted that research shows 98 percent of tech founders are white or Asian.
She added that although Kapor Center cares about inclusion in all forms, the framework focuses on gender and racial diversity, but not age, because of the type of data and research that’s available.