Diversity in Tech
“Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future. We aspire to do more than just make our company as diverse as the talent available to hire. We must address the broad underlying challenges, offer new opportunities, and create a future generation of employees as diverse as the world around us.”
-Tim Cook, Apple CEO, 2015 press realease
As the most prominent openly gay CEO in Silicon Valley, Tim Cook is uniquely positioned to highlight diversity and alter the status quo in the technology industry. In the same press release he mentions the history of Apple as a company that has always thrived on its insistence to be different, to think different. His call to continue that legacy by not just allowing hiring practices and workplace culture to follow its course is a welcome step in the right direction that many other companies have started initiatives to correct. And this course correction is just what the ship of the tech industry needs.
According to a recent Fortune survey women make up roughly one third of the tech industry work-force, while only about 40% of employees are non-white. These numbers only get lower among leadership positions. Tristan Walker of Code2040, a non-profit dedicated to increasing diversity in tech, says that this problem isn’t just explicit bias it is implicit as well. He gives the example of white-boarding processes in interviews that give predominantly non-minority programmers with classical training in schools like MIT an advantage. Unfortunately some of this bias is inherent in the system of a wealthy-white-male dominated culture outside of technology; but this system has a creeping effect in specific parts of our culture that might be seemingly innocuous at first glance.
When computer science was a nascent creation it organically became the purview of students with enough privilege, free-time, and education to study it. While it was still a niche industry, this was not particularly exclusive or isolating, but as it grew, the associations of the culture did not. Technology, however, has a built-in silver lining, and that is the revolutionary and transformative pace at which the industry moves. Computers were once in such a primitive state as we find the color of the industry today, but they changed and evolved at an exponential rate making them the powerful machines that now drive industry and commerce. If technology can change this rapidly, so can the technology industry. Fortunately techies are notoriously good problem solvers and identifying the problem is the first step. After researching proposed solutions to the problem, there appear to be about five positive recommendations that will move the industry in the right direction.
-Make a more inclusive culture:
Minorities and women that do work in the industry often leave because they didn’t feel welcome even after they were able to break into it. As the culture becomes more aware of the issues of minorities it will become more capable of accommodating them. Dev BootCamp has been a pioneer in this aspect by making engineering empathy a core component of their curriculum and reaching out to female and LGBT coders.
-Greater oversight:
Forbes contributor Bonnie Marcus proposes that tech companies of a certain size need to hire an outside firm to assess the culture of the organization including discrimination in pay and hiring practices.
-Top-down approach:
Leaders of tech companies and the industry in general may be a white-boys’ club, but that doesn’t mean they want it to always be that way. Many of them recognize that a main reason is because the culture has propped that notion up for too long, and it is time to correct it in the opposite direction.
-Educate to the culture gap:
Another recommendation of Marcus’s is to give minorities resources to network and take advantage of systems that non-minorities often have at their disposal that go overlooked.
-Mentorship:
And Marcus also suggests that women and minorities receive mentors to level the bar even further.
The numbers are already starting to shift in the right direction and if the momentum can be maintained for ten or twenty years it will be transformative. Take Apple as an example again. After announcing their diversity initiative they hired 65% more females than the previous year, 50% more black employees, and 66% more hispanics. If the tech industry was taken at its current demographics it would be pretty bleak, but its power to transform is limitless. The factors that have contributed to it being exclusive are numerous and complex, but the solutions are fortunately rather simple. Diversity has been a driving force of the industry in the past and if it remains in our thoughts it will be the force that drives its future.