People Like The Idea Of Workplace Diversity More Than Actual Diversity

Diversity in the workplace is often something employees say they want, but it turns out workers may actually prefer a homogeneous environment. That’s the finding of a new study on gender diversity in the workplace.

So does diversity in the workplace matter?

In short, yes. The study also found that gender diversity can help a company’s bottom line and lead to more revenue.

According to MIT economist Sara Ellison, who co-authored the study, “Having a more diverse set of employees means you have a more diverse set of skills” which “could result in an office that functions better.”

The researchers focused on answering two questions: How does diversity affect the “social capital” (cooperation, trust and workplace satisfaction) of employees? And how does diversity affect the company’s performance?For the study, the researchers looked at eight years of employee surveys and revenue data from a Boston-based company with offices in the U.S. and abroad. The company’s offices ranged in size from just a few employees to nearly 100 at their headquarters. The gender makeup of the company’s offices also varied — some offices were all male or all female and some offices had both men and women. The company administered anonymous employee satisfaction surveys each year from 1995 to 2002, which gave the researchers data on office satisfaction, cooperation and morale.

Though the data is now more than a decade old, Ellison believes the findings would still hold up today.

According to Ellison:

“The more homogeneous offices have higher levels of social capital. But the interesting twist is that … higher levels of social capital are not important enough to cause those offices to perform better. The employees might be happier, they might be more comfortable, and these might be cooperative places, but they seem to perform less well.”

The study also found that shifting from an all male or all female office to one that is evenly split along gender lines could increase revenue by about 41 percent.

In addition to looking at the effects of workplace diversity, researchers also looked at the perception workplace diversity.

“In offices where people thought the firm was accepting of diversity, they were happier and more cooperative,” Ellison said. “But that didn’t translate into any effect on office performance. People may like the idea of a diverse workplace more than they like actual diversity in the workplace.”

But some people believe that finding paints with too broad a brush.

“It is a pretty broad statement to say that people prefer a gender-homogeneous environment,”said Linda Moulton, the former CEO of Tru Corporation, a technology product manufacturing company based in Peabody. “Everybody gravitates to a comfort zone of familiarity, but my view would be that that’s quite superficial.”

Moulton said she believes the gender preference issues highlighted in the study may be generational.

“I think [the gender preference] probably disappears fairly quickly in the generation coming along,” Moulton said. “You look at work environments like Google, PayPal, and others that are diverse by gender, language, color … I would guess that if a study was done in those environments that people would have no particular bias and no particular preference because they are no longer accustomed, as that older generation is, to having a gender distinction being made in all facets of life.”

Moulton, who also spent several years working in financial services, said she never experienced any gender-related issues in the mostly male-dominated offices she worked in during her career. She said she would also like to see how company type, education levels and income levels play a role in in employees’ workplace preferences.

Since the researchers focused on a single company, the scope of the study is limited. Researcher Ellison said she welcomes more research on the topic. In an email, she said she “would love to see whether the results on improved financial performance in gender-diverse groups would hold up at other firms and in other settings.”

via Study: People Like The Idea Of Workplace Diversity More Than Actual Diversity | WBUR.

People Like The Idea Of Workplace Diversity More Than Actual Diversity

Becoming Conscious of Unconscious Bias in High Tech

The percentage of underrepresented minorities who work for tech giants is in the single digits.

The lack of diversity isn’t just harmful for underrepresented minorities themselves. It actually hurts the bottom line.

Diverse organizations make better decisions. People from varied backgrounds and experiences bring different perspectives to the table on everything, from which products and services to develop to how to market them across the world.

And the lack of minorities in tech companies puts them out of step with their own users.

With the United States heading to a majority-minority position by 2043, diverse views are more integral to businesses decisions than ever.

So what’s lurking behind these abysmal numbers and what can companies do about it?

The cause is more hidden and therefore more difficult to solve. It’s an unconscious partiality that we all have toward those who are similar to us, called an affinity bias.

Unconscious affinity bias has an evolutionary purpose. It’s hard-wired into us as part of our survival instinct.

At earlier times in our history, if an object coming up the path looked like you there was less chance that it was a hostile animal or tribe member who might kill you.

But, in the present day, the bias has enormously harmful consequences.

Reports demonstrating the exclusionary effect on employment practices abound.

A telling example is a 2004 study published in the American Economic Review finding that applicants with white-sounding names received 50% more callback interviews than those with African-American-sounding names.

Even if you’re only slightly, subtly biased, over time the effect compounds and eventually you end up with a closed caste.

You hire people who are like you, they do the same, and so on. Ultimately, your organization looks just like Google and other technology companies, with very few employees from outsider groups.

What can be done to counter a bias that we don’t even know exists?

The answer lies in making the unconscious conscious. We need to convince people the bias is happening and that it has consequences that are counter to their interests.

Easier said than done, though.

Bias carries a serious stigma in our society. That’s why education and outside pressure must be applied to bring the issue into the forefront of public discourse and convince companies to take preventative measures.

The truth is you need both positive and negative pressure, inside and outside organizations, to make change.

Rev. Jesse Jackson’s recent Silicon Valley initiative is a great example of the external stick.

In March 2014, Jackson called on the top tech companies to release their employment demographics. By the end of July, most of them caved to the pressure and publicly exposed the lack of diversity in their ranks.

And in September, Google announced Unconscious Bias at Work, an internal education program designed to create a “more aware” Google.

The entire workshop is available for viewing on YouTube, and Google says that more than 26,000 employees have attended a session. Hopefully, Google’s competitors and collaborators will follow suit.

But awareness is only the first step.

Next, you must employ tactics to ensure that employees hire without regard to color, gender, age, sexual orientation, appearance, class, or any other non-merit-based characteristic.

But how do you get rid of a bias that isn’t conscious?

Utilize a blind review process. Human resources should white label each incoming resume so that hiring managers only see: Applicant A, Applicant B, and so forth, ensuring that non-white-sounding names don’t work against applicants.

Blind review can even extend to the in-person interview stage. Transcripts can be made of recorded interviews and parties that didn’t attend the interview can review the transcripts in a blind fashion similar to the resume review.

Another tactic is to employ a consistent questioning framework in every interview. Asking the same questions in the same way of every candidate enables the reviewer to evaluate answers objectively.

In addition, cronyism must be combated throughout the hiring process.

Jesse Jackson: Tech diversity is next civil rights step

According to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, 75 percent of white Americans have “entirely white social networks.”

Before you start reviewing applications, you have to make sure you have a diverse pool of potential candidates. And companies should mandate that multiple employees be involved in every stage of review so that favoritism doesn’t pollute the process.

The road to eliminating unconscious bias from hiring and making the tech giants resemble their users is a long one. There isn’t a singular magic solution.

But keep in mind that just a few years ago, there was zero conversation about the issue. Now, initiatives like Jackson’s and Google’s are bringing people together to discuss and shed light on the topic.

Change is in the air. And that’s good for everyone — minorities, majorities, consumers, businesses, and society at large.​

via Becoming conscious of unconscious bias in high tech.

Becoming Conscious of Unconscious Bias in High Tech

How tech companies compare in employee diversity

From Apple to Google, we ranked 14 tech companies from most diverse to least

Silicon Valley companies like Google, Apple and Facebook may be innovative, but they sure aren’t when it comes to making their workplaces diverse.

Criticized for their hiring practices, tech companies started publishing employee demographic data over the past few months. It only confirmed what many people had suspected: White and Asian men dominate. Everyone else – women, blacks and Hispanics – are severely lacking.

In many cases, the companies issued a sort of apology in tandem with their diversity reports. “As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a blog post online. “Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, said.

At least 14 tech companies have released data. In an effort to provide further clarity, Fortune has ranked them in individual categories and then again overall, using a point system. Here’s how they compare:

Gender diversity (overall)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Pandora (51% male, 49% female), Indiegogo (55% male, 45% female), eBay (58% male, 42% female), Pinterest (60% male, 40% female), LinkedIn (61% male, 39% female), Yahoo (62% male, 37% female), Hewlett-Packard (67% male, 33% female), Apple (70% male, 30% female), Facebook (69% male, 31% female), Google (70% male, 30% female), Twitter (70% male, 30% female), Microsoft (72% male, 28% female), Cisco (77% male, 23% female), Intel (77% male, 23% female).

Gender diversity (leadership only)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Indiegogo (57% male, 43% female), Apple (72% male, 28% female), eBay (72% male, 28% female), Hewlett-Packard (72% male, 28% female), LinkedIn (75% male, 25% female), Facebook (77% male, 23% female), Yahoo (77% male, 23% female), Google (79% male, 21% female), Intel (79% male, 21% female), Twitter (79% male, 21% female), Pinterest (81% male, 19% female), Cisco (81% male, 19% female).

Gender diversity (technical workers only)

From most diverse to least: Indiegogo (67% male, 33% female), eBay (76% male, 24% female), Pinterest (79% male, 21% female), Apple (80% male, 20% female), Pandora (82.1% male, 17.9% female), LinkedIn (83% male, 17% female), Google (83% male, 17% female), Yahoo (85% male, 15% female, 1% other/undisclosed), Facebook (85% male, 15% female), Twitter (90% male, 10% female).

Data for Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel were unavailable.

Ethnic diversity (overall)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Apple, LinkedIn, Intel, Google, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Cisco, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Pandora, Indiegogo.

Ethnic diversity (leadership only)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Apple, LinkedIn, Intel, Google, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Cisco, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Pandora, Indiegogo.

Overall rankings

To calculate how the 14 tech companies fared overall, Fortune assigned points based on how they ranked in five categories: Overall gender diversity, overall ethnic diversity, gender diversity of the leadership team, ethnic diversity of the leadership team and gender diversity among technical workers. Companies that failed to report data in a particular category were given last place points for that category. Here’s how they stacked up, at least by Fortune’s measure:

1. LinkedIn

2. Apple

3. eBay

4. Indiegogo & Yahoo (tied)

6. Pinterest

7. Pandora

8. Facebook

9. Intel & Google (tied)

11. Twitter

12. Cisco

13. Hewlett-Packard

14. Microsoft

via How tech companies compare in employee diversity.

How tech companies compare in employee diversity

5 Women In Tech Share The Best And Worst Advice They"ve Ever Received

 They aren’t waiting around or keeping their heads down, no matter what anyone says.

 Young, hopeful entrepreneurs are never at a loss for free advice from those who have “been there, done that.”

The best companies have millennials and women in charge, so it’s no surprise there are countless well-meaning people ready to dole out their two cents.

But how do you separate the distractions from truly valuable advice? These five women in the tech and business industries made their own ways, but sifted through their share of unsolicited chaff in the process.

The Best Advice

These words of wisdom were given or learned the hard way.

Bo Ren, Facebook product managerphoto: Matthew Houlemard

Hold high standards. Bo Ren, product manager at Facebook, says mentor Ken Ebbitt urged her to become the “go-to person” for challenging problems in the company. “He told me the way I hold myself, speak, write, and walk shapes how others perceive me,” she says. “You should always hold yourself to the standard of the person you want to be.”

Be ready for anything. You’re at a casual cocktail party (finally, an event that isn’t precluded with “networking”) and you strike up a conversation with a stranger–who happens to be able to connect you with the investor of your dreams. Do you stumble over your words, trying to sum up your startup’s goals before she loses interest?

If you’re Monica Rogati, VP of data at Jawbone, you’re already killing the pitch. “Demos are powerful, efficient ways to communicate what you’re working on,” she says. “If you have a 30-second, three-minute, and 30-minute demo handy at all times, you’ll constantly be prepared for that serendipitous encounter with someone who can change your career trajectory.” Don’t end up kicking yourself over slippery opportunities.

There is a voice inside you that will tell you that you are not good enough, prepared enough, or worthy enough to fulfill your dreams. Quiet that voice.

Hush the voices. The best entrepreneurship advice Elisa Jagerson, CEO and owner of Speck Design, ever received was from her grandfather, a hall-of-fame quarterback. He said, “There is a voice inside you that will tell you that you are not good enough, prepared enough, or worthy enough to fulfill your dreams. Quiet that voice.”

Remember why you got into it. Many entrepreneurs today want to make a difference more than they want six-figure salaries. “Technologists aim to enhance lives,” Jagerson says. “To that end, my advice: Relentlessly seek to make the user’s life better. To do this well, learn how to deeply understand their unmet needs.”

Before becoming cofounder and CEO of Lumo BodyTech, Monisha Perkash started a consumer Internet company that helped users make college more affordable. “I love applying technology towards solving important problems,” she says. “Being an immigrant whose life was transformed by education, I gravitated towards the idea of using tech to improve educational access for others as well.”

Monisha Perkash, Lumo BodyTech co-founder and CEO

Bad Advice Worth Ignoring

Words of wisdom are often well-meaning, but can be far off-target. To those suggestions, these tech leaders said, “thanks, but no thanks:”

Wait around for your moment. The worst advice Tara Syed Williams, business analyst at Pinterest, has ever heard? “Just wait.”

“Great opportunities come to those who do more than what is asked of them,” says Williams. “Be curious and ask for context around decisions and work that falls on your plate.”

Hide your light. The worst advice Jagerson has ever heard: Quash the doubting inner voices completely. Your personal pep talks shouldn’t turn into delusions of perfectionist grandeur, but rather, tempered with humility.

Elisa Jagerson, Speck Design owner and CEO

The voices Perkash heard came from outside, and said she needed a new desktop screensaver. “Investors will question your commitment to the startup” if you have baby pictures displayed proudly, some told her. That’s noise to her, and she’s not buying it–instead, she says her best advice is to avoid comparison to others.

Worst advice: “Investors will question your commitment to the startup if you have baby pictures displayed.”

Keep your head down. “Be a good foot soldier,” someone told Ren when she raised questions about her path. Staying content to be a cog in the system wasn’t true with her ambitions: “The statement discouraged me from pursuing other opportunities in the company. So glad I ignored it.”

via 5 Women In Tech Share The Best And Worst Advice They’ve Ever Received | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

5 Women In Tech Share The Best And Worst Advice They"ve Ever Received

Ebay - most gender-equal tech company still hires mostly men

Copying the lead of other big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, eBay has detailed its workplace diversity for the first time. The figures released show a company that hires more women, Hispanics, and black people than its industry peers, but one that is still dominated by white and Asian men.

42 percent of eBay’s 33,000 employees are women. By comparison, only 37 percent of Yahoo’s and 30 percent of Google’s workforces are female. But up at the top of the company, eBay’s figures are less impressive: only 28 percent of the company’s leaders — people at director level or above — are women. The company’s tech division is even less equal, with men making up 76 percent of the workforce, but its non-tech arm is almost perfectly balanced at 49 percent female to 51 percent male.

eBay also has a slightly higher percentage of black and Hispanic employees in its US workforce than peers such as Facebook and Google. 7 percent of eBay’s US employees are black, while 5 percent are Hispanic. These figures drop again at the director level and in the company’s tech division. White people make up the bulk of the company’s US workforce, but the tech division is composed mainly of Asian people.

The new report puts the company slightly ahead of its peers in representing societal diversity, but eBay is still predominantly white and predominantly male. eBay says it is “far from satisfied” with the current makeup of its workforce, and closes its report with the promise that it will “continue to strive for progress,” and push for a “stronger, better, more diverse eBay.”

via The most gender-equal tech company still hires mostly men | The Verge.

Ebay - most gender-equal tech company still hires mostly men

Pinterest, dominated by White and Asian workers, looks to diversify

Like many other big tech companies, Pinterest says it knows it has a problem with diversity, or lack thereof.

Despite having users who are overwhelmingly female, Pinterest’s employees are 60% male, and 92% of the company’s 400 employees are white or Asian.

In a blog post published Thursday, the photo-sharing social media giant revealed that only 21% of the San Francisco-based company’s tech positions are filled by women, and more than 80% of its executives are male.

These imbalances are common in the tech world, Pinterest software engineer Tracy Chou said in an interview with The Times. Chou has been advocating for diversity in the tech industry at Pinterest and in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley-based tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have all published uninspiring diversity data over the last few weeks, and information collected by Chou breaking down gender in computer engineering reveals an industry-wide problem.

But Chou, with stints at Facebook and Quora before joining Pinterest, says the company is trying to change that. It is supporting programs promoting tech-friendly fields to under-served populations.

“The [tech] environment is not particularly friendly to minorities,” Chou said. “The industry is not doing a very good job at retaining diversity.”

Tech’s diversity problem can be traced to two intersecting issues, says Chou – a “pipeline problem” of not enough diversity in computer science and engineering college students, and a tendency for tech founders and employees to hire only people who look like themselves.

Chou said tech hiring practices usually aren’t maliciously keeping minorities out, but a lack of diversity awareness, especially early on, leads to festering and hard-to-solve problems down the road.

“Say you build up a team that’s 50 men to one woman,” Chou said. “It’s hard to course correct at that point.”

Especially for Pinterest, which serves a largely female user base, the lack of diversity can be glaring. Chou said the company is working on change, including a 32% female engineering intern class and by partnering with organizations like Girls Who Code to start expanding the talent pipeline.

Compared with similar companies, Pinterest does slightly better in terms of diversity of its tech team and overall gender makeup. Twitter, which released company-wide diversity data on Wednesday, is 70% male with women making up only 10% of tech workers.

Despite the underwhelming diversity numbers, Chou said working at Pinterest has been an enjoyable experience due to the company’s inclusive culture.

“This was the first place where I felt that I’m an engineer, not a female engineer,” she said.

via Pinterest, dominated by white and Asian workers, looks to diversify – LA Times.

Pinterest, dominated by White and Asian workers, looks to diversify

9 Women Respond Brilliantly To A Sexist Question

The more we look into what it means to be a woman in the corporate world, the more stories come to light–and it’s been a frustrating time in the world of women in leadership.

It’s hard to look away from stories like Dov Charney’s unbelievably sexist behavior, the words of Tinder cofounders that are a slap in the faces of entrepreneurial young women, not to mention the slew of depressing reports about nearly every aspect of the gender gap at work.

So, with the help of Elizabeth Plank, a senior editor at Mic, we’re changing the tone to check in with women who are doing us all proud. In the spirit of Lauren Conrad’s epic response to the question, “What’s your favorite position?” (spoiler alert: it’s CEO), Plank compiled a list of 23 women responding to that same question, and their answers. Here are a few of our favorites.

They’re breaking big news

Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, host and producer at HuffPost Live, helped create the weekly panel, #WMN. “Someone once asked me if it’s worth focusing on women as they’re ‘not a minority.’ I told them: ‘Have you taken a look at the news recently? Heck yes, we are!’”

“The best part of my job right now is that me and my colleagues are given the freedom to experiment, which is a necessary but all too rare part of creating something new and meaningful,” says Anna Holmes, Voices Editor at Fusion.

And then there’s writer Soraya Chemaly, whose work is published in the Guardian, Salon, CNN, and the Nation, to name a few: “What I love most about my work is the ability it gives me to engage people in challenging the everyday assumptions that impede equality.”

Political analyst and freelance writer Zerlina Maxwell does what comes naturally, for a living. “Politics is personal for me, and there is no way I would sit by silently and watch politics happen without raising my voice and changing the conversation about issues that I care about,” she says.

They’re making big things

“The best part of my job is being able to work with engineers and tradespeople to see a project come from a design on paper to a usable structure,” says Patricia Valoy, a civil engineer at STV Inc.

Christina Wallace, program director of BridgeUp at the American Museum of Natural History, is building a program to encourage girls in computer science fields. “It’s an incredible role, working with a best-in-class institution to change the ratio of girls in computer science and ensure more women have the opportunity to create and not just consume technology,” she says.

“The best part of my job is that I truly believe my team is building a better world–the kind of world I want to live in,” says Bea Arthur, founder and CEO of Pretty Padded Room. “With Facebook and Instagram, we only seem to want to present the best versions of ourselves, but what makes the world go round is the other side of that coin: the sin, the shame, the story, the true story.”

And changing the world

“A leader is only as effective as the house around her, and I am floored daily by the commitment and the passion and the stories that drive people’s fight for reproductive freedom,” says Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “If the other side is the last dying gasp of an outdated patriarchal system, the team I get to lead is the very expression of what a future looks like that embraces justice, equality, and respect for diversity.”

“The best part of my job is that I truly believe my team is building a better world–the kind of world I want to live in.”

“I feel inspired every day,” says Courtney Harvey, director of operations at Women Moving Millions. “How many people can say that about their jobs? I get to work with visionary philanthropists, innovative nonprofit leaders, and a talented and scrappy team who all share the same vocation–the advancement of women and girls for the betterment of the world.”

via 9 Women Respond Brilliantly To A Sexist Question | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

9 Women Respond Brilliantly To A Sexist Question

Inside The Complicated Mess Of Discrimination And Diversity In Hiring

Recent studies show that we’re backsliding when it comes to inclusiveness. But the reasons might be more complicated than discrimination.

Got diversity? If you believe the headlines, not so much.

A spate of recent studies delivered some troubling findings related to how race, religion, sexual orientation, and even your name can determine whether you get that call for an interview or job offer.

A recent study by the Equal Rights Center (ERC) and Freedom to Work (FTW) found that fictitious applicants’ resumes which included a leadership role in an LGBT organization were 23% less likely to be called back for interviews.

Two studies by University of Connecticut researchers–one published in the December 2013 issue of Research in Social Stratification and Mobility and one published in the March 2014 issue of Social Currents–found that identification with some religions could be a setback, too. Overall, applicants who identified a religious organization on their resumes received 26% fewer calls and email responses from prospective employers. Muslim applicants received one-third fewer responses from prospective employers. The studies also showed that atheists, Catholics, and pagans faced discrimination as well.

A July 2012 study published in PNAS found that, in a randomized, double-blind study, students’ application materials for entry-level lab manager positions were randomly assigned male and female names. Female students were less likely to be hired because they were viewed as less competent.

And if your name gives you away, you could be in trouble, too. People with hard to pronounce names are less likely to get hired.

Was all of that diversity awareness and training for naught?

Not really, says Corecia J. Davis, J.D., director of legal compliance at Palmer Kazanjian, an employment law firm based in Sacramento, California. She says the people at her firm pore over employment data “all the time” to discover how they can help their clients be more diverse, she says. While you can’t entirely discount the study data–discrimination still exists, of course–the she says the results can be misleading.

“There are so many factors that you can’t judge accurately. Were you the first resume that came in or the 100th–that could affect your call-back chances? Were your skill sets viewed differently? You never know why people decide to call you in or not,” she says.

She says a more telling factor is whether a company actively resists recruiting people of color, LGBT employees, older workers, or people with disabilities. If you see a homogenous workforce and leaders, that’s more indicative of a bias issue than a study that may have many mitigating factors.

Recruiter Kenneth L. Johnson with Philadelphia-based East Coast Executives also cautions about reading too much into isolated studies, especially those based on small samples. He says the more frequent use of automated applicant tracking systems, which rank prospective employees based on factors like experience and education helps mitigate bias. In addition, employee resource groups are more prevalent and help attract people from various races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and with other attributes. However, there’s still less diversity as people rise through the ranks, he says.

“That’s where some candidates may be getting shot down because of bias at the higher levels,” he says.

Davis also makes a distinction between racism and other forms of malicious bias and people who are simply uncomfortable with people unlike themselves.

“There are fewer ‘racist’ hiring managers than people who just aren’t sure about how a person of different culture might fit into the workplace. Those are things, societally, that we need to work to improve,” she says.

via Inside The Complicated Mess Of Discrimination And Diversity In Hiring | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

Inside The Complicated Mess Of Discrimination And Diversity In Hiring

Facebook Mirrors Tech Industry"s Lack of Diversity

When it comes to the gender and ethnic diversity of its work force, Facebook‘s record is on par with the rest of Silicon Valley. It’s overwhelmingly male, white and Asian. And white men dominate the management ranks.

The social networking company, which has about 1.28 billion users globally and turned 10 years old this year, disclosed Wednesday that 31 percent of its 6,500 workers worldwide were women. The ratio is even more imbalanced among Facebook’s tech workforce, which is 85 percent male.

Breaking down demographics of Facebook employees.

Gender (worldwide)

69%

Male

31%

Female

Ethnicity (in U.S.)

57%

White

34%

Asian

4%

Hispanic

3%

Two+ races

2%

Black

Source: Company report

In its United States operations — where the bulk of Facebook’s employees work — about 57 percent of the workers are white, 34 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, and 3 percent of another race or two or more races.

As with other Silicon Valley companies, Facebook’s management is more white and male than its workforce at large. Globally, 77 percent of senior level employees are men. And in the United States, 74 percent of the company’s managers are white, 19 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, and 1 percent of another ethnicity or two or more races.

“As these numbers show, we have more work to do — a lot more,” Facebook’s global head of diversity, Maxine Williams, wrote in the blog post announcing the data. “Diversity is something that we’re treating as everyone’s responsibility at Facebook, and the challenge of finding qualified but underrepresented candidates is one that we’re addressing as part of a strategic effort across Facebook. Since our strategic diversity team launched last year, we’re already seeing improved new hire figures and lower attrition rates for underrepresented groups.”

Facebook’s disclosure follows similar reports recently released by other major Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn. Older Silicon Valley companies, such as Intel, Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard, have also released their employment diversity data.

Unlike many of its fellow tech companies, Facebook declined to release its EEO-1 report, which provides a more detailed breakdown of its American workforce and must be filed annually with the United States government. (None of the companies reported racial and ethnic breakdowns of their global workforces, in part because some countries prohibit the collection of such information.)

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., the civil rights leader and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, had urged Facebook and other tech companies, including Google and eBay, to release their EEO-1 reports in personal pleas this spring at their annual shareholder meetings.

Facebook initially declined to release any of its diversity data, saying that it wanted to discuss the findings with employees first.

But once Google released its data in May, it put pressure on other companies to follow, Rev. Jackson said in an interview on Wednesday.

He said that Facebook’s partial data disclosure was “a step in the right direction” and will contribute to a broader discussion in Silicon Valley about how to increase the diversity of its workforce. EBay has not yet released its data, nor have other prominent tech companies such as Twitter.

While tech companies say their diversity challenges are largely due to the lack of women and minorities getting science and engineering degrees, Rev. Jackson said the industry’s diversity data show that it has done a poor job of recruiting black and Latino workers even for nontechnical jobs such as lawyers and marketers.

“We expect to have follow-up meetings to deal with the deficiency,” Rev. Jackson said. The Rainbow PUSH Coalition also plans to host discussions on the issue at its annual conference in Chicago next week.

via Facebook Mirrors Tech Industry’s Lack of Diversity – NYTimes.com.

Facebook Mirrors Tech Industry"s Lack of Diversity

Google Steps up Efforts for More Racial Diversity

Google has had more trouble diversifying its workforce than its computer scientists have had writing programs that respond to search requests in the blink of an eye or designing cars that can navigate traffic without a human behind the wheel.

That seemed to be the conclusion when the Silicon Valley giant this week issued a gender and ethnic breakdown of its workforce that showed that of its 26,600 U.S. employees, 61 percent are white, 30 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black. Thirty percent of its employees are women.

“Google is miles from where we want to be,” said Laszlo Bock, head of personnel at Google.

Why is one of the most innovative, dynamic sectors of the U.S. economy looking like the corporate world of the past, at least when it comes to blacks, Hispanics and women?

The biggest factor is a shortage of such students majoring in computer science or other technical fields in college, according to Bock.

“There is an absolute pipeline problem,” he said in an interview Wednesday with “PBS Newshour.”

One year, Google says, there were just two black people in the U.S. with newly minted doctorates in computer science on the job market. The company hired one of them, and Microsoft hired the other, according to Bock.

But the educational choices of some minorities don’t entirely account for the lack of diversity at technology companies.

For instance, Google sells $50 billion in advertising annually, a task that required more than 2,900 salespeople in the U.S. as of last August. Just 79 of them, or 3 percent, were black. A total of 127, or 4 percent, were Hispanic. More than 2,000, or about 70 percent, were white.

Google attributes this phenomenon to “unconscious biases” that have historically favored white people. “We like people who are like us, who watch the same shows, who like the same food, who have the same backgrounds,” Bock told PBS.

To address this issue, Google has put more than 20,000 employees through 90-minute training sessions during the past year to help them become more aware of their biases.

Google is also trying to do more recruiting at colleges with large minority enrollments. During the past year, Google has dispatched a specialist to work with historically black Howard University to draw up a curriculum that will give its graduates a better chance of competing for technology jobs against the likes of MIT. The program will be extended to five other colleges this fall.

Google is just one of many high-tech companies that are pledging to diversify their workforces this spring under pressure from the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But the same promises were made in the Silicon Valley 15 years ago, again under pressure from the civil rights leader. That effort included a conference, a new website, commitments from top firms, and a call to educate and employ 200,000 young people.

“I’m disappointed. For the most part they have not improved,” said Jackson on Thursday. “Look at their board of directors and their c-suites. There’s a culture of exclusion.”

Google’s efforts come amid a renewed bout of advocacy from Jackson and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which have been leading delegations to shareholder meetings this spring at such companies as Google, Facebook, eBay and Hewlett-Packard, decrying “old patterns that exclude people of color and women from opportunity and advancement.”

Jackson said that he hopes others will follow Google’s lead, and that this time he is redoubling his efforts here.

In 1999, when Jackson launched his first Silicon Valley initiative, 89 percent of Silicon Valley chairmen and CEOs were white, while the white-collar workforce was about 60 percent white and 31 percent Asian. Those figures have barely budged.

Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and Advanced Micro Devices have published similar labor data breakdowns.

Four percent of the 57,000 U.S. employees at computer chip maker Intel Corp. are black, according to the company’s breakdown. About 8 percent of Intel’s U.S. workers are Hispanic and 26 percent are women.

“We are not satisfied with our diversity data, and we continuously strive to improve,” said Patricia McDonald, the company’s vice president of human resources. The company also says it has invested more than $1 billion worldwide during the last decade to improve education.

Intel also recently promoted a woman, Renee James, to president.

Hewlett-Packard Co. has won praise for hiring two different women, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, as CEO since 1999. Overall, one-third of HP’s U.S. staff are women, according to the company’s most recent statistics; 7 percent of HP’s U.S. workers are black and 6 percent are Hispanic.

Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, an organization focused on the local economy and quality of life, said one problem is that the sector moves swiftly.

“Silicon Valley moves at a pace that is unbelievable. It is a breakneck marketplace. So when you’re adding people, you don’t take time to cast a wider net,” he said.

Sharon Vosmek, CEO of nonprofit Astia, which connects women-led startups with financial backers, said: “This is not a Google issue; this is a societal issue.”

“Are there subtle biases? Yes, but they exist in society. Men get together and play golf, have a beer,” she said. “We’re up against societal norms, and we have to break those down by simply supporting networking between genders.”

via Google Steps up Efforts for More Racial Diversity – ABC News.

Google Steps up Efforts for More Racial Diversity

How to Build a More Diverse IT Workforce

A diverse workforce is more productive, innovative and contributes to increased market share, profitability and lower employee turnover. Agreeing with that statement is the easy part. The tricky part: How to achieve that diversity.

One possibility is Entelo Diversity. The service is designed to give hiring managers, human resources professionals and recruiters an additional way to help identify, attract and hire talent from diverse, underrepresented populations, says Entelo CEO Jon Bischke.

Recruiting a Balanced Workforce

“Many companies still struggle to create such diverse and balanced workforces and to identify and reach out to women, to different ethnicities and other underrepresented groups,” Bischke says. “We found many clients already working to address the issue of diversity, and we built this tool to assist them in their efforts,” he says.

Entelo Diversity works in conjunction with Entelo’s existing suite of recruiting and hiring tools, which leverage big data, analytics and social data to screen and source candidates, says Bischke.

How to Build a More Diverse IT Workforce

“Entelo Diversity is a Web crawler that uses a proprietary algorithm to aggregate profiles from publicly available information,” Bischke says.

“It uses what’s already indexed to create a more in-depth profile of a candidate, and then look at certain data points that could signal whether candidates are male, female, Hispanic, a veteran, ” Bischke says. For example, is the candidate a member of the NAACP? That could signal they’re African-American. Or, if the candidate was a member of a sorority during her college years, the assumption’s made that they are female, he says.

Proof of Compliance

Bischke says though Entelo has done its due diligence around the legal and social implications of the tool, each client should understand the legal and compliance regulations of its particular industry and make sure the tool is right for them.

“As long as this tool is only being used to proactively recruit and identify underrepresented groups for hiring, then it’s fine, but if it’s used to weed out people, then obviously we don’t want any part of that,” Bischke says. “But we don’t see companies using the tool that way; what we see is that many companies are already searching for more diverse candidates manually, and Entelo Diversity helps them automate some of these manual processes, saving both time and money,” he says.

Entelo Diversity can also help companies meet legal and compliance statutes that require proof that they’re searching for and hiring a diverse workforce, Bischke says.

Companies that contract with the United States Government, for example, are often required to provide documentation of their search and recruiting efforts from underrepresented groups, and the tool offers a fast, simple way to document compliance, Bischke says.

Hiring Veterans

In addition to helping companies identify and recruit women, minorities and other underrepresented groups into the workforce, Bischke says Entelo Diversity also helps businesses identify and recruit veterans.

“We’re also excited about the military aspect, and application of the tool for that population, too,” he says. “We know that hiring from the population brings candidates with great leadership and technical skills, and we hope the tool can help veterans find employment,” he says.

In addition, Bischke says, Entelo is committed to helping close the technical and skills gap currently plaguing the education system through its Hiring for Good program. Bischke says that Entelo works closely with CodeEd, an organization that teaches programming skills to middle school girls from underserved communities.

“Every time someone’s hired via the Entelo tool, we fund one year of code instruction and education for an underprivileged girl through the CodeEd program,” Bischke says.

via How to Build a More Diverse IT Workforce – CIO.com.

How to Build a More Diverse IT Workforce