Topic: Diversity
Google accused of ‘extreme’ gender pay discrimination by US labor department – The Guardian (Apr 7, 2017)
The Department of Labor is suing Google over an alleged failure to adequately disclose its compliance with equal opportunity laws as a federal contractor. During the course of the court case, the DoL has accused Google of having a significant gender pay disparity, something Google strongly denies. Were the allegations to be true, it would be extremely damaging for Google’s reputation as an employer, but given that Google hasn’t given the DoL all the documents it’s asking for, you have to ask whether the Department has a full picture of Google’s pay practices. Google, in turn, has argued that the DoL has gone too far in its request for documents and that it has already adequately complied with the applicable regulations. Recent surveys have shown significant gender and race pay disparities within the industry, so it wouldn’t be surprising if those patterns held at Google too, but it claims its own data shows no such disparity. The court case will presumably eventually come down one way or another both on this question and whether Google has adequately complied with regulations, so it’s worth keeping an eye on how this develops.
via The Guardian
In tech, the wage gender gap worsens for women over time, and it’s worst for black women – TechCrunch (Apr 5, 2017)
I covered a similar story a while back, but this one has more detail, and focuses more on gender in addition to racial disparities in tech salaries. It turns out that being a member both of an underrepresented gender and race increases your odds of being underpaid significantly, such that black and Latina women earn 79 cents for every dollar equivalently qualified men do. In part, as with that earlier study, this is because women often ask for lower salaries than men, though apparently only after their first few years in a career (in their first four years, they actually tend to ask for more). That, in turn, may reflect both conditioning in terms of what to expect and lower previous salaries. Regardless of the reasons, this is yet another sign of systemic problems in the tech industry when it comes to hiring women and racial minorities and paying them at the same rates as white men.
via TechCrunch
Uber’s first diversity report is not the worst thing ever – TechCrunch (Mar 28, 2017)
TechCrunch wasn’t the only publication to go with a headline like this, and it makes sense: Uber’s diversity report in many ways mirrors those from other big companies in the tech industry, and doesn’t appear noticeably worse on several of the big metrics. Indeed, if you were reading the report itself including the commentary about the various efforts Uber is engaged in, you’d get the impression that Uber was a forward-looking, tolerant, diverse, and vibrant place for people of all backgrounds to work. And that’s the problem with these reports – they say nothing about what it’s actually like to work at the company if you’re in one of the underrepresented groups, and we know from recent news that Uber can actually be pretty awful if you’re a woman, especially in a technical role. So even though Uber comes off not much worse than other big tech companies from the report alone, that shouldn’t be all that reassuring. Since this is the first of these reports, we also have zero data about how things have changed in the past year, and whether they’ve got better or even worse, something some past female employees have suggested. But numbers alone don’t tell the story, and that’s why the investigation – flawed though it is – is critical for evaluating and hopefully changing the other aspects of Uber’s culture as regards diversity which this report says nothing about.
via TechCrunch
Google opens Howard University West to train black coders – USA Today (Mar 23, 2017)
This seems like a great program from Google aimed at bringing in a more diverse workforce. For all that tech companies like to say they try to be diverse in their hiring, part of the problem is that people from underrepresented groups never apply in the first place, and companies therefore have to proactively reach out to those groups, as Google is doing here. Google is bringing students from Howard University, a historically black college, onto campus in Mountain View to help train black coders. This is on top of existing programs where Google employees spend time at Howard and other historically black universities helping students prep for interviews at Google and so on. Good for Google for doing this.
via USA Today
Survey Suggests Tech Workers Feel Workplaces Are Diverse Enough – USA Today (Mar 22, 2017)
This survey is a great illustration of one of the biggest challenges in increasing diversity in the US tech industry: most employees feel there’s already enough diversity. Reading through the various bits of insights in the article here, it appears that it’s a combination of most employees by definition not being in the minority or underrepresented groups and therefore not being personally affected by it, and a sense that the problems are systemic in the industry and their particular employer is doing its best. But it’s obviously very hard to change workplace cultures in favor of diversity when most of the current employees don’t even see a problem. Moreover, I suspect many individual employees are so focused on doing their day jobs that they rarely give a second thought to cultural issues in general, whether diversity specifically or something else.
via USA Today
Uber Press Call Highlights Huffington’s Conflict of Interest (Mar 21, 2017)
One of the more troubling things about the sexual harassment investigation at Uber is that Arianna Huffington, who is helping to lead that investigation, is also currently acting as both Uber and Travis Kalanick’s most visible public defender, undermining claims that the investigation is independent. Either Huffington is committed to getting to the bottom of what has happened (and may still be happening) at Uber, or she can defend it and its leadership, but she can’t do both. That she reiterated those public defenses of Kalanick personally on this press call today just reinforces that point. Meanwhile, the call itself revealed little that was new, by all accounts – a previously promised diversity report is indeed on the way, and both the investigation and the COO search are ongoing, with nothing new to report for now. Meanwhile, Kalanick himself was apparently too busy with that COO search to appear on the call, while Uber’s (female) HR manager was available. (The headline here is mine – the headline on the Axios piece linked below focuses on the diversity report.)
via Axios
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick just told staff he’s hiring a COO to help him – Recode (Mar 7, 2017)
Small follow-up on yesterday’s Information piece about Uber trying to hire a number two for Travis Kalanick. That news is now official, though Kara Swisher here also reports that Uber is looking to put another woman on its board, and that the board would prefer the COO to be a woman as well. That echoes both what I said here yesterday and what I implied last week in my Techpinions piece on CEOs and corporate culture: fixing Uber’s problems will be a lot easier with a woman in a senior executive role.
via Recode
How Uber got into this human resources mess – Recode (Feb 21, 2017)
Some great reporting here from Johanna Bhuiyan, with lots of digging behind the scenes into not just the corporate culture at Uber but more specifically the HR department and its lack of resources over the last several years, which likely contributed to the events Susan Fowler wrote about this week. It’s fairly clear that Uber underinvested in some of the aspects of HR not related to hiring and firing, but also that CEO Travis Kalanick continues to drive the company culture very much from the top down, including in a number of negative ways.
via Recode
Uber is not the only tech company that mishandles sexual harassment claims – TechCrunch (Feb 21, 2017)
Though I focused in yesterday’s bit on the Uber harassment claims on that company’s toxic corporate culture, it’s far from the only tech company with a culture that’s often unfriendly to women at best and which tolerates harassment and misogyny at worst. This TechCrunch article does a good job highlighting some other cases which were reported anonymously after the Uber news broke. If the tech industry is to become more diverse, this kind of thing has to go away, although of course until it does become more diverse, that’s a lot less likely – there’s definitely something of a catch-22 here.
via TechCrunch
A former Uber employee’s disturbing claims of workplace sexism reignite calls to #deleteUber – Recode (Feb 20, 2017)
On the one hand, this is an awful set of accusations regarding Uber and a culture of misogyny and damaging internal politics, and on the other I suspect most people who follow Uber won’t be surprised. The company has long been known for a bro culture which starts at the top with Travis Kalanick, and it seems to have done very little to change that culture. Corporate cultures are very powerful things, and very hard to change once established. Uber early on created a culture of intense competition both internally and externally – a culture where winning at all costs is what matters – and no matter what executives have said in formal settings since, their early actions have spoken much louder, and it appears that the culture at Uber is deeply toxic, especially for women. Travis Kalanick has predictably responded with feigned outrage, despite the fact that at the very least his direct reports were aware of the specifics here, and of course he’s directly responsible for the company culture that allows these things to happen. I’m glad an investigation will be led by Arianna Huffington, who is outside the hierarchy at Uber but on its board, and I’m very curious to see what it shows. A whitewash will go down terribly, but anything short of a serious shakeup is likely to be seen as insufficient.
via Recode (Susan Fowler’s full post here, and Kalanick’s Twitter response thread is here, while Arianna Huffington’s short tweet thread is here)
Being black in tech can cost you $10k a year – USA Today (Feb 9, 2017)
This report from Hired this article is based on has lots of interesting data about salaries for software developers in lots of cities in the US and beyond, but the focus of the article is what the report says about bias. Specifically, the report finds that African Americans are 49% more likely to get hired than white candidates, while Latino and Asian candidates are each less likely to be hired, but it also finds that African American candidates ask for and receive lower salaries than Latino, Asian, or white applicants. The report doesn’t draw many conclusions from the data – increased likelihood of being hired for African Americans may be tied to that lower asking price, to diversity initiatives, or something else, and it’s also unclear whether these candidates ask for lower salaries because experience tells them to expect them, because they’re less well informed about going rates than their white counterparts, or again for some other reason. But the results are the results – yet another indication of systemic issues in the tech industry when it comes to race, whatever the underlying causes.
via USA Today (Hired report here)
Apple shareholder proposal seeks more diversity at top – USA Today (Feb 1, 2017)
Apple, along with most of the rest of the tech industry, could be much more diverse than it is in its employee makeup. It’s made progress in some areas (and can argue it’s the only major tech company to be run by an openly gay individual), but women and people of color are still unrepresented at all levels, and especially on the board and among senior management. This shareholder proposal wants Apple to move more quickly to change that, while Apple argues that it’s already working on increasing diversity, and the accelerated changes are focused too narrowly to be broadly beneficial in changing Apple’s workforce as a whole. It’s a reality that changing the composition of a workforce that’s over 100,000 strong is much harder than, say, Twitter’s workforce of a few thousand, and will take considerable time. And swapping out senior executives with full-time jobs based on increasing diversity alone obviously wouldn’t wash either, especially in a company that has as little movement in the upper ranks as Apple does. But board seats are one area where Apple could potentially move more quickly, because there’s a plethora of qualified individuals available. I’m betting the proposal gets voted down, but that’s not to say there isn’t some merit in it.
via USA Today
Silicon Valley tries to spread wealth to Trump’s America – USA Today (Jan 30, 2017)
Leslie Miley, who has been director of engineering at Slack, is working with Venture for America to start a program that will take employees of coastal tech companies and place them for one year at a time in new locations in the US, especially in minority communities, with salaries paid by their employers. Yelp and LinkedIn have signed up already. The initiative aims to break down a couple of facets of the tech industry’s lack of diversity, opening up opportunities for those in the communities served who may come from underrepresented groups, but also hopefully exposing the Silicon Valley types who participate in the program to new ways of thinking and lifestyles. This seems like a great initiative which should benefit both groups, and we should also see more from coastal tech companies investing in non-traditional locations in the US by putting offices and employees there. There are already several smaller tech hubs outside the traditional ones (including where I live in Utah), and they’re often able to attract great employees who don’t want to put up with the cost and other downsides of a Silicon Valley lifestyle.
via USA Today (see also Miley’s own blog post)
Twitter users are diverse but not its staff – USA Today (Jan 19, 2017)
Lots of the coverage of Twitter’s new diversity report (and accompanying blog post) today was positive – the company has made real progress over the past year in increasing its diversity and achieving its own goals, though it also fell short in some areas. However, Jessica Guynn at USA Today has been one of the most active reporters on the diversity beat and doesn’t think the gains are good enough – for one thing, Twitter didn’t share last year’s equivalent report, so it’s impossible to know exactly what gains have been made over the past year alone (the last report released publicly was the 2014 one). But the overall numbers for some minority groups are still very small relative to their share of the US population overall. Kudos to Twitter for increasing its diversity, but kudos to Guynn too, for holding not just Twitter’s but all tech companies’ feet to the fire on this issue.
via Twitter users are diverse but not its staff – USA Today
Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode (Jan 18, 2017)
A lot of the coverage of the lack of diversity in the tech industry focuses on employment and the lack of opportunities and barriers to entry for minorities and women. In other words, the focus is on the negative impact on those who would like to work in the industry. But this article highlights one of what I’d argue are many practical reasons why this lack of diversity is also bad from a product perspective – less diverse teams produce products which are poorer at meeting the needs of a diverse base of users. In this case, the specific issue is face recognition software and its inability to effectively recognize darker faces, in part because it tends to be trained on data sets of largely white faces and tested by mostly white engineers.
via Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode
Ellen Pao joins forces with Kapors to bring diversity to technology – USA Today (Jan 10, 2017)
It’s good to see Ellen Pao land in another venture role, but also one where she’ll be able to continue to push for more diversity in tech now that she has a high profile in this area. Funding is one of several bottlenecks at which diversity is stripped out of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, so having her and her new partners working on improving things should be helpful.
via Ellen Pao joins forces with Kapors to bring diversity to technology – USA Today
Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce – Bloomberg (Jan 9, 2017)
Like most big tech companies, Facebook struggles with diversity, but would like to do better. And yet its own internal processes are apparently hindering its efforts here, with existing engineers having too much power to shape hiring of candidates in their own image. This is a known issue at this point, and it’s frustrating that Facebook – with all its innovation – can’t crack it. All this just highlights that all the will in the world can’t trump flawed processes.
via Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce – Bloomberg
Join Our Board: Companies Hotly Pursue New Wave of Women in Tech – The New York Times (Dec 30, 2016)
Board positions are one of the most visible aspects of a company’s commitment to diversity (or lack thereof), and this means competition for women to sit on boards is at an all-time high. That’s a good thing, but it’s still far less common at lower levels in companies to have this kind of commitment to hiring women or other underrepresented groups in tech.
via Join Our Board: Companies Hotly Pursue New Wave of Women in Tech – The New York Times
Canvas — Project Alloy Executive Summary (Dec 28, 2016)
This seems like an admirable effort aimed at increasing diversity in the tech industry by sponsoring people from underrepresented backgrounds to attend conferences. Nice to see someone come up with a logical and realistic solution, and one that allows those already in the industry to put their money where their mouths are.
via Canvas — Project Alloy Executive Summary