Silicon Valley struggles to hack its diversity problem

06 Aug Silicon Valley struggles to hack its diversity problem

Yahoo disclosed this month that African-Americans made up just 2 percent of its workers, while Hispanics stood at 4 percent. Those revelations came days after Facebook reported it had employed just 81 blacks among its 5,500 U.S. workers.

Silicon Valley has a diversity problem, a contentious issue that has come into sharper focus in recent months as tech firms sheepishly released updates on their hiring of minorities. The companies have pledged to do better. Many point to the talent pipeline as one of the main culprits. They’d hire if they could, but not enough black and Hispanic students are pursuing computer science degrees, they say.

But fresh data show that top schools are turning out black and Hispanic graduates with tech degrees at rates significantly higher than they are being hired by leading tech firms.

Black, Latino grads

Last year, black students took home 4.1 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in computer science, information and computer engineering, according to an annual survey by the Computing Research Association of 121 top U.S. and Canadian colleges. That’s double the average of blacks hired at the biggest tech firms. Hispanics accounted for 7.7 percent of the degrees.

“It would be a more convincing argument if their numbers more closely tracked what we were producing,” said Stuart Zweben, an Ohio State computer science professor who helps conduct the survey. And Silicon Valley’s diversity problem exists not just on the tech side.

Tech’s largest companies also significantly lag in their hiring of minorities for sales, marketing and public relations jobs.

At Google, blacks and Hispanics each accounted for just 4 percent of Google’s non-technical workforce last year. At Facebook, blacks made up 3 percent of its non-tech workforce in May. Hispanics were at 7 percent.

In the overall U.S. workforce, blacks made up 13 percent of employees, and Hispanics were at 16 percent.

The lack of minorities in Silicon Valley has been met by a rising sense of urgency. Companies only began disclosing their diversity data last year under pressure from groups such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition. And those numbers have underscored the extent of the problem in this tech hotbed, where former startups have matured into some of the nation’s leading economic engines.

‘The right places’

Jackson disputed claims by companies that there simply isn’t a robust talent pool of blacks and Latinos.

“They aren’t looking in the right places,” he said. “And this doesn’t answer the question of why the vast majority of their workforce – which is non-tech – is also lacking diversity.”

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